by Greg Kincaid
“Good. We’ll start at the beginning. We call it the first realization.”
“We?” Ted asked.
“Yes, me, Father Chuck, and the rest of my friends. The study group I told you about.”
“I remember.”
“After we discuss the first two realizations, we’ll drive up to the trailhead to the lake, and along the way I’ll give you your first training exercise.”
“I have to do exercises?”
“Yes. There is a difference between grasping that a bike can be ridden and actually climbing on it and taking a ride; it takes time and practice to train the brain.”
The afternoon sun reflected off Angel’s black hair so that it sparkled with thousands of points of light. Ted’s hesitation about the curriculum did not apply to his tall, dark, and confident instructor. He flexed his muscles as if he were doing arm curls with thirty-pound weights and said, “I don’t mind exercises.”
“What if I told you that you could wake up and operate from your fully conscious or true self. Would that be of interest to you?”
“Sure, why not?”
“Good. Do you know how the word ‘Buddha’ translates?”
Ted had no clue. “Hindu slang for ‘Buddy’?”
“Not really, Ted. It means the awakened one.”
“So was the Buddha more awake than the rest of us?”
“A better way to help you understand the concept of waking up is to view consciousness as variable—existing on a hierarchy of awareness from a deep coma at one end of the spectrum to a fully awakened, enlightened being at the other end.”
“I take it you see me on the wrong end of the spectrum? Pretty much a zombie?” Ted asked.
“Not just you but most of us. Me too. This first realization—we are not awake—is simple to understand. You must accept this realization or nothing else we do together will matter or make much sense. A spiritual quest is always about transformation, increasing awareness.”
“I get the concept: some people walk through life in a seemingly more conscious way than other people. Still, I’ve got to ask a few questions before I’m all in.”
“Fire away.”
“Is what you are describing Maslow’s concept of self-actualization?”
Angel stood up, walked to the shelf of the bookmobile, handed Ted a book from her mobile library, and sat back down.* “You’re close, Ted. The absence of consciousness is the absence of a fully actualized life.”
“So what’s the difference between spiritual work and psychological work?”
“This is my take on it. Psychology focuses on working with what you’ve got: how to have the healthiest ego possible. Spiritual work asks you to step away from and transcend the ego entirely: to let go and become egoless. It’s probably best seen as progression. You first need a healthy ego before you’re strong enough to leave it behind.”
“Okay, Angel, I’m with you on this first realization. How do I fill my life with more awareness? Should I double my caffeine, buy a saffron robe, or chant a mantra in a Himalayan cave?”
“I wish it were so easy! To answer your question, we’ll need to turn to the second realization, but first let’s walk the dogs and stretch our legs. I want to check out the bookstore too.” She stood up. “A-plus on the first realization. One down and two to go. A spiritual vacation is not all bad, is it?”
Angel started to exit Bertha with No Barks before Ted could answer. The posterior view of Angel was remarkable. Ted removed his yellow legal pad from the kitchen drawer of his mind and sketched Ted’s First Total Undisputed Realization: Angel Two Sparrow was hot.
He nudged Argo. “Get up or they’re going to leave us behind.” He gave the dog’s collar an affectionate tug. “Day one and you’re already licking that she-wolf’s ears. Very impressive. Do you think there’s any hope for me and Professor Two Sparrow?”
* Angel had come across this book in her Psychology 101 class at Haskell Indian Nations University. She thought that Maslow offered a very helpful insight into the way we progress through life developmentally; only to the extent the needs from the previous level have been satisfied can we move on, unfold, or become more actualized. Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1962).
9
Angel and Ted each took a turn holding the dogs while the other one wandered through the monastery bookstore. With a formidable pile of books already tossed his way, Ted limited his purchases to snacks, fruit, and two bottles of water while Angel waited on a bench and stretched her legs. Ted handed her one of the water bottles and a polished red apple. By way of an explanation, he proffered, “Hey, it’s a tradition on the first day of school.”
