Introduction
I REMEMBER AS A CHILD of four or five asking my mother, “Where
did I come from?” The answer I got was anything but satisfactory.
I was told that babies were born out of the mother’s body. This
I already knew, of course, since I had seen my aunt’s belly get
big and was told there was a baby in there. I tried asking my question
another way: “Why did I come into the family I did? If I hadn’t
come to this family, where would I have gone? What
was I before I was born?” My parents shrugged and smiled when
I asked these questions. But my questioning continued.
At
first I sought answers to these mysteries in the woods and open fields
around our home. I found a dead bird one day and held it in my hand.
Clearly the life was gone from this tiny fragile body. But how could
that be? Where did that life go? Could it come back? I’m told
I was six or seven years old at that time. I placed the bird in a cardboard
box, with air holes I’d punched in the cover. Every morning, and
several times a day, I opened the box to see if life had returned to
the bird. Of course, it didn’t, and in time my parents suggested
that I bury it, which I did, even placing a stone on its grave to mark
where it lay.
There
were times when I thought I saw things very clearly, when the veils
of everyday life seemed to lift, revealing a truth about my own life
and life around me that even today defies words. But the mystery I pursued
always felt just beyond my reach, sometimes so close I felt my heart
lift ecstatically. I didn’t know what any of this was, nor could
I even talk to others about it since nothing I said seemed to communicate
what I was experiencing. When I first considered writing this book,
those early childhood memories came back to me. I realized that the
questions I was now asking as an adult were the same as those I’d
asked as a child. I did not know it as a child, nor were there people
around me who were able to put words to it, but even at that tender
age I was aware of the spiritual. And regardless of how intangible it
might be, I knew it was real.
As I recalled those experiences, I realized that things hadn’t
changed all that much, even to this day. Hardly a day passes that I
don’t stop with wonder and ask pretty much the same questions
I asked at six and seven and eight. But I also know that I’m not
alone in this. I doubt there is a person alive who has not, however
fleetingly, been touched by those spiritual breakthroughs that cause
us to look with new eyes on the meaning of our lives.
Today I’ve learned the contentment of living with a deep inner
peace around my questions, no longer requiring the answers but knowing
it’s enough to bask in the mystery. I suppose
this position was what caused the initial resistance I felt to writing
this book. Many people from my workshops had urged me to write the book,
though I don’t think I began to take it seriously until I’d
heard the same suggestion for about the hundredth time. My resistance
had to do with my belief that there is something almost arrogant about
presuming to have the words to speak of the spiritual. It took me years,
at least five, to get over my resistance and actually sit down to work
out the problems this book posed for me.
The breakthrough for me came when I realized that you, the reader, would
bring to your writing the material you would be teaching with your words.
All I had to do was show you the ropes of how to put a spiritual book
together. I started asking some new questions: How was a spiritual book
different than any other nonfiction book one might write? Were there
aspects of a spiritual book that were different from a nonfiction book
on any other subject, say a book about organic gardening or health?
Yes, I decided, there were differences. I knew this from having written
a number of spiritual books and from helping
other authors write them. And so I set out to define those differences
and explore them in a book—this book.
First and foremost are the deeply personal experiences that we bring
to the writing of a book on spirituality. I’d learned from teaching
classes that these highly individualized experiences were also where
we touched others, often striking a universal chord. That is one of
life’s greatest contradictions, that what is the most personal
can also reach into other people’s lives and get them in touch
with the truth of our oneness. Thus, we need to
know how to reach into ourselves and describe what is nearest and dearest
for us.
Second was the realization that we best speak of the spiritual after
we’ve established a particular relationship with our readers.
Because readers feel the integrity of an author’s spiritual experience
through his or her words, and through what we are willing to share with
them about our lives, we cannot hide our hearts from our readers. At
least where the subject of our book is concerned, we need to disclose
enough about our own thoughts,
feelings, and experiences to convince our readers that we are as passionately
involved in our material as we might wish them to be.
