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People think spirituality is about contemplating lofty ideas, like God and souls and consciousness and higher dimensions and flying spaghetti monsters and so on.
But spirituality is really the most pragmatic, rational, down-to-earth business there is.
Okay, okay, who am I to say what spirituality is about?
Fair enough. You can make spirituality about anything you like.
If you want your spirituality to be about extraterrestrials bamboozling all of us with their superior manipulative power, you do you.
Who’s going to stop you? Me? I won’t.
Enjoy! Please put in a good word with the E.T. for me, okay?
But let’s say you don’t care about having a more esoteric belief system.
Let’s, for the sake of this article, assume you don’t care about altered states, souls, past-life regressions, aliens, higher beings, or anything else that requires more knowlegde/beliefs.
Let’s, just for funs and giggles, pretend all you care about is knowing the truth.
Is spirituality still for you?
Well, a large part of the marketplace might not be for you. But there is something that is for you. And that something is so spiritual it doesn’t even need spirituality.
It’s not as fancy and flashy as some of the other stuff out there but it has something that the fancy and flashy stuff doesn’t have — verifiable truth.
Pragmatic Spirituality
The spirituality that is concerned with the truth of your existence doesn’t need you to take part in any rituals or prostrations. It doesn’t demand you to follow a religion, philosophy, guru, teacher, dogma, or belief system.
All it demands is a willingness to open your eyes and see what actually is.
That’s also why any teaching about it is merely regurgitation of the same old.
It can be summed up thus:
Notice that everything just kinda is.
This is the most important point. You have to actually see. How you go about seeing doesn’t matter.
There is no right or wrong way — that would be a fallacy of objective knowledge. If it works, it works.
When you do open your eyes and wash that gum out of them (as Whitman would say), you notice that the thing you’ve been missing your whole life is right there in the open for everyone to see.
You also realize that you weren’t missing anything; you were just insisting on interpreting what you’re seeing as something else.
Fun, huh?
This means that “waking up” might not be the grand achievement you hoped it would be.
It’s more like a grand disappointment.
The Grand Disappointment
Disappointment is derived from the verb “to disappoint”, which itself comes from the Old French word “desappointer” (meaning “to remove from office” or “to deprive of an expectation”).
The word “appoint” traces back to the Latin verb “appointare”, which means “to arrange” or “to set in place.” The prefix “dis-” then negates this meaning, leading to the sense of “to frustrate” or “to fail to meet expectations.”
So, “disappointment” essentially means “the action of being deprived of an expectation” or “the process of failing to fulfill an expectation.”
And this is what awakening can never fulfill — expectations.
We might also say that disappointment means “the action of being removed from office.”
Who’s being removed from the office of your life?
The you that has been playing CEO.
In our context, disappointment then means “the action of removing the imagined you from the controller position.” For the separate you this has to be a disappointment because it is the one being dis-appointed.
That doesn’t mean it’s bad or anything like that.
Imagine a company that has a corrupt and, quite frankly, overwhelmed CEO. He’s driving the company straight into bankruptcy. Then the owner comes in and kicks him out, appoints a new CEO, and things improve.
The only difference here is that there is no one new being appointed nor is there an owner to do the appointing. The company runs without anyone in charge and it does so perfectly.
I’ll stop this analogy now, otherwise I’ll be floundering like a marooned dolphin.
The point I meant to make is this: no imagined future experience will be your salvation.
We can play with all kinds of fantastic esoteric concepts and ideas and there is no issue with that.
The issue, if there is one, is believing that another, preferably exotic, experience, new knowledge, or more wisdom will resolve the identity crisis we are convinced we suffer from.
As long as you project your fulfillment onto a conceptual experience that will hopefully happen in the future, you might as well start working in a cinema. That’s what projections are good for — entertainment.
If you want more than Plato’s shadows befuddling the hell out of you, all you need to do is a 180 and look at their source.
Röhrüa!
I know I’m making this sound simple and straightforward. But I also know that I’m not making this sound simple and straightforward enough.
And this is the main difference between, let’s just call it, flashy spirituality and, for lack of a better way to put it, pragmatic spirituality.
Complexity versus simplicity.
If I tell you to open your third eye, I could fill a whole library trying to explain what I’m talking about.
If I tell you to open your two eyes, what else is there to say? You’re familiar with opening and closing them.
Again, the truth of our being is simple beyond simplicity. It’s simpler than any word anyone can come up with.
If some teaching needs you to adopt a whole new vocabulary or learn a different language just so you can know what’s up, then that teaching might not actually be about what’s up, or at least not the main line.
We can point at it in any language, no matter which one it is you prefer.
Here, I’ll come up with a language. It’s called Pevüre. I want you to imagine you speak it. It’s now your mother tongue. Don’t worry it’s rather easy to learn. It has only one word — röhrüa.
Röhrüa roughly translates into is/being/presence/all.
Now when a Pevüreean wise/crazy person wants to remind you of your true nature, what do they do?
They wave their arms around in an ubiquitous motion yelling, “Röhrüa, röhrüa, röhrüa!”
And that is enough. It cuts straight to the chase.
When someone insists: röhrüa! they are inviting you to notice what is.
And when you do recognize it, which is actually pretty hard not to, then you no longer need to search and seek for it.
Then you just go about your life in any way you like: open your third and fourth and fifth eye, align your chakras, make a Trillion dollars, go to the pub and have a beer, help people recognize their röhrüa, or whatever else floats your boat.
Luka
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