Your Best Life Now

Maybe you don’t have any trouble with your thoughts, but I do. Thoughts pop into my mind without my permission faster than a mosquito bites my skin on a sweltering summer afternoon. And, equally without my permission.

Descartes, father of modern philosophy, pointed to both the distinguishing characteristic of human beings and to the biggest curse of human beings when he made his famous statement, “I think. Therefore, I am.”

The fact that you and I can think, reflect on the past, imagine the future, even to be conscious of our own consciousness is what distinguishes humans from all other animals. The fact that you and I CAN think, reflect and so often regret the past, imagine and so often fear the future, even to be unconscious of our own capacity to be conscious is the biggest curse humans live with and so try to escape from almost continually.

In other words, “Thoughts,” as Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard, “can be our best friends and our worst enemies.” I would highly recommend his book entitled Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill. I heard him speak for the first time just last week and love the way he blends the best in psychology and the science of happiness with Buddhist teachings regarding the mind and its many afflictions.

Until what is on the inside – that is, your mind – is corrected, the external world, that is, how you perceive and experience the world around you will be a mere reflection of it.

In other words, if the world around you is to you an unfriendly, hateful, scary, and judgment-filled place, why is this so? Have you ever sought to know why? Is this the way the world really is? Or, is this the way you really are? Often we project onto the world, as well as onto other people, the afflictive, negative thoughts and emotions that we cannot admit. Or refuse to acknowledge.

More and more, I am convinced, you and I create the world in which we live. Pop psychologists glibly suggest, “Change the way you look at things and the things you look at change.” While this is true, the problem for most people is how to change their negative thoughts and the afflictive emotions that are their inevitable consequence.

Want to change your inner world? Better control your mind, as well as your thoughts?

Here’s the only way possible:

1. Meditate daily. If you’re one of those persons who quickly excuses yourself as having tried meditation and discovering it does not work for you, that’s the first thought you need to change.  Why? Because it isn’t so.  So much of our thinking is just that – wrong. Deceitful. And, the most deceived person is one-and-the-same deceiver.  You CAN learn to meditate and you must, if you wish to learn to control your thoughts and your thinking.

Books on meditation are as abundant today as cookbooks. I would recommend The Miracle of Mindfulness: An Introduction to the Practice of Meditation, written by Thich Nhat Hanh.

2. Observe your thoughts. Don’t judge them, observe them. How many times has a thought popped into your mind – let’s say some kind of judgmental thought about a colleague at work and, instantly, you jump into judgment mode, finding fault with yourself for even thinking something negative about someone else.

I would suggest an alternative solution to unwanted thoughts. Instead of quickly dismissing them and then judging yourself harshly for having such thoughts, start from the premise that thoughts are neither right nor wrong. They just are. It’s what you do with your thoughts that introduces the “rightness” or “wrongness” of them.  In other words, in the purported words of Martin Luther, “You cannot keep a bird from flying over your head; what you can do is prevent it from building a nest in your hair.”

How? By observing your thoughts. In the east, this is called acting as the “witnessing presence.” Like witnessing an accident and then reporting on it to the authorities.  Be the observer of your own thoughts, even the ones that frighten you.

3. Cultivate the space between thoughts.  In other words, as you train yourself to be the observer of your mind…you thoughts, you are actually cultivating what easterners call “the primary consciousness” or “pure consciousness” that underlies all thinking.  It is that “space between the notes,” said Claude Debussy “that makes the music.” If there were no spaces between the notes on a sheet of music, the sounds you would hear would not only be unintelligible but meaningless, even annoying.

This space is the place of internal peace. It is what some call “pure consciousness.”

The idea of emptying your mind of thought is terrifying to many people.

Why? Because they mistakenly think they ARE their thoughts. This is the core error in our shared human experience. You are NOT your thoughts. You’re not even the observer of your thoughts, although that is much closer to who you really are.

Why is this all so important?  Because this is the only way to get control of your thoughts. And, if you wish to be happy, and who among us does not wish for this, you must learn to manage the mind. Otherwise, it will menace you like the constant dripping of a leaky faucet.

The problem in our western world is not that we do not know how to think. As enumerated so eloquently by the spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle in A New Earth, “the problem most people have is not thinking; it is not knowing how to stop thinking.”

Make this your spiritual practice for to do so is to pursue…

Your Best Life Now!