Third, the subject of spirituality does not always reveal itself in
linear or scientific processes. The spiritual exists in a space that
extends out in all directions. Thus, in attempting to organize one’s
ideas and experiences, I turned to a system called mind
mapping, or clustering, that allows our minds to expand outward even
as we develop a format for writing our books.
Fourth, while the spiritual writing we might do for ourselves, often
in our journals, is deeply personal, it may or may not be important
to others. When it comes to writing a book, we
must acknowledge the other. We are no longer just recording our own
experiences but are entering into a rather intimate relationship with
our readers. To address this, I started looking at the responsibilities
we take on as authors when we write about themes that reach deeply into
our readers’ hearts and souls. I weave my insights about those
responsibilities throughout the book.
Fifth, I looked at the fact that many times readers come to spiritual
books for confirmation to erase their own doubts. Especially in the
early stages of opening to Spirit, we look for
proof and find it elusive. So, it is my belief that in writing a spiritual
book, the doubt and hesitation readers may feel has to be addressed
in a way that fosters trust even when tangible proof is unavailable.
Finally, despite the many differences between spiritual books and other
nonfiction, there are also certain realities about writing anything
for publication, and I knew I had to bring those into the mix. Writing
is not just about craft. Publishing a book is ultimately a community
effort, involving the work of many others —editors, book designers,
proofreaders, printers, sales reps, booksellers, and finally readers.
I’ve tried to provide a kind of map through the process of writing
and publishing a book, and even beyond that into the marketing and promotion
of the book. For this you’ll find a large “Resources”
section, a place to go to find the help you need to take each new step
along the way. As I came to the final pages of writing this book, doubts
about my efforts to share my knowledge began to fade. I felt myself
buoyed up by an image of this book helping to inspire people who want
to write and fostering courage by providing good tools and resources
for success. It excites me to imagine people who are on a spiritual
path bringing their own wisdom to the world through the assistance of
this book. Writing books of
this kind is more important than ever, for there are great changes going
on in the world that require us to speak out about the truth we see
beyond the veils of everyday travail. I hope this small book might help
you manifest your dreams of sharing your vision.
Writing
a spiritual book at times presents us with wild contradictions. How
can words possibly duplicate the awe, or even ecstasy, that wells up
in us as we lift the veils of our everyday world and catch a glimpse
of the spiritual aspects of life? We find ourselves reaching, even yearning,
for something that cannot be described or named, yet is made no less
real by our inability to encompass it with words.
Throughout the millennia, spiritual teachers have avoided words, or
used them sparingly, favoring object lessons instead. For example, there’s
the traditional story of the Buddhist master who whacks his students
on the head with a stick, forcing them to come into the now.
As a Buddhist friend once remarked, “The wisdom of that stick
outshines the power of thought.” What he referred to was the fact
that approaching the spiritual only from our intellects distances us
from the present. The pain of that firm but harmless whack on the head
brings us back into the now, which is exactly where we must
be to encounter the spiritual. Ironically, the more we come to know
the spiritual, the more frustrating it can be to express it with words,
regardless of our skills with language. We can no more capture the spiritual
with words than we can paint or draw the wind. But we can suggest the
presence of the wind with flowing lines or swipes of paint on canvas.
Similarly, we can suggest the presence of the spiritual by offering
anecdotes of other people’s experiences, or our own. By entering
these experiences voyeuristically, readers essentially borrow the author’s
eyes to view an aspect of their own lives that was invisible until then.
To accomplish these ends, we sometimes borrow the craft of the poet
or novelist, conveying to our readers not just factual information but
sensory and emotional information as well. For that reason, we might
be advised to study how poets and novelists immerse their readers in
the author’s experiences, or in the experiences of a person the
author wishes to tell us about. Some people call these techniques “creative
nonfiction,” since they call upon the creative and imaginative
powers of the writer. I am not speaking here of creating make-believe
worlds so much as using the writing techniques of creative writers.
