“The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it.”
We are not talking about a botanical garden. Eden means, “abundance.” It is a symbol for the image of God—the seed of basic goodness.
This seed has been planted in the heart of man. The body is the soil. Our life is a garden.
Cultivating this garden is often called spirituality.
The term garden designates a degree of intention and investment. Gardens do not grow themselves; they require attention and work. We have to cultivate the soil and water the seeds. Our ideas and plans can be big and truly insightful. But if they are not supplemented by action, they fail to grow.
Walking the spiritual path requires motivation and dedication. When something resonates with us, it is said to have meaning. Motivation is the movement or eruption of meaning. It is inspiration. So, we look at a space and it strikes a chord within us. Suddenly, the motivation to engage our situation arises—to cultivate that sense of meaning. This is an act of investment.
When we arrive at the gateway of the spiritual path we find that our awareness is spread in the worry of many things.
The modern way of life is a busy life; we are perhaps the first generation of humans who have successfully eliminated silence. We wake up to the offensive sound of an alarm clock. We watch the news or listen to music, while frantically drinking our coffee and fixing our hair. Then, we run out of the door. We get in the car and fight through traffic until we arrive at our cubical. We play solitaire, answer e-mails, and make a few phone calls.
During our lunch break, we scroll through the news feed on Facebook, while mindlessly consuming our tuna fish sandwich. Then we return to our cubical for more e-mails and phone calls, supplemented this time by minesweeper. Finally, 5 o’clock rolls around. We fight back through traffic until we are back home. We help the kids with their home work, prepare something for dinner, and wash the dishes. We plop down on the couch and stare at our favorite TV show.
Eventually, we start dozing off. So we go to bed, where we remain until the offensive sound of our alarm clock wakes us up and we start over again.
We have removed any and all periods of silence from our day.
We even take our phones to the bathroom with us! The absence of silence is driving us mad. The modern way of life is claustrophobic. There is no room to breathe. We desperately need a breath of fresh air. We crave silence. Our state of well-being—basic sanity—breathes silence in the same way that our lungs breathe oxygen.
So when our life is cluttered, we feel suffocated. We begin to gasp for air; panic sets in. This sense of panic is the sprouting of wisdom. We are beginning to appreciate silence.
This appreciation brings us to the practice of meditation. Perhaps, we get on-line and locate a meditation center or practice group. Or maybe we just watch some YouTube videos that teach us the basics. There is a great deal of excitement regarding our lifestyle changes. We are fired up about starting a daily practice. This excitement serves as a wave of momentum that we can ride for a few days, but unfortunately it dies out. We find ourselves suffocating in the busy-ness of our daily life, yet again.
After three or four days meditation became just something else we swore we were going to get around to. If we truly hope to produce real, sustainable change, we must invest. Action generates change.
True inspiration leads to gratitude, and gratitude is an action, not an idea. If we are truly grateful for something we will take care of it. If we are grateful for our car we will wash it, vacuum it, and change the oil. Gratitude is down to earth. It is so easy to get wrapped up in the idealistic wave that brought us here. But transformation is dependent upon grounding this energy.
We have to channel our energy into action; rather than allowing it to slowly seep out through the couch cushions as we sit around talking about our big ideas.
The gulf between idealism and pragmatism is bridged through commitment. Remember, a garden is a particular space endowed with potential value that we seek to cultivate. Before we can begin to cultivate that space, we must locate it.
So, we need to listen for echoes of value in our daily interactions. The practice of meditation is a great place to start. There are a couple of reasons for this.
First, many people will find within a moment of silence the spark of wakefulness they crave. There is a precision and freshness that is rejuvenating. The practice of meditation is a great way to reconnect with this basic sense of vitality on a daily basis. You may find a similar quality of liveliness in rock climbing, but most people cannot go rock climbing every day.
This is the second quality that makes meditation indispensable.
Meditation not only lifts the spirit, it enables you to become more familiar with the presence of spirit, so that you may recognize this presence in a variety of different activities.
The third great quality of meditation practice is its ability to increase your sensitivity. So not only will you reconnect with the quality of wakefulness and become more familiar with the characteristics that accompany the spirit of wakefulness, but meditation practice will enable you to be more sensitive to this presence. Through the practice of meditation you will become aware of subtler and subtler dimensions of wakefulness. So, it really is a great foundation. It is a down to earth, action based commitment that resonates with the intuition of meaning and encourages other activities that do the same.
Spirituality is a fidelity to the unfolding of our true life.
Inspiration gives birth to change only when it is coupled with action. Action is fueled by the winds of meaning. An inspired way of life is contingent upon physical commitments that resonate with the spark of wakefulness within us.
