March 19, 2024

The Spiritual Thing

March 7, 2007
Are you a spiritual person? This being our annual “Mind-Body-Spirit” issue, it seems a good time to ask.
What does it mean to be “spiritual”?
That’s a question my generation has struggled with since the ’60s, when we read “Siddhartha” in college, discovered yoga, transcendental meditation, the I Ching, turned Jesus freak, joined communes... But, being Americans, our quest was more about style than substance, so when the next big thing came along (disco, the “Me Generation,” the running boom, Reaganism... ), we bailed out on spirituality.
Plus, no one could ever quite figure out what it was to be “spiritual,” other than acting kind of dreamy and yearning to live “up there” in a disembodied existence, as vacant as a glass of water in Buddha’s kitchen. The rock group Procol Harum summed-up the mumbo-jumbo of the spiritual quest in their song about a wise old yogi telling a young seeker the meaning of life: “Oh, my son -- life is like a beanstalk, isn’t it?”
Right.
But since material pursuits have a habit of turning up empty (for instance: Anna Nicole Smith and Britney Spears), we tend to keep coming back to spirituality as the ultimate human pursuit.
The first obstacle on that path, however, is getting a handle on what it means to be spiritual.
Personally, I like the analogy of a tuning fork. If you strike a tuning fork against your palm and let it resonate on the saddle of a guitar, you hear a pleasant vibration resonating through the wood at the pitch of 440 cycles per second. You tune the string to the note until both the string and the fork are vibrating in harmony.
But although that intense vibration and its angelic sound has an application in the material world (ie: tuning the guitar), it is incapable of lingering here. Within a few seconds, the hum fades -- ethereal, ineffable. Like the ghostly butterfly in the Lunesta commercial, it’s gone before the sleeper awakes.
But the message is the same: spirituality is being in tune to a higher standard -- in harmony. You are the guitar -- the hum of the tuning fork is the standard of perfection which you strive for to avoid hitting sour notes.
The nice thing about spirituality is that you can choose your standard of perfection: Jesus, Buddha, or the French philosopher Rousseau, who posited the innate goodness of humankind. Plenty of kids are walking around claiming Rob Zombie as their spiritual standard. Whatever.
No one has more of a handle on the nuts & bolts of spirituality than the wise old holy men (aka: bamboozlers) of India, whose ideas have seeped into America’s subconscious over the past 100 years... often to the “ca-ching!” of a distant cash register.
Indian ideas of spirituality were cracked open on the millstone of suffering -- the literal grind of life in a disease-plagued land of famine and cruel maharajahs.
Buddha, and many Indian philosophers who followed him, said the natural condition of a human being is one of suffering in a world that is little more than a shifting dream: That everyone is neck-deep in water buffalo crap... and sinking. Buddha claimed that even rich folks were miserable, trapped in their golden cages. He had a dismal philosophy: “The world is full of pain, suffering and evil. That is the first truth.”
Buddha’s widely-ignored solution? Don’t even bother pursuing material things, fame or power, because they’ll only bring you more unhappiness, as will the failure to achieve them. Instead, pursue the spiritual path, evolving over many lifetimes to the perfect nothingness of Nirvana -- “the place where fire goes when it goes out” -- and the disintegration of the self.
Deep stuff, but a bunch of malarkey, as Gore Vidal observed in “Creation,” his excellent book on the roots of the great religions. The hero of Vidal‘s book asks: What’s the point of the human race if its ultimate task is to dematerialize itself?
Spiritual seekers have struggled with that no-fun idea of dematerializing ever since, and it pops up in many religions (playing harp for eternity as a sexless, mindless, disembodied soul in heaven, etc).
And frankly, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense in modern-day America where most of us haven’t a clue as to what actual suffering involves. For me these days, suffering is learning that “Desperate Housewives” has been pre-empted by the Oscars, or having to clean out a really stinky cat litter box.
But Buddha did offer some practical advice for bringing the spiritual thing down to earth: choose the Middle Way. Keep everything in moderation -- don’t be too rich, too poor, too big for your britches, too obscure, too full, too hungry, too proud, too humble -- stay on the level. Be a political moderate and wear sensible shoes. Keep your life on the middle path and follow a higher standard.
And then my friend, you will find enlightenment as a spiritual person, perhaps without even knowing it.

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