She ignored the apple and took a bag of unsalted peanuts from his other hand. “Thanks. These are perfect.”
Even though the bench was small, barely large enough for two, Ted plopped down beside Angel and spat out a question that was bothering him. “I’m surprised by something.”
“What?” Angel asked.
“You said that the focus of all good spiritual work was elevating consciousness or awareness. You didn’t say a thing about God or heaven. Why not?”
Angel leaned over and nudged Ted with her shoulder. “Whoa, Ted! You’re getting right to the heart of the matter.”
Ted leaned away from her and said, “I only have two weeks. Remember?”
“We all have a God problem,” Angel observed. “It’s not day-one stuff.”
“A God problem?” Ted asked.
“We want to believe in a personal, discrete God that exists like an object and sits around making the world right for us, but as we get older—more sophisticated—we realize that we are worshipping a god of our own creation, a superparent figure.”
Ted had never shared his own frustrations on the subject, but he doubted he would meet another spiritual consultant anytime soon, so he sat his bottle of water on the ground, puffed his chest out slightly, and started one of his rare rants. “God is the most illogical and really extraordinarily unlikely concept imaginable. Something that can know everything, be everywhere, do everything, and yet can’t communicate with us in an intelligible way—a way we can understand and even agree upon—is a gigantic farce. Why would God choose to act like some Phantom of the Opera that lurks in the shadows of our lives without letting himself be known to us? That makes no sense to me. In fact, this is precisely what pisses me off about religion. To get into the club, you have to believe in something stupid.”
“I’d say you have a serious God problem,” Angel said, smirking.
Ted tried to come down off his rant. “If there is God, then why wouldn’t he just stand up, manifest, and be heard? How hard could that be for an omnipotent being? I’m pretty sure most of the major networks would give him airtime. He wouldn’t even need to ask nicely.”
“You’re falling into the opposite end of the God problem. You’re assuming that any real god must play by our rules. Defining God like an object seems to always result in feeling abandoned and somehow unworthy. Like, Everyone else seems to get God, so why can’t I?”
Ted tried to convey a primal feeling of rejection. “It’s like inviting the most popular kid in school over to your house, and making all of the arrangements, and then he just never shows up.”
“What I want you to understand is that our God problem is part and parcel of our self problem. Man has always created gods in the cauldron of his own mind. We have to be strong enough to admit that there are no unicorns, there are no Santa Clauses, and there are no gods like the ones we create in our heads. Gods can’t be created, only experienced or realized.” Angel smiled and rested her hand on Ted’s wrist. “We all experience this frustration, but it’s a necessary step along the way. Tomorrow you get to meet Father Chuck.” Her voice turned more affectionate. “He’s been such a blessing in my life, particularly on this topic.”
“What is he like?”
“He’s a Catholic priest. That’s why he is here at the
monastery. He has helped me to understand that we don’t so much have a God problem as we have a ‘knowing’ problem. Trying to know God is like trying to use a microscope to find a duck. You’re using the wrong aperture and the wrong tool. Frustration is inevitable until you find the right tool.”
“Are you going to put the right tool in my school supplies?”
“Yes, but for now your goal is much simpler: waking up and expanding your awareness beyond mere knowing. In this expanded state, many things will become clearer for you. Who knows, God might be one of them.”
“Angel, I’ll be perfectly honest. A long time ago I decided that church just doesn’t work. I agree with you that God can’t be known, but I get there for a totally different reason. There is no such thing.”
“A perfectly reasonable place to begin.”
Ted stood up. “I’m sorry for jumping ahead, diverting you like this. For now, I’m satisfied with your first realization. Most of us are not fully awake. I don’t see how anyone could argue with that.” Ted bent down and retied the laces on his hiking boots. He stood back up and asked, “What’s the second realization?”
After emptying the remaining peanuts into her hand, Angel drank deeply from her bottle of water, stood up, and began to walk slowly back to the parking lot with No Barks. “Give me a minute.”
