Feel-good spiritual paths espousing light and love and the prospect of some kind of an enlightenment with little or no effort are plentiful, but have they really changed you? A trend is developing toward a serious approach to spirituality involving personal, in-depth, permanent changes in perspective, and the trend is rapidly growing. Practitioners are becoming increasingly wary of recreational spirituality because their lives have not fundamentally changed; the same troublesome problems exist with the same old "self" in control, and they are no closer to the new consciousness that is evolving in the world than they were years ago.
Sometimes we can feel as if we are in a spirituality supermarket, everything looks so good, so enticing. We put a little of this in our baskets and a little of that . . . and check out. We go home, try a little of this and a little of that, and have lots of fun. Everything is interesting and keeps us busy and absorbed, and we really believe that we are making some kind of transformation.
Then one day, perhaps suddenly, we are faced with a situation that confirms that all the old tendencies that we thought we have left far behind were only hiding, waiting for the right moment to remind us that nothing has changed at all.
We cannot keep our cake and eat it too, we cannot keep our old ego, our old idea of us, and expect to change into something else. We are only play-acting if we think this way. This begs the question; do we really want to change or not? Because change involves letting go of who we are. If we are fundamentally in love with who we are, and only want to touch up a few edges of our personality, then a fundamental change will never take place. Only at the end of personality is where that big one happens, and few want to go that far.
If you haven't thought about this in depth, you should. Before spending money on self-help books, CDs, and spiritual paths, make certain that you really want to change, because real change means letting go of everything that you currently believe in, and that can be a radical step for many people. Without letting it all go, the core remains unchanged.
If you find that you really don't want to change that much, then the spiritual path becomes no different from any pastime, like knitting or tennis. As matter of fact, knitting and tennis are a bit more honest - no pretenses.
E. Raymond Rock of Fort Myers, Florida is cofounder and principal teacher at the Southwest Florida Insight Center, http://www.SouthwestFloridaInsightCenter.com His twenty-eight years of meditation experience has taken him across four continents, including two stopovers in Thailand where he practiced in the remote northeast forests as an ordained Theravada Buddhist monk. His book, A Year to Enlightenment (Career Press/New Page Books) is now available at major bookstores and online retailers. Visit http://www.AYearToEnlightenment.com