God on Your Own E-Book

Joseph Dispenza

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 349

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

After spending eight years in a monastery, Joseph Dispenza walked away from his life as a monk and the religion of his youth in search of a different kind of spiritual path. Outside the confines of organized religion, Dispenza was able to create a spiritual life that gives direction and meaning to all he does and all he is. God on Your Own is written for anyone who has left (or is thinking of leaving) organized religion but wants to continue on a spiritual path. Written by noted author and retreat leader Joseph Dispenza, this book provides a spiritual road map for those who want to make the transition from conventional religion toward a richer and more satisfying direct relationship with the Source, without rules, dogmas, or doctrines. Throughout the book, Dispenza offers wise, compassionate guidance, speaking as one seeker to another. He has made this journey himself, gleaning spiritual truth from across traditions and practices.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Foreword

Introduction

PART ONE - beginning

CHAPTER ONE - a larger picture

CHAPTER TWO - beyond religion

PART TWO - seeking

CHAPTER THREE - sacred skeptic

CHAPTER FOUR - beliefs

CHAPTER FIVE - discernment

CHAPTER SIX - obstacles

PART THREE - building

CHAPTER SEVEN - detachment

CHAPTER EIGHT - innocence

CHAPTER NINE - responsibility

CHAPTER TEN - peak experience

PART FOUR - being

CHAPTER ELEVEN - service

CHAPTER TWELVE - heaven on earth

AFTERWORD

BIBLIOGRAPHY

THE AUTHOR

INDEX

OTHER BOOKS BY JOSEPH DISPENZA

On SilenceThe Way of the TravelerThe Magical Realism of Alyce FrankLive Better LongerThe Serigraphs of Doug WestWill Shuster: A Santa Fe LegendThe House of Alarcon (novel) Advertising the American WomanFreeze Frame: A History of the American FilmReruns: Cinema on TelevisionForgotten Patriot

Copyright © 2006 by Joseph Dispenza. All rights reserved. Published by Jossey-Bass A Wiley Imprint

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Quote from Buckminster Fuller’s writings copyright © The Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller.

Passage from The Dark Night from The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, translated by Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez. Copyright © 1964, 1979, 1991 by Washington Province of Discalced Carmelites. ICS Publications, 2131 Lincoln Road, N.E. Washington, DC 20002-1100, USA, www.icspublication.org.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dispenza, Joseph, date.

God on your own: finding a spiritual path outside religion / Joseph Dispenza; foreword by Thomas Moore.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7879-8312-3 (cloth) ISBN-10: 0-7879-8312-8 (cloth)

1. Spirituality. 2. Spiritual life. I. Title.

BL624.D586 2006

204’.4—dc22

2006004547

HB Printing

Teachers open the door.

You enter by yourself.

—CHINESE PROVERB

This book is dedicated to all my teachers.

FOREWORD

RECENTLY, I WAS interviewed by a regional magazine. I mentioned that I sometimes use Tarot cards when making a big decision. I got a letter back from a man who quoted the Bible against divination and said I was dead wrong and leading young people astray. I responded by asking him to lighten up his theology. I suggested that the Bible warns against a certain kind of magic that is indeed wrongheaded, but that I use the Tarot to jump-start my intuition. Hoping to find a little middle ground, I was disappointed to get another letter from him, even more condemning.

I have the sense that this man represents millions of people, in various religions, who grew up deep in anxiety that manifests itself in harsh, punitive, and joyless judgment of others. This is not religion in any vital sense of the word, but a profound twisting of what could be a source of life-affirming spirituality into some deathly, inhumane caricature. People who persist in this kind of religion suffer their highly constricted lives and paradoxically stand in the way of the world enjoying the meaning and self-affirmation that deep religion offers.

Joseph Dispenza and I have much in common. We know monastic life firsthand, and we know Christian theology. When we were very young, something stirred to turn us toward an unknown spiritual focus; though the forms have shifted over the years, the path of seeking is intact. I admire many elements in his story, especially his willingness to pursue intuition in service of his unique spiritual destiny. He takes the spiritual life seriously and yet wears it lightly.

I know that this book can help many people who find themselves stuck between their old religious practices gone stale and the uncertain possibilities in front of them. Joseph’s principles are solid. I am especially pleased to see his emphasis on avoiding spiritual seeking as a way to bypass the emotional issues that keep us stuck. If we go forward in our spiritual search and fail to deal head-on with the major problematical raw material of our past, and with emotions and fantasies that block the life in us, then our spirituality doesn’t have much chance to be vital and honest.

