"Sobriety…. is the greatest intoxication"… (I believe this quote is from Hazrat Inayat Khan)…. Perhaps it's not an easy one to instantly get, as at first they (sobriety/intoxication) seem polar opposites. Yet I have been growing into a deepening appreciation of this subtly reversed view, especially because of my direct practical experience of the challenges of embracing the oppositions in life. Often when I first awaken I receive particularly clear views into myself.... like a divine 'thumbnail revelation' of what is really going on inside me. Thus one morning recently I awakened into the realization that I am sometimes very much like a drunk who is fighting the fight to get sober.... amidst a world-wide smorgasbord of easily available intoxications….in my case, these are often 'spiritual intoxications'.
There's no good place to start talking about this, it seems. But there are points along the way that are important. One such point was in last weeks Journal… my comments that some 'new thought' Positivity Teachings were 'somewhat suspect' to me. I often discover what I really think and feel about many things as I write…for as I work to follow and language my most honest thoughts, new views and understandings appear. That's the way it was about that Positivity comment. Later, I went to a worship service at our only local new thought church and some new insights arose. I was hesitant at first to even admit to my self what I was witnessing… (who was I?,… and anyway, was this discernment or judgment?)… but what was there repeatedly in me was the experience that our minister (who was speaking and teaching from the writings of the churches founder) was not teaching the meanings that the founder had written. She would have the teaching projected on a screen so we all could read them, and then she would speak about what the author had written. So I saw what was written and an understanding would come to me about them... then the minister would say the writings meant something different. If it had been in any way appropriate socially in a church service to have raised my hand and to have asked questions, I would have. Nobody else seemed to notice. Watching the facial expressions and body language of the congregation, they all seemed to be in agreement with the minister's version. Somewhere along the journey in that service I recognized the addictive nature of what was happening....that 'the minister and the congregation are all getting drunk'….meaning, coming to church was in order to consume a habitual and entrancing steady diet of God-positivity intoxications. Then suddenly it made sense why our minister was not seeing what were to me clearly visible misinterpretations… because to see the obvious nakedly is always very sobering. It's the kind of sobriety that begins ending the addiction to the intoxication/intoxicant.
What I mean of course, is that our minister was speaking from a fairly standard positivity point of view… but as I mentioned in the last weeks Journal, in that new thought paradigm, there is no room for 'the other half of the yin/yang symbol' to even exist, nor for it to be given 'space to be', or to be viewed with any equanimity. And while believing a positivity view only certainly does produce a lot of temporary feel-goodness (just like getting drunk on anything does), as Werner Erhard once commented, 'Positive thinking only works as long as you keep thinking positive'.
If that is true, that is the crux of a big spiritual problem… because in life there are inevitably experiences that are personally viewed as both positive AND negative,and they are not fixed either… because the same thing that from one perspective is positive can shift to being negative at a different time, when another perspective is somehow obtained. How to 'be with' that requires something more than just positivity….for just as someone with a clown face perpetually painted on…to me it is a spiritual trap to believe that the way to true happiness is to only allow our positive feelings to exist within us. In fact, what I see is that to the degree we do this one-sided choosing of our experiences, we actually guarantee that we will continue to be…un-whole.
Perhaps I am somewhat sensitized to this as a result of watching my father model this methodology in his Protestant (Methodist) ministry. I as a 'preacher's kid' witnessed from the inside that my father usually exhibited one face to his congregation, and another in private. It was as if he didn't think he could be totally authentic to his 'flock'… that if they saw he was human and fallible he would be betraying Christian Ideals, or God or something. So he cloaked himself in a charming spiritualized personality when in public or from the pulpit, but at home in private, while normally being a loving person… he also occasionally exploded from the pressures he felt upon him. To me, my father lived in a dualistically-based world… where things were good or bad or in-between somewhere… but where his view was 'we were supposed to be GOOD', and that we were supposed to kill off all the bad in us to do that. So essentially, I recognized that our local new thought minister was saying the same thing… be positive, ie, be good only, and you will escape all the bad stuff of life.
