2016-06-30

Excerpted and adapted from "God On Your Own: Finding a Spiritual Path Outside Religion, Live Better Longer" (Jossey-Bass, 2006), with permission.

If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things. —René Descartes, Discours de la Méthode

My hand quivered as I prepared to open the envelope. The documents had arrived in the mail at my new address two days earlier, but I waited until now, with my mind clear and my courage plucked up, to open the large white envelope with regal Vatican postal stamps in the upper right corner and the crest of the Holy See in the upper left. From other brothers who had left the order, I had heard about the declaration of dispensation and the impact it was likely to have on me.

By that time, six months after informing my religious superiors that I wanted to petition a release from my vows, I was living back “in the world,” in a small rented apartment a thousand miles from my monastery. I lingered there in a kind of suspended animation. Although I had left monastic life, until an official dispensation arrived I was still living under the obligations of my vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience.

As you can imagine, it was a peculiar time for me. I had left my community, which is all I had known for eight years, and was living by myself. I felt uprooted, dislocated, and utterly alone. In addition to leaving my religious order and my solemn vows, I had also given up my religion. In my mind at the time, the two were the same. I could not continue in conscience practicing my religion because my misgivings about it were what led me to renounce my monastic calling.


“Insofar as we are able . . .” the letter began. The words sent a chill through me. As I explained earlier, I had made my perpetual vows directly to God, not to the Catholic Church or my religious order. Here was the church saying that, as far as it was concerned, I had no further obligation to live the vows. But the implication was that unfinished business remained between God and me over the sacred promises. I did not know it at the time, but it would take years for me to come to terms with the first line of my formal dispensation.

The document, emblazoned with the impressive papal coat of arms, marked the end of one phase of my spiritual journey and the beginning of another. Slowly, I would pick up the pieces of my life and start the process of trying to build a personal spirituality on the ashes of my experience in monasticism—and in religion. I had known since I was a child that I had a calling to seek my creative Source. Now, with a painful but rich and powerful spiritual experience behind me, I was about to continue my search.

***

The Seeker questions everything. A skeptical viewpoint is the best resource for starting to create a personal spiritual way of life. You may find this radical approach difficult to contemplate, and even more difficult to activate in yourself. You may also consider it somehow disloyal or dishonest. Would-be seekers, shrinking from this important spiritual task, may take cover in the paradoxical notion that by seeking they are being sinful—as if sin were not a fabricated idea and part of the very system they are fleeing for spiritual freedom.

Fortunately, we have numerous role models for seeking at this important time in history when we are leaving the limitations of religion and beginning to explore spirituality in different ways. Seekers have always been with us, inspiring us to go out on our own and look for spiritual truth. Recently, in response to the yearning that so many of us are feeling to chart our own spiritual course outside the traditional routes, many writers and thinkers have been appearing to help us in our search.

You are already aware of these seekers. They range from scientists such as the late Carl Sagan to medical doctors such as Deepak Chopra, Larry Dossey, and Andrew Weil, from social commentator Marianne Williamson and psychologist Wayne Dyer to theologian Matthew Fox and spiritual teacher Ram Dass.

Over the years of my own seeking, I have admired these charismatic seekers and their work; occasionally I have had the opportunity to meet some of them and discuss their vision. One of the most impressive was Shirley MacLaine. The first time I met her, she and I were out in the country near Santa Fe attending a private workshop on the subject of faith healing. A Philippine healer was demonstrating how he dug his fingers directly into the stomach of a sick person to pull out cancerous tumors and other harmful tissue. Later that day, we would receive one of these “faith operations” from him.

During a break, I sat under a tree with MacLaine and we spoke about the process of spiritual seeking. Although she had been an internationally famous movie star for more than thirty years, she was just beginning to come into public awareness as a spiritual seeker. Her first book, Out on a Limb, about her explorations of out-of-body travel and reincarnation, had been published a few months earlier.

At that time, it seemed incongruous, to say the least, that a movie star would be writing about spiritual seeking. She was risking the credibility of her long and extraordinary career by revealing her interest in nonmainstream spiritual thinking and encouraging others to undertake their own spiritual investigation. But when I asked her about it, she reminded me that part of being a spiritual seeker is not being ashamed or afraid to tell what you are discovering. Besides, so much is at stake now.

“I like to think of it this way,” she said, sipping on the allowed green tea during our strict fast, “God may have made me famous so he could use me to get new spiritual information to large numbers of people quickly.”

In her spiritual search, MacLaine was evolving a truth for herself that she could share with millions of others. After her innumerable trips back in time to past lives, her visits to the sacred sites of Machu Picchu, Stonehenge, and Santiago de Compostela, and her many autobiographical writings, she was able to report: “Maybe the tragedy of the human race was that we had forgotten that we are each divine.”

These seekers and many others like them are not suggesting that you and I follow their path. In fact, the whole point of being aSeeker is to pursue one’s own way and find one’s own spiritual truth. However, they are splendid exemplars, reminding us that seeking is what we are here to do—and that sacred skepticism, which they encourage, can help us create our own special path.