I was born with a “W H Y” chromosome which is why I’ve been asking questions all my life. Unfortunately, many religious people are threatened whenever you question faith. But, my own opinion is, until you question your faith, you have no faith.

The Dalai Lama is coming to Louisville this Sunday.

I was thinking the other day, “It’s about time. After all, I visited his part of the world for the first time when I was but fourteen.”

It’s true. It was the first of many trips around the world that I was fortunate to take. My mother was a tour planner…tour leader, too. She and Dad would lead groups on trips to faraway places and my two brothers and I got to go. By the time I graduated high school, for example, I had been to Europe and the Middle East on three occasions, but also to the Scandinavian countries, as well as the far east including Russia, China, Thailand, and Japan. Hawaii was included in all those trips too.

It was a remarkable childhood, to say the least.

You can imagine then, to a young Baptist boy growing up in a conservative Southern Baptist church with its conventional notions of Divine exclusivity and its theological propensity to act as the self-appointed guardians of God’s grace, that I would see things in my travels that would lead me to question my narrow upbringing.

Before traveling the world, for example, the most “other” in terms of religion I had ever known was another Catholic. So, when we visited Rome for the first time, I found myself wandering around the Basilica of San Pietro with thousands of other Catholics who were waiting for the appearance of the Pope. I could not help but wonder who these Catholics  were and where they had come from. I knew that Baptists could trace their lineage all the way back to John the Baptist himself but, I wondered, when after us did these Catholics appear?

LOL!  I had a rather limited understanding of Christian history at age fourteen.

What I did have, however, was the curiosity to ask questions. Even hard ones. So, as someone else has said, I, too, was born with a WHY chromosome. I’ve questioned things all my life.

I heard a psychic on the radio the other day advertising her services.

“You have problems? I’ve got answers. Call me at 1 – 800…”

I thought. “If you are so psychic, wouldn’t you know who had a problem and call them?”

My propensity to question has led me to the conclusion: Christian fundamentalism doesn’t work anymore. Not only in its more extreme forms, as in Islamic fundamentalism. We all know that does not work. Nor can it be tolerated. But, fundamentalism does not work in it’s tamer versions either.  In the tamer versions of Christian fundamentalism, for example, followers vent their anger on the world they’ve failed to save by believing in and praying for the imminent return of Jesus and the rapture of the church.  In other words, since they’ve failed to save the world, they pray and long to get the hell out of it.

A kind of paranoid schezophrenia fundamentalist Christianity.

Fundamentalism, either in its harsher forms or milder versions, has never worked. But this is especially true today.

In our increasingly scientific and pluralistic world, fundamentalist theology unravels at almost every seam.  I’m becoming more and more aware of this and I suppose I’m becoming a bit bolder in my public admission of it, too.  God has not appointed me, nor has God appointed you, to be his guardian over truth.  For one thing, you and I “can’t handle the truth.” But it’s also because our little minds and even smaller egos too often try to squeeze God into our little box of limited explanations. In other words, we are guilty of the very thing God warns against – “fashioning God into an image we can manage…control…manipulate…put parameters around…and, basically, just incarcerate in our little heads.

But God is not only bigger and grander than you can imagine, God is bigger and grander than you can imagine.

For me, the shift in my thinking began even at fourteen when we visited Kathmandu, Nepal. That beautiful city that sits under the shadow of the snow-covered Himalayan Mountains. Can you imagine how impactful it was to observe, as I did, the Buddhist Monks in prayer and meditation, sitting in the familiar Lotus position, draped in their saffron-colored robes?

“What do they believe?” I asked myself.

“How is it so different from what I believe?”

“If God is a God of love but Christianity is the only way to know God…the only way to go to heaven, why would God permit so many other religions?”

“Why would he allow so many nice people to be so misled, too?”

My confusion was compounded when, after meeting some of them and then exchanging conversations with the monks who knew English, I discovered that they were actually happy in their faith. They weren’t the bit interested in my more enlightened way…my truer path to God. They seemed quite content with the path they were following. Furthermore, when I learned some of them had been sitting in meditation for days without food or water, I remember thinking, “When have I ever seen that degree of discipline or dedication even among the most dedicated Christians I’ve known?”

I had not. Why? Because most Christians are not that dedicated. Nor are they that sincere. This is no judgment. It’s just a fact.

