Awakening to the Sacred – Creating a Personal Spiritual Life
Awakening to the Sacred – Creating a Personal Spiritual Life
By Lama Surya Das
Broadway books, New York
ISBN: 0-7679-0275-0
Lead us from darkness to the light;
Lead us from illusion to wisdom
Lead us from death to the deathlessness
Lead us from conflict and suffering to harmony, peace and happiness.
This prayer is from the Upanishads, the mystical Hindu scriptures, first written down sometime around 900 B.C. In many ways I think of these four lines as the universal seeker’s prayer. Since the beginning of recorded time, the quest for truth, love, and the highest good has been associated with the quest for light.
As seekers, you and I search for illumination and guidance. We want understanding – not only of our immediate problems but also of the great mysteries of the universe. We want to be able to move from murky illusion and confusion to wisdom, certainty and clarity. We want to go from delusion to truth; we want the promise that we will be able to escape the darkness of the soul’s infernal regions and make it to a place of infinite luminous peace, contentment, and divine unconditional love. We want to leave ignorance and unconscious as well as semiconscious behaviour behind. We know that the antidote to ignorance isn’t just more information. We know that our spiritual life depends on our being able to cultivate a higher consciousness – a mindful consciousness – as well as greater awareness. We know that our spiritual life depends on cultivating our own capacity to love.
There is an old Jewish saying: ‘God is closest to those with broken hearts.’ For most of us this is a true statement. At times of great sadness and personal crisis we feel more tenderhearted and closer to our soulful center. When we are most confused and buffeted about by the vagaries of life, we hunger intensely for spiritual guidance and wisdom. Hasn’t that been true in your own life? As you seek to deepen your spirituality, you may be reacting to a pattern of ups and downs that has proven to be ultimately dissatisfying. You may feel inwardly empty and long for a deeper connection to meaning, purpose and the sacred. You may feel spiritually hungry as well as alone.
Some of you may feel discouraged because you believe that you have already ‘given way too much.’ Or perhaps you feel as though you can’t ‘give’ or don’t know how to ‘give’ what life requires; some of you may actually freeze up when it comes to giving or receiving love or spiritual gifts. Many of you have come to see that you are responsible for your own fate, your own experience, your own karma. You want to help create a better world for others as well as yourself.
Difficulties and disappointments often help us find and strengthen our spiritual resolve. At this moment, life’s confusions have aided you by making you wise enough to know that you don’t have all the answers. This awareness – this sliver of light – has made you conscious of the possibility of some form of inner radiance, clarity or light. You can almost see the light – hear it, feel it. You want to be able to know it and be(come) it. This glimmer of awareness represents an epiphany or mini-enlightenment.
The joys and sorrows of your human life are presenting you with a tremendous opportunity. Taking the spiritual path to enlightenment implies some unconscious if not explicit belief in the possibility of deliverance, self-mastery and transcendence. Others before you have plunged into the sea of spirit and bliss; others have found what they were seeking while drinking deeply of the immortal, elixir-like waters of enlightenment. Why should any of us spend our lives as onlookers at the seaside, nervously wading in the shallows? Life has a lot more to offer than that. Others have found freedom, satisfaction and liberation. You can do it too. We can all do it. Together. The time has come to stride in and begin swimming in the deeper waters. Surf’s up!
This book is available for sale in
Buddhist Philosophy Bookshop, Hong Kong. |
