Shifting from Religious to Spiritual, the Need for Spiritual Teachers
Humanity needs to shift its perception of itself and how it relates to the world it lives in on all levels. This tremendous shift requires a change in core beliefs. This shift can best be described as a change from religious to spiritual in the general way that humanity relates, shifting from believing and relating to the world religiously to relating to it spiritually. Religions produce folks that think that the religion that they practice is the best and the only true one. These bi-products of religious belief produce attitudes of the practitioners that they are somehow more special than those not of their religion. Borrowing an idea from George Orwell’s Animal Farm, a religious person in the US (for example) could be described as believing that all Americans are equal but that those that practice the same religion as they do are more equal than others. It is a way of spouting equality while acting otherwise. The religious bias of inequality is a main part of the thinking that justifies exploitation, oppression and violence against others. A similar correlation can be explored about the way that attitudes of entitlement and elitism relating to natural resources have to be shifted in order to make human existence on this planet sustainable. (The effects of prejudicial religious attitudes seem so obvious that I am not going into the specifics necessary to make a formal argument. If this is too general please post a question or argument and we can discuss it further.) Thinking that is fundamentally biased in this way makes the future of humanity unsustainable and must be shifted.
One major obstacle to making this shift is the lack of understanding of what spirituality is. Spirituality is not a belief system. Spirituality is based on experience of connectedness that produces consistent specific results. It is not enough to simply believe that all things are interconnected, there must be consistent experiences of this interconnectedness that can be examined and explored. This element of validation is a required element in all aspects of spirituality. Going back to the Karen Armstrong discussion of the need for a shift in the perception of God, simply replacing the religious belief based image of God with a spiritual one is not enough. For the spiritual concept of God to have validity there must be some direct experience that one can use as the basis for that understanding (Blogs visited: 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).
There are those that understand this because they have not only had these experiences themselves, but they have an understanding of the what is required to to establish that experience. These people are Spiritual Teachers. Spiritual Teachers are the key ingredient that humanity needs to make the shift from religious to spiritual because they know the reality of spirituality through spiritual experience. One great example of this is the common concept of compassion compared to that concept presented by a Spiritual Teacher. People frequently refer to compassion, but when asked what compassion is specifically the definition becomes very vague. Compare this with what the Buddhist Spiritual Teacher Thich Nhat Hanh (blogs: Danny Fisher, 108ZenBooks, RBO, Enlightened Horsemanship, the loveART blog, Feeling Up In Down Times) teaches: that compassion only comes from understanding. This indicates that both understanding and compassion are specific direct experiences, and it implies that compassion is always a predictable result of increased understanding.
Along this same line, the Spiritual Teacher Eckhart Tolle (blogs: Tao of Now, Sweet in the Middle, Eckhart Tolle: Uncut Interview, Evolutionary_Mystic’s Blog, Award Winning Books, Online Inspirations ) has a book, The Power of Now, that gives specific definitions for words that are used vaguely before they are understood through direct spiritual experience. The book even includes his vivid firsthand account of the most basic of spiritual experiences.
Another example is in the way that the Spiritual Teacher the 14th Dalai Lama (blogs: Paderborner ‘SJ’ Web Blog, Dare to Bare, Sojourn to the Past, inklake, BreakLines, Pakistanpal’s Blog, In Good Faith) answered the question of what is the best religion. He said that he meets many people and if they have a warm heart it doesn’t matter what religion they are, and if they don’t have a warm heart it doesn’t matter what religion they are.
I once met the Spiritual Teacher, the Supreme Patriarch of Buddhism from Cambodia, Maha Ghosananda (blogs: CHANROEUN, Making Peace, Ruby Ramblings, Democratic Peace Blog, Skip Schiel, Church of Skippy) and asked him what Dharma is. He began telling me the textbook definition of the eightfold path. I rudely interrupted him to explain that I understood the general theory but I wanted to know how one knows what is the right thing to do in life when one is actively practicing Dharma. How do we know when to do more and when we are to back off, etc. He genuinely smiled and held up three fingers. He said, “Here, Now, This. When you are here, be only here. When it is now, be only now, and when you do this, do only this.” I said “So if I practice this I will always know what to do?” and he exclaimed, “Precisely! and when I do not I only make mistakes.”
These are all examples of Spiritual Teachers teaching from direct experience, and validating direct experience over religious belief. When the Enlightenment of these individuals and the Sikh Spiritual Teachers that I have mentioned in previous posts, Yogi Bhajan and Sant Guru Dev Singh, is investigated and examined it is found that they all were students of Spiritual Teachers themselves first. There are notions that spirituality can be learned without a Spiritual Teacher, or that it can be learned from a book. The notion that Enlightenment can be achieved without a Spiritual Teacher is simply a way to avoid the reality of what is truly necessary. The intimacy with which we delude ourselves makes Enlightenment without a Spiritual Teacher an impossibility today more than ever. The reason it is more impossible now than in the past to achieve Enlightenment without a Spiritual Teacher is that technology is so available now to divert attention from dealing with harsh truths and cater to our self serving tendencies. This is the role of a Spiritual Teacher, to show the path, to know the requirements, and to confront the cheating along the way. No one learns without this level of involvement with a Spiritual Teacher.
My Spiritual Teacher, Yogi Bhajan (blogs: Kundalini Yoga I Am, Kundalininow’s Blog, Har-Prakash Khalsa, Catalyst Yogi, Spirit Voyage, Sosieji’s Weblog), considered what is referred to as the New Age as the time when the shift from religious to spiritual will occur and that this can only occur through a newfound discovery of the validity of Spiritual Teachers. Yogi Bhajan was very clear that the defining purpose of his life was to create Spiritual Teachers to facilitate that shift. He was also a pragmatist. He established the structure for the second side of the teachings, Sat Nam Rasayan (blogs: Darsana Wellness, Healing with Lea, Be the Lighthouse ). He made sure that this was established in an open way so that students from any Spiritual Teacher can learn to understand the inner teachings of their own lineages. At the same time Yogi Bhajan was also aware that the vast majority of his own students had made their reverence of him paramount and had come to rely on that relationship in such a way that made learning the second side of the teachings virtually impossible. He allowed this to happen deliberately.
It presented itself to do this because while it is necessary to develop the strength of commitment required to have a Spiritual Teacher in order for a student to fully face and resolve their self-centered delusions, the student must also get beyond their Spiritual Teacher and learn to exclusively rely on the Spiritual Teacher that lies within. Yogi Bhajan chose his own students to be examples of how this is not achieved when he allowed them to instigate the IKYTA certification. Allowing this stands as a clear example of how the teachings of a Spiritual Teacher become subverted into a religion by over-relying on the Spiritual Teacher and making the godliness of the Spiritual Teacher and the relationship to that Teacher more significant than the teachings that produce the experience of spirituality. In order for there to be a monumental shift from religious to spiritual there needed to be a very clear example of the pitfall of deifying a Spiritual Teacher which is the basis for all religions. Yogi Bhajan allowed his own students to be that example so that humanity could make a permanent shift from religious to spiritual.
It’s not the life that matters, but the courage we bring to it.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 3 so far )How We Deepen What We Know Is True, the Second Side of the Teachings
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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Sacred Space 