The Awakening Spirit

"God is a verb."

— Buckminster Fuller

Love, Compassion, and Tolerance by His Holiness the Dalai Lama

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"Love, compassion, and tolerance are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive."

The essence of all religions is love, compassion, and tolerance. Kindness is my true religion. No matter whether you are learned or not, whether you believe in the next life or not, whether you believe in God or Buddha or some other religion or not, in day-to-day life you must be a kind person. When you are motivated by kindness, it doesn't matter whether you are a practitioner, a lawyer, a politician, an administrator, a worker, or an engineer: whatever your profession or field, deep down you are a kind person.

Love, compassion, and tolerance are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive. If you have a particular faith or religion, that is good. But you can survive without it if you have love, compassion, and tolerance. The clear proof of a person's love of God is if that person genuinely shows love to fellow human beings.

To have strong consideration for others' happiness and welfare, we must have a special altruistic attitude in which we take upon ourselves the burden of helping others. To generate such an unusual attitude, we must have great compassion — caring about the suffering of others and wanting to do something about it. To have such a strong force of compassion, we must have a strong sense of love that, upon observing sentient beings, wishes that they have happiness — finding a pleasantness in everyone and wishing happiness for everyone, just as a mother does for her sole sweet child. To have a sense of closeness and dearness for others, use as a model a person in this lifetime who was very kind to you. Then extend this sense of gratitude to all beings.

Deep down we must have real affection for each other, a clear realization or recognition of our shared human status. At the same time, we must openly accept all ideologies and systems as a means of solving humanity's problems. One country, one nation, one ideology, one system is not sufficient. It is helpful to have a variety of different approaches on the basis of a deep feeling of the basic sameness of humanity. We can then make a joint effort to solve the problems of the whole of humankind.

Every major religion has similar ideas of love, the same goal of benefiting through spiritual practice, and the same effect of making its followers into better human beings. All religions teach moral precepts for perfecting the functions of mind, body, and speech. All teach us not to lie or steal or take others' lives, and so on. The common goal of all moral precepts laid down by the great teachers of humanity is unselfishness. Those teachers wanted to lead their followers away from the paths of negative deeds caused by ignorance and to introduce them to paths of goodness. All religions can learn from one another; their ultimate goal is to produce better human beings who will be more tolerant, more compassionate, and less selfish.

Human beings need spiritual as well as material sustenance. Without spiritual sustenance, it is difficult to get and maintain peace of mind. The purpose of religion is not to argue which one is the best. Over the past centuries, each great teaching has served humanity, so it's much better to make friends, understand each other, and make an effort to serve humanity than to criticize or argue. Buddha, Jesus Christ, and all other great teachers created their ideas and teachings with sincere motivation, love, and kindness toward humanity, and they shared it for the benefit of humanity. I do not think those great teachers created differences to make trouble. Our human mind always likes different approaches. There is a richness in the fact that there are so many different presentations of the way.

There are two ways to enter into Buddhism: one through faith and one through reasoning. Faith alone may not be sufficient. Buddha always emphasized a balance of wisdom and compassion: a good brain and a good heart should work together. Placing importance on just the intellect and ignoring the heart can create more problems and more suffering in the world. On the other hand, if we emphasize only the heart, and ignore the brain, then there is not much difference between humans and animals. These two must be developed in balance, and when they are, the result is material progress accompanied by good spiritual development. Heart and mind working in harmony will yield a truly peaceful and friendly human family.

I feel that my mission is, wherever I am, to express my feeling about the importance of kindness, compassion, and the true sense of brotherhood. I practice these things. It gives me more happiness, more success. If I practice anger or jealousy or bitterness, no doubt my smile would disappear.

The real troublemakers are anger, jealousy, impatience, and hatred. With them, problems cannot be solved. Though we may have temporary success, ultimately our hatred or anger will create further difficulties. Anger makes for swift solutions. Yet, when we face problems with compassion, sincerity, and good motivation, our solutions may take longer, but ultimately they are better.

When I meet new people, in my mind there is no barrier, no curtain. As human beings you are my brothers and sisters; there is no difference in substance. I can talk with you as I would to old friends. With this feeling we can communicate without any difficulty and can make heart-to-heart contact. Based on such genuine human relations — real feeling for each other, understanding each other — we can develop mutual trust and respect. From that, we can share other people's suffering and build harmony in human society.

Creation Spirituality by Matthew Fox, Ph.D.

