IONS Review #58 • December 2001

The Practices of Essential Spirituality

Roger Walsh | IONS Noetic Sciences Review | IONS Review #58 |

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Perennial practices rooted in ancient traditions, are critical today. They address and redress the psychological and spiritual roots of our contemporary crisis

Do you realize this is the first time in history that publicly acknowledging that you follow two or more distinct spiritual traditions would not have you burned at the stake, stoned to death, or facing a firing squad?

We tend to forget what an extraordinary time this is, that for the first time in history we have the entirety of the world's spiritual and religious traditions available to us, and we can practice them, at least here, without fear.

We are discovering that underlying this vast array of practices and traditions and theologies and beliefs is a common core of wisdom and practices. Beneath the surface we find a deeper wisdom, not usually recognized but hidden in the depths of each and every one of the great religious traditions, a wisdom known as the perennial philosophy and the perennial psychology, which encompass a set of perennial practices.

The Perennial Philosophy

The perennial philosophy was known of for some time, and at its heart are four statements about the nature of reality: The first is that this physical world we live in and see and touch is not all there is to reality; that underneath it—in fact, at its source—is another world, a sacred world, a world of spirit or consciousness or Mind with a capital "M", or Geist, or Tao.

The second of the four claims is that we as human beings partake of this reality. We are rather like amphibians. We have a part of our life and being in this world we see and touch, but in a deeper part at the core of our being, at the center of our minds, at the center of our awareness, we experience this other sacred realm, and we partake of it, and we are it.

The third claim of the perennial philosophy has to do with epistemology: It states that we are capable of knowing this other realm. If we train and develop the mind sufficiently, if we hone our awareness, develop our attention, refine our perception, then we can come to know this reality directly for ourselves. This is what differentiates the perennial philosophy from dogma. It is not a truth-claim to be believed simply on someone's word. It is an experiment that is offered to us, that each and every one of us can try.

The fourth claim is an ethic. It states that coming to know this sacred realm and coming to recognize it as ourselves is the highest good and the highest goal of human existence—that it is the means by which we can best serve ourselves and others.

The Perennial Psychology

Closely married to this perennial wisdom is a perennial psychology, an understanding about the nature of mind. The perennial psychology tells us that our usual state of mind, our usual state of consciousness, is underdeveloped. We are immature. What we have taken for normality is actually a form of collective developmental arrest. The perennial psychology tells us that because of our immature states of mind, we do not perceive accurately; our beliefs are distorted; our understanding is awry; we don't recognize our true nature. In fact, we suffer from a case of mistaken identity!

On a more affirmative note, the perennial psychology says it is possible for us to restart the growth process. It is possible for us to grow up, and to wake up. As the greatest gift of all, the great spiritual traditions offer road maps and means for doing just that. They offer a variety of practices, the so-called perennial practices, designed to help us awaken. And whether they're known as the yogas of Taoism and Hinduism or the Eightfold Path of Buddhism or the contemplations and commandments of the monotheistic traditions, we find a set of practices designed to hone and train the mind.

At first glance these practices may seem disparate and conflictual. But when we look more deeply, when we look at their contemplative core, we find they are road maps for training the mind and inducing the same states of consciousness, the same wisdom, the same love as their various founders discovered.

We find, also, that underlying this vast array of practices is a common set of perennial practices of which there seem to be seven—seven practices which each and every one of the world's great religions says is essential for any of us who would come to awaken to our true potential and recognize our true identity.

These seven are: redirecting motivation, transforming emotions, living ethically, developing attention or concentration, refining awareness, cultivating wisdom, and expressing these in service. I view these seven practices as part of an essential transformative curriculum.

In this talk I focus on those practices particularly relevant to the fostering of a Wisdom Society: emotional transformation (the cultivation of love), ethics, the training or cultivation of wisdom, and the expression of that in service.

The Cultivation of Love

Numerous emotions pour through our minds each day, but among the great traditions, there's unanimity that one emotion is to be valued above others, and that emotion is love.