The key is in describing what you sense, that is, what you see, hear,
taste, smell, touch, and feel (emotionally) rather than only what you
think. There is a strange irony in this, is there not, since logic would
tell us that abstraction and the intellect, more than our physical senses,
would carry us into the spiritual? But like counting breaths in meditation,
these tricks of the pen often reveal to us the truths that reality obscures.
When writing in our journals about the spiritual work we’re doing,
or the epiphanies we’ve had as a result of that work, it’s
not unusual to find that we have used physical descriptions and even
dialogue to capture those experiences. After all, we understand the
world only by first encountering it through our senses. Go back and
review your journals. Look for passages where your descriptions were
particularly vivid and effective. It just might be that you are already
quite adept with this kind of writing. If not, have patience: we’ll
be exploring many such techniques in the pages ahead.
Putting
Your Readers into the Picture
Another way to write about the spiritual is to describe ways your readers
can experience it for themselves. After all, what’s better than
firsthand experience? Experiential exercises, as they are called,
put your readers into situations where they are most likely to get what
we are saying not through our explanations but by their own feelings
and senses. I am reminded here of something that happened several years
ago, while teaching a writing workshop at Mount Shasta, in Northern
California. As anyone who has ever spent much time there knows, Mount
Shasta is a spectacular formation, rising over 14,000 feet into
the sky. Most of the year her peaks are crowned in snow; by October
she is completely blanketed in white, down to about the 3,000-foot elevation.
The breathtaking beauty and spiritual power of Mount Shasta are often
compared to Japan’s Fujiyama, recognized by many as her sister
mountain. Both are known for their ability to awaken visitors to the
spiritual dimensions of all life.
My visit to Mount Shasta was in the spring, with bracing winds still
sweeping down from the snowy peaks. From the place where I was teaching,
the mountain dominated the skyline, a view that ordinarily left me in
sublime awe. But on that weekend, this same view aroused a sense of
sadness. I simply could not connect with it as I had done in the past.
To me it might as well have been a painted backdrop on a movie set.
Between a heavy writing and teaching schedule, I’d been feeling
there was no space in my life for taking in the joys of the present.
I hadn’t even taken time to reflect on personal issues that had
been piling up. (All of this was a great contradiction, of course, since
these were the issues I was teaching.) As a result, my life had been
reduced to meeting the demands of my too-busy schedule. There was no
time for creative endeavors. I felt completely out of
touch with Spirit.
As the class was breaking up and people were packing their cars to leave,
I overheard Robyn, one of the women from the workshop, talking with
two others about a shamanic process she’d learned at a workshop
she’d recently attended. It was a reflective technique that she’d
found very useful. She said that it helped her get in touch with thoughts
and feelings that had been blocking her and that it was great preparation
for vision-questing
or for a daily meditation practice. I was eager to find out about this
exercise, hoping it might guide me into a reflective space where I might
sort out some of the things that had been troubling me.
I excused myself for eavesdropping and asked Robyn if she had the time
before she left to show me this technique. She answered yes. She was
planning to stay in the area for two more days and would be glad to
do just that. Immediately, the two women she’d been speaking with
asked if they could join us and said they were planning to stay through
the next day. I had things I had to do the next morning, so we made
plans to meet in the afternoon.
At three the next day, we met at the high school parking lot and drove
up the mountain together in Robyn’s SUV. We stopped at about 8,000
feet and headed out along one of the less-used trails. Robyn said we
should each find a place to sit alone and meditate. I was very much
looking forward to this, regardless of what other skills she might bring
to the experience. She promised that after a certain time had passed,
she would come around and work with each of us individually.
I’d climbed for a half hour or so when I stopped to catch my breath.
The place where I stopped offered a spectacular view of the mountain.
Dense white clouds nuzzled the distant crests against a deep blue sky.
In that special moment, I could remind myself that all the tensions
I’d been carrying for the past several weeks were just beliefs
and feelings I had created and was holding onto. As real as my problems
might be, it was clear they did
not need to consume me. While I could see this was true, my monkey
mind continued to chatter away, keeping me focused more on the
past and future than on the present.
