Chapter 1: The Problem with a Spiritual Identity

Available 9/30/22

Read the book introduction here.

If you consider yourself spiritual, you might be moving away from your goal. In fact, that’s almost certainly the case.

We all know people who are a little too identified with their spiritualty. You know the types. The ones who describe themselves as empaths and lightworkers but seem like they would benefit more from a few psychotherapy sessions than another cacao ceremony. Or the spiritual seekers who always seem to be chasing another spiritual experience, be it through ayahuasca, retreats, workshops, or an endless consumption of books—as their ability to be fully in this world seems to grow more tenuous.

And we have the Zen students who think they’ve transcended reactivity but who feel cold and detached instead of awake and alive. There are more types than this, of course, from the sanctimonious and hypocritical Christian, to the New Age devotee who has either abandoned reason or never knew it in the first place. With all these kinds of people it seems possible that for many, their identity as a “spiritual” person might actually be in the way of their spiritual growth. It’s a delicious irony worthy of a Russian novelist.

Unfortunately, it’s not that different with us.

If you have a spiritual practice, be it yoga, meditation, prayer, nature mysticism, contemplation, or some kind of conscious practice that you define as “spiritual,” then you may be heaping a whole bunch of expectations on yourself, your community, and your experiences.

These expectations could be undermining the very thing you’re seeking inside of your practice, which is some kind of deeper expression of and connection to “source” (God, Jesus, oneness, nature, enlightenment, heart, divine feminine or masculine, or something else “beyond” ego).

 Considering yourself spiritual could be as innocuous as believing there might be “something rather than nothing” behind the undeniable beauty and complexity of the universe in which we find ourselves, we curiously self-aware little hominids. That would hardly rise to a problematic view of spirituality or one that’s likely to get in your way.

Most of us get into spirituality at least in part because we reject religion, with its dogma and its outdated rules, but also reject atheism and scientific reductionism, which insists (sometime with a religious fervor) that life is nothing more than random chance and luck.

Many of us self-identified spiritual people would, I think, say that being spiritual helps us find a middle path between religion and atheism, or faith and logic. It is an understandable attempt to be open to things we don’t know while rejecting the conviction of religion. Nevertheless, going into our practice as a “spiritual” person can create problems far bigger than those it solves in trying to find this middle way.

Part of what draws most of us to spirituality is, of course, experience as opposed to belief. At some point you may have had a spiritual experience, like a deeply blissful moment, a feeling of deep belonging, an overwhelming sense of love, a connection with the unspoken and nonlinear wisdom of nature, a non-dual view of being both the watcher and the watched, a deep immersion in emptiness (or fullness), and on and on.

The paradox is that a genuine spiritual experience always gives us a sense of a world beyond our limited ego view … and our ego immediately attempts to make that experience part of its view! This is a very human thing to do, so it’s not a bad thing, or something to feel ashamed of doing, or something that’s stupid. We all do it, in one way or another.

And we all experience the problem this causes: when we try to possess a spiritual experience, we end up corrupting the experience while also making it impossible to transition from an experience we have to something we live. This is one of the main ways that we get stuck—trying to possess our spiritual experiences with our egos.

Centuries before there was Zen in Japan, there was Chan in China, and it laid the foundations for the Buddhism that would eventually spread to Tibet, Japan, and the West.[1] In the 9th Century, a great meditation master, Nanquan Puyan (c. 749 – c. 835), was asked by his student, “Master, what is the Way?”

He replied, “Ordinary mind is the way.”

In the roughly 1,200 years since that famous reply was uttered, there has never been any serious disagreement from generations of Buddhist meditation masters that Puyan spoke a powerful truth. But how can ordinary mind be the way? What about the divine? What about enlightenment? What about Christ consciousness? What about holy books? Prayer? What about the non-dual, or emptiness? What about Gaia? What about ancestors and spirit guides and astrological conjunctions? What about other realms of existence, energy, chakras, past lives?

Ordinary mind is the way? I must admit that it’s hard to imagine selling many books or online courses with that slogan. Part of what we’ll get up to in this book is to explore exactly why ordinary mind is the way, and exactly what that means for our own practice.

One problem with identifying as a spiritual person is that you attempt to possess your spiritual experiences, as I already stated. Another common problem is you may think that only spiritual experiences are legitimate and therefore try to destroy or get away from your petty thoughts and mental stories. In other words, meditation and spiritual practice become forms of attempting to kill the “bad” ego, and you think a busy mind means you’re an unspiritual person. Jealousy, anger, lust, or shame may be unwelcomed and repressed because those are considered “lower” human emotions that are not enlightened or spiritual.

