The Spiritual Guide: Four Steps on the Path of Enlightenment

The Spiritual Guide

Four Steps on the Path of Enlightenment

Richard White

THE SPIRITUAL GUIDE

Four Steps on the Path of Enlightenment

Copyright © 2016 Richard White. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Cascade Books

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

Eugene, OR 97401

www.wipfandstock.com

paperback isbn: 978-1-4982-9483-6

hardback isbn: 978-1-4982-9485-0

ebook isbn: 978-1-4982-9484-3

Cataloging-in-Publication data:

Names: White, Richard J. (Richard John), 1956–.

Title: The spiritual guide : four steps on the path of enlightenment / Richard White.

Description: Eugene, OR: Cascade Books | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: ISBN: 978-1-4982-9483-6 (paperback) | 978-1-4982-9485-0 (hardback) | 978-1-4982-9484-3 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Spiritual life. | Spirituality.

Classification: BL624 W465 2016 (print) | BL624 (ebook)

Manufactured in the U.S.A. November 28, 2016

All quotations from the Bible in this work are from the Revised Standard Version copyrighted in 1973 by the National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of America.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Preface

Chapter 1: Spirituality

Chapter 2: Staying Open to Suffering

Chapter 3: Living a Generous Life

Chapter 4: Cultivating Mindfulness and Wonder

Chapter 5: Accepting Death and Returning to Joy

Chapter 6: Conclusion

Bibliography

For Clarinda

With love and gratitude

Preface

This book is a guide to spirituality and what it means to live a spiritual life. The basic question is, how can I live a more genuine life—a life that can lead to enlightenment? There are many responses to this question, and several competing claims. But there is also some agreement between different philosophical and religious views on what it means to be spiritually centered. As a professional philosopher, I have been blessed with the time to think about ultimate questions, and I have been able to study different spiritual traditions in depth. But spiritual writings are often difficult, and spirituality is an elusive theme. How are we to make sense of it all? I wanted to think these things through; and so, with some trepidation, I began to outline a very simple account of what it means to live in a spiritual way. My goal was to write a book that would appeal to intelligent readers who had the passion as well as the courage to come to grips with spiritual matters—people who take such things seriously and who are willing to change their lives if they need to. The Spiritual Guide: Four Steps on the Path of Enlightenment is the book that I wanted to write. And while it is a short book, it is also the outcome of spiritual and intellectual striving that aims at the heart of wisdom itself.

This book does not support any specific doctrines, and it has something to say to all people, regardless of their religious affiliation or lack of it. I do not assume anything about the nature of God or the self, the reality of karma, reincarnation, or personal immortality. All of these ideas are quite independent of the spiritual framework that I argue for here. But like everyone else, I do have my own perspective: My great-grandfather was a Methodist minister preaching hellfire and damnation; I was brought up in England in the Anglican church; I have taught for some time at a Jesuit Catholic university in the United States; and I have studied different world philosophies; I am also drawn to contemporary spiritual writings, and I have spent some time with alternative healing arts and meditation. But I have not written this book as an apologist for any particular religion; and in spite of my own philosophical background, I am not a Platonist, a Daoist, an Aristotelian or a Stoic. I believe that there is some spiritual truth in all of these approaches and this is the reason for their enduring appeal. I have also come to think that there is a basic wisdom in the world that is applicable to all human beings, regardless of where they come from or at what point in time they happen to live. Spiritual wisdom can be found in many places, and we only have to look for it—not only in religion, philosophy, and art, but also in everyday life, and the people who are all around us. Wisdom or enlightenment is definitely not a private possession, and no one has a monopoly of spiritual truth.

This book should speak to anyone who is interested in spiritual matters: Seekers and skeptics; students and students of life; philosophers, atheists, agnostics, and defenders of the faith. Information, or the state of our knowledge, is forever changing from one day to the next; and in the modern age, we are frequently distracted or even addicted to whatever the new technology brings us. But the nature of spiritual wisdom remains constant over time, and it is available to all of us. In this book, I sketch out four of the most important aspects of spiritual understanding, or the four steps on the path of enlightenment. Taken together, I think they represent the most basic spiritual themes and the true focus of a spiritual life. I hope this will resonate with your own view of things, and help you to think more clearly about matters of ultimate concern.

1

Spirituality

When I was a student, I fell in love with philosophy. Philosophy can help you to think more critically and more thoughtfully about the world; but more than anything else, philosophy seems to ask all the big questions: What is the meaning of life? What does it mean to live a good life? Does God exist? And how can I be true to myself? Philosophy is literally the love of wisdom, and the true philosopher is a lover of wisdom. Not a guru figure who claims to have all the answers but a seeker who longs to discover the truth about things, like the lover who yearns for the one that he loves.

