I certainly understand the frustration with blogging and the compulsion to give it up. I gave it up for seven months, resumed with renewed vigor for several months, and lately have been very sporadic. However, I am not ready to give up on blogging. I still believe blogging has potential, although not in its current form.

Understanding the limitations, less then a week ago my teacher made some comments about blogging. He had previously commented that it seems everyone is very eager to state their understanding, and often state it as if it is THE understanding. His more recent comment was a continuation of his earlier observations. “What I see happening is something I see everyone doing. ”

“First, some people will come on and state that they do not understand the issue being discussed. Then, after saying that, they will give their opinion, but the opinion is stated in a tone of being factual. Now, I do not have a problem with someone saying they don’t understand; nor do I have a problem with someone saying they don’t understand, and then giving an opinion from the perspective of being someone who does not understand. But, I do have a problem with someone who doesn’t understand, who then gives an opinion as though they do understand.”

“Second, sometimes someone will be right on the point, but then they lose it, or it drifts away, with no one picking up on it. People will connect to the point for a moment, and then they will drift off course.”

Maybe we don’t see the problem this way, but my teacher’s insights suggest that discouragement with the medium is because we either don’t know what the point is, or we don’t recognize it when we see it, or we lose it once we have it. Of course, it is very easy to apply this to our own lives and frustrations with how to make a deeper connection, the one we are yearning to make. So why all the frustration? It is because we don’t understand the next step.

The reason we are having a problem is because we are cutting into the unknown. Last night I heard a teacher describe the door into understanding as being very tiny. He said it is the teacher’s job to show us that tiny, little door.

Two nights ago I personally met a fellow blogger for the first time, Jon Zuck. I have known Jon for a couple of years and it was great to finally meet him. After a night of getting acquainted face to face over dinner, we agreed to get together the next night so that I could attend a class with Jon’s teacher. This master is dedicated to the Way; it is his profession and life’s work. Born in 1948, Kitabu Roshi is an author, teacher and martial arts master. He recently started a new website. After the evening class, in which he discussed the importance of a teacher and the importance of learning how to ‘get out of the way’ and let the ‘One’ come through, there were refreshments and informal chats. Among other things, we briefly discussed the web as a teaching medium. While I sensed in Roshi a hopeful optimism, he also sees its limitations.

E.R. Spruiell and Kitabu Roshi

As bloggers we are touching people, but we are sometimes hitting barriers within our blogging and within ourselves. Spiritual blogs and websites can help and inform us, but words only take us so far. Using our intellect only gets us to a certain point and then we start regressing or at best doing lateral development. Essential to deeper development is the need for actual deeper experiences. How is the web going to get us to the next point? How is the web going to give us deeper experiences? We don’t know the answer to that.

If we want to open up, in a truly meaningful and substantial way, we need a teacher (in whatever form that takes) to guide us through the unknown. Yet, we are often way too quick to define what the unknown thing looks and feels like.

With respect to a person as a teacher, many people resist the notion of a spiritual teacher. They don’t want to give up their personal power, or they have been taught that everything is already in them. Everything is in us, but if we glibly dismiss the need for a teacher because ‘everything is already in me,’ we are denying our salvation. If everything is already in us, then why don’t we demonstrate and live the ‘everything’? This is one of those many paradoxes that can confound us when we are on the outside of the door looking in. Actually, we are not looking in the door, because we don’t even know what the door looks like. We wouldn’t recognize it if it was staring us right in the face.

Teacher’s who are genuinely capable of being a guide along the inner path are hard to find. But they are much easier to find than the point inside of us that we find to be so elusive. Meanwhile, the teacher stands patiently, ignored as he continuously, 24/7, points to the tiny, little door.

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How do we know exactly where we are along the path of eternal awareness? That would be a valuable thing to know.

An accurate understanding of where we are in this process is different than making a general statement like, “Well, I can tell you one thing - I am not all that eternally aware” or “I have some awareness, but I sure need more.” Such statements are vague and generally useless. Yet we often say them in a clubby or chummy sort of way, perpetuating the conspiracy of ignorance that occurs when we laugh and agree.

