When Ideas Get in the Way

One of the worst things that ever happened to my spiritual life was that I started reading about spirituality, especially “spiritual awakening.” This started happening only recently. Before I started reading about it, I only had my own experience to contend with.

The problem with reading about spirituality is that a fresh, lived experience has a layer of ideas, concepts and language added to it. With concepts in hand, it is then very easy to think that understanding the concept is the same as understanding the thing itself. The really destructive aspect of this is that the concept then becomes a filter that prevents any real surprise. Life becomes dull. The essence of spirituality, at least as I understand it in my own life, is to be oriented toward the real, toward what actually is. The real is constantly changing, constantly surprising. To have spiritual ideas or beliefs is to kill the real. When one has a box full of spiritual ideas, it becomes very difficult to be surprised anymore, and that is the death of the spiritual life.

It would be better, I think, to throw out all the spiritual self-help books, and stop listening to spiritual teachers who are peddling their particular experience or method of “waking up.”

I am throwing away all the spiritual ideas that I have acquired from reading and listening to spiritual teachers. I am even throwing away my own “spiritual” and “mystical” experiences, and going back to direct engagement with life as it is right now.

So, here is the question: what remains when we throw away all our ideas about “awakening” “enlightenment” “heaven” “eternity” “spirituality” “God” “higher self” “bliss” and all the rest of it? What if we set aside, at least as an experiment, everything we think we “know” about ourselves and the world and the spirit? Everything. What if, at least for a moment, we set aside every idea that there is some future place or experience that will fulfill all of our longings, and return all we have lost?

What if this, right here, right now, is all we have and all we are? What if, without any reference to the past or the future, with no past knowledge through which to filter the present, no imagined future through which to postpone the direct engagement with now, with no program through which we will achieve anything at all, we simply dwell in this, right here, right now?

What is that like? How many people even know what this is like, without the overlay of past and future? Without the burden of all our concepts layered onto what actually is?

I can tell you, this is not what most “spiritual seekers” are looking for. Not this moment, exactly as it is. We want something higher, something better, something eternal, something exciting and perfect and purely blissful.

The saddest thing in the world to me is that most of us go through our lives without ever experiencing life as it actually is. We are caught in the net of how we want things to be, and how we think they are. Our ideas about it dominate, and create a screen through which we are incapable of experiencing things as they are. We live in our ideas of the past and the future almost exclusively.

Meanwhile there is this beautiful thing called Life that only exists here and now. By dwelling in the mind’s idea of past and future, we miss most of what is going on right here and now. This. Exactly as it is. Beautiful, painful, inexplicable. Absolutely real. Absolutely free of our ideas about it.

This is all there is. And all the books and all the teachers only serve, in my limited experience, to give us more ideas about what it all means. And those ideas add to the filter that blocks our direct engagement in the real.

Now and then you might meet some one who embodies this reality, and has nothing at all to sell you. And you meet that person, or that animal, or that tree or that blade of grass. And you get it too. You see how you have been imposing your world view onto the world. And for a moment you drop your world view, all the accumulation of your ideas about the world. How it should be. How you want it to be. How it should have been. How you hope it will be. And for a moment you come into direct, unmediated engagement with what actually is, right now.

You will, never, ever forget such a moment. You may fall back into the trance of the mind. Maybe for days or weeks or years. But you will never forget what is real and what is false, and how we spend our days mostly in devotion to what is false.

You will never forget the vitality of that moment. And maybe the mind will realize its gigantic mistake and will become quiet at last, and allow the real to live and breathe again, without any idea about it whatsoever. That moment is still here, waiting to be heard, touched, seen, felt, and lived.