Nearly an hour passed as I sat atop a great rock waiting for Robyn to
show up. I started wondering why she was taking so long. I knew two
other people were involved, though this did not satisfy me. My mind
was going a mile a minute, refusing to slow down what had become my
habitual pace. Maybe Robyn had been unable to find me. Maybe I’d
gone further up the trail than she’d intended us to go. Maybe
I should return to the car. What
if the others had already finished and were waiting for me? I became
so distracted by the waiting that I could not even focus on the issues
that had brought me here. I saw the irony in all this but was helpless
to do anything about it. At last Robyn showed up. She asked how I was
doing and I admitted that I’d been too distracted to meditate
or even begin to stop my busy mind from chattering away incessantly.
Her response to this admission took me completely off guard.
“Go find a rock,” she said. “Something around the
size of a loaf of bread or slightly smaller.”
“Just any rock?”
“Choose one you can easily hold . . . one that appeals to you.”
I was feeling dubious and began to regret having come on this escapade.
What could this possibly have to do with personal reflection and clearing
my mind of distractions! Nevertheless, for the next few moments I wandered
around looking for a rock that appealed to me and that met the criteria
Robyn had described. I brought it back to the place I’d been sitting
and took out the pencil and small notebook she’d instructed me
to bring.
“Now, turn the rock several times, looking at it from all angles,”
Robyn instructed. “When you are ready, stop, study the surface
facing you, and describe anything you see. When you’ve seen something,
quickly write it down in your notebook, just a word or two, then turn
the rock ninety degrees and repeat the process.”
Over the next twenty minutes or so, I did as she instructed. On the
first side of the rock I saw only a kind of trail, in miniature, working
through the rock. It might have been a trail in the mountains: “Precipitous
trail,” I wrote.
I turned the rock ninety degrees. Now I saw a cat, perhaps a puma, stalking
its game. I wrote: “Puma hunting.”
Twice more I turned the rock and recorded what I imagined seeing in
its veins and configurations. That done, Robyn asked me to go back to
my notes, and use the rock as my reference to revisit what I’d
written down. She then left me and walked back down the trail, presumably
to spend time by herself.
I do not know how much time passed, but as I worked with the stone,
expanding on my notes, I became immersed in my reflections, easily focusing
my attention on the images I’d seen in the rock. Not unsurprisingly,
they all related directly to the issues that had been piling up in my
inner life over the past several weeks. Truly, I had been feeling like
I was treading a “precipitous path.” The images I projected
to the rock were telling me much about the broader, more spiritual dimensions
of the problems I was encountering. Most had to do with personal changes
I was facing in my life. Others were more mundane, each one a small
matter that, if approached individually, had a relatively quick solution.
I soon realized that the accumulation of all these small issues had
led to my feeling overwhelmed. The imagery I found in the rock helped
me to more clearly see what I had to do.
When I at last looked up, I had my bearings and could take action to
resolve the issues that had been troubling me. I knew where I was going
with them and felt confident in my ability to proceed. I set aside the
rock and my notebook and looked around me. My mind was no longer cluttered.
A sense of solitude and contentment came over me. A tiny bird fluttered
in and settled down on my rock, less than two feet away. It stayed for
only
a second, chirped, then flew away. For that moment, it seemed to relate
to me as just another animal in the landscape. I began to notice other
small animals, chipmunks, a squirrel, birds overhead. Had they been
there before I’d worked with the rock? If they were, I hadn’t
noticed them. For several minutes I sat there, enjoying this moment
of communion with the animals, the rocks, the mountain, the sky, and
the sparse vegetation.
Immersed in the landscape, I felt so much a part of it that the thought
of leaving filled me with regret. However, the sky was growing dark
and I became concerned about the others who might be waiting for me.
I carried my rock back to the place where I’d found it, as per
Robyn’s instructions, thanked it for its service, then made my
way back down the trail to the car where, indeed, my friends were waiting
for me.
