' Awakening is not for sissies '...

AWAKENING IS NOT FOR SISSIES!

The following is not a popular teaching..You will not hear it on the satsang circuit and you will probably not see it on an episode of Super Soul Sunday on the Oprah Winfrey network! You will also probably not read it in any of the books on the Watkins Bookstore list of the 100 most influential spiritual books at the end of the year!

As my old novice master in the Trappists used to say, "Everyone wants humility but no one wants the humiliations that go into forming it!" Likewise, everybody wants to awaken, but no one wants to pay the price of awakening. And the price of awakening is the willingness to let go of absolutely all that we think we know and find comfortable and spiritually consoling and to stand in a place of utter humility and insecurity, to stand in a place of not knowing anything at all. "In order to really know, we must go by a way in which we know not." said wise Saint John of the Cross!

Instead, we often want a "cheap grace" that requires little or nothing of us...We want a spiritual path that will hand us riches and impressive spiritual siddhis and powers. We want Life, or a teacher, a spiritual system, or a religion, to hand enlightenment to us wrapped in beautiful wrapping paper with a big red bow on top and sitting on a silver platter! We want a literal or figurative "savior" on a white horse with wings to swoop down from the heavens and save us from the big, bad devil-ego-monster.

But no-one is going to save us. Awakening requires a deep earnestness on our part that is willing to pay any price and is willing to relinquish anything and walk the extra 1000 miles in order to embrace the truth. But virtually no-one wants to hear this.

Granted, "efforting" and "doing" in the spiritual journey can certainly be overdone, and often is. Nonetheless, on the other hand, awakening is not normally something that just shows up in our life automatically either....For you see, in the end, there is no cheap grace.....True and authentic grace will always cost us the surrender of absolutely everything we hold dear!

Awakening is definitely not for sissies!


- Francis Bennett