Part 5 (1/2)

This man had devoted his life to the values of stage two, and the challenge he faced now was to expand, not outwardly, but inside. In stage two the ego is so bent on accomplishment that it ignores the threat of emptiness. Power for its own sake has no meaning, and the challenge of acquiring more and more power (along with its symbols in terms of money and status) still leaves a huge vacuum of meaning. This is why absolute loyalty is demanded by G.o.d at this stage-to keep the faithful from looking too deeply inside. Let's clarify that this is not an actual demand made by the Almighty; it is another projection. The retired executive in my anecdote had a decision to make, whether to begin to cultivate an inner life or to start up some enterprise that would give him a new external focus. The course of least resistance would be to gear up a second business; the harder road would be to heal the disorder of his inner life.

This is the choice that carries everyone from stage two to stage three.

What is my greatest strength? ...

Accomplishment.

What is my biggest hurdle? ...

Guilt, victimization.

Anyone who finds satisfaction in being an accomplished, skilled worker will find stage two a very tempting place to rest on the spiritual journey. Often the only ones who break free to a higher stage have had some drastic failure in their lives. This isn't to say that failure is spiritually worthy. It carries its own dangers, primarily that you will see yourself as a victim, which make the chances for spiritual progress worse than ever. But failure does raise questions about some basic beliefs in stage two. If you worked hard, why didn't G.o.d reward you? Does he lack the power to bestow good fortune-or has he forgotten you entirely? As long as such doubts don't arise, the G.o.d of stage two is the perfect deity for a compet.i.tive market economy. He has been cynically referred to as the G.o.d of getting and spending. However, there is still the problem of guilt.

”I came from a small town in the Midwest, the only student from my high school to ever make it to the Ivy League. Getting in was the prize I valued the most,” a friend of mine recalled.

”A month ago I was leaving work at my law firm, on the way to a new restaurant. I was late, and as it happened, a homeless man had chosen the doorway of our building to spend the night. He was blocking the door, and I had to step over his body to get into the cab. Of course I've seen homeless people before, but this was the first time I literally had to walk over one.

”I couldn't shake that image the whole time I was riding uptown, and then I remembered that the first month I was in college, twenty years ago, I was walking in the part of Boston known as the Combat Zone. It was one string of bars and adult bookstores after another. I was scared and intrigued at the same time, but as I was leaving, a stumbleb.u.m on the sidewalk ahead of me went into a seizure. He fell down, and some people ran to call an ambulance, but I just kept on walking. Twenty years later, sitting there in the cab, I could feel the old remorse wash over me. I had been lying to myself, you see. The homeless man in front of my building wasn't the first time I had walked over somebody.”

Despite its external rewards, stage two is a.s.sociated with the birth of guilt. This is a form of judgment that requires no all-seeing authority, except at the beginning. Someone has to lay down the commandments defining absolute right and wrong. Afterward, the law-abiding will enforce their own obedience. If you translate the process back to the family, the origins of guilt can be traced along the same lines. A two-year-old who tries to steal a cookie is reprimanded by his mother and told that what he is doing is wrong. Until that point taking a cookie isn't stealing; it is just following what your ego wants to do.

If the child repeats the same act again, it turns into stealing because he is breaking a commandment, and in most families some sort of punishment will follow. Now the child is caught between two forces-the pleasure of doing what he wants and the pain of being punished. If a conscience is to develop, these two forces have to be fairly equal. In that case, the child sets up his own boundaries. He will take a cookie when it is ”right”

(permitted by mother) and not take one when it is ”wrong” (causes guilt through a bad conscience.) Freud called this the development of the superego, our internal rule maker. Super means above, in that the superego watches over the ego from above, holding the threat of punishment ever at the ready. Learning to modify the harshness of the superego can be extremely difficult. Just as some believers never get to the point of accepting that G.o.d might be willing to bend the rules every once in a while, neurotics have never learned how to put their conscience in perspective. They feel tremendous guilt over small infractions; they develop rigid emotional boundaries, finding it hard to forgive others; self-love remains out of reach. Stage two brings the comfort of laws clearly set down, but it traps you into putting too much value on rules and boundaries, to the detriment of inner growth.

What is my greatest temptation? ...

Addiction.

