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ORIAH MOUNTAIN DREAMER
is a visionary teacher and writer and author of the best
selling The Invitation
and The Dance. She gives speeches and leads workshops, ceremonies, and retreats throughout
Canada and the United States.
Oriah and I have been holding mutual reality check
conversations, over the years, sharing reports from our
journeys along the
weird and wonderful
paths of the the New Spirituality.
I find
her at home working on her new book. She has
recently completed a speaking and workshop tour of the major and some minor
New Spirituality centers
throughout the north American Continent.
ORIAH INTERVIEW PART TWO:
The interview takes on a different character on a member site like this.
In print media in a magazine say, the Interview when it works, is two engaged
people in real non linear conversation. The reader becomes the third person
the engaged listener. The conversation informs stimulates thought provokes
reaction. If the reader is so moved they can write a letter or an email to the
editor that may or may not get printed. Usually not, often because space on
the letters page, is at a premium. This is different.
ABE: All kinds of surprising people get into the spiritual. When they tell
their story, a very interesting thing happens: their story may be very
plausible but not exactly believable, or it might be highly improbable and yet
it’s believable. It seems to be difficult for most people to tell an accurate
story about how they got involved in the spiritual.
Oriah: I hope that's not true. I'm making my living trying to do that!
(Laughter)
ABE: Yes indeed and there is this. You get into the spiritual: it radicalizes
your consciousness, which in turn makes you perceive your memories with a
different quality of awareness.
Oriah: I think there are a number of problems with telling the spiritual
story, which are painfully evident when told on television,
more so even than in print. I think what you said is true: consciousness
changes and so your memory is changed too.
Telling a story of spiritual development, if it's true to what happened, will
result in another spiritual development. It's very hard to define it, because
it's transforming as you tell it.
ABE: Now, people want to hear the story. They always ask: “How did you get
into this?"
Oriah: Absolutely. It's interesting - when people hear and receive the
spiritual story, if you have been true to engaging with the inner form of the
story as you tell it, because it is alive now, in a sense, as something not
just part of you, but as something greater.
If you bring all of yourself to it and are faithful to it when you tell it,
then people will have a direct experience of that inner form which is embedded
in the story. What they receive from it will be different in many ways from
what you did.
ABE: How do you feel about that?
ORIAH: I used to have trouble with it, because people would tell me about
transformational experiences they had had reading my story, particularly
people who were in extreme situations.
ABE: What kind of extreme situations?
ORIAH: Women whose children had recently died, and in the midst of that grief
someone had given them one of my books, and they felt that it had moved and
helped them in some deep healing way. Sometimes they would try to tell me
about it and I would push it away: "No, that wasn't me." I was absolutely
right, but I didn't need to push it away.
ABE: What is actually at work there?
ORIAH: My part of the path is to be as faithful to the story as possible and
to let it change even as I tell it. If I do that, then the receptive reader
and these women were particularly receptive because they were in pain, will
engage the story’s inner form and have an
experience that's well beyond any knowledge I could have.
ABE: So is something intuitive going on there, something working through from
another level?
ORIAH: I couldn't possibly write a book that would help a woman whose child is
dying or has just died. I'd have no idea what to say! And yet they felt that
what was in the book helped them, and I can only credit that to an engaging
with something larger than the small details of the story. And, of course,
that's the power of story.
ABE: So, you're bringing in the subject of death here. There are also
near-death experiences, which are almost a media cliché at this point.
Oriah: They are, aren't they? There are so many of them, and then
there are all of these explanations being given of chemical changes in the
brain - that if you cause certain chemical changes, people will have the same
kind of visioning that they had in near-death experiences – and these
explanations are often used to invalidate the power of the near death
experience for people.
As a culture we seem oddly incapable of considering the possible explanations
for the near death experience without closing ourselves off from some of them,
without sucking the life out of what it meant to us and the transformation
that took place in us as a result.
ABE: Well, we all know that’s just the abominable arrogance of materialistic
scientism, trying to tell people that they didn’t experience what they know
they experienced. As if electro chemical brain responses exclude spiritual
experience. From another perspective they confirm it.
