By Stuart Dunbar

A Leap of Logic

I currently work as an IT specialist in the health insurance industry. It’s not a particularly inspiring profession. In fact these days, with all the debate about health care going on in America, I sometimes feel like I’m working against progress. Most people I know well think it’s a strange choice of trade for someone who studied philosophy at Yale and spent fifteen years as a close student of spiritual teacher Andrew Cohen. And I agree.

I’ve learned many lessons at work but I’m eager to do something more with my life. The large corporate environment is a different world than the one I was trained to be in. It has different values and different rules. You feel like you’re plugged into a machine rather than contributing anything of value to the world. I can survive quite well there, but I don’t think I can ever excel. I just don’t believe in it that much.

After giving so much of my energy, time, and resources to furthering Andrew’s cause and helping to develop a dimension of the human experience that few people can actually relate to, it’s easy to feel rather empty handed in a world that is occupied with other things. In fact it’s tempting to question what all the drama of spiritual work was really about. If I follow this line of thought it takes me down some dark alleys. But it’s important to shed some light there.

The thinking starts something like this: I couldn’t let go enough to embrace the life that I discovered with my teacher. Something was missing. Maybe I didn’t have the depth of experience I needed, maybe when it came down to it, I just didn’t have the interest or the intention, but in the end I just didn’t trust what was happening to me enough to continue. Though it’s not innocent, this position is perhaps tenable. That is, if I leave it here. One doesn’t have to look very far to find a reason why we might find it hard to trust the great wave of passion, insecurity, love, and fear that unfolds in us on the spiritual journey. Anyone who has set foot in this territory for real knows what I’m talking about. But many people do not leave it here. That is to say, many spiritual seekers do not accept responsibility for their own lack of faith in the challenging process of spiritual development.

Instead, they are compelled to find reasons why they turned away from their ideals. They need a reason why they didn’t trust what was happening to them. They need something to wrap it with, something to help them integrate the trauma that is the very nature of spiritual experience. Rather than honor its magnitude, this Great Unravelling of who we think we are, they replace the complexity of the spiritual journey with something smaller, something they can more easily understand. They begin to nourish their doubts. Perhaps their teacher didn’t provide the depth of experience they needed to endure their trials, or maybe others made it too difficult, or maybe the whole situation was somehow lacking in integrity. Instead of living with the fact that they just couldn’t trust Life as much as it demanded, they insist, usually self-righteously, that they were asked to trust something that was fundamentally untrustworthy.

There is an obvious leap of logic in this response. It goes like this: we didn’t become the heroic soul that we wanted to become. Therefore, our Teacher or Guru must not be the Master we thought he was, so we should find faults in him that justify why we didn’t change all that much. How about this instead? Maybe we didn’t become the heroic soul that we wanted to become, because we aren’t really that heroic.

It’s amazing how alluring the victim logic is when who we think we are suddenly comes into question. We can spend the better part of our youthful energy believing our life to be profoundly significant. Then suddenly our self-image is challenged and before you know what has happened you aren’t the rock star of your own dream anymore. The spotlights turn off, the house lights turn on, and you’re left with a shattered sense of self in a world that smells like cigarettes and stale beer.

When our self-image is challenged in this way, what happens next depends on how big our heart is. We know now that the idea that we had of ourselves is false, but we haven’t figured out how to be in the world without it. We don’t know how to relate to others, how to respond to life as it hurtles its challenges toward us. Because of the inherent insecurity in this position, it’s difficult not to move impulsively away from it.

There is, I would suggest, a very big-hearted response to this experience, certainly bigger than fighting against the truth that has been revealed to us, and possibly bigger than struggling the rest of our lives to become what we thought we once were. Painful as our experience may be, it is of course still possible to trust.

Rags to Riches

Before I met Andrew I had already had a stark look at the difference between who I thought I was and the reality of my actual life. Eight years before I met Andrew, I had graduated from college, a smart, ambitious, young man. Straight out of school, I started a successful non-profit job training business for inner-city kids. I was very idealistic. I wanted to change the world and I was convinced I could play a part in that change. But things became more difficult than I had expected. The reality of running a business started to land, and my idealistic dreams were challenged. Ultimately I didn’t have the interest to stick it out. So I began to look for something more meaningful than a politically correct life.