It's no coincidence that a wealthy and privileged society is so p.r.o.ne to rampant addictions. (1) Stage two is based on pleasure, and when pleasure becomes obsessive, the result is addiction. If a source of pleasure is truly fulfilling, there is a natural cycle that begins with desire and ends in satiation. Addiction never closes the circle.

Stage two is also power-based, and power is notoriously selfish. When a doting parent finds it almost impossible to let a coddled child break free, the excuse may be ”I love you too much, I don't want you to grow up.” Yet the unspoken motive is self-centered: I crave pleasure it brings me to have you remain a child. The G.o.d of stage two is jealous of his power over us because it pleases him. He is addicted to control. And like human addiction, the implication is that G.o.d is not satisfied, no matter how much control he exerts.

Psychiatrists meet people every day who complain about the emotional turmoil in their lives and yet are blindly addicted to drama. They cannot survive outside the dance of love-hate; they create tension, foster mistrust, and never leave well enough alone. Other addictions are also based on behavior: the need to have something wrong in your life (or to create it if it doesn't exist), the obsession over things going wrong-this is the ”what if” addiction-and finally the compulsion to be perfect at all costs.

This last addiction has taken secular form in people who crave the perfect family, perfect home, and perfect career. They do not even see the irony that such ”perfection” is dead; it can be bought only at the price of killing our inborn spontaneity, which by its nature can never be controlled. There is a corresponding spiritual state, however, that aims to please G.o.d through a life that has no blemish whatever. In the loyalty oath of Psalm 101, the believer makes promises no one could live up to: I will set before myself no sordid aim ...

I will reject all crooked thoughts; I will have no dealing with evil.

Such absolutism itself amounts to an addiction-and it is here in stage two that fanaticism is born.

The fanatic is caught in a self-contradiction. Whereas an orthodox believer can feel satisfied if he obeys the law down to the last detail, the fanatic must purify his very thoughts. Complete control over the mind is unachievable, but this doesn't prevent him from imposing ever-stricter vigilance on ”crooked thoughts.” Fanatics are also obsessed by other people's purity, opening an endless quest to police human imperfection.

This fate lies in wait for those who get stuck in stage two: They lose sight of the actual goal of spiritual life-to free humans and allow them to live in innocence and love. This loss cannot be repaired until the devotee stops being so concerned with the law. To do that he must find an inner life, which will never happen as long as he is policing his own desires. Vigilance kills all spontaneity in the end. When a person begins to see that life is more than trying to be perfect, the bad old desires rear their heads again. Only this time they are seen as natural, not evil, and the road is open for stage three. It comes as a source of wonder when turning inward breaks the spell of I, me, mine and ends its cravings.

STAGE THREE:.

G.o.d OF PEACE.

(Restful Awareness Response) No one could accuse the earlier G.o.d of stages one or two of being very interested in peace. Whether unleas.h.i.+ng floods or inciting warfare, the G.o.d we've seen so far relishes struggle. Yet even such powerful ties as fear and awe begin to fray. ”You believe that you were created to serve G.o.d,” an Indian guru once pointed out, ”but in the end you may discover that G.o.d was created to serve you.” The suspicion that this might be true launches stage three, for until now the balance has all been in G.o.d's favor. Obedience to him has mattered far more than our own needs.

The balance begins to s.h.i.+ft when we find that we can meet our own needs.

It takes no G.o.d ”up there” to bring peace and wisdom, because the cerebral cortex already contains a mechanism for both. When a person stops focusing on outer activity, closes his eyes, and relaxes, brain activity automatically alters. The dominance of alphawave rhythms signals a state of rest that is aware at the same time. The brain is not going to sleep, but it is not thinking, either. Instead there is a new kind of alertness, one that needs no thoughts to fill up the silence. Corresponding changes occur in the body at the same time, as blood pressure and heart rate decrease, accompanied by lessened oxygen consumption.

These various changes do not sound overly impressive when put in technical terms, but the subjective effect can be dramatic. Peace replaces the mind's chaotic activity; inner turmoil ceases. The Psalms declare, ”Commune with your own heart on your bed, and be still.” And even more explicitly, ”Be still and know that I am G.o.d.” This is the G.o.d of stage three, who can be described as Detached Calm Offering consolation Undemanding Conciliatory Silent Meditative It hardly seems possible that this nonviolent deity emerged from stage two-and he didn't. Stage three transcends the willful, demanding G.o.d that once prevailed, just as the new brain transcends the old. Only by discovering that peace lies within does the devotee find a place that divine vengeance and retribution cannot touch. In essence the mind is turning inward to experience itself. This forms the basis of contemplation and meditation in every tradition.

