Sunday Contemplation # 26 Enlightenment Is A Team Sport

We Need To Do This Together

Photo by Vasily Koloda on Unsplash

• This Week’s Quote

• This Sunday’s Contemplation

• A Guided Meditation

• Grateful For

• This Week’s Community Chat

• Upcoming Activities

This Week’s Quote

“It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life — daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct”. Viktor Frankl

This Sunday’s Contemplation

Enlightenment Is A Team Sport.

Good Morning Wisdom Path Walkers:

I hope you are moving into 2025 with some peace in your hearts and hope where it is needed.

Today I also want to send loving support to the people of Los Angeles who are suffering, and to all people suffering this day.

I wanted to take a moment this week to consider how we can take our highest spiritual aspirations and put them into day to day practice. Forgive me the team sport reference. I grew up playing team sports and love them still. For the non-competitive please translate to…we can work together to bring our individual spiritual aspirations into the communities, the businesses and the institutions we need to build and rebuild.

To me this is the essence of what I might call, The Wisdom Path. That is not some path you need to find. You are, we are, already on it.

Like you, your path will be unique, and have attributes and vistas known only to you. The trick is to become aware of where you are on the path. Every model we build to try and explain the ineffable will fall short, but in the world of time and space sometimes we need structure and patterns. Consider characterising the phases of the path like this:*

• Exploration (resistance training)… where we look in every direction outside of ourselves to find happiness and value. We seem to succeed, then stumble and suffer. Human history is testament to the suffering of this blindfolded and flailing exploration. Our resistance to what is essential about us is marked in our own lives. We each have our stories of the apparent highs and the painful lows of this part of our path. This is the phase where most cultures in the world are stuck.

• Discovery (eyes begin to open)…usually exhausted by the resistance training, we are forced to, or choose to, look within. We become aware that I am. We wake up to the fact that happiness and value are the inside job of discovering that we are indeed the Awareness we were seeking. We realise it, in steps and pieces or in eye opening moments. Either way we get there. As Paul Of Tarsus said, “now through a glass darkly, then, face to face”. We glimpse the face of God, of Awareness. Little by little we discover that face also appears in the mirror. We live in a time, where, despite great suffering, there is a growing crowd on this part of the path. This is a gathering of great hope, yet even here, many are struggling with the central question…”now what do I do”?

• Embodying (living your wisdom)…where we strengthen our support network, and learn the new lessons we need to function in the world. These networks are internal individual connections, and the other humans we need to find to support, and to support us, to move our own lives, the lives of those we love, and our world, towards peace. It is the phase of movement in the world, the phase of connection and service. I think it is the team phase, the community phase.

Living Your Wisdom

I called my Substack site Living Your Wisdom because I think this it is the third stage that currently remains poorly explored. We are moving through the age of Homo Sapien towards the age of Homo Spiritus.** I think it is in this stage of human evolution where we can now make significant progress on this part of the wisdom path.

How so?

Many people think that their awakening, their enlightenment, is the end of the path. “Finally I am awake…I made it”!!!!

Yes, we made it…………….to the beginning.

If we look at much of the self-help and personal development world, it is often dancing in the exploration phase. Very often the tools appear to be helpful until such time as you have tried yet another therapist***, read yet another book, been to yet another advanced workshop, and still feel exhausted, and that something still isn’t quite right.

The spiritual traditions that guide us in our discovery, in our waking up to who we really are, are critical. They are wonderful, precious and clearly open the doors of awakening for so many. But so often, once awake, our options remain individualised. I will strengthen my practice. I will make more time for additional retreats. I will find my community to support my practice. I will quit my job and become a healer, a teacher, a writer, an instructor.

It is the time to move awakening beyond the individual. It is the time to find those to work with to be awake to acting in the world.

As we walk on our wisdom path we begin to see that the paths of others seem only a hand reach away. We can walk this together.

Consider these possibilities -

• When we have the experience of waking up to who we really are, we are much better equipped to understand our purpose in the world. We can move from defining a purpose to keep our ravenous ego satisfied, to divining a purpose that aligns with the spiritual intentions rising within us.

• By nature these purposes tend towards…”what I can do to help the world”.

• We discover that there are now many others whose purposes, though unique, can align with mine. We can support each other.

• We discover that in fact, not only are there many whose purpose can align with mine but they are hiding in plain sight. They are not just in the ashrams and retreats, they are in my work, my community, my kids’ schools, my investment group, on Substack. They are in my everyday life.

