Awake in This Life

The Universe has a way of reminding us that no matter how hard we try, we can’t control everything. Regardless of our efforts, however heroic, things eventually fall apart. As unwelcome as these reminders of ultimate entropy might be, we can’t prevent them. Over a long enough timeline we find that all things are temporary. Things get lost, bodies break down, relationships end, circumstances shift, and all of us eventually must succumb to death. The law is simple: all things change.

Good news comes with this law of the Universe, however, once we see that things like despair, depression, pain and fear are also impermanent. Just as darkness eventually takes light away, so does light break the hold of darkness in our lives. When we begin truly to realize and accept these rhythms of give and take, we are instantly invited to take on a deeply personal quest so that we might find peace and stability in the face of life’s uncertainties. At least this is what all the world’s mystics, both ancient and contemporary, have been telling us. Despite all the chaos brought on by the temporary nature of everything, they say, there is a peace that each of us can uncover that supports conscious living. Realizing this, however, means that we have to agree to meet the challenge of climbing the Mountain of Spirit fearlessly.

Once we decide we are ready for the ascent, we recognize that the adventure at hand is unlike any we have ever attempted before. It is demanding of our time and patience, and it continually challenges us to question all that we’ve always thought to be true. What’s more, the climb is not linear. It starts off leading us in two directions simultaneously. We find ourselves moving outward into the thin air of spiritual altitude, and, at the same time, we are moving inward, exploring the depths of our sense of self. We find that the higher we climb, the more our steps seem to take us in several directions at once, thus rendering our familiar tools like intellect, wit, and instinct useless since we are not simply moving forward, trying to gain some type of understanding or approval. Rather, the climb allows for our consciousness to expand in all directions. As we purposefully let go of more and more of the things to which we usually cling, we spontaneously find that we are increasingly aware of every single attachment in our experience, all at once.

Climbing the Mountain of Spirit helps us each become students of both our experience and ourselves, constantly uncovering what makes us happy and sad, what generates pain and suffering, as well as what brings us peace and joy. With continued effort, we start seeing that we are connected with all things, and that the deepest levels of being point out that we are never separate from anything. The higher we get, the more we realize our interconnectedness and interdependence with the Cosmos. As we climb even higher, we see that most of our discomfort is self-created since it comes from the mistaken belief that we are separate from the Cosmos. This belief in separation, or the sense, as the Zen teacher Yasutani Roshi says, that “I am in here, and everything else is out there,” perpetually generates greed for anything that can protect this internal sense of a distinct and separate “I” and aversion to anything that threatens its sense of security. Living from separation may appear to be normal, but the higher spiritual seekers climb, the less they are satisfied with what has always appeared normal. Seekers at even higher spiritual altitudes want to be free of all that generates the patterns of resistance, fear, anger, pain, and negativity. The more openly we observe all of these normal appearances, the more we can recognize the inherent and perpetual struggle that the experience of separation carries with it. “Why carry on living this way?” climbers will ask.

Why, indeed? Climbers realize that the vast majority of their pain and suffering is something that they create themselves. As odd as this sounds, spiritual mountaineers see how the very thing in us which always feels separate from everything else—what psychologists would call the ego—works constantly to attach and identify with various ideas, feelings, roles, and situations in order to “normalize” our circumstances, thereby limiting our altitude. Metaphorically, the ego needs the air generated by separation in order to survive. This means that normal living, for most of us, is about constant, low-grade, and sometimes high-pitched battles between our egos and whatever might oppose them. When any ego successfully defends itself against an attack, it celebrates its success by immediately preparing for the next assault.

This ascent can get difficult. At every turn in the path we have to look into the depths of our experience fearlessly without avoiding whatever the view shows us. Climbing with integrity and intention means we must be ready to offer nothing less than total honesty and radically open observation for whatever shows itself at each of our steps. Doing so helps us see that in order to move up the Mountain of Spirit, we must live lives that continually come from an open place of attention rather than a closed place of judgment. This is the essence of our climb. As the spiritual teacher Krishnamurti says, “Observation without evaluation is the highest form of intelligence.” Using this kind, open, non-judgmental intelligence of ours frees us from the traps set up along the path by our minds, thus allowing for us to climb and eventually to reach the summit of the Mountain of Spirit.