Over dinner at a restaurant in town, we shared our experiences, with
Robyn answering our many questions. Several things became clear to me
that day: First, that this process had been tremendously helpful in
allowing me to get focused on issues that had been preoccupying me for
days; second, when I finally addressed those issues, I was able to be
in a contemplative space in my being that allowed me to be present with
the mountain and all the small beings who made it their home.
The tiny bird who had settled on the rock so close to me had made me
feel that I had made a definite shift of consciousness that even the
animals noticed. Certainly I was feeling more at one with the world
around me. Was it possible they had felt this about me as well?
As I look back on that day, I am reminded of how important tools and
exercises such as this can be. The rock definitely helped focus my attention,
allowing me to reflect calmly on
everything that had been piling up in my mind. The rock had become a
mirror of my inner world, allowing me to come to terms with the challenges
that lay ahead.
As you were reading the previous passages, with Robyn guiding me through
the process with the rock, you might have noticed that I wasn’t
the only one learning how to do it. So were you! If you wished to, you
could probably repeat it for yourself, based on what you just read.
Simultaneously, you were experiencing a little bit of what I was going
through—what I was feeling, thinking, sensing all around me, and
learning. What just happened here is that I took you into my own learning
experience, using
the craft of the novelist and poet—such as physical description,
character description, and dialogue—even as I was giving you enough
description to do the rock exercise and experience it for yourself firsthand.
And, yes, for the record, this really did happen.
You can effectively guide your readers into the spiritual realm through
anecdotes about other people, by sharing experiences of your own, by
describing exercises for experiencing what you’re talking about
firsthand, or through a combination of all three.
More than with most types of books, you’ll want to keep in mind
that you are taking your readers into territories that many may not
yet be comfortable with, and thus they’ve been reluctant to venture
too far on their own. There’s a certain responsibility in what
you are writing; of that we should all be aware. What’s often
not obvious to us as writers is that readers have entered into an unspoken
agreement with us. Readers appreciate authors who seem able to understand
and support the processes of change and expansion that they, the readers,
might be going through. As authors, we need to be conscious of this.
We need to build upon and honor the trust our readers have placed in
us.
Contracts
Between Readers and Writers
Way back when I was studying creative writing at the university, there
were lively debates about whether or not there was an implied contract
between author and reader. The arguments covered a wide spectrum, from
writers who believed that their only contract was to be true to their
own creative gifts, to those who believed that our only responsibility
was to not disappoint our readers. The latter was pretty self-evident,
since authors who disappoint their readers are soon looking for other
work.
No doubt there was some truth in those arguments we defended so passionately
back at the university, but as the years passed—now more than
thirty—it has become obvious that life teaches us lessons we aren’t
ready to hear when we’re sophomores in creative writing school.
Chief among those things we learn is the implied contract we have in
every human interaction, whether it is writing a book or buying stamps
at the post office. If we’re buying stamps, the implied contract
is that our interactions with the clerk will result in an exchange of
like values —stamps for money. If we’re choosing a book
to read, the implied contract can be found in what the book promises
and how well the author fulfills that promise.
What exactly is the promise? In a mystery book, the contract might be
that the author will keep us guessing and provide a satisfying resolution.
In a book about American history, the
contract might be to deliver in an interesting way some semblance of
truth about what has gone before us. In a book about how to run a software
program, the implied contract is that we will be better at running our
computers. And so it goes. But spiritual writing often involves a contract
that goes much deeper, and is perhaps less obvious than any of these.
A
spiritual book often delves into places that are deeply personal and
even precious to us. Because of the intimate nature of spiritual writing,
writers need to be aware of the depth to which they might be going with
their readers. These books can and do change lives, and that’s
not to be taken lightly. A woman in one of my workshops suggested that
it is like proclaiming our love to another person. In both cases—falling
in love or writing a spiritual book—we need to really mean what
we say and take our readers’ lives at least as seriously as we
take our subject matter.
