The Temple of Self and The Temple of Soul

I spent the month of August in south India. I spent five days getting married to the love of my life, and the rest of the time in a kind of awed stupor. Rarely have I gotten a chance to be a pure observer of what was happening around me. But in India I was surrounded by people I did not know, speaking a language I did not understand, and doing things I had never seen done before. Because of this, I was truly able to stand outside of myself and witness all that was happening around me in a detached and compassionate way. I found myself experiencing an amazing clarity about life and the human condition. I found myself losing the feeling as if I had a "self" at all. I have decided to share several interesting lessons I learned from my journey to the east in this blog. I hope they will help you in some way as you continue your own journey through this life.



In India, there are temples everywhere. No, really. I mean everywhere. (Think the American equivalent of Starbucks.) You can't go one block without stumbling on a temple. There are several in each neighborhood, along the sides of the highway, placed randomly in the market streets, in the middle of cities and rural villages alike. They are huge and magnificent or they are small, dirty concrete boxes. Gods are beautifully carved statues decorated with valuable jewels or they are rocks or piles of clay painted with turmeric and kum kum. It doesn't seem to matter there. A temple is a place where God lives. A God is an object one decides is a God. The God is named, a cleansing prayer is done and followers worship appropriately.

Never in my life have I been surrounded by so much devotion.

Every morning at 5am the temples would play their kirtans (these are kind of like hymns). The city of Hyderabad wakes up to the sounds of sacred music before the sun rises. Each business has an altar that you see when you enter. Every Friday pooja (prayer) is done in the stores, incense and candles are lit, pictures and statues of Gods are blessed with vermilion. Customers wait for the owner of the shop to finish and then go to the altar to pay respects to the God before they go shopping. It seems as if all of the social events and holidays in India revolve around the celebration of some religious aspect or another-the defeating of an evil spirit or the celebration of a God's birthday. The whole culture seems to hum with a kind of ritualistic faith no matter where you go.

Om Nama Shivaya, Shivaya, Nama Om.

For me, it is easy to slip in and out of temples, to offer my prayers and participate in sacred rituals, no matter what religion. I have an atypical understanding of God because I believe the concept of God is symbolic. So when I am in a spiritual place, I try to understand what the God before me symbolizes, and then I try to bring these aspects from my higher self into my own personality. For me, Jesus represents unconditional love, Abraham represents faith, Buddha stands for detached observation and truth, and the Hindu Gods represent the qualities they are known for (there are, quite frankly, so many it would be hard for me to list them all here).

Since I was a small child, I have been sensitive to the energy in different places. To some people this sounds strange. To others, they know exactly to what I'm referring. Never before have I felt such strong spiritual energy as I did in India. It was magnetic and all consuming. It dissolved my stories and my sense of self and humbled me to the point where I realized I could do nothing else but spend the rest of my life serving others if I wanted to be happy. I understood unconditional love and compassion and devotion and self-discipline all at once. Never before have I felt so close to the highest aspect of life that I call God.

It occurred to me while I was in India that we are suffering a kind of spiritual crisis in America. It is not so much that we don't know devotion. It is that we have given so much devotion to this concept of "self" that we are creating a great deal of personal suffering. We have unconsciously created such a large void within ourselves by constantly giving offerings to our egos that we aren't able to see our way out of it. Look at all of the temples to the self we have created in this culture! Look at all of the excuses we have made to remain self-centered.

We have a ridiculous amount of prosperity in this country. Even as we tell this story about being in a "recession" it is almost embarrassing the amount of material wealth that is present here. Yet here we all are, grasping for more. Here we are, physically overweight and spiritually starving. I am not being self righteous here; I have been grasping right along beside you for many years. I have been listening to my personality and ignoring the needs of my highest self.

Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna, Krishna, Hare, Hare.

Several years ago, I was a bit shaken up when Thich Nhat Hahn, one of my favorite spiritual teachers, referred to America as "the land of the hungry ghosts." After visiting India, I feel more like shell shocked. As long as we continue to be devoted to this temple of self, we will remain unhappy and unfulfilled. As long as we continue to offer prayers to our self-image, we will remain imprisoned. Liberation comes when we devote our lives to something higher than the needs of our personalities, when we become devoted to the needs of our souls. It seems to me that if one wants to live a happy life, a peaceful life, one needs to stop visiting the Temple of Self and begin worshipping in the Temple of Soul.

The way to do this is to ask your soul what it needs. Then find a way to devote your life to it. Watch the abundance that flows when you live this kind of beautiful life. Watch the joy that seeps into your whole being when you serve your greatest self. Watch the amazing process of losing the concept of an "I" or a "me".

I cannot tell you what it is your soul needs. It is your soul. Nor can I tell you the path that you should take to get there. But I have a feeling that if you start searching, if you start asking your soul what it needs in the quiet dawn hours of the morning, the answers will start coming. And when you do start hearing the answers, may you have the courage to live your truth.