As you will discover, this is a grave misunderstanding, and this view makes spiritual evolution impossible, causes repression of emotion and spiritual bypassing, and can deaden empathy and compassion both for self and for other.

A small but profound shift in perspective can begin the process of freeing you from being trapped by your ideas of what a “spiritual” person is, and therefore freeing you to experience things like awakening for yourself. This shift is actually quite simple, and I’ll get into that in just a moment.

But like so many simple things, it’s far more profound and far more difficult to fully experience that it might seem. As long as you try to have and hold spiritual experiences for yourself, rather than let the experiences have and hold you, you will remain trapped in concepts of spirituality that cannot free you from yourself.

It’s worth repeating: It’s a very human thing to try to possess a spiritual experience. It’s one of the most human things we can do. Beating yourself up for doing it doesn’t help—and won’t work. It’s a hard habit to break, but when you do, the universe will open herself to you and share her secrets. We just can’t keep what we find.

This book is designed as an invitation to view your spiritual experiences in a much simpler way. I know this is challenging when we have such beautifully sophisticated maps of our own spiritual selves that we’ve become quite attached to using. Zen has been pulling spiritual maps from people’s hands for centuries, of course, but Zen has also been inexorably bound to Japanese imperial culture that can make it challenging for modern, westernized minds. We’ll use the tools of Zen, but we’ll modernize them to be applicable to the world we find ourselves in today.

Spirituality Defined

Let’s take a step back and define spirituality. I define it as the search for the sacred. I think this is a pretty good definition. By “search” I mean this is an ongoing journey, a process that begins with the discovery of something sacred hidden right here in the seemingly profane life of a modern human. By “sacred” I mean discovering a perspective that illuminates some kind of transcendence, immanence, boundlessness, or ultimacy.

But the key here is insight, not belief. It is often said in Zen, for instance, that, “you need to deepen your insight.” This means go back to the meditation cushion, sit in meditation, and see if a deeper illumination can be allowed to arise within you.

If belief is the domain of religion, then insight is the domain of spirituality. The realization of a spiritual insight is more important than having a spiritual belief, in the same way the comprehension of a scientific insight is more important than having a scientific belief. It’s great if you believe climate change is real, but really what good is that? You’re merely parroting the insight of others; you have nothing to base it on but faith, and an educated climate skeptic will tear your pants off in an argument.

It’s far better if you’ve looked at the data and had the interior illumination that the scientific evidence shows that climate change is real. Not all of us have the time, inclination, intelligence, or energy to become experts in all the places we have opinions, which is why we tend to cite experts in the defense of our beliefs.

And there’s nothing wrong with looking at the majority of climate scientists, seeing that almost all of them think that climate change is real and is caused by human activity, and then saying, “Well, I think we should listen to the overwhelming majority of people whose job it is to think about these things.” But we often defend our beliefs as if they were our insights. This is part of why the world is so much at war with itself.

Spiritual insight can’t be taught but instead needs to be fully realized for oneself, the same way that love must be experienced in order to be fully understood. You can talk to a fourteen-year-old about love until you’re blue in the face, but nothing you say will prepare them for the intensity of their first experience of falling in love with another person.

The depth of the experience must be felt in one’s being, not just understood as intellectual knowledge, in order to be fully comprehended. The same can be said of intense heartbreak, of the unexpected death of someone you love, of experiencing the pain of the last few breaths of an exhausted marriage, or any number of things that must be felt and not ever just understood.

Spiritual insight comes, in part, from being able to let go of the self—thoughts, feelings, stories, beliefs, etc. This doesn’t mean that those who have done this are egoless, however—egoless is what an infant is, which is why they can’t hold their heads up, pee their pants, and need to be fed to survive.

Highly realized spiritual masters do not identify with their egos and their thoughts, stories, and feelings. Being awakened or deeply realized or enlightened means being radically dis-identified with the self and from identity of any kind. Yet the self and the identities are still very much there—they’re just not held very tightly.

These rare people—and they are truly rare—certainly experience pain, but they experience a great deal less suffering because they’re not in the habit of resisting the world as it is. Rain is wet, snow is cold, the sun is warm, life ends in death, heartache hurts, love is expansive, and many other things simply happen without reactivity.

Many of us take up meditation or prayer in order to find some degree of peace in the world, but for most of us the path is blocked even before we begin. We’ll never move beyond a glimpse of freedom because we’re in the way.

