Catastrophe as Spiritual Practice

It is important to see that the main point of any spiritual practice is to step out of the bureaucracy of the ego.

~Chogyam Trungpa, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism,

That is one of my favorite book titles ever. I love that title because it distills the essence of the book’s message into four words. That makes the book, while being a fairly challenging read, possible to grok. It is 100 proof Tibetan Buddhism. A little shot goes a long way. Trungpa lays it on the line. Most of what parades as spirituality is not that at all, it is spiritual materialism. It is the trappings of spirituality, while missing the guts.

Recently I told Tim he’s spiritually “ahead” of many of the authors he reads. Now Tim is not overly modest. In fact, we joke about his arrogance. But he rankled a little at the description. He didn’t get what I meant. He was not actually flattered by my comment. He has ideas like belief and faith and the image of a grandfatherly figure with tyrannical tendencies associated with the term “spiritual.” The word “God” puts him right over the edge.

And yet, to me, he is a deeply spiritual person.

What does that mean?

The other morning I told Tim I felt like I needed some kind of spiritual nurturing or sustenance, an experience of the presence of someone or something “out there,” offering support, guidance, and affirmation that I’m on the right path through these very dark times.

This was the morning Tim had shared James Lovelock’s most recent comments that the equator will look like Mars mid-century, with the surviving 20% of humans now alive living near the north and south poles. When I hear or read that kind of stuff I get very sad, sick and scared inside. This particular morning I told Tim about how deeply I want to feel that there is something greater than me and my little scared ego available to help.

People who pay attention, who allow themselves to feel, and not just think about the situation, recognize that these are the most emotionally challenging of times to be alive.

In the face of this challenge, some people retreat emotionally, some go on the offensive and run about trying to fix the situation, some people experience profound outrage. Others just go numb. In the face of emotional challenge I’ve always looked for connection and affirmation outside of myself. This hasn’t always been healthy or helpful. I don’t know if it is my birth order (third and the baby), my astrological sign (Pisces), my Myers Briggs type,( INFP), or my Enneagram type (6), but I’ve had a deep and lifelong pattern of neediness for affirmation from “out there.”

So when the shit hits I start looking for help. And shit of this magnitude looks to me to require something more than seems available in the human realm. I want something BIG to help. So I look to the spiritual realm.

Tim can be really good at listening and his observation skills are acute. He pushes me to get clear about what I am talking about, what it is that I really want. The other morning he pushed me to define what exactly IS spiritual? What does that mean?

It’s not based on “belief.” I don’t take blind leaps of faith. I don’t believe because it is just so damned uncomfortable NOT to believe. That’s just denial all dressed up. That’s just being a good girl, looking pretty on her way to church, but really underneath being battered and bruised and suffering. When people say they “believe” that the world will muddle on for several more decades or centuries I bite my tongue and wonder if they also believe in the tooth fairy. Belief doesn’t seem to have much to do with it. Belief doesn’t cut it.

What I want and what I trust is experience. The experience need not be “rational” or understandable or scientifically verifiable. But the experience does needs to be palpable. I need to be able to point to some area of my body between my neck and my lower abdomen and say, “I feel the truth of this.”

I need to resonate with things, not believe in them.

Tim eats this up of course. Because it puts into words his own experience.

In order to develop love—universal love, cosmic love, whatever you would like to call it—one must accept the whole situation of life as it is, both the light and the dark, the good and the bad.
~Chogyam Trungpa, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism

If I cut to the chase, the essence of real spirituality for me is the ability to look at, and be with, things exactly as they are.

When we look at the current predicament of Peak Oil, climate change, political and economic meltdown, depleted uranium toxicity, desertification of the rainforests, etc. etc. etc. What happens? What happens when we look at these things exactly as they are?

What happens for me is that I feel. And what I feel is not comfortable. I feel what I perceive to be overwhelming sadness and fear about the future. I fear that life will become too much to bear. I fear that the pain will be endless, that I’ll have to die to escape it. I fear that there won’t be any help or comfort or relief or humor.

A scene from the movie United 93 comes to mind. As it became clear the plane was going down despite all efforts on the part of the heroic passengers to take back control, the atmosphere was rife with fear and pain. And as I watched that movie about a plane full of people, going down amidst great chaos, I reflected, of course, on how this is a perfect metaphor for the situation we all face with the impending collapse of life as we know it, perhaps of life on the planet.

As I watched that final scene in the movie I was struck with a very clear image of what I would do if I were in that situation. What I would do is this: I would take the hands of whoever was sitting next to me and I would look into their eyes. I would let them know that they were not alone and that in that very moment they were loveable. And in doing so I would experience the same, my own lovability. As I imagine that scene, there is something that stirs in my gut that feels true and profoundly meaningful.

And relevant.

It is in extremity that all reason for hiding or pretending or defending oneself from utter transparency with another and with life itself, dissolves. In extremity there is the opportunity to be completely oneself, true and real, and to reveal that self fully. That way of being, utterly true and honest and in the moment is the essence of real spirituality.

