And the Greatest of These is Love.

This post is an excerpt from my book, Finding God in the Body: A Spiritual Path for the Modern West.
 To purchase, click here.

The Power of Love.

On the spiritual path, we will fall short many times. It is easy to become impatient, frustrated, and overwhelmed. That is why love is so important.

Love sees life in everything. It recognizes the life that abides within every creature. This recognition begets respect. Love is patient, kind, and endures all things, as anyone who has attended a wedding knows. Our knowledge, plans, and strategies will reach their wit’s end, but love never tires.

One day, while watching my favorite television show, “The Office,” I heard those famous words of St. Paul’s yet again but this time with new ears because I was holding my newborn son. As I looked at him and heard, “And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love,” I understood. For the first time, I understood.

In that moment, I knew: I knew that I could read every book in the world and make plans from now until the end of time, but my knowledge would be exhausted and my plans would fall short. No strategy and no amount of preparation could ever get me to the finish line. The only thing that remained was love.

Only my love for him can bear the hardships and difficulties that our relationship will bring to the surface. Only my love for him can overcome my impatience and arrogance. Only my love for him can guide him without trying to bend him to my will. Only love is humble enough to teach him how to think without teaching him what to think. For only the eye of love sees him as his own person and only love is selfless enough to grant him the space he needs to grow into that person. Love is the only voice within me honest enough to admit that he does not belong to me.  

Truthfully, it is not “my” love and it is not “for him.” Love is the defining characteristic of the Kingdom. I do not create love. I receive it. Love is a gift.

“Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.”

And as children of God, we resemble God. Love is our birthmark. When freedom from self is realized, the likeness of God is reflected in our actions. The cataracts of fear and expectation are removed and we can see the world as-it-is. When we recover the freedom to see people as they are, we see the life that dwells and sings within them, and love is our natural response.

Love is wild. It has no manners.

It comforts the afflicted, and afflicts the comfortable. Love often defies logic. It would have us embrace our enemies and be uncomfortably honest with our friends. This cannot be taught. Love does not come with a manual. It is the spontaneous expression of our True Nature.

Unconditional Love

As I said before, love is complete freedom—the freedom of God to love friend and foe as our Self. Love is complete and total freedom because it is selfless. Selfless awareness is wide open, agapic awareness. This is the all-embracing quality of Undifferentiated Awareness that recognizes and embraces everything that is real and true, regardless of whether it is comfortable or not.

Self-centeredness is the worst kind of prison. It keeps us chained and shackled to our fears and illusions, reserved to making decisions that serve our own narrow-minded agenda. Love doesn’t see the world or the people in it through the knowledge of good and bad. Love does not see what we stand to lose or gain. It sees things-as-they-are. And when you see things-as-they-are, you see the spark of divinity that lives within all things.

Gratitude

In the embrace of unconditional love, it feels like we are loved into Being. This awareness brings about a phase change. It transmutes the energy of unconditional love into gratitude. Dominion is not control, but responsibility. Gratitude accepts this responsibility. When you are grateful for something, you “tend to it.” When God told Adam to tend to the Garden, he meant love it—love the body, your fellow man, and the earth.

Gratitude is an action, not an idea. It is the act of caring for that which we are grateful. Gratitude doesn’t hang out in the oceanic presence of unconditional love. It reaches out to the world from the deep space of love. It invests, not only in the maintenance of our Self, but through likeness recognizes and welcomes the True Self in others. Likeness is a quality of Basic Sanity. It looks beyond race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, and social status to find its kind in others. In this way, likeness gives rise to kindness, which is the foundation of relationship. Having established relationship, love goes through yet another conversion.

Creative Love

At this stage, gratitude and kindness give way to the creative power of love. The principle of Eros or erotic love isn’t limited to “sexual desire.” It refers to the creativity of love. Therefore, sexual union is both an example of Eros and a most useful symbol for its creative nature. We are born out of love and therefore born to love. Love is the Alpha and Omega.

Eros is the desire to make love. It is the creative force that seeks to express love through relationship, art, poetry, music, prayers of devotion, and songs of worshipful silence. Eros articulates love. In fact, creative love is art—it is the aspect of love that lends shape to the unformed inspiration of our inner life. Eros is love Incarnate.

While creative love is the principle that underlies the great works of art, it is not limited to painting, music, or theater any more than it is to the bedroom. In fact, creative love is most active in our daily life. It is the aspect of love that expands the field of practice. It brings our spiritual practice out of our home and into our day.

Love in Daily Life

The Upanishads say, “And then He realized that he was this creation, as it had poured forth from Himself. In this way, He became this creation. Therefore, he who realizes this becomes, in this creation, a creator.” To become a creator is to bring the divine image to fruition. Having discovered an untapped inner wealth, we are no longer dominated by our poverty mentality. We are full. We seek to give back, to create.

Eros transforms our life into an art form. It is the art of living. When we consent to the power of love, it shapes our life in the same way Michelangelo chiseled his sculpture of David from raw stone. This happens in relationship. We cannot wall ourselves off from the world and call it spirituality. Without relationship our practice is incomplete. Commitment connects the responsibilities and obligations of our daily life to the indwelling reality of our True Self.

Committed relationships are difficult because they demand that we give of our Self. This is hard because the false-self is selfish. It wants to avoid discomfort and clings to immediate gratification. Creative love matures us by reminding us that we cannot hope to grow into our True Self without something demanding our false-self in return.

The resurrection of our True Life is proportionate to the death of our inauthentic life.