Most meditations we learn are designed to give our egos something to do: We count our breaths, we focus on our inhales, we label our thoughts as thoughts and let them go, we come into our body in a particular way, we recite mantras, or we pray.

These things are all fine, but they can’t deliver us into liberation, into freedom, into the ability to be with what is. Meditations that give you nothing to do are simple, and in that simplicity they can be quite challenging.

This is meditation with a simple goal: to allow the clarity that is already here to arise (not find the clarity—finding is doing, which the ego loves, and awakening isn’t there in some other place. It is here, now).

Allow the clarity that is already here to arise within you. That could be this entire book. Nothing about identity in that. No crystals or malas needed, no six-part course to take, no two-hour satsang, no week-long retreat, no divinity. If your experience includes a realization of a creator, that expression might be: Allow the God-consciousness that is already here to arise within you. God or no God, it makes no difference to the awakened Christian monks I’ve trained with, the agnostic Zen masters who I’ve studied under, or the mystical Tibetan lamas under whom I first took vows.

God or no God is irrelevant to all of them because their spiritual insights are so deep that they transcend utterly such meaningless distinctions. (If you’re saying to yourself, “Wait, God or no God is meaningless? How is that possible?” you’re not crazy, or dull. But it’s a truth that’s rooted in spiritual insight, not in logic or learning or philosophy or ideas. And it should make a lot more sense to you, in your being, by the end of this book.)

Pure awareness, or God, or spirit, or suchness, or enlightenment—or whatever you want to call the Omega and the Alpha and the real goal of your meditation—isn’t responding to your meditations. It’s not affected by your meditation techniques, and it doesn’t come and go. Your ability to sit as awareness itself is what comes and goes.

Pure awareness, or God, or spirit, or suchness doesn’t ever become part of you. God never becomes a part of you because God could never be apart from you. And you don’t become part of it. Awakening is simply awake. God is simply God. God is simply awake. You can’t wake up; you can’t become enlightened because you can’t keep what you find here. But you can allow what’s already here and notice for yourself that awareness is aware, not you.

You can then discover, as we say in Zen, that you have everything you need and have been “awake” this entire time. That’s why in Zen we say that teaching meditation is “selling water by the river,” because you’re teaching someone to find something that’s right here, right now. The only real instruction is to show them what they already have.

Zen also calls enlightenment the “gateless gate” because once you have awakened, you look and see that awakening was here the entire time—you go through a gate only to see there was never a gate in the first place.

Allow the clarity that is already here to arise within you.

Those are easy words for me to say and might even be easy for you to understand with your mind. But knowing this in the depths of your being is another thing entirely, and something that we’ll spend much of this book doing.

Most of us meditate not with a radical approach to allowing, but instead with a goal in mind, like relaxation or mindfulness or greater equanimity or, God help us, enlightenment. We think we need to do things like quiet our mind, or do visualization practices, or clarify our karma, or mature from spiritual adolescents to spiritual adults to spiritual elders, or 10,000 other things that keep us from the truth.

If you’re looking to spiritually awaken, really awaken out of the dream of your separate self, you need to stop the practices that have your ego looking to perfect your practice, gain powerful “spiritual” insights, uncover “powerful” methods, or be seen as some kind of holder of wisdom.

The good news is that when you actually do nothing with your mind and leave your ego alone, you can find this sense of being “awake” inside of yourself—a luminescent core of your being that is already perfectly still, already perfectly awake, already perfectly enlightened, already fully in love with the world as it is, and that already has everything it needs.

But you can’t have it for yourself. You can’t keep all your judgments about the world, your sense of being so fucking right about this or that. The practice is to get out of the way in order to know this truth for yourself, which will also shatter your self.

The great teachers have told us, over and over again, that enlightenment isn’t really spiritual at all. That word, enlightenment, has been bastardized, spiritualized, and miscategorized, yet isn’t complicated. Enlightenment includes everything. And by everything, they mean everything, not everything except Donald Trump, leaf blowers, the patriarchy, a cold swimsuit sticking to your thigh on a chilly night, rush hour traffic, and that asshole you dated last year.

As we’ll see in this chapter, this truth is really a problem for most spiritual people. Because if we’re in love with half the world but hate the other half, how do we ever get our mind into a place where we can accept that the deepest spiritual insight that we can have not only isn’t spiritual, but it includes everything in the manifest universe—including all the nasty bits?

“Enlightenment is intimacy with all things.” – Zen Master Dogen[2]

And by “all things,” Zen Master Dogen means all things, not just “most things,”  “the spiritual things,” “the good things,” “the liberal things,” “the free market things,” or “the moral things.”