We have to be willing to work against our own psychological momentum and install these commitments. They will not just fall out of the sky. It will require work. When we find that jogging arouses the divine spark we discovered in meditation, we must be willing to pencil it into our day and defend that time slot with our life.
If we find that cooking is a path to meaning, then we must remove any obstacles that prevent our meeting with meaning in the kitchen. In this way, we can identify the various plots of earth we intend on cultivating.
It is inevitable that the day will come when we do not want to uphold our commitments. We must dig deep and reconnect with our capacity to do what we do not want to do, and not do what we do want to do. Sustainability is dependent upon independence from the whimsical nature of self-will.
This is true freedom.
In the beginning, it will seem like we are cultivating our cooking skills, our concentration, or our physical fitness. Over time, we will begin to see that our body is the patch of earth that we are cultivating. The seed of divinity planted in our hearts has many attributes.
As this seed unfolds into the fulfillment of its potential, these divine qualities begin to surface. These qualities include principles like generosity, dignity, patience, courage, presence, and wisdom. Here we begin to find that, while these qualities maybe aroused in meditation, prayer, jogging, study, or painting, they seek fulfillment in our daily affairs.
So, we start to feel ourselves pulled off of the cushion and into relationship. We begin to see that a committed relationship is difficult, because it demands that we give of our self. This is difficult because we are selfish or need to cultivate generosity. We cannot hope to grow in patience without an asshole in our lives.
Patience is growing out of the seed planted in your heart’s soil, and the frustration associated with certain relationships is a sign that we have not been tending to this particular fruit of the spirit—we have not been watering our patience or tilling the soil. So the relationships and tasks that present us with difficulty are revealed to be the path we must cultivate.
Our true Self sprouts out of the soil of relationship.
Just as it first appeared that we were exercising our cooking skills, now it appears that we are cultivating various relationships. But upon closer examination we begin to realize that it is the principle itself that has brought us into this relationship.
It is as if the whole universe is working as a mid-wife, assisting in the birth of our true Self. But this is not a self-centered situation. The same is true for the other person. There is something deep in the other that yearns to be realized, and it has identified a relationship with you as the path towards completion. The longer we stick with this process, the more obvious it becomes that we are not in control. There are forces, which are beyond the jurisdiction of our conscious mind, that arise from depths of our being and organize our life.
Once we become aware of this we can consent to these forces, instead of resisting their subliminal influence. In a moment of consent, we relax into the portal that these virtues are planted in. We fall into the earth through these rabbit holes. While on the surface it appears that all kinds of trees grow out of the ground—trees that are pleasing to the eye and good for food—their roots all draw from one source.
As we grow in sensitivity and become more aware of our inner-life, we begin to sense a singular thread of energy animating every aspect of our lives. In fact, the idea of ownership—“our”—no longer seems applicable. The idea of ownership works only when there is a disembodied sense of identity that is fixed in the thinking mind. The cramp in our head we call “I” feels as if it were a foreman looking down on a process called “life” that it owns and does.
When every aspect of life—our career, cooking, relationship, meditation, chirping birds, vanilla ice cream, fresh cut grass, anger, a mote of dust passing by a sunlit window, and every thought—is revealed to be a leaf or a fruit growing on a single tree that is rooted deep in the earth, then and only then, do we begin to see that our life is not our own.
We come back to the depths. We see that life exists in the darkness. It is surrounded by light, and “I” is just a ray of light. It is not the source of light.
There is a spirit stirring deep in the body, and everything—the claustrophobia that started this journey, the freshness of the in-breath, our meeting with meaning in the kitchen, our friends, and our enemies—has been calling us back to the deep and abiding presence of unborn wakefulness.
This spirit is the same spirit that said, “Let there be light.” We cannot stay in the darkness. Who we are is forever expanding into the present moment. The abyss opens up and breathes. Life comes shooting out of the darkness like a shooting star tearing across the night sky. This is the movement of the instincts and sensations.
We can ride these burst of life like a horse by meeting them with conscious participation. When we do we emerge on the surface as a creative expression of the void—a husband, wife, parent, a son, a daughter, writer, or a friend.
These modes of expressivity do not belong to us.
When they are ripe they fall from the tree. We have to let them go. We cannot take who we are at work to the house. We cannot identify with them because we are not the form.
We must be willing to die to the forms, so that we may return to the abyss, out of which we will be re-born as a musician, an enemy, a son, a daughter, a grandparent, an artist, a chef, or some other unique representation of inspiration.
We must learn to love the seed, which is the image of God, which means that we must learn to love the act of loving.
This requires that we let go.
We must cultivate our own death.
