Ascension And Descension

We have this ideal in our culture of always rising. We are oriented to rising, toward success, to being capable, always in control, never defeated. So we have been given this ideology of ascension as if ascension is the proper direction in spiritual life. There is a dynamic tension between the ascension which we commonly view as spirit and the descension which we could call the soul. And we need both, without the depth, our lives are lived on the surface.

Transcript

Spiritual awakening is frequently described as a journey to the top of a mountain.

We leave our attachments and our worldliness behind and slowly make our way to the top.

At the peak,

We transcend all pain.

The only problem with this metaphor is that we leave all the others behind.

Our drunken brother,

Our schizophrenic sister,

Our tormented animals and friends.

Their suffering continues,

Unrelieved by our personal escape.

In the process of discovering the awakened heart,

The journey goes down,

Not up.

It is as if the mountain points towards the center of the earth instead of reaching into the sky.

Instead of transcending the suffering of all creatures,

We move toward the turbulence and doubt.

We jump into it.

We move towards it however we can.

We explore the reality and the unpredictability of insecurity and pain and we try not to push it away.

If it takes years,

If it takes lifetimes,

We let it be as it is.

At our pace,

Without speed or aggression,

We move down,

Down and down.

And with us moves millions of others,

Our companions in awakening from fear.

At the bottom,

We discover the water,

The healing water of the awakened heart.

Right down there in the thick of things,

We discover a love that will not die.

So I want to talk a little bit about our orientation towards ascension,

The drive towards getting above our messy life,

And the value of the descent.

We have this ideal in our culture of always rising.

We're oriented towards rising,

Towards success,

Towards being capable,

Always in control,

Never defeated.

We've been given this ideology of ascension as if ascension is the proper direction in spiritual life.

What rises is pure and better.

And in these bodies that we live in,

We're not always feeling that way.

We get sad and there is grief and we feel deflated and like we can't make a difference or we're lost or there's insecurity and we feel limited in some way.

So what about those experiences?

If we're living with this ascension model,

Then those experiences are inferior.

They're less than,

They don't belong to like in a successful psychological life.

So then what happens is that we're at war with ourselves,

With our own experience.

And then we all have this conditioning,

This conditioning to sort of rise above,

Getting better and higher and lighter.

But in the way,

Like,

You know,

The low lying places,

The low lying places of regression,

Of dissent,

They're not less sacred.

They're not.

The work that is most interesting to me personally is the holiness,

The holiness that lives in the darkness,

The dissent.

I mean think about it.

Think about your heartbeat in this moment.

In this moment,

It's happening completely in the dark.

Yet there's something sacred about it.

I'm not controlling it.

It's happening miraculously,

Utterly out of my control in the dark.

You know,

All of us were conceived in the darkness of our mother's womb.

In some way,

Everything that happens above ground is because of what happens below in the shadows.

So we have to go into the dark,

But we're continually trying to climb out of it,

Climb out of it.

When we're living with only an ascension value,

All the experiences that are held in the dissent that take us into the dark,

Into grief,

Into loneliness,

Are seen as contrary to the sacred or the spiritual life.

And there's a dynamic tension that I found between ascension,

In which we commonly kind of view as spirit,

And dissension,

Which could be called soul.

And we need both.

We need both.

Without the depths of dissension,

Our life is lived on the surface.

We can't feel the depth of closeness with each other.

We can't feel deep compassion for another and their suffering,

Unless we too have been in the dark with our own.

If we don't have some familiarity with the grief and the loss and the shame that is our human experience,

Then we live on the surface in our life.

I love how the poet Rilke puts it,

Yet no matter how deeply I go down into myself,

My God is dark and like a webbing made of a hundred roots that drink in silence.

This speaks to the holiness,

The sacredness that is connected to our depths,

To the darkness of descent that the ascension culture doesn't really touch.

And this feels like a huge loss.

We want to rise up out of the dark places as soon as they come into view,

Right?

It feels like a version.

Yet the irony is that we need these times in the depths.

That's what supports us.

It supports our rising.