An old friend from high school showed up at my door. She had just had a near death experience and had a deep spiritual understanding at the time. She and I always shared a curiosity about the deeper meaning of life. We also shared a sense of abandon and wanted to break the mold. So I took the risk and got together with her. We set off to find a world that was different than the one that we had been handed. We were very close and deeply committed to each other. We got married because it seemed like the right thing to do. But we were very naïve and like many who have walked this path before us, we entered the dark and painful labyrinth of confusing emotional demons that lurk behind the closed doors of so many relationships. Before we knew how bad things could get, we were in too deep.

For many reasons that we did not fully understand, my wife was tormented by issues of mistrust. She would often flip from being very generous and kind to very angry and suspicious. She would turn on me with fierce intensity. I didn’t understand what was happening at the time. I wasn’t always innocent of her accusations but their intensity far outweighed the offence. I could tell when these episodes were about to occur, but I couldn’t do anything to avoid them. After several years, I started to fight back against my growing self-doubt, and my anger began to destroy us both.

I began to wake up from this nightmare about five years into it. We had had a particularly bad fight, it was the middle of the night and I had sped off in the car, not knowing if I was going to come back. I was really losing it. I had no control of my anger anymore. Inside me was a well of rage that had no bottom and it scared the hell out of me. It was clear that this marriage was not working, but I simply had no room in myself for that fact. It was also clear that I couldn’t endure the fighting anymore. I parked in a remote spot in the road and in the pitch dark began screaming at Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad, Krishna, every great saint I could think of, demanding some answers. I don’t think you could call it prayer exactly, it certainly wasn’t pretty, but in hind sight I think I got someone’s attention.

I heard Andrew speak for the first time about a year later. I was studying to be an engineer and had managed to keep it together fairly well in school, but by this time my personal life was in pretty bad shape. Isolated, frightened, and confused, I heard something in Andrew’s words that I had not considered before. Who I am, he said, is not my mind. When I look back on it, this realization made all the difference in the world.

In my first private conversation with Andrew, still struggling to understand what was happening to me, I told him that I was afraid I was joining a cult. I remember how straight his response was, “In a way, that’s what this is, a charismatic teacher and a group of passionate followers.” He was clearly unfazed by what people thought of him and the implication was that I had to make up my own mind whether it was positive or not. From behind my reservations I told him about my life, not sure if I wanted to hear his response. Years later he would often refer to how crazy I was at that time, but from that first meeting, out of the goodness of his heart and simply because I continued to express the interest, he started to help me put the pieces back together.

I had never had a spiritual teacher before. I had no experience of Enlightenment teachings to speak of. Like most people with my background I was deeply suspicious of the whole scene. But I knew the Truth when I heard it and I knew that somehow I had stumbled upon something extraordinary, a truly awakened man with a powerful ability to communicate his experience. Few people are blessed with such an opportunity; fewer still recognize it as such. I don’t know why, but I did recognize it. I knew that if I could hang in there, this man could show me how to be sane in a world that had gone very wrong.

Some people say that they trusted Andrew almost immediately when they met him. My wife certainly did. She had no doubt from the start that Andrew was for real. For others, like me, it took more time. Andrew would encourage new people to really check him out before getting too close. He knew what he was asking of people and he knew this relationship wasn’t for everybody. The profound trust that I have in Andrew now is something that I gained through the hard work of renouncing my doubts, keeping my eyes open, and taking the risk to stay with it. Trust comes from seeing the results. If a Teacher’s sole intention really is to free your spirit from your limited self then in the end the whole journey is about trusting him enough to follow him off the edge of what you think you know and who you think you are.

