The Heart of Being

We live in the Psychological Age. Every modern malady is traced back to psychological roots. Another mass shooting? Mental health problem. Homelessness? Mental health problem. Depression and anxiety? Mental health problem. What is the deal with Donald Trump anyway? Mental health problem.

            There’s no doubt that psychological healing modalities – talk therapy, wisely applied pharmaceuticals – have healed families and saved countless lives. But by ascribing nearly every form of human suffering to mental health imbalances we might be missing out on a deeper, even more foundational dimension.

            Western psychology is after all only a hundred years old. With roots in the groundbreaking work of Sigmund Freud and William James, psychology was born largely out of the medical sciences. Some maladies could simply not be traced to physiological causes. They seemed to rise up out of the uncharted depths of the mind. And if we wanted to do anything about it we needed to chart those depths.

            In the twentieth century psychological knowledge grew by leaps and bounds. Mistakes were made, as in any endeavor, but great gains were realized. As James taught us, we ought to judge the value of any practice by its pragmatic value, that is, by whether or not it works. Are there measurable positive benefits? Good. Then we’re moving in the right direction.

            But what if the psychological approach alone is not enough?

            What did people do before the invention of psychology? To whom did they turn when suffering from debilitating sadness, alienation, anxiety, or worse – suicidal fantasies, psychosis, and violence? They turned to the tribal healer, a multi-faceted practitioner knowledgeable not only in botanical medicine, but also in divination, shamanism, and ritualized spirituality.

            In other words, what we now call psychological problems were for 99% of human history known as spiritual problems. Maybe it’s time to reacquaint ourselves with this perspective.      

Throughout the world’s mythologies and religions there is a unifying archetype – the idea that the sensory world is a foreground behind which lies a hidden background beyond the reach of sensory or even conceptual awareness. And that this unseen background is superior to and in fact the source of the foreground. Most cultures conceptualize and personify this hidden background as gods or goddesses, or as the one true God. Others understand it to be a non-conceptual, impersonal force like Dao, Brahman, or Being. But the fact remains – everything in the seen world is rooted in the unseen world, (and in the end both are simply dimensions of one singular reality). When we lose our original relationship to our sacred source, by whatever name you call it, we feel lost, alone, frightened, and deeply unwell, as if we’d been hollowed out. For indeed we have.

            Spiritual practices then are designed to bridge the two worlds so that the infinite wisdom and creative energy of the unseen world can imbue the seen world with its restorative powers. This is why we pray, worship, study, meditate, chant, walk the labyrinth, serve, and perform all manner of sacred acts. Throughout time and across cultures an unshakable realization has taken hold – our lives are an expression of that unseen source, and the closer we stay in touch with it the closer we stay in touch with our own essential nature.

            Organized religions began with the best of intentions. But for many of us, their attempt to codify these insights into narrowly define doctrines and practices did as much harm as good. It is the sad history of all institutions that their original intentions are eventually and inevitably drowned in a sea of self-preservation. Soon it is not the teachings of the founder that matter – it is the maintenance of the institution that matters. Many of us still participate in the faith traditions that have meaning for us, while at the same time maintaining somewhat embarrassed distance from the most regrettable aspects of our tradition’s teachings. It is often the case that those who most stridently claim to speak for God have the least to say of any value or consequence. As Laozi put it, “Those who know don’t say, and those who say don’t know.”

            That is why more Americans than ever before are defining themselves as spiritual, not religious.

            It would be foolish to advocate for the abandonment of the psychological model in favor of the spiritual. For me, it’s never either/or but always both/and. I see both psychology and spirituality playing crucial roles in the maintenance of our sanity both individually and collectively. I have benefited greatly from periods of psychotherapy in my life, and I have been woven back together again and again by spiritual practices. I see absolutely no reason not to use every tool in the box.