The enlightened mind doesn’t condone the “bad” things, mind you. But it also doesn’t condemn them either. It just accepts that they’re real, for now. Just like we’re real, for now. Until we’re not. (If you feel a tripwire of an ethical dilemma here, you’re onto something, but I’ll hold that off until Chapter 8, where together we’ll plug it into some of the simplicity, and complexity, we’ll discover along the way.)

Enlightenment isn’t spiritual, yet all spirituality flows from it. At the core of your being is tremendous peace, and love, and equanimity. Not as thoughts, beliefs, or things to be cultivated…or that even can be cultivated. And they’re not better than their opposites.

They’re just truths that arise out of the pure essence of who you are. They’re more interesting than their opposites because they arise out of your direct experience of the very deepest part of your nature, our nature, my nature. And you can find them and see them for yourself.

In this book I’ll do my best to highlight how you too can allow this to be. You may, however, have to leave behind your ideas about spirituality, about the world, about God, about the nature of the universe, and about enlightenment, because none of those ideas will help you discover this truth for yourself.

Why Do You Have a Spiritual Practice?

Let us start, then, at the beginning, with the asking of a simple question: Why do you have a spiritual practice in the first place?

There are many good answers to this question, but my favorite context for this comes from my own teacher, the fiery and sometimes ornery Junpo Denis Kelly Roshi, the eighty-third patriarch in Rinzai Zen. Junnpo was my teacher and my friend, and we wrote two books together before he passed in the spring of 2021.[3]

“Awakened mind (enlightenment) cannot be disturbed. Nothing but you can move you out of stable clear awareness and presence and into contraction—nothing. If you have a spiritual practice or belief that isn’t strong enough to withstand prison, the death of a loved one, infidelity, bankruptcy, or the diagnosis of a terminal illness—it may be time to start over.

If your consciousness cannot remain undisturbed by these things—which doesn’t mean no tears or no emotions, by the way—you might want to ask what is missing in your practice, and why you’re bothering in the first place.”[4]

A spiritual practice can be about many things, but a deep approach with the correct frame can offer nothing less than liberation. The spiritual teacher Adyashanti used to frequently ask his students, “What do you want more than anything else?”

Some would find themselves, with a bit of digging, saying they wanted the truth—the real truth. And he would always then ask them, “Do you want the truth, or do you want to be special? Because you can’t have both.”

If you’re going to bother with a spiritual practice at all, you might as well strive for the truth, or to awaken fully from your egoic dream, because anything less than that will leave you, as Junpo said, unable to withstand what life will inevitably throw your way.

Your practice will be hollow at the core because of a belief that you’re somehow special in how you do it, or who you are, or in what you gain. This is the making of your spiritual identity, which is the making of a trap from which you can’t escape.

A spiritual identity, you see, might be a better and more helpful identity in stressful times than that of, say, a banker, but not necessarily (and probably not in a financial crisis).

But more times than not, when the shit really hits the fan, our spiritual identity is just another thought form, another set of beliefs fueled by the ways we string together our musings to create stories and thereby our worlds.

Beliefs aren’t much comfort against the seeming chaos of life, or we’d all just have great beliefs that insulated us fully from the suffering of the world. But we don’t. At the first sign of trouble our spiritual beliefs are often out the door, leaving us to deal with the mess of life without all those understandings we thought would be so comforting.

Our identity is created by our thoughts experienced over time. We can have incredibly complex identities based on the tension or lack of tension between our internal experience and our cultural one.

(Some of these identities are now considered marginalized, but oddly can be simple semantic choices. For instance, someone raised male, straight, white, and middle class can choose to be queer—without changing anything else about their life—and become part of a marginalized group. This isn’t to minimize or marginalize the struggles that queer people face, but merely to show how fluid and powerful identity has become in our culture.)  

The larger point, however, is that our culture is at an inflection point as it wakes up to both the liberations and limitations of intersectional identities: How do ethnicities, histories, power differentials, implicit or explicit cultural biases, and other dimensions generate new self-meanings, and ways of interpreting who we hold ourselves to be? We will explore identity more later in this book, but for now let’s peel back a few layers on something most of us take for granted: who we think we are.

From a Zen perspective we look at things a little differently, making a distinction between the relative and the absolute (although that distinction too eventually falls away). All thinking is relative, meaning thoughts are not permanent. They arise, they exist for a time, they vanish.