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"When I'm operating at my best, my work is my prayer. It comes out of the same place that prayer comes out of — the center, the heart."

My relationship with God started when I was a child. I was raised in a practicing Roman Catholic home, with my parents and six brothers and sisters. When I was twelve, I had polio and lost my ability to walk. I was in the hospital for many months, and people didn't think I would ever walk again. My adolescent desire was to play football. I had to let go of that as well as much of everyday living. Children tend to face death (and letting go) more directly than adults do. Consequently, it was a great maturing experience for me.

When I regained the use of my legs and was able to do things like play football, I was overwhelmed with gratitude for something that I had previously taken for granted — my ability to walk. From that time on, gratitude has been at the heart of my spirituality. It has to do with awe — the awe of having legs, or anything else that works, the awe of just being here.

That was when I started thinking of becoming a priest. Many things affected this decision. There were the wonderful Wisconsin lakes and fields and woods where I would pray. There was the Catholic Mass, especially the Saturday masses, when priests read the wisdom literature from the Hebrew Bible. Those texts are, in effect, feminist and cosmological readings about the Mother Goddess. They spoke to my soul; they brought me, as a male, the feminine dimension of divinity, which nothing else in the 1950s culture was doing.

Then there was music. I heard Beethoven for the first time when I was in high school, and it made my soul leap. And there was literature — the works of Shakespeare and, above all, Tolstoy's War and Peace.

My experience with prayer is both mystical and prophetic. The mystical aspect is the falling in love with life. The prophetic aspect is the standing up to the crucifixion of Divinity, which happens every time there is injustice. That combination of pleasure (mysticism) and struggle (the prophetic) is the dialectic that creates my spirituality and my experiences with God.

There are many paths to God. Four in particular correspond to what I name in my theology "The Four Paths of Creation Spirituality." Divinity is present for me in all four paths.

The first path is the Via Positiva, or the experience of divinity as the blessing of creation. It's what Meister Eckhart, the thirteenth-century theologian, called "is-ness." I can pick up a blade of grass and experience its twenty-billion-year history and its color, shape, and form. Artists can do this: They draw a blade of grass and capture its divinity. We can feel awe when we experience the planet, or a dog, or a friend. Anything that has "being" is holy. God dwells there and speaks as revelation.

This experience of divinity is a very simple thing. It's omnipresent. The problem is our consciousness: We need to simplify our consciousness to experience this omnipresence of divine awe in all things, to return home.

The second path, the Via Negativa, is that of darkness, of emptiness, of nothingness, of absence. This is a very important experience — when we suffer or experience the suffering of others, when we doubt or let go. In the process of letting go, there is always a sinking; and in sinking we never know when we're going to bottom out. But as Jesus said, "I am the Way"; the way of sinking is itself a divine experience. It takes a lot of trust. The darkness is also a kind of revelation of divinity, but it can't be put into words. Ultimately, it's silence. With that silence comes a union with God.

The third path is called the Via Creativa, or the Creative Way. This is an explosion. Eckhart invented the word "breakthrough" to describe it. This is when we bottom out, when out of the darkness or through the dark tunnel comes the light. From the story of Jesus' crucifixion (the Via Negativa) comes Easter Sunday Resurrection (the Via Creativa). The stone is rolled away, the tomb is opened. In the sinking process we've been so stripped and emptied that we're ready for something new. Path three is this newness — this creativity.

For myself as a writer — and for any artist in the process of creating — I realize sometimes that I am just an instrument, a channel, a conduit for a spirit far greater than myself. There's something truthful coming through me, partly because I've been so emptied by the Via Negativa that I'm not sitting around controlling things anymore. The Via Creativa is an immense experience of divinity for people. We all have it because we're all creative at some level of our being. This is the experience of cocreation. We realize, "My God, we're creating with God and God needs us to create."

The fourth path is the Via Transformativa, the Transformative Way. This path carries the imagination — this creativity, this new bliss, this new resurrection power — into society. This is the work of the prophet: to disturb the peace by sharing the good news, what Thomas Aquinas called "sharing the fruits of our contemplation." But not everyone is eager to hear the fruits of our contemplation, because people are content to live in the existing structures, psychic and social, of our society.

This is the path of struggle, the path of compassion, and the path of celebration. And the God of Celebration ritualizes with people, gets them to enjoy life again, to see life again as a child — to see the wonder, the awe, the marvel, the simplicity of the blade of grass.