It does.

In our culture,

We compulsively avoid things that are difficult.

All of us.

And there's an obsessiveness to distraction.

In our hyperpositive tendencies,

They actually feed the spiritual bypass.

Let me just go around all this messiness.

But it's right there in the mess that we are most human.

Right there in the mess.

Descent and descent can vitalize each other.

When we polarize them,

Which we do,

Then we end up splitting off.

This is good and this is bad.

We praise success and we despise failure.

We value strength and we devalue weakness.

So that every time then when we experience defeat,

Inadequacy,

Loss,

We're at war with ourselves.

And that's a bitter fight.

And sometimes people think that if we enter the dark,

Somehow we're going backwards.

Dredging up the past is kind of the way in which it's often spoke of.

As if forward is the only acceptable direction.

But the spiritual path and psychological development,

It moves in every direction.

Forward,

Back,

Back,

Forward,

Up,

Down,

All of it.

And our practice is to sort of follow its lead.

Be curious about where it's taking us.

We can't avoid losses in our life.

We can't avoid failures in our life.

The wounding that comes from being a human being on this planet.

What we can do is we can bring compassion to what arrives at our door and meet it with kindness and affection.

Perhaps some of you recall what the poet Rumi says or invites us to do.

I'll share in case you forgot.

This being human is a guest house.

Every morning,

A new arrival,

A joy,

A depression,

A meanness.

Some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all.

Even if they are a crowd of sorrows who violently sweep out your house,

Empty of its furniture,

Still treat each guest honorably.

They may be cleaning you out for some new delight.

The dark thought,

The shame,

The malice,

Meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.

Be grateful for whatever comes because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.

So we can become a good host to those marginalized parts of ourselves,

The excluded pieces of ourselves that were previously unwelcome.

And it requires a bit of courage.

It requires that we be authentic,

Revealing what lies behind the image we're trying to show the world.

Including our flaws,

You know,

Including our peculiarities.

So courage,

Courage kind of integrates the faith of ascension and the doubt of dissension.

And we all kind of have ideas of what courage is.

It's a kind of bravery,

A willingness to face pain and to face hardship,

Even death.

In our culture,

The American patriarchy,

Courage is often depicted as a soldier.

And going into battle to face an enemy out of conviction of what the soldier stands for.

And this is,

You know,

In many ways,

A profoundly courageous thing to do.

It doesn't mean that the soldier isn't afraid.

The soldier may be terrified.

But the courage is what helps them overcome the fear.

So courage is about overcoming fear.

And we also admire people who exhibit moral courage.

I'm thinking of Martin Luther King Jr.

He was an exemplar of moral courage.

You know,

It really takes a lot of courage to move forward a vision for something that other people are not quite able to see.

Like the courage to act in a skillful way in the face of popular oppression.

And the willingness that he exhibited to endure all kinds of trouble.

In his last speech the day before he was assassinated,

He said this,

I don't know what will happen now.

We've got some difficult days ahead.

But it really doesn't matter with me now.

Because I've been to the mountaintop.

And I don't mind.

Like anybody,

I would like to live a long life.

Longevity has its place.

But I'm not concerned about that now.

I just want to do God's will.

I've seen the promised land.

I may not get there with you.

But I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land.

I hope so Martin.

And then there's existential courage.

Emotional courage can be defined as a willingness to change the way that we live.

To recognize that how I've been living my life so far hasn't actually enabled me to realize the capacities that I feel I have.

We may feel like our life is not our own.

It's the life that our parents wanted us to lead.

It's the life that is generally admired in our culture,

In our society.

It's a life that provides us with material security.

And maybe we're not willing to embrace insecurity.

So this type of courage is a willingness to change your life.

To live differently and not just in a superficial way.

But in a way that really constitutes meaning for us.

Trusting more of an intuition.

Maybe it's a little naive and a little idealistic.

But if it rings true in a way that we can't ignore,

Do that.

This type of existential courage requires that we think differently.

We adopt a different set of values,

Maybe different values than the ones we were brought up on.