The false-self is incapable of accepting this truth. It is bound to itself. Love is free to accept this maxim. This is the power of love to endure all things: marriage, divorce, success, failure, friendship, rivalries, heartache, and death. The freedom of love enables us to adapt to life’s changing circumstances. From the point of view of creative love, there are no problems, only opportunities. If the problem can be solved, it is not a problem, just something for you to work with; if it can’t be solved, it is not a problem, just something to accept and move on. Creative love sees everything as workable.

Without struggle there is no growth which is why Shantideva writes, “All enemies are helpers in my spiritual work and therefore they should be a joy to me.” Where there is an enemy, a shortcoming, or an obstacle, creative love sees a gateway. When we are angry, afraid, jealous, depressed, or obsessed, love knows there is an underdeveloped aspect of our Self struggling to be born into the world. Love seeks to cultivate it. It loves our devils into the present moment; it does not reject them. We may be intellectually sympathetic to this idea, but only the power of love recognizes this on a practical level.

What we call spiritual principles live within us as potentialities embedded within the structure of Being, but just as the capacity to walk is a potentiality that has to be exercised by toddlers, these potentialities have to be actualized through the struggle of daily life. In this way, God is born into the world.

Spirituality is about accepting our obstacles as the path, not avoiding them. Only love is capable of seeing the relationships and tasks that present us with difficulty as the plots of land that we must cultivate. In short, what we call obstacles, love calls the path, and all paths intersect.

If we look closely, we will see an intricate web of interdependence emerging. It may appear that we are attracted to this person or that job for one reason or the other, but if we look closer—beyond the veil of the false-self—we will see that the power of love has brought us into this relationship. “Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come to being,” writes Teilhard de Chardin, the brilliant Catholic theologian.

It is as if the universe is working as a midwife, assisting in the birth of our Self. But love is never a one-sided situation. The forces of love are at work in the other person as well. The universe is using us to assist in their birth. There is something deep in the other that yearns to be realized, and it has identified a relationship with us as part of its path. We are there to aid in their birth, just as they are there to aid in ours.

While love may bring us together, it does not chain us to one another. It binds us to the truth in our hearts. So in love, there is solitude. “For the pillars of the temple stand apart,” writes Kahlil Gibran, “and the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.” Selfish love—which is no love at all—sees the other as an object to be exploited or a hostage to be taken; authentic love recognizes the symbiotic structure of the relationship. A healthy relationship moves back and forth between solitude and communion. It sees both interdependence and independence.

* This is article is excerpted from Finding God in the Body: A Spiritual Path for the Modern West by    Benjamin Riggs. To purchase, click here.

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Eros recognizes disappointment as part of our path. It doesn’t see tribulation as something to be avoided. The Dalai Lama once said that we cannot view a beggar as an obstacle, if we hope to grow in generosity. This axiom can be applied to all other virtues as well. Patience is an indispensable spiritual principle, but when given the opportunity to grow in patience, many of us reject it. We rail against the person trying our nerves. We label those who try our patience as “assholes,” but without an obstruction or an “adversary” there is no growth. Creative love knows that we cannot grow in patience without an asshole in our lives and binds our actions to this principle.

The Most Common Mistake in Meditation Practice & How to Correct it.

People come to meditation because they are stressed out.

They are stuck between their ears, disembodied. They want to arrest the feverish pace of thought and abide peacefully in the present moment.

Simply put, they want to get out of their head. But they don't know where to go. They don't know what it means to move beyond the thinking mind.

Getting out of the head means, for most, stop thinking. So they take a seat and try to silence their mind. But the only resource available to them is thought, so they start thinking about not thinking, which, needless to say, is a frustrating exercise in futility.

Mindfulness practice is not about concentrated attention. It is the thinking that seeks to concentrate the spectrum of awareness upon a single point. When we are navigating rush hour traffic at the end of a long day, the thinking mind reduces the multitude of sights and sounds down to only those features of the present moment pertinent to the task at hand, making it home safe. This is undoubtedly necessary but nevertheless stressful. It, however, is not the aim of meditation practice.

In the context of mindfulness, "mind" does not mean brain. We are not talking about brainfulness. "Mind" means awareness. Mindfulness is the fullness of awareness.

In mindfulness practice our awareness is relaxed, not concentrated. It's no longer monopolized by the thinking mind. Meditation enables our awareness to pour out into the fullness of our person, into the body. Only a somatic reference point, like the breath or posture, can interrupt our tendency to think about our own thoughts, enabling us to escape the claustrophobic world between our ears. Mindfulness is embodiment, presence.

Don't try to get out of the head. Just reconnect with the body. When you notice your mind drifting off, simply feel the breath, the heartbeat, the blood flowing through your body. No more, no less. Any more is elaboration and any less is lethargy.

To get out of the head is to return to the body. Meditation practice is about embracing the fullness of our life. The Life of the body is too rich and vast to be held within the tunnel vision of the thinking mind. However, the undifferentiated awareness of the body is expansive enough to include the life of the mind. In the basic awareness of the body nothing is left out. Thoughts arise and pass away, like any other sensation, but they are no longer the point around which our identity is centered. 

In the fullness of awareness the wholeness of our person is embraced. Our true life is resurrected.

It is not about abiding in that space continuously. It is about allowing our thoughts to touch the present moment, which we are anchored to by the breath. It is about grounding our point of view in reality as it is revealed in the naked awareness of the body. Meditation is about sanity. That's what it means to get out of her head.

