Welcome to Adobe GoLive 4

REFLECTIONS

LEX HIXON on
INNER LIFE
As told to R. D. Tolz

Seeds of Unfolding, Spring 1984

Inner life is not to be thought of as being isolated from the world or isolated from other people. It is a quality of spiritual awareness which is always refining itself and revealing more and more about itself. It happens, as it were, secretly - behind any sort of outer activity. It is hidden even behind all the words that one may try to use to describe it. A person who is focused on inner life is one whose life is only for constant inner praise, surrender and gratitude, and for prayers for the world and for contemplation of the mystery of the Divine.

For someone who is living inner life, no matter how extensive or how limited the outer activity is, that outer life only gives a clue, and it even veils, the nature of inner life.

Inner life gives everyone the strength to survive in the outer life, but you have to be careful not to localize where that strength comes from, by saying, for example, the "inner spot within you." Inner life is not inside the body, or inside the mind, or even inside the self. The inner life is inside God, inside the Truth. The body, mind and self - they themselves are part of the outer life. The only thing that is truly inner is ultimate reality, the Truth itself. But, of course, everything that's happening in the universe is emerging from that reality and is sustained by it, moment by moment.

There is no question that we rely upon our inner ear to give us a sense of balance. We couldn't even take three steps on a flat surface without falling over if it wasn't for the inner ear. Similarly, the inner life gives strength and balance for us to carry on at whatever level of activity or responsibility we have.

Someone who just has to go to work every day to earn enough money to sustain the family, to take time out for the kids, to make sure that there is some contact with their aging parents and to be with them if they are dying - all of these tremendous demands of ordinary life could not be carried out without the constant sustenance and power of the inner life.

So the inner life is not something just a few mystics cultivate. Everybody has it- the difference being the degree to which we are conscious of it. One has to be careful not to think that the so-called ordinary person - who is out in the world struggling, who doesn't believe in God, who doesn't read profound books or engage in religious worship - has no inner life. That would be a false assumption. Every human being is a soul and therefore unavoidably has an inner life. It is the inner life of everyone which sustains the whole outer existence.

Again, without pushing the analogy too far, everybody integrates the inner ear wiih their movement in daily life. If they didn't they would fall down even on a flat surface. But, of course, people with athletic training or dance training have developed their balance and focused it and made it precise in a certain way.

That is what we call the inner life. It is the training and focusing of our innate sense of balance. It enables us to be more conscious and more harmonious.

Inner life should never be regarded as an escape or a moving away from the outer life. But at the same time, the inner life does provide something more reliable than the outer life. The outer life is subject to all sorts of disasters and misunderstandings. One could, for instance work for years and years and years, dedicated to a very good project in the world, and then have it collapse. If one had identified one's life work with that outer project, it would be a real time of devastation.

So although we should live the outer life, we shouldn't really depend on it for the source of meaning, but rather on the inner life and then allow its meaning to radiate into our outer life.- We should be very careful not to begin to feel that the meaning is really in the outer life. It's really only in the inner life. The outer life shines with the light of the inner life just as the moon shines only by the light of the sun.

Our everyday actions, duties and responsibility do not have to interfere with living inner life fully. If we added up all the hours a day that we spend working or commuting to work and the time we spend dressing or taking a shower, brushing our teeth, even preparing food - we would end up with this vast number of hours a day. And then suppose we are able to do a spiritual practice such as meditation for a half an hour oi an hour a day. It seems that an excessive amount of time is going into just mundane responsibilities, and only a tiny percentage of the time is going into spiritual practice. So that's why we have to completely change our image of spiritual practice. The inner life goes on constantly. It operates twenty-four hours a day. There is no time that we cannot connect with it. Being able to work in an office with colleagues and stress is actually a spiritual attainment. The people who are able to do this gracefully and fruitfully are able to do so because of their inner life. Just ordinary life in the world is a spiritual attainment.

A person who desires to develop inner life usually needs to find some activity which is conducive to that, to find some discipline or spiritual path. But we have a very serious crisis in spiritual education in our Western culture, because the strength of the church has waned a great deal. There's a mass of secularized people, a lot of them highly educated, who have fallen prey to all sorts of quasi-spiritual training that would never have been tolerated in an earlier time when religions of the culture exercised a stronger influence. In some sense it's wonderful that we are no longer so confined by religious traditions but, on the other hand, into this vacuum of freedom and liberality all sorts of crazy alternatives are flowing.

But that's looked at from the human standpoint. If we look at the whole thing from the standpoint of the all-wise, all-merciful guide, who is guiding all souls at every moment, there may not be a terrible problem here. Perhaps this is an opportunity to move people through their spiritual evolution faster or to give them a more multi-faceted kind of training than available in the past when they were born, lived and died inside one particular religious tradition.

The seeker has to be cautious but at the same time, open. That seems contradictory, but it's perfectly natural. This is the way we must live life moment by moment. Take the example of learning how to ride a bicycle. You’ve got to be careful not to fall over to the left or fall over to the right, but the only way to do that is to get a strong forward momentum. So the caution is a sense of balance in not tipping over to one side or another, and openness is the forward momentum. You actually need both to ride the bicycle.

All individuals are born for the spiritual path. Some of them manage to avoid it, manage to build enough barriers between soul and the rest of their being so that somehow they can reject it or turn aside from it. But it takes more energy to resist the spiritual path than it takes to walk along it.

