The Spiritual Path as Ascent Through Agency

… One can picture a pure state in which one knows, one is aware of, the whole meaning and significance of the world. Then one can become united with the Will by which the whole world is kept and created.[1]

The entire spiritual path can be framed as climbing the hierarchy of agency: by transcending independence at a given level, one can serve and be a part of a greater agency at the next level. Transcending independence is not a sacrifice, because we gain incomparably more than we lose. What do we lose along the way? Nothing essential. We lose our readiness to be shoved this way and that by every passing whim. Instead, we let our thoughts, reactions, and impulses pass through us without feeling compelled to act on them. We lose our willingness to act against the promptings of our conscience, in stark contrast to our former willingness to sweep the voice of conscience under our mental rug and pretend to ourselves it's not there. And we lose our separateness from other people.

In place of all that, we gain entrance to the world of community and love. We gain a step toward the fulfillment, not only of our own life, but of the very purpose of the world: the evolution of humanity and the flowering of the Divine within this world.

To integrate and purify our inner life to open into our I, is to rise to the next level of wholeness. Agency advances when the independent entities of one level join into a greater whole at the next level. For example, full-body sensing unites our bodily experience into a single whole. Feeling energy comes from and enables awareness of our emotions, moving our emotional life toward unity. Mind energy arises from and enables awareness of our thoughts as thoughts, bringing us toward the pure cognition that unites our mind. With this preparation of the Sensitive energies, the Conscious energy arises from and enables the integration of our body, heart, and mind into a complete whole serving our unified individuality. In addition to that unifying power, the conscious energy is boundless and all-inclusive. Through all those qualities, the conscious energy opens the way to the next rung of the hierarchy of agency, that of unified individuality.

And so it is, up the scale of the Creative, Unitive, and Transcendent energies. Each level emerges from the prior one and its agent is the one, the will, who uses the energy of that level. With the Creative Energy, the energy of Sacred Light, the agent is the Global Individuality. People of that level are saints. With the Unitive Energy of love, the agent is the Universal Individuality, the prophets and bodhisattvas among us. With the ultimate Transcendent Energy, the agent is the Divine, God as an emergent agent: the Whole of all wholes. The emergent God is the immanent side of God, the One who maintains, evolves with, and participates in the universe, whereas the transcendent God is the One Who sets the universe in motion in the beginning.

The purification of our inner life can also be understood as climbing the hierarchy of agency. Two levels of purification can illustrate this. Early on the way, we find ourselves scattered and fragmented, our attention easily diverted. Random thoughts and mental images, sensory impressions, emotional reactions, and bodily impulses all push us into acting, thinking, and feeling in contradictory, ill-considered, inconsistent, and sometimes harmful ways, with limited awareness of our actions or motivations. Bringing all this into relationship pivots our inner world toward wholeness. Each part, each splinter of motive, starts to live in the purifying light of the others, in the light of the greater awareness afforded by the intentional accumulation and organization of the sensitive energies of bodily sensation, feeling energy, and cognitive energy. That light shows the underlying relationships and the shared purpose among our many parts. This is moving from being an agglomeration of varied impulses toward being whole. Until that process is well underway, we cannot be very effective outwardly or inwardly. Until then, we live at the mercy of whatever comes up next.

The result of that level of purification and integration still leaves us subject to our self-centered ego, yet another whole separate from the others around it, separate from the egos in other people. This whole, this ego, proves elusive, because it is illusory. We may outgrow the selfishness of our early years, but the illusion of separateness persists unabated. In Buddhism this illusion is called the self, which through practice can be deconstructed, shown to be unreal and non-existent. That utter disillusionment with our own ego is a crucial stage of our unfolding spiritual path. Not only does it largely heal the rift of separateness between us and other people, but it also makes room for our true I, which is the next level whole and opens the way to widening our identity to include All. In that process we go from our little self to the Big Self, from ego to I, the will, the agency, which, though it is our personal individuality, is nonetheless an emanation of the Divine. We may not have come to the pinnacle of the hierarchy of agency, but we are no longer separate from it.

One of the keys to this step is inner stillness. When we find that quiet place within us, we find our core, where ego has no influence. The illusion of ego persists in our thoughts, our attitudes, our emotional reactions. In the quiet, those are all absent, at least temporarily. And in their absence, we find freedom from the illusion of separateness, freedom from self-centeredness. We find ourselves. Crucially, we can find the quiet even in the presence of thoughts, attitudes, and reactions, but underneath them, behind them. We can be our larger selves without stopping our thoughts, without stopping the illusory thought I.

That sets the stage for our expansion and integration into the next level. The inner stillness, the natural seat of presence, expands to permeate the whole of us. That becomes our within. Then we look from our within to the within of all the things around us, including the living things and people. That external within and our internal within are one and the same. With their merging, with their blending, we enter the larger life, the larger whole of this world we inhabit, its sacredness revealed to us.

This is our common presence. The simple presence of a rock, its will-to-be what it is. The presence of a tree, of a flower. The presence of a house, a car, a lake, a mountain. The presence of the people we meet, the animals. Our own presence. It is all one presence. And at the core of any presence is will, agency. We merge into the largest whole, into the presence we share with everything and everyone, into our common presence. This is the true way to live large, in the Divine Agent of the Whole.

[1] John G. Bennett, Study of Man, Centers; Talk B2, Sherborne House audio recording, minute 7:00; October 12, 1974

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