The first solid research on the restful awareness response came with the study of mantra meditation (specifically Transcendental Meditation) in the 1960s and 1970s. Until then the West had paid little scientific attention to meditation. It didn't really occur to anyone that if meditation was genuine, some s.h.i.+ft in the nervous system must accompany it. Early experiments at the Menninger Foundation had established, however, that some yogis could lower their heart rate and breathing almost to nil.

Physiologically they should have been on the brink of death; instead they reported intense inner peace, bliss, and oneness with G.o.d. Nor was this phenomenon simply a curiosity from the East.

In December 1577 a Spanish monk in the town of Avila was kidnapped in the middle of the night. He was carted off to Toledo, to be thrown into a church prison. His captors were not bandits but his own Carmelite order, against whom he had committed the grave offense of taking the wrong side in a fierce theological dispute. As advisor to a house of Carmelite nuns, he had given them permission to elect their own leader instead of leaving it to the bishop.

From our modern perspective this dispute is all but meaningless. But the monk's superiors were seriously displeased. The monk underwent horrendous torture. His unlit cell ”was actually a small cupboard, not high enough for him to stand erect. He was taken each day to the rectory, where he was given bread, water, and sardine sc.r.a.ps on the floor. Then he was subjected to the circular discipline: while he knelt on the ground, the monks walked around him, scouring his bare back with their leather whips. At first a daily occurrence, this was later restricted to Fridays, but he was tortured with such zeal that his shoulders remained crippled for the rest of his life.”

The tormented monk has come down to us as a saint, John of the Cross, whose most inspired devotional poetry was written at this exact time.

While imprisoned in his dark cupboard, Saint John cared so little about his ordeal that the only thing he begged for was a pen and paper so he could record his ecstatic inner experiences. He felt a particular joy at communing with G.o.d in a place the world couldn't touch: On a dark, secret night, starving for love and deep in flame, O happy, lucky flight!

unseen I slipped away, my house at last was calm and safe.

These opening lines from ”Dark Night” describe the escape of the soul from the body, which delivers the poet from pain to joy. But for this to happen, the brain has to find a way to detach inner experience from outer.

In medicine we run across instances where patients seem remarkably immune to pain. In cases of advanced psychosis, someone who has become catatonic is rigid and unresponsive to stimulation. There is no sign of reacting to pain-just as with a patient whose nerves are dead. Chronic schizophrenics have been known to cut themselves with knives or burn their arms with lit cigarettes while showing no awareness of pain.

We cannot simply lump a great poet and saint, however, with the mentally ill. In the case of St. John of the Cross, there was a pressing need to separate from his tormentors. He had to find an escape route, and perhaps that was the psychological trigger for his ecstasy. In his poetry he flees to his secret lover, Christ, who caresses and soothes him in his arms: ... and there my senses vanished in the air.

I lay, forgot my being, and on my love I leaned my face.

All ceased. I left my being, leaving my cares to fade among the lilies far away.

Saint John describes with precisely chosen words the transition from the material level our bodies are trapped in to the quantum level where physical pain and suffering have no bearing. Lying beneath the spiritual beauty of the experience, its basis is the restful awareness response.

To put yourself in a comparable situation, imagine that you are a marathon runner. Marathons test the body's extremes of endurance and pain; at a certain point long-distance runners enter ”the zone,” a place that transcends physical discomfort.

The runner no longer feels pain as part of his experience. The G.o.d of peace is detached.

The runner's mind stops fighting and struggling. The G.o.d of peace is calm.

The zone makes one feel immune to harm. The G.o.d of peace offers consolation.

Winning and losing are no longer a driving force.

The G.o.d of peace is undemanding.

There is no need to fight; the zone will take care of everything. The G.o.d of peace is conciliatory.

The runner's mind quiets down. The G.o.d of peace is silent.

In the zone one expands beyond the limits of the body, touching the wholeness and oneness of everything. The G.o.d of peace is meditative.