Love, of course, has been the subject of myth and poetry, the object of study of philosophers and sages, the source of meaning and purpose for countless lives. Millions of people have lived and died for it. The Encyclopedia of Religionhas this to say about love: "The idea of love has left a wider and more indelible imprint upon the development of human culture in all its aspects than any other single notion. In fact, many great figures have argued that love is the single most potent force in the universe, a cosmic impulse that creates, maintains, directs, informs, and brings to its proper end every living thing."

But what is love? If you turn on your radio, you have about a fifty-percent chance of hitting a "love song." These are wonderful studies in pathos and pathology. They have such great lines as "I can't live without you; I'm thinking about you all the time; I break out in sweats; I can't sleep." These are the symptoms of heroin withdrawal! Our culture has totally conflated love and addiction.

And yet the great religions point to something much more profound, a love which is vaster, more stable, more encompassing, a love which, as Saint Paul said, "Bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things." Or as the Buddha said, "As a mother watches over her child, willing to risk her own life to protect her only child, so we too, with a boundless heart, should cherish all living beings, suffusing the whole world with unobstructed loving kindness."

This spiritual love, then, is something far deeper, far more profound than the romantic love which is almost the sole focus of our culture. This of course is Christianity's agape, Confucianism's universal love, the bhakti of Hinduism, or the metta of Buddhism. And
it raises a very important question: "Can love be cultivated?"

Our culture has a very curious answer to this. In our culture, love is something you feel when you're with the right person, who looks the right way, and who says the right things to you. Then love will probably descend on you like an attack of epilepsy. You'll be taken and swirled around, then left bereft and wonder what the hell happened. But the great religious traditions suggest there's another possibility, that love is an art, a skill, something we can cultivate and develop. And they lay out a very specific road map for how to do so. This map consists of four strategies:

1) Reducing barriers to love, such as fear and greed and anger and jealousy and pride, which are seen to be incompatible with love. In contemporary psychological terms, we would say they reciprocally inhibit one another. Take anger, for example. We would want to reduce anger, because as we all know, anger has an extraordinary power; it can take us over. Here's a wonderful example: Two psychiatrists were talking, and one said to the other, "You know, I was having dinner with my mother the other day and I made this terrible Freudian slip. I meant to say, 'Mother, would you pass the peas, please?' And instead, I said 'You bitch! You ruined my life!'" So anger will come out. Of course sometimes we can use it skillfully, but it is like playing with fire. When Ram Dass' teacher Neem Karoli Baba was saying one had to let go of anger, Ram Dass asked, "Baba-ji, can't I even use anger for teaching?" Neem Karoli Baba leapt up and came face to face with him and yelled "NO!"

But how do we reduce anger? The great religious traditions give us a variety of practices. They would suggest, for example, reflecting on how it feels when you're angry. Stop, be mindful; be aware of what it feels like; it doesn't feel so good.

Alternatively, reflect on your life and the nature of life itself, and recall that you are mortal and the person you're angry with is mortal. If you're really angry and you wish someone were dead, be patient! They will be. And so will you. And then it won't seem so important.

Another strategy recommended is to reflect on your own mistakes. I am repetitively humbled whenever I'm angry with others if I just take a moment to reflect. Then I realize it wasn't all that long ago that I just did what I'm angry at them for doing. You can practice forgiveness, letting go of anger. Lao Tzu said it wonderfully: "Only pursue an offender to show them the Tao."

2) Cultivating supporting attitudes and emotions such as gratitude and generosity. Stop for a moment to recall how much we have to be grateful for. For example, think of all the people who were involved, all the work they did so we could be together today at this conference. It's inconceivable how many people's work our well-being and coming together is dependent on. Most people are grateful because they're happy: wise people are happy because they're grateful. It's a recurrent theme across traditions. St Paul recommended, "Be thankful in all circumstances."

3) Cultivating love directly through prayer, contemplation, or meditation, for example. Here is one very simple meditation. Just close your eyes for a moment . . . and take a couple of breaths to relax . . . Now bring to mind someone who's pretty angry . . . and notice how you feel . . . and let that go . . . Now bring to mind someone who's loving and kind . . . notice how you feel . . . and when you're ready, bring your awareness back to the room. Isn't the difference remarkable! By meditating on loving people one cultivates love itself. What we meditate on, we become.