***

After I left monastic life and my Catholic religion, I spent several years wandering on a directionless inner journey. I experimented with psychotropic substances such as magic mushrooms, peyote, and LSD but did not find them to be helpful in my spiritual growth. Drugs are often touted as a shortcut to the Source, but there really are no shortcuts. My experience has been that drugs do not take you to the face of God. They only delay the process of high spiritual awareness.

I tried a number of therapies as well, including an anger-based method that had me punching pillows for hours on end as a facilitator shouted at me. That was interesting and exhausting but did not seem to lead anywhere. Individual talk counseling with a sympathetic former nun did little at the time to advance my search.

For a long time, I attended all the latest workshops and lectures of a spiritual nature. I learned about Findhorn in Scotland, where people were growing cabbages in the sand with spiritual energy and a spoonful of compost. I became familiar with esoteric astrology and the mysteries of the Tarot. I showed up at EST. I studied and comprehended most of what I read of the new quantum physics, which was bringing the physical universe ever closer to the spiritual vision I glimpsed reading Teilhard de Chardin.

I delved into the works of several contemporary gurus, including the great Swami Muktananda, and later his radiant successor, Gurumayi Chidvilasananda. As much as I was drawn to their wonderful philosophy of love and compassion, I encountered the same fundamental dilemma that had haunted my years in the Catholic religion: I was being asked to adopt someone else’s spiritual truth. Moreover, the chants, homilies, meditation practices, and flowers-and-incense rituals were too reminiscent of the religious trappings from which I had so recently walked away.

Some of my wandering must have seemed rather pointless at the time, but now I understand that everything was preparation for the next step up in my spiritual awareness. From the perspective of the present, it appears the Seeker archetype was working powerfully in me and for me.

In addition to my inner search, I was trying to live a reasonably normal life. My vows, for all their undeniable spiritual substance, left me somewhat helpless in huge areas of life. The vow of poverty gave me a distorted sense of the value of money. Chastity rendered me naïve and inexperienced in relationships. Obedience undermined my personal power often making it difficult for me to make a good decision or any decision at all.

In spite of these handicaps, I managed. In monastic life, I was trained as an educator. Soon I was teaching again, making new friends, and building a new kind of life. My spiritual search continued and continues to this day, but gradually it came into balance with all the other parts of my life that needed attention. Much later I would understand that living an ordinary, day-today life with integrity and impeccability is most of what it means to be “spiritual.”

Seeking wisdom and truth is one of our essential human pursuits. We are truly human when we are looking for the next higher place in self-awareness. However, there is a shadow side to the Seeker archetype. The Seeker cannot stop seeking. Now and then during that feverish period, I felt I might have been going too fast. I wondered whether I should be giving more attention to each of my spiritual investigations before dropping them to take up the next one in line.


If we are always seeking and never finding, we may be in danger of sinking into a dark and lonely place. Shadow Seekers are lost souls, constantly out on the road looking for home but never coming to rest in a sense of belonging with community. I used to run into them at workshops. These determined Seekers were so absorbed in their search that they seemed to forget their original goal of spiritual enlightenment. This was a pity, I thought, because compulsive seeking was preventing them from receiving the information they so ardently desired. They would take up with one spiritual teacher, but even before they had heard the entire instruction the shadow of the Seeker archetype would kick in and they would be off to another teacher, only to repeat the same circular sequence of events.

Seekers who fall into the shadow are never content, never fulfilled, never connected. A song by U2 describes their experience: “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.”

You may have met people like this. They travel a great deal but never seem to be comfortable in any one place. They hop around among careers. They move from apartment to apartment, house to house, without achieving what they really want and need, a true home. They do not finish things but instead run on to the next possibility, the next opportunity for seeking. Victims of addiction are invariably driven by the shadow of the Seeker archetype.

I remember a caution from one of my teachers, the American mystic Joel Goldsmith. Later I will have much to say about Joel, but here he is on the subject of the shadow Seeker: “By all means, go and seek. But once you have found your spiritual truth, it is time for you to stop your search and begin to live that truth.” The shadow Seeker, by obsessive seeking, is always denied the peace of mind that living spiritual truth brings.

If you have found yourself caught up in excessive seeking, whether inside or outside organized religion, you are in good company. Siddhartha Gautama spent many years wandering through India, fasting, feasting, and listening to teachers, before he came to rest beneath the Bodhi tree, understood that he was one with all there is, and became the Buddha.

The challenge for the spiritual seeker is to come to the end of searching. If you have done your inner homework, you will find that the end comes about quite naturally. Something clicks within you. There is an “ah-ha.” Seeking is never truly over, but the urgency of the exploration loses its energy as you relax into the tranquil place of living your spiritual truth.

When you go forth from the comforts of religion, with its “revealed” truths, doctrines, and formulas that tend to lull the soul to sleep, taking on the attitude of a professional seeker will keep you awake and open to life-changing spiritual insights. After I embraced a sacred skepticism and began to question the entire spiritual worldview of my childhood, doors opened. I began to see some of the thrilling, infinite possibilities of living in connection with my Source.

Wonderful work awaited me. The more I saw myself as a professional seeker, the more I found I needed to tear down some dilapidated inner structures so that new ones could be built. In that amazing process towers of useless beliefs would topple and walls of false values would crumble.

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