Finding the On-Ramp to Your Spiritual Path: A Roadmap to Joy and Rejuvenation
176
Finding the On-Ramp to Your Spiritual Path: A Roadmap to Joy and Rejuvenation
176eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
True to the title, this guidebook directs beginners on the spiritual journey. Author Jan Phillips, reared Catholic, has traveled through Buddhist, Hindu, and Muslim cultures merging dualities of East and West. A popular workshop leader for decades, she is a dynamic, upbeat, straight-talking, wise old woman in her own right, and her prose reflects her character. In warm, engaging language, she presents basic spiritual concepts and practices for the multitudes of Americans who have left traditional religion and are searching for a full-bodied, mind-expanding, convincing spirituality
The book consists of short essays and personal anecdotes. Each story incorporates the wisdom of various traditions, all suggesting the immanence of the Divine in our lives. Each chapter reframes the meaning of a typical road sign-such as YIELD for surrender, STOP for taking time for balance, LANE ENDS for giving up old notions. All in all, this lively book maps an adventurous trek from illusion to reality, fear to fulfillment, isolation to community. It invites us to go deeper and further, finding, at the end, that the journey is everything.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780835630849 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Quest Books |
| Publication date: | 07/15/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 176 |
| File size: | 349 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Finding the On-Ramp to Your Spiritual Path
A Road Map to Joy and Rejuvenation
By Jan Phillips
Theosophical Publishing House
Copyright © 2013 Jan PhillipsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8356-3084-9
CHAPTER 1
Stop
* * *
Since the spiritual path is a path of mindfulness, the first step requires that you come to a complete stop, catch your breath, and be aware that wherever you are right now is the perfect place for you to be. All the choices you have made in your life have brought you here, and they deserve to be honored. Or as the Sufi mystic Hafiz would say, "The place where you are right now, God circled on a map for you."
So give yourself credit. Stop judging yourself. Stop being critical. Stop thinking negative thoughts. You have chosen the path of enlightenment, and that path is illumined from the inside out—as we believe, so it becomes.
The journey on which you are about to embark is a pilgrimage inward, and the destination is awareness. This is a guidebook for the joyful adventure of finding yourself; for once we know who we are, where we are, where we want to go, all heaven breaks loose with the possibility of fulfillment. Once you become mindful of your thoughts, your words, and your desires, you tune in also to the great power they hold; you tap your own potential to use them to create the kind of life you came here to experience. The more mindful you become, the more you will experience your creativity, and the more you will understand how it works. You will begin to feel in your flesh and bones the very inflow of the Creative Force that is collaborating with you at every moment.
The difference between people who are on the spiritual path and those who are not is a matter of consciousness. To be on the path means that you are living in the state of awareness. You are conscious of what you are doing and why you are doing it. You are conscious that you may not always have a choice about what happens to you, but you do have a choice about how you respond to it. And this is where you begin to experience your own life as something you are actually creating, because every move you make along the way is your own choice, your own creation.
A few years ago, I veered off the path and found myself in a stressful frenzy. I had begun graduate school thinking it would provide a scintillating, engaging environment. I imagined myself in Socrates's circle and found myself instead surrounded by students half my age concerned more with spring breaks in Cancun than anything else. I was disenchanted with the whole experience, found fault with everything and everyone, and worked my way into a mental and spiritual morass. Totally out of balance, I called up my spiritual mentor, Paula, and informed her I was quitting school.
She listened to my outburst of negativity, then asked three questions: Are you eating and drinking moderately? Do you have a physical regimen for your body? Do you have a spiritual practice? I couldn't answer yes to any of them, and she said, "Jan, no wonder your life's a mess. You don't have any balance in it. Nothing can possibly work out for you if you don't take care of those three areas." She suggested I make some changes in my life, work on balance, and wait a few weeks to see how I felt about quitting school. "Call me before you do anything drastic," she said.
That morning I made a commitment to beginning each day with twenty minutes of silence before I got out of bed. That would be my spiritual practice. No newspapers. No books or TV or phone calls. I lit a candle and focused on my breath for twenty minutes. I bought a bicycle and started riding it to school instead of driving. I threw out the junk food I had all over the house and started eating and drinking mindfully. They were not big changes, but they did require attention and vigilance. I shifted from automatic pilot to manual control for twenty-one days.
After three weeks I called Paula. "You are not going to believe what happened. Everyone on campus has changed dramatically!" I announced, full of joy and hopefulness. And she laughed right along with me, knowing that all the change I referred to had happened deep down inside me. I had stopped blaming people for not living up to my expectations, because I was no longer disgruntled. I was feeling good about myself and didn't have to blame anyone for my life being all wrong. I was eating well, drinking moderately, exercising daily, and staying true to my twenty minutes of silence a day. I had started down a spiritual path, and the journey felt adventurous and liberating.