In striving for eternal awareness am I 1% aware? 10%? More? Knowing exactly where we are along the trail would give us a sense of how far we’ve come and how far we have to go.

One time I was backpacking with my brother and a couple of friends along the Appalachian Trail. The AT is a 2175 mile footpath that runs from Georgia to Maine. We were hiking over a section of ten mountains in New York state. Lugging a 55 pound backpack, I was coming down a small descent between mountains when I misstepped and my ankle twisted, folding under the full downhill weight of my right leg. Instantly collapsing, I had suffered severe ligament tears and could barely walk. We had topographic maps and it was easy to see that there was no quick way out. We were exactly half way, so I sucked it up and with the help of my trusty walking stick and sympathetic hiking companions, we climbed over the last five mountains for another day or two of painful hiking.

That map gave me get a better perspective of the length of the journey. Knowing that I was over a day away from relief kept me from whining about not being on the way home in an hour. I was able to develop a sense of timing which, together with a sense of the trail’s length, helped me overcome the excruciating pain. Whether we are in pain or not, whether our day is filled with light or darkness, shouldn’t we strive for a similar first rate sense of perspective along the path of eternal awareness?

If you knew exactly where you were along the awareness road, you could more clearly see the problems you are experiencing. Maybe you’d see that you aren’t even on the main road, but are on some side road, detouring for no good reason. Then again, if you knew there was a lot of road construction up ahead, perhaps a detour would be appropriate.

This precise sense of measurement is missing. Our current methodologies for determining our position are too vague. “All I know is that it just seems like the same thing keeps happening over and over,” laments one seeker. Another adds in frustration, “I just can’t get a clear sense of what I am supposed to do.” Another echos a common spiritual teaching, “It is all about Love,” while another says, “I am nothing and nothing matters.”

We read books, enroll in classes and surf the net, searching for answers and clarity, and our effort and progress often seems to be measured in inches not in miles. We convince ourselves that we are advancing because our friends act as though their meager progress is satisfying, so we agree and attempt to feel good about ourselves. The prevalence of this reinforcement conspires to convince us that we are making significant progress, but deep inside we know we aren’t.

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Every winter brings a certain bleakness with its shorter days and its colder temperatures. It is a time when long dark nights are often accompanied by stillness, lethargy and dormancy. Winter’s attributes affect human behavior. For example, there are times during each winter when I feel like I am going to be done in. Sometimes these are just fleeting thoughts of despondency, but at other times I have found myself too deeply submerged into weeks and weeks of the darkness called winter.

Winter is a time to allow the soil to rest, as we prepare for the new growing season ahead. It is also the time to look into the darkness called our self, and examine our roots and the ground we are growing in.

Here are a few things that I usually go through in the dark night of winter:

Questions about my self worth

Dealing with desires to ‘give it all up’

Discouragement, such as asking questions like, “What’s the point?”

In past years I had a hard time seeing how to build something positive out of winter’s doldrums. In recent years, however, I have realized that just as it is good to contemplate Death every day, it is also beneficial to use questions like these to mine deeper into our root system. I find that as I go deeper and deeper, I discover more and more substance. This discovery can yield a confidence and determination to center on and in the deeper and more fundamental aspects of life, including the root drivers that are determining our reason for Being here in the first place.

Mining of this nature doesn’t come without a price, and one price is standing up for what we discover to be True as we travel beyond the shafts and tunnels of Time, and enter into the vast cavern of the Eternal.

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The inexpressible becomes expressible through building common experiences. We can see this in everyday life.

For example, a solitary traveler returns from the far reaches of the world and says, “Let me tell you what great things I have seen.” But no matter what he says, it doesn’t convey his astounding adventures. So, the listener politely nods her head, occasionally murmuring, “That sounds great.”

On the other hand, when one or more people share an indescribable experience, a vocabulary emerges. Read the rest of this entry »

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