You could say I followed Andrew off that edge but then clawed my way back up the cliff to have a second thought. As deep as my trust is in him as a Teacher and a human being, I haven’t trusted him enough to take me further than that. This is just a fact that I have to face everyday, but what should I conclude from it? Is this fundamental lack of trust there because of something he is doing or something I am doing? The whole firestorm around spiritual teachers and Gurus, Andrew included, comes down to this question.

If you haven’t been in the heat of a relationship with a spiritual Teacher or Guru then you really cannot understand the depth of this question. When one would-be follower asked Jesus if he could go home to bury his father before continuing with the quest, Jesus supposedly said “Follow me now! Let the dead bury the dead.” It’s an outrageous thing to say. Think about it. What would it take to trust a teaching like this? And could anyone outside the context of that relationship be expected to understand where Jesus was coming from? The whole point of getting into a relationship with a true spiritual Teacher or Guru is to be challenged like this. So only those of us who have really been close to the flame can weigh in on this question of whether it was ourselves or Andrew who broke the trust in our relationship with him. And it really doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks. In your heart of hearts you already know the answer.

After two years attending community events and living in close proximity to Andrew’s community of students, things had started to improve, but it was obvious to both my wife and I that our relationship had too much baggage in it to support our intention to get closer to this inspired group of people. We split up and I moved in with nine other men and women who were aspiring students. After years of isolation in my personal drama, I started to experience the very real joy of communion and it was like breathing air again. Over the next fifteen years these men and women, along with fifty or sixty others around the world, became my spiritual brothers and sisters on a journey into the depths of the human spirit that I could not have even dreamed up.

I had done a lot of yoga over the years and I knew that Andrew was interested in yoga as well. When the right time came along, I found the courage to ask him if he’d like to do yoga together. He was delighted. And from that day forward I was very fortunate to practice with him. Being a student of Andrew’s was one thing, but actually doing practice with my teacher, just the two of us, was something many seekers only dream of. Andrew viewed yoga as a physical practice, but he took it very seriously. He had me put a sign on the wall in his practice room that said, “We only do Yoga here. Nothing personal will interfere with the practice of Yoga in this room.” I stuck to the rules and pushed myself as hard as I dared. We usually didn’t speak about anything other than our workouts, but a lot got communicated. He had one of the most intense yoga practices I have ever come across, and it was all I could do to keep up with him. Though he was far, far ahead of me, he welcomed me into this part of his life and poured his care and attention on my every move. I was determined to stay with him even if it meant going to extremes.

Over many years he not only reshaped my body, but through his ever-present guidance he gave me much needed perspective on my overactive mind. In time he introduced me to the brave woman that I would later marry and with whom I now share a very wholesome life. He also helped my first wife deal with her emotional instability, which against all odds, allowed us to maintain a close friendship. Basically when I add it all up, over the course of fifteen years, Andrew rebuilt my life from the ground up. But even this speaks only to the personal side of my relationship with him. As a formal student of his ever evolving teaching and a passionate participant in the on-going experiment of his community of students, I was immersed for years, 24/7, in a tremendous revelation of truth and communion. Given the condition I was in when I met Andrew, by any standard, I have been blessed beyond measure that he chose to take me under his wing.

I often think about this when I hear people speak about the unfair treatment that they received under Andrew’s tutelage. The basic gist of their complaint is that Andrew made mistakes and screwed up their lives. I look at my own experience and wonder. What kind of a monster would I have become, what kind of damage would I have done in the name of my own pride had I not met this man? I’m definitely not the enlightened one that I thought I wanted to be, but thanks to Andrew I’m not the arrogant hothead that I was before I started to do battle with reality either. And as a result I’m now free to pursue a constructive, creative life that can give back to the world the enormous amount that I have been given. For most people in my shoes, this is a far cry from failure, and who knows what is yet to emerge from this journey.

