My Spiritual Practice

[sdi]

I recently resigned from my tech job with the intention of taking more time to focus on my family and on my spirituality. A friend and co-worker asked me, "When you say 'focus on spirituality,' that can mean a lot of things to a lot of different people. What does that mean for you, specifically?"

I thought I might write my answer up here in case it's useful more generally. Please note, however, that I don't consider myself a spiritual teacher or guide—just a student who seems to be making adequate progress! There is perhaps nothing more personal than spirituality, and I'm pretty convinced that there are many heavens and many endpoints we strive towards. The spiritual world is by far more vast than ours! So please do not take any of this as gospel, just as one seeker's experience.

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My own spiritual practice is a sort of three-legged stool, where each leg supports the other two. Removing or replacing any one would undermine the entire structure and the whole thing would fall apart. These three are meditation, study, and prayer.

• Even though I'm not a Buddhist, I practice what I suppose is Zen-style meditation, following the instructions I picked up from one or another of Alan Watts' books years and years ago. What this does is peel back the constructed layers of experience that we all build up around ourselves. Most people identify closely with their bodies and sensory experiences, but in reality this is only the outermost layer of the thing that you really are: the first goal of meditation is to bypass the senses to get to the part of you that lies beyond them. Once you've quieted the senses, you experience the mind and it's incessant, chattering thoughts and ideas. Some people, like intellectuals or the infirm, identify with this part of themselves—once you've experienced this, your body seems superflous and the mind essential; but again, it's only a shell around your true self: the second goal of meditation is to bypass the thoughts. Once you've quieted the thoughts, you experience a pinpoint center of awareness or consciousness that does not sense or does not think, rather it experiences and knows. Once you've experienced this, it is hard to think of your mind or personality as "you," and the notion of reincarnation starts to seem obvious. This is as far as I've gotten, but twice I've brushed up against the level beyond it, though I haven't yet properly broken through. Nonetheless, by practicing meditation regularly, it gets easier and easier to peel these layers back, and gain perspective on who (or what) you really are, and free yourself from the confines of a petty society's herd mentality.

• Study, of course, exists in order to allow you to benefit from the experiences of others. The need for this is apparent even in the material world which we all readily and easily experience, so how much more is it necessary with spiritual worlds, which most of us have only very dim experience of, if any! So by studying, one can train their mind, learn to double-check one's experiences to see if they are real or imagined, and gain useful models by which to contextualize their experiences. I have pretty severe insomnia and read a lot, but if I had to pick the texts that have been most valuable to me to date, they would be:

  • Laozi's Tao Te Ching
  • The Zhuangzi
  • Nyogen Senzaki's and Paul Reps' Zen Flesh, Zen Bones
  • Plotinus' Enneads
  • Porphyry's Sentences

  I encountered the the Taoists in 2009, the Zennists in 2011, and the Neoplatonists in 2022. In my experience they all agree exactly, though they have different emphasis. I warn you, of course, that these are not for everybody! They're just what has proved valuable to me.

• If one is exploring a foreign country, it is useful and appropriate to have a guide to show you around. This is no less true for the spiritual realms, since while you are technically a native of those places, you've been in exile so long that you've forgotten the customs and ways. So it is very good to pray for guidance and help in finding your way! Many people have many preferences on who to pray to, and appropriately so; personally, I spend most of my time with my "genius" or "guardian angel," who finally managed to consciously get in touch with me after many years of meditation (though, of course, they were always unconsciously available), and I recommend the practice, but your mileage may vary!

And as I have said, each of these reinforces the others:

• Meditation has a tendency to empty the mind, and just like a freshly-cleaned table has a static charge and tends to attract dust, a freshly-cleaned mind tends to attract ideas and thoughts. Study improves meditation by making the void more likely to be filled by something worthwhile. Prayer improves meditation by moving your mind to a cleaner space: there is less "dust" near divinity, keeping your mind clearer for longer before it needs cleaning again.

• Study is only as valuable as what you study. Meditation improves study by helping you focus and decide on what is what is really important to you. Prayer improves study because divinities know what is good for you and can lead you to material worth your time. I have also found that study can help you to make sense of the sometimes-strange experiences one has in meditation and prayer.

• Prayer is usually considered to be a one-way phenomenon, where one speaks but doesn't get a response, but this is not my experience at all. Usually, however, we humans are so invested in our sensory and mental experiences that we are unable to hear divinity over all the noise! Meditation improves prayer by clearing out the noise so that the signal comes through easier. Study improves prayer by expanding one's perspective so that one has useful things to pray about.

It is important to note that one doesn't shift gears all at once: you can't simply magically become excellent at meditation, or just force yourself to study the best material, or instantly connect with a deity in prayer. Rather, I tend to think of all of this as a gradual ripening process: by simply engaging with the practices, all these things naturally come about, little by little. It is said that "what you contemplate, you imitate:" so if you want to be more loving, don't force yourself into lots of various activities or try to make intense promises at the altar of Aphrodite or whatever; rather, simply take such steps as are around you, and the little things will become second nature, and when you no longer have to think about the little things, the bigger things will develop all on their own.

Comments

[emmanuelg]

That's a bold move SDI!
Is this a sabbatical, a permanent lifestyle change, or too soon to say?
Meditation, Study and Prayer seems like a sound approach though, and it's never too soon to focus on one's family, though sometimes it can be too late...
If I may, I pray that the god(s) you serve and your guardian angel guide and preserve you through this quest !

[sdi]

Thank you! My intent is a more-or-less permanent change in direction, but I'm also happy to go where my angel leads me—and they are most certainly a tease! So we'll just have to see.

[boccaderlupo]

Best wishes and good Fortune to you and yours!

Watts is great. I probably need to revisit him soon.

[sdi]

Thank you!