Submitted by Kiri on
I was poking around a blog directory recently, trying to figure out what the hell my “niche” is (Religion? I don’t think so. New Age? You must be kidding. Unaffiliated curmudgeonly mystics? Category not found.)
Suffice to say, I didn’t find my niche. But I did find a blog full of beautiful words about peace and positivity and light and spirit, and instantly cringed. It was evident that whoever wrote those words was a very nasty person indeed.
Nasty? Someone who writes about peace and love and light? You bet. In fact, I bet you, the reader, know exactly what I mean. You’ve met the type.
It’s easy to wave one’s hand and dismiss the nasty spiritual people of the world as “hypocrites”. That, they appear to be. But labelling the phenomenon doesn’t help one to understand why there are so many nasty spiritual people. Most importantly, it doesn’t help one avoid becoming one of them.
The fundamentals of mysticism are a matter of public knowledge. Everybody knows, generally, that it involves something to do with clearing your mind, that mystics report experiencing joy and peace and bliss, that some of them, some of the time, can do way-cool amazing things, etc. Tweak the words a bit to fit the religious tradition, and that’s a pretty good “common knowledge” description of mysticism.
Mysticism certainly does involve clearing one’s mind. Mystics who persist do experience joy, peace, and bliss. Sometimes mystics have been reported to have unusual powers. Unfortunately, the first sentence is out of context and grossly oversimplified, and the second two describe an outcome of years of persistent, disciplined mystical practice — not “something you do” (or more often, pretend to do) when you want to be “spiritual”.
Enter the missing context:
It is not possible to clear one’s mind solely through relaxation techniques (which is what meditation amounts to in the popular mind). First off, most of everyone’s day is not spent sitting in the lotus position counting one’s breaths. Most of one’s day is spent in some permutation of work, housework, family or community obligations, and academics. If one truly is going to “clear one’s mind”, one is going to have to do it during normal daily activities, by watching one’s mind constantly. This isn’t a relaxation technique, it’s a thinking repair technique. It rarely generates much in the way of happy relaxation. It does occasionally generate moments of squirmy discomfort.
And if one wants to truly be aware of, and to reshape and control, one’s thought, then one has ultimately to look into the closets and under the beds for the bogeymen of one’s own thinking, the ones causing all that squirmy discomfort. This means getting down and dirty with one’s shame, one’s guilt. and one’s fears. All of them. To do that one has to do two things: one has to be willing to hurt — a lot — and so one has to be willing to countenance “negative thinking” and “negative energy”.
There wouldn’t be a lot of shame and guilt if one felt no obligation to others. Being free of bad feelings that way is a defect, not an asset. Another name for it is sociopathy. Sociopaths don’t just lack bad feelings about themselves. They lack insight into themselves.
To truly see ourselves, then, we have to be of a mind to act for the benefit of others. And, as we do so, we’ll sometimes screw up and thus fuel the drive for clarity, bringing us full circle in this web of spiritual practice.
Nasty spiritual people don’t move in this web of interdependent practices. They don’t because these things aren’t blissful. Most real spiritual practice, of necessity, doesn’t involve a state of relaxation. There’s nothing blissful in turning over every rock looking for bogeymen (in fact doing so has a way of precipitating crises). Even acting for the benefit of others doesn’t always feel good (do-gooderism notwithstanding). I remember once giving my jacket to a child on a chilly autumn bus trip after the heater failed. It sucked to feel guilty before I took it off and offered it to the kid. It sucked to be freezing without a jacket afterwards.
What nasty spiritual people do is try to jump over all the suckiness. They feel they are most spiritual when they are relaxed, or in some state of spiritual excitement brought about by prayer or reading spiritual works, or when they have a good feeling about themselves because they think they’ve done good to others. So they try to cling to these happy moments, and put on a spiritual happy face.
In the New Age and Prosperity Gospel iteration of this, it goes one step further. Not only do they cling to happy feelings, they repudiate sucky feelings, sucky moments, people in need who can’t afford to make-believe along with them, and in looking at anything other than the effortlessly prosperous and happy person they want to be.