Moving Past Individualism - Building The Skills

My experience of being on this Living Your Wisdom phase is that there is an obstacle we must find a way around, through and past.

It is this. It seems that once we are awake to who we really are, there is a strong current pulling us towards quiet individualism, towards the inner peace we now treasure that we most likely discovered alone and in silence. There is no crime in this of course, but we, like the Bodhisattvas, must come to understand…It is not about me.

The “I am” that we wake up to, is not small, separate and chasing value. It is the “I” that is inseparable from what we used to think was the other. It is the “I” that is Love, not searching for love. We are by nature, here to connect with and serve others.

If this is true, and I think it is, there is a whole new set of skills we need to learn to connect and to serve effectively.

The “end point” of The Wisdom Path we have spoken of here is not enlightenment or awakening. It is a return to the beginning; to service. At this beginning we have much to learn.

There is a reason that so many of the awakened ones and teachers of the past stayed in caves, deserts or wilderness. Translating the experience of Divinity and Awakening into action in the world, in the words of the ancient texts, is…bloody hard.

Some came tentatively “back into the world” and tried to translate their experience to help people reach awakening. Jesus reached out for disciples, the Buddha built his sangha. Mostly they guided their followers to discover their own true nature.

The Buddha, and the tradition that grew from him, did much to concretely guide followers in the day to day right action required to live in the world. In the Christian tradition there are beautiful examples of service to the world. But by necessity these teachers focused most on the point essential for that stage of human evolution… a path to enlightenment or to salvation. They did not write handbooks for functioning awake in the world.

None of them wrote handbooks for functioning awake in the 21st Century.

This is our job.

The closest analogy I could come up with for what is required to walk along this embodying, living your wisdom part of the path is…we need a team. We need each other. Not just a supportive community, though that is really important. We need the capacity to find and/or build our team. The best teams understand that individuals joined by a clear and aligned purpose, achieve much more together than by acting alone. The impact is significantly greater than the simple sum of the parts.

In the end, or the beginning as it turns out, “my” enlightenment is not about me. Emptied of the need to define myself, I am more free to serve. Service is best achieved together with others in common purpose.

Hands up those who would like to be on a team that works in the world to express in day to day action; Love, Peace, Compassion, Kindness, Resilience, Forgiveness and Equanimity. Requirement for acceptance on the team? The desire to serve others, the willingness to share you purpose with others you might align with, and the readiness to learn with others the skills required to live our wisdom in the world…together.

Let’s write the handbook for that team.

Thank you for reading this today. I was so tempted to keep on writing, but it is Sunday, you have other things to do.

In upcoming Sunday Contemplations I plan to write about some of what I think could be in the handbook for living our wisdom in the 21st Century.

See you next week I hope.

I wish you peace.

* I’ve tried a few names for these stages over the years. If you have better ones, I am open. The spiritual traditions of course have versions of these phases, but I was looking for names that are not esoteric and work in our modern world.

** See Dr David R. Hawkins’ writings for more on this.

***Please don’t misunderstand…I love and value the good souls who are therapists. So much so that “I are one” 🙂 In my view the best of these therapist are like midwives supporting the birthing of our awakening.

A Guided Meditation

I have received quite a bit of feedback that a guided meditation connected to the topic of these contemplations has been appreciated. When appropriate I will provide one each week. This week’s guided meditation is called Living Awake In The World.

Grateful For

I include this section because I found that when I read or hear about what others are grateful for, I tend to think more about what I am grateful for. Feel free to share what you are grateful for in the comments. I think it is a beautiful service to others.

Today I am grateful for airplanes. I flew three hours to New Zealand last week, spent time with people I love in a beautiful place. Then I flew home. It was so much easier than if I had to swim! I thought of all the people over all the years who developed these things that fly. What that will look like in one hundred years, I have no idea. But today I was grateful for airplanes.

This Week’s Community Chat

The theme in the chat this week is:

What does your living your wisdom team look like? How is your transition from the individual path of awakening to the community path of acting in the world?

If you have suggestions for the three phases of The Wisdom Path I am ready to hear better ones than I came up with.

Or…whatever you are moved to share with us today.

Thank you.

Upcoming Activities

My friend Sally Avison and I have been hosting a Wise Hearts Circle zoom meetings every two weeks. We are taking holiday break and will be back in touch about these in the near future.

Should you want to message me directly, please feel free to do so.