4) Looking deeply into reality, with the understanding that the deeper we see into reality, the more we recognize that, at its heart, wisdom merges or unites with love. At its deepest, we find beautiful words such as these in the Gospel of John, "God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them."

Ethics

Ethics is regarded, not as conventional moralism, but as a foundational practice for anyone who would really wake up. However, this practice is much misunderstood. As Confucius said, "Rare are those who understand virtue." But the essential message is very simple. It's the golden rule of Christianity, "Do unto others as you want them to do unto you," or the silver rule of Confucianism, "Don't do to others as you don't want them to do to you." But this is done with a very interesting twist, because ethics as the great spiritual traditions define it is not done as sacrifice. Ethics comes from a recognition that an ethical life is a superb means for training the mind and coming to awakening. It's based on a very sophisticated understanding of the way the mind works. It's based on an understanding that unethical behavior, behavior in which we deliberately intend to harm ourselves or others, springs from destructive and painful mind states such as fear, greed, anger, and jealousy, and reinforces them. That's the kicker. Unethical behavior drives these factors deeper into our minds, it reinforces them, it conditions them, or in spiritual terms, it carves karmic traces deeper into our awareness.

On the other hand, ethical acts designed to enhance the well-being of everyone, including ourselves, spring from motives and emotions such as love and joy and generosity and compassion, and strengthen them. So from this perspective, we can begin to understand that ethics is not sacrifice. It is a very sophisticated approach to train the mind and refine our awareness so as to wake up. There was a study in 1996 which found that those people who felt they were trying to live their life ethically were twice as likely—twice as likely—to report themselves as happy compared with those who weren't. I love it when modern scientific research catches up with perennial wisdom.

Cultivation of Wisdom

A beautiful quote from the Jewish Torah states: "Happy are those who find wisdom. She is more precious than jewels, and nothing you desire can compare with her. Her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace. Get wisdom. Get insight. Do not forget."

What is wisdom? It is a lot more than knowledge. Knowledge acquires information, but wisdom requires understanding. Knowledge informs us, but wisdom transforms us. Knowledge empowers, wisdom enlightens. Knowledge is something we have, but wisdom is something we have to become. I suggest that wisdom is a deep understanding and practical skill with the central—especially the existential and spiritual—issues of life.

How do we cultivate wisdom? The Torah says, "Wisdom will not enter a deceitful soul." So an ethical foundation is essential. The next step is to recognize how much we don't know. As the Buddha said, "The fool who thinks he is wise is a fool indeed." One of my favorite stories comes from Seung Sunim, the Korean Zen master who teaches "Don't-know mind, just keep don't-know mind, don't know." He tells the story of a rabbi in Russia at the turn of the last century who was crossing the village square to go to pray. On his way he ran into the Cossack who was in a lousy mood and said "Hi Rabbi, where are you going?" Rabbi said, "Don't know . . . " The Cossack said, "What do you mean you don't know? For twenty years you've crossed this square, you've prayed in the tabernacle, you're trying to tell me you don't know where you're going?" He was so angry he grabbed the rabbi and hauled him off to the village jail. Just as he was throwing him in the cell, the rabbi said, "See, you just don't know!"

The great spiritual traditions suggest wisdom can be found in five places. First, we find wisdom in nature, which winnows away the transient and unimportant. Second, they suggest that one should turn to silence and solitude. Father Thomas Keating, the popularizer of centering prayer, said it wonderfully: "Silence is the language God speaks, and everything else is a bad translation." And Taoism says: "In stillness the mind becomes clear; in clarity it becomes bright, and this brightness is the radiance of the Tao within."

There is a third place to find wisdom: from the wise. I spent three years researching this topic, writing the book EssentialSpirituality, and the thing that surprised me most in those three years of surveying the world's spiritual traditions was how tradition after tradition said, "If you want to develop this quality, whether it's love or compassion or wisdom or generosity, hang out with people who have it." That was the common thread which was so repetitive it really surprised me

The fourth place to look for wisdom—surprise—is in yourself. "Those who know themselves know their Lord," said Mohammad. The fifth place to look is in the nature of life and death, to realize our mortality, and to realize how brief our time here is. To recognize that, as the Taoists say, "Our lives last but a moment." Or as the Jewish Psalms state, "They are soon gone. They come to an end like a sigh, like a dream."

