A
Spiritual
Predicament

by VJH Mitchell PhD

That's the usual punchline.

So simple, and yet so very elusive! Some of us find ourselves in a very unhappy predicament. We know the punchline, and we believe it's true, but all our efforts to step on the Path meet with dismal failure. There's a block to the 'higher Self' we hear and read so much about, and to add to the bafflement and frustration we are told, gently and patiently, that we put the block there ourselves. There's a strong hint, oft-repeated, that the block has to do with thinking too much (I still get teased about my 'busy little brain'). Just be still, and know - but how can we tell insight from prejudice, faith from wishful thinking, or positive thinking from self-deception?

The predicament is the absurd feeling that you have to complete the journey before you can read the map.

Simple faith, we're told, is streets ahead of sophisticated doubt. The argument to end all argument is the old standby: 'He who knows does not speak; he who speaks does not know'. But faith isn't simple at all. I can put my faith in something that happens to be false - that is, I can be mistaken - but however hard I try I can't believe something that doesn't make sense. I might as well try to believe that wine has wings. To reach towards the state of sublime simplicity, recommended by saints and mystics of all traditions, paradoxically requires a great deal of sophistication to avoid stepping into nonsense.

For instance, the old man in the sky, the Cosmic Policeman, what Blake called 'Nobodaddy', is obviously nonsense. That kind of intellectual framework has terrible trouble with, among other things, the 'problem of evil': how can an omnipotent, loving and perfectly just 'God' permit so many innocent people to have such a rotten time and so many obviously vile characters get away with murder? The result is a lot of unconvincing philosophical gymnastics under the heading of 'theodicy'. The question 'whether there is a God' is not a straightforward scalpel dividing truth from falsehood, like asking whether there is ink in the printer.

The Truth can't be spoken, and it's not too difficult to see why, but ordinary everyday truths can. Any meaningful question will have, somehow, somewhere, at least one meaningful true answer. So we need to turn the predicament into meaningful questions that can be answered in a straightforward way.

What I want to do is to clear the way to the first step on 'the spiritual path' (whatever that turns out to be). When the predicament is solved, we might have a ghost of a chance of understanding what those-who-know are talking about. All those books by the cognoscenti for the cognoscenti will, with luck, begin to be accessible at last. Some of them might even turn out to be way off the mark after all.

There will be no loss of mystery. The busy little brain is quite happy with mystery: it makes its life worth living. But mystery is not the same as the confusion that is engendered by mystique. Mystery is clean and beautiful, mystique is not. Not that all of the mystique is deliberate: much of the opaqueness of spiritual talk comes from deep misunderstandings. Inevitably any tradition gets distorted sooner or later by the Chinese whispers effect, especially where there is a conscious attempt to make the message 'simple enough for everyone to understand'.

The Project

The first step in the project is to make a distinction between spiritual advancement and personal development, which for a long time I assumed were the same thing because they use similar language. As it turns out, the two worlds split very easily. On the one hand, personal development is all about fulfilling your true potential, finding a sense of your own identity and learning to rejoice in it. On the other hand, spiritual growth seems to be aimed at surrendering anything to do with the self, and melting into the Oneness. If you have a preference, whether you act towards it or not, you're putting a block between you and the Divine. Your own identity is an illusion that you have created, and is the root of suffering.

One of these 'growth journeys' aims towards finding our own separateness, uniqueness and autonomy, the other points to a relinquishment of that separateness and a unity with the Divine. Since they point in opposite directions, it would seem logical that we have to choose one or the other. Such logic, though, would be misplaced. We can't be sure yet that progress on one path has to mean loss on the other. We'll have to try to look closely at them both before we can ask whether or not these two journeys are fundamentally opposed to each other (in the sense of one leading to Reality, or Truth, and the other leading to illusion and self-deception). It may be that there is only one Path, and our choice is in our way of looking at it. Alternatively, it may be that one is a prerequisite for the other, or that Life itself has come from the tension between them, or even that they lead in opposite directions but ultimately arrive at the same outcome. This project, I'm hoping, will make it possible to ask that question in a meaningful way. Then the answer, our original punchline, will make sense, and the choice of path will be a free one at last.