Sacred Space

How We Deepen What We Know Is True, the Second Side of the Teachings

Posted on October 24, 2009. Filed under: How Spirituality Works | Tags: compassion, enlightenment, God, Karen Armstrong, kundalini, meditation, new age, religion, sat nam rasayan, spirituality, yoga, yogi bhajan |

I read about Karen Armstrong’s Charter for Compassion yesterday, along with her becoming outspoken against the traditional definitions for God. I then visited blogs that were discussing these things and decided to make this post as part of that discussion. This contribution to that discussion is from a the perspective of someone that has followed a specific Spiritual Teacher and so the response reflects that association. This does not mean that I presume that my Spiritual Teacher has the market cornered on enlightenment. I do not. In fact I feel that I have identified several Enlightened Masters alive at this time from different lineages, and refer to them as Spiritual Teachers. It is my impression that there is very little respect today for Spiritual Teachers which is a tremendous loss if those teachings have validity. This response is therefore an attempt to expand on the thoughts that Karen Armstrong puts forth from the perspective of the lineages that produce Enlightenment. Any validity in this response comes from the validity of the teachings of those lineages.

The blogs that I visited were: In Good Faith, Learn English with Turgay Evern, This Tumbleweed Life, by Hibernopithecus, Insight, Rethorykal Questions, Find and Ye Shall Seek, Prometheus Unbound, Slow Muse, March Fourth Blog, Run Motherfucker Run, Marmalade, Randall Butisingh’s Weblog, Empowered Thoughts

We deal with questions that do not have specific answers all the time. Questions like:

Is there God, and if so what is God?

What is compassion?

What is love?

This list could go on and on. Just because there is no specific answer to questions like these does not mean that no answer exists. The difference here is that while there is no answer for these question from any source outside of ourselves, we do have the ability to produce an answer from our own understanding through direct experience. Questions like these cannot be satisfactorily answered by sources outside of ourselves because the answers that we seek are experiential. No book or explanation can convey an experience such as what it is like to become a parent, or ride a bicycle. The experience is the only way to these understandings, and even then each individual’s experience will be unique. Karen Armstrong’s argument that a finite mind cannot ever conceive infinity and therefore God is correct, but this does not mean that we have no experience of infinity or God. It means that our understanding of that experience will always be less than the full understanding.

This is the reason that Spiritual Teachers have always relied on spiritual practices to teach students. The words of the Teacher are not enough to convey the understanding that is necessary for the students to achieve enlightenment, there must also be the personal experience that is acquired through the spiritual practice.  This is still not the full answer however, if it were all students that performing spiritual practices would become enlightened. Simply performing spiritual practices is also not enough. There is more. In order to understand what is needed from the spiritual practice honesty is required. Deepening spiritual understanding requires a deepening of our honesty. This is reflected when we meet a Spiritual Teacher. What we understand when we meet the Spiritual Teacher is that they have developed much deeper honesty with themselves. If we recognize that honesty we recognize the person as a Spiritual Teacher.

How to develop this internal honesty through spiritual practice has been called the second side of the teachings, and has traditionally only been taught in the silence. The rigidity of this tradition has had the effect that the vast majority of students of any Spiritual Teacher do not learn the second side of the teachings. The result is that these students that do not learn for themselves and become dependent upon relying on spiritual practices and their relationship to the Spiritual Teacher. When this occurs we notice that something essential is missing in religious practices and rituals, and that reliance on the divinity of the founder of the religion is stressed more than the pursuit of an ever deepening spiritual understanding, and way of relating to others. This has become an ever worsening problem as belief systems that run contrary to the original teachings have been constructed based on limited understanding of the original teachings and used to justify subjugating others, genocide, and even justify the extermination of humankind.

In order to teach this second side of the teachings openly so that a greater number of students can develop a structure had to be developed. One Spiritual Teacher to dedicate his life to doing so was Yogi Bhajan. His structure for learning the second side of the teachings was given the name Sat Nam Rasayan. which means healing through the true identity. The appropriateness of this name is apparent in the healing that is experienced whenever the internal honesty is further developed in some meaningful way.

The second side of the teachings, the structure of Sat Nam Rasayan, is built on very simple experiences that we all have of being honest with ourselves. The significance is that this means that all spiritual development is built on this. The first of these experiential awarenesses is that all we know is what we feel.

When I first started learning Sat Nam Rasayan this seemed to me to be too simplistic to have much significance, but it proved important on at least two levels. First because I was critically assessing what was being taught, I was intent on finding something to argue with, and the assertion that all I knew was simply a result of what I felt passed my critical assessment. Secondly in order to learn to re-evaluate my perceptions there needed to be a way to establish a shift in normal perception in order to make learning possible.

The assertion that all we know is what we feel may seem overly simplistic but it conveys that we can always identify what we feel if we are honest enough, and that everything that we think of as our understanding is ultimately experiential.  On the other hand, consider that we have feelings (many of which that we may not understand but do have none the less) about everything. There is no thought or idea or concept that can be presented to us that we do not have a feeling response to. This does not imply that the way that we interpret our feelings is correct. On the contrary, we normally delude ourselves into believing that what we feel we want is most important. The process of how we untangle our self-delusion about what we feel requires us to develop deeper personal honesty and is the structure of the second side of the teachings, Sat Nam Rasayan.

It’s not the life that matters, but the courage we bring to it.

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