MINDFULNESS AND SPIRITUALITY

Love, compassion, healing and liberation from suffering are the core existential human concerns all religions and spirituality focus on. The question always is how to deeply live and embody these concerns in an effective manner. The core message of all major religions and spiritual practices is a systematic analysis of what gets in the way of such a liberation. Although depending on cultural, historical and geographical context different words and metaphors are used to engage in that analysis, its core structure is always and everywhere fundamentally the same, consisting of diagnosis, etiology, prognosis and prescription.

First, we always have to make a diagnosis, which tells us what is wrong with us. The diagnosis is a simple, though penetrating one: ‘Misalignment’, ‘imbalance’. We are off center, always in a wrong space, or as the French like to say, ‘nous ne sommes pas dans nos assiettes’, meaning literally ‘we are not in our plates’, or ‘we are out of sorts’. To mention the big three-letter word, we are not in sink with God. Something is wrong with the way we live and relate to each other and the environment that sustains us. In short, we suffer, and most importantly, we often don’t know, don’t recognize and deny that we suffer. The clear recognition of the diagnosis, which is the acknowledgement of suffering by not masking it, pushing it away, or distracting from it, and the kind and non-aggressive acceptance of it by opening ourselves to being with it and honoring it, is the first step towards an improvement of the human condition.

Second, there is an etiology to be understood, meaning that there are reasons and causes for this suffering; our suffering has origins we need to clearly get to know and recognize. How can you treat a disease if you don’t know its origins and mechanisms? To put it simply (and possibly a bit simplistically), the cause of our suffering is the fact that our mind plays tricks on us, so that we end up with a clouded view of reality, with distortions of truth, with illusions, and with a false sense of what freedom really is. A much used metaphor for this state of being tells us that we are asleep, zombies who are unaware of being on automatic pilot. What’s more, our ignorance about our mind’s clever distortions is really no different from suffering itself – suffering is this kind of ignorance. In seeing our suffering clearly, in recognizing the mechanisms by which it is caused, we start to be able to understand possible ways out from it, a process that strengthens our intention to let go of the causes of suffering. This letting go is the beginning of an awakening. Being awake is the core concern of all religions and spirituality, because we can only love, have compassion, heal, and liberate our world from suffering, when we do not allow our mind’s secretions to cloud and distort our view. With awareness, our actions start to become liberating and creative. This awareness, as we are going to have to discover, reveals the most unexpected reality, which is that the mind’s tricks prevent us from living the emptiness of existence.

Thirdly, we can now pose a prognosis: Freedom from suffering is completely possible. This insight challenges us to embark on the path of liberation, to take the medicine needed to treat the disease of imbalance and suffering. When we start working with this prognosis, with the good news so to speak, we come to realize something even more fundamental than suffering and its causes. We discover that cessation or containment of suffering in the form of well-being and ease is already available to us, if we know how to see it when it is present, and enjoy its precious gifts we already have. As we develop a deep understanding of this fact, we recognize that suffering is not as fundamental as we thought. By looking deeply at our present situation, we can see that the conditions for happiness are already there, and then we can nourish these conditions. We thus come full circle: In facing our suffering and accepting it in a loving way (resisting it would only intensify our suffering), we come to the realization that this acceptance itself is an aspect of ease and well-being, and that all the conditions for ease are already there to be lived. In other words, suffering and happiness are not separate, but one and the same.

The fourth step is to now fill the prescription and take the medicine. We now have to start practicing in a pragmatic and creative manner. This practice is not like a musician practicing the instrument, although there are elements of this image in it, but more like a vocation, a doctor practicing medicine. It is being in the moment on purpose, as if our lives depended on it.  As the word ‘vocation’ (from Latin ‘vox’ = ‘voice’) implies, to commit to this practice of being alive is to put forth our voice into the world, to declare in no uncertain terms how deeply committed we are to alleviate suffering in ourselves and everywhere around us. This prescription to practice entails a number of precise instructions that are all encompassed by the discipline of mindfulness meditation, a ‘spiritual’ discipline if you will, the discipline God gave us as a tool to surrender to the way things are.         

Religion, as its etymology implies (Latin ‘re-ligio’ = ‘reconnection’), brings us back full circle ‘to where we started, in order for us to see the place for the first time (T.S. Elliot)’. As we follow the path of our investigations into the organism that we are, we have to tackle ever more difficult issues, culminating in the lofty realms of consciousness and the sense of a knowing self. But as we get ‘up there’, we discover that the air becomes thinner and thinner, increasingly depleted of its life sustaining oxygen. The highest peaks of consciousness cannot be climbed or understood outside the foundations of nature, which rest in the story of the survival of life forms. Once we climb the peak, and we had to do that to get the full bird’s eye view of the horizon, we have to climb back down to what nourishes our existence, namely survival. It is in the ordinariness of life and the organism that we are that we discover how extraordinary nature is. But that climbing effort, like Moses’ effort of climbing the mountain to get God’s Ten Commandments, leaves us with gifts we are now responsible to pass on. These are the gifts of wisdom, responsibility and concern, gifts that are characteristic of a minded organism such as human beings.

In Jon Kabat-Zinn’s words, ‘perhaps ‘spiritual’ means simply experiencing wholeness and interconnectedness directly, a seeing that individuality and totality are interwoven, that nothing is separate or extraneous, and that everything is spiritual in the deepest sense, as long as we are there for it.’ We may add, that spiritual surrender means to return to the roots of survival with the gifts acquired on the journey through consciousness; to exercise concern towards all existence with the humility that comes from realizing that all we need is the love and compassion necessary to overcome suffering. We became knowing organisms in the course of evolution, and acquired a knowing sense of self, which allows us to discover and understand the world we live in. However, it is our task to learn from the journey of initiation, as the mindfulness journey could be called, that all this knowledge is only worth the extent to which it is put in the service of one of the greatest of God’s gifts, concern. It follows, that the highest form of knowledge is love.

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