Spirituality as a lived experience

Why it's tempting but deceiving to get lost in the realm of spirituality as an intellectual experience (and what to do instead)

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the spiritual ego.

The spiritual ego loves to consume spiritual knowledge. It strives to awaken. It compares and judges. When Westerners embark on a spiritual path, this is often where we start. We learn that perhaps the things society taught us make life worth living — a well-paying job, a beautiful house, the perfect marriage, lavish travels — are not the things that will make us fulfilled. What will instead, then?

We go on a quest, we explore spiritual teachings, we get into yoga and meditation, perhaps we venture into the world of altered states and psychedelics. Along the way, we read many, many books to educate ourselves about the actual reality of this universe, and our mind. (That’s me, I’ve done all these things).

Since we’ve grown up in a culture that prizes the thinking mind above all else, we turn spirituality into an intellectual endeavor. The task is clear: we need to get to the bottom of spiritual truth, to uncover the true meaning of life, to comprehend the ineffable nature of consciousness.

That’s all well, but that’s not actually the end game.

The real endgame is to live the spiritual insights we’ve accumulated. This is the task that is actually much harder than embarking on the intellectual quest.

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What We Can Learn from the Story of Siddartha

Herman Hesse’s story of Siddartha illustrates the pitfalls of the spiritual path perfectly.

After leaving his comfortable life, just like the Buddha, Siddartha embarks on a spiritual voyage with his friend Govinda. They travel through the country, meet spiritual teachers, meditate, and fast. They let go of all belongings and renounce all worldly pleasures in order to “lose the Self”.

Yet, Siddartha remains unsatisfied and eventually grows skeptical of his pursuits. He even encounters the Buddha and joins his camp of followers for a while, until he realizes that Buddhism also will not provide him with all the answers he’s seeking.

Frustrated, Siddartha turns away from meditation and the spiritual world and throws himself back into the realms of physical pleasure and the material world. He meets a woman who teaches him love. He becomes a merchant and accumulates great wealth within a few years. With time, however, Siddartha finds himself once again detached and unhappy. One night, he decides to once again leave it all behind.

On his journey, Siddartha eventually encounters a river, where he meets a ferryman who radiates inner peace. Peace which, as he argues, he reached after studying the river for years. Siddartha is determined to learn from the ferryman and begins contemplating the timeless unity of all things in a dialogue with the river, day in, day out. He uncovers the deep spiritual truths he’s been looking for all these years.

“Above all Siddartha learned from the river how to listen, to listen with a still heart, with a waiting, open soul, without passion, without desire, without judgments, without opinions.” “Have you also learned that secret from the river; that there is no such thing as time? That the river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past nor the shadow of the future.”

When Govinda later runs into Siddartha, he immediately recognizes his friend’s undeniable enlightenment and asks for him to share his wisdom.

“Wisdom cannot be imparted. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to impart always sounds like foolishness to someone else ... Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.”

At last, Siddartha woke up, but it was only through lived experience in communion with nature that he reached awakening, not through fasts, spiritual teachings, or meditation.

The Essence of Spiritual Teachings Is Astonishingly Simple

We can read all the spiritual texts in the world, yet spiritual teachings at their very core all share the same underlying messages. They are astonishingly simple.

It goes something like this:

Be present, love everything, and tell the truth.

Being present may be the most important one. There can be no awakening without presence.

Loving everything hinges on the connectedness of all things, the yo-ga (union) of all beings, the unity consciousness that connects us all to each other and everything in existence. When we break through the delusion of separation, we realize that every act of love is an act of self-love. We’re able to find compassion for all beings. We see ourselves in everything around us. We finally feel the belonging we’ve strived for all our life.

Telling the truth, finally, is the best way to hold ourselves accountable to our truest, most authentic Self. Yet, practicing relentless truth may be the hardest. The commitment to truth is the commitment to respect, authenticity and alignment. At times, it’s a sacrifice, but it’s one that rewards us with a life beyond our wildest dreams.

Unless we’re able to live these spiritual truths, we will return to detachment, lack, and suffering.

We may ask ourselves all the big questions, and for most of them, we may never find an answer, given the nature of the questions. To avoid a life of constant striving, a more rewarding approach may be to “live the questions”, as Rilke suggests.

A spiritual life is not just one of inner knowing and understanding, but one in which we wake up each day in awe of the beauty around us, present to the human experience, whether it’s enchanting, terrifying, or all the unexciting nuances in between.

After all, a spiritual life is a lived experience, not a contemplated one.