The whole world is having a near-death experience, there are nuclear bombs,
other terrible biological and chemical weapons the ecological crisis, the
always looming third world war. The death of the planet is so present that
people are having these near-death experiences in a different way than they
might have had them in the past. It's as if something is happening to people
to awaken them to the spiritual meaning of mortality, to the meaning of life
itself.
Is it possible for someone to actually escape the spiritual if it's meant for
them?
Oriah: Yes. I think so. We are loved more than we will ever know, and that
love is so unconditional that it includes free-will, even when we are not
well-equipped to use that free-will wisely.
ABE: So you're saying that the spiritual could touch you, could come into your
life for real, but you could just deny it and walk away from it.
Oriah: Yes. I've seen people do this. I've seen people denigrate their own
experience on all kinds of different levels. We’ve become jaded in so many
ways. This young woman was telling me that she had just met someone, that she
was in love, and she said it in this kind of sing-song, derisive tone:
"Well, you know, were in that 'oh isn't everything wonderful', 'I can
hardly wait to see you' mode" and ground into the dirt this unbelievable
experience that we all have had of being madly in love and the whole world
looking differently, and I said to her, "Please don't do that." To have
remained silent, I would have been complicit in her denigration of her
experience, of falling in love.
ABE: What is it, bogus cool and fake sophistication? People do that a lot with
non-ordinary experiences…
ORIAH: When it comes to mystical experiences, I have worked with people who
suddenly remember something very meaningful that happened to them as a child,
when they heard a voice or saw something that they haven't thought of for
thirty or forty years. You think, "Where did it go?" I think that being-ness,
the presence that's within us and around us, is constantly calling to us. I
don't think it's waiting for an opening. I think it's there constantly. We
think that we go around in our normal consciousness, and that occasionally
something else reaches out for us. I think that something is always reaching
out for us, and occasionally we let it through.
ABE: I agree totally. If you accept the notion that there's an individual
Higher Self in everyone, that guides us, manipulates us even, until we wake up
fully as the Higher Self.
Oriah: Yes, I think our essential being-ness, our essence, is continually
interested in seizing life, and that means waking up. Again, it's constant in
its effort to help us wake up.
ABE: It would appear that some near-death experience come about because the
person's Higher Self had been trying to get through to them, and they hadn't
been listening. There are stories of terrible road accidents for instance,
followed by near-death experience, and then afterwards the individual looking
back at their life and seeing and knowing what the accident has meant
spiritually. The person realizing that they had been willfully ignoring a
spiritual call, and that finally they’d gotten a slap in the head in the form
of the terrible road accident. Have you ever run across that kind of thing?
Oriah: Yeah, but I'm uncomfortable with the slap in the head thing...
ABE: (laughing). Me too!
Oriah: I don't think that’s how it works, that the accident is actually caused
by the Higher Self for that purpose. Shit happens. It is caused. It's all
caused. Who knows what combination of things happened on that day - was
someone distracted? We're all driving around in vehicles we know will not
withstand collisions, at speeds we necessitate because we spread ourselves out
from where we live and where we work, and all the rest of it. So there's a
certain amount of inevitable collisions and various injuries and death which
can occur from that. We know that collectively. We make that choice.
ABE: Still vast numbers of people drive the roads of the world and never have
an accident, so ‘accidents’ may still have spiritual meaning.
ORIAH: Do I think that people are given opportunity to really wake up to a
bigger awareness of what they're doing here and who they are through
accidents? Absolutely: But I don't think that my Higher Self or your Higher
Self and the presence that's larger than all of it orchestrates those for that
purpose.
ABE: So do you think maybe the accident is karmic, and the Higher Self takes
the opportunity to come through?
Oriah: I think the accident is whatever it is, and I'm not sure we can know
what causes it beyond the string of physical events. But yes, I think the
Higher Self is trying to use every opportunity to speak to us. Like I said, it
is calling all the time. When something drastic happens it stops the usual
things we put in the way of hearing it. We get shocked out of the usual
chatter, the usual explanations or running away from whatever it is we do not
to wake up, get stopped, often by
a drastic circumstance, like an accident. And we hear what's always been
there. It seems to us like it's the first time it's been there. But it's
always been there. It's just the first time we can hear it.
