First Commentary on Simply Put #1

Simply Put #1

There being reasons for things happening is not the same as everything happening for a reason.

Cause and effect is indisputable, yet completely compatible with chaos.

Look behind the belief in divine causation and you'll find the denial of chaos, suffering and meaninglessness.

Yet without accepting the reality of chaos, suffering and meaninglessness, the truly organized, compassionate and meaningful cannot be fully perceived.

Thus the denial of the meaningless robs us of the ability to perceive true meaning.

The denial of chaos obscures the true wonder of intelligent organization.

The denial of suffering makes compassion appear less essential.

The denial of death dulls our experience of aliveness.

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Most forms of spirituality are caught in this trap precisely because they unwittingly seek to distort reality.

The function of these forms of spirituality is to dream up a feel-good metaphysical reason behind what we don't like about reality.

Innocents are slaughtered, wealth is unfairly distributed, evil people prosper, accidents happen, old age sickness and death come to all of us.

It is not fair.

In many ways, life makes no sense and is not what we think it ought to be.

This is spiritual truth number one.

In meditation, noticing the activity of the mind that tries to spin elaborate belief systems and metaphysical concepts to pretend this is not so, we can stop and direct compassionate attention underneath that activity - toward our own fear.

Relating honestly to fear by offering ourselves compassionate presence is good medicine.
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My 21st Century Spirituality model is an attempt to offer a contemporary alternative to old world religious metaphysics and new age magical thinking. As such the model asserts three key principles:

* critical thinking (and cognitive/intellectual self-development)
* inquiry-based (as opposed to faith-based) practice
* shadow-work (depth-oriented psychological honesty).

Simply Put is a distilled statement of critical thinking based truths that  have inquiry-based practice application in conjunction with shadow-work.

The first three installments will be a re-run from earlier this year and thereafter I plan to add more installments to this series. This time around I will add a commentary  and video blogs offering elaboration and meditation instruction - this is just the beginning:


Commentary

This is in reference to the popular belief that everything happens for a reason. The belief postulates a kind of hidden order to things, perhaps the hand of god, perhaps a grand plan of some kind. It distorts the reality of cause and effect via a confused idea that overdetermined events that have no meaning per se (though they do have causes) are actually meaningful and are part of how "the universe, "god" etc teaches us what we "need" to learn.

My 21st Century Spirituality approach suggests that using healthy adult critical thinking to debunk this idea opens a space for true inquiry-based practice and allows us access to the all-important shadow work that beliefs like these unwittingly seek to repress. This unintenional repression actually limits our capacity for compassion, honesty, insight , freedom and grounded aliveness - capacities that healthy spirituality seeks to strengthen, deepen and express more fully!

This first commenary will flex those critical thinking muscles. The second will provide meditative instruction and resources to handle sitting in the fire!


Meaning and Mystery

911 is of course a great example. What does 911 "mean?" Well it has geopolitical meaning, it has meaning in the context of jihad and the delusional mania of fundamentalism, it has meaning in terms of an analysis of empire and global economics, sure. But 911 is tragic and horrifying precisely because of the complete lack of meaning for those who died in the towers and for the families who remain. Death as an innocent at the hands of senseless violence is meaningless. This is why it appalls us. The smallness and flimsiness of "everything happens for a reason" is revealed to anyone who honestly enacts the thought experiment of trying to fit something of the magnitude of 911 into that bumper-sticker-sized philosophy. As Ken Wilber said to me in our dialog on The Secret - "The question is: can it pass the Auschwitz test?"

Of course for Auschwitz feel free to substitute child-abuse, natural disasters, VA Tech., serial killers etc... Who "created" those realities - and what are the higher "reasons" ? At this point the spiritual metaphysician will usually step back and either resort to a) saying that its all "karmic" and there is some way that the dead, abused, tortured souls have learned something important for their next lives, or have been paid back for some horror they committed in a previous life or b) resort to what I call the "Mystery Defense" - characterized by saying that they believe in "the mystery" (which ironically amounts to very simplistic, unprovable, feel-good,  non-mysterious metaphysics riddled with giant holes ) and so therefore the fact that they can't explain the metaphysics makes them more spiritual - and conversely I must be a very unspiritual, overly-intellectual person who doesn't believe in the mystery. This of course is complete bullshit, plain and simple.