There is No Room for Admirers.

"Of all the children born to women, there has never been anyone greater than John the Baptist; yet the least in the Kingdom of Heaven is greater than he." - Matthew 11:11

Conversion or the rebirth experience (metanoia) marks the resurrection of our True Self, which is of the Kingdom and not born of woman, so to speak. Metanoia is a renewal of one's mind and motivations. It is an experience that re-orients our entire being because it relocates the point or center from which we live our life, moving it from the head down into the heart.

In the Gospels, the Christ image is made manifest in Jesus of Nazareth. Through Jesus's life and actions the indwelling presence of God is born into the world. But the life of Christ does not end with the crucifixion of Jesus. Christ is resurrected. In fact, Christ is Resurrection. This unending Resurrection is the story of Christianity. It is the True Self or the Resurrected Christ that, in Galatians, Paul says has replaced his false-self.

Paul further elaborates on this point in Ephesians where he writes, "Put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life, and be renewed in the spirit of your minds, putting on the new self, created after the likeness of God." This false-self/ True Self, former life/ New Life dichotomy is common in spiritual literature. In Alcoholics Anonymous members celebrate "sobriety birthdays." The sobriety birthday is often more significant than their biological birthday because it marks the point at which they adopted a new manner of living. The sobriety birthday is in fact a re-birth day. It is a celebration of the True Self, which obviously was not born of a woman or brought about by reproductive means, but by a spiritual death and resurrection.

In the opening quotation, Jesus also says "the least in the Kingdom" which denotes a spectrum of realization (least to greatest). This spectrum recognizes both maturity and depth of insight into the Kingdom, ranging from the admission of powerlessness found in Alcoholics Anonymous to the realization of Oneness with God proclaimed by Jesus in the Gospel of John.

But either way, he who is of the Kingdom is greater than he who is of the world because Kingdom dwellers, so to speak, strive to live in accordance with their True Nature and not the law or the prescribed guidelines of religious and social institutions. In fact, the prescribed guidelines of churches and governments are legitimized only in so far as they relate back to the inclinations of human nature and aid individuals in their quest to realize or embody that nature for themselves.

Often, institutions fail to do this because they are more concerned with perpetuating their power, which is why people like Jesus, Gandhi, and King are seen as subversive by those institutions. They embody the principle freedom of the Kingdom, not the ways of the world.

Many Americans believe America is a Christian nation. The majority of Americans may self-describe as Christian, but it is becoming increasingly clear that the spiritual principles outlined in the Gospels—the principles Jesus embodied and Christians are called to follow—are repugnant to many American "Christians," especially those that frequently say America is a Christian nation. It is obvious from the Gospel account that Jesus offered a counterculture and because of this he was seen as a troublemaker. And he was. But he also still is. He causes trouble for anyone that claims to follow him because the path he outlines is not an easy path to walk.

Richard Rohr wrote in Jesus' Plan for a New World, "We keep worshiping the messenger, keeping Jesus up on statues and images, so we can avoid what he said. It's the best smokescreen in the world! We just keep saying, 'We love Jesus.' The more we talk about Jesus, the less we'll do what he said. That's the way the ego fools itself. And in this case, it's the way culture, nations and even churches have fooled themselves."

We worship the messenger but ignore the message. In the process, Jesus obtains admirers but not followers. We have confused our ego with the Christ image depicted in the Gospels, and tragically with the image of God that lives within us. This is spiritual materialism.

The Christ image is subversive. It undermines our ego and all of its attendant fears, prejudices, resentments, and defense mechanisms. This is a challenge. It requires that we empty ourselves. Letting go of the false-self and it's strategies takes the burden off of the True Self. It shifts the burden over to the false-self. This burden is the cross upon which the ego is crucified. And the resurrection of our True Life is proportionate to the death of our false-self. "He and I cannot dwell together in the same space." Without death there can be no rebirth. "We cannot welcome the presence," writes Rohr, "the Parousia, the full coming of Christ until we've let go of the old."

Beyond the noise, the chaos, the stress, fear, and anger we can feel our heart beating, calling out to us, pleading with us to let go of our false-self and to return to the life of the body. This is the call of Christ, which lives within us as the image of God, our True Self. Jesus shows the way. And only those that follow can be called Christian in any meaningful sense of the word, regardless of what beliefs they affirm. On the path Jesus outlined there is simply no room for admirers.

Order Finding God in the Body: A Spiritual Path for the Modern West by Benjamin Riggs today. Available in Paperback and Kindle on Amazon. 

Moving Beyond Literalism: Myth, Lent, & The Resurrection

The Bible is an anthology. It is a collection of books; not a single book as it is often thought to be. 

Furthermore, the Bible did not fall from the sky in its completed form. The books that comprise the Bible were penned over the course of approximately 900 years. Therefore, the books of the Bible were written by many different authors, each of which had their own worldview, interests, and agendas. As a result, the Bible narrative unfolds on several different levels. In it we see the curiosity of pre-scientific man musing over the origins of life and the cosmos. We see the ruling class advancing their socio-political agenda. We also see the voice of the oppressed and marginalized pushing back--pressing the issues of morality and social justice. And as the Biblical narrative advances, it becomes increasingly concerned with human spirituality.

The Bible records an evolving worldview, which is simply incompatible with the idea that it was dictated to a series of stenographers by an all-knowing anthropomorphic God. With every act of divine retribution, flood, exile, and with each emerging prophet, and every time the words "you have heard it said, but I say unto you" are uttered, the Bible ushers in a new vision, a new covenant. It is a record of mankind's wrestling with God, as well as an invitation for each successive generation to continue wrestling with the indwelling presence of the divine.

