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(Editor’s Note: the following are extracts from First Steps: An Introduction to Spiritual Practice published by Findhorn Press; 1993

Click here for an overview of posts in the series The Art of Living in Community.)

The basic message [of First Steps] is that spiritual practice consists of three interwoven dynamics:

Every day, in some way

  • We review, contemplate and transform our attitudes and actions.
  • We align with and explore the inner and sacred dimensions of self and life.
  • We serve.

Perfectly, all three happen simultaneously and continuously. They also need to happen

  • With a general attitude of amused realism about our relative state of ignorance, and
  • With an interest in seeking continuing education and inspiration.

In the following chapters, then, I first look at the innate seeds of spirituality within all of us and at the challenges of being human, and then I go on to describe in greater detail the basic dynamics of spiritual practice.

Daily Self-Reflection
The Two Selves
We are all faced with an inspiring, but irritating, challenge. We have this inspiring sense of our true inner self and we have the irritation of not being able to express it fully. This is a terrible paradox, isn’t it? What greater frustration can there be for a human than to be told: this is who you really are — and you cannot be it; you can become it, but you are going to have to work at it.

But there is an even greater discomfort if, having become aware of our core self, we then ignore it.

There are two simultaneous pieces of work to do:

  • First, we have to melt and transform the layers of our defences and daily attitudes.
  • Second, we have to give attention to our core self and bring it more fully into our consciousness and actions.

‘Self-reflection’, then, is reflection on both the everyday personality self and on the inner Self.

Reviewing the Personality Self
The basic principle of self-review is that by shining the light of awareness onto our attitudes and behaviour we can begin to transform them; and as we transform them, this allows who we truly are to become more present. There are many techniques for doing this, but I think they can be usefully summarised in three basic approaches:

  • Contemplative review.
  • Journal-keeping.
  • Breath.

Whichever technique we use—and all three can be combined—they need to be based in as much self-honesty as we can achieve. Over the years, as we practise self-review, the ability to look frankly at our dark aspects increases. This is work that we do on our own. In the privacy of our own reflection we can be absolutely honest with ourselves. It is not worth being anything less. In the Christian tradition this form of self-reflection has been externalised into Confession, in which the honesty occurs in a dialogue with a priest. The attitude of confession—telling all—is useful. I confess to myself …

It is also crucial that this review, like all other aspects of spiritual practice, take place on a daily basis. If we do not monitor ourselves regularly on a daily cycle, then things slip by and the transformative dynamic of honesty is lost.

Within the classical spiritual traditions, the institution or the teacher provides the disciplined guidelines within which we do this work. As we move into the 21st century, however, we have mainly thrown away relationships in which we surrender to top-down discipline. This means that we have no option but self-discipline.

Alignment With the Sacred
‘God’
The sacred, the divine, the multidimensional, the magical, is around us and within us. As children we often experience this other reality, but the immediacy of physical, psychological and social existence penetrates our vulnerability and we build up defensive—and successful—personas for coping with it. As this happens we lose our openings of communication with the other, inner world. We close down, and create and thicken our defences.

Later, for one reason or another, we begin to recall this inner world and its sacred beauty. We begin to sense that there is some form of underlying and transcendent connection between everything. We may call this Spirit or God. It is useful to understand that ‘God’ is shorthand for an indescribable reality which is experienced in various ways in different traditions and individuals. For some people it is a very personal experience; others are more detached. Generally we tend to project onto ‘God’ ideas that suit our society. A patriarchal society has a patriarchal God.

Some spiritual traditions, such as Buddhism, recognise this tendency to appropriate, exploit and manipulate the idea of God. These traditions recognise that defining God is a matter of where we place our attention and how we attune our perception.

In the mystical tradition of Judaism there is a helpful map of inner realities called the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. On this tree are ten great spheres, each of them representing an aspect of the sacred or an expression of God. The lowest sphere represents the Earth and the highest sphere represents the radiance of pure cosmic consciousness and the Source of all that is manifest. Above this highest sphere, however, there are three further half circles, each higher than the previous one, sitting like hats on top of each other. The first of these crescents represents The Unknowable. The second represents The Absolutely Unknowab1e. The third and highest is named The Absolutely Completely Unknowable.

The Tibetan teacher Djwahl Khul, well known through the many books of Alice Bailey, most of the time studiously avoids the word God, preferring to use the phrase All That Is. And J.G. Bennet, who taught and initiated people into a mystic way called Subud, once had a student who upon entry into the order refused to go along with a pledge to God. Bennet’s students were dismayed, but Bennet looked at the rebel and asked, ‘How about a pledge to Cosmic Electricity?’ The rebel nodded that he could accept such a notion and Bennet flowed ahead with the entrance.

This digression about God underlines a crucial point about true spiritual practice. In it, as private individuals, we are free to explore what God is or is not, or whether we even choose to relate to the concept at all. What is central is that there is an inner world and that there is a sacred quality to all life. In spiritual practice we explore these worlds, free of preconceptions, open to the unknown.

Some people may say that they are incapable, perhaps even unworthy, of experiencing the sacred. This is not possible. No person, unless deprived by terrible injustice, lives without tasting the experience.