ABE: So the spiritual call - you're saying that it's there continuously,
night and day, everywhere, all the time.
Oriah: Yes.
ABE: So a person then could simply choose to turn away from being a
self-involved little nitwit and open him or herself up to that higher
possibility.
Oriah: Yes, I think people who decide to do a spiritual practice, learn a
spiritual tradition, find a spiritual path, are seeking a way to hear that
call all the time in the center of their being - a way to stop doing and learn
how to be.
ABE: So would it be fair to say that the spiritual found you in a dramatic way
at a certain point in your life connected to a tradition of native
spirituality?
Oriah: Yes and no. From my earliest memories as a child I had a sense that I
was aware of the call of what they said was god in Sunday school. But the
Christian tradition I was raised in, seemed to be less and less relevant to my
understanding of that experience as I grew up. The native spirituality
appealed to me because it offered other ways of deliberately opening and
cultivating that connection. But it had always been there.
ABE: Understood, nevertheless, there are moments in one's life when something
radicalizing occurs and shifts the whole of one's life, into a new center of
spiritual gravity.
Oriah: Yes, I think there are a number of those moments where things get
radically shifted right in the moment. Some of those shifts seemed much larger
at the time, but as I go on, I begin to appreciate that some of the more
subtle shifts have just as large an impact in the long-term.
ABE: See, that's an interesting thing, too, isn't it, where somebody is
already involved in an ostensible and deliberate spiritual life, there'll
often be a period where there doesn't seem to be much happening at all, but
something very subtle is going on in the background, and then there's a sudden
epiphany or awakening on a much deeper level, and it will often be thematic.
It's as if you've realized the same things over and over and over again on a
deeper and deeper and deeper level.
Oriah: Yes. What I have always loved and has scared me too is; that will be
happening, and I'll think, "Wow, I didn't really understand what that meant at
all before." And then I realize that five years
from now I'm going to say the same thing about what's happening right now!
(Laughter)
ABE: So given that there are themes of ever deepening spiritual awareness and
awakening is it possible to essentialize the spiritual. Understand it as an
integrated cluster of distilled ideas and insights, as opposed to, say,
spiritual consumerism where people constantly go from one thing to another?
Oriah: Yes. This is the difficulty. I think you can distill it down. And it
comes out as something like, "Love is all there is", which sounds like so much
of a cliché that it doesn't mean anything. The difficulty with the
distillation down to essentials is that you can come up with a half a dozen of
these wise proverbs, and they're all absolutely true with a capital T, but
without the experience, they don't mean anything.
ABE: That's right.
Oriah: And they're not accessible to people without the particular
experience, without the story, whatever their story is, of how they get there.
ABE: On one hand, we have Zen, which we've all read about, at least. So that
seems to be a radicalized essentializing of both spiritual practice and
thought.
Oriah: And I'm sure that it really works for some people.
ABE: Well we know it does, but that also means you go into a monastery and sit
zazen meditation. What would an essentialized spirituality look like if you
work on Bay Street in Toronto or Wall Street or a factory or a shopping mall?
Oriah: It's no different from a Zen monastery, because, in essence, it's still
about learning to really be, to stop doing, and allow the being-ness that is
both what you are and larger than what you are to fill the space and let all
motion arise from that deep stillness. But hearing that, if you don't have
that experience, while your boss is bugging you to get going, or the kids need
to be fed and sent to school, doesn't sound like it has anything to do with
your life. Learning to be fully aware wherever you are means that you are
dealing with your own internal chatter, your own ego-desires and that goes
wherever we go. So we can change our circumstances and our geography, but were
still challenged by the same things.
ABE: So here we have the individual in the world, realizing there is real
meaning, realizing the meaning is love in the deepest sense, that Life is One,
it's a gift. And so the individual comes to the brink of the spiritual itself,
comes to a horizon of awareness of the passage from the separated self to the
unified self, and the person hesitates at that horizon of awareness.
Oriah: Absolutely.
ABE: A lot of people must be very interested in what is really going on
there at that horizon of awareness, many people now are very aware that they
are at that horizon. They want to cross over or pass through, but something
does not permit it, or they feel stopped.