Any egoic identity is created by our impermanent thoughts experienced over time, creating an impermanent identity. We can all think of identities we’ve let go: maybe a counterculture teenage punk, a responsible wife, an angry rebel, a liberal activist, a nice guy, a conservative, a slut or a prude, a man or woman (if someone transitions to the opposite), a gender identity of any kind, etc. Other identities are fixed, such as ones based on our physical appearance (people of color can’t choose to be white), but they too vanish as death takes them from us.

“Death comes equally to us all, and makes us all equal when it comes.” – John Donne

While an identity can be useful and very much necessary to navigate life and to grow up parts of ourselves, it can be a double-edged sword when it comes to having and sustaining spiritual experiences that happen beyond its reach. You might have a good objection as to why your identity is very necessary and very real. And your identity is real—it’s just not fixed or permanent or, as you will see, very stable.

Maybe you fought hard to find this part of yourself, the “truest” version of you (so far). Maybe you feel your identity is under attack, and claiming it positions you as an activist and ally.

Perhaps it’s something you’ve never really questioned, but it feels so obviously true and natural that you can’t really imagine life without it. Perhaps you think that letting go of an identity is itself an act of privilege that abandons those who don’t have that option.

Or that letting it go will plunge you into madness. There are so many reasons to have and to hold an identity, and it’s not my place to tell you how you should or shouldn’t hold yours. But I can speak to how that identity intersects with your spirituality, and how you can have your identity but paradoxically be less attached to it, which isn’t to deny its existence but to honor its limitations and its transparent impermanence. 

If we look a little closer, we see that any self-identity has to be made up of how we view ourselves. This view will likely be reinforced by society, positively or negatively. But at its core, identity is made up of thought. And our thoughts are a fascinating place to bring some attention, some awareness.

While we can harness our thoughts into practical thinking, on occasion, we are utterly powerless to stop them. And we cannot really control what we’re thinking most of the time, either. If we could, we’d simply choose not to focus on our last breakup, or our mortality, or our sick child, or our test tomorrow, or whatever might be bothering us.

Perhaps we’d only ever think spiritual thoughts, never have thoughts that upset us, or never have thoughts that end up hurting ourselves or hurting someone else when they’re acted on. We’d be the sovereign of our own minds. But we know that’s not true and, on the whole, we feel much more like the slave to our thoughts, beliefs, feelings, and yes, identity—spiritual and otherwise.

Said another way: If we can’t find freedom and lasting peace with our thinking minds, how can an identity built on those thoughts and feelings help us achieve freedom and lasting peace?

They can’t, and on some level we all know this already because we’ve already tried it, time and time again, throughout our entire lives. Most of us are trying it even now. Ask yourself: what identity are you searching for right now? Perhaps even the one motivating you to read this book?

Sometimes in deep meditation, or just for some spontaneous and unknown reason, we can pop out of our thinking mind entirely and find ourselves in a place where we are simply looking out at the world, and at ourselves, as everything arises. In those moments, we might experience our thoughts and our entire identity as arising within a much greater awareness, no different than how the wind arises out of nothing and dashes across our skin, coming from nothing and going into nothing.

And yet even without thinking and without any externally defined identity, there is awareness simply and powerfully looking out at all that is. These moments of grace, of liberation, can completely change our world … so long as we don’t try to hold onto them. And they have nothing whatsoever to do with a spiritual identity.

If you’re convinced that you’re in control of your thoughts, then simply set a timer for two minutes and choose to not think. It’s unlikely you’ll make it past twenty seconds before a few thoughts arise, and by the one-minute mark whole ideas should be streaming past.

The reason you can’t stop your thoughts is simple: You are not thinking, you are being thought. I know. It sounds like something a clever spiritual person would say. But it’s the same with our breath: We can control our breath when we choose to, but most of the time breathing happens to us. We can’t stop our breath because we’re not breathing, either. We’re being breathed.

Now, these are just words on a page or sounds entering your ears. They mean nothing until you experience their truth for yourself. But one of the goals of this book is that you may, soon, experience the profound sensation of being thought, and the incredibly powerful sensation of being breathed. I assure you that if you’ve never experienced this, the experience will transcend anything you might imagine.

There’s one final point I’d like to drive home. I am not saying you shouldn’t have an identity—absurd (especially since society may have expectations about your identity that require your attention, care, and action if you’re in a non-privileged position).

Thoughts and identities are quite useful, and they’re indispensable to the business of being a human being. But it’s good to keep in mind that your identity, no matter how profound or brilliant or original or righteous or historically oppressed, cannot liberate you from your suffering.

