11.28.07
My Journey So Far by Susan Rakowski
We have all been told that our place of worship was built atop the Well of God, and that has been enough for most people–to simply be close, instead of being an actual PART of God. It wasn’t enough for me–I wanted to drink from the Well itself; I wanted to swim in the water.
For the last decade or so, I’ve been methodically examining and discarding belief after belief (other people’s and my own) in an attempt to find what’s truly at my core. Only after discarding most of the junk that’s accumulated within me, have I finally begun to see what’s hiding underneath it all; and what I see is very simple and very exciting; it requires no specific religion, no ceremonies even–it requires only that I breathe, listen to myself, remind myself that I am whole and balanced; it requires only that I allow everyone else the freedom of their own beliefs and journeys, and that I don’t try to change people or convince them of anything–that I just let them be who and what they are in each moment, while I explore and express who and what I am in each moment.
These things sound cliché (”it’s so simple,” “just breathe,” “to thine own self be true,” “live and let live,” “I AM”). I’ve heard these words over and over from different teachers, or in different books for years, but there’s a difference between hearing something and knowing it. Now these understandings flow from me–they’re not copied or quoted. Instead, they spring out of my own experience, my own conclusions, my own source of wisdom. I’ve had to reinvent the wheel, and I think such an undertaking is essential in any type of spiritual exploration. This reminds me of a short story I once read, by Jorge Luis Borges. He described a fictional modern author who spent a lifetime completing his masterpiece: a word for word copy of the text of Don Quixote. However, instead of physically copying the words, the fictional author actually re-wrote the book by diving into the history and culture of the original book and allowing the narrative to arise from him organically, as it would have for Cervantes.
A few years ago, I read a book or two on Buddhism but I wasn’t really convinced of the necessity of giving up “attachments” and “cravings;” or in Christian parlance, I guess that would be the seven deadly sins. I didn’t want to give them up just because an outdated old book or scroll said so. I adamantly thought you shouldn’t’ force spiritual growth by depriving yourself of the things you truly wanted (to thine own self be true, right? Oh wait, that was written in an old book–can’t trust that, either). I was never completely convinced by the Christian doctrine of sacrifice: I believed in total freedom. So I didn’t deprive myself. I didn’t force myself down any paths that made no sense to me. Gee, I wasn’t stubborn or self-righteous at all, was I?
Eventually, through allowing myself that “freedom,” I came to understand–through my own experiences–the problems inherent in attachment. I noticed that I felt better when I wasn’t desperately craving an In n’ Out Burger (and that the fulfillment of the craving rarely brought enough satisfaction to cancel out the discomfort that came along with the craving). Through observation of myself, I learned to tell the difference between habits that created momentary, superficial happiness, and those that created deep, sustained happiness. Naturally, I began choosing more of the things that led to deep, sustained happiness. This meant I wasn’t depriving myself of anything valuable by moving away from things that only provided illusory satisfaction–all it took was an honest examination of what really constituted “value” in my life.
So, despite my initial, inflexible stance, I ended up teaching myself the same lessons that the Buddhists and the Christians and all the others teach. For some reason, I just couldn’t learn them in a church.
Basically, I was able to perceive the chains that invisibly bound me to certain foods, habits, etc. I realized that I was ultimately more free without the attachments–when I was free to make a choice without being driven by compulsions that I wasn’t even aware of until I chose to look for them. I also gained a lot of tolerance and compassion for all the people out in the world who are learning–through their own personal experience–what helps them and what truly harms them (even if they don’t consciously realize they’re learning this). The world looks so violent and ugly and confused sometimes because people are simply living out the consequences of their choices, but they haven’t awoken to the fact that they made any particular choices in the first place. Humans are choice-making machines; all choices have consequences; only when we truly accept this do we begin to make healthier choices.
I lost my faith in high school. It happened suddenly, almost overnight, with no specific event preceding it…One day I no longer had the ability to believe what I heard in church or read in the bible…That strange, invisible cord that had tied me to the church had simply vanished. I remember in high school, in Calculus–I always asked my teacher to go through the lengthy process of deriving a proof for any theorem or formula she gave us. Religion became the same for me. I finally started paying attention to what I was hearing (or speaking) in church, around the end of eleventh grade, and I wanted a deeper understanding: I wanted someone to show me where exactly these ideas came from. What did it sound like when God spoke to the prophets and why wasn’t He speaking to the rest of us? How could we really trust what these ancient guys wrote down? Whose voice were they really hearing? I couldn’t take “their” word for it. I couldn’t take “God’s” word for it when I wasn’t even convinced that he was responsible for the Bible; when I wasn’t even sure he was real.
In seeking a consistent, compelling “proof” for Catholicism and for the Judeo-Christian religions, I was disappointed: To me, nothing seemed to justify the bells and whistles that characterize most religions. The Eastern and indigenous religions seemed to share the same flaws and were mired in so many revisions and contradictions–just like the monotheistic ones–that I chose not to delve too deeply into any of them. However, I believed that at their deepest root, almost all belief systems would share simple, common ideas that had withstood the test of time (but what is time? There’s a whole other discussion . . ) I knew that ultimately, it didn’t matter which you explored: they’d all lead to the same place–”God,” whatever that was (or wasn’t). I knew this, but personally, I couldn’t get to God through religion like everyone else seemed to do. I was too aware of the edifice that was built around him–the artificial, man-made structure.
It seemed to me like the person or persons who founded each religion had discovered a pure Well of God–they had found the ultimate Source of All that Is. And so they built a beautiful church, or mosque, or temple right on top of the Well, and a community began to gather there. But, they had forgotten to dig an opening in the floor to let the water flow up to the people who gathered there. And most people never noticed! They just told stories about that guy a long time ago who had found this magical well and drunk from it, never realizing that the guy they spoke of had brought them all there so that they could drink, too–not just sit around and reenact his life and death.
And people wonder why, when there are so many avowed religious followers today, there is still so much hatred and disharmony and discord…Maybe it’s because many religions have inadvertently blocked their followers from true access to what they need, by placing undue emphasis on hero-worship and self-sacrifice, and not enough emphasis on self-observation, self-awareness, self-discovery, and self-growth (all of which inevitably lead to out-reach, community service, love, compassion, etc. Of course, on another tangent: it could go the opposite way–community service and outreach can lead to self-awareness and self-growth, but the point is that people tend to be missing out on the whole “personal access to divinity” thing). We have all been told that our place of worship was built atop the Well of God, and that has been enough for most people–to simply be close, instead of being an actual PART of God. It wasn’t enough for me–I wanted to drink from the Well itself; I wanted to swim in the water.
So I walked out of the temples and wandered through the woods. I wandered until I found the source of the water myself, and I jumped right in. I like to think that I’m swimming in Source now, but maybe there’s still a bigger water that feeds into this one…who knows? And even in these waters, I confront sharks and rapids and challenges, but at least I know where I am and who I am, and that keeps me floating and flowing. And pretty excited to see what’s to come.
Comment from MPJ: So, this is not so much a story, but maybe more like an essay? In any case, most of the concepts are more like Stage Four than anything else. I wish she had told us more of how she got to where she is now. But - stay tuned. She has another story - coming up in the next few days that may tell us more.