An Interspiritual Stance
These words from Sitaram Dass were adapted from the upcoming book, Loving-Awareness: Awakening the Heart-Mind through the Path of Grace. They describe SCP’s core interspiritual stance of Loving-Awareness actualized in the teachings of Love, Service, Remembrance, and Truth.
Loving-Awareness is who we really are. Deeper than the mind, body, or sense of self, Loving-Awareness is the essence of Being and the fabric of Reality. It is the Transcendent Nature of God, the Holy Imminence of the senses, and the Inherent Divinity of all sentient beings.
We are not our thoughts. We are not our body. We are not our emotions, sensations, name, social roles or self-identifications. We are not our hobbies or passions. These may be a part of us, but there is still something more core, primal, and stable to our being. It has been called by many names. Buddhism calls it emptiness or the Not-Self. The Vedas called it the Atman, or True Self. Modern-day Acceptance and Commitment Therapy calls it “self-as-context.” Our conscious awareness, rather than being identified with any particular subset of thoughts or feeling-states, is in fact the container that holds all of our experience. Every sensation we experience, every concept in our mind, and even our idea of being an individual are still happening inside our awareness.
Yet, we often identify strongly with the content of our mind. It is like the dreamer of the dream who identifies with only a single character. In truth, the dreamer has dreamt the entire dream and all of its contents, all of it woven from the dreamer’s own consciousness. We are awareness itself, and this awareness is what makes up the entire world of our experience.
To use another metaphor, we are the ocean, and each thought, sensation, feeling, emotion, and self-identification is a wave in this vast, eternal Sea of Consciousness. They are created by sea, arise from sea, will return to sea, and are held in the buoyancy of sea. We often identify with some of these waves, pretending that they are solid, separate, and eternal, yet no single wave can be permanent or the totality. Only the water remains.
This implies a sense of relationality. We are simultaneously all of it and none of it. We are the cause and effect, the strands of connection, the relational web, the dreamer, and the dream. And relationality means Love.
This is why Love is the highest value and the deepest truth. Every other premise we believe to be true is held up by an underlying assumption, but Love is the one thing that doesn’t rest on anything else. It is self-evident as Truth Itself. The Sanskrit word for Truth is “satya.” It comes from the root sat, which means existence, and the suffix ya, which means pertaining to. Truth is that which pertains to existence. This is why Truth is the most powerful force. It doesn’t require belief, effort, or clinging in the mind. It is what is left when everything else has fallen away. When clinging releases, clarity emerges that this Truth is Love. This sea of experience is Love.
“Love is the most powerful medicine. It is even stronger than electricity.” –Neem Karoli Baba
Ram Dass, towards the end of his life, coined the term “Loving-Awareness” to discuss this Ultimate Reality. What I love about the term is that it allows for all paths up the mountain. We have awareness practices–where we actively release clinging in the mind, and we have love practices–where our heart sings with love or burns with longing for God. And we have service–because that is what Love means in action.
Love as an action is service; it’s what it means to be interrelated. If we have a sprained ankle, we will naturally start limping. We limp because the stronger parts of our body take the burden of weight from the part that is hurting. Our body knows it is interconnected. There is no thought of “serving” or not serving. As we grow into Loving-Awareness, the spirit of our service takes the same form.
This name, “Loving-Awareness,” also shows us a fuller picture of the pinnacle of the path. Because when we rest in the spaciousness of awareness, love naturally infuses everything it touches. As Pavan Das states, “Just as we cannot separate heat from sunlight, we cannot separate love from awareness.” If it is true that we are all One and Interrelated, then releasing the identification with our individual node in the relational web allows us to feel the strands of connection that enmesh us with everything. Rather than “me” identifying as a separate island looking out across the sea towards “them,” we become the water that holds all of us. Love is the natural outpouring of this.
And once this has been awakened, once we have gained a taste, a whiff, or even an intuitive hit, everything changes. Because then practice becomes the simple act of remembering what is always and already true. This is what liberation really means.