Path four is also about standing up to structures that are oppressing us psychically or socially. The movements of Gandhi or King or the Nicaraguan revolution, for example, are works of the artist's path carried into the social sphere.

How can you cultivate an intimate relationship with God? If I were giving advice, first I would question: What poets do you read? What music moves you? What social issues arouse your passion? What work do you most love doing? Eckhart said, "True work is about enchantments." When does enchantment strike you? When do you feel a connection to the Universe? Where is your bliss? And what about the darkness — what have you tasted of nothingness? What have you tasted of the God of the dark?

In addition, I would respect your experiences. Some people come out of very wounded backgrounds. Being an uncared-for child, for example, determines much of a person's experience of God and the world.

I would encourage you to draw, to use your right brain. I often ask people to draw a picture of their experiences with God when they were 10, when they were 20, 30. Then I ask them to reflect on the relationship among the three experiences, how their image of God changed. Many adults, sad to say, still use the image they had when they were eight years old. In other words, their spirituality has not matured. But it's there in promise, in potency. I would work at an image level instead of using just words.

I have a little trouble with the phrase "personal relationship with God," because we have so psychologized reality in our culture. The "personal" tends to imply a kind of tête-à-tête, or a talking to God; a kind of projection of a two-legged person, an anthropomorphizing of divinity that I think is dangerous. We need to listen as well as to talk — to listen to the glory and the pain of our times. I think that most people's basic experiences of God are like Einstein's — the awe of the universe, the experience of the cosmos as our home, and God dwelling there. Rather than say "personal relationship with God," I'd prefer to use the term "personal cosmology" — a relationship to the divine presence that dwells in us. "We dwell in God and God dwells in us." By "we," I don't mean just two-legged creatures, but the whole universe, all creatures. We must learn to be entranced again by the presence of God in all things.

I think there's danger in the "personal," for the American psyche especially. It has something to do with being stuck in our adolescence, when friendship — Am I liked? — meant everything. This idea can be projected into religion, as in "Jesus loves me." This is not adult mysticism. For one thing, it is not child-like enough. Children are citizens playing in the universe. True mystical adults recover that child inside and play in that personalized universe, but don't create out of God some kind of partner or mate who is missing in their lives.

When I'm operating at my best, my work is my prayer. It comes out of the same place that prayer comes out of — the center, the heart. All work is meant to be heart work: it comes out of our heart and goes to the heart. All authentic work is an effort to move other people's hearts. And this can range from music to authentic and healthy religion to decent commerce to creating objects that human beings need. Work is the way adults return the blessing of being here to the next generation. Work is relationship. And other relationships, such as friendship and mutuality and community and intimacy, I hope also come out of the same center.

How do we get in touch with that center? Through paths one, two, and three, especially at that node between paths two and three. Between the emptying of the darkness and the creativity there's a silent stillpoint that we experience as our center, through which light and grace pour. And they pour into all our relationships.

One way I pray is with Native American prayers. It's one of the most grounding and the most radical of all forms of prayer I've used. It has been the way of praying for thousands of years, and we ought to avail ourselves of such wisdom. I do a Native American sweat, and when I leave I always say A Ho Mitakye Oyacin, which means "to all my relations."

Native Americans constantly celebrate all their relations, which means relations to the earth, to the rocks, to the birds, the trees, the clouds, to all people of all races and all religions, and, of course, to divinity and to the spirits. But in our anthropocentric culture we hear the word "relation" and tend to think of relatives or lovers or other relationships with two-legged creatures; but the true mystical tradition says that our relations come out of the womb that birthed us all: the cosmic womb of God. We can return to this womb in the Via Negativa, which is what happens in a sweat lodge; people come out of this experience of darkness and emptiness into creativity.

To experience a personal cosmology, become a child again — not an adolescent, but a child — and thereby become a player, a playful being in the universe. Believe, as all great teachers have told us to believe, that the universe is friendly; the universe is blessing us constantly. Become unself-conscious (Eckhart defined mysticism as unself-consciousness). If we can learn to delight again and to play again, then we will learn wisdom again. That's how we accompany God through our journey and through this universe.

The Long Journey Home: Reconnecting with the Great Mother by Riane Eisler

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"What we think of as 'sacred' actually is present in everything we do."

I used to think of the divine as "God." Now, if I think in terms of a personalized deity at all, I think more of the Goddess than of the God. I feel very strongly that our society's denial of the feminine aspect of the deity, the Mother aspect, is one of the great obstacles to having that personal relationship, that direct connection with the divine.