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What is spritual freedom seen from the viewpoint of Spiritual Psychology?
A reply Robert Sardello delivered to a series of questions from Elizabeth Rhein of the Fetzer Institute. She was doing research into the question of what constitutes spiritual freedom.
Dear Elizabeth,
Thank you for your letter of February 5. I was away, teaching in Montana, and just returned last Saturday. I leave again this Sunday, to teach in Sacramento, Portland, and Vancouver, so I am taking advantage of this small window to work with the dialogue questions you sent. I will write responses to your questions in the order you sent them, and have numbered your questions to help follow where we are.
- I have a little trouble understanding the term "freedom of spirit" because, in itself, it seems to me, spirit is always free; to be spirit is equivalent to freedom. If we could realize that we, each and every human being, is a spiritual being, then the freedom that is spirit would be realized. The work, the task, then concerns how to enter into the fullness of who we are. What kind of community could foster the individuality of each person (not the same as the individualism of each person, which would be to foster egotism)? I think this is a difficult question because, in fact, the stories we know of people coming to experience the fullness of who they are, coming to experience their spirit, mostly come from instances of extreme suppression. Think of Nelson Mandela, Vaclav Havel, Jacques Lusseyran, Martin Luther King, Gandhi, and oh, so many others.
- I have, above, already moved to this second question, so let's continue a bit along this line. The instances and stories that come to mind of individuals coming to experience the freedom that is spirit, such as those cited above, can be instructive for us. Surely, we do not want to arrange communities of suppression. But, the other side is also true - communities that seem to provide everything can in fact be suppressive of spirit realization. That is, a community that fosters human freedom may be doing a great and humanitarian thing, but not necessarily a spiritual thing. What happens in situations of extreme duress, or at least among the things that happens is that egotism, personality, the ordinary sense of who we think we are, is quite immediately either relativised or removed altogether. Spiritual initiates, those who deliberately set out to enter into the freedom that is spirit, begin by removing some of their own comfort, or at least work to release their indentification with what is comfortable. This, in itself, can also become a form of egotism, perhaps a supreme form of egotism; there finally has to come a point in which the person realizes that the purpose of seeking the experience that is spirit is not for oneself, but in order to be of service to others and to the world.
In this question, you ask for professional or personal experiences of freedom of spirit. Can't say I have had any terribly remarkable experiences. My own life has been one of gradually removing more and more accouterments, such as status, position, institutional affiliations, religious affiliations, but trying to do so with the right timing, and not as an abstract ideology. Mostly, the removal of something came only when I felt it so suffocating that it seemed that something essential would die if I continued on in the same direction in the same way. At the same time, I am absolutely opposed to being an ascetic. Outer comforts were removed only as inner qualities strengthened. What kind of inner qualities? A grieving for the world, for all the suffering; an intense desire to create my life rather than have it given by external circumstances; a love of soul; placing soul and spirit at the center of life. Having done all this removing, I am now interested in seeing if it would be possible to be connected again, but now in a different way, with, for example, an institution.
- Freedom of spirit, I do not think, can be attached to anything - like, freedom to do something or not to do it, or freedom to be. Freedom of spirit has no object, and, I suspect, the moment we seek an object for it we diminish it rather thoroughly. What in the world is freedom of spirit for? I do understand the distinctions you made in your question. The difficulty with attempting to speak of matters of spirit ( or of soul, for that matter) is that they so easily become appropriated by the ego. So, I have to continually remember, over and over, what is freedom of spirit actually for?: to relate with the spiritual worlds, to form a community with the spirits, the dead, the angels, the gods. It is not for anything we might want for ourselves. If there is a desire for the experience of freedom that is spirit, it is the desire, first, to serve the spiritual worlds, and second, to work, in very little ways, toward the coming together of the spiritual worlds with the earthly world. But, we have to do this out the circumstances within which we now live; we can, for example, look to cultures that have/had forms for such work - ritual forms, communal forms, various practices coming from times before the separation of the human and the spiritual worlds were complete. In our culture, the separation is complete. We cannot find the way back, but have to keep going forward, and forward means, now, out of our independence from the spiritual worlds, we have to, on our own, decide to orient our efforts toward uniting with the spiritual worlds.
- In this question, you are getting at quite a lot. In the United States, freedom means "freedom from" or "freedom to"; that is to say, right now, on the one hand it means freedom from oppression and freedom to do what I want. Right now, freedom in America has almost nothing to do with spiritual freedom. We, and in fact, the whole world gradually has to go through finding freedom of individualism to get to freedom of spirit. The great danger is that we will get stuck in the freedom of individualism.
