Post two of seven, in section Hard Truths
One of the things that has come out of my awakening is the embodied understanding of there being no single source of truth. This is very important to grok if you want to be able to hold nuanced and mature spiritual beliefs.
Minds have a habit of taking your experience and creating fixed perceptions and ideas about it. In contrast, the heart connects to a wider range of experience because its natural state is one of interconnection.
When you are more connected to your heart and less stuck in your mind, you can take into account different ways of processing and experiencing the world and include a broad range of input, from your perceptions to your sensate experience to your intuitive understanding and your deepest held beliefs, for example, without grasping at finding an ultimate authority.
Another way to look at this is Iain McGilchrist’s work on the right hemisphere (which relates to what I am calling heart) and left hemisphere (which relates to what I am calling mind) ways of experiencing the world.
The Elements of Experience
In a lot of meditation teaching, particularly Buddhist practices, awareness or the mind is held as a special aspect that holds the truth of your experience.
It is a special quality in a way, in that for most people, the mind and awareness are the primary lenses through which they spend their whole lives experiencing the world.
But it is not the only lens that you can experience things through; neither is it more fundamentally important than any of the others.
To help people connect with a broader range of experience, I have found it incredibly useful and experientially true to describe experience in these 4 parts:
- Body
- Heart
- Mind
- Soul
The important thing here is that you cannot boil experience down to one thing being the primary source; they all play a role in you being here and now, having the experience you are having.
What Does This Mean for Awakening?
Lots of people choose one of these aspects of experience – body, heart, mind, or soul – and put it on a pedestal where it holds the ultimate truth and therefore has the answer to all of their problems.
They build a spirituality or worldview around the redemption of that specific aspect of experience, thinking that everything else is just a subset of it. This creates the idea that everything will fall into place if you can just get that one thing clarified.
Some examples of this are:
- Scientific materialists believe that everything arises from matter and we will find all the answers to the Universe there
- Rationalists believe that the answers can be found through logic
- Hippies believe that you just need to love the world enough and all the problems will be solved
- Theravadan Buddhists believe you just need to purify your mind to end suffering
- Psychotherapists believe in healing your trauma until you are whole
The narrowed perspective is created by people ignoring the importance of the other factors of experience and building an entire worldview out of their preexisting beliefs.
To enter into a mature discussion about the positive benefits that spirituality, or any kind of personal development, can have, you have to be able to understand that human beings and societies are eco-systems, that are created from a combination of many different aspects.
The Collective
As well as these different aspects of individual experience, there is also how this fits into the collective experience.
Even if you work very deeply to heal and awaken every aspect of your being, this is still not necessarily the answer to a fulfilling life in which you can be present. You exist within an eco-system, and this will affect your experience deeply.
There needs to be a healthy balance between all these aspects internally and with the external eco-system that you exist in in order for you to be a happy, healthy, and functioning individual.
To find truly meaningful connections with yourself, your environment, your life, and other people, you need to find ways to work with all these factors individually and to be able to bring this awakened self back into your connections.
Things like truth, beauty, meaning, wellness, peace, and love arise from your relationship with your environment and the things around you as much as from your separate world.
A lot of contemplative traditions deal with this by disconnecting from the world around, and there’s no doubt that having the capacity and freedom to do this supports a deepening on the spiritual path and an ability to be present with the depths of experience.
If you want to maintain connections with the world, spirituality needs to incorporate ways of working with these connections and making them as deep, rich, wholesome, and clear as your inner world.
For this to happen, awakening is something that, in part, needs to be done collectively.