Curing the dis-ease of your soul.
When we come to the point of extreme disappointment with this material world, our authentic spiritual life can begin. We accept the futility of searching for lasting joy in a world of suffering and death.
When we have the courage to accept that harsh truth, we stand on the threshold of eternity.
We step out in search of the divine, expecting our spiritual journey to immerse us in the warm glow of heavenly sunshine, rainbows and bunny rabbits.
But instead we confront the realisation we’re standing on a battlefield and we are mortally wounded.
The honest spiritual calling isn’t like going to a celestial party in our ballgown. It’s like a trip to the dentist for that root canal we’ve neglected for so long, scared to endure the necessary suffering such healing entails.
Self-realisation is a path of self-discipline and the abnegation of the things causing our dis-ease. Christians call those things sin. Hindu’s call them papam. They’re all the dirt and decay we’ve allowed to fester in our soul, and they must be uprooted and eradicated.
Diagnosing our dis-ease
If we weren’t dis-eased, there would be no need for the spiritual quest. If there was nothing we needed to be saved from, there would be no need of salvation. But we aren’t at ease, we’re perpetually dissatisfied, disturbed, and anxious.
This is our soul sickness, and healing from a disease is painful and unpleasant.
William James defined religion as the belief there is an unseen order, and our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves with it.
This is the essence of the spiritual world view, that this material world is only the surface of reality and the divine substance of reality is presently shrouded from our view.
But if the divine is the foundation of all existence, that in which we live and move and have our being, how is it possible we can’t perceive it? It can’t be a fault or lack in the divine, the divine has no lack.
The defect must be in our vision. Like a cataract covering the soul, our vision is clouded and we can’t perceive who and what we are. That cataract is false ego, a false sense of self.
Right now we align ourselves with the physical world, the world of suffering and death. Our salvation lies in aligning ourselves with eternity and joy. To connect with the divine realm, we must dive beneath the surface and participate in the inner substance of the world.
The vision of good and bad
Some people say the spiritual search is a vain hope to avoid the harsh reality of our mortality. But even they can’t deny that suffering is wrong, disease should be cured, and health is the natural state.
No healthy person welcomes sickness or death.
We may admit that suffering can be good if it’s in the service of a greater good, but everyone knows suffering is inherently undesirable. No one stands idly by without trying to eradicate it, or at least minimise it.
We continually aim towards the good and the valuable. We may be misguided where the good is found, but no one denies the good is the goal of our existence.
The spiritual search rests on the acknowledgement that we need a transformation of the dis-eased person we are now, to the ideal person we could be. The healthy state of the soul is an ease of consciousness; an inner contentment and satisfaction unaffected by the vagaries of passing moods or circumstances.
Our quest for the good starts with ethics.
Ethics is the quest to transcend our animal nature
Living an ethical life is the demand to rise above our animal nature. Ethical living isn’t a demand of the beasts or the barbarians, but only those with a more evolved consciousness and a vision that can discern good and bad.
Ethics is the recognition that mere survival is insufficient. Survival shouldn’t be pursued at any cost, how you sustain your existence is important. Certain actions are forbidden and certain actions are obligatory. This isn’t a law imposed by external force, it’s the inner demand of our conscience.
Ethics is the inner demand of our higher self.
Ethics transcends individual preference and the collective laws of the community. Ethics demands those with awareness of good and bad should live according to certain unwritten standards.
But for the ethical sense to rise above human preference and opinion, it requires a tether to the cosmos, a ground in which to take root. The substance of reality itself must contain the good.
The inner demand for eternity and joy
Just as ethics demands we rise above our animal nature, spirituality and religion demand we rise above our material nature. It’s the demand to rise above the inevitable death and decay of the physical world and live in eternity.
Religion beckons us toward a better world. Toward an existence not subject to decay and death. A world without dis-ease, where the heart-breaking losses of this world are transformed. A world where we aren’t forced to consume the life of others to sustain our own existence. Where life is aimed at service rather than exploitation.
Spiritual life is the call to discover our higher nature, our true self. And because this is the demand of our true self, who we really are, it can’t be denied. It can only be temporarily subdued with distractions and excuses.
The higher demand is that of eternity and bliss, not suffering and death. To allow ourselves to be satisfied with a temporary existence of suffering and death is to lose touch with who we are.
This spiritual quest for eternity isn’t some vain hope to soothe the harsh reality of life, but a recognition of the true nature of our higher self.
Spirituality at bargain prices
Authentic religion is the path of self-transformation, not world transformation. But self-transformation is hard, we have to face our own defects and work to cure them. How much simpler and easier it is to try and save the world.