The Illusion of Continuity

Still, I sometimes find myself thinking that had I not met Andrew, that I should have been able to accomplish something more with my life. These moments of discontent come, I think, from the erroneous assumption that who I am now is who I was eighteen years ago, and had I not made the choice to follow my heart in the direction of this spiritual teaching I would have more to show for my life. This is clearly false. Who I was then, and what I was interested in, was so different from what I am today. It’s beyond comparison. Many of the choices I was making at the time I met Andrew were in actual fact very destructive. It’s very hard to let this in. But it’s crucial that we do. Because it is this kind of thinking that generates much of the bitterness and disillusionment around spiritual teachers and the spiritual endeavor. If we cannot see how much we’ve changed over the years then the years don’t end up meaning very much.

Part of the problem is that change in this dimension of our experience is very difficult to measure. If we have gathered a lot of possessions, earned a lot of money, built a large family, or achieved some position of stature over the years, then change is very easy to see. Let’s face it. If Andrew was regularly producing world leaders, scholars, and statesmen from his spiritual community would anybody be questioning his methods? No doubt some would say these kinds of achievements are signs of real progress and if we are learning anything at all in the spiritual dimension, then something like this should be evident. But I’m not sure this is true. Spiritual development changes our fundamental values. Typically these new values are not aligned with the culture from which they emerge. In fact they are more likely a radical departure from the values of that culture. It takes time for new values to take hold at a cultural level. If we achieve anything of value to our culture through spiritual development it will most likely be because we have found a way to communicate what we’ve learned into a language that others can understand.

Of course this requires that we recognize and understand for ourselves what has changed in us. Ironically, because of the nature of internal development at this level, it’s actually very easy to miss what is changing in us. I think there are several good reasons for this.

First, in the spiritual dimension we’re dealing with something that is almost too close to perceive, closer than anything we could want in the world, closer than anything we could even think of. We’re trying to develop that which perceives, the Subject itself. It’s easy to think you know the perceiver in yourself. But that idea of yourself is not the perceiver, it’s just another idea, a perception. In spiritual development, because what we are developing is where we are perceiving from, it’s hard to get any distance on what we are engaged with, hard even to detect change, and easy to doubt that we’re developing anything at all. Because of the ineffability of the spiritual dimension, there are real challenges to seeing spiritual experience in a developmental context.

Second, the recognition of truth is experienced as something that exists already. When something happens to catalyze a realization, we don’t find it outside ourselves. We find it inside ourselves, in our own deepest experience, and it feels like we are recognizing something that we already knew to be true. When I first met Andrew, I was struck more by his courage than by the truth of his words. To be sure, what he was speaking about was deep and powerful and it made me look with new eyes on myself and the world, but it wasn’t exactly new information. In a very deep place in myself I knew it already to be true. I was stunned by how much courage and conviction it must take to respond to the world from that depth, but I wasn’t surprised that that depth existed. Most of us interact on such superficial levels. The few times we embrace depth in our lives are usually those moments we cannot control. Even though we know this to be true, we pretend otherwise. It takes someone who is actually living from that depth to break through this pretense. They don’t actually tell us anything we don’t already know. They just show us that it is possible to live true to that which we do already know. It’s easy to convince yourself in moments of authentic revelation that you are just listening to a part of yourself that you don’t normally listen to. And in this way you could believe that nothing in you really changed. In a way you are right. What was there all along finally surfaced. But the fact that you are hearing it is enormously significant and speaks to the depth and clarity of the experience that revealed it to you.

Third, this sense in spiritual experience that nothing in us has fundamentally changed is supported by something far less enlightened in our experience: the continuity of our sense of self. Throughout our lives, no matter what happens, a part of our attention rarely leaves this fundamental sense of self. Even in the midst of a profound upheaval in our experience, we rarely take our inner eye off who we think we are. Because of this, we have the illusion that we are the same self all the time no matter how much we are in fact changing. Even though we may be expressing something profoundly different from one moment, one day, and one year to the next, we still think that who we are deep down is the same. This illusion of continuity gives us something to hang onto through all kinds of change, positive and negative. But this sense of self is false. It’s not who we really are, and it’s usually profoundly limited. It’s a set of ideas that we overlay atop all of our experience. The spiritual Teacher’s role is to get us to let this false sense of self go and become more interested in expressing what is underneath it. His job is to destroy the static idea of who we think we are and free up the dynamic energy of who we really are. And who we really are is something that trusts life absolutely and is profoundly free to change and develop. Needless to say, it takes an extraordinary person and a profound degree of trust to let the false sense of self go. Why? Because this sense of self is who we think we are. When it goes, we no longer exist in the way we did before.