Now I am a professional philosopher, but in recent years I have become more involved in the field of spirituality, which is, I think, the very heart of wisdom itself. I have studied classical texts as well as New Age writings. I have become more familiar with spiritual practices, and I teach classes in World Philosophy and The Philosophy of Spiritual Life, which looks at important spiritual themes such as compassion, forgiveness, reverence, and the sacred. I am not surprised that my students are anxious to talk about spiritual questions and matters of ultimate concern. In today’s world, there is so much pressure to compete for a career or just to get a job, while the most important issues that everyone has to deal with are neglected or viewed as irrelevant. But the fact is, before you are a nurse or a teacher or a computer programmer, you are a human being; and as a human being you must set out on your own path to think about ultimate meaning, values, and truth, all of which are key to living a spiritual life. This is not always an easy path, and it is very easy to get distracted; but as Socrates famously said: the unexamined life is not worth living.

For the most part, philosophers use reason and argument to get to the truth of things. And philosophy can be a very critical enterprise that calls established truths into question, not just for the sake of being skeptical or perverse, but to see which of our ideas can be justified, and which are based on something like faith alone. Spirituality on the other hand is much more intuitive and it uses basic insights about human life to describe how we are meant to live and fulfill the most serious part of ourselves. Of course, spirituality is not the same thing as religion. Some people believe in God, but their lives seem to be largely unaffected by this belief, which is just an intellectual commitment. Other people, including some atheists and agnostics, are drawn to living the most spiritual and meaningful lives possible but they cannot make a faith commitment or accept the idea of personal immortality. At this point, even after some years of practice and philosophical study, I don’t have a simple, straightforward definition of what spirituality is; but as a useful way to begin this book, I will argue that spirituality can be thought about in at least three different ways—and this brings me now to the core of my own ideas about this subject.

The Nature of Spirituality

First of all, I think that a spiritual life is the opposite of what we would call a materialistic life, which is devoted to the pursuit of wealth, prestige, or power over others. The selfish and unspiritual life is self-involved and unconcerned with matters of ultimate significance. At the same time, however, a spiritual life is not just a life that is focused on otherworldly matters. More than anything else, living a spiritual life means recognizing the true meaning and value of this life, trying to live authentically in the world, and keeping more selfish concerns in their proper perspective. In many spiritual traditions, the ultimate goal is to overcome the ordinary and petty concerns of the ego and to embrace the deeper reality where everything is connected and one. In Christianity, for example, the goal is to identify one’s own will with the will of God, and to lose oneself by surrendering to God’s will. In Hindu Vedanta philosophy, we are told to reject the standpoint of the separate individual—which is an illusion—and to embrace the ultimate undivided reality of Brahman, for That art thou!¹ In Buddhism, the cultivation of compassion inspires a sense of interconnectedness—which includes the value of all sentient life—and this is held to be the deepest wisdom of all. From this kind of perspective, individuality is an illusion, or at least a very limited point of view, which is fostered by selfish concerns. And it typically leads to alienation as we sense our separation from nature, from other people, and the community we belong to. So the spiritual remedy for this is to overcome materialism and the false perspective of the individual self. In this respect, we can think of spirituality as a movement away from materialism and the ordinary values of commercial society that we usually find so powerful and absorbing.

Second, this means that a spiritual life must involve a quest or a journey in search of ultimate truth. It is a life lived in terms of questions: How should I live? What should I believe? What is the purpose of my life? And such a life is absolutely committed to making progress in becoming a better person, or one who is more fulfilled and well-adjusted to existence itself. Many people experience alienation in the sense of not feeling at home in the world or with others. But I think a truly spiritual person can achieve a sense of belonging, which means that he or she must be prepared to trust in life; and in spite of the problems, and even the tragedies that life throws out to most of us, he or she will remain committed to the idea that life is basically a good thing. Over the course of history, many important spiritual paths have been established, including Christianity, Platonism, Buddhism, Stoicism, Confucianism, and others. Some people seek union with God; others search for nirvana or the Absolute or the Dao, which is the way. In ancient Vedanta philosophy, the three paths of karma yoga, bhakti yoga, and jnani yoga correspond to the way of work, the way of religious devotion, and the way of study and meditation respectively.

Today, we live in a global society where all of these different paths can be studied, while at the same time we are not always so bound to the traditions and ideas that we have inherited from the past. This means that spiritual life is likely to involve more active discernment on the part of each individual seeker, where the point is to dialogue with different spiritual perspectives in order to find the truth that is most inspiring in one’s own life. And this is important, even as a way of understanding the spiritual tradition that we grew up with, by looking at it with new eyes and from a more global point of view. Today, different spiritual traditions are available to spiritual seekers through the Internet, workshops, books, and classes. This does not mean that spirituality has been diluted, but it is much easier than ever before to come to grips with different paths to determine how they speak to us. One thing that hasn’t changed is that the spiritual life is a quest or a journey towards the highest truth.

The third point is that