Manifest Revolution Live Truth.

I was on a train from Ghent to Antwerp earlier this month, on my way to Amsterdam to catch a flight home the next day. And yes, I could have included at least one more city name in that sentence but I chose not to. I was relaxing to Miles Davis (Bitches Brew) after a long work week and reading a commentary on the Heart Sutra and was about halfway through the section on "form is emptiness, emptiness is form," when I was startled by the sudden appearance of the ticket collector. It took me a second to get my head back in the world around me and start fumbling through my overstuffed bag, but I knew right away something was wrong.

I've been thinking about our tendency to keep retreading the same techniques and lines of spiritual inquiry that we've been using for thousands of years. We hold an inexplicable reverence for the past, as though it were fundamentally more "in touch" than we are, despite a historical record that shows growth on some lines and stagnation on others, but no fundamental backslide, as is implied by traditionalism. We have undergone hundreds and in some cases thousands of years of human development since these traditions originated. The rise of formalized, rational methods of inquiry alone alters the landscape of our experience fundamentally. Yet we do not incorporate this into our spiritual methods. In fact, because of the stark difference between the epistemology of religious traditions and modern and post-modern rational methods, we have polarized between rejection of spirituality and retrenchment in tradition.

What if, for millenia, we've had it exactly right in exactly the wrong way?

What if the answer to questions about god is all of the above and then some? Not a pluralistic god of you worship yours and I'll worship mine, or the infinite forms of Krishna. But instead, a synergy of all of the truth about god that mankind has evoked from it's collective spiritual awareness over time.

Yes: the Self that is god; yes, the personal god with which we enter into communion; yes, god the universe, the web of life. Yes, god the formless mystery, the eternal unknowable. What would it mean to assume that perspective of approaching the manifold god and to practice the corresponding teachings of creation: karma, faith, and attraction in their pure form, as one?

So much of human nature and condition is derived from our nature to advance. We observe what has been done, and strive for more. In fact, our ability to be retrospective is critical to our ability to do more. I like to use the four-minute mile as an example. It used to be considered impossible that anyone could run a mile in less than four minutes. Then in 1954, Roger Bannister made history by running a mile in 3 minutes, 59.4 seconds. Just six weeks later, his record was broken by a full second.

Synopsis: Twentieth-century spiritual teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti conducts a series of lectures and dialogs in which he leads his audience through an exploration of the processes of their minds in order to understand the mechanisms by which fear, confusion and striving exist.

Recommended For: Readers serious about self-inquiry practices who see more value in asking questions than in being handed someone conclusions -- by themselves or anyone else.