Ted and Argo kept close beside her. She walked slowly as she collected her thoughts on the second realization. Halfway back to Bertha, she found another bench and motioned to Ted to sit down beside her again. She concentrated, exhaled, and let her mind relax, almost going blank. Envisioning a shroud of loving acceptance wrapping around her and Ted, she began, “Ted, these realizations grow, one on top of another. This one will be slightly more difficult. I need you to be open and curious.”
Ted locked his fingers and stretched his arms behind him. “For you, I’ll do it. No knowing.”
“To even begin comprehending the second realization, you’ll have to give up something that you find very dear.”
“Brats and beer? Krispy Kremes?” Ted asked.
Angel wondered if Ted was using humor to avoid doing this work but then decided there was nothing wrong with Ted trying to make the work fun. She took No Barks’s paw in her own. The wolf dog enjoyed the touch and her tail wagged enthusiastically. “This second realization may seem strange on the first pass. It goes to the essential nature of self.”
“If it’s my essential nature, what do I have to give up?”
Angel stood up and tried her best to emulate a pitcher’s windup. “Here you go, a softball right down the middle. If you miss it, don’t fret. Just let the concepts sit in your mind without trying to grasp or know them. How you see God and how you see yourself is in large part a labeling problem.”
Ted moved to the edge of the bench and pulled his arms back like he was holding a baseball bat. “Let her rip. Teddy DiMaggio is all ears.”
“Hopefully, I can explain it in a way that makes sense.” She sat down on the ground in front of the bench and pulled No Barks close to her. Her voice took on a professorial tone as she dug deeply for her lecture notes. “Really simplistically, the left side of your brain likes to formulate and define concepts and give them shorthand names or labels—each object and every encounter. Once you formulate the concept for an object and use it a few thousand times, it becomes fixed in your mind and the distinction between the actual pebble and the symbol or sign you hang on it becomes blurred.*1 This is the price you pay for rapid mental processing.”
“Makes sense to me,” Ted said. “That way, Romeo need not thoroughly investigate a pebble every time he wants to toss a stone at Juliet’s window.”
“That’s right. There is no reason to slow down and dissect the attributes of a pebble every time you want to skip a stone, load a slingshot, or flirt with Juliet. This allows our mind to function at light speed. The left brain’s software uses words as convenient placeholders to process our environment. Most concepts in our universe—God, rocks, Ted, Argo—are eventually given a name. By naming these concepts, we make them fixed and inflexible.”
Ted asked, “What is the right side of the brain doing while the left side is so busy labeling?”
“New encounters are processed in the right brain. Once we believe we have grasped a concept, it becomes familiar and it’s moved from the right brain, where things are still open to exploration, to the left brain, where known things are stored. This is why children are more right brain–focused. They have not yet had time to fully label and inventory their universe with words.”
“Are you going to tell me that there is a price we pay for our brain’s labeling system?”
“You guessed it. In the spiritual dimension, you’ll have to train the left side of the brain to lighten up a bit. This will free you to uncover some interesting treasure that has been locked away for a very long time.”
Ted was not sure he liked the implications. “Surely in most ways our logical, conscious mind works quite well. It got me through law school. It pays the bills.”
“It’s not that there is anything wrong with your logical-thinking brain, Ted. It’s just that you have a brilliant parallel mental operating system that is underutilized. Your left-brained worldview has co-opted your higher or more entire self and tricked you into believing that the left brain of Ted is the entirety of Ted, that nothing else really matters or is even real. You are not your left brain, Ted. You are much more than that. It’s our job to get the entire, true Ted back in the game of your life.”
“You make it sound like I’m possessed.”
“Neurologists can teach us that we do not have a unified brain. It would be more accurate to say we have a brain system with many parts that sometimes come into conflict with each other. This brings us back to this fundamental confusion over exactly what we are referring to when we refer to ourselves—when we say ‘me,’ or ‘Ted.’ ”
“You’re saying I’m the sum of my parts and not just one part—the labeling left brain.”