Collective Emergence

One of my deepest realizations as a student of Andrew’s was an experience I had in discussion with a small group of my spiritual brothers. I had participated in hundreds of discussion groups over the years. Some were just a chore. Many were difficult and full of fear and reservation. Some were very inspiring. But the most exciting groups were those that resulted in new spiritual insights that I could apply to my life. And I appreciated them for this reason.

I was aware however that Andrew not only encouraged these groups; he staked his whole teaching on them. He insisted from very early on in his teaching career that when a group of people came together with a shared intention to leave their egos behind and explore their mutual experience, something extraordinary could happen. I was intrigued by his interest in these groups, but other than insight and spiritual realization, I couldn’t imagine what could “happen” from a group of people simply talking together. And I often thought that a good walk in the woods would do more to inspire me than another discussion group.

But this particular discussion showed me first hand what Andrew had been pointing to for so long. As we began speaking, I had a familiar sense of making the effort to listen hard to my own experience and to filter out the more dubious responses. This was now second nature to me. Then I had the experience of disorientation, also familiar, when I had to strain hard to pay attention and really hear the points that others were making, to follow them as they started to describe their own insights and immediate experience. And then something altogether different happened. I felt the whole effort transform into a compelling interest, as if I had entered a completely different field of consciousness altogether.

One by one, each of us in the group started to describe the same experience. We were amazed as this rarefied consciousness started to reveal the profound unity of All That Is. In this revelation, before our fully conscious experience, we could see the sense of who we thought we were falling away into insignificance. One member of the group was having difficulty letting go into this new perspective, and it was revealing to see him struggle to ‘know’ what we were talking about. It was the first time I had seen the ego, this false sense of self, objectively. I felt a deep sense of care and compassion for my friend as he fought with his limiting ideas. It was clear that the rest of us were no longer looking at each other from different perspectives. There was no separation between us, and no separation between us and the entire matrix of experience we call the world. In fact we were describing the very same inner experience, a single “inter-subjective” experience, not as outside observers, but as if we were something else looking from the inside out. What we were exploring seemed to be a whole new inner dimension of consciousness. Something none of us had heard about from other teachings or from traditional spiritual literature.

The little understanding we had of this experience was from Andrew himself. When he first recognized what was happening between his students and later started to cultivate this collective emergence very few, maybe none of us, had any idea what he was talking about. We were inspired by what he was pointing to, we knew that something powerful was happening to us, but we had no understanding of it. Just being together in this elevated context was thrilling, but we were not yet conscious of what it was that was emerging between us. My experience in this discussion group was the first time I recognized the real potential that Andrew had been pointing to, and I was stunned by how truly radical it was.

But then it was over. As the discussion ended, I found myself suddenly back in “my” life again, looking out at the world from within a limited sense of self. I was very moved by what had just happened, but I remember thinking to myself, “What good is this really?” What use is it to any of us if we depend on the group to make this happen? Clearly I cannot take this with me. I cannot even experience it as an individual. What can we possibly accomplish in this world if all we can do is talk in groups? Ironically, after such a powerful spiritual experience, an affirmation of everything that my Teacher had been teaching for years, I started to slowly pull away from his community. Why? I think because it was finally clear to the part of me that wanted to be someone special that I would never be able to walk around with this realization on my own. I could never have it or own it in any way. It couldn’t even fully emerge in me, it could only fully emerge in a collective. And I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life as a member of a collective teasing out this ephemeral realization. I had bigger things to do. I had more to offer than this.

It’s important to be clear that like many of my peers I had been through an enormous amount to get to this point. I wasn’t just rejecting something that I had experimented with for two or three years, I had devoted my life to this teaching, renounced my graduate education, my career, and all kinds of worldly interests to prove that what I heard in Andrew’s teaching was true and had real significance for the world. For me to turn my back and walk away from this effort (it actually took many months before I actually left) was radically destructive to everything I had believed in for fifteen years.