Inner life is not to be thought of as being isolated from the world or isolated from other people. It is a quality of spiritual awareness which is always refining itself and revealing more and more about itself. It happens, as it were, secretly - behind any sort of outer activity. It is hidden even behind all the words that one may try to use to describe it. A person who is focused on inner life is one whose life is only for constant inner praise, surrender and gratitude, and for prayers for the world and for contemplation of the mystery of the Divine.

For someone who is living inner life, no matter how extensive or how limited the outer activity is, that outer life only gives a clue, and it even veils, the nature of inner life.

Inner life gives everyone the strength to survive in the outer life, but you have to be careful not to localize where that strength comes from, by saying, for example, the "inner spot within you." Inner life is not inside the body, or inside the mind, or even inside the self. The inner life is inside God, inside the Truth. The body, mind and self - they themselves are part of the outer life. The only thing that is truly inner is ultimate reality, the Truth itself. But, of course, everything that's happening in the universe is emerging from that reality and is sustained by it, moment by moment.

There is no question that we rely upon our inner ear to give us a sense of balance. We couldn't even take three steps on a flat surface without falling over if it wasn't for the inner ear. Similarly, the inner life gives strength and balance for us to carry on at whatever level of activity or responsibility we have.

Someone who just has to go to work every day to earn enough money to sustain the family, to take time out for the kids, to make sure that there is some contact with their aging parents and to be with them if they are dying - all of these tremendous demands of ordinary life could not be carried out without the constant sustenance and power of the inner life.

So the inner life is not something just a few mystics cultivate. Everybody has it- the difference being the degree to which we are conscious of it. One has to be careful not to think that the so-called ordinary person - who is out in the world struggling, who doesn't believe in God, who doesn't read profound books or engage in religious worship - has no inner life. That would be a false assumption. Every human being is a soul and therefore unavoidably has an inner life. It is the inner life of everyone which sustains the whole outer existence.

Again, without pushing the analogy too far, everybody integrates the inner ear wiih their movement in daily life. If they didn't they would fall down even on a flat surface. But, of course, people with athletic training or dance training have developed their balance and focused it and made it precise in a certain way.

That is what we call the inner life. It is the training and focusing of our innate sense of balance. It enables us to be more conscious and more harmonious.

Inner life should never be regarded as an escape or a moving away from the outer life. But at the same time, the inner life does provide something more reliable than the outer life. The outer life is subject to all sorts of disasters and misunderstandings. One could, for instance work for years and years and years, dedicated to a very good project in the world, and then have it collapse. If one had identified one's life work with that outer project, it would be a real time of devastation.

So although we should live the outer life, we shouldn't really depend on it for the source of meaning, but rather on the inner life and then allow its meaning to radiate into our outer life.- We should be very careful not to begin to feel that the meaning is really in the outer life. It's really only in the inner life. The outer life shines with the light of the inner life just as the moon shines only by the light of the sun.

Our everyday actions, duties and responsibility do not have to interfere with living inner life fully. If we added up all the hours a day that we spend working or commuting to work and the time we spend dressing or taking a shower, brushing our teeth, even preparing food - we would end up with this vast number of hours a day. And then suppose we are able to do a spiritual practice such as meditation for a half an hour oi an hour a day. It seems that an excessive amount of time is going into just mundane responsibilities, and only a tiny percentage of the time is going into spiritual practice. So that's why we have to completely change our image of spiritual practice. The inner life goes on constantly. It operates twenty-four hours a day. There is no time that we cannot connect with it. Being able to work in an office with colleagues and stress is actually a spiritual attainment. The people who are able to do this gracefully and fruitfully are able to do so because of their inner life. Just ordinary life in the world is a spiritual attainment.

A person who desires to develop inner life usually needs to find some activity which is conducive to that, to find some discipline or spiritual path. But we have a very serious crisis in spiritual education in our Western culture, because the strength of the church has waned a great deal. There's a mass of secularized people, a lot of them highly educated, who have fallen prey to all sorts of quasi-spiritual training that would never have been tolerated in an earlier time when religions of the culture exercised a stronger influence. In some sense it's wonderful that we are no longer so confined by religious traditions but, on the other hand, into this vacuum of freedom and liberality all sorts of crazy alternatives are flowing.

But that's looked at from the human standpoint. If we look at the whole thing from the standpoint of the all-wise, all-merciful guide, who is guiding all souls at every moment, there may not be a terrible problem here. Perhaps this is an opportunity to move people through their spiritual evolution faster or to give them a more multi-faceted kind of training than available in the past when they were born, lived and died inside one particular religious tradition.

The seeker has to be cautious but at the same time, open. That seems contradictory, but it's perfectly natural. This is the way we must live life moment by moment. Take the example of learning how to ride a bicycle. You’ve got to be careful not to fall over to the left or fall over to the right, but the only way to do that is to get a strong forward momentum. So the caution is a sense of balance in not tipping over to one side or another, and openness is the forward momentum. You actually need both to ride the bicycle.

All individuals are born for the spiritual path. Some of them manage to avoid it, manage to build enough barriers between soul and the rest of their being so that somehow they can reject it or turn aside from it. But it takes more energy to resist the spiritual path than it takes to walk along it.