Selfishness and Spiritual Aspiration

Beloved Fellow Spiritual Aspirants,

I want to talk with you all very honestly and humbly about a problem that I’ve had that I think many spiritual aspirants also have. It is a problem of selfishness and a kind of selfish orientation to life, and even a selfish orientation to spirituality.

Personally, I’ve had a lot of mystical, beautiful, and wonderful experiences with God. God has graced me with great visions, beautiful emotions, with Her own Divine presence dancing and living through my body. And all of God’s intentions and orientations to life and people, are those of love. The most beautiful, tender, and intense love.

God loves people, and God wants what’s best for people. With a sublime sensitivity She will always dance with those before Her in such a way as to make them feel so loved, so held, so appreciated and known, in a way that makes them feel at home. That is the kind of love that I have known from God through mystical experience and even at times in direct relationship to loved ones.

And then I have known the way of ego as an everyday experience and motivation, the tendency to give people short shrift, the tendency to cut corners on my responsibilities, the tendency to want things to work out well for me, the way I want them to. Even in my spiritual ascent I have wanted these things and not really let them go sufficiently to be more or less continuous love and stability for those around me. And I have learned that even my highest states of rapture and God-consciousness can quickly fall like a stone due to insufficient attention to my friends, or to the practical realities of life.

So, I’m sharing this with you because I do not want you to do what I have done – to be overly enamored with mystical life, and insufficiently attentive to the care of our friends.

The truth is, spiritual life is the life of love and surrender, for the benefit of the beloved (and the Beloved is those around us, our friends, our co-workers, the people who are counting on us for love and steadiness). And we need to bring our mystical experiences of love into real life, and cultivate a kind of personal responsibility that is Godly. That is the work there is to do.

When our loved ones feel that they can count on us to be openhearted, steady, practically responsible, and rightly sensitive to them in real life, then we really will be succeeding spiritually. Until then, “we’re on the way, and in the way,” as one of my closest friends likes to say.

I have five friends who are primarily out of the way, they move as the spirit moves and not as the ego moves. What they do is they help. They help people all the time. They write to people, they cook for people, they plan for people, and they are honestly available to help people sensitively round the clock. These five friends are the pillars of spiritual inspiration and sustenance in my life, and they’ve helped me learn, over the years, what real spirituality is. 

You aspire for a long time to be enlightened, or to have some intense spiritual experiences or knowing, or to have certain kinds of relational fulfillment that may not be all that pure, and then it dawns on you one day, that what really needs to happen is you need to be a good person. That it would just be so wonderful to just be a good, trustworthy person, who people rely on, who friends come to talk to openheartedly, who feels good towards people and life in general, and who is willing to help however it’s needed, without personal complications, or anything like that. Just to be a good person. That’s it. It seems so nothing, but it is so much. It is love, pure and simple.

Love!

Mati