It takes no effort to point out the defects of others and avoid confronting our own. We try and rearrange the furniture of the world in an attempt to create the utopia we seek. But utopia already exists, our task is to gain an entry visa to that divine realm.
That visa can’t be purchased with material wealth. The capitalist mentality reduces everything to profit, even spiritual life.
Religion is out of fashion and spirituality has become a superficial self-help designed to make us comfortable in this lifetime. It sells methods to calm our mind so we can pursue a material life with equanimity. It massages our ego, but it can’t cure our soul.
Curing a disease is uncomfortable. The ethical life isn’t aimed at our comfort, it’s about doing what’s right even if it’s inconvenient. The same is true of spirituality, it aims at honesty and authenticity, not cheap self-deception.
No one can deny that one day they’ll be forced to give up everything material, even their body. Whatever you love in this world, you cannot keep.
Honest spirituality acknowledges that truth, and realises we’re only being asked to give up things that can never bring us lasting joy. Spirituality demands we give up our false ego of thinking we are a mortal, physical being.
The death of the ego gives birth to the soul
When people hear that spirituality requires giving up certain things, they assume the demand is to live as a monk with no possessions. But we’re asked to give up the idea that anything here belongs to us, or that we belong to this world.
This world is not our home, it’s a temporary camp life that will soon be over.
Nothing belongs to us, we’re only caretakers. We arrive with no possessions and whatever we accumulate here, we must leave behind. That doesn’t mean that in the interim we must survive with nothing, that we can’t enjoy a nice meal or loving relationships and a comfortable home.
A public servant can be in control of vast wealth and have comfortable quarters, but they never forget that none of it belongs to them. It’s all to be used in the service of the true owner.
By contrast, modern self-help spirituality is flattery of the ego. It sells us comforting lies. It tells us this world is for our enjoyment, and promises us we can steal the fruits of heaven without paying the price.
But we can’t live happily in this world, an eternal soul can’t be happy in a world suffering and death. We aren’t children of this soil.
This is the true demand of the spiritual aspirant. We reject this world and all it’s sparkly enticements because we’ve realised this world is a chimera with no real joy within it.
Palliative care when a cure is available
There are those who deny this inner demand. They say we’re nothing more than our physical selves, and the inevitable death of the body is the death of the self.
This is the story our false ego wants to believe. The false ego marshals the forces of doubt in the service of its own cause. It resists its own death.
The false ego is sticky. We’re all familiar with all those sticky habits we constantly struggle to control. We endlessly make resolutions to find the self-control to stop eating so much pizza, stop overindulging in drugs, hit the gym and get healthy….
These sticky habits are entropy, the natural direction of the physical world. We overcome one sticky habit to find it replaced with another. We perpetually surrender to self indulgence rather than doing what we know is right.
Some people preach that we should abandon our faith and our religion in the service of truth. But what is their truth other than a claim there is no cure for suffering and death?
They claim the best we can hope for is palliative care. We should be satisfied enjoying the temporary comforts of this world until our inevitable demise. This palliates the symptoms, but ignores the disease.
There is a perpetual chain of prophets and saints who broadcast the promise of a cure and it’s availability to anyone with the courage to pursue it.
There is no lack of detail for how to do this, our problem is too much detail. We need to filter those voices from different times and cultures, and find the essence of the message, the inner thread which binds the cacophony of voices.
A matrix of meaning
Our worldview is the narrative of our false ego, the story we tell ourselves about who we are and the purpose of our lives. It’s a matrix of meaning, an interpretative lens on the world telling us what it all means and how we should live.
The story consists of the ideals and values we choose to worship. We surrender our self and our life to the service of those ideals.
This narrative is a type of mythology, it’s not a theory detached from reality and our experience of the world. We aren’t innocent bystanders in the world, we’re active participants. The only way to access the truth of mythology is to participate in its truth. The only way to know the truth of any self-image is to live it.
That’s where the truth of myth is found, this is what the mythology of religions offer. Myth is a map to navigate the meaning of our shared human experience.
A map may have theoretical virtues, but it’s accuracy is only known by using it to traverse the reality it represents. Our map can only be tested by living according to its guidelines.
And our experience of being more than the body, of transcending matter, is irrepressible. This irrepressible inner demand points toward the transcendence and eternity of our being in the same way the wings of birds point toward their ability to fly.
We can spend our valuable life on the ground, endlessly debating whether flight is possible and which theory of aerodynamics is best. But the only way to know the truth is to take to the skies.
Prudence Louise 