“Yes, that’s right. It’s not just our larger brain that separates us from the other primates. It’s also our considered reliance on the left hemisphere of that brain.”
“Can we consciously choose which hemisphere to use?”
“Like muscle function, brain function is a use-it-or-lose-it paradigm.”
“There may be a problem with what you’re saying, Angel. Without that left brain, could we even have this conversation? It seems like Juliet was more than willing to let Romeo drive her to the prom, but now that she has arrived and shown off her pretty new prom dress, she wants to dance with Mr. Right.”
“You’re reacting exactly the way I did the first time I heard this. We’ll come back to this concept several more times. For now, please just be open for a moment to the possibility that you have far more processing capacity than you realize. That should be exciting, right?”
Ted leaned back on the bench and rested his hands on Argo’s back. “If you’re correct and my left brain is a brazen usurper and a trespasser, am I being violated or betrayed by my own operating system? How does that make sense?”
“When you use the word ‘me’ to describe yourself or the word ‘God’ to describe the divinity and mystery in the universe, you have reduced yourself or all of life’s beauty to a discrete and separate object that can be labeled and identified by the left brain. In many ways, using proper nouns is a very accurate, convenient, and helpful way of thinking about ourselves or the divine—just like it is with rocks.”
Ted pointed to himself and said, “Using my Ted label makes it easier for my brain to have this philosophical conversation with you.”
“However convenient and conventional it might be, thinking of ourselves or God as a discrete and separate object is actually a distortion, or at least a dilution of reality. My ancestors’ language better suggested the connectedness of all things: brother bear, mother earth, father sun, sister wind, and so on. A better way to truly understand Ted would be as a very c
omplicated system of interconnected and interdependent biological and emotional parts engaged in a process called life. A more accurate way to think about God might be as a verb and not as a noun—as a force, like love.*2 As a result, we shouldn’t worship God as object so much as try to experience God-ing.”
“Isn’t that what I really mean when I say ‘Ted’ or ‘God’?”
“What I am suggesting is that the way we use words reinforces seeing ourselves and the world around us as objects and not as complex systems. This is not only misleading, but it is at the heart of the psychological, spiritual, and religious problems that perplex us. It’s a barrier to the natural evolution of consciousness—to waking up Ted! It’s something you’re going to have to move beyond. It is the essence of the second realization: we are in error to the extent that we see ourselves as discrete and separate objects.”
“So you’re saying that we really don’t know ourselves?”
“It’s not just me. This is why every spiritual teacher, from the Buddha to Jesus, relied so heavily on aphorism and metaphor. Remember, they use metaphor to get around our labeling problem.”
Ted shrugged, indicating that what she was saying was at least plausible. He pulled Argo closer to him. “What do you think, Argo? Should we wake up and figure out what it really means to be Ted or Argo?” He held the dog’s left paw in the air. “He says, ‘We’re ready.’ ”
“Good. Let’s go deeper into this second realization with an example.”
“You’re very sneaky, Angel. I know what you’re up to now. Another hemispherical sleight of hand!”
“Just go with it.” Ted didn’t argue, so Angel began. “Imagine that your ring finger, the one I was touching earlier today—let’s label him Mr. Digit—has some left-brain logical-thinking skills, the basic five senses, and language.”
“My fingers have been known to talk.”
“So if this finger had these things going for it, it would adopt an operating system or a worldview that saw itself as a separate entity. In some ways, he would be right—each finger is unique and separate. Mr. Digit would pretty quickly start engaging in whatever survival strategies were necessary to be a finger and probably find some drama about the irritating adjoining digits: the rude Mr. Middle Finger, the fat thumb, etc. What do you think Mr. Digit’s body might say to that slumbering, unaware, confused little Mr. Digit?”