I am surprised by the number of people I encounter who feel the spiritual search and enlightenment are an escape from life. Even spiritual seekers often feel guilty, as if they are avoiding life through the spiritual search rather than embracing it. As if it was nobler to stay in the trenches and suffer with the troops. Yet, enlightenment is more akin to a soldier “going over the top” and venturing into no-man’s land. Far from avoiding life, the spiritual search is plunging full-bore into the paradox of life and our self. It is not avoidance, but it is escape – or the potential for escape. Only a fool would not want to escape an unfortunate circumstance.
And we are in an unfortunate circumstance. In a world at once stunningly beautiful, yet full of calamities. We witness love and hate, birth and death, tragedy and comedy. We witness our own mental and physical vacillation between extremes – health and illness, anxiety and calm. We see the picture of our life change, grow still, and fade. We don’t know why any of this is happening, and we can’t even be content to simply witness, for knowing that the witness will die and all it knew, all it experienced will be lost. Still, we have the feeling that something must survive, something must be permanent, yet is that feeling the truth, or denial of the truth?
Psychology, under its many guises, offers a host of escapes – which are better named avoidances, as not one of them is a permanent solution. Yet I do not dismiss all of psychology with that statement. Psychology can help us uncover our fundamental anxiety – death. When faced with the fact that everything fades, however, psychology’s solution is for us to soldier on in the face of oblivion – to take solace in experience and join hands with the other experiencers.
Psychology casts stones at the spiritual search, or at best gives a condescending nod. The perception being that the spiritual seeker is a sort of refined alcoholic drinking in practices that numb him to the realities of the world. This is true for many seekers – it is true for most everyone in the world. The culmination of the search, enlightenment, is believed to be a state unfazed by the storm and tide of life and mind. So the self-realized aren’t really experiencing life, or are in a drug- induced-like bliss.
I have not known a self-realized person who was without emotion, without thought, or without a body and its ills. Yet, there is a difference between someone who has been to no-man’s land and returned, and someone who has never left the trenches. Enlightenment won’t be what you want (you will still be, wet feet and all, in the trenches), but will satisfy your wants for all time. And that is not the avoidance of life, but the culmination.
Yes, the spiritual search is an escape. You have two choices, whether to avoid the problem of life and death, or escape it. A true spiritual search is an active study of escape routes that takes you through questions about how you will live life, through the realm of psychology, and into examining (looking for the source of) your experience of experience.