Passion

I spent five consecutive months in 2009 writing about 4 to 6 hours per day, with the end result being a manuscript titled The Three Dangerous Magi: Osho, Gurdjieff, Crowley. I had conceived of the idea for this book several years ago -- I've been involved with the teachings and communities of all three intermittently for three decades -- but bogged down as I was with work, travel (I run personal growth trainings in several cities), and other writing projects (I had no less than four manuscripts in development), my Magi book was continually getting put on the back burner. I then stepped aside for a moment, and pondered why my writing of these manuscripts was developing so slowly. The answer was immediately clear. I was trying to write them in accordance with a pre-conceived plan about which one should go first, second, and so forth. I was not listening to my 'deep self', and in particular, how it communicates via passion. 

To cut to the chase: more often than not, it is passion that is our most trustworthy guiding light in life. When we don't follow our passion, our work stagnates, our creative offerings (as they may be) dry up, and we always have a sense of being out of step with our greater possibilities. Passion is an energy that is distinct from its more problematic cousin, 'desire'. Desire both needs (and usually uses) others, but passion works fine on its own, un-welded to the object it may be focused on.

Noting which of the manuscripts I was working on I had the most passion for, I proceeded on that basis, and soon found myself free of any annoying 'writer's blocks'. The chapters churned out almost effortlessly, and at the end, I had not only a manuscript of 230,000 words (over 700 pages), I also had a contract with a reputable publisher (O-Books, based in England). 

I took a break from writing for a few months after finishing the Magi MS, and plunged back in in the summer of 2010 with my next project, Rude Awakening: Perils, Pitfalls, and Hard Truths of the Spiritual Path. The book is also contracted to O-Books and will be out likely around mid-2011. It's a no-holds barred look at a lot of what passes for transformational work in current times, a critique of such, and a lengthy section on what I see as seven graduated stages of awakening. The book also contains a section profiling seven radically awakened people, those being Socrates, Jesus, Milarepa, Hakuin, Ramana Maharshi, Nisargadatta Maharaj, and Yaeko Iwasaki. (Aficionados of 'enlightenment lore' may not immediately recognize the latter name: she was a Japanese girl of 25 who passed through several deep awakenings in her zazen practice, as guided by the fierce Zen master Sogaku Harada, shortly before dying of chronic illness; her story is told in Roshi Philip Kapleau's classic work The Three Pillars of Zen (Anchor Books, first published in 1965). 

Rude Awakening is concerned with cutting through the layers of fog that accrue around the average truth-seeker in life, and the importance of remaining true to the highest calling of the seeker. In some ways it is a 'next chapter' to The Three Dangerous Magi, as these three 'rascal sages', whatever else might be said about them and their double-edged lives, were deeply passionate souls with vast appetites for both the 'spiritual path', and life in its most obvious and natural sense. What truths they came to were via both their relentless investigations into such, and their fearless embrace of the world around them. That all three stumbled, at times badly, is a given. And yet stumbling should, indeed cannot, stop us from proceeding deeper into our calling. I don't think we get anywhere in life if we don't tune in to, open to, and follow, our passion -- our 'bliss' as Joseph Campbell called it. And that certainly applies to the spiritual path as well.

Spirituality is not meant to be monochromatic, lacking in juice, in creative vitality. It is meant to be a marriage of wisdom and life, and a direct expression of what it is we realize via the sincerest efforts of our probing mind and spirit. Ultimately, our passion is to be oriented toward the highest, and deepest, truths of existence and being.