Awake in This Life

Religions have the potential of offering us a much closer relationship with our spiritual nature, yet, more often than not, the doctrines used in most traditions act to reinforce separation between believers and non-believers. This doctrinal wedge is also exactly what separates any seeker from Spirit. Attaching to any sense of separation significantly diminishes our chances at living an Ultimate Life. Put simply, separation nourishes fear, and fear nourishes grasping, and grasping gives birth to fundamentalism. And fundamentalism, in all of its forms, offers every fearful ego a place, albeit a temporary one, to hide. For any of us who feel strongly about our spiritual practices or the practices of others, we should be careful not to get caught by the fires of fundamentalist passion, since, by definition, fundamentalism is merely grasping by another name. Instead, we should try to witness our experience of fear as it happens, and then participate in its intensification and its waning from a position of open curiosity and peace. Simply noticing our attachments to the things that we are afraid of losing helps us, and our various wisdom traditions, to evolve. If we continue to allow ourselves and our respective faiths to be governed by fear, we will continue to act as pawns in unnecessary spiritual wars, and religion will only continue to exacerbate personal and collective suffering.

Unfortunately, religions tend to root themselves in attachment. Even Buddhist teaching can generate grasping. This is because any institutional structure is made by, and built for, egos. This is more than a little ironic since the mystical teachings of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, and Buddhism, speak so much about egolessness and compassion. But for a teaching to develop a following, it must offer something onto which followers can grasp. Since attachment is what gets in the way of establishing an enlightened perspective in anyone or any group, we shouldn’t ever count on religious doctrine to truly transform us.

On the other hand, we can definitely count on religious doctrine to help our egos make sense out of the chaos of our circumstances. Religions give simple translations to what the ego sees as the infinitely complex and threatening language of the Universe. Religions provide salvation, safety, luck, and even promises of immortality. This is exactly the kind of assurance that the ego wants, and it is also something that the ego will fight to protect. The important point to remember is that for any serious person climbing the Mountain of Spirit, transformation is the goal. Simple translation isn’t. Translation will only allow for the small self to feel a temporary sense of security. Transformation gets us past the threats altogether and helps us realign ourselves as beings who embody an enlightened view and live an Ultimate Life.

Seekers of true transformation will do well to remember that religions grasp at their self-authored versions of truth in order to survive. They are, once again, merely institutions built upon collective egoic clinging. As such they will always have the potential to generate suffering over time. The Upanishads, the Old and New Testaments, the Koran, the Lotus Sutra, all have the potential to help us awaken, but our individual and collective attachments to the words, ideas, and perspectives expressed in these texts always inhibit our opening to Spirit. What’s more, our religious convictions simultaneously feed on and fuel an entire cultural pattern of interpretation. Once this codification happens, there is little room for flexibility, and this lack of flexibility is the manifestation of division, fixation, extremism, and the associated fears that arise within and among these various versions of grasping. This leads us into war. Even if our religion is science, or the market, or nature, we are susceptible to the call offered by our attachment to our particular version of faith the minute we cling to it. And in that moment of clinging to what we believe to be right, we give birth to war. It may be small. It may be huge. But it’s war.

So why do we cling? Because, once again, ego wants to be able to manage our lives with as few complications as possible. Religions essentially offer the ego candy when they promise future salvation if the ego merely commits to believing in its particular version of Truth. When this happens, a tradition’s version of Truth offers absolute safety for a separate self that feels threatened by absolutely everything. Getting on the other side of this prison masquerading as salvation will change the entire world by opening us up to a profound freedom. Ironically, it is the very freedom toward which the founders of the world’s great wisdom traditions pointed. But neither Christ, nor the Buddha, nor Mohammed, nor any other founding sage of the world’s religions has offered any critique of the doctrines that they inspired. Instead, we have to follow their example by leading conscious lives informed by the wisdom and compassion brought on by stillness. Egos will think this assertion naïve, yet it is entirely possible for an individual, no matter how entrenched or attached, to unlearn his conscious and unconscious attachments to all of the mind patterns that get in the way of a deep liberation from fear and suffering. Continuing this climb, however, takes courage and work. And while it might not necessarily be easy, the process can be undertaken by anyone wishing for, and committed to, Awakening.