The Bible records mankind's unending exploration of the human soul. In it are snapshots of those remarkable moments from the inner-story of mankind. This record of mankind's inner history is known as mythology. Carl Jung wrote,

"The coming of consciousness was probably the most tremendous experience of primeval times, for with it a world came into being whose existence no one had suspected before. "And God said, 'Let there be light"' is the projection of that immemorial experience of the separation of consciousness from the unconscious."

From there the Bible poetically communicates mankind's longing to return from exile and reconnect with the unconscious wisdom of the body. It captures that moment when a people suddenly realized that God's will is realized, not by making the right sacrifice at the temple, but by consenting to the divine image within them. As the Biblical narrative unfolds, it becomes increasingly clear that the body is the temple: "Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in your center?"

Myth is mankind's on-going dialog with the divine. But the record is not closed.  It is our job to continue the dialog. We have to enter the myth. 

To understand myth you must involve yourself in the motif. You cannot stand back and read it like a newspaper. A literal reading of the Bible will lead you to the unintelligible conclusion that an all-knowing, all-powerful anthropomorphic God created a world with which he was so displeased that he had to offer up his son as a blood sacrifice to pacify his own wrath. This is nonsense.

Myth is a practice that you must immerse yourself in. When you realize that the path of the central figure (the hero) is presented to you as your way, your truth, and your life because their journey is a metaphor for your journey, the story dissolves into the immediacy of your own adventure. "The big question," says Joseph Campbell, "is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty yes to your adventure."

Mythology invites us on a journey. "I am looking for someone to share in an adventure," Gandalf said to Bilbo Baggins. The Hobbit is not a story about an adventure. The Hobbit is an invitation to adventure. Likewise, the Bible does not tell us about God; it invites us to wrestle with God. It invites us onto a path of spiritual practice that leads to union with God.

The liturgy invites us to act out the myth. 

For example, advent, in the Christian calendar, is the liturgical period leading up to Christmas. It is a process of preparation--of readying ourselves for the arrival of an important person or significant event. In this case, we are preparing ourselves for the birth of God into the world. But God does not live in the clouds, nor is he the exclusive property of another person. God dwells within us. So advent is a process of preparing ourselves to birth God into the world through our actions and Christmas is a celebration of this event as the meaning of our life. This is our adventure.

If God lives within us as our inmost Self and the central meaning of life is to birth God into the world, then it is not a blood sacrifice or even a ritualistic sacrifice that is required of us. Before our True Self can be realized, our false-self must be crucified: To put on the new self, created after the likeness of God, we must put off our old self,which belongs to our former manner of life.

The old self or the false-self is a self-centered habit of consciousness and behavior that revolves around the pacification of our fears and the immediate gratification of our desires. Being a habit, it is superfluous to our true nature. In fact, one could call it our second nature. The path of preparation or the act of putting off our second nature is called kenosis. Lent is the liturgical cycle that invites us onto the kenotic path outlined by Jesus. Lent anticipates the Easter miracle. It encourages us to empty ourselves of the false-self system, so that God maybe resurrected in our body.


Of course, spiritual practice is not reserved for liturgical observances. Everyday is a day where we must prepare ourselves for the resurrection of God in our body. We must empty ourselves so that the light of God may shine out through every thought, word, and deed.

Every time we look within ourselves for the causes and conditions of suffering, instead of looking for fault in others, we throw off the false-self. When we pray for those we resent, rather than lashing out, we move beyond our former manner of life, enabling the presence of God to pour out through our actions. When we let go of what we think, allowing the mind to relax into the truth of silence, our True Self is resurrected from the rubble of our disembodied life. This is the practice of contemplative prayer. Every time we set aside the strategies of the false-self system and turn into our life, armed only with an honest desire to be present and helpful, we are practicing lent. We are preparing ourselves for the Easter miracle.  

The Role of Myth in Spirituality: From Tantra to Alcoholics Anonymous

In the early 1930's J.R.R. Tolkien began work on The Hobbit. 

Had he taken up the task of penning an academic essay extolling the virtues of courage and self-sacrifice, I doubt we would remember him.

The overwhelming majority of people prefer storytellers to philosophers. Storytellers occupy a special place in society because they perform a sacred function. The storyteller's elevated status in society is owed to their ability to bypass our superficial sense of self-identity and arouse those energetic principles embedded deep in the human condition that animate our lives. They are the keepers and progenitors of our mythology.

Myth is a constant force in human history. Wherever man is found, so too is myth. Whereas history and science records the story of the cosmos and our species, mythology tells the remarkable story of mankind's inner journey. When mythology is mistaken for the former, it devolves into fundamentalism. 

Mythology is a form of spiritual practice and the storyteller is a kind of shaman. In fact, one could argue that what placebic efficacy tribal shamans demonstrate is due to the powerful union of myth and drama mastered by the most accomplished amongst them. The shaman enters into and embodies the myth of the people they serve. In his essay "The Effectiveness of Symbols," the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote:

"That the mythology of the shaman does not correspond to an objective reality does not matter. The sick woman believes in the myth and belongs to a society which believes in it. The tutelary spirits and malevolent spirits, the supernatural monsters and magical animals, are all a part of a coherent system on which the native conception of the universe is founded. The sick woman accepts these mythical beings or, more accurately, she has never questioned their existence. What she does not accept are the incoherent and arbitrary pains, which are an alien element in her system, but which the shaman, calling upon the myth, will re-integrate within a whole where everything is meaningful... But the shaman does more than utter the incantation; he is its hero, for it is he who, at the head of a supernatural battalion of spirits, penetrates the endangered organs and frees the captive soul."

