What If Your Drive to Experience Pleasure Enhances Your Spiritual Growth?

What If Your Drive to Experience Pleasure Enhances Your Spiritual Growth?

For one human being to love another is the most difficult task of all. It’s the work for which all other work is mere preparation.

—Rainer Maria Rilke





EXPERIMENTAL AFFIRMATION

Say this: "Novel intuitions are now erupting from my smart heart, awakening me from any trance I've been ensnared in. I am hereby breaking and escaping obstructions that have hindered my ability to express my soul's code. All of my unique capacities are being unleashed, all of my potentials activated. I recognize that I'm a miraculous work of art, a masterpiece unlike any other ever created in the history of the world."

Say this: "I am a genius. I am a lucky, plucky, good-sucking genius."





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CLAIM YOUR REWARDS

With grace and persistence, you will be able to claim the rewards promised you at the beginning of time -- not just any old beauty, wisdom, goodness, love, freedom, and justice, but rather:

• exhilarating beauty that incites you to be true to yourself;

• crazy wisdom that immunizes you against the temptation to believe your ideals are ultimate truths;

• outrageous goodness that inspires you to experiment with boisterous empathy;

• generous freedom that keeps you alert for opportunities to share your wealth; insurrectionary love that endlessly transforms you;

• and a lust for justice that's leavened with a knack for comedy, keeping you honest as you work humbly to liberate everyone in the world from ignorance and suffering.





Proposed Experiment: Compose a declaration describing an experience, state of mind, or project you'll be most excited to cultivate at the center of your life during the next six months—starting now.

Write it out in longhand on a piece of paper. Put that statement in a place where you will see it regularly.





MODESTLY RADICAL HYPOTHESES ABOUT WONDER

1. If everything seems to be under control, we're probably not moving fast enough.

2. If we're not pretty much always a bit confused, most likely we're not thinking deeply enough.

3. If we're not feeling forever amazed, maybe we're not seeing wildly enough.

4. The truth is fluid, slippery, vagrant, scrambled, promiscuous, kaleidoscopic, and outrageously abundant. And yet it's worth trying to corral!





KEY TO THE FUTURE

The key to the future of the world is finding the optimistic stories and letting them be known.

—Pete Seeger





MODESTLY RADICAL HYPOTHESES ABOUT LOVE

Love thrives when neither partner takes things personally, so it's wise for us to cultivate a devotion to forgiveness and divest ourselves of the urge to blame.

Love is a game in which the rules keep changing, so it's wise for us to be crafty and improvisational as we stay alert for each unexpected twist of fate.

Love enmeshes us in your partner's unique set of karmic complications, so it's wise to make sure we're very interested in his or her problems.

Love is a laboratory where we can uncover secrets about ourselves that have previously been hidden, so it's wise to be ravenously curious.

Love is never a perfect match of totally compatible saints, so it's wise for us to not let sterile fantasies seduce us away from flawed but fecund realities.

Love is not a low-maintenance machine, so it's wise for us to work hard on cultivating its unpredictable organic wonders.

Love is not a wholly-owned subsidiary of DreamWorks or Disney, so it's wise for us to not allow our romantic story be infected by the entertainment industry's simplistic, sentimental myths about intimate relationships.





WHY PERFECTION SUX

Homework: Write an essay on at least two of the following topics:

1. "How I Used My Nightmares to Become Smart and Strong"

2. "How I Exploited My Problems to Become a Spiritual Freedom Fighter"

3. "How I Fed and Fed and Fed My Monsters Until They Ate Themselves to Death"

4. "How I Turned Envy, Frustration, and Smoldering Anger into Generosity, Compassion, and Fiery Success"

5. "Why Perfection Sux"





WE ARE DISSIDENT BODHISATTVAS

We are dissident bodhisattvas rebelling against those forces that feed fear and ignore love.

We are spiritual freedom fighters rising up to protect nature and foment peace and demand justice.

We are subversive mystics stoking the cool blue fires of poetry and lobbying for the liberated imagination.

We are militant ecstatics invoking the transformative powers of pleasure to sanctify and beautify our one and only Earth.

We are mutinous purveyors of grace who redistribute the wealth so that all creatures may have the means to thrive.





Invitation: Go inward and contact the wisest source you know—call it your higher self, your holy guardian angel, Goddess or God, the genius of nature, or your strongest intelligence. Then pose this inquiry: What do I need to become aware of that I wouldn't even know to ask about?





CYNICISM ISN'T BRAVE

Many people today believe that cynicism requires courage. Actually, cynicism is the height of cowardice. It is innocence and open-heartedness that requires the true courage—however often we are hurt as a result of it.

—Erica Jong