We feel it in beautiful landscape; sometimes we experience it when looking at a child or holding something beautiful. It may gently stroke our consciousness, like the touch of a feather. At some point in our life, the magic quality of the inner world has touched us. Only remember and notice it.

In spiritual practice, on an ongoing daily basis, we deliberately do certain things to cut through our psychological defences and to bring us into communication and communion with this inner reality. There are many different techniques and approaches—spiritual technologies—but the purpose of all of them is to bring the sacred and the divine into our conscious awareness, and to repeat the experience so often that it fuses into our daily consciousness.

Abandon, Devotion and Contemplation
It is one of the joys of human culture that there are so many different approaches to God or Spirit—but it is also a challenge. It is a challenge because one of the more terrible problems of humanity is that people are often intolerant of spiritual paths different from their own. I am not just thinking here of the obvious theological conflicts between religions and belief systems. I am also thinking of the very different styles of spiritual approach. These differences in style can provoke terrible prejudice and are perhaps more of a problem than the theological and intellectual divisions. Theological conflicts are easily identified, but those between styles can exist within the same belief system and are more insidious. There seem to me to be three basic styles which appear to conflict and create trouble between their practitioners. These styles are:

  • Mystical abandon
  • Devotional aspiration
  • Contemplation

Imagine, for example, a devotional seeker who loves intense prayer and a person who meets Spirit by dancing in abandon. The one may be deeply alienated by the style of the other. In the same way, a seeker who enjoys the more contemplative approach may be highly judgmental of both the devotee and the dancer. In fact, the three styles need not be mutually exclusive. It is worth regularly monitoring ourselves and asking which of the three styles is our predominant way; then asking whether it is appropriate to try one of the others; and making certain we melt any prejudices against them.

Actions, Attitude and Service
The Fire of Idealism
In the practice of self-reflection and the practice of attuning to the sacred, we gain visions and experiences of a world, of a consciousness and of a reality different from that in which we daily live. The sacred world has a quality about it that calms the dynamics of unbridled egoism. The driving need to survive, to compete and to win, retreats in the face of the sense of the true Self and the sacred nature of all life.

The challenge, then, is to remain true to that sense of the Self.

Once we have begun to feel the power of the Self and the sacred, there is a natural drive to fulfil it and to embody it in our whole lives. That instinct which we had as children, that there should be a world of justice and right behaviour, reawakens. Perhaps some of us have managed to hold on to our early sense of natural justice; if that is so, then our new encounters with the inner world will reinforce and empower our awareness and activity. We also learn that there is nowhere for this process to begin except in ourselves.

It seems to me that there exists a natural instinct to surrender to the vision and sense of the Self. I have watched many people who do indeed have a clear sense of their Self but who do nothing to surrender to it in their daily lives.

Without exception these people are wounded by a deep personal dissatisfaction—although their pain may be hidden under veils of psychological defence.

There are other people who surrender with such willingness to the moral imperatives of the Self that their personal sacrifices to the general good can shock and inspire us with their courage and lack of self-interest.

For the sake of ease let us call all behaviour that is dedicated to achieving a moral, just and loving world service. Our instinct for service derives, I believe, from an uncontrollable inner desire to bring into tangible manifestation all that we know to be just and beautiful of the true inner world. This is a great passion. It is also a dangerous passion, for most of us prefer safe lives. Caught in the realities of mortgage payments and family commitments, ensnared in the illusions of status and social survival, we find the idea of surrender to the passion of service threatening.

Yet we have no choice except to surrender— each in our own appropriate way— to this passion of service. Our lack of choice derives not only from the moral imperative of our soul. It also derives from the reality that service is the physical foundation stone of our spiritual transformation.

Service as Personal Transformation
The essence of personal transformation is the process by which our core self, our true inner self, comes into full incarnation and expression. Spiritual transformation is our true self coming in for a landing. Many of us forget this or choose to ignore it. We prefer to think that our main work is to expand outwards into ever less earthly awareness. Certainly we have to expand our consciousness, but all the expansion in the world is useless unless it is brought down and expressed through us in our behaviour, actions and attitudes.

We need to be very clear about this. The reason why we need to express our Self is not simply because it is a good idea, or because it is of service. The reason is that only when our new consciousness is expressed through us do we really change. If it does not express through us then it is happening only in our psyche. New awareness—about love or spirit or consciousness or natural justice—has to ground through us and we have to experience that inner ‘friction’ that happens when we genuinely act it out in body, mind and heart. It is in this process that we transform ourselves. If our changes happen only in our psyche we are wasting time and it is fair to accuse us of narcissism.

To put it in an energetic way: The core self has a different vibration, radiance and consciousness from the everyday psycho-social self. When the core self comes into and expresses through the everyday self, then the everyday self changes its vibration, radiance and consciousness. In this way transformation, integration and true freedom are achieved.

There are many mystics and spiritual idealists who, because their new awareness is not grounded in the physical reality of their actions, are completely out of balance and in many ways dysfunctional.

The energy field of the Self has to flow fully through our whole being right down into what is often today called our cellular awareness. Every cell of the everyday self needs to vibrate and radiate the awareness of the Self. This is spiritual transformation.

Service, then, seen from another perspective, is that behaviour which expresses our core self into the world.