It’s easy to think that spiritual progress means something grand, mystical and other wordly. That’s it’s removed from the everyday life of ordinary human beings.
But spirituality doesn’t point to some other world that is mysterious and only for special people. Spirituality is seeing the everyday world in a new way. It is itself part of the everyday world of self understanding and personal growth. It isn’t about metaphysical truths we can’t fathom or special experiences of consciousness that require mystical insight. Some people might have elaborate metaphysical ideas, just as some people might have visions and enter into trances. But those aren’t the essence of spirituality, as if they are a marker or signal that one is really spiritual.
Spirituality is the most mundane thing in the world: overcoming insecurities. It feels hard, and can be hard, when we think it is something we ought to do like homework or making the bed or donating to charity – a good deed and a good habit we should cultivate to be other than who we are.
A main obstacle to spirituality is the interpretation that it is something mystical and not for us ordinary folk. The desire for spirituality often manifests as a desire to see it as a diamond in the sky far above us, like we are ants looking up at a distant star light years away. In this picture the very image of the unbridgeable, incalculable distance between us and the diamond we admire becomes an obstacle to seeing how we are already holding the diamond in our hand.
When reading The Bhagavad Gita this sense of the diamond in the sky can present itself in two ways. First that one has to be a great warrior/thinker/human to actually even want spiritual truth. And second that to gain that truth one must gain some special, esoteric mystical awareness like seeing the thousandfold image of Krishna as the entirety of the universe. But in fact it’s so much simpler and also so much more beautiful in its ordinariness than that.
The root of Arjuna’s problem isn’t that he doesn’t have mystical knowledge. It is the extremely mundane problem that he is beset by anxiety. In contemporary terms we would say he is having a panic attack or he is depressed or he is having a nervous breakdown. He is frozen in the face of an action he experiences as overwhelming. He is nervous, unable to think clearly, obsessing over what to do and whether he can do it. He feels a natural easy flow of action has been thwarted, like he can’t do the simplest things with the ease with which he did them all his life and which others still seem to be doing with that ease.
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