But I ask, where in this view is true wholeness? Where is complete self-acceptance… complete self-love… if we are always busy blocking any negative emotion, and never allowing ourselves to be aware of our dark side? Werner taught very plainly: You can only be as great a being as you are able to know and be able to be with your own smallness. And Don Juan, the Toltec shaman, taught Carlos Casteneda to 'walk with Death on his left shoulder' and to 'make Death your friend'…. which is another way of saying "stay aware that nothing in this world is as it seems---it all changes, it is all temporary". To me, realizing this is the entering of the mystically journey. While this is a journey absolutely containing all beauty and love, it also absolutely also contains all darkness….because to be mystical, it must be 'of the unity', and to be of the unity, it must contain--as is said in Zen--"everything equally". Thus, to me, it is in working with the contrasts within ourselves that our personal wholeness arrives… but only in direct proportion to the degree that we also realize our unity with everything, including all things supposedly negative. I am not saying this gives us a license to negative mayhem, by the way. I am simply saying that to be whole we cannot continue denying that the negativity that we see outside of ourselves does not live inside us. Because all is one unity, it does. Until our Self-Love heals our separations...
This willingness to include all… and by this, entering a true wholeness… to me, this is 'sobriety'. I am seeing that if missing this sobriety, our minds can easily become destabilized, and thus susceptible to things or thoughts 'addictive' (meaning something that you have to keep doing). My seeing is that we humans usually search for and seek certainty, instead of 'the wisdom of insecurity'…. we also go to extraordinary lengths to protect ourselves from life, to be safe, to avoid risks, and above all, to simply continue surviving. And when a body of thought appears with a teaching promising that the way to have everything we want is to just always think positive, we strap it on and live into it…. without a deep investigation into the contextof what is really being taught, or of the impact our actions-thus-influenced may have upon the entirety of life. This is our blindness… that we live as if our choices only impact ourselves…personally. I say they don't… I say (and quantum physics also says) that our every action impacts everything. It's a big view… that our choices impact everything… and it's not easy for our small individual selfs to be responsible for it. Usually, we (myself included) habitually and unthinkingly choose to deny we are so powerful…
I think the key to unraveling our susceptibility to these addictive illusions lies in the investigation of 'I'…. particularly the 'wanting I'… as distinct from the 'being I'. To illustrate, where is the 'wanting I' in a rock? or a tree? or a river? or a cloud? It is difficult to even imagine, right? For while it is easy to imagine the natural world 'being alive with consciousness', whenever I am fully in nature, there is very little experience of it's aliveness as being a 'wanting' …. at least not in any way similar to the way human beings do 'wanting'. This is because the essence of being is fulfillment, which is the antithesis of 'being a wanting'. So, taking 'positivity' as an example… that is all about wanting to go somewhere else… or getting some 'not thing' to now exist. It's a technology. It works as long as you practice it. It will give you the goodies that you said you wanted. But the question is, has getting what you want ever really permanently satisfied you, me, or anybody? Not for long, if the truth be told.
So what about giving up the wanting and choosing 'just being' instead? What about learning the art of following life, instead of the technologies of pushing life? Does that ever produce a happy person? I would be inclined to assert that nothing else actually ever has…. and that happiness is fundamentally derived from 'allowing what IS' to be.
Therefore, allow me to make a leap and assert that 'allowing what IS fully' is what produces in us the fundamental sobriety of the enlightened---because 'allowing what IS to be' is completely non-judgmental, and therefore doesn't set up any higher/lower, better/worse dualities. I'd even assert that being duality-free is the great joy in life. And conversely, 'wanting something….anything…to be different than what IS' is the fundamental source of our addiction to escape intoxications. I say 'anything', because A Course in Miracles counsels us that we must 'make no exceptions' in the application of truth in our lives. In the same way, the awesome Zen teaching called 'The Great Way' counsels that to 'make (even) one "distinction" will set Heaven and Earth infinitely apart'. I understand this to mean that if I believe I am in any way separate from you as a result of my separate form, I have just created duality, and in that duality, the possibility of 'not Love' exists.
In summation: To create authentic Love in this universe requires a Godness-like wholeness of being. It is ours to be and have when we exclude and resist nothing. That state attained will teach us of 'the Love that just IS'.
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