Spirituality That Includes Darkness

Life is a mystery, and most of the systems that claim to explain it are covering it over. If you're honest, you don't know why any of this is happening. Some of it is wonder. A lot of it looks like a random run of luck, and some of it looks flatly cruel. Anyone who lives long enough sees that.

There are two easy ways out, and both are a kind of denial. One is to drown in the darkness until you want to give up. The other is to deny it's there. The second one dresses up as spirituality more often than the first.

The law of attraction is the clean example. The pitch is that you can think your way to whatever you want. Stay positive, hold the image, and it comes. Which means when the unwanted thing arrives, the illness, the loss, it must have been something in you that drew it. You weren't positive enough. Your own thoughts betrayed you. I've watched people do real damage to themselves with that idea. It's the same trade the performance runs: worth and safety made contingent on getting it right, and the ache turned into your own failure.

I don't think your disgust and your grief are flaws to rise above. They're part of how you tell true from false. A spirituality that asks you to feel only the bright things isn't open. It's guarding, with better vocabulary.

There's a knowing that doesn't come through the intellect. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors ran on it, because their lives depended on sensing what was around them. We traded most of it in for planning, tracking, and controlling, and we got good at that, and we came to trust nothing we couldn't verify. So now we feel the truth of something in the body and wave it off unless the science backs it up.

An honest spirituality leaves nothing out. Not the darkness in the world, not the darkness in you, not the thing you sense and can't prove. It doesn't reduce to four tidy truths or ten clean rules. It stays at the razor's edge of what you know, where what you were sure of yesterday might not hold today.

The True Meaning of Faith

Years ago I came across a talk by Karen Armstrong on the Golden Rule. What stayed with me was a side point about the word belief.

In its older sense, belief did not mean agreeing to a set of propositions. It meant something closer to commitment: I engage myself. Trust in God was not something you decided. It formed through practice, day in and day out, and the doctrine only made sense once you were living it. Armstrong's point was that religious teachings are a summons to action, and you understand them only when you act on them.

The Yoga Sutras work the same way. There is a worldview under the text, but it is barely described, and it does not much matter whether the yogi believes in it. The text is organized around practice, the doing. What comes out of the practice is a kind of insight you can trust. That is belief in the old sense. You did not take it on. You arrived at it.

Once, I tried to open a debate with an orthodox Jewish friend about his interpretation of the Torah. He told me we couldn't have the discussion because he understood the Torah to be written by God, and I understood it to be written by men. To talk with him, I would have had to disbelieve what I knew. That is the modern arrangement: a comprehensive account of the world that asks you to override your own sense of things. Blind faith is claiming to know a subject you never studied.

Practice can turn into the same trap. I've seen yoga and meditation teachers whose whole lives are dedicated to a severe version of a tradition, even when it injures them and the people they teach. They can contort their bodies. They stopped growing a long time ago. The adherence became the point.

Whatever discipline you keep, its job is to put you in contact with something you could not have seen otherwise. Stay with it long enough, and what forms is different from blind faith. It is the kind of trust you know in your bones, even in the moments you've lost your way.