Editor's Note: Conversations with Lorian is a collection of different voices and perspectives responding to inquiries pertaining to Incarnational Spirituality. Often we receive questions that don't have a single, uniform answer, due to the ways that individuality and sovereignty shapes our practice. At times like this we like to gather a number of responses from teachers, priests and other colleagues in order to honor our diverse yet complimentary approaches to Lorian's work in the world.
Please note that Conversations with Lorian blog posts are the personal insights and opinions of individual practitioners and do not represent others in Lorian or the Lorian Association as a whole.
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Question :
“I’m a person who has, for years now, been disillusioned by the new age focus of hope, light, butterflies, and ‘if you tune into energies high enough and correctly, all will be well’.
Life on this planet also includes pain. Life here is not life without suffering.
These are realities. This duality is real. So is paradox.
My question: Is there a place in Lorian’s focus for Conscious Suffering as a subtly chosen path? Or is this a ‘compromise path’ for those who ‘faltered‘ along the way, a path for those of us who are less evolved? - to be navigated better and more correctly in a future incarnation?
I balk often at the spiritual need to remain serene and unruffled on a planet so energized by ruffling, flow and energetic (and emotional) extremes that I sometimes wonder if we are here to fully experience life at all.” - J.S.
I too have witnessed the pressure in spiritual communities to conform to positions that exclude suffering, though I think this is far from being a “new age focus.” From the moment human beings first invented the idea called belief, we also created a structure around it that associated misfortune with punishment.
It can be equally problematic, though, to attach oneself to conscious suffering. Many of us are spiritually sophisticated enough to recognize the importance of paradox, yet often the only ways we can think to create balance is to move to the side of the boat where fewer people sit. (I’m guilty of this!) We position ourselves in an either/or state, and cling to an idea of transcendence as an elevation above conflict.
Real transcendence is the ability to focus on the internal movement of spirit regardless of where we’re sitting. A spiritual practice focused on either love and light, or suffering and pain, strikes me as our personalities clinging to stories about life, instead of accepting certain complexities that are simply part of the cost of admission.
I personally feel the beauty of Incarnational Spirituality lies in its simplicity. We are here - that means we belong. God exists anywhere we are. For me right now, God exists in a middle aged, brown-skinned cis heterosexual woman. This body and life is not just a suit that I must transcend in order to have a spiritual experience. It’s an integral part of that experience. I have experienced racism, cruelty, sickness. I have been physically and emotionally abused. I have suffered health challenges. At a glance, society would see me as marginalized in multiple ways. At times I have seen myself as a victim. Other times a survivor. All of these versions hold some truth. Yet I also recognize that when I said yes to this strange and surreal adventure, God chose to express itself through me in this particular form and shape. And I came here to experience something, to achieve something, to be something here in an incarnated form that really isn’t possible without a body, mind, spirit and complex set of emotions. There are things we all came to do that really aren’t possible anywhere except on earth in skin suits of humanity.
Having said that, I don’t wish to ignore conscious suffering completely. Life on earth does seem to require some suffering. Why? Spiritual teacher Reverend Cynthia Bourgealt once illustrated the reasons as part of a lecture series I listened to a handful of years ago. Here is what I gleaned from her teaching:
God, the One, the Almighty, was undivided. An infinite artist and creator always seeks to unlock their own potential, so God divided itself into an infinite number of expressions of self. In one incarnation, God chose to be, say, a gay priest struggling to come to terms with the church’s teachings and their inner experience. In another incarnation, God chose to be that priest’s father torn between what they had been taught of right and wrong and love for their child. Both are expressions of the same God.
How can we not have suffering on Earth with so many different incarnate expressions of Oneness running around loose? God’s experience of Themself generates conflict. Why? It’s because God wants to expand beyond God’s own limitations. Expansion requires tension.
I know this view may be difficult to accept. We don’t easily identify as divine expressions any people or forces whose actions create opposition to our values. Yet every person that lives and has ever lived has a purpose in being here. Apart from the inherent challenge in this statement is the fact that resistance to the Sacredness within others often masks a resistance to the Sacredness within ourselves.
The Compromise Path
I find it interesting how our human minds got it twisted that an absence of conflict equates with a more spiritually evolved person. I’d say the opposite is true. The truly evolved people are the heavy lifters. A sweeping glance at modern history immediately produces a few outstanding characters: Victor Frankl, Etty Hillesum, John Lewis. In moments when I feel like I’ve had all that I can take of challenging conditions on planet Earth, I look to Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl and An Interrupted Life by Etty Hillesum. I don’t know how anyone could walk joyfully away from the Holocaust with their spirit intact, but Victor Frankl did. Etty Hillesum died at Auschwitz in 1943, and her journal stands as a testament to the resiliency of the human mind, body and spirit to transcend suffering by wholly embracing the state of one’s life exactly as it is. My father recently shared with me a similar degree of respect for civil rights leader and US senator John Lewis: I don’t know how that man survived what he did and still loved people.
It seems to me that the lightweights are those who surround themselves with "love and light", and retreat from any experience which contradicts their ideas of spiritual abundance. If God loves me, then he will bless me with happiness, comfort and ease. There's nothing wrong with desiring a life free of pain; however, true spiritual abundance is the ability to connect with the God within oneself, no matter one's external circumstances. It's finding the Sacred Inside the Fire.
On September 30, 1942, just over a year before she was slaughtered in a Nazi concentration camp, Etty Hillesum wrote the following in her journal:
“To be true to one’s own spontaneity, to what one set out to do in an all too spontaneous moment.
To be true to every feeling and thought that has started to germinate.
To be true in the fullest sense of the word, to be true to God, to one’s own best moments.
If I have one duty in these times, it is to bear witness. I think I have learned to take it all in, to read life in one long stretch. And in my youthful arrogance I am often sure that I can remember every least thing I see and that I shall be able to relate it all one day. Still, I must try to put it down now.
I seem able to see ever more clearly the gaping chasms which swallow up man’s creative powers and joie de vivre. They are holes in our own mind. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. And: man suffers most through his fears of suffering. The body keeps leading the spirit, when it should be the other way around…
How much I want to write. Somewhere deep inside me is a workshop in which Titans are forging a new world. I once wrote in despair: ‘ it is inside my little skull that this world must be rethought, that it must be given fresh clarity.’ I still occasionally think so, with the same, almost diabolical, presumption. I know how to free my creative powers more and more from the snares of material concerns, from the idea of hunger and cold and danger. They are, after all, imaginary phantoms, not the reality. Reality is something one shoulders with all the difficulties. And as one shoulders them so one's resilience grows stronger. But the idea of suffering (which is not the reality, for real suffering is always fruitful and can turn life into a precious thing) must be destroyed. And if you destroy the ideas behind which life lies imprisoned as behind bars, then you liberate your true life, its real mainsprings, and then you will also have the strength to bear real suffering, your own and the world’s.”
- An Interrupted Life: The Diaries of Etty Hillesum 1941 - 1943
No matter who we are, where we are, and the darkness of the times in which we live, there is a path of light. Truly, the only compromise that I can see lies in the denial of even the tiniest aspect of our human experiences, no matter how overwhelming it may seem in moments of vulnerability. I don’t think we need to consciously seek out suffering as a life choice. Instead we should openheartedly accept the unfolding of our lives in fullness. After all, they, with their particular difficulties and graces, are the places where the Gods within us seek to embrace the world.
- Drena Griffith