A more sophisticated application of mythology can be found in Buddhism and Christianity. In Vajrayana Buddhism, there are meditation practices that remove the need for a shamanic middle-man, enabling the individual to enter the mythos themselves. Practitioners of Buddhist tantra visualize themselves as the deity, (yidam) which enables them to awaken to the principles associated with that deity, as well as subtler states of awareness--all of which, in reality, constitute the structure of Being. Through repetition, the practitioner incorporates the attributes associated with the deity into their lived experience. 

Similarly, Christian mystics practice what is called "The Imitation of Christ." They use the power of imagination to identify with the Christ image, which through repeated practice births the image of God into the world, thereby fulfilling the central aim of Christianity.

Exercises like yidam practice and the Imitation of Christ are perhaps the most profound systems of mythological application ever developed by mankind. They allow the indwelling presence of God to become incarnate. Their profundity is a result of their practicality, as well as the fact that one can utilize them without buying into the mythology on a literal level, which in the modern world is no longer useful. While they maybe the most profound expressions of myth, they are certainly not the only means of mythological expression nor are they the most common.

Storytelling is a powerful vehicle of spiritual transmission. It is also the most ubiquitous practice of mythology. Practitioners of this art include everyone from Homer to Nachman to Tolstoy, Tolkien and Joseph Campbell. Judaism is perhaps the best example of storytelling as spiritual practice. For rabbis like the Baal Shem Tov and Rebbe Nachman, storytelling was one of their preferred methods for unveiling the divine. Another example of this practice can be found in groups like Alcoholics Anonymous. 12 Step groups owe much of their success to the union of storytelling (personal nature of their meetings) coupled with an actionable path structure (12 Steps themselves).

When skillfully pursued, the study and practice of myth (or scripture) is a spiritual practice because it has the capacity to elicit the experience of transcendence. It has the ability to move us beyond the limited, self-centered world between our ears and connect us with a greater reality, the unconscious wisdom of the body. I will conclude with an excerpt from my book, Finding God in the Body:

"The symbols that populate the world’s great mythologies are born out of the body. Mankind cannot part ways with myth. He can distance himself from organized religion, but not spirituality and myth. 

“Throughout the inhabited world, in all times and under every circumstance, myths have flourished,” writes Campbell. “And they have been the living inspiration of whatever else may have appeared out of the activities of the human body and mind.” 

Mythology is rooted in our biology. It is a part of our makeup to the extent that it gives voice to our makeup. Mythology satisfies the desires of our heart without sacrificing the integrity of our intellect. In this sense, mythology occupies the space between fundamentalism and atheism.

Since spirituality is ultimately concerned with embracing and embodying the human condition, and myth is rooted in our very nature, myth is an integral part of the spiritual path. 

There is always a dimension of inner-space beyond words, definition, and explanation. This is the domain of myth. Mythological symbols mediate the relationship between the unconscious wisdom of the body and the intellect. Myth connects the formless realm of truth and inspiration with our rational mind. Our sacred myths are rooted in the transcendent realm of human experience—those aspects of our humanity that escape plain speech."

The study of myth is a spiritual practice and like all practices there is an element of how to. Myth is a map for our inner-journey. But before we can utilize the map, we have to learn how to read it. If you would like to learn more about the relationship between spirituality and mythology, meditation, personal inventory, and contemplative prayer, check out Finding God in the Body: A Spiritual Path for the Modern West. It is available in paperback and Kindle formats on Amazon.

How Belief Prevents Believing.

I have worked in substance abuse for the better part of a decade. 

I regularly lecture and give workshops on 12-Step spirituality at drug and alcohol treatment centers. Often it is those of agnostic or atheistic temperament that are thought to struggle most with the spirituality of the Twelve-Step program. But this has not been my experience.

In my experience, it is the more religiously inclined people that struggle with Twelve-Step spirituality. This is because Twelve-Step spirituality is action-based. Alcoholics Anonymous has no prescribed theology, no system of belief. It is a pragmatic spirituality. In a single AA meeting you might find a couple of Christians, a Buddhist, a Jew, maybe a Muslim, and a handful of people that identify as "spiritual but not religious." They all believe different things but enjoy the same result: sobriety. This is because they all follow the same course of action.

Pragmatic spirituality focuses on how you believe, not what you believe, which can be difficult to grasp if you are used to propositional religion. 

Evangelical Christianity is the largest single religious denomination in America, accounting for 25% of the total Christian population (40% in the South). Evangelical Christianity stresses the acceptance of certain theological propositions more than the practice of spiritual principles. It is more concerned with what you believe than it is how you believe it. When these people try to get sober they think they already have the spirituality angle worked out because they answer in the affirmative to all the right propositions. They already believe, and as far as they're concerned belief is what spirituality is all about. And that is why they struggle with Twelve-Step spirituality.

Their religiosity prevents them from seeing the obvious: "You already believe." If the problem persisted in the face of your belief, then more of that belief cannot possibly be the solution. The Twelve-Steps are referring to action or practice, when they prescribe spirituality, not the affirmation of supernatural propositions. You can believe that Jesus Christ is the one and only Son of God and still walk into a liquor store or the dope dealers house. Belief is worthless unless it effects our actions. In fact, a "belief" that fails to inspire action is no belief at all.

