A Continuous Peril of the Spiritual Journey

Running counter to the deepening trust in our experience is our incredibly insidious tendency to intellectualize. We don't think we've got it unless we can name it. Inevitably, with any amount of insight, we want to talk about it. We want to be able to fit it into our reference system. Of course, absolute wisdom doesn't fit any referential perspective because it has no limits. It is boundless. But we try anyway, and, in order to make insight fit our data base, we chop off a chunk here, squeeze a few things together there, modify its shape. We push it through the filters of our preconceptions and force it into the container of our knowledge. But what we have now is no longer the experience. It is a static abstraction.

Spring breeze is a definite experience. We can take a jar, run out with it into a warm April morning, and capture some air in it. Put a cap on the jar and label it "spring breeze." What do we have? Obviously, not the spring breeze. It is now an idea, not an ineffable experience. After the first glimpse of the True Self, people quickly latch onto it, make a concept out of it, grasp, and strangle it. That's not it. That misses it.

This attempt to intellectualize our lives is a continuous peril of the spiritual journey. There is no way to avoid it. We do it all the time. We distance ourselves from our lives with our thoughts. We distance ourselves from our clarity with no thoughts. And what rests ahead of us on the spiritual path is the uninterrupted training of letting go of that tendency; of learning how to appreciate and trust the direct experience and the mystery that is unspeakable.

---John Daido Loori---