Week 1. Spiritual Practice
Begin by Descending
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Therefore...
“Do you wish to rise? Begin by descending.”
— Saint Augustine
Furthermore...
“God is not found in the soul by adding anything but by a process of subtraction.”
— Meister Eckhart
Which also means…
“Spiritual practices help us move from identifying with the ego to identifying with the soul.”
— Ram Dass
Which means...
“Going forward seems like retreat.”
— Lao Tzu
“Whatever you choose, it will feel more like unlearning than learning, more like surrendering than accomplishing. This is probably why so many resist contemplation to begin with. Because it feels more like the shedding of thoughts in general than attaining new or good ones. It feels more like just letting go than accomplishing anything, which is counterintuitive for our naturally ‘capitalistic’ minds! This is our age-old resistance to the descending kind of religion.”
— Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ
“Yet in the absence of a spiritual practice, we fail to develop the mental habit of listening to and following its guidance. Its signals are always there, but we often don’t attend to them. The world is very loud, and the Voice for God is very soft. The ego speaks first, and the ego speaks loudest. We learn to quiet the mind so we can hear what God is saying.”
— Marianne Williamson, The Mystic Jesus (The Mind of Love)
And ultimately…
“Spiritual practices that involve the physical body, such as t’ai chi, qigong, and yoga, are also increasingly being embraced in the Western world…..They will play an important role in the global awakening.”
— Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth
As an example…
“The ultimate essence of yoga is the contact and the union between the individual consciousness and the divine consciousness.”
— Raphael
“The deeper you get into Yoga you realize it is a spiritual practice. It's a journey I'm making.”
— Sting, singer/songwriter
“I have written and spoken my thoughts over many years. Now I'm on new ground and spirit. I want to bring these together. Things like karma yoga, bhakti yoga.”
— Ram Dass
So, what I am trying to get across here is…
“The discipline of spiritual practice is everything. If you don’t turn on the light in the room, it’s ridiculous to curse the darkness.”
— Marianne Williamson, The Mystic Jesus (The Mind of Love)
“Through a lifetime of personal practice, human beings are capable of revealing all of the secrets of the cosmic essence.”
— Buddha
“We always become what we behold; the presence that we practice matters.”
— Richard Rohr, The Divine Dance: The Trinity and Your Transformation
And…
“An ounce of practice is worth more than tons of preaching.”
— Mahatma Gandhi
Because ultimately…
“In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.”
— Albert Einstein
“Common men talk bagfuls of religion but do not practice even a grain of it. The wise man speaks a little, even though his whole life is religion expressed in action.”
— Guru Ramakrishna
“An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, essayist
And just…
“Maybe we’ve spent too long trying to figure this out with theory.”
— Amelia Brand, Interstellar (film)
And currently, unfortunately…
“It is easier to produce ten volumes of philosophical writings than to put one principle into practice.”
— Leo Tolstoy, writer
“The one who learns and learns and doesn't practice is like the one who plows and plows and never plants.”
— Plato
And in the end…
“A learned person will become noble only when he or she has put into real practice what has been learned, instead of mere words.”
— Dalai Lama
“As I go along, some things will be changed or enhanced; I’ll add to the practice, but the important thing is to continue practicing this relationship with myself, and with God.”
— Common, rapper/actor, Let Love Have the Last Word
“You don't need to justify your love, you don't need to explain your love, you just need to practice your love. Practice creates the master
— Don Miguel Ruiz, author
And fortunately for us…
“There are laws of the universe and if you practice them, they will respond to you.”
— Michael Beckwith, author
“My message is always the same: to cultivate and practice love, kindness, compassion and tolerance.”
— Dalai Lama
Because ultimately…
“The kingdom of God is available to you in the here and the now. But the question is whether you are available to the kingdom. Our practice is to make ourselves ready for the kingdom so that it can manifest in the here and the now.”
— Thich Nhat Hanh, Buddhist monk
“Life is all about practicing for heaven.”
— Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life
The key to creating Heaven on Earth is that we need to shift our spiritual emphasis. We move from climbing religious practices—like attending services and reading so-called “sacred” passages—in the attempt to know the unknowable for the reward of salvation someday. And focus on descending spiritual practices - that emphasize not knowing, but simply being and spiritually connecting in the moment.
I cannot emphasize this enough… to create Heaven on Earth, I suggest that all sentient beings participate in some form of a descending spiritual practice daily.
With descending spiritual practices, we are consciously evolving from the mindset of accomplishing to surrendering. From learning to unlearning. From going for to letting go. From achieving to being of service. And, from the promise of a future salvation, to living the presence of Heaven here and now.
You see, the ego wants more lecturing, because it knows we can’t learn our way to Heaven. Spirit wants connection through practices that bring consciousness into the world of form—through breath, presence, stillness, surrender, and silence.
So instead of being caught up in the religious practices of lecturing, preaching, and instruction, we choose to consciously evolve through the spiritual practices of meditation, yoga, qigong, and tai chi. Because these practices emphasize the breath of being—not just the accumulation of knowledge that contributes to our compulsive thinking.
Let’s concentrate on what our hearts desire and our spirit needs: descending spiritual practices, preferably daily.
This is what the OCA Movement content is built to provide—both individually and collectively—until our spiritual practices become our natural state of being.
Doesn’t that sound divine?
And...
"‘Blessed are the poor in Spirit’ are Jesus’s first words in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:3). And although Jesus made this quite clear throughout his life, we still largely turned Christianity into a religion where the operative agenda was some personal moral perfection, our attaining some kind of salvation, ‘going to heaven,’ converting others rather than ourselves, and acquiring more health, wealth, and success in this world. In that pursuit, we ended up largely aligning with empires, wars, and colonization of the planet, instead of with Jesus or the powerless. All climbing and little descending, and it has all caught up with us in the twenty-first century.”
— Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ
To establish a spiritual practice that allows us to make Heaven on Earth real, let’s begin with this awareness…
“It is not insignificant that Christians chose the cross or crucifix as their central symbol. At least unconsciously, we recognized that Jesus talked a lot about ‘losing your life.’ Perhaps Ken Wilber’s distinction between ‘climbing religions’ and ‘descending religions’ is helpful here. He and I both trust the descending form of religion much more, and I think Jesus did too. Here the primary language is unlearning, letting go, surrendering, serving others, and not the language of self-development—which often lurks behind our popular notions of ‘salvation.’ We must be honest about this. Unless we’re careful, we will again make Jesus’s descending religion into a new form of climbing religion, as we have done so often before.”
— Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