Oriah: Well, it's the fear of death! (laughter)
ABE: Fear of death? (laughter)
Oriah: (more laughter) I'd say it's top on that list!
ABE: (more laughter) Okay, fear of death...
Oriah: I think there are two issues here: one is that, on one level, the
description you're laying out is very accurate; on another level, it's a
construct of the mind that we're going anywhere. We're not going anywhere.
ABE: Agreed, go on…
Oriah: There's no horizon line of awareness. It's right here. On the other
hand, realizing that it is right here is a kind of journey a leap into the
event and the ego knows that its death is imminent, if it lets go and leaps
into that event.
ABE: So in a spiritual, existential sense, the horizon of awareness is both
real and unreal.
Oriah: I really believe that being in a human life is about marrying the
consciousness of ego and essence, it's about letting your essential core shape
and color your ego and how it lives in the world. Its part of living a human
life that you're going to have passing thoughts and feelings and sensations,
you're going to have preferences, strengths, and weaknesses, these are all
part of that ever-changing thing we identify as our self, which is our ego,
and it's not unreal. It's part of a human life.
ABE: What happens if someone fails to strike that balance?
Oriah: Unfortunately, the psychiatric hospitals are filled with people who
become filled with the essence and cannot hang on to enough sense of ego to
let that essence live in a human life.
ABE: The challenge then of our time is that spiritual awakening is the
imminence and immediacy of sacred awareness rather than simply transcendence,
where it happens to you if you detach yourself from the world or you retreat
into a monastery or after you die.
Oriah: Yes, and I think the longing for that has been the driving force behind
the pursuit of the new spirituality, people wanting to feel that there's less
of a separation between their daily life and their spiritual essence, people
being discontented with organized religions. There is a longing for imminent
spirituality. It comes back to a deep knowing that there is no separation
between spirit and matter. It's one substance. You look at it one way, you see
spirit; you look at it the other way, you see matter. I'm a monist - like
Spinoza, I think there's only one thing going on here, not two. And I think
somehow people instinctually feel that, and so they feel their own discomfort
with the separation, with always reaching for transcendence and leaving the
human behind.
Copyright © A.
Blair-Ewart 1995-2003.
| rabbithowl |
imminent spirituality
3/7/2003 11:37:45 PM |
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In the past I was disturbed by descriptions of spiritual beings meditating far away from civilization in a remote location, communing with the Spirit or “God”. I felt that this could not be the true path: how was such a withdrawal going to help a suffering humanity? I felt there was so much work to be done, action to be taken, right here in the world among human beings. I viewed such a retreat as selfish, even cowardly, and of virtually no use to the rest of humankind. Since then I have learned of the boddhisatva who remains on earth, on this material plane, even though he or she has attained enlightenment, to guide and help others to go free.
For me, personally, spirituality is not about transcendence from either the world or the body. It’s about waking up in the body in the world to everything that goes along with being human, including the various, amazing, sometimes excruciating, senses, emotions, and thoughts. I’m on the spiritual path because I want to be human, which means, I want to feel, I want to think in clarity and innocence, I want to meet and love other beings and relate to them without the necessity of forethought or intent, but rather with a natural spring of deep respect, compassion, and sincerity from an ever-open heart. And I want to experience the world in all of its wonder and beauty and take it back from its would-be destroyers, who only maintain power while we stay asleep.
Perhaps I am just revealing my naivete, but transcendence almost seems boring in comparison. What could be better than waking up right now and enjoying the body and the world as it was meant to be enjoyed, and inviting other people to join you? Afterall, it’s no fun playing in the playground all by yourself! As Oriah points out, the Spirit is all around us, within us, calling to us, from everywhere, all the time, right here on this plane, in our bodies. All we have to do is embrace it and get on with living.
So who wants to play? |
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| Royes |
immanent-transcendent
10/24/2009 8:07:26 PM |
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The immanent and the transcendent are both equally spiritual - two sides of the same coin so speak. The traditional rejection of the spiritual quality of the immanent, phenomenal world was a mistake - overemphazing one side of reality alone; but the transcendent is also real, and the full face of reality includes both. |
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