Look how spiritual I am

There was a time when enlightenment doctrines were secret, and only revealed after an acolyte had been through a period of teaching and initiation.

Undoubtedly some of this was just so teachers and high priests could milk the situation for every bit of authority and power they could extract.  But there  is also something to be said for not letting it all hang out.

Why?

Well, first, and perhaps most perniciously, there’s a sort of spiritual competitiveness around today, which is particularly noticeable in New Age circles.  A lot of spiritual practice seems to be around making it clear to others that the devotee is very “spiritual” (a contradiction in terms), or “spiritually evolved” (an even bigger contradiction in terms), or has had his or her “consciousness raised” (I didn’t realise they’d dropped it).

Of course you can’t evolve spiritually.  The point about encountering spiritual reality is that it is uniform, non-dual, a void containing all possibilities.  There is no room for separate beings and no concept of separation, much less separate beings at different stages of “evolution”.

The spiritual process is, toward the end, anyway, what the Bible (which occasionally gets it right) calls “the Refiner’s Fire”.  Everything that makes you an individual is gradually (or sometimes quite suddenly) stripped away, until you can encounter the void with no sense of being other than the void itself.

I think it was Andrew Cohen who said that there are no degrees of enlightenment, but that there may be degrees of unenlightenment.  He’s right, of course.  The more of you that gets burnt off, the closer you are to enlightenment.  The Buddhists express this as “no-self”.

But a lot of modern New Age spirituality is about following some set of steps (like in the Course in Miracles) which will somehow, inevitably, result in your enlightenment (as well as your wealth, beauty, happiness and a great many other rather materialistic goals).  And those who present themselves as being somehow close to this state can be rather threatening to those who don’t.  It is as though there was some sort of system of spiritual Noddy Badges, and the more of them you earn, the more “spiritual” you are.

This leads people to deny the state of being they are in (“I’ve gone beyond anger”), the need for processing life stuff, the fact that they might have karma which could show up as health problems, emotional problems, money problems, whatever.  It’s not allowed to be there, because they are supposed to be “manifesting” some sort of state of spiritual completeness (while creating their own reality).  I’ve met people who insisted, through grimly clenched teeth, that they had “gone beyond anger”!

It’s all ego, of course –  it is one of the mind’s favourite tricks.  The illusion of spiritual virtue is one of the toughest ones to put down.

Another problem with the whole notion is that the concepts of enlightenment become more important than the experience.  (This is true of most spiritual practices).  Believing that you are one with God or the Cosmos, that you have non-dual awareness, that you’ve burned away your karma, etc etc, is about as useful as believing in Santa Claus or the tooth fairy.

Eventually the path of the soul will allow us to experience the emptiness of enlightenment, even if only briefly.  This may happen next Wednesday, or it may happen after another thousand lifetimes, and there’s no point trying to hurry it up. The first step to enlightenment is always an act of grace, Eckhart Tolle tells us.  I prefer to think of it as a matter of timing.  But regardless, it is outside our control.

So a belief system built around what you have heard or read about the enlightenment experience is useless; in fact it’s counterproductive.  If you delude yourself into thinking that you are God, or one with God, well, bully for you.  I’m Napoleon; between us we can rule the world!

The net result of believing that you are god is what psychiatrists call psychotic ego inflation.  In the experience of spirit, the concepts of “you” and “god” fall away completely.

So what is the ordinary seeker to do?

Pema Chodron’s advice to start where you are is always valuable and worth repeating.  The stuff of your own life –  the people, the problems, the joys –  is what fate has given you to work with, so start by accepting your life as it is now instead of aiming for some sort of sanitised spiritual superiority which is fool’s gold anyway.  And if that means that right now, you’re not very “spiritual’, you’re not very nice, you haven’t gone beyond anger or gluttony or lust, that’s absolutely fine.  Self-honesty and a sense of humour about yourself will take you a lot further along the path than trying to adopt faulty beliefs in order to keep up with some imaginary set of spiritual qualifications.