I got an email from Oprah the other day telling me about
the seven books that very spiritual people read. I opened the email, not
because I have any aspirations to be more spiritual, but out of curiosity. The
link took me to a book written by an Eastern guru type author.
I forget the title but the blurb didn’t tell me anything I
haven’t read or heard somewhere else. No aha moments for me. So I didn’t read
any further.
That word spiritual
has slowly but steadily climbed the list of status definitions in the past 20
years, and as it has, it’s become more and more of a glittery currency that has
no real reserves. Paper money with no gold in the bank to back it. Because the
truth is that spiritual is an absolute. We’re all spiritual. We’re spirit
housed in physical form. It’s impossible to be more or less of what we
inherently are. It’s possible to be more
conscious of the fact that although the physical impacts so powerfully on us
through our senses it’s not the most powerful part of us. But that’s just about
education; it’s hardly something we can use to elevate our ego status.
It’s only the things we don’t fully understand that we
think are phenomenal. So I guess if we were all a bit more educated, about the
truth that we’re as much spirit as we are matter, and that at least whilst
we’re on this plane, we can’t detach ourselves from either, we wouldn’t attach
such significance to this wretched word spiritual.
Where did it start, this craze? Perhaps it began in earnest
in the West when hippies travelled to the East in search of a more meaningful
life and mind-altering substances. They learned about Buddhism and they liked
what they saw. They came back home and brought it – or their interpretation of
it - with them. Along with the mind-altering substances.
These days, in the West, it’s not unusual for Westerners to
consider Buddhism the most elevated religion or philosophy, whatever you want
to call it, in the whole world. How did that happen? Either because it is the
most elevated - or because Buddhists are great at PR, perhaps. Or because in
the West we latch onto religions or philosophies that let us off the hook of
grappling with our physical experience and with our very very uncomfortable
emotions. Religions that promise us a life of freedom from inner conflict.
Letting go is the
term that I hear the most often in connection to Buddhism. Can’t get your life
together? Just let go. Detach. Attachment is where all the trouble lies and
it’s the least spiritual thing you can do.
They tell you that all suffering is a consequence of being
attached to something. If you let go, abracadabra! no more pain. It sounds
good. But is it even possible? We seem particularly fixated on letting go of
emotional baggage. It’s in the past, they tell you, there’s nothing you can do
about it. You need to move on. Whether that’s real Buddhism or not is
questionable, to my mind. What isn’t questionable is that in reality, until we
process whatever binds us to our emotional baggage it will stick like
superglue. We can repress it for a while, or anaesthetise it, but it will drive
our lives and our relationships and we won’t be able to understand when things
go wrong. Nor will we be able to fix them.
Emotional baggage is a symptom of something that’s
unresolved within. It’s there because we still need something that we didn’t
get when it was first created. Emotions are uncomfortable because if they
weren’t we’d ignore them. Stick your hand into a fire and it hurts. It’s
supposed to hurt. The pain tells you what to do. If you didn’t have the pain
you wouldn’t know.
So, maybe we’re not supposed to let go of anything. Maybe
we’re supposed to actually pay attention to what we’re experiencing. Lean into
it. Feel the feeling until we understand what it’s trying to tell us about what
we need. Maybe trying to detach is just another form of escapism. The way we
perceive letting go in the West, is it really letting go, or is it just another
kind of anaesthetic? Do we want to reach a state of serenity because it’s the
height of spirituality or because it’s very comfortable? If it’s the former,
we’re addicted, attached, to spirituality. And the truth is that there’s no
height to anything that involves knowledge and understanding, because the more
you know the more you realize there is to know.
If we’re just looking for serenity because it’s comfortable
and relieves us from the burden of dealing with emotions, then we’re attached
to fear of feeling, and letting it drive us. I don’t see how that can be
spiritual.
Is it really Buddhism? Surely not. The thing that I wonder
about is, do we in West have any real understanding of what the original
Buddhists meant when they let go? Can
we even get anywhere close to knowing, given that we look at everything through
our own Western filters? It seems more probable to me that what we know as
Buddhism in the West is more likely to be a loose translation, with all the
difficult parts left out, than an absolutely accurate one.
One thing seems pretty obvious. We in the West use spirituality to ego-aggrandize and we're attached to letting go. Couple of oxymorons there. So, thanks Oprah but
no thanks.
