Photo by Rob Wicks
“This focus of ‘inward path’ and ‘outward path’ is as limiting a belief as any. As if one is more ‘righteous’ or ‘right’ than the other. A judgment of outward as materialistic and inward as ‘spiritual’ when they’re both the same. That ‘inward path’ is just another way of fulfilling something ‘missing’ or ‘necessary’. Don’t get caught confusing one as better or more worthy than the other.”
I wrote this in 2015 after back-to-back experiences with people who wear the mantle of ‘spiritual’ professionally. One made it a point to tell me I’d be more spiritual if I wore white. She clearly didn’t understand that my relationships with coffee, ketchup, jelly and dog paws are as close to that I have with the Gods. Her focus on the performance of ‘being spiritual’ rather than the actuality of it was compounded by suggesting I not use foul language. My response? “No shit?”
There’s a common thread that arises as people begin to connect their experiences of awakening to that of ‘being spiritual’. The overt actions and interactions tend to be the exhortation of intuition vs intellect and the judgment of how others should be. The ‘inner path’ as The Way much as the Southern Baptist or Catholic manner of judgment and action is The Way; the ‘right way’, the True Way, the Only Way to God or Heaven or Consciousness or etc, ad nauseum.
There is no separation means that there is no separation. No separate path that is more right or righteous, way of experiencing or expressing one’s self that is more perfect, closer to a God or the Gods.
Intuition doesn’t work without intellect and vice versa. God or consciousness and our stories about it only seek to separate us from It with those stories yet there is, again, no separation. Our ideas of perfection (God is, we aren’t) are associated with our performances in our aloneness and in a crowd, a way to measure how we measure up against that God or someone else in the crowd. It’s a non-religious version of purity culture and the yardstick, the measure of goodness and rightness, is identical.
In spent nearly six months at Standing Rock and annoyed more than one person because I didn’t participate in the performance of ceremony or ‘action’. No one could see or would hear of what I did in the night-quiet, merged into water and with prayers wrapped around weapons. “This is my rifle…” Not today, it’s not.
There are two things on regret about being at Standing Rock: not understanding why I was actually there and the fact that I didn’t stand up for a young man who was being told he wasn’t ‘doing enough’, appearing ‘spiritual’ or ‘active’ enough in the performance of it to meet another’s random standards of either.
There aren’t two paths. There are 7.5 billion (for humans). Judge not of hearts you can’t see. The reliance on the tool of judgment is the first sign your own reflection isn’t clear to you and maybe your ‘inward’ needs to be ‘outward’, in front of the mirror