The Root of the Problem

Identities are vital to the business of being human. We must all create and sustain identities—our stories of ourselves—as we differentiate from our family of origin and, for some of us, our culture. For most of us, that’s enough—creating an identity that is our own and is more or less aware of its history, its culture, its enculturation, and its biases and neurotic conditioning. (Those last two are very good things to be aware of.)

But some of us will be called to move beyond identity and into something less defined, including moving beyond an identity as a spiritual person or a spiritual teacher. In this place, our identity is something that is more situation-specific. For example: When I teach, I’m a teacher. When I write, I’m a writer. When I meditate, I’m a meditator.

When I do martial arts, I’m a martial artist. Those identities arise as necessary to serve a function, but they’re not something that I hold inside of me as some indelible part of my being. When I’m walking in the park, watching the sunset, or watching football, I’m none of those things.

A spiritual identity is unique because in some way or another it is trying to find a reality deeper than the one in which it currently finds itself. Typically, spiritual people will share a good deal of these beliefs about the world:

·     kindness over aggression

·     love over indifference or hate

·     anti-racism over racism

·     equanimity over anger

·     feminine over masculine

·     spiritual over materialistic

·     environmentalism over capitalism

·     action over inaction

·     natural over manmade

·     spirit over matter

·     soul over ego

·     peace over war

·     liberal over conservative

·     being over doing

·     transcendent over worldly

·     embodied over analytical

·     quiet over noisy

·     inclusive over hierarchical

Now there’s nothing wrong with wanting a more peaceful, kind, just, and fair society where more people are aware of the impact of mindless consumption, unconscious power structures, and their behavior on the larger world. These are noble and powerful goals to have and to work towards.

It becomes problematic, however, when we take these ideas into our spiritual practices. The problems arise not because we want to make the world a better place. To state the obvious: It’s okay to want to make the world a better place, but it’s also much more complicated than that.

We assume, as “spiritual” people, that we would all agree on what it means to make the world a better place. But many of the most diabolical dictators in history, and the most abusive cult leaders, were convinced they too were doing exactly that. There is nothing inheritably ennobling or clarifying about wanting to improve the world as we see fit, because that goal, like so many that seem good and just, can get hijacked by our nastier, unconscious parts.

Take another look at that list of typical spiritual beliefs. Most of us will think half of that list is better than the other half. If we could stop there, we might still be able to bring true clarity into our spiritual practice, but almost none of us stop there.

If we really tell the truth, it’s far more accurate to say that the half we like has more reason to exist than the half we don’t—and that we should exterminate patriarchy, abolish capitalism, and be intolerant of the intolerant. That sets us up into an odd place of not accepting the world as it is in our spiritual practice or in society at large.

I want to slow this way, way down, because it’s very easy to misunderstand this point. I’m not saying you should accept, support, or ignore that which needs your attention. I’m not saying you need to ignore the environmental issues facing us, or accept child sex trafficking as “just the way things are,” or support corrupted systems like that of American prisons. Junpo used to say, “Cynicism, denial, and apathy are not helpful traits on the spiritual path.”

So I’m not saying watch the world burn from a Zen haze because, “it’s all real, man.” I am saying that the universe gives precisely zero fucks if you accept it as it is or not—reality just goes on being real, in the same way a rainy day goes on raining regardless of your opinion of the rain.

This is a problem with a spiritual identity: It prefers “spiritual” things, like nonviolence over violence. Or environmental sustainability over capitalistic industry. As a citizen, an activist, or a concerned human being, there is nothing wrong with having these preferences and in fighting for them. I’m certainly not suggesting we allow rampant corporate control of our government or systemic racism to continue, or that there is something wrong with being in opposition to those things and fighting to remove them as much as possible from our culture.

As a spiritual practitioner, however, believing that one half of the world (the half you like) has more reason to exist than the other half of the world (the half you don’t like) is hugely problematic, because that thing continues to exist no matter how you feel about it. The world, you see, is not divided. Only we are, and only we project that division outwards where it doesn’t exist.

In other words, reality is not divided by its very nature, and it’s not in opposition to any part of itself. We are divided in all the ways explained so far—we love some things and hate others, we think we’re right about this and others wrong about that, we bristle at a world that isn’t more in tune with how we think it should be.

And we project that perceived division onto the world, onto that undivided reality, where it simply does not exist. At its core, the universe is whole and undivided and complete, and therefore so are you, no matter what your opinion of things might be.

Remember: You cannot be liberated and opinioned at the same time. And since we’re telling the truth, in our highly politicized times most of us don’t stop with wanting to get rid of the half of the world we don’t like. Truthfully, we want to eradicate those parts, a strategy that creates tremendous internal opposition to the world as it is.