That’s why I consider Tim to be a spiritually developed person. He demonstrates that capacity to show up and report the truth of his experience, his thoughts, his feelings, his assumptions and his prejudices. As much as any other person I’ve ever known he has the capacity to be utterly transparent.

It has nothing to do with praying to God or meditation or chanting or eating right. Those things may be helpful for different people at different times. There may be all kinds of tools that aid people in developing that capacity. But for me, real spirituality is about showing up and being who you really are, without masks, without delusions, at any given moment.

That kind of transparency and unmasked presence is not uncommon for me to experience and witness. I’ve been a glutton for it most of my adult life. Over the years I have consciously cultivated the ability to hold the people who come to see me for counseling with great regard and a distinct lack of negative judgment. And people respond to that regard and lack of judgment by allowing me to see them, to hear the truth of their experience, to tell me their stories, without embellishment or defense, unvarnished and raw. I make it safe for them to feel the full catastrophe of their lives. And in feeling that catastrophe, in that extremity, they show up and tell the truth.

I’ve learned to engineer my own personal catastrophe by putting myself alone in the woods fasting for a few days every year. Fasting and exposure to the elements creates a physical catastrophe and the body responds by slowing down movement while heightening perception. The catastrophe the ego experiences is even more profound. In the silence, solitude and extreme restriction from cultural distraction, there are no fixes for my ego’s addiction to achievement and productivity. There’s no escape from anxieties, sorrows or unresolved resentments. There’s no running from boredom either. This is indeed calamitous for the ego.

It is no wonder that “vision quest” kinds of experiences, silent retreats to the desert, extended times of meditation in a cave, have been prescribed spiritual disciplines across religious and cultural traditions. These practices are effective because they create a catastrophe for the human ego. Every time I’ve done a wilderness fast I’ve had a breakthrough. I’ve surrendered some part of my conscious identity to Life. And I’ve emerged truer, more courageous, and more compassionate.

The other situation where that truer, less ego-identified self emerges for me is in counsel circles with others. Interestingly these have largely been in workshop or training retreats not specifically devoted to creating a “spiritual” experience. They have been settings where by design or willingness, the group agreed to enter catastrophe together. That catastrophe came about as we encountered our differences and conflicts and crashed, hopefully gently, but not always gracefully, into our personal and collective wounds. Out of commitment, and then necessity, we mysteriously reached inward to find our more essential selves. I say mysteriously because it is a mystery. It not a rational technique learned by the ego. But over and over I’ve seen it is in that place of interpersonal catastrophe, where nothing is working, nothing is being resolved, and the conflict sits as an inescapably gaping wound that magic happens. It is there that my individual ego identity becomes willing to give up, to surrender her stories, to suspend her long held and well-defended assumptions, to let go and open to experience a larger view, a larger truth.

The culture of Empire, the culture of consumption, is designed to keep people from experiencing these kinds of transformative catastrophe. People are too busy, occupied with work and television, cars and cell phones, mortgages and health care. They are busy trying to look good so no one will see how empty it all feels.

The truth is that the American lifestyle IS a catastrophe. It is shallow and meaningless and disconnected. It is life threatening in every way imaginable. But very few people allow themselves to feel that. They are living a catastrophe already but they can stay numb to it so long as the oil and food and entertainment hold out.

That’s why the prospects of the coming convergence of resource crises and ecological crises and the ensuing economic and social crises seem unbearable. We’re pretending that the worst is yet to come. And so we fear that those things yet to happen are unbearable.

They are not. But to be bearable we will have to allow the catastrophes to do their work, to have their impact on our egos and cherished identities as surely as they will have their impact on our cherished lifestyles. We’ll have to notice that the airplane is in a nosedive, that there is no pilot in control, and that its time to take the hands of our neighbors, look into their eyes, and love them. And let them love us back.

We could do this now, with those other precious souls, the ones that are now self-identified mutants. We could learn together to drop our defenses and ego positions and just be quietly, albeit messily, honest with one another. It won’t be pretty. The wounds of Empire have affected us all. We need to acknowledge that. We need to be willing to look at ourselves and each other exactly the way we are.

If we do that, if we let ourselves have the catastrophe that is already happening, we will find new courage to do things we never thought possible.

Like making a very confronting documentary. Like quitting meaningless jobs and walking away from our addictions to comfort. Like learning to grow food and build cisterns to catch water. Like learning to show up and tell the unique truth we’ve been given to tell in ways we never thought possible.

If we who are awakening do that, we don’t know what will happen.

But if we don’t, it’s pretty clear there won’t be much of a planet left for our children and grandchildren or the millions of other species who inhabit our planet.

Tim and I thought, naively, that we would make a documentary and then run away to the woods to create our lifeboat and hide. It’s not turning out that way. As our new friend Carolyn put it, “Its seems you are being asked to show up and ask people to feel.”

For a recovering “baby of the family,” that’s a catastrophe, but just one of many.