It is not uncommon to recoil from spiritual realization in this way. In fact one learns to expect this kind of reaction when something big like this happens. Why then did I not question this response? Apparently I trusted something more firmly than that to which I had devoted my life. More than the depth of my personal experience, the current of communion, the promise of revolutionary change, or the wisdom of my Teacher, I believed in my own self.

To be clear, I have not turned away from Andrew’s teaching, but I have certainly hesitated to embrace it. When I began to recognize that the spiritual development I was pursuing was dependent on a collective environment, I balked. At the time it felt like a tremendous limitation on my own autonomy. In fact it was not. Andrew has always said the experience of this new dimension of consciousness is not only supportive of an individual’s autonomy, it is actually dependent on it. Without each of the individuals in a collective being true to their own experience, it cannot happen. But the kind of autonomy that Andrew is pointing to has nothing to do with the false sense of self that I carry around with me all day. In fact my incessant defense of this illusion and its right to exist is at odds with this new emergence of consciousness and because of this it acts as an obstacle to something very positive happening in this world. This, of course, is what Andrew has been trying to communicate for twenty-three years. With the hundreds of students that have been attracted to his teaching over the years, he has been trying to prove that something extraordinary lies beyond the personal sense of self.

The fact that this new emergence of collective consciousness has actually happened not just once or twice but over and over again now, changes everything. At the very least it reframes everything that we all suffered through to make it happen. With this new empirical evidence, you might say, we have verified a hypothesis that Andrew put on the table twenty years ago. What he has proven, certainly to all of us who experienced it, is that it is possible for those of us who are not enlightened—that is those of us who are still very much attached to who we think we are—to drop our fascination with ourselves long enough to allow a radically different reality to reveal itself in our collective experience. This revelation changes our understanding of who we are, our understanding of what consciousness is, and our understanding of what spiritual development is all about.

In our post-modern world with the understanding we have gained from psychology and the new insights that have emerged out the phenomenological study of consciousness, human beings have become overwhelmed by the vast interior spaces that have opened up in their experience of themselves. While this has exploded our experience of life and perhaps led to a re-awakening of spiritual interests, it has also made us aware of how relative our perspective is and how difficult it is to point to anything truly absolute in our experience. Without an absolute dimension in our experience, without something solid to hold onto, many of us have turned to our sense of self for stability and in this we have become dysfunctional, overly self-conscious, and narcissistic. Clearly the next step for human development is to find a way to go beyond this over-involvement with ourselves. The post post-modern world, the world that is beginning to emerge in consciousness today, is one in which human beings can be fully aware of these interior dimensions, their most ecstatic heights and deepest darkest corners, without being fundamentally twisted up and inhibited by them. Any spiritual teaching in a post post-modern world will have to show us how to be deeply informed by our internal experience of consciousness but fundamentally undistracted by it, aware of the many dimensions of ourselves but fully engaged with the world and other people in a way that expresses profound sanity and creativity. I truly believe this is the world Andrew is trying to introduce to us all.

Facing a New Frontier

But our attachment to the illusion of a separate personal self is a powerful one. When you are convinced that who you are deep down is never going to change, no matter how much you actually experience, you will always return to who you think you are. This, I think, is one of the fundamental reasons why former students turn against Andrew and what he is trying to give to the world. And there are definitely some who are intent on destroying him and what he has tried to create.

If your false sense of self really is an idea of some heroic character, for example, who is going to change the world through some inspired act, (and if you’re a boomer like me this probably is a part of who you think you are), out of your pride you will eventually do something stupid and destructive. In a close intentional spiritual community there’s a good chance others will witness that act and begin to treat you differently. Even with this evidence to the contrary, if your pride is not broken, you will continue to believe that deep down you are still that heroic character in spite of it all. If you don’t get the respect you think you deserve, you will feel deeply insecure and begin to resent the people that have imposed that painful experience on you. Rather than endure this challenge to your false idea of yourself, you will probably change the environment you live in to preserve that idea of yourself.

