The death of a family member. A bad financial situation. A relationship that goes sideways. We all experience calamity at some point in our lives that tests the mettle of our spiritual resilency.
There is no greater test to the veracity of one’s beliefs, than to suffer misfortune. What you may believe in, God or no God, becomes a test of its own value. The usefulness of what you believe and what meaning you attach to them, all come into play when the chips are down and you are backed into a corner. Poking up hesitantly over the trenches as you peer into the smoke and fog of a war being waged in front of your eyes. Feeling your chances of survival growing slimmer as each one of your prayers appear to be going unanswered.
This is the situation that I have found myself in a few times throughout my life. There were moments when I thought I could not recover from the crippling anxiety that depression had imparted upon me. Times when I thought I would never find the right relationship for me. Times when I thought that my fate was to suffer, and that I didn’t have the tools or the discipline to push myself forward and to overcome the odds that seem so heavily weighed against me.
I had renounced my spirituality in some of those moments. Thinking that for all my struggles, that my faith was insufficient and unacknowledged and going unrewarded.
And as I look back at the suffering and hardships that have been inflicted upon me; I’ve come to realize that I am still here.
I am still here.
I did not die. I am not homeless. I am not powerless. I am not any less glorious of a human being than I was at the height of my self-esteem.
There was a time when I suffered a multi-year existential crisis. I found it hard to find reason enough to get out of the bed each morning. I found it difficult to go out on yet another date with someone who was incompatible with me. I had a lot of difficulty in truly believing that there was a divinity inside and outside of myself that is guiding me towards a higher and happier purpose in life.
In those dark moments, I went inward. Inside, I felt empowered and began taking responsibility for how I was feeling. Yes, there were external causes to my condition I felt; but much of it I realized was coming from how I was perceiving myself and the world around me.
This type of deep introspection is something that inspired the Spanish mystic; Saint John of the Cross, to term it as “la noche obscura del alma” or “the dark night of the soul.”
Saint John had written three books on the subject, using both poetry and theology in order to get his points across. The dark night of the soul was characterized as an existential crisis where one begins to doubt the existence of divinity. Exactly the predicament I had found myself at different stages in life.
How then is one to remove this fear of having been abandoned by God? This fear or knowing that your beliefs do little to protect and shelter you when they are most desperately needed?
St. John has this to say:
The way in which they are to conduct themselves in this night of sense is to devote themselves not at all to reasoning and meditation, since this is not the time for it, but to allow the soul to remain in peace and quietness, although it may seem clear to them that they are doing nothing and are wasting their time, and although it may appear to them that it is because of their weakness that they have no desire in that state to think of anything.
The truth is that they will be doing quite sufficient if they have patience and persevere in prayer without making any effort. What they must do is merely to leave the soul free and disencumbered and at rest.
From that passage we can infer that “stillness” is the antidote to spiritual ennui. To be attentive and contemplative in a relaxed and unbothered manner. This echos the sentiment that many mystical and religious traditions suggest as part of everyday spiritual practice. From living in the “now” to being still and knowing that you are God; to the mindfulness techniques of Buddhism and Taoism, there has been a lot of teachings that center around the value of slowing yourself down to the point of stillness. A challenging goal given that we all exist in a world that stands still for no one.
During my dark times, I had unconsciously gone inward and realized the simple truths of what mystics and scholars and teachers and gurus had all been espousing. Being still and living in stillness; confers the benefit of stripping away the influence of an ego, by surrendering to the situation you have found yourself in.
As I was suffering, I had come to the realization that I was giving it more power over me than it deserved to have. And I also had come to discovering that instead of fighting against what I was feeling, I had to OWN what I was feeling first. I had to accept that I was depressed. Sad. Alone. Miserable. Withdrawn. I had to make peace with what my situation was, because there was no way for my life to get any better until I was able to do so.
In my everyday during this period, I was fighting to keep a brave face on. To not let anyone know how I was feeling. To not honor the truth of what was inside of me, preferring to instead place a mask upon my face and carry about my business and responsibilities under false pretenses. That was where I discovered my misery was stemming from. I was disguising my authenticity and lived in constant denial of it.
Recently I had come across a fantastic book that really puts this whole concept of being spiritually resilient and still, in an economically concise way. The following passage comes from Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior by Chogyam Trungpa, a Tibetan Buddhist:
“When we are afraid of ourselves and afraid of the seeming threat the world presents, then we become extremely selfish. We want to build our own little nests, our own cocoons, so that we can live by ourselves in a secure way.”
Trungpa hits upon the Dark Night of the Soul in his own way, but further elaborates on the solution by introducing a term I had not heard of called “Tathātā” which translates to “Suchness” or allowing things to be as they are.
When I first heard this word, it felt like a deep wave of resonance came pouring over me. Giving voice to thoughts I had not been able to articulate. Yes, being still and knowing that I am God was helpful; but the concept of “suchness” letting things be as they are, was immensely more of value to me.
This idea should be viewed more as an expansion upon the Buddhist notion of doing away with attachment, both to the material and the intangible. But it does not advocate doing away with attachment altogether. What Tathata promotes, is stillness and acceptance. Both of which has helped tremendously in removing myself from a situation that I felt helpless in resolving.
For many years, I had relied on information to make sense of the world. I hungered for knowledge, and read a countless number of books on the subject of spiritual and personal fulfillment. And yet, despite the wealth of wisdom I had accumulated, I still was not spiritually or personally fulfilled. I still hungered. I still felt empty and malnourished and alone and pessimistic.
But upon reading the Sacred Path of the Spiritual Warrior, I began to see how it was that I survived and triumphed over the past. Where my intellect has failed, my intuition had succeeded. I began to “feel” my feelings more and succumbing to the whims of them. Not irrationally or impulsively, but with consideration and forethought. I had been given prescription pills for depression, and those did not work because I was not dealing with an irrational soup of biological chaos that decreed for my serotonin levels to go down, magically and without rhyme or reason; I was dealing with a spiritual crisis, and science had no solutions for it other than to artificially numb the pain enough for me to forget it exists.
Putting a band-aid over the gaping hole in my chest wasn’t going to solve anything for me in the long term. I had to go inward. I had to learn to be still and to honor my feelings.
“To discover oneself is to let go oneself and see oneself in everything.”-Nagarjuna
And so it was. I had to learn to surrender. Surrender to what my true feelings were, to accept them and to realize that life is both finite and infinite, and that I needed to believe in the contradiction. That I am both an individual and a force that permeates the entire universe. I had to believe that I was just as much a Creator as the Creator itself.
And that taking responsibility, is an obligation not an option, for those of us who are experiencing pain in our lives. However form it takes. Denial and avoidance and outright lying both to yourself and others; will have the effect of further compounding an already precarious situation.
As spiritual beings having a human experience, we would do well to truly embrace what we believe in. No matter what gets thrown at us. There is a bigger picture that we often do not get to see, which works in our favor and does not desire to see us unhappy, unloved or unfulfilled.
But I learned I first had to believe it.
Otherwise, what good is having a certain type of belief or value if I will not take up arms to defend it? If I do not consider it important enough to guide my life by? If I turn my back on what it is that I consider to be important and meaningful and worth cultivating?
What would that say about who I really am?
Socrates once said that the greatest way to live with honor in this world, is to become what we pretend to be.
And to weather a spiritual storm, that is exactly what needs to happen. To live the values and beliefs we often pretend to espouse. To allow things to be as they are and allowing ourselves to be as authentic and as truthful as possible.
No matter how much it may hurt.
And especially when it does.