We are all neurotic, some more than others. This means we all have a pile of raw material to sift through and refine. If you had an abusive childhood, you have a big pile to deal with. If you have had a drinking problem, your pile is thick and rich. The more difficult the stuff of your past, the more promising your future spirituality. As this book demonstrates so beautifully, spiritual seeking is not a pleasant safari through a lush landscape but a lifelong trek through jungle and desert. There will be moments of clarity and delight, but the way is challenging. It demands that you take your life seriously and, in the words of my namesake, Thomas More of England, not pin it on someone else’s shirtsleeve.

On the other hand, Joseph makes it clear that certain gifted people may well appear at crucial moments and help you make important turns and leaps. But you have to be alert and willing to be their student. The lone spiritual path is not for those who think themselves superior to religions and churches. In fact, it is a humbler way.

I admit I was a bit shocked to read some of Joseph’s words against religion. Especially in my doctoral studies in world religions, I developed a love of this word religion, and I still try to give it fresh life. To me, religion is a prerequisite for being alive as a human being. It is not just an outward and outmoded institutionalization of spirituality. It is a posture in life: reverence for life’s mysteries, practice of contemplation and deep consideration of those mysteries, and consequent profound ethical sensitivity. Joseph speaks quite properly when he says that spirituality requires a life of service.

But I do think this difference is largely a matter of words—my concern for keeping religion alive. Joseph even tells us how to keep traditional teachings and practices fresh and meaningful. Nothing could be more important in this age of secularism, which is to say soullessness. Unfortunately, religious institutions often collude in keeping modern life secular by failing to understand sufficiently the prophetic and penetrating nature of the religious point of view.

I too live a monk’s life, disguised as an ordinary citizen trying to get along. Contemplation, detachment, deepened sexuality, obedience to the spirit when it moves, community, reverence, and certain stillness can be part of an ordinary life. Spirituality is sensual, practical, and quotidian, if it is anything real at all.

Maybe Joseph and I can convince others to try the monastic life in the world and create an invisible monasticism. In the medieval world, monasticism was the source of learning, art, and moral sensibility. There is no reason a new, invisible monasticism cannot similarly revive culture and transform our current unconsciousness, materialism, and aggressiveness into intelligence, sensuousness, and mutual regard.

Thomas Moore

INTRODUCTION: TAKING BACK YOUR SOUL

We find God in our own being, which is the mirror of God.

—THOMAS MERTON, SEEDS OF CONTEMPLATION

ONE NIGHT IN 1984, in a remote village in northern New Mexico, I stood barefoot before a path of hot coals about three feet wide and thirty feet long, trying to decide if I was going to walk on it, or walk away. I was told that at that moment the glowing red nuggets, half a foot deep, had reached the temperature automobile factories use to melt down scrap metal.

I hesitated there, my pant legs rolled up to my knees, my eyes fixed straight ahead at the fire-path, reminding myself to breathe. The hypnotic sounds of drumming filled my ears. I knew I did not have to do this, but on another level I absolutely knew I had to do it if I were going to break through to a new place inside myself.

I filled my lungs with the chill night air, let it out slowly, and made the first step onto the fire bed. Staring ahead, avoiding looking down at my feet, I took one step, then another, then another. The fiery coals felt like soft cinders under my feet. I made my way down the path with unhurried, deliberate steps, and at last reached the end. I stepped off the fire and onto the cool earth.

For a moment, I just stood there dazed and slightly numb. I had not been incinerated. The soles of my feet had not been scorched, had not turned to ash, had not even blistered. I had confronted one my greatest fears and moved through it. My body had survived fire.

Then, as if in slow motion, I lifted my eyes to a sky ablaze with starlight and sensed a rush through my body so powerful that for some time I seemed to be weightless and outside myself. In that thrilling moment I felt myself one with all of creation—one with the earth I was standing on, with the sky, with the stars, with all people, animals, trees, mountains, rivers, the very air I was inhaling. I felt truly alive, grateful for my life and my connection to all other living things.

For me, walking on fire led to a high spiritual experience, a sacred encounter with the Source of all life. That feeling stayed in me with varying intensity for several days afterward. In time, my life went on as usual, but somehow with more spiritual awareness and attention. The memory of the firewalk and its aftermath has remained with me all these years as a reference point—one of many that were to follow—for a spiritual life I have forged for myself outside of organized religion.