According to Pew Research, 58% of Americans believe the Bible is the Word of God. Over 80% of Evangelicals believe in the existence of heaven and hell. Now, think about that for a minute: There is an afterlife. You will spend eternity in either perfect bliss or unimaginable torment and God alone is the arbiter in this matter. He will weigh the balance of your life against his prescribed guidelines recorded in the Bible and assign you to eternity in either heaven or hell.

If you really believed that wouldn't you read the Bible cover-to-cover over and over again? Wouldn't you consult it before every consequential decision made? But what percentage of people who claim to believe all of that have read the Bible cover-to-cover?  Approximately, 1 in 3 Evangelicals  read the Bible once a month or less and 1 in 5 church-goers say they never read the Bible. Why does a substantial portion of the people who accept those religious propositions not read the Bible more frequently?

People often do not believe what they say they believe. 

At this point, we must distinguish between a belief and a thought. A thought is an unsubstantiated idea; whereas a belief is an idea we are inclined to trust based on some measure of evidence, even if we cannot prove it to be true or rationally explain our position. Belief is an idea or network of ideas substantiated by enough reason or experience to inspire action, though it falls short of knowledge or the state of knowing.

For example, imagine being in a strange house all alone. Late at night your mind may start to wander. Based on nothing at all, you start thinking there is someone in the house. But you don't call the police. Why? Because you know those thoughts are nothing more than the spontaneous ruminations of your paranoid mind. Now imagine you heard a strange noise in the house, something that sounded like a person rummaging around. Now you have reason to believe there is someone in the house, so you pick up the phone and call the police. You are not certain. It could be a mouse, a raccoon, or the old home settling, but there is enough evidence to take action. That is the threshold an idea must cross to become a belief.

Most people do not actually believe, they think. Their "beliefs" are in reality unsubstantiated ideas. This is a serious problem in American religion, which is ate up with fundamentalism. As I wrote in Finding God in the Body:


"The fundamentalist is an individual who subscribes to a system of ideas that do not belong to them. They rely upon a book or the experience of another person who relies, interestingly enough, on a book or the experience of someone else. This line of co-dependency stretches back to the source of the tradition, the owner of the original transcendent experience...Fundamentalists study books rather than using books to study themselves. They mistake myth as fact and read it like history. This inoculates religion. It says that the transcendent realm is off limits to everyone except the historical embodiment of transcendence that sits on the altar of their tradition."   

Fundamentalists have an unwavering attachment to a set of ideas that do not belong to them and lack the potency to effect meaningful change in their lives, partly because a strong in-group dynamic is established which utilizes the mechanism of fear and the threat of ostracization to perpetuate their psychological identification with those ideas. But those ideas are not beliefs. They lack the experiential component needed to effect action.

The experiential component comes from spiritual practice. That is why practice-based spirituality is so important. 

Practice can be seen as a process of experimentation and experimentation leads to experience. Ideas, which are otherwise unsubstantiated, can be tested using spiritual practice. The truth or validity of a certain spiritual ideas can be tested using prayer, meditation, and self-examination. In more religious language, you could say that practice makes us susceptible to revelation.  

Once again we must pause to clarify an important issue. When I say the "truth" of an idea can be verified through spiritual practice, I do not mean, for example, that the existence of a personal God can be proven using prayer. I mean "truth" in the pragmatic sense. William James wrote, in The Meaning of Truth, "The true, to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in our way of thinking, just as the right is only the expedient in our way of behaving." It is also worth noting that Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous and the author of the Twelve Steps, was deeply influenced by James.

The idea of a personal God, if properly understood and skillfully employed, can be proven effective--and therefore true in the pragmatic sense--through spiritual practice. Prayer can be used to transcend our limited, self-centered point of view and arouse courage, compassion, and sanity in the face of fear, anger and confusion. This obviously does not prove the existence of a creator God, but it does demonstrate the truth or expediency of the belief in God.

In order for the idea of God to be transformed into a belief in God the idea must be practiced. In Luke 6:32-34, Jesus defines practice as the application of an idea outside of our comfort zone: 

"If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. If you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again."

In other words, practice must be demanding. There must be sacrifice. Prayer cannot be limited to periods of quiet reflection in our bedroom. It has to enter our daily life, particularly when we are angry, stressed out, and afraid. The expediency of prayer is demonstrated when we pray beyond the false-self system and reconnect with the life of the body. There we tap into the power needed to "love our enemies, do good, and expect nothing in return." This is where we discover the truth of God or as Jesus said, "Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High." But this is easier said than done.

Bill Wilson wrote, "Almost none of us liked the self-searching, the leveling of our pride, the confession of shortcomings which the process requires for its successful consummation." It is easy to think, but the work and sacrifice that belief requires is demanding. So we go looking for the easier, softer way. "The gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it. For the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it."

For most people, the concept of God never matures into a proper belief--an idea that orients their entire being toward the world in which they live. Instead, it remains an impotent piece of intellectual property with which they psychologically identify. This identification is a form of spiritual bypassing. It circumvents the painstaking work of transformation by plastering over fear, anger, and self-centeredness with delusion and spiritual rhetoric. But that rhetoric is empty. "Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven."

What we think and say does not matter.  It is our actions that matter. When we think and talk of spiritual principles but fail to express those principles in our daily life, we betray our True Self. This is the betrayal of Christ, the Kiss of Judas. 