You don't need to subscribe to religious dogma to be spiritual. Spirituality is not about creeds, saintly behavior, martyrdom, or selflessness. It is not about aspiring to be what we are not. It is about being everything we are with the greatest courage we can muster. It is about realizing—making real—our very selves. Meister Eckhart, a German mystic, writes that "when the soul wants to have an experience of something, she throws an image of that experience ahead of her and then enters into her own image." Being on the spiritual path is doing just that: envisioning what we want, then setting out with intention, desire, and diligence to get there. Whether or not we're "religious" or belong to a church has very little to do with it.
My uncle once said to me, "I'm not spiritual. I can't pray anymore." When I asked why, he said, "I forgot the words." He had confused spirituality with religion, thinking it had something to do with what he had once learned and had now forgotten. And come hunting season every fall, he would go to the hunting camp with his brothers, strike out on his own with his gun in hand, find a tree to sit under, and be alone with his thoughts. "I never fire a shot," he said. "I'm just waiting for a deer to come so that I can enjoy its wildness. It's the place I go to feel connected with nature. That's really my religion, but don't you dare tell anyone."
My uncle never thought of himself as being on a spiritual path. He didn't come to it with that kind of consciousness, and yet he knew where to go when he wanted to connect with the inner world. Hunting season was his stop sign in life. It was his chance to turn his back on the chaos of life and trudge into the woods, where he found his balance and bliss in communion with the wild.
Each of us must determine for ourselves what it takes to keep us balanced. This is the greatest gift we can give to ourselves, and therefore to our loved ones, for if we do not love ourselves lavishly, we cannot love others lavishly. And that is really what we are here for—to be a great light for others, to heal them with our touch and our deep listening, to mirror back to them their own majesty and magnitude.
So when you come to a stop sign on the road, let it be a reminder. Stop judging yourself. Start loving yourself. Think balance as you come to your complete stop, and after you look to the right and the left, look inward as well, to be sure you have what you need to stay steady on the path.
CHAPTER 2Lane Ends
* * *
I came to the end of a lane once, and it was terrifying. It was my first month in the convent and our first day of Theology 101. The tall, bulky Jesuit priest burst through the doorway, heaved his books on the desk, and turned to the thirty postulants before him saying, "All right, so you're going to dedicate your lives to God. Let's hear something about your relationship with this great love of your life."
This was easy, I thought. We had all been educated in Catholic schools and had memorized the Baltimore catechism. One by one, my classmates raised their hands, stood up, and repeated the answers we had been repeating all our lives.
"God made me to show his goodness and to share his life in everlasting happiness," said the first sister.
"That's the best you can do?" the priest replied.
"Yes, Father."
"Sit down!"
The next postulant took a shot. "God is the Father and the first person of the Holy Trinity."
"That's it?" he said.
"Yes, Father."
"Sit down!"
A third postulant met with the same disdain; then the room was quiet. What was he doing? I couldn't imagine what was wrong. The answers everyone was giving were perfect, and still he dismissed them and asked for more.
"This is the best you can do?" he shouted, his arms flailing heavenward. "You call this God of yours believable? None of you have said one thing I can believe in. This is nonsense you're uttering. What about your relationship with this God of yours?" A wave of anxiety rushed through me. I wanted to cry. Who was this terrible man and why was he doing this? Here we had offered up all we knew of God and he was taking a hammer to our cherished beliefs, shattering what we had clung to all our lives. It was devastating.
None of our beliefs stood up to his questions. Not one of us could defend our faith, for we had never learned the answers to the questions he was asking. We had learned what to think, but not how to think, and his questions ran deeper than any of our thoughts.
I sat frozen, full of shame and anger, staring down at my hands folded on the desk. As if my gaze were a testimony of respect, I withheld it from him. Finally the priest broke the silence. "You must find out what is true about God for yourselves. Arrive at a faith that is deeper than your learning, a faith that rises up from your own depths." He said that we needed to let go of what everyone told us and come up with our own faith, a faith of commitment, a faith based on relationship and experience, a faith that was alive and rooted in our ultimate concerns.
It took a while to understand what he was talking about, but eventually the distinction between faith and religion surfaced. Religion was something that I had inherited, that I was born into and taught. It came to me from the outside. Faith was something that I was being challenged to create from the inside out, something profoundly personal that would stand up to any test because it evolved from my own compassion and commitments.
The lane that ended for me that day was the lane of dependence—dependence on the church, on external authority, on others' concepts and opinions about what is true. The biblical paradox that claims you must lose your life in order to find it started to make sense. I had to give up the known—my programming—which was handed down to me and accepted without challenge, for the unknown, which is the continually unfolding mystery and expression of who I am and what I believe.
Religion is up to others. Faith is up to us. If there were no religions in the world, it wouldn't keep any of us from having an intimate, vital relationship with the Divine, for that relationship is something we create personally, every day. It doesn't take religion to make a person of faith. It takes awareness, compassionate practice, mindful behavior.
