The only difference between us is that I am aware of my natural state, while you are bemused… We discover it by being earnest, by searching, enquiring, questioning daily and hourly, by giving one’s life to this discovery.
—Nisargadatta Maharaj
Those who enter the gates of heaven are not beings who have no passions or who have curbed the passions, but those who have cultivated an understanding of them.
—William Blake
If you gaze long enough into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
The commitment to walking along the Path of Awakening challenges us in ways that most of us don’t expect. Truly dedicating ourselves to anything is hard work, but this is especially true for this process. Devotion to deep spiritual work is perhaps one of the most treacherous areas for any of us to explore since it involves nothing short of an all-encompassing promise to live our lives as profound expressions of the Truth that all the great spiritual teachers, whether they be Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Christian, Buddhist, or anything else, have been pointing out over the course of human history.
What is it that those among us who are returning from the Mountain—who are truly living the confluence of wisdom and compassion—use to guide their every response to conventional circumstances? The answer is simple: they vow simply, wholeheartedly, intentionally, and continually to live in ways that won’t harm. But this vow not to harm can be a challenge since enacting this profound promise extracts many of the things our egos have tucked away in our consciousness and forces them into our immediate experience. This exposed living means that we can no longer hide from either what is false or from what is True. We are forced to show up and face our lives.
As we attend to our lives, we live intimately with the fact that we can cause harm whenever we act from a tangled web of clinging. Whether we are clinging to something that we believe will benefit us or even to the teaching of non-clinging, we can cause damage to ourselves and to others. So how do we stay aware of our clinging? Many traditions have guides: the Buddhist precepts, the Biblical commandments, the Hindu Yamas and Niyamas all help us expose even our most subtle attachments and our deepest secrets, thereby supporting the continual development of an undefended and truly open spiritual life. While this doesn’t necessarily mean that we have to show anyone what we’d just as soon keep private, it does mean that we can no longer keep anything hidden from ourselves. We find ourselves in a situation where there is no way to avoid either our past or our future. Committing ourselves to living from this place of radical honesty means that we use our Eighth Sense to study continuously everything that we cling to in life without judgment or evaluation. We see the stories from our childhood that still might be keeping us from living more fully, and in the seeing, we uncover the tools needed for freedom. We uncover the pictures we’ve painted that represent ideal futures, and in the seeing, again, we dis-identify with any future attachment and can become free. This seeing and freeing helps us to live a life of greater expanse, depth and integration.
Because there are so many situations that can offer impediments along the Path, authentic spiritual work connects itself with ethical frameworks that support continual and conscious surrender of the objects and ideas that can keep us from Realization. For instance, Buddhist practitioners should be intimate with not killing, not stealing, not lying, not abusing intoxicants, and not misusing sexuality. While a great deal can be said about the interpretations of these precepts, they can support a deepening of any traditional spiritual practice. This is because in our vow to remain intimate with these precepts, we can consciously live from a place of nonattachment in relation to the things that generate our most intense psychological and physical desires. This isn’t to say that we must accept being governed by rules, which, if broken, cast us into a hellish realm from which there is no escape. On the contrary, it is most healthy and helpful to look at these ethical structures, regardless of our preferred tradition, as guideposts rather than edicts along the Path. Edicts, after all, are merely imposed attachments. But with our commitment to openness, each precept can act as a bridge, rather than as an attachment, that leads us from the prison of the small self to the freely integrated expanse of the Big Self.