Spirituality is nothing if it is not the act by which we transcend the claustrophobic world between our ears and reconnect with the vastness and richness of our True Life. Any ideas about spirituality we possess or identify with must be measured against their capacity to realize this goal. If those ideas fail to inspire action or bring about meaningful change, then they must be discarded. If they inspire us to give freely of our time and energy, to love our enemies, and shed the skin of our false-self, then these ideas must be practiced until they become a working part of our mind. That is the path of transformation. 

Impermanence & the Truth of Selflessness

the following is an excerpt from Finding God in the Body

“No same man could walk through the same river twice because the man and the river have since changed.” ~ Heraclitus

We have all heard about impermanence. It has become a threadbare spiritual catchword, along with its sterile cousin, “the present moment.” Intellectually we understand the concept of impermanence but we do not feel it. This detached knowledge fails to effect change. The intent here is not to explain the concept of impermanence, but to point it out—to wake you up to the truth of impermanence within yourself.

Impermanence is a fact. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus famously said, “No same man could walk through the same river twice because the man and the river have since changed.” Impermanence is the nature of life and all that lives. In fact, change is just another word for living—“to live” means “to grow” and growth is change. But few of us are conscious of this fact, which means we go through life without living fully.

The natural world is not in a constant state of fluctuation. It is fluctuation. The natural world is forever growing, evolving, disintegrating, dying, and giving birth to new life. Furthermore, we are not born into this world. We are born out of it. Mankind is a product of nature. We grow out of the earth just like a dandelion, apple, or a pine tree. Since we come from nature, our nature is change—or better yet, our True Nature is the space or plasticity that facilitates birth, growth, adaptation, disintegration, and death. In short, the apple does not fall far from the tree.  

Our True Self is a process of unfolding, not a solid entity. We are not a noun, but a verb. When we think of ourselves as a solid, permanent entity we separate ourselves from nature, which lives within us as our True Nature. This is the inner meaning of “exile” in the Jewish tradition. The concept of spiritual exile comes from the Hebrew word galut, which, according to Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, means “everything is moving except me.”   

Alan Watts, the popular philosopher of Eastern religion, used to compare life to music. “The point of music is music,” he would say. People enjoy listening to music for the rhythm, the stream of melody. No one listens to music to hear it end. If they did, as Watts pointed out, their favorite songs would be the ones that began and ended with a single uproar of noise. Life is the same way. The point of life is to live, to participate in the melody. Melodies are streams; they are flowing. You cannot freeze them. When you do, there is no flow. That is spiritual death.

The only way to participate in the melody is through basic awareness. Basic awareness is open. It is fluid. An open mind loses its sense of self in the music, whereas a self-centered mind tries to pause the song. It is not enough to enjoy the music. The self-centered mind wants to know the words. It wants to identify with the song. So the false-self rewinds it, trying to commit the lyrics to memory and claim the song as its own.

Life is change. Change is life. They are the same thing. Trying to organize impermanent phenomena into permanent categories of thought is a frustrating and impossible waste of energy. It is like trying to herd cats. Furthermore, we are not other than this change—we are life. We are change. The river of life flows through our core, emptying out into the truth of selflessness. We are not a noun standing on the bank watching life flow by; we are a verb or a wave emerging out of the stream of impermanence.

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"Finding God in the Body draws from the wisdom of the world's traditions--Buddhism, contemplative Christianity, Judaism, and Twelve-Step spirituality--to present a modern view of embodied spirituality. It turns inward to examine the human condition, meeting personal suffering with heartfelt insight and transformative practice.

Ben Riggs leaves no stone un-turned, addressing each stage of the journey as he explores the space between fundamentalism and atheism to uncover a spirituality that resonates with the modern, Western mind. Then he binds that view to an actionable path of self-analysis, prayer, and meditation, which introduce the reader to the God of the body."

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The Light of Freedom

Spirituality is the Chaos of Daily Life

My favorite time of day is noon.

I’m usually in the living room hunched over my laptop, promoting my book or working on an article. Then suddenly my single-pointed focus is interrupted. A loud scream rips me away from my computer. I immediately feel irritated.

I want to finish what I’m working on: write one more paragraph, make one more change, just get to a good stopping point. But that cry will not be ignored. It pierces my concentration.

I put my work aside and make my way down the hall. As soon as I open the door that cry is transformed into an innocent laugh. My frustration falls away. I crawl in the bed with my two-year-old son. He lies next to me smiling, but only for a second before he starts climbing on top of me.

There is nowhere else I would rather be. This is my favorite time of the day.

All of the world’s great spiritual traditions agree that self-centeredness is at the root of human suffering. And they all provide us with practices meant to peel us away from our identification with the false self. Meditation, prayer, yoga, self-examination, and study all help dissolve our delusion and shine the light of awareness on the false-self.

But daily life is the only practice I have encountered that ruthlessly slaps at our self-grasping hand. This is particularly true of relationships.

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Spirituality is an ambiguous word. I define it as “a resonant mythos infused with an actionable path of self-analysis, prayer, and meditation that enables us to transcend the false-self system and reconnect with the vitality of the body.”

In short, spirituality is concerned with one thing and one thing only: transcending the ego.

This can happen in meditation, prayer, savasana. It can happen while we are walking, running, or studying. But it can also happen while we are loading the dish washer, cutting the grass, or arguing with our spouse—if we are present and willing to respond with authenticity. The moment of awakening might be heralded in by a honking horn or a crying baby, rather than a meditation bell or a choir of angels.