When we do these practices, they culminate, finally, in what's called liberating wisdom, a wisdom that is of a different order. It's not so much a conceptual understanding but a transrational intuition—a direct transrational, transconceptual seeing into the nature of mind, and into the depths of awareness. We can penetrate the very nature of consciousness and thereby into the nature of reality, and discover that our minds are unbounded and one with reality.

We recognize that who and what we are, is far more than we first realized. Our true nature is not only intimately linked with, but embraced by, and even one with, the sacred. The words from various traditions are different, but they all echo the same
theme. In Christianity: "The kingdom of heaven is within you." In Islam: "Those who know themselves know their Lord." In Confucianism: "Those who know completely their own nature know heaven." Or, "In the depths of the soul, one finds the Divine, the One." In Hinduism: "Atman, the individual consciousness, and Brahman, the universal consciousness, are one." Or in Buddhism: "Look within—you are the Buddha." "Who chants the name of Buddha? Buddha."

Service

This depth of wisdom leads to service, to expressing our understanding and insights in contribution and service to others, which is the final practice, the culmination. All of the great traditions emphasize service as a means to, and an expression of, awakening. We go into ourselves to go more effectively out into the world, and we go out into the world to go deeper into ourselves. This is the so-called "cycle of withdrawal and return" which the great historian Arnold Toynbee found was the one common characteristic of the lives of those people who he felt had contributed most to the development of civilization and human well-being. Each of these persons had taken time out from society to turn their attention inward, to wrestle with the fundamental questions of existence, to plumb their own nature, and when they finally found some illumination or understanding, then they returned to the world to heal and help. This is Plato's reentry into the cave, it's Zen's final ox-herding picture, entering the marketplace with help-bestowing hands. In Christianity, it's the fruitfulness of the soul which follows after the sacred marriage.

In Buddhism, there's the extraordinary ideal, the Bodhisattva, the person who dedicates his or her life to the welfare and awakening of all. And our world desperately needs such people, more than ever. We all know that never before have we faced such enormously complex and demanding problems, not only to ourselves but to our planet and all species. We all know the litany of problems: overpopulation, pollution, starvation, ecological decay, resource-depletion.

Yes, there are problems, but we also have extraordinary opportunities. Never in human history have we had such an array of technologies or communication or resources. We have the power to leave our planet as a radioactive, polluted, plundered place, or to turn it into a heaven on Earth. It's our choice.

Our Choice

The perennial practices are rooted in ancient traditions and at the same time are critical in today's world. For the first time in human history every single one of our global problems is human-created. Every one is a reflection of our individual and collective choices and behavior. Every single global problem is a symptom, a symptom of our collective and individual psychological and spiritual distortions. And this means that the state of the world is a reflection of the state of our minds. If we are to truly heal the world, we need not only to reduce nuclear stockpiles, not only to care for and feed the hungry. We also need to deal with the psychological and spiritual pains and forces within us and between us which created these things in the first place. Otherwise we are only dealing with symptoms. We need, in short, to address and redress the psychological and spiritual roots of our contemporary crisis.

The methods for doing so are found in the perennial practices, the essential curriculum. We do these practices not only for ourselves, but for the welfare and awakening of all. We do them in order to become an optimal instrument of service, an optimal instrument of help and healing. And we do our service as karma yoga, as part of our own awakening, so that there is nothing we do which isn't service. Our world is in grave trouble, we all know this. Our world is in grave, grave trouble, but our world also rests in good hands, because, actually, it rests in yours.

Transpersonal psychologist and psychiatrist RogerWalsh, PhD, MD is currently a professor of psychiatry, philosophy, and anthropology at theUniversity of California, Irvine. He has published more than 200 articles, and is the author of Paths Beyond Ego and Essential Spirituality: The Seven Central Practices to Awaken Heart and Mind.