In a spiritual sense, success is right relation to God, and this must first be established before it can be maintained. Right relation requires a surrendered heart, and many of us falter here because it requires relinquishing control of our lives. But we are not relinquishing control to an arbitrary entity such as an institution or ideology, but rather to the paragon of ultimate reality, from which flows the Holy Spirit. We are limited to communing with this Spirit instead of directly with its source, though the Spirit itself is the voice of its own source, and might rightly be considered as being the Word of God. It is living and dynamic, and may not say the same to me as it might to someone else, nor necessarily guide me now as it might have earlier in my life. Knowing that this Spirit guides us as individuals renders us unqualified to accurately judge other people, though we are more likely to discern self-centeredness once we have surrendered the heart. The familiar concept of good versus evil, then, becomes reduced here to the idea of the surrendered heart versus the unsurrendered heart, or rather to Spirit versus self. Not that the heart is evil in itself, for we admire many of the qualities of the heart, but left alone it sure can be self-serving. Only in communion with the Spirit can the heart reach its true potential. Once we have surrendered the heart, incidentally, self becomes Self, and we are on our way to fulfilling our ultimate destiny.
The best thing I can do for anyone and for everyone is to be rightly related to God, and this is the ultimate self-sacrifice, though it is perennially in my own best interest. It is the path to effective living, and once we have found it there is nothing else worth doing, for anything else falls short. I am reminded of the United States and of its involvement in World War Two. Despite the implicit horror in some of our actions, there is left an indelible satisfaction that the United States performed a great service to the world by its participation in this war. Nothing less would have brought the war to a satisfactory conclusion, for such can be the insanity of power-mad regimes. It was a tremendous sacrifice, for we lost over 500,000 soldiers, and the war consumed us culturally and economically for years, even though we did not seem to be directly threatened. We involved ourselves because of a divine inspiration, and imagine us today if we had not. Our role in helping defeat Germany and its allies brought well-deserved glory to the United States, which we are still basking in to some extent today.
The spiritual life can itself involve mind-numbing sacrifice, and it is the ultimate test of our fidelity to remain true unconditionally. Ultimately, success means acquiring the discipline to keep the heart surrendered regardless of what kinds of pressure we face. After the war, the victorious allies fractured into east and west, into Soviet communism and capitalist democracies, and almost immediately a Cold War developed between those who had recently been allied, and the world became oppressed for decades on account of this. Without the common enemy keeping them bound together, these recent allies rather became enemies to one another. Something similar is happening in the United States and within its government today.
When Soviet communism collapsed several decades ago, it was again perceived as a great triumph for the United States, and for democracy and capitalism everywhere. It was such, sorely needed by the world, as Soviet communism was founded and then exercised in self-will. When Marx’s prediction of the working class rising up to spontaneously overthrow capitalism never happened, the Bolsheviks approximated the realization of that prediction by overthrowing the czar themselves, seizing control, and the result was the long and slow suffocation of culture, for the heart cannot thrive wherever self-will is in control. When the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War ended, it would seem that without this common enemy binding together the political parties in the United States government, slowly these parties became the bloodthirsty enemies of one another, until now when the government can barely function. A kind of political cold war has just about crippled our government, arising ironically out of the same political establishment which effectively won the Cold War on a global scale only decades ago. Is it only the presence of a common enemy which is capable of keeping divergent groups bound together?
If a common enemy is what we need, in the spiritual realm we need look no further than the exaltation of self, manifest in behavior as self-will, where outcomes are forced because someone has decided that circumstances ought to be arranged in a certain way. The motivation for this behavior is not the greater good, though it will often be asserted as such, but rather to benefit an individual or institution politically, socially, or economically, regardless of the consequences to others. This is why American politics has devolved into something resembling a rivalry football game, where nothing matters except winning, with no thought toward sharing the responsibilities of governing. A few years ago, a prominent world leader denounced American politics as being schizophrenic: it was not always thus, though it is hard to deny that it now resembles this. Overcoming our political “psychosis” will surely require surrendered hearts, for otherwise we will remain trapped in the same chronic myopia which made us ill in the first place. Life in the Spirit forces us to look beyond ourselves, by shifting our perspective to include the bigger picture. The very act of surrendering the heart confesses that we cannot do this on our own.
The beauty of confronting the phenomenon of self-will is that we cannot judge its presence in others as well as we can detect its presence in ourselves. This is, again, because God may be steering individuals somewhat differently. What may be wrong for me may not necessarily be wrong for someone else, and who am I to judge someone else’s spiritual credibility? If we are serious about establishing healthy spirituality in ourselves, however, we will find ourselves being checked when we are about to transgress, and we will not behave in certain ways. We will also find ourselves being led toward the establishment of certain priorities, and it is along these lines that we may freely exercise our will, so long as the heart remains surrendered. Here is where we find the substance of liberty: in the exercising of our will toward clear objectives established spiritually. This may include obtaining a particular degree from a university, or establishing a family, buying a house, or writing blogs. It is the ongoing development of spiritual discipline which will lead us ever more precisely through the wilderness of our own instincts and emotions, to establish our niche in the rich and dynamic diversity of human culture.
To honor the essence of the Earth means being in harmony with its fundamental purpose, and this purpose involves the entirety of life. Animals are not destructive beyond the basic quest for survival, yet often we will accumulate layer upon layer of redundancy to our comfort, which only makes sense if it ultimately returns some measure of profit to the world. The self-centered life consumes more than it produces, while the Spirit-centered life produces more than it consumes. The spiritual life is equally challenging to the wealthy as to the poor, and thusly it may be considered as the great equalizer. Honoring the essence of the Earth means surrendering the heart to life’s purpose, and this is discernible only through intimacy with the Spirit. We do not know the extent to which the Spirit acts upon life in the natural world, though it is likely a one-way communication, while ours is ideally a two-way communication. There could be nothing more profitable than for all of humanity to surrender its heart to the divine.
One day, several summers ago, I found myself alone on a portion of Middle Bass Island out in Lake Erie, and I meandered myself close to the shoreline. The breeze was rather stiff that day and happened to be blowing towards me, and so the waves were unusually pronounced. There was a wall of rock behind me, and the situation seemed delightfully primitive as I reveled in the unexpected solitude. Perhaps I saw a decaying fish on the shore, I do not remember, but something triggered the thought of me floating dead there in the water. I imagined myself bobbing with the waves, and I was struck by a curious juxtaposition: knowing that the surrendered heart in tandem with spiritual communion puts me in harmony with the natural world, I perceived myself being richly honored by nature in that post-mortem state, and thereby eagerly welcomed into the Great Expanse. It felt wonderful, and distinctly immediate! Then, I imagined myself having never surrendered my heart, having lived selfishly instead, and the same corpse drifting helplessly in the water now seemed sadly shunned by nature, desolate as if it were somehow left stranded alone on the moon. The clarity of these perceptions is what I remember most, and because of this I have given added credence to these insights. I knew which corpse I wanted to be, and therefore I now aspire to be the one welcomed unforgettably into the Great Expanse.