            So what now? What drove me to a study of philosophy and religion in the first place many years ago was my own alienation and depression, coupled paradoxically with a nearly ecstatic conviction that the universe was a holy place. I could feel it. I felt it just on the other side of the sadness, on the other side of the curtain – that infinite healing, ungraspable beauty, the mesmerizing thrum of the sublime. I didn’t have words for it, but it called me into its heart. The closer I got to it, the more I came home to myself.

            For me, philosophy, religion, and spirituality are healing modalities, like talk therapy, surgery, and pharmacology. And when I look out at the world, and within myself, I see an endless need for healing. That’s what drives me to this work.

            For 27 years I’ve been teaching philosophy and religious studies in academic settings. And for the last ten years I’ve ventured further and further off campus to bring the life-changing insights of the world’s wisdom traditions to audiences far and wide. For the last four years I’ve been leading meditation workshops teaching and encouraging others to deepen into the wisdom welling up through the cracks of their own suffering. And through it all my guitar was always close at hand – I keep writing and performing songs from this same place – the longing for healing and connection.

            And all of that work is coming to a head on Saturday, September 8 when I’ll be facilitating an all-day retreat at The Chopra Center in Carlsbad, California called “The Heart of Being.” My partnership with The Chopra Center, one of the world’s premier spiritual healing institutes, is a wonderful synchronicity – we were bound to cross paths one of these days. And when we did we both agreed that what we wanted to create was an all-day immersive experience where all of these different elements were woven together into an integrated whole – guided meditation, philosophical inquiry, spiritual practice, meaningful dialogue, interactive engagement, musical performance, and more.

            What’s at stake? Everything. As Ramana Maharshi said, “Your own Self-Realization is the greatest service you can render the world.” After our day-long retreat we will return to our messy and wonderful everyday lives renewed, realigned, and restored to our rightful place in the centered wholeness of the Heart of Being.

Real Freedom

Enshrined in the Declaration of Independence is the idea that freedom is a core American value. But the question remains – What is freedom? I think there are three stages of freedom, and until we carefully differentiate between them, all of our well-intentioned dialogue about this vital issue is doomed to end in frustration and confusion.

            Let’s call the first and most rudimentary form of freedom adolescent freedom. At this stage of our development freedom simply means doing whatever you feel like doing. As children we are ringed round with authoritarian structures dictating our every move. Adolescents necessarily rebel against these external control-mechanisms as they evolve toward personal autonomy. I think we can all agree that adolescent rebellion is a good thing, no matter how uncomfortable it makes us. It’s how people are made. But personal evolution is rarely neat and tidy.

            It turns out that this first stage of freedom isn’t very free. As adolescents we are driven largely by unconscious needs and the forces of peer pressure. We only think we are free. Then we grow a little older and wiser.

          At the second stage of freedom we mature beyond hedonism and learn that our best self-interest is often served by postponing immediate pleasures for larger long-term gains. And on an even deeper level we learn that our best self-interest is entirely interwoven with the interests of others. We learn that there is no me without we – that there is no such thing as private happiness or private freedom. Our freedom and happiness cannot flourish if others are imprisoned and miserable. As Nelson Mandela wrote, “To be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.” At this second, mature stage of freedom our separate sense of self grows translucent, transparent even, as our sense of interdependency expands. We begin to see ourselves not merely as individuals, but as a part of a whole. We are evolving toward the third and highest state of freedom – awakened freedom.

            In awakened freedom we drop more and more of our cravings and attachments, we get better at accepting current conditions without resistance or resentment, and we move from reactivity toward acceptance. Spiritual teacher Krishnamurti called this state of consciousness “choiceless awareness” – to experience reality as it is without the neurotic compulsion to have an opinion about everything. Asked once what his secret was, Krishnamurti replied, “I don’t mind what happens.” Imagine how freeing that would feel.

          Awakened freedom means shifting from the consciousness of scarcity to the consciousness of abundance. It does not mean receiving everything I want, but realizing freedom from want.