Well, you say: So fucking what? Why shouldn’t I be in utter opposition to things that I know are harmful, destructive, toxic, and otherwise unfit to exist? Because the deepest spiritual insights we can have as a human being are not shrouded in our preferences, biases, or opinions.

We can’t be liberated and opinionated at the same time. Those are mutually exclusive states, like awake and asleep, sober and drunk, alive and dead, and wise and foolish. When we’re at war with part of the world we are always at war with a part of ourselves, and if we’re at war with ourselves we cannot be free. (And freedom, as we’ll discover, is only the beginning of the spiritual journey. There are so many more interesting treasures to behold on the path of awakening than our supposed freedom.)

There can be no genuine spiritual insight that refuses to accept reality as it is. That’s just a belief that is looking out onto the world and saying “that deserves to exist but that doesn’t” as the universe goes on arising, not caring at all how much you don’t like parts of it.

 ◊♦◊

There is a Taoist story of an old farmer who had worked his crops for many years. One day his horse ran away. Upon hearing the news, his neighbors came to visit. "Such bad luck," they said sympathetically.

"Maybe," the farmer replied. The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it three other wild horses. "How wonderful," the neighbors exclaimed.

"Maybe," replied the old man. The following day, his son tried to ride one of the untamed horses, was thrown, and broke his leg.

The neighbors again came to offer their sympathy on his misfortune. "Maybe," answered the farmer. The day after, military officials came to the village to draft young men into the army. Seeing that the son's leg was broken, they passed him by.

The neighbors congratulated the farmer on how well things had turned out. "Maybe," said the farmer.

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To state it just once more for emphasis: Acceptance of things as they are doesn’t mean we have to let polluters pollute, racists run police departments, despots run countries, and rapists rape. That is not at all what this means. When we look out at the world from an awakening state, we’re simply not at war with what we see there already existing—and we’re not at war with those parts of ourselves that refuse to accept it. We accept the world as it is even as we work to change it, and even as our hearts break open at the suffering we encounter.

I am not offering a ticket to watching the world burn from a place of enlightened detachment, from the Zen student’s cool and detached persona. No, the pain of the world’s ignorance and of the host of manmade problems can become very, very intense and very, very intimate. You may find yourself weeping at the sight of a tree being cut down. Or in tears at the sight of a piece of plastic on the beach. There are more tears in seeing how things really are, not less; more times you are literally brought to your knees by seeing reality as it is, not less. This is because you’re willing to see the world without bracing yourself against the parts you don’t like or don’t think should exist. My teacher, Junpo, judged the depth of others’ awakening not by their spiritual insight but by the depth of their compassion.

The depth of our compassion is a marker of our spiritual depth. This is not the depth of our pity, which is looking at something and shaking our head saying, “So sad,” as you move on with your life. Spiritual insight is not measured by the depth of one’s outrage, which might simply be a refusal to accept what is. No, compassion for the pain of the world as it is now will take you to your knees as your heart breaks— without having to turn away from it in judgment and contraction, in anger and disbelief, in numbness or fatigue, or in a righteous rage. When you’re one with the world, you’re one with the world’s pain.

One final point that is important to make: We do not ever need to get rid of identities, spiritual or otherwise. We need our egos, even as fully awakened beings. Far too many spiritual seekers go to war with their own minds and try to destroy their egos, along with their less spiritual thoughts and ways of being, ensuring they will never know true wisdom and never have lasting peace. When the mind goes to war with itself, the war never ends.  

Divided and Conquered

When we refuse to accept certain parts of reality or hate their existence, part of each one of us can get pushed into psychological shadow. This is a pretty obvious phenomenon when, say, a group of frat guys beat up a kid for being gay. While there are certainly cultural beliefs, peer pressuring, socioeconomic factors, and educational levels at play, studies have also found another consistent reason: homophobic people often have unacknowledged feelings of attraction towards the same gender.[5] Put another way, their own homoerotic feelings are in shadow and they hate those feelings in themselves. When they see someone manifesting those feelings, they pounce.

Yet this phenomenon can be harder and more insidious to spot when it’s something that seems virtuous. The Black Studies professor Ibram X. Kendi has pointed out that until we—black, white, and other—claim and identify the racist parts of ourselves, we are terribly ineffective at finding helpful ways to bring more awareness to racist policies, ideas, and narratives. He maintains that racism is more like a state of mind than a trait, so that we could be racist in one moment and antiracist in the next, depending on how we’re thinking and acting.

