The Middle Path

In the last blog I made quick reference to The Budha's teaching of following the middle path. Budha was born the crown prince of his country and raised in a state complete insulation from his world. He was surrounded by wealth, love, and reverence - never being confronted with the harsher realities of life until the day when he was presented to his populace. On that day he was shocked and horrified by the poverty, pain and suffering that he had never seen. He was also ashamed of his own wealth and position, realising that it came at the expense of others. So much so that he ran away from his life of privilege and became a spiritual ascetic, living  naked in the forest with nothing to eat but mud and water. After eight years of living this way, emaciated and weak from starvation, he had a realisation that life and truth was all about balance, that one had to walk the middle path.

So what does this mean? For me it means that this is a world of polarities, that life exists somewhere between the extremes. Everything in this reality is polarised - hot and cold, dark and light, up and down, in and out, fast and slow, male and female and so on. So too with matters spiritual. We live on the razors edge between the infinite oneness that resides inside us, and the extraordinary individuality that is our existence. We are both the same as everyone else, and entirely unique. And so too with life. We each of us struggle to live a life balanced between competing differences - we try to balance work and play, giving and receiving, caring for others and looking after ourselves, speaking and listening, activity and rest, consumption and creation, adventure and security, belonging and individuating, etc. Every moment of every day involves choices we make about which way we are going to go. Do I eat more food, or take a walk? Do I clean the house, or watch TV? Do I spend time with those I love, or get into my hobby? Yet despite this enormous burden of choice, this ever present balancing act, most of us manage to get through the day successfully - until we don't.

Therein lies the problem, sometimes we get it wrong, sometimes we get it horribly wrong, sometimes we get so far out of balance that life becomes unbearable. I think it would be rare to find a person today who hasn't got at least one area of their life where the balance is out of whack. Perhaps they work too much, eat too much, give too much, let too much slide, or covet too much. Perhaps they love too little, take too little, laugh too little. So many lives today are consumed with greed and dreams of wealth, at the expense of their family's, their friends, their lovers. While others take too little and sacrifice their own wellbeing for dreams of love that never comes. As always the question of the hour is this - why and how do we get so far out of balance?

The easiest way to answer that question is to ask another - how is it that we manage to stay in balance at all? How, with the vast array of competing polarities and impossible choices, do we ever get it right? Certainly the complexity of life is too much for our poor feeble minds to handle. So what other forces must be at work just to get us to the end of each day intact and reasonably sane? My belief is that we manage to get it right so much of the time exactly because we don't give it to our minds to figure out. In truth, the vast majority of our actions and choices are happening at the unconscious level. We experience them as instincts, feelings, intuitions, desires, hungers, frustrations, longings, whims, fancies and inexplicable urges - rarely questioned and almost always acted upon.

It seems that we are built to carry out this delicate act of balancing, with little need for our minds intrusions. Our mind gets to know about the decision after it's been made. Sometimes it gets to figure how to put the decision into action, but rarely gets to influence the decision itself. I would go so far as to suggest that it is truly our hearts (the middle chakra, the balance point between the two polarities) that gets to make our decisions. That for the most part, we walk the middle path that Buddha, echoed and affirmed by every great teacher throughout the ages, spoke of.

So to come back to the original question, why do we get so far out of balance? It seems to me that the problem here is ideation, which is to say that we forget to trust in our hearts and entrust it to our mind. We lose touch with our instinctive wisdom, because we have given authority to ideas - to philosophies, beliefs, creeds, political theories, religions, charismatic personalities and so on. We have failed to place our faith where it truly belongs, in the quiet still voice gently whispering in our hearts.

Is there anything so dangerous as a good idea? Is there anything more likely to disrupt our connection to the divine than a grand religious theory? Anything quicker to destroy the peace of society than the latest all encompassing Utopian dream?

Does balance and truth really come from having the answers or from the willingness to keep asking the questions, a moment by moment inquiry, what needs to happen right now?

Walking Between the Worlds

My path to grace began with a childhood fascination with the Tarot. Without knowing why, I found myself compelling drawn to these evocative images. Over the ensuing years I studied all I could about it, but it wasn't until much later that it truly revealed itself. In 1998 I sat down to write a course on reading Tarot, and discovered that the words appearing on the screen were both achingly familiar and totally unknown to me. I found myself channeling the wisdom of Grace, and it was laying out in my mind the true teaching of the Tarot, which are an extension of the knowledge of the Kabbala. So what has this got to do with anything?

Well, the image you see to the right is one of the many depictions of the lesson of Temperance. In many traditions, this is called the path of enlightenment, what Budha called 'walking between the worlds'. Reaching enlightenment indicates that the person lives both in the world of form and in the world of spirit, or grace. Actually, this is what everyone is doing all the time, we are spirit made flesh, god in creation. However, when we take form we go usually through a process of forgetting our spirit self in order to inhabit our physical self. If we didn't, we would find it very difficult to go from the experience of  unlimited grace and power to the experience of limitation, vulnerability and not-oneness. If we didn't forget, adjusting to this new reality with it's potentials for pain and frustration would be almost impossible.

However, we are not meant to forget forever. Over time our spiritual self gradually and naturally makes itself known, unless this process is interfered with, usually by false religions and socialisation designed to keep us in ignorance of our true being. Continued forgetting is disastrous to our wellbeing, it's like trying to motivate a car after we've run out of petrol, all hard work and frustration. When we have become over identified with a self concept of limitation, life can become hard and meaningless. Life stops being an adventure in form, and becomes a journey in suffering. The opposite is also true - if we are trying to live in the world of spirit and deny the world of form we've missed the point entirely. The trick is living with our awareness in both worlds, deeply centered in the world of spirit but thoroughly and joyfully immersed in our physical reality. Enlightenment is the process of undoing this forgetting and learning to reconcile the two seemingly separate realities. Grace is the mechanism that spirit provides to achieve this.

Of course, the question is how? In the Tarot, Temperance is the final lesson in the path of enlightenment. It is the teaching of En-joy-ing, meaning that we bring joy into everything by having an attitude of meeting all experience with joy. However, coming to this point is a process best learned in stages. In future blogs I'll be talking about the six lessons of grace that precede Temperance, designed to move us naturally to a place where we can greet every moment of life with joyful welcome. For now, you might like to play with the idea that joy is not so much a product of the reality you face, but a result of the attitude with which you face it. It's the decisions I make about what is happening that determine whether my experience is one of suffering or one of exstacy. When I greet each moment as an adventure, an opportunity to experience the wonder of life, I naturally find the good in it and respond from a place of power and creativity.

Grace be with you