Long before I walked on hot coals that night in search of spiritual connection, I turned my back on the life of a monk and gave up my faith—the religion of my parents. I decided to seek the divinity, if there was a divinity, away from the traditions, rituals, and rules of Roman Catholicism.

I was born into a family of practicing Catholics and so grew up as a member in good standing of that religion. After graduating from Catholic high school, I entered an order of teaching monks and lived as a professional religious man for eight years. In monastic life, I had the opportunity to study the theology of my religion in great depth. My inquiries led me, in time, to question many of the beliefs I accepted blindly as a child and a teenager. The questions became spiritual issues for me, and finally and ironically they became blocks to my spiritual growth.

Leaving the faith of my childhood was not easy, particularly at that time, forty years ago, when attitudes about religion were considerably less flexible than they are today. Predicable pressures exerted themselves: the puzzlement and then the disapproval of family and friends, the embarrassment, the shame. Leaving religious life was even more difficult. When I gave up my religious vows, I received a letter from the Vatican that began, “Insofar as we are able, we release you. . . .” I had made my vows to God, you see, and therefore I was answerable to God for my actions. A disapproving family was one thing; a disapproving God was quite another—divine displeasure could endanger my immortal soul.

Years later, now, I see that walking away from religion has turned out to be a blessing. It led me to many fascinating areas of soul exploration, from past-life regression and dream work to faith healing and shamanism, and just about everything in between. It allowed me to investigate the splendid spiritual traditions of other cultures and go deeply into a mystic realm in search of my spiritual Source. Leaving the confines of organized religion opened me to the possibility of creating my own spiritual life, one that gives direction and meaning to all I do and all I am.

In my search, the challenge for me has been to try to recognize spiritual truth when I see it and discard the rest—particularly the superficial offerings of popular metaphysical thought and practice. My background was in the rigorous discipline of traditional theology; I wanted my spirituality to be solid. Looking back at the process I went through on my journey from organized religion to personal spirituality, the most discouraging times were when I realized I had no roadmap to guide me even a little. I left the spiritual “certainties” of religion because I was finding no nourishment there, but outside religion there were no certainties of any kind, only open questions and sometimes crushing doubts that what I was pursuing had any meaning at all. I was on my own.

This book emerged from my experience of wandering in a kind of spiritual no-man’s-land for many years after leaving organized religion and finding, at last, a spiritual home within. When you leave religion, you are not handed a guidebook for leading a sound spiritual life. If you are in that spiritual place, taking full responsibility for your soul and looking for guideposts, my story may help you navigate your way.

I believe we are waking up as a species. One sign of that grand awakening is the dawning awareness of our essential spiritual nature. Half a century ago, the mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin anticipated this new leap in consciousness when he said, “We have been thinking of ourselves as human beings on a spiritual journey—it would be more correct to think of ourselves as spiritual beings on a human journey.”

Suddenly, it seems, many of us are feeling compelled to seek and have our own personal connection with our spiritual Source. We are making our own spiritual way in life apart from the compulsory dogmas, doctrines, and canons of organized religion. Every year, more and more of us are embarking on a spiritual search outside religion. From 1960 to 1980, the years during which I was struggling with the discrepancies between my religious faith and my evolving personal spiritual beliefs, Americans dropped out of organized religions in huge numbers: 84 percent of Jews, 69 percent of mainline Protestants, 61 percent of conservative Protestants, and 67 percent of Catholics.

In the past decade, 14.3 million Americans left organized religions, giving rise to the term “nones” for people who choose none on surveys of religious affiliation or preference. Of the nearly thirty million nones in total in America, less than one million think of themselves as atheists. This leaves approximately twenty-nine million Americans in search of a personal relationship with God, the Source, the Divinity, the Creator, the Great Spirit, the Supernatural Being, or whatever name they attach to a power higher than themselves, including the Higher Power. They are spiritual seekers.

Seeking spiritual truth and connection with the divine, however we conceive it, is part of being human. The pioneer psychotherapist Carl Gustav Jung and many others before and after him understood that spiritual seeking was a powerful theme in human nature. According to Jung, we all share a deep level of consciousness, which he called the collective unconsciousness—a pool of human experience and concepts that includes patterns of human thought or archetypes developed through the centuries. The Seeker is one of those archetypes.