Of course it’s not possible to hang onto a fleeting moment of spiritual excitement. Stand on top of a mountain, looking over a magnificent vista, for too long, and you will find yourself freezing in a blizzard in the dark. When the normal workings of life “interrupt” their imagined bliss, they dip into their baser impulses and lash out at whatever or whoever they blame the interruption on. The culprit has interrupted their high. Worse yet, the culprit is threatening their self-image.
People who won’t tolerate discomfort never turn over rocks and peek into the dark corner of the basement of their mind, and so they don’t know anything of their baser motives. Since they don’t know what they are, they act them out. And since they refuse to consider that they have any baser impulses, they stare blankly at those they hurt, and hurl out epithets (or go in for a round of verbal backstabbing).
Even though they usually aren’t sociopaths in the true sense, they become, with all this forced positivity, functional sociopaths. When something, intentionally or unintentionally, disturbs those happy moments, they snap at whatever and whoever disturbed them, hard.
Are you grappling with some real world task or event and did you ask for their help (or even mere cooperation or understanding)? Are you feeling like crap because you turned over one of your own rocks and are doing the hard work to clean up the mess you found under it? You have negativity (they will sometimes feel that telling you how loathsome you are to them is helping you). Did they harm you in their do-gooding, (assuming they do any do-gooding at all, and don’t limit their “do-gooding” to telling everyone else who grapples with the labors and problems of life that they deserve such things because they are “negative”), and did you speak up? What ingratitude among the undeserving negative people!
But wait, there’s more. Life has never allowed anyone to stick their head in the clouds, by any means, and find happiness. This phenomenon in cases of drug addiction and sexual compulsion and thrill seeking of every sort is called anhedonia. The more someone gets high or otherwise experiences pleasure, the less they are able to feel pleasure. This principle, where the mind jettisons pleasure in excess, applies as much to the merely pleasurable in spiritual practice as it does to any other pleasure. Cling to pleasure, and it goes away. Nasty spiritual people are deeply unhappy people who can’t but know, somewhere in the highly unexplored recesses of their minds, that their assumed blissfulness is fake, and that the “spirituality” they seek is slipping farther and farther away from them daily.
So, like other pleasure seekers, they double down. They try harder. They seek out their own kind, thinking that the more they isolate themselves from “negative” people, the more they can hang on to their bliss. They snap more and more at anything “negative” that intrudes into their supposed bliss. They get ever more unreal about matters like money and work. They may, as the practicalities of life start to crumble around them, resort to overspending in order to “demonstrate prosperity.” Or they may set themselves up as spiritual guides for others, at a hefty price tag, rather as a junkie might turn dealer.
Until they become willing to embrace suffering — perhaps because all of their magical thinking has gotten them into a real pickle (as any metalworker can tell you a “pickle” is an acid that eats through metals, stripping the oxides and and laying it bare so that it might be polished) — or simply because their misery becomes too palpable for feigned bliss to be maintained — they will never come to grips with the real thing.
The foundations of spirituality are in the suckiness of the world. Whether you want to call this embrace “taking up your cross”, or you want to take an oath not to enter nirvana until everyone else does, or you accept Allah’s will in all things, even the difficult things, in some manner or another the genuine mystic must embrace, not the temporary pleasures that can sometimes be found in practice, but the suck of it all.
And it is in this embrace of the suck — in looking at things as they are, not in imagining how we would rather they be — that we can find the clarity to perceive Deep Truth. It’s in the pain, the labor, the interruptions and disruptions, in the sacrifice of shouldering not only one’s own burdens but those of others, and in sharing the pain of the world — not in grabbing onto fleeting spiritual pleasures with a death grip — that we can beat down our ego enough to find our compassion and our insight.
Mysticism isn’t The Secret. It isn’t even a secret. There’s so little to add to the topic I feel I have no business blogging at times. It’s all out there, as a matter of public record, in the sacred books and oral traditions of every culture and spiritual tradition worth the name. The vocabulary isn’t the same, but the message is: the only way to find Everything is to become nothing.
What’s more the ways of the mystic are written in the very being of every creature, prepared to sprout like a weed, especially when fed a diet of nourishing manure.
Don’t be nasty. Instead, have a day that compassionately and insightfully sucks.
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