The 4 Indispensable Ingredients to Spiritual Life  ~Part 2

Motivation:

What makes us want what we truly want, that elusive thing called spiritual liberation? And how can we actually get it?

We need a level of motivation that removes obstacles. Particularly the obstacles in us, the way we are unconsciously attached to our suffering. Every so often we get a taste of bliss, watch a sunset of transcendent beauty, have a breath-taking insight or a moment of deep love. They are the cheese in the cosmic mouse-trap and if they’re strong enough we’re hooked, we’re dancing on the peak, we see the Promised Land, we’re just about enlightened – we think.

Okay, you’ve noticed… it hasn’t been quite that easy. First the bliss fades and the old hang-ups march right back in and it becomes clear that we have work to do. Perfect!

It’s the roller coaster ride of a spiritual life. If we’re lucky we hurt just enough not to let us forget our commitment to our spiritual work. Once we feel better it gets dangerous because suddenly we have so many more important things to do – we think!

Time goes by in distraction and eventually somehow we do remember, sometimes by grace, more often just by sheer pain. That is how pain can be grace, but I don’t like it, and I assume you’re just like me. So what can we do? How can we get a motivation that’s strong enough so we don’t need the pain to remind us? How can we get this rigorous work done of emptying ourselves of all we cannot take with us through the next door into freedom?

What has worked best for me are 2 things: I can get still, really still. Maybe get away from my life for a while, like the time I climbed into the Rockies and stayed by a lake at 13.000 feet with nothing but my thoughts between the mountains and the vast sky. But it’s also every moment I become fully present in my life, not getting away from anything, but getting closer. Getting intimate with the Now.

The Now empties me of all the confusion, of all the activity in the brain. I fall into stillness and from there into my Heart, that great Heart that is as vast as the sky. And in that stillness a yearning arises, a hunger for that freedom. It can become an addiction, the one addiction that can set us free, the addiction to the Now.

It has that taste of eternity that stays with me when I am fully present in daily life and that is there reminding me again and again of what I really want – that vast freedom!

And then there is the second way I get motivation and this one is even better: I hang out with someone who has that yearning burning in them more brightly than I. Then I can sun myself in the bright glow of their love. I’m like a dry piece of wood and they are ablaze. And soon enough I too start to burn with that same longing for God that is alive in them. That one is the best trick!

~ Stillness works well when I can’t find someone in whom that same stillness has taken form!

In India they say you catch that love of God by the grace of the saints. I have found that to be true again and again. It makes you humble.

They don’t give you anything, really, except their whole being. That’s what love does, and it gives us the motivation to do the same. It is the secret of love: you give it away until you become nothing and all that is left is that love.

Then you’ve become nothing and everything and you’re free!

~ Thank you and Namaste,

Ram Giri