mentality plus feelings = spirituality
MENTAL EXERCISES ON THE ROAD TO TEPAKÁN

A while back I mentioned the mental exercise I do while hiking to and from Tepakán to exchange an empty 20-liter water bottle in my backpack for a full one. I was glad when someone asked for more information about the exercise, for it's a feature of my spiritual awakening, and these days I'm more focused on that than anything. It's an experience worth sharing.

At the heart of the exercise is something I've done all my adult life. That is, as I travel I pay close attention to the plants and animals around me, always hoping to see something new to me, so I can look up its name and learn more about it.

After a few years of doing this, while still young, I realized that the process was affecting me powerfully. I was discovering a world much more diverse, complex, mysterious and gorgeous than I'd dreamed possible. This sensation felt like a spiritual insight. Having rejected all formal religions, finding spirituality blossoming within me felt good.

The next big step in my development was this: Having come to know so many species interrelating with one another in complex patterns, the patterns themselves, it seemed to me, offered spiritual teachings: "Nature as Bible."

For example, Nature recycles Her resources, so I should do the same. She seems obsessed with diversity, yet She's utterly impersonal and often dangerous, so I need to cherish diversity, and watch out for my own survival.

Eventually I noticed this: That the more I knew about things, the more feelings I had for the things I knew -- especially the feelings of empathy and compassion. Not only that, but it seemed to me that during my years of having feelings about things, my spiritual awakening had sped up.

For years it seemed that my development had reached a plateau beyond which I couldn't pass. However, now in my early 70s my mental/emotional/spiritual state has been supercharged by fully internalizing the One Thing concept.

Now when I hike to Tepakán meeting trees, birds, rocks, men on bicycles, the attitude that defaced the town-limit sign, the disease in the eye of the little boy playing at the hut's door when he looks up at me and smiles... it is a meditation meant to help me focus.

But, what does all this mean? What am I to do about it? Are not these precisely the questions native to robustly maturing spirituality?

Though I haven't the foggiest "what it all means," I do have an answer that feels right for the "What am I to do about it" question. Though there's no science to support my answer, from the evidences in my own life outlined above, it feels right to me to believe that we sentient beings are supposed to live our lives consciously and penetratingly paying attention to whatever life we happen to be living.

Why would the One Thing want us to pay attention? Again, the answer that feels right to me is that we sentient beings are the means by which the One Thing experiences Herself, maybe even realizes Herself. We are, I suspect, something like the One Thing's nerve endings. And that notion suggests that sentient beings, no matter how we screw up our lives, in the end are doing what the One Thing "wants," and that can be a comforting thought.

In review, on the road to Tepakán I think up various focusing exercises meant to give me more self discipline for paying attention to everything, always, everyplace. When I experience anything -- anything! -- with unusual intensity, I feel like I'm doing my job.

FOOTNOTE: The study of plants and animals is by no means the only path to higher spirituality. After all, Nature is everything. What's important is the paying of attention. Moreover, especially early in life, the main thing needing attention is this: The natural predispositions and needs each of us is born with. For, those are the best of all indications as to what the One Thing "wants" us to do with our lives. Know thyself, they've been saying for thousands of years, and with good reason.