the danger of belief

Chop wood, carry water

When President Obama was elected in 2008, my local Unitarian Universalist church offered a service in celebration of this country electing its first Black president. This seemed like a good time for me to visit, something I’d thought about doing for a while. I’d been to the church - a midcentury building nestled in a beautiful natural setting, when I was in college to hear a band - but I’d never been to a service, and I was curious.

So I went. The minister invited newcomers to stand and introduce themselves. I did not do this, but a woman seated behind me stood and said, “I have always been a spiritual seeker,” and her words stuck with me.

Long after I visited the church, I thought about what she had said. I have always been a spiritual seeker. Was I also a spiritual seeker? I felt like I was, but if I was, what was I seeking exactly? What was I hoping to find and why? How would I know if I found it?

Years earlier, when I was a graduate student living in suburban New York, I subscribed to the newsletter from the Episcopal Church in my little town. After much consideration, I went one Sunday. I don’t know what I was looking for. I don’t know what I was hoping would happen, but whatever it was, it didn’t. The church was fine. Neither friendly nor unfriendly. Very white. Very wealthy. I didn’t go back.

Before that, when I lived in the city, I spent some time exploring the witchcraft stores in the East Village. There was one shop in particular that called to me. I felt a little nervous when I stepped inside the small space, its shelves lined with wax-sealed bottles and bundles of herbs. I bought a charmed pendant there, that did seem to do what it promised to do, but the two women behind the counter - gorgeously goth women with spiky hair and dark eyeliner- did not seem to notice me or have any interest in speaking to me, and honestly, that made me a little sad.

So perhaps what I was seeking in my spiritual exploration was community, but when I moved back to Kentucky, my spiritual life was a decidedly solitary one. I was living alone, for the first time in a long time, and I dove into creating not only a space I wanted to live in but also a consciousness I wanted to live in. I spent a bit of time glancing around online Pagan forums, but all of the conversation seemed to be focused on Wicca, and try as I might, I just couldn’t feel connected to that system.

I loved my cards - tarot and oracle - and my crystals and aromatherapy candles. I made a little altar in my bedroom where I meditated and wrote intentions in my journals. I had a tape deck in my car, and I listened to lectures by Sylvia Browne and Wayne Dyer. I listened to hours of Hay House Radio. I soaked in information and swam around in it. I wasn’t particularly discerning. If one of the soft-spoken voices of spiritual authority said something, I took it to heart.

And the truth is, all of the information I was taking in at that time was helpful to me. I had lived a life of anxiety, depression, and self-criticism that bordered on self-hatred. New Age spirituality was like a soft wing that swept through my consciousness and liberated me from the heaviness.

At that time, I didn’t think about things like cultural appropriation, and I didn’t notice that New Age spirituality was sometimes a whole lot like repackaged religion. I didn’t know that white sage was endangered and that burning it was a closed practice. I only knew that when I burned sage and used my oils and meditated with my candles and listened to chakra music, when I got Reiki treatments or sat in salt baths, I felt better. I felt better. And I wanted to feel better. So maybe that’s what my spiritual seeking was about.

Or maybe it was about the nagging feeling that there was more to life than what met my eye, a bigger truth somewhere, a meaning. Maybe I was trying to find meaning in my experiences, the voices I heard in the ethers, the visions I saw in my mind’s eye.

Once, when I was living in Brooklyn, a friend of my then-boyfriend came to visit with her husband. The four of us went out to dinner. I didn’t like the guy…at all…But I liked the woman. After dinner, we were standing on a subway platform. The two men were talking about whatever they were talking about. The woman and I started, somehow, to talk about energy. She told me that she’d been doing something that she’d read about. When she squinted her eyes in a particular way, she could “see” energy. So, the two of us started experimenting. We peered down the dark subway tunnel and squinted and agreed that we could both see squiggles of energy. The two men started laughing. They thought we were ridiculous, and they told us so.

At the time, I was perplexed. Why wouldn’t they want to try this fun experiment with us? Why not be open-minded or light-hearted about it? Why not make the wait on a dusty subway platform a little more magical? When I look back on it now, I see their reaction differently. It feels hostile to me, and it feels like control.

I am someone who famously does not like to be told what to do or how to do it. My mother likes to tell the story of trying to get me ready to leave the house when I was a toddler. I refused help with my shoes even though I didn’t know how to buckle or tie them. Plopped down on the floor in front of the door, struggling with my shoes, I would throw my hand up to my mother’s approach and say, “I do myself!” which meant she had to stand there and watch me flail in frustration as the minutes ticked on. If we have spirit guides, this is surely how mine spend most of their time.

Along with my distaste for being controlled, I possess another, more insidious wound in my ego that has created barriers for me throughout my life. I don’t wish to be seen as unintelligent. It tugged at me as I sweated out timed multiplication tests in the fourth grade or daydreamed out the window of high school history lectures. I have always known that I am intelligent, but how I am intelligent doesn’t exactly match up with the expectations of mainstream society, and that fact has always bothered me.

I wish I could have been in the National Honor Society or pursued a PhD in philosophy, but instead, I talk to trees and memorize monologues from classic movies because I like the way words fit together and speak philosophy to myself in the darkness of the middle of the night when I can’t sleep. I know that I am smart in the way that I am smart, but it’s a soft and hurting place in me that recognizes others don’t always see me as intelligent, a quality I value.

So when my then-boyfriend stood on the subway platform and encouraged the husband of his friend to mock us for trying to see energy, it was because he knew me. He knew where my vulnerabilities were, and he used that knowledge to his advantage in an attempt to wield control. Make me look stupid, and I’ll shut up.

That is one of the ditches I’ve fallen into again and again as a spiritual seeker. But while it has been a barrier, it has also been a safeguard, because there is a shadow side to spiritual exploration, and a real danger in believing in the non-material, especially through anyone else’s lens.

We can do real harm to ourselves and others when we fall into spiritual bypassing. We can do real harm when we start to believe things like everything happens for a reason or your thoughts create reality, or other spiritual truisms that barely skim the surface of human existence and serve to simplify that which is infinitely complex. When we blindly follow gurus or read spiritual texts, as if they are rule books for living, we can easily lose sight of our compassion for and connection to one another. And that is deadly.

So I am a spiritual seeker, practitioner of the woo, and believer in that which can not be seen or proven, but I am also deeply skeptical and solitary in my quest for unity. In these solitary pursuits, I have found leaders and teachers who speak to me, and I carry them in my heart while carefully never placing them on a pedestal. One of these is Ram Dass, whose words are often a balm for my soul and a light at the end of whatever dark tunnel I happen to be traversing.

He once said, “I’ve been asked many times whether this is the Aquarian age and it’s all just beginning, or if this is armageddon and this is the end, and I have to admit I don’t know. The way I’ve usually copped out in dealing with it is saying, ‘Whichever way it goes, my work is the same. My work is to quiet my mind and open my heart and relieve suffering wherever I find it.’ That seems to be what my life is about, and it doesn’t matter which it is- it’s the beginning of everything or the end of everything – regardless, that’s still what I gotta do.”

And that’s the heart of it for me. While I love to think about interdimensional beings soaring overhead in silver ships, ghosts in flowing dresses dancing in my kitchen, elementals at play in the trees, and Jesus breaking bread at a table where no one was excluded, the real beating heart of spiritual exploration is chop wood, carry water. No matter what, my work is always the same. It’s love.

Notes:

You can learn more about Ram Dass here.