There is more than one way to skin a Buddha.

The Tantric traditions of India—Buddhist and Hindu—have long understood the immense spiritual potential packed into daily life. In these traditions it is the moms and dads, the husbands and wives, the shopkeepers and farmers that are venerated, not the monk or the recluse.

Unfortunately, daily life is too often seen as an obstacle to spiritual growth, rather than the path itself. Perhaps our spouse says something that pushes our button or our child is being especially needy that day. We become impatient. Anger and frustration start bubbling up. The ego’s tendency is to blame the other. It lays our feelings at their feet. It says that our frustration is the result of their behavior. This leaves us feeling stuck.

Blame chains us to our misery, waiting on the other to change their ways so we can be happy.

The truth is that our feelings are the result of our own self-clinging. Circumstances expose the ego. They point out the areas of our life the ego has claimed.

When my child wakes up from his nap and his cries pull me away from my work, I’m only frustrated because I am identified with that work. I have become hyper-focused on that work. In the Buddhist tradition, we would say I’m living in the animal realm—piggishly pressing forward with blinders on that blot out everything except for the mud hole my ego is wallowing in.

In my case, it is doubly interesting because I am most likely writing about spirituality when all of this happens, which means I’m looking at the finger and not the moon. I am focused on the words but have forgotten their meaning.

Spiritual practice is about letting go of the ego. When daily life exposes our self-grasping tendencies, we are granted an opportunity to actually practice spiritual principles. In that moment, a portal opens. If we choose to drop our self-centered narrative and step through that gate, we discover our path.

Spirituality does not exist independent of our suffering. The Buddha said as much in the First Noble Truth. “Our path” is like a series of stepping stones that appear the moment we become aware of our shortcomings. What we call obstacles, pitfalls, and shortcomings, the Buddha calls the spiritual path.

Spiritual principles do not exist in a vacuum. They are born into the world through our actions and daily life is our midwife. Take patience as an example. In order to practice patience, there must be an asshole trying our nerves. When someone pushes our buttons they are inviting us onto our path. Without impatience the practice of patience is just a simulation. This is true of all spiritual principles.

We cannot practice generosity without a needy person—whether that be a toddler or a beggar—demanding something of us that we cling to. Morality is little more than a self-righteous façade without the presence of temptation. It is temptation that invites us to move beyond self-will by affording us the occasion to do what is right, regardless of whether we stand to profit from it or not.

We often think of freedom as the ability to do whatever we want, whenever we want. This is not freedom. It is bondage. It is the bondage of ego.

True freedom is found in freedom from self. When we are free of the ego we are no longer reactive. If, when our buttons are pressed, we move beyond the petulant, self-centered narrative between our ears, down into the silence of body, we will discover the power to meet anger with loving-kindness, fear with courage, temptation with character, and our frustrations with patience.

This is spiritual growth. Growth doesn’t happen in the safe and quiet space of bedroom. We cultivate the capacity to let go during our formal practice, but true growth happens in relationship.
Meditation, prayer, and yoga are all practices—and practice is essential—but daily life is where the rubber meets the road.

Practice pulls back the veil a bit. It enables us to glimpse the truth of selflessness, but that truth is born into the world through our actions. It is in daily life, in relationship—when we are caught up in self clinging—then and only then, are we afforded the opportunity to let go.

We cannot practice letting go, unless we are holding onto something. Anytime we are disturbed—whether we are angry, depressed, jealous, afraid, obsessed, or bored—it is because we are clinging to ego. This clinging is not only the cause of our suffering, it is the only thing that prevents us from reconnecting with our True Life. And we are often unaware of this clinginess until something tries to pry open our hand. So when we step off of the cushion or the mat and into our daily life, we are passing through the eye of the needle. We are stepping onto the path and on the spiritual path, the meditation bell sounds more like a crying child or a beggar asking for a dollar.

I will close with a relevant excerpt from my book Finding God in the Body: A Spiritual Path for the Modern West:

“Relationships are difficult because they demand that we give of our Self. This is hard because the false-self is selfish. It wants to avoid discomfort and clings to immediate gratification. Creative love matures us by reminding us that we cannot hope to grow into our True Self without something demanding our false-self in return.

“The resurrection of our True Life is proportionate to the death of our inauthentic life. The false-self is incapable of accepting this truth. It is bound to itself. Love is free to accept this maxim. This is the power of love to endure all things: marriage, divorce, success, failure, friendship, rivalries, heartache, and death. The freedom of love enables us to adapt to life’s changing circumstances. From the point of view of creative love, there are no problems, only opportunities. If the problem can be solved it is not a problem, just something for you to work with; if it can’t be solved, it is not a problem, just something to accept and move on. Creative love sees everything as workable.”

Suffering and Spiritual Practice

Excerpt from Finding God in the Body: A Spiritual Path for the Modern West

"Wanting to stop does not lead to transformation. What is an addiction apart from the perpetuation of an unwanted behavior? The idea that swearing off overcomes suffering is an adult version of the adolescent attitude that, following our first break-up declares, “Love stinks! I will never date again.” We are trying to protect ourselves from pain instead of listening to it. “I am done,” means, “I am out of here!” This is the point of departure. It is where we turn away from life."

Spiritual practice enables us to turn into our suffering, to accept it. Meditation, prayer, and self-examination enable us to work with our suffering. This work is redemptive. It is transformative.

~ Quote from Chapter One: The Truth of Suffering, Finding God in the Body

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