So many of us, as we have seen, are being called to take full responsibility for the care of our souls by becoming spiritual seekers. This movement away from organized religion surely is part of a wider trend that touches many other areas of our lives. Probably the most well-documented is the parallel development taking place in the care of our bodies. The National Institutes of Health reports that in the United States 36 percent of us are using some form of complementary or alternative medicine (CAM). If megavitamin therapy is included in the definition of CAM, the figure rises to 62 percent.

Seekers of physical well-being are leaving conventional Western medicine, with its doctrinaire methods based solely on narrowly interpreted science, to pursue healing through alternative medical systems such as homeopathy, naturopathy, and ayurveda. Thirty years ago, alternative medical modalities were practically unheard of in the United States. Today, many thousands of people take up biologically based therapies, such as food supplements and herbs, along with chiropractic, osteopathy, energy healing, massage therapy, and acupuncture to address their health issues.

Spiritual seeking meets bodily healing in mind-body medicine, a variety of techniques designed to enhance the mind’s ability to affect bodily function and symptoms. They include yoga, meditation, and other relaxation practices, and a range of spiritual practices.

What is happening in our relationship to the body—taking the primary responsibility for it away from “professionals”—is strikingly similar to what is unfolding in the realm of our spirituality. Just as we are seeking physical healing outside the old system of medicine we grew up with, we are also seeking to create a personal spiritual life away from the old structure of organized religion.

Many people in our culture find it difficult to recognize that there is a difference between religion and spirituality. Confusion around the two keeps sincere spiritual seekers in organized religion even when they know they are not being nourished by it. They often suspect, as I did, that continuing as a faithful member of a religious organization actually is impeding their spiritual progress. Nevertheless, they remain in religion because they believe it is the only way to have a relationship with their divine Source.

Religion offers us a connection with the divine—with conditions. Primary among those conditions, which include myriad laws regulating our conduct, is the notion that our relationship with our Source depends on the agency of a church and its ministers. In religion, we go to “God” through a paternal authority figure, a priest, minister, rabbi, preacher, guru, or some other form of spiritual specialist. The underlying assumption is that we are incapable of making and keeping a connection to our Source on our own. There is no room for spiritual seeking inside religion, because religion already has all the answers. In religion, what is required is faith.

Personal spirituality is entirely different from religiosity. Spirituality is the content of religion (or should be, under the best of circumstances). Spirituality is the awareness of ourselves as beings living in a multidimensional world, in connection with our Source and all other living beings. We know there is much more to us than what we can see and touch. This “much more” is the realm of spirit. We understand that our human experience is like an iceberg: only the tip, a small part of the whole, is visible. Living daily in this awareness, we lift all that is human in us to the level of interconnectedness with all other living things, all there is.

The challenge for the spiritual seeker is to come eventually to spiritually solid ground, avoiding the temptation to follow this self-important guru or that ego-inflated workshop leader, and sidestepping the sentimentality of most modern inspirational writers. The search for a meaningful personal spirituality is a serious one, demanding the full attention of both heart and mind.

Spiritual seekers create their own spiritual lives out of their personal experience of the divinity. They are led to build a personal spiritual philosophy—an open-minded, open-hearted, ever-evolving one—from many spiritual or humanistic traditions and worldviews. Some seekers are even guided back to all or part of the religion of their parents, but with a completely different spiritual understanding.

Out of personal spiritual philosophy, which motivates and gives meaning to all of our life, we live as “higher humans,” beings with one foot on the earthly plane and the other in the mystical, unknown kingdom where we are one with all. From that awareness, we are moved to live our lives in a certain principled way—leading to service. The proof of a healthy spiritual life, I believe, is the extent to which we make ourselves available to the needs of others.

Many people remain members of an organized religion because they are concerned that without religion their children and family will receive no moral guidance. They may also be troubled about the prospect of being on their own spiritually, without a professional religious overseer or caretaker. If this or a similar fear is keeping you tied to a set of religious beliefs that have ceased to nourish your soul, what follows should assure you that there is indeed life after religion.

If you have left organized religion and are searching for a way to create a rich spiritual life on your own, you will find here a plan for doing so, with my experience as an example. As a member of a Catholic religious order, I was as religious as one can get. Now, outside religion, I try to live a spiritually informed and inspired life, connected to my Source and to all that had its beginnings there.

When we become spiritual seekers, we take full responsibility for creating a deep personal bond with the divine on our own. The path may not be an easy one for some (it was not for me, at times), but the rewards of searching for the Source of all being and enjoying an intimate relationship with it are immense.

PART ONE

beginning

CHAPTER ONE

a larger picture

Truth is within ourselves; it takes no rise