In any discussion of our spiritual lives there are at least three entities
involved: you, me, and a presence greater than all of us. That third
entity is part of the equation in whatever we write. There’s a
line from the Bible that has always impressed me: “Where two or
three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them”
(Matthew 18:20). In the passage’s original context, it was Jesus,
representing the Word of God that would be in their midst. But whether
you’re a Christian, Jew, Muslim, Zuni, or Buddhist, or you follow
any of the infinite paradigms that guide spiritual thought, the deeper
meaning is not attached to any specific person or belief system. What’s
ultimately implied is that somehow in our gathering together we touch
our common source, that is, our oneness. Gregory Bateson is said to
have stated it thusly: “It takes two to know one.” 1
It seems to me that in virtually every spiritual book, it is this “one”
that we are striving to join with. What we can count on as we sit down
to write is that we share with our readers this desire to connect with
Spirit. That’s what your readers want from the synergy that they
establish with you when they sit down to read your book. Unlike other
writing, however, there is this third “voice” involved,
whatever name you might call it—God, Allah,
Jesus, Buddha, Moses, Mohammed, The Word, etc. Ultimately, the message
we communicate in a spiritual book is not just our own but a glimpse
beyond the veil of everyday reality, a glimpse of the One.
The
Perennial Philosophy: Key Spiritual Principles
A number of years ago, someone in a seminar remarked that he believed
there were universal themes that were part of every spiritual teaching.
Though he couldn’t define these themes for himself, he was convinced
they were there. He thought it important to have some grasp of these
themes if we were going to be writing books in this genre. The answer
I gave at the time was to explore what Aldous Huxley had written about
the “perennial philosophy.”2
Huxley helped to popularize work that was originally expressed by German
philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in the 17th century. Leibniz had
stated that there are four fundamental concepts that form the foundation
of all philosophies, religions, and spiritual practice, both Eastern
and Western. These concepts reflect not only what motivates an author
to write spiritual books but also what motivates our readers to be seekers
on the spiritual path. I paraphrase Huxley’s words below. The
following are the four principles of the perennial philosophy:
1. The phenomenal world—that is, the
entire world we perceive
through our five senses, including ourselves, all other creatures,
and all matter and all form of being—is inseparable
from Divine Ground. To be other than Divine Ground is
impossible, for Divine Ground is all that exists. While we
may have illusions of being separate from it, this cannot be
since nothing can exist apart from Divine Ground.
2. We humans are able to not only know about
the Divine
Ground—that is, to be able to grasp it intellectually—but
are
also able to experience it directly, through direct knowing, or
intuition, in this way uniting knower with known. When we
experience this unity, or oneness, our dualistic illusions (that
we are separate from spirit) fade away and we have no sense
of separation from Spirit or Divine Ground. We literally find
our grounding in the Divine.
3. We all possess a double nature: an ego self,
which operates
within the physical world of the senses (the phenomenal
world), and an eternal self, which is identified with Divine
Ground. The eternal self (spirit) is, in fact, inseparable from
Divine Ground, and we can choose to identify with this part
of our being or with the ego self. If we identify with the latter,
we perceive ourselves as only a separate being existing
within the phenomenal world.
4. Our ultimate purpose on Earth is to identify with
the eternal
self and experience coming into oneness with the Divine
Ground.
As you write, remind yourself of these four principles and note how
they turn up in your writing. This doesn’t mean that you necessarily
find yourself quoting or even paraphrasing these statements, but that
if you search far enough you will find they are keystones in the foundation
of virtually anything we might say about our spirituality. I’ve
found that the awareness of these principles helps me to keep whatever
I write focused and clear.
Going
Forward
As you read the chapters ahead, the subjects we’ve discussed here
will become increasingly clear, as will their application in the writing
of a spiritual book. What you will discover along the way is that your
motives for this kind of writing bring you more fully in alignment with
these principles. You will also find that your own interests will translate
easily into your readers’ interests, with the form and style of
your book evolving in a way that is completely compatible with what
you wish to write.
©
Hal Zina Bennett, 2004
This book can be purchased by clicking
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