8:21pm October 7, 2014

“
When I really started to think about what it was that I meant, I realized it had an elementary definition so simple and obvious it had been hiding in plain sight. What I mean when I say “hard core” spirituality, I mean spirituality founded in love. That’s it. That’s the definition, precisely.

The absence of love is precisely what I criticize when I criticize spirituality built around mechanical practices (breathing methods, meditation on chakras, etc.) whose purpose it is to provide its practitioner with private altered states of consciousness. It’s what’s missing among the many gurus for hire, for whom the most important quality in a student is the size of his or her bank account. It’s what you don’t see in the ornate spiritual fantasies of space aliens, channeling, crystals, and magic calendar dates. You won’t find love among the urban shamans whose ideas of spirituality consist of consuming substances and writing trip reports. You absolutely will not find anything that looks like love — not even a mild awareness that one is a member of a social species towards which one has obligations — in the ideas of those who think that wishing and hoping for more stuff is spiritual.

It is no private feeling

How can I say this when many people who engage in practices I criticize speak of love and compassion? Its this: when they speak of love and compassion, they mean by that feelings of sentimentality. They confuse their private emotional states with love, when love is not a feeling or emotion or anything private at all. It is not even action driven by maudlin feelings.

Love is something more potent. It is a deep intention indistinguishable from being and inseparable from action. To discover love in oneself is to uncover something much more extraordinary than a feeling.
”

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Hard Core Spirituality

When I wrote a sonnet recently, it was a conversation between me and Death. It ends:

“And did you act from love, and only love?”

And after that, no question is as tough.

Because no question is. But I’ve found that every time I’ve met Death, or even come close enough to glimpse Death over the horizon, I find myself evaluating myself not on how much of my “bucket list” I got done, but on how much I acted on love. Not maudlin sentimentality, but the hard-core love that my friend speaks of in the above quote. The kind that is an action, that is strong, that is not an emotional state at all, that is something that pervades everything yet we run away from it and hide from it and do everything we can to have nothing to do with it. Standin’ knee deep in a river and dyin’ of thirst, indeed (which is a Lacy J. Dalton song all about this).

Or as my friend puts it:

So I guess a subtitle of this blog could be “Shit, or get off the pot”. Summon your courage (or desperation, which is often the same thing). Go wrestle with your terrors. Make the commitment to love, living and acting love in all things, understanding that none of this is ever about yourself. Embrace loss as the whetstone of love. Or stop pretending to yourself that your search for private comfort is spiritual, when it is nearly its mockery.

I worry that the wrong people will read this. That the people who are on an earnest spiritual quest for love will read this and think my friend is telling them they’re not good enough. I can assure you she’s not. Everyone has moments where we doubt, everyone has a dark night of the soul where we can’t even feel Love, everyone has times when we want out of all this. But for many of us there is no choice but to keep trudging onward knowing that what happens will not be pleasant, but that it is necessary.

Meanwhile the people who really need to hear these things will rarely read, or hear them, at all. I hate that about stuff like this. You post something criticizing one group of people, and another totally innocent group of people gets burned, and may even become suicidally desperate if they were sitting on that edge. So let this sentence be my promise to you that if any of this made you feel worthless or suicidal, it wasn’t intended to criticize you, but rather to criticize what others are doing in the name of Love. If you feel suicidal or worthless as a result of reading this, this was not intended for you.

TL;DR: Love is central to spiritual practice, and is what my friend means when she says ‘hard core’ spirituality. But the love she means isn’t maudlin, sentimental, or emotional. It’s solid, it’s an action, it’s an attribute of the world, it’s a state of being. You are either acting in and from love, or you’re not. Like hate, it’s not directional. Also, if reading this makes you feel worthless or suicidal, it was not intended for you. True mystical paths have an element to them that is truly hellish, and people can become very emotionally distraught during the course of them. If that is you, then this isn’t meant for you, it’s not meant to make you feel worse than you already do. It’s meant for the ones whose ideas of love and compassion are really twisted up. And unfortunately, they won’t be listening very hard. But when you get close to death, everyone will have to face themselves, and love will not only be the top of the list, ti will be the whole list of things you should’ve done when you were alive. Nothing is as hard as being confronted with that and realizing you have to change your life around, nothing on earth is that hard, and nothing on earth is that rewarding or important.