As long as we have an ego, it just works this way. If it ends here, if we can admit that we just don’t want to let go of our sense of self even though we know it now to be false, even potentially destructive, then I want to suggest that even this is a tolerable outcome as long as we continue to face the facts and take responsibility for our decision. It’s not a morally defensible position because we do in fact know better, but it’s tolerable because it maintains the potential for change that Andrew revealed in us all. Clearly, for all but the rarest of souls, it’s inevitable. Who knows what will come of our efforts if we do not deny what we know to be true and keep the possibility of radical change open?

But if, in the face of our own cowardice, we shut down, and try to justify our dubious behavior by destroying the people who observed it, then we have indeed crossed a line. This kind of response is difficult to witness in any human being much less a spiritual brother or sister, because not only is it morally repugnant, it’s like watching someone throwing their life away. Even so, it’s important for us to understand the deep survival motivations that elicit this kind of response, because we must never assume that we are not capable of crossing the same line ourselves.

Many of us who have participated in Andrew’s teaching over the years have a deep understanding of the profound possibilities for human development that he is pointing to. It is an integral part of our own experience. We continue to have a connection to our spiritual brothers and sisters and can testify to the bond that holds us together. But still we struggle to embrace our deepest experience of life and in our hesitation we face the same dilemma that those who have turned against Andrew have faced. Standing before an ever-expanding world, a world that just got a lot bigger because of what we helped to manifest, we are forced to reckon with the Life process itself. I came across this quote by Bishop Spong years ago and offer it here to emphasize this point.

“On each level of our life, after crossing each new frontier, we build for ourselves a security system. We live in that system until, like the darkness of the womb or the shell of a cocoon, it binds our potential and is no longer able to contain our life. Then we must choose whether to accept those limits and die to what we can become, or to leave that secure place behind and cross another frontier. Life grows and expands only as long as we are able to cross from one level to the next.

Finally, there comes, for many of us, a new frontier that we are unwilling to cross. A new insight, a new truth, a new vision of reality challenges our previous view of life, and we discover that to cross that frontier is too painful. Our being is not secure enough to give up our previous support network. So we say no and, closing the door, we refuse to walk into that new arena. At that moment our human potential begins to decline. Our world has touched the edges of its final limits. We settle down to live within these hardening, if not yet permanent, boundaries on our being.
Once we have said no to a vision, we are never the same. For when we see a frontier that we have refused to cross or a truth that we have declined to embrace, the security of our life is threatened. What we have decided to be is judged by that which we refused to entertain or take into our lives.”

-Bishop John Shelby Spong, This Hebrew Lord

The truth of these words cuts deep. They force anyone to take stock of their lives. Have I reached the final limits of my life’s expansion? Have I settled down to live within boundaries? Am I rejecting that which revealed my limitations, or have I stepped beyond the restrictive “limits” of spiritual community and begun to explore new territory?

Only time will tell. But perhaps there is a way to engage with this picture that we have yet to explore, a way that does not deny our deepest experience but recognizes our limitations in relation to it. The struggle to embrace the new has always been part of the new. Spiritual revelation in its many forms has always been a glimpse of what is to come, a visit from the future, something we must ever strive to meet in our worldly lives. It has always inspired us to expand our boundaries and be more than we are now. Who knows how long we will struggle with that which we have realized? And to what new horizon will we be called beyond what we know now? This ever-present confrontation between what we are now and what we have been called to become seems to be the very nature of the spiritual endeavor, indeed of life itself. As long as we do not harden ourselves to this confrontation, as long as we let that which we have realized create its evolutionary tension in us, then even in our hesitation we are participating in the Life process. This realization, if we let it work in us, has to have an effect. If this new emergence in consciousness is in fact where Life itself is headed, then anyone who has faith in the Life process is eventually going to trust it with an open heart. In that trust, sooner or later we will all be swept away.

Stuart Dunbar can be reached at stuart@guru-talk.com