And this provides a vantage that we can view different religious and spiritual paths from. I still remember when, in my early 20s as I was first seriously exploring the nature of consciousness, I read the New Testament for the first time. I had read the Bhagavad Gita and the teachings of the Buddha, but the fact that the Bible–a religious text that was widely read in my conservative hometown–could provide spiritual nourishment was not something I had considered. I was sitting in a coffee shop in Seattle when I first read Christ’s words, “The Kingdom of God is within you.” Those words surprised me so much that I said out loud, “Has anyone else read this?”
In 1999, Wayne Teasdale coined the term “interspirituality” to describe the growing recognition between global faith leaders and practitioners that the sometimes widely different religions share a common spiritual heart. Although a relatively recent term, it is not a new assertion, and mystics from all spiritual traditions have stated this throughout the ages.
“Theologians may quarrel, but the mystics of the world speak the same language.” – Meister Eckhart (1260 - 1328)
“All religions lead in the same direction, all religious trends are identical - we are all ONE!” – Anandamayi Ma (1896 - 1982)
“The Truth is One, but sages call it by many names.” – Rig Veda (1000 BCE)
“In every religion there is love, but love has no religion.” – Rumi (1207 – 1273)
This is not a recent movement placing modern sensibilities on ancient traditions. It is an evolution of understanding that has grown since the earliest pioneers of spirit encountered those with different words to describe Ultimate Reality. With the rapid globalization of the last century, religions were able to mingle in ways not previously possible. Because of this, two things happened— an increase in fundamentalist dogmatism and a growing interspiritual movement. The fundamentalists claimed superiority over other religions in order to defend their own epistemological stances, and this has resulted in unimaginable violence. But alongside this, Sufi masters like Hazrat Inyat Khan, Hindu gurus such as Anandamayi Ma, Christian Mystics such as Leo Tolstoy, and modern spiritual luminaries like Mirabai Starr have all espoused the shared mystic heart of Love as the Universal Source for all religious traditions.
Like many sincere practitioners today, I find myself both rooted in tradition while willing to engage in any practice that will subsume me in the fire of Love. I have danced with Sufis, scanned the subtle sensations of the body in silent Vipassana meditation, and felt the Holy Spirit in Christian prayer. Ram Dass never once told me I had to limit myself; he only ever encouraged me to engage with sincerity.
The foundations of Sacred Community Project are both rooted in the Sanatana Dharma of Hinduism while also branched out into many of the world’s great traditions. The goal is not to fit inside a box or join a club. The goal is the liberation of Loving-Awareness.
Ram Dass famously summarized the teachings he learned from his guru, Neem Karoli Baba, into four lines, “Love everyone, serve everyone, remember God, and tell the truth.” SCP has been deeply influenced by Ram Dass, Neem Karoli Baba, and their teachings, and I wrote the first draft of SCP’s founding document on the plane ride home from seeing Ram Dass at the Neem Karoli Baba ashram in Taos, NM, 5 months before he died. SCP takes these teachings of Love, Service, Remembrance, and Truth as the center of our interspiritual stance.
As far as I can tell, all great wisdom, philosophical, and spiritual traditions teach to love everyone, serve everyone, tell the truth, and to remember. Not all traditions make truth claims about a higher power, but all traditions teach to remember the Sacred in some way. We can remember God, remember to let go of clinging in the mind, remember Interdependence, remember our shared humanity, remember our core values, or remember our Buddha nature. The word we use is Loving-Awareness. Regardless, this remembering is central to why spiritual, contemplative, and devotional practices are so important. It is very difficult to love everyone, serve everyone, and tell the truth if we don’t remember to do so. And by remembering the Sacred, we reinforce core values that fuel our love-filled service in the world.
As Hari Scott Whitmore teaches, Love, Service, Remembrance, and Truth are “beautifully cyclical.” In a sermon he gave to a Christian congregation in Southport, CT, he says, “Why do you serve everyone? Because you love everyone, and why do you love everyone? Because you remember God in all beings and all creation.” We practice Truth for this same reason. As satya, that which pertains to existence, Truth is a practice that keeps us in relationship with Reality. And because Truth and Love are synonymous, practicing Truth is an act of Love.
