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From the School of Hard Knocks to the University of Life

Life is full of a vast array of positive and negative emotions, it’s just part and parcel of the deal. We can sail through life for years feeling comfortable and happy. Spiritual life and relationships can feel so easy in that mode of living, everyone is your friend with smiles all around.  The real defining factor of our destiny is actually decided by tests in the guise of a supposed injustice; some form of negative experience or some moral dilemma. Through this process, I felt there were 3 key phases that we can learn and develop from...

Thesis


How we view spiritual life usually goes unchallenged by our judgement in the early stages of our chosen path, we tend to imitate what others are doing or can be easily coerced into adopting a role that others have envisioned for us, through this we develop our initial thesis of what we feel spiritual life is all about. Following the dictations of others can work out well, if there is a relationship based on love, trust and mutual respect. When someone wields power in a relationship; it could be parents and children, spouses, or a teacher and a student, any relationship where someone has some power over the other person. It is very important when we are the person who wields that power to remember, that our experience and knowledge of the world is limited. We can definitely speak with certainty about spiritual principles, but when advising people on the application of these spiritual principles to worldly situations, we must be very cautious in our dealings. This stage of spiritual life is usually when we plant our foot before we can pivot.

Rebellion is our Antithesis


As transcendentalists in training we develop through the initial stage of spiritual adolescence by experience, we can then typically see a phase of rebellion against our original self made ideology. As we develop into an adult we must assert our own nature and we do this through rebelling against our initial conception of spiritual life. This inevitable rebellion sprouts as a result of feeling malcontent. Our dissatisfaction has usually taken root through mistakes we have made, which have been cultivated through lack of experience; impurities within the heart, lack of trust with our guides or from the exploitation of people who don't actually have our holistic best interests at heart. This can be a defining moment in our spiritual progress. Either we try to internalise our experiences to learn and grow from them, or choose the popular option of the middle finger meditation...

The middle finger meditation is where we literally stick our middle finger up at the world and say:

 'I’ve had enough and now I am going to live life on my terms and I don’t really care what anybody thinks' (That's the censored version).

When developing this mode of thought it's very easy for us to revert to a whimsical life governed solely by our mind and negative experiences. We can abandon qualities which are actually the key ingredients of cultivating a transformative spiritual life (Humility and Tolerance), without which we'll be running round a hamster wheel. We also tend to abandon the valuable advice and mentoring from experienced guides, genuine saintly friends and the irrefutable wisdom of the ancient scriptures which should always be the basis of one's spiritual aspirations. If we aren't able to resist the lure of the middle finger meditation, it's unlikely that we'll get the opportunity to move forward and embrace the deeper aspects of spiritual life because, to put it bluntly, you can't go it alone...

Synthesis


As we evolve towards a mature understanding of ourselves and our nature, our attitude towards rebellion moderates - in achieving this maturity we no longer feel the need to rebel and this is where the synthesis happens, a synthesis of the principles and practices we've learnt during our thesis and the introspection and experience during our antithesis.

 The crucial aspect of the process outlined above is development over time. The development of a mature personality is incompatible with complete obedience to our neophyte understanding of how spiritual principles are to be applied to our life. We have to learn and grow through the process.

 For me, it should never really have been about institutional utopia, I've come to realise that it's about purifying the heart and letting the dormant qualities of the soul shine through. We are all in the rock tumbler of life, we may clash with one another, but if we can simply see these experiences in a humble and tolerant mood, then the austerity of the mind will lead us towards revolutionary change within the heart.

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