Spirituality as an Alibi

Would you like to play a little game? Just for a while. Now read the next sentence to the end and promise to act. Get up, keep holding this book, or this sheet of paper, go to the bathroom, look at yourself in the mirror, a long full of curiosity kind of look, then stop. Put this sheet, or this book down, and look again.

As you read these words it means you are no longer looking at yourself in the mirror, a long full of curiosity kind of look. Then let’s carry on with the game. After having read this sentence, look in the mirror and pretend you are a stranger that you meet for the first time. No, you don’t recognize these features, totally alien to you. Go behind the mask that is peering at you. Trying hard? Don’t put energy into trying. Just do it. Succeeding? Impossible?”

What is emotion? A movement from here to there, a direction. A movement of being pushing you to realize what you are through who you are. Who you are is what you are. The physicists are now in agreement with the mystics of the past to say that matter is crystallized or frozen light. All the cells of your body are this light, the sensations, the thoughts (a subtle form of matter), the air you breathe, and the food you eat. Emotion is hinting at this unity but the hint is a convenient approximation, it is not the thing. At the interface between the material and the mystical world, emotion sets forth a breakdown in the barriers between the two, and this occurs at the surface of each cell of the body.

You are lost in deep contemplation. A word strikes the eardrums: “Grapes?” There is the feeling of the round object between the half opened lips. The human animal in you (but who is you?) welcomes the fruit, crushes it between the teeth, the fluid awakening the taste buds. There is sweetness throughout the whole body. There is no food, no body, nobody, the sweetness and the light of the fruit is the sweetness and the light of the body, oneness. There was no movement toward becoming the light of the fruit, no mind, no emotion. “ Drink this wine, this is my body”.

What is indulgence? Is it a sentiment? Is it an activity such as to abandon oneself to a fantasy, or to cultivate an inclination, a hope or a desire? Gratification is sought, a leaning is encouraged, and a habit is reveled into. We are squarely in the world of duality, from there to here to further ahead, from then to now to some future ersatz. The steps from gentle indulgence to erethism or morbid over activity of mental powers or passions are few – fight for peace, ascetism, addictions, obesity…

Spirit is the animating power; the breath that life uses to send itself hurtling into existence. Because of our limited mental capabilities - after all mind is a very simple tool fashioned by consciousness to function in everyday reality – we need to make categories in an attempt to realize what we are without realizing that the sound of the scales of the practicing pianist stems from the same source as the symphony: silence.

Spirituality – pertaining to spirit. The word armchair designates a particular piece of furniture. It is not the actual object. No amount of repetitions of the word chair will ever give you the feeling of the solid beautifully crafted wooden object. You can’t sit on the word itself. Spirituality will never deliver spirit, as if spirit would look for spirit. As an emotional indulgence, spirituality puts the searcher beside spirit, elsewhere, as if there was a separation between spirit and searcher. Spirituality keeps you elsewhere, in the quest, in the search. It’s an alibi. Turn away from the alibi and find what you seek for you are it.

The mind uses spirituality as a means of defense to ensure its own survival, as a good parasite keeping its host, the whole of you, away from the possible scene of the crime. Death? Whose death? The ones that occur when some of your patterns transform, relinquishing an old form so that the freed energy can inform a new you, already present in an un-manifest way in the energy field of the old form.

Look in the mirror again. Do you need to summon a series of faces to perceive your frowning brow, a tentative smile, and some sparkling eyes? Look well, and look again, deeper, deeper into your true Self. Careful, the mirror may disappear!