Lanes are coming to an end for all of us all the time. Just when we think we're sailing smoothly down the path of life, along comes an upset—we lose a job, a loved one dies, our marriage dissolves, we find out that we have cancer or that our child is on drugs. When the structures around us collapse, our first response is often shock, as the walls of our well-constructed lives come tumbling down. But shock is often the first step in the creation of something new and more beautiful than the old. Shock may be what the caterpillar feels when its safe cocoon breaks open to reveal a remarkable transformation into butterfly nature. Shock may be what the acorn experiences when its shell bursts apart to let loose the unfolding oak within.
Imaginative changes are brought about by shock, experiences that unsettle our whole notion of reality and require that we reconstruct our universe in some new way. In Moments of Being, Virginia Woolf writes,
I suppose that the shock-receiving capacity is what makes me a writer. I feel that I have had a blow; but it is not, as I thought as a child, simply a blow from an enemy hidden behind the cotton wool of daily life; it is or will become a revelation of some order; it is a token of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words. It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed pieces together. Perhaps this is the strongest pleasure known to me.
When the lane we're on comes to an end, it's time to give up an illusion for the truth that lies beneath it. And this is not a matter of effort. As Deepak Chopra says, "Effort is the problem, not the solution." The only thing we need to do is let go. Our self-understanding is about to undergo a revolution, and we need to stop clinging to the past and let the revolution happen. Instead of asking, "Why is this happening to me?" ask, "Why is this happening for me?"
Your own cocoon is splitting open so that your wings can emerge. Just breathe deeply, stay calm, and know that you are evolving every day, just like the rest of the natural world of which you are a part. This is a growth spurt, a step forward. Every breakthrough is preceded by a breakdown. Every dawn starts at midnight.
Some real thing is behind these appearances: awareness of that reality we are seeking on the spiritual path. We are in search of the Real, and the suffering we experience is tied to our illusions. The only means of transformation in our lives is awareness—awareness of who we are and what is real.
When I was a novice in that theology class, I had no idea who I was or what was real. I knew only what I had been taught, and I could barely stand to question the concepts that supported my life. Mentoring from that priest taught me how to create my own faith, to put the severed pieces together and come up with something real and powerful enough—not to die for but to live for.
The hard thing about inherited beliefs is that we think we should defend them. It doesn't occur to us that, as we evolve, our thoughts evolve; as we mature, our spirituality matures. We develop our own worldview. We see how others have shaped our thinking and begin to drop what no longer rings true. We ask ourselves, would I think this way if I was born in China, in Africa? Then we begin to develop, from the inside out, a faith of our own making, based on what it is we believe is true and right and worthy of our commitment.
The Buddha, on his deathbed, said, "Do not accept what you hear by report; do not accept tradition; do not accept a statement because it is found in our books, nor because it is in accord with your belief, nor because it is the saying of your teacher. Be lamps unto yourselves." To be lamps unto ourselves we must claim who we are and create our own creeds from our own depths. No guru, no priest, no mystic can give us truth. They can give us formulas, offer concepts, interpret sacred writings, but these are not truth. They are the menu, not the meal. They are the map, not the journey.
True sages admit that we cannot say anything about the awakened state but can speak only of the sleeping state. St. Thomas Aquinas said about God that "we cannot say what He is"; we can say only "what He is not." The highest form of knowledge is to know that one does not know, like the Zen master who was asked by a student what happens when you die.
He answered, "I don't know."
"But aren't you a Zen master?" asked the student.
"Yes, but not a dead one."
It is only our experience that is real. No one can say what is true for anyone else, for our truth rises up from who we are and what we experience. The Indian poet Kabir writes, "If you have not experienced it, it isn't true." Spirituality is a matter of who we are, of becoming what we are. The spiritual path, then, is a journey into ourselves, into our own divine nature, our own knowing. In the words of Marcel Proust, "We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness, which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to view the world."
So when a lane you are on comes to an end, and you feel the world caving in because what you thought was true no longer appears to be, go into yourself and remember who you are. Remember that you are not your thoughts, not what anyone ever said you were, not what you have tried to construct from your concepts of right and wrong.
You are Infinite Mind. When you look up and see only clouds, remember that above the clouds is infinite sky and that this, too, is you. The shocks you experience are openings into your infinite nature. We get brief glimpses of this so that we do not forget; we get moments of enlightenment so that we know to hang on to the wheel and keep moving forward. There is nothing ahead but the Light.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Finding the On-Ramp to Your Spiritual Path by Jan Phillips. Copyright © 2013 Jan Phillips. Excerpted by permission of Theosophical Publishing House.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction,1. Stop,
2. Lane Ends,
3. Yield,
4. Curves Ahead,
5. Divided Highway,
6. End Divided Highway,
7. Falling Rocks Ahead,
8. Workers Ahead,
9. Merge,
10. One Way,
11. Crossroad,
Appendix 1: An Apostle's Creed,
Appendix 2: Book Club Guidelines,
Further Readings,
About the Author,