What is the danger of being at war with some part of the world, even something as horrible as racism? Well, if we haven’t faced up to the inner racist inside of us, then that unconscious racism can wreak havoc on our conscious decision making. Kendi’s word for freeing ourselves from this is antiracist, which is stronger than not racist because it implies one is working against not only what they see in the world but also what they see inside of themselves. An antiracist, by Kendi’s definition, accepts the world as it is now and works inside of that acceptance to create different behaviors the only place they matter: in the moment.[6]

When we hate something out in the world and refuse to accept it might be inside of us, too, we can strive to stamp it out of everything and everyone in a fit of zealotry. Nazis are a good example here, because if ever there was an epitome of evil, it’s them. No one comes to the defense of Nazis or Nazism (except those already on the fringes of society).

Nazis are a pretty safe place to heap one’s scorn and hatred, for they believed in the racial superiority of the Aryan race (despite it not actually being a race). If you don’t think you have the capacity to be a Nazi somewhere inside of you, you are far more likely to become a zealot.

True, you might not goosestep to your next Pilates class, but you might lose the capacity to see why antifascists, with their covered faces and quick move towards violence, look an awful lot like the people they’re supposed to be fighting (namely, fascists). To remind those whose memory of history may be a bit faint: fascists are those who put race and nation ahead of any individuality and support that form of society by force through a strong dictatorial power.

This can be hard for liberal folks to see because the antifas are on their side and seem to be fighting against, in the United States at least as of the writing of this book, Trumpism and racism. It’s also likely true that many on the left have disowned their own inner fascists.

A fascist would have an intolerance of those unlike themselves and a desire to rid the country of those kinds of people. And yet some on the left have become utterly intolerant of those unlike themselves. They start with a rejection of what was once a liberal value, tolerance. And as we can all too easily see, this is how one starts a war, not how one creates lasting peace.

Liberals understandably see the problems of racism, sexism, and other social problems and want to eradicate them, and yet this seemingly noble stance can be problematic. For we must see these things inside of ourselves and begin there—not with an iron fist of intolerance at what we find, but with a velvet glove of understanding and inner dialog. Only then can we help others to make this transition.  

Both liberals and conservatives of all stripes might do well to listen to Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn. This Russian, Nobel Prize-winning novelist and philosopher spoke out against the Soviet Union and Communism through a deeply humanistic lens. He refused to see those who had exiled him and his family, and ruined his homeland, as merely “evil.”

“If only it were all so simple. If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”[7]

― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to educate people and reform our various systems of education and law to better accommodate and address injustices we see in the world. There is a problem with wanting to eradicate certain kinds of people or even certain kinds of ideas, rather than wanting to transform them.

Ordinary mind is the way. Enlightenment is intimacy with all things. As awakened beings, we do not reject the bad things in the world, nor do we resist them. Rape, war, discrimination, poverty, sex trafficking, and worse are all real and all happening now.

We don’t close our hearts to these things or turn away with “compassion fatigue.” We accept these things are real, for now, just like you and I are real, for now. We don’t hate or resist what is, any more than we hate and resist the entire winter because we don’t like the cold, or hate and resist life because we’re afraid of death.

This doesn’t mean we do nothing. It most definitely doesn’t mean we feel nothing. My teacher Junpo tells a story of seeing a tree freshly cut down and the sap oozing from it, and falling to his knees in tears as the tree “bled” to death in front of him. He was one with the sentience around him, and it broke his heart wide open.

That experience also was part of what drove him to become a lifelong environmentalist. The Dalai Lama talks of, when he was a young boy, seeing a group of other boys stone a puppy to death, and he has used that memory to open his heart to compassion and love and openness to the world, to those boys, and to the puppy.

Accepting the world as it is doesn’t mean doing so with a smile, although truthfully you may find yourself smiling a great deal more often when you’re no longer at war with what is.

◊♦◊

Footnotes:

 [1] For geopolitical reasons, there is some controversy that Buddhism spread from China to Tibet, instead of from India to Tibet. The matter is not considered settled by academics.
[2] This is sometimes interpreted as “…intimacy with the 10,000 things,” which is saying the same thing.
[3] A Heart Blown Open, Divine Arts Media, 2012; The Heart of Zen, North Atlantic Book, 2014.
[4] From The Heart of Zen
|[5] https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2012-02599-001
[6] From How to be an Antiracist, One World; 2019
[7]The Gulag Archipelago, Harper Perennial Modern Classics; Abridged edition, 2007