And we may embrace something foreign,

As is the case for the Buddhist path,

Right?

There's a story in the life of the Buddha.

Many of you know this story.

The young prince,

He leaves his comfortable palace.

He sees a sick person,

An old person,

A corpse,

And a wandering monk.

And he's so shaken by these existential insights about his own death,

His own aging,

And his capacity to get sick.

That he,

And he's so inspired by this figure of this monk,

This ascetic.

That he goes off with his existential courage and he leaves his world behind,

His privileged life behind to actually pursue these deep questions of life and death.

To feel the urgency in your bones to set out on a quest with no guarantees of any particular outcome that takes courage,

Existential courage.

And what we do here in this practice is this type of courage.

We keep on focusing on meeting our experience,

Or actually not meeting the experience so much as how we are meeting our experience.

How am I meeting my experience?

Maybe moving on a track that's different than our normal way of practicing in life,

Our normal reactivity.

We start to ask the questions like,

How did I show up today?

How do I show up now?

Did I engage?

Did I engage?

Did I risk showing myself authentically?

Did I risk showing myself authentically?

And if we're anxious about showing up authentically,

If we're provisionally welcoming parts of ourselves,

Not all parts,

But just a couple of them,

And leaving out other parts,

If we're more in tune to performance,

How we look,

How we're seen,

How did I do,

How did I do today in the eyes of others,

Then what we're doing is we're only doing what we feel competent in doing.

We're not taking risks,

And we don't push ourselves beyond the familiar.

And staying in the familiar is fine,

It is.

But what I found and am finding often is that when I'm pushing beyond familiar,

I feel much more alive.

We're most alive at the edges of our life,

The frontier of our life.

So letting yourself go to those edges where we don't know,

It's powerful.

There's a wonderful Zen phrase,

Not knowing is most intimate.

Not knowing is most intimate.

We've been taught and conditioned through a mission.

What's not welcome?

That's not welcome behavior at the dinner table.

What's not welcome behavior in society.

Or by shame.

We've been taught that there are huge parts of ourselves that do not belong,

That do not belong in this world.

And we do a pretty good job of exiling them,

Of pushing them away,

Of keeping them away.

These are the outcast parts of ourselves,

The parts that don't measure up.

But the real,

The truth of it is that these are also the parts that make us most human.

They're the parts that are vulnerable.

And if we banish these parts of ourselves,

The inferior parts,

The parts that are not living,

That we don't show to the world,

Then we're not living in our fullness.

You know,

These inferior parts of our lives are still on the margins.

They've been pushed to the edges.

So my weakness,

My neediness,

My vulnerability,

My shame,

It's through them,

Making them known to the world with trusted people.

And that's the operative word here,

Trusted people.

This community,

Trusted community,

The true belonging happens.

No part left out.

You get to see it all.

So we can only really belong when we bring the inferior into the conversation,

When the outcasts are brought into our community,

The outcast parts of ourselves,

Into our marriage,

Into our friendships,

Into our community.

That's when aliveness and living in the world really begins.

So again,

We're coming back around to the descent.

When we can move closer to those parts of ourselves that are living on the edges without an agenda,

Without trying to fix them or change them or improve them,

Those parts of ourselves begin to be integrated into our being.

And sometimes change is so reluctant to happen because we have to create the conditions or the atmosphere of inclusion.

We have to welcome them like Rumi reminds us.

Before something can open up,

We have to welcome them.

It's okay,

These parts of ourselves,

These parts that we've labeled inferior.

So the invitation and the discussion that we can move into,

The offer is to become friendlier with your own life.

Become aware of your drivenness to be better.

Become aware of it,

To be mindful of what's moving in the depths.

Become mindful of that and try to invite your attention into the shadow,

Into the edges.

It's such rich territory,

Such potency for growth.

So thank you for your kind attention and your consideration.

I invite you.

Reviews

Embracing my darker unwanted skin

This gave me an different and needed focus as it goes beyond me -effecting the efforts needed to help the planet. Thank you for highlighting such an important aspect of our internal journey!