If there is a path to self knowledge that doesn’t require so much damned pain, then someone should write a book about it or make a movie or a first-person video game. Its no wonder most of us simply sit on our butts and watch Survivor: “spiritual survivor” is way too hard on the nerves.
Last week, when I was in the grips of some kind of emotionally induced ailment, I read the Prophet by Kahlil Gibran for the first time in fifteen years. I took cold comfort in his meditation on pain: “Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.”
It reminds me of an experience in Kiakum, at Hollyhock, where my friend Yoni Gordis explained how we move through stages of spiritual growth. I asked him to recount the story for me, and this is what he writes:
“It is my re-wording of a teaching by the Hassidic Master, Rabbi Nachman of Breslov (1772-1810). He tells us that many spiritual teachers tell us that when we encounter the hard stuff in life it is a sign that we have fallen or failed in our paths. The truth, Reb Nachman explains, is that life is somewhat like a pile of stacked records (does anyone remember records?). Each record is a stage of spiritual growth, or a period of one’s life. In a stage of spiritual growth, you start by plowing through the peel (like a fruit), the outside, and you get through the external layers and get through to the core teaching and essence of that stage, the “what is this stage all about” point. But what happens when you get to the core and are through with that stage is that you get bumped up to a higher spiritual plane. But on that plane you hit the outside of the next higher record first and have to drill through the peel of that stage to get to its core. Thus, encountering the hard stuff (the peels or shells as they are known in Hassidism) is a sign that you have merited to move up rather than have fallen. The lesson, perhaps, is that we need to congratulate people who are encountering hard stuff and let them know that they are moving forward on their spiritual path and that this is a sign of that progress.”
Like Rabbi Hachman’s stack of records, there isn’t a single shell, but layers upon layers of shell. We emerge into this world at the centre (or, at the bottom of the stack of records, or maybe part of the way up depending on our reincarnation) of a series of shells. That first moment of blissful emergence from the womb is the first shell through which we pass, and it would seem that the rest of our days are preparation for, and emergence through subsequent layers of shell.
For some. Again, it is no wonder many choose to lock themselves inside the shell and placate their inquiry with reality TV, booze, drugs, shopping, general excess, sloth and general malaise; all substitutes for the hard work of genuine growth.
Because its painful. Breaking the shell hurts. As we grow spiritually, we find that the layer of shell that contains us no longer fits and we press up against it, and when we finally break through, there is discomfort.
Gibran says: “Much of your pain is self chosen. It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self.”
This recent emergence has been amoung the most painful, and beyond a doubt I know it was self chosen. Given the unfolding over the last two years, that’s saying a lot. I thought that I had broken the most painful layers of shell when Kat and I separated last year, but now I’m pressing up against subsequent layers that are resisting fracture.
What am I finding as I break through these layers of shell?
* I still must work to define my own happiness internally, rather than externally. My happiness must be the result of my own spiritual grounding, and not the people in my life, their approval or acceptance of me, my financial status, whether I have my children with me physically ever day, or what the weather happens to be doing during a rainy Victoria summer;
* I must continue to affirm that I deserve to succeed in love, in work, and in life;
* Somehow I’ve got to pay my karmic debt around the pain and hurt I have caused Kathleen, and others in my life;
* And that karmic debt is somehow linked to my current, and ongoing, misadventures in love;
* That I need to learn to find a place of harmony between spiritual and physical love, and self-referred detachment from that connection which is so vital to me.
Painful lessons. But necessary it would seem.
One might ask why? Why accept such pain? Because to not inquire into our true nature, to not delve into these quandaries, means stagnation, and spiritual death. With each emergence the world becomes so much more beautiful, so much more bountiful, so much more magical. With each emergence we tap into the field of all possibilities that fashions the universe, and which the universe fashions itself from.
Lord Buddha said that suffering was a result of attachment, and that there could be an end to suffering, through transcendence of attachment. It has also been said that pain is inevitable, but suffering is a choice. I’ll take door number two, Alex….
I wonder if it gets easier? Some of the layers of shell that I’ve broken through have been very painful, but others haven’t been as difficult. I remember that first conscious moment when I actually felt, rather than simply imagined, the connectivity of all things, which I think of as bliss: I was practising Tai Chi on the beach at Hollyhock, and I slipped out of the confines of my physical self and gently became the sand, the jumble of logs on the foreshore, the water lapping on the highwater mark, the dark forests beyond. I remember walking, as if through a dream down the beach to find a three foot long mud shark on the beach – I knew it was there not because I could see it, but because I was the beach that I felt it on my sandy back.
That wasn’t so painful (though other events that weekend were). Some layers we emerge through in pleasure, and others we have to peck hard to break. My guess is that as our heart and spirit grow wise along this spiritual journey, each layer will become unique, and our memory of and insight into our past emergence will make the breaking shell softer, and the recovery from its pain faster.
