“Life is this simple: we are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and the divine is shining through it all the time. This is not just a nice story or a fable, it is true. ”
Thomas Merton
I may have written about this before. Forgive me if I have, but I want to start this column with a memory from high school. I was in the locker room after track practice about to shower and a Bill Withers song was blaring from a stereo system someone had donated that sat atop a couple lockers against one wall. I think it was “Ain’t No Sunshine” and Withers was at that part where he sings “I know” 26 times in a row while barely stopping to breathe and the rest of the guys were being guys, yelling and laughing and telling lies about things they had done with girls and I was being me which meant at that moment I was ignoring the cacophony around me while sitting and staring at a sock I had removed from my foot and was just thinking, lost in a thread of thought that I found mildly mesmerizing.
Then from within me arose an extremely pleasant feeling as I realized the universe was (is) always teaching us, not just occasionally or once or twice in a long, ordinary life, but continually and that we need to be alert if we are to learn its valuable lessons. The way the words formed themselves in my mind – and this is the truest part of the story – was this: “Everything teaches but not everyone learns.”
Years later, while attending the University of Dayton and engaging in my one and only act of bathroom graffiti vandalism while standing at a urinal, I impulsively wrote in small, neat letters in the grouting between two tiles: “When will learn?” I meant to write, “When will we learn?” but I forgot the “we.” In all my years at UD that was my favorite place to pee because I liked to read those words and think about their meaning.
I am currently preparing for a five-week class I will be teaching soon with an inspired title that excites me when I think about it: Becoming Light: Methods of Mindfulness that bring us Peace and Joy, increase our Understanding and heal our Relationships. In preparing for the class, I am doing what I usually do which means buying more books from Amazon that I won’t have time to read and filling my car with them so they are nearby when I have time to grab one and carefully mark its crisp, white pages with a skinny, yellow highlighter.
I spent the day at my office recently reading a new book by Adyashanti titled: Resurrecting Jesus, Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic and I thought of my locker room insight from years ago, only this time I thought about a fire hose of wisdom that floods through us at such a rate we couldn’t possibly catch it all with our distracted, preoccupied minds. Everything teaches but not everyone learns.
Adyashanti is a spiritual teacher I went to see in San Rafael a year or so ago along with a few hundred others. According to the dust jacket, Adya is “devoted to serving the awakening of all beings.” In this particular book, he illuminates the Jesus story like cracking open a coconut and generously spilling its sweetness into our thirsty minds. For the first time, I get it. I really get it.
When I was 15 or 16, like a lot of us in the 70s, I sat in my closed room and listened to Neil Young, Cat Stevens and David Bowie on my little record player and read what felt like deep, dense, spiritual truths from Kahlil Gibran. On my door I taped a quote from Paul Williams’ Das Energi that I still remember: “Here and now boys. Or else spend infinite future fighting quarrels of endless past.”
As I read Gibran, the words never changed but my mind slowly did. My consciousness grew to a point where I could finally grasp their meaning. That is why we study some things over and over. There is deep mystery sequestered in simple words. When it finally comes into focus, we wonder why it took so long.
Adya helps us see that every aspect of the Jesus story is about the steps we must take as we move toward and through spiritual enlightenment. Waking up is a deliberate process involving purposeful awareness and mindful observation. Whenever I am disturbed, it has less to do with external things than I usually realize. I may think my dog barking just now was the cause of my annoyance but the true culprit is my internal resistance to it.
Reality is neutral. It is neither good, bad, right or wrong. My thinking mind is at war with reality because it wants what it can’t have or it has what it doesn’t want. Like Steven Covey said, we don’t see the world as it is. We see the world as we are. In our unconscious state, we project our needs upon the world and identify with fear and anger, lack and limitation.
There is another way. Happily. We don’t have to suffer. The truth can set us free. Once we finally see that we are the cause of our own pain, we can surrender, open up and find other insights and truths that serve to deepen our spiritual understanding.
Adya reminds us that as we age and time passes, something remains unchanged within. From one moment to the next, as the years and decades crawl, trot and then gallop past, my true self is still here and now, where its always been. In the midst of an external me that changes over time, who is the internal “I” that stays the same?
“That sense of something unchanged is the eternal spark within. At the beginning it may be felt as a very subtle, almost incomprehensible intuition, but when we bring our full attention to that felt intuition of what’s the same throughout our whole lives, then that little seed of divine radiance can begin to reveal itself, can begin to shine brighter and brighter in our lives.”
We are divine beings pretending we aren’t. We can see it if we look. We can feel it in the silence between our breaths. Here and now, boys and girls, here and now.
Doug Craig graduated from college in Ohio with a journalism degree and got married during the Carter administration. He graduated from graduate school with a doctorate in Psychology, got divorced, moved to Redding, re-married and started his private practice during the Reagan administration. He had his kids during the first Bush administration. Since then he has done nothing noteworthy besides write a little poetry, survive a motorcycle crash, buy and sell an electric car, raise his kids, manage to stay married and maintain his practice for almost 25 years. He believes in magic and is a Sacramento Kings fan.