Mystery is approached by i) being clear about what we do know and ii) not pretending to know what we don't know and iii) not making things up that distort what we do know to try and make it something else and then calling it unassailably mysterious and profound when our reasoning is shown to be faulty.

What is mysterious? Life, love, creativity, evolution, language, the brain, mythology, the psyche, quantum physics, imagination, on and on.... But the fact that something is mysterious doesn't make bad god-in-the-gaps arguments any more plausible, nor does it make those who do not accept those explanations less spiritual, nor does it across the board make what we do understand or what is provably true somehow swirly and uncertain - it makes us more open to  what actually is mysterious on its own terms...

Confusion abounds around the word "meaning" as well as between an oversimplification of the powerfully valid  psychological understanding about how our own personal unconscious draws us into situations that bring up material that has personal meaning vs a kind of narcissistic sense that the whole universe is organized around us learning lessons and will go to great, complex, blessing, traumatizing,  and painful lengths (tsunamis, rapists, alchoholic parents, financial calamity, getting you cast in that movie, and giving your downstairs neighbor the gift of being able to channel "information"  from an alien intelligence to confirm various kitsch spirituality concepts) to help us learn our important lessons.

The implication is that even when something looks or feels bad it is actually for the good if you could just step back far enough and see where "the universe" (which by the way is the sum totoal of everything, most of which is empty space, carbon and thermonuclear explosions with no depth or consciousness)  is supposedly taking us.

Karmic hopscotch, divine orchestration, astrological connect-the-dots, the big book in heaven's antechamber.... All of this is a made-up fantasy that puts the cart before the horse and denies chaos, randomness and tragedy. In doing so we cheat ourselves out of depth and a true sense of awe in the face of the precious rarity of meaning, compassion, love and consciousness.

True Faith

Why do we do this mind-trick? To try and pretend that pain is not pain, death is not death and injustice in the world is not real. Kitsch spirituality constructs fantasy-realities that are designed to perpetuate this denial in the name of "faith" and "positivity" - the irony is how little of either are actually evident in relationship to reality. This is the real "Matrix!" Where is the faith in reality as it is, in the presence of truth, beauty, goodness and the possibility of compassion and insight even though (and in fact in response to the reality that) there is injustice, there is tragedy, and all of us will in fact age, experience sickness and die?

Spiritual maturity includes learning to sit with these very disappointing truths about life and embrace the bittersweet beauty that opens as we appreciate the fragility of this human existence... Its precious because it is fragile, not because we are immortal beings from some invisible realm! Meaning is powerful because it is rare, like consciousness, like unconditional love - not because these things are everywhere apparent!


The Real Choice

So the central questions in our smorgasbord spirituality-as-entertainment marketplace are these:

* Is spirituality something that helps us to be in relationship to reality or something that creates unreasonable belief in fantasy?
* Is philosophy a way of discerning truth or of distorting it?
* Should spiritual practice be an arena for healing, for facing our fears, for acknowledging the full spectrum of the human condition, for finding deeper layers of awareness by staying present with our defensive impulses and seeing what lies beneath, or a way of trying to force the multifaceted, bittersweet, imperfect reality of life into an oversimplified, Pollyanna, prefabricated fantasy about some kind of all-good ultimate truth or enlightenment?

Whatever "ultimate truth" or "enlightenment" may be, these terms become meaningless when imbued with the wishful thinking that attempts to make them magic antidotes to life as-it-is.

I prefer to stay away from such absolute spiritual terms and say rather that insight, compassion, healing, and growth happen through a dynamic and honest relationship to the reality of our inner and outer worlds - and that the doorway in is usually through precisely what the mind (and the culture) tries to deny and avoid through make-believe spirituality.

Cultivating genuine resources, learning to tolerate the reality of suffering, facing the shadow, practicing (yes, actually practicing) with an attitude of inquiry, and keeping critical thinking close-at-hand on the spiritual journey - these are powerful transformative keys; they help us to grow up.

Videoblog and guided meditation in the Second Commentary to follow.