We are definitely entering an age of change; it is not automatically change in the direction of spiritual awareness; it is just change, instability, movement, dynamism, where structures are falling apart, where they will continue to disintegrate, producing more and more fear, and more and more ways to alleviate all of the fear; more comforts to dull it, more spiritual programs to escape from it. In the middle of all of this, many people are genuinely seeking spiritual depth. We simply must get out of the notion that spiritual practices, growth, development, leads to anything beyond itself. If it means feeling better, being more successful, being more whole, having unusual experiences, leaving the body, receiving messages from the great beyond, then spiritual freedom has been appropriated and made into a commodity. The experience of freedom that is spirit is a necessity because we are spiritual beings and we are not being who we are without it. What it leads to, that I do not know.
- Ah, yes, the relation between love and freedom. It seems to me that love is the path toward spiritual freedom. I know of no other way. But, love is a very confused and confusing word. It also all too easily gets appropriated by the ego. It helps to begin with the notion that love is a divine force that works through us; our work is to make ourselves the instruments through which this force can flow. I cannot love better, more intensely, more selflessly, but I can work to become a vessel through which love can work, through me, and into the world. Then, second, it seems necessary to multiply the senses of love - not love, but loves. Sexual love is the divine force of love working through the physical body; it makes the body into the organ for transformation of the world. The work here; to let the heat of divine love increase in the body; this means neither suppressing sexuality nor taking it to mean complete sexual freedom; we know too much about the regulation of behaviors surrounding sex and not enough about the glory of our sexual being. Emotional love is the divine force of love working through the soul; here we are drawn toward another precisely in order, in leaving the emptyness of our aloneness, to discover the completeness of our separateness. That is, through relationship, we discover our individuality; otherwise, it is not relationship but unhealthy merging. Spiritual love - we hardly know yet what this form of love is like. If I merge with another emotionally, the result is disaster. But, spiritual love precisely means the merging of two spirits, which enhances both without detriment to either. We actually do experience this form of love, but it is very subtle. The other person is every moment with me - not in just an emotional way, but in such a way that what I want for the other person is nothing other than the enhancement of who they are; I stand completely for the other; I can only do this out of spirit. Then, there is creative love; the divine force that works through the totality of the person and creates something new in the world; for this love to come about, a degree of maturity in sexual, emotional, and spiritual love is necessary. Through creative love, the very substance of the world begins to be transformed into the light of love. This, I think, is the real purpose of spiritual freedom - the transformation of the substance of the world into the substance of love.
It seems to me that the way of love is the way to spiritual freedom because it takes us into the necessary process of purification - of body, soul, spirit, through which we can come into right connection with the freedom that is spirit.
- The sequence you propose in this question is interesting. You say: "Are there ways in which freedom of spirit can play a part in bringing the soul alive again." Well, here we get into a real tough one. I have a quite strong reluctance to almost all spiritual work and spiritual practices because, typically, the soul is bypassed. That is, soul work, I believe, must precede or at least accompany any kind of spiritual work. It is the soul that is most neglected. It is the soul that is attacked by the kind of culture we live in. The enterprise I am involved with is called Spiritual Psychology. While the term is currently used all over the place, what it signifies to me is that the connection between soul and spirit must be maintained, deepened, strengthened. Spirit without soul leads to ungrounded fantasy, illusion, and no way of evaluating what you are experiencing. Soul without spirit leads to self-absorption. I know this leads to all sorts of questions concerning what is spirit and what is soul. Can't answer that in a few words without falling into the trap of definitions. Each can be characterized but not defined. What I can say, though, is what little I have read of the work on spiritual freedom from Fetzer tends to be spirit sprinkled with soul, with soul mainly being replaced by sentimentality. Second hand spirit does not go very far. And to discover it first-hand, one must do so by going deeply into the soul. I do not say this as one who has done so, but one who is constantly on the lookout for some guidance in doing so.
Concerning healing. Every true healer knows that she or he does not do the healing, but is the instrument, the vessel through which healing takes place. That is to say, the healer becomes the vessel through which the divine force of love works.
- Learn to love the boundaries. The boundaries are the doorways. They must be passed through, not lifted away.
- Freedom is attainable, but only by gathering all that is dark and repulsive, all that seems to block us, stop us, and somehow finding the way to love it, every bit of it, just as it is, not as we think it should be.
Hope this is of some little help. Thank you so much for taking the real effort to come up with very important questions, which I do not think I have answered but saw as openings for conversation.
Sincerely,
Robert Sardello
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