            Awakened freedom means allowing the ebb and flow of life to rise and fall unabated without taking it personally. Sometimes we feel strong. Sometimes we feel weak. Sometimes we receive joy unbidden, other times a nameless sadness overwhelms us. It’s o.k. In awakened freedom even our sadness becomes a friendly companion. As contemporary teacher Adyashanti puts it, “Real freedom is freedom from the demand to feel good all the time.” We realize that we are deeper than our thoughts, deeper even than our pain. In the boundlessness beneath the thought stream, we are irrevocably free.

            Awakened freedom mean relinquishing the illusion of control, slipping into the unbridled miracle of the present moment, and resolving to walk through this brief, beautiful life awash in wonder and willing to love.

[This piece was originally published in my column "A to Zen" in the May/June 2018 issue of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permision.]

The Missing Link

[This piece originally appeared in the column "A to Zen" in the January/February 2015 issue of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission.]

 
The use of antidepressant medication in America has jumped 400% in the last two decades. One in ten Americans over the age of twelve is taking them. Women are two and a half times more likely to take antidepressants than men, a gap that grows wider in middle age – one in four women between the ages of 40-59 are being treated with antidepressants. And it’s not just depression we’re talking about. Antidepressants are frequently prescribed to treat anxiety as well.

Here, in the most prosperous and comfortable society in human history, millions and millions of us are struggling to cope with deep and abiding feelings of disconnection, fear, sadness, and alienation. Complex problems never have a single solution because no event or condition stems from a single cause – all phenomena are the result of multiple causes. This is what makes fixing anything so difficult. In our current age – the age of psychology – all maladies of consciousness are called “mental illness” and are treated by medical professionals. For most of human history we called them “spiritual problems.”

Psychology, with its modalities of psychiatry and talk-therapy, is about 100 years old. Philosophy and religion are as old as humanity. Throughout our history whenever the world grew dark and began closing in, we turned to the shaman, the priestess, the seer, the sage, or the spiritual healer. Setting a broken bone is one thing. But how do you treat free-floating, debilitating fear or deep, pervasive hopelessness? How do you bring someone back into the fold of their own best life?

The origin of the word “religion” is obscured somewhat by antiquity, but modern scholars believe it comes from the Latin root re-ligare meaning “to bind, to link back or to reconnect.” In our usage, “religion” has come to mean any system of myth and ritual that binds a community together in a shared experience of the ineffable, transcendent divine. In this sense, religions aren’t themselves true or false – they point to the truth, a truth that can only be experienced and verified in the depths of the individual through reverence, prayer, meditation, ecstasy, or ritual. All words, concepts, teachings, doctrines, texts, and traditions are fingers pointing at the moon. They show us where to look. But they are not the moon.

If in this ancient sense religion and philosophy are healing modalities designed to re-integrate those among us who are disintegrating, then job number one is returning our prodigal sons and daughters to the loving embrace of the tribe. But this re-integration goes way beyond a few warm hugs from loved ones. Real and painful existential crises have to be addressed and repaired. Sadly, we cannot love someone well. If it were only that easy.

What the world’s wisdom traditions do offer is this – a vision of the cosmos as an orderly whole in which each of us has purpose and infinite value. But a simple, straight-forward explanation of this concept is insufficient. Replacing old concepts with new ones is a start, but it’s not enough. Being told about delicious food doesn’t quell one’s hunger.

To be linked back, bound, and reconnected to one’s original wholeness requires a direct experience of unity. Medications and psychotherapy are helpful. The spiritual teachings, methods, suggestions, and practices of others are helpful. Any journey benefits from a map. But then the walking begins.

There are many hands to hold us up when we are too weak to stand. There are many voices to speak truth when we have forgotten it. There are many hearts full of kindness. There are many feet that have walked out of the valley of the shadow of death and know the way. None of us does any of this alone. But no one can stand for us, know for us, speak for us, feel for us, or walk for us. If we have the ears to hear, the universe is forever singing us home. It too disintegrated when we unlearned our unity. Its longing is our longing. Begin from where you are. With a word, yes, we can reconnect the sacred cord. Our resolve is the missing link.