The Spirituality Trap

The Essence of the Spirituality Trap

In the Spirituality Trap Self cannot get out of self

Spiritual seeking, spiritual transformation & transcendence, spiritual development, and spiritual growth share a common thread, someone wants to change – and therein lies the spirituality trap.

The Misconception of Enlightenment

I think I read it in The End of Your World by Adyashanti. He wrote, “Spirituality is the worst thing that ever happened to enlightenment.”

The point is that enlightenment is not an event. It is the ever-present state of affairs. Self, that subjective sense of an independent entity existing through time, seeks enlightenment or awakening as a change to its condition, state, or perception. A change that occurs in time to a subjective consciousness circumscribed by time – regardless of its intellectual or conceptual understanding of timelessness.

The Timeless Nature of Enlightenment

Timelessness is one of many possibilities wanting
to be experienced and claimed by self.

Understanding the Self

Understanding how the self is constructed, how it functions, and what drives it can help reorient interest and curiosity from ideas and beliefs of “what you are” to clear observation of “what you’re not,” which may result in moments of clear awareness of self not as an object, an independent entity through time, but as a belief created moment-to-moment through mental process.

Self, a created phenomenon of a process, cannot escape that process and cannot exist outside of that process. This results in the spiritual trap self finds itself in, which results in irritation of identification, and restlessness of self, which leads to endless seeking and practice to change or escape self.

The Illusion of Self-Transformation

The premise of spirituality is that it can help selves change or transform through various rituals, exercises, or practices like prayer, meditation, chanting, mantras, etc. But who (what) is meditating? A self – and a self meditating is recreating itself every moment it meditates. 

What is the self’s goal for transformation? To experience transformation. Self wants to be around for the payoff of enlightenment. It imagines enlightenment as some rarefied, heightened or subtlety happening to it, embodied by it.

The Irony of Self Seeking No-Self

What a riot!
Self wants to experience no-self!

Self wants to observe and understand being; it wants to perceive that which is beyond the process of its creation.

Paul Hedderman, Zen Bitch Slap, understands self not as a noun but as a result of verbing or what he calls selfing. Selfing is the claiming of mental process by the entity created by the process – self. Self believes it can do. It believes it chooses and has some degree of control over its experience.

Hedderman refers to this as having the cart before the horse. What is really happening, and neuroscience is beginning to confirm this, is that the mental process happens first, and then the sense of a self in time claims that process as something it did – I thought that, I felt that, I saw that. I – I – I – I

This claiming happens almost instantaneously, but once the idea of the possibility of observing the horse before the cart is presented, It is possible to observe selfing, the mental process, and the claiming as “what we’re not”.

The Diamond Approach to Exploring Reality

The Diamond Approach evolved out of interest and curiosity about the nature of reality. There was no posit of reality, no goal to achieve, no belief to confirm, no journey with an end. It all arose out of “What is immediate experience?”

This curiosity led to insight into the body’s five gates of perception for awareness – seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling. These are encapsulated in Sensing, Looking, and Listening – the very bedrock of spiritual practice in the Diamond Approach.

This practice and all other practices, including inquiry, are easily incorporated into selfing. I’m inquiring into my experience. I’m sensing my body.

The Pitfalls of Self-Claiming

In reviewing the teachings of the Diamond Approach, it becomes more apparent how ubiquitous and subtle the claiming by self is. This is interesting because the DA clarifies that nothing is sought, and nothing is to be acquired; in fact, more and more disappears.

Even this can be coopted by self as something to master or work with.

The Unknowable Nature of Being

Probably the most fundamental misunderstanding that supports participation in entrapment is that being can be known – known via self-reflection, known via comparative process, known via experience rendered for a body-self.

But, being cannot be known because being is being. Being cannot be seen because it is seeing (awareness) – a one-way street. It can’t turn around and look at itself (so to speak) because it is not of time or space.

Perhaps the closest being comes to seeing itself is awareness of the expression of being. Being discovers itself in its expression. As Almaas says, we discover our nature in the immediacy of its arising.

You are what you’re looking for. Where do you go to find you? What practice reveals without obfuscation?