The really big question came to me after having made friends with some of them. That question was, “If I’m going to heaven because I believe in Jesus but they’re going to hell because they don’t, how am I going to be happy in heaven knowing these happy monks are suffering in the flames of hell?”

My narrow, fundamentalist theology of exclusivity was falling apart even at that very young age. Yet, like many Christians then and many Christians still now, including many ministers who draw their livelihood from fundamentalist Christian congregations, I learned to stay quiet about what I was really thinking…what I was really believing…even through my own seminary days where I earned a doctorate in theology and went from there to serve as a Baptist pastor…I kept quite about what was going on inside my truer self, my higher self, because, to admit publicly the questions I had would have been tantamount to career suicide.

This is why I receive almost daily today emails from Christians ministers, priests, pastors, from virtually every denomination across America – Catholic, Protestant, Evangelical, notwithstanding – and, they all say virtually the same thing. “I believe much of what you write about Steve but, if I were to admit this from my pulpit, my ministry would be over.”

I learned the hard way, my friends, you cannot live a lie and pretend to be a happy Christian or believe things you really do not believe.  Oh, I suppose you can and many do. Sooner or later, however, and, for me, it came sooner than later, the curtain will drop on your theological charade…you phony belief system.  If salvation, as Christians call it, or enlightenment as Zen Buddhists call it, is anything at all, it is inner wholeness…integrity…peace inside, even within paradox and contradiction. If you’re trying to make yourself believe something that, “just ain’t so,” as Mark Twain would put it, or preaching one thing but, in your heart, believing something else, just know that you’re likely on board an emotional and spiritual train wreck that’s just waiting to happen.

And, guess what?

Life will find a way of bringing your duplicitous journey to a screeching halt.

It did me. I’ve written about that in The Enoch Factor: The Sacred Art of Knowing God.

On this day, at fourteen, in Kathmandu, Nepal, we visited the famous Swayambunath Temple, known to most tourists as the “Monkey Temple” because monkeys actually live there.

When our tour group was ready to return to the bus, I was still standing near the Zen monks, transfixed as I watched them sitting motionless in meditation. I thought, “It’s just a show…surely, at any moment, one of them will twitch with discomfort or peek to see who was watching.”

They never did.

Fearing I might be more impressed than I should be by their devotion…their discipline, detachment, dedication…or, worse, their happiness and contentment, one of the little Baptist ladies in our tour group came over and stood by me. Presently, she whispered in my ear, “Look at those poor monks praying to a God they do not know.”

She paused.

Then, she picked up the familiar, fundamentalist refrain: “Why, if only they knew our sweet Jesus”…it came out like – ‘schweet Jesus’ – the way some southerns ask for ‘schweet’ tea in small town cafes’ – “why,” she said with such certainty…”I know but those poor souls do not”…”why,” she continued, “if they just knew our sweet Jesus, they would go to heaven when they die…instead of that other terrible awful place.”

My Christian friends, this is the madness that must end.

I was just fourteen years old that day outside the Monkey Temple in Kathmandu. No kid could have been more self-centered, more self-absorbed, or more pretentious than I. Yet, I can distinctly remember feeling offended by the sincere but sincerely wrong old Baptist lady. I wanted to look up at her and say…

“What makes you so certain you’re right and they’re wrong?”

“What if they’re right, and you’re wrong?”

What is it in you and me that wants to make God into a manageable deity?

The psalmist said, “The fool says ‘No god’!” (Ps.14:1).

I think the psalmist today might say, “The fools say, ‘We KNOW God’!”

No God.  Know God.  I’m not sure which fool is the bigger.

Two little fish are swimming along in the ocean one morning when they meet with an older fish who casually asks them, “Hello fella’s, how’s the water today?”

They responded with equal casualness, “Fine, sir” and then, they continued to swim on. After a moment passed, one of the younger fish turns to the other and asks, “What the hell is water?”

The point is obvious. But, isn’t it true that often, the most obvious signs of Divine grace are all around us, but we miss them? We fail to see, or express our thanks…our deepest and most profound thanks…for the most obvious…the air you breathe…the sunshine, as well as the rains, the Presence so obvious in the eyes and smiles of another we but casually meet along the way?

What is spiritual enlightenment?

The capacity to see, and so appreciate, the most obvious signs of grace…God’s inexpressible grace.

Awaken, my friends. Spirituality need not be more complicated than joy over the obvious.