There is some thinking in spiritual circles that the spiritual process is a passive process whereby you sit patiently and wait for the gift of Grace which heralds awakening and then enlightenment. Without Grace there is no spiritual journey. Moreover, whatever journey there is, is largely conceptual or mind-based. The gift of Grace marks the shift from concept to experience. But that gift of Grace is earned by an active conscious process. You cannot escape the intellectual rigor and reasoning required for the spiritual journey.
That active process begins by being authentic when reading spiritual books or listening to those claiming to have achieved certain stages of realization. Asking yourself, "What feels right about what I am reading/listening to?" What resonates as Truth and what doesn't. This is a process, which, in my case, began in early childhood when I began to identify those parts of the Catholic faith that felt right and those that didn't. Whether or not my reasoning was correct is not the point; the point is to have the courage to ask the questions and begin the vital process of discernment.
This process of discernment continued when I started studying Buddhism. I questioned everything, and most importantly I related everything back to my own experience, not to what I thought about or what I had read or heard — but to what resonated with my own experience. This was a particularly active process in meditation: observing the chaotic nature of my mind and thoughts, recognizing directly their impermanence and the root of my suffering.
However, seeing and experiencing this mind turbulence does not end the process; it continues as Sadhana or one's regular practice, and it is not easy. The process demands the engagement of the consciousness; there is no way around this. It involves facing up to and taking responsibility for every thought, word, action without projection onto anyone or anything else. All of this work is necessary before the gift of Grace is bestowed.
Then, having done all of this work, there is the active process of "letting go" so that everything can be refined, as if by internal incubator so that something new can emerge. This is a challenging part of the process because in my case when I let go in the sense of not reading/writing/listening to anything spiritual, I didn't understand what was driving this urge to "let go." Was it my ego getting too close to its own disintegration or was it a genuine intuition, which I had to listen to if I wanted to progress further? Writing this I can still remember the confusion and emptiness I felt at this time. Up to that point, I had spent so much of my life reading/writing/listening to all things spiritual that I couldn't see how life could be enjoyable without it. Was I self-sabotaging? All of these thoughts ran rampant through my mind.
There are crunch points at various milestones on the spiritual journey and each of these crunch points demands something in order to progress to the next stage. The intuitive impulse to end my search was one of these points. Choosing to surrender to the Kundalini energy when I experienced it was another. I wrote in detail about this experience in my book, Female Kundalini. These times demand that the individual make an active conscious choice at that point.
On this path, there is nothing given that is not well and truly earned. So, those non-dualists who say, "There is nothing to do, you are already THAT. There's no need for practice, discipline, or self-observation."
I say, "This is simply not true. Believing it so is to live inside a spiritual bubble, which will sooner or later burst."
This process of discernment continued when I started studying Buddhism. I questioned everything, and most importantly I related everything back to my own experience, not to what I thought about or what I had read or heard — but to what resonated with my own experience. This was a particularly active process in meditation: observing the chaotic nature of my mind and thoughts, recognizing directly their impermanence and the root of my suffering.
However, seeing and experiencing this mind turbulence does not end the process; it continues as Sadhana or one's regular practice, and it is not easy. The process demands the engagement of the consciousness; there is no way around this. It involves facing up to and taking responsibility for every thought, word, action without projection onto anyone or anything else. All of this work is necessary before the gift of Grace is bestowed.
Then, having done all of this work, there is the active process of "letting go" so that everything can be refined, as if by internal incubator so that something new can emerge. This is a challenging part of the process because in my case when I let go in the sense of not reading/writing/listening to anything spiritual, I didn't understand what was driving this urge to "let go." Was it my ego getting too close to its own disintegration or was it a genuine intuition, which I had to listen to if I wanted to progress further? Writing this I can still remember the confusion and emptiness I felt at this time. Up to that point, I had spent so much of my life reading/writing/listening to all things spiritual that I couldn't see how life could be enjoyable without it. Was I self-sabotaging? All of these thoughts ran rampant through my mind.
On this path, there is nothing given that is not well and truly earned. So, those non-dualists who say, "There is nothing to do, you are already THAT. There's no need for practice, discipline, or self-observation."
I say, "This is simply not true. Believing it so is to live inside a spiritual bubble, which will sooner or later burst."
