Author: Steve Sphar

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The Power of Deep Dive Reflection

I usually see my path as it advances, eyes forward, looking to see what insights might be waiting up ahead. Every so often, it is helpful to look back and see the distance traveled. I recently did a deep dive reflection that included this question:

“Has there been a time when something you believed about God, the Divine, spirituality, or the meaning of life changed profoundly? What happened, and what emerged from that experience?”

Memories come flooding back.

I see the small-town church where I was raised. It was a loving place. There was no fire and brimstone, only the Gospel preached by a mysterious rabbi who wandered the plains of Palestine, imploring people to be more forgiving than resentful, to care for the stranger, to love their neighbor. I marveled at his courage and wisdom, and tried to follow the path he laid out. I believed; I was confirmed; I was active in youth ministry; I felt held and loved. This was where my spiritual yearnings were first awakened.

That life was my foundation, and so when the belief scaffold began to crumble under the weight of reason, it was a hard fall. I could not reconcile the inner presence I felt with Christian tenets that said salvation required specific beliefs. Jesus told me to forgive transgressions continually, not seven times, but seventy times seven. How could such boundless forgiveness be a commandment if God could not abide a person’s honest convictions? The contradictions mounted. I asked questions, but the theological answers I was given were dry, detached from the experience of love I had thought was the heart of Christianity.

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Deep Listening

The way we frame things changes how we see. I’ve recently started viewing my spiritual practice through the lens of listening, and I have been surprised and enriched at the many layers.

Because I’m a visual and mental person, listening shifts my attention to a different mode, less used, underappreciated. A stream of thoughts is always running in my mind, flowing at different rates, but pausing to listen can slow it to a trickle. The pause makes room for my perceptions to widen, to gather jewels I would normally miss. At any point in the day, I can stop and pay attention to the sounds around me. Even in the most urban environments, I can hear the notes of birdsong, or the whisper of a breeze. Underneath the melody of a song I’ve heard a hundred times, there is a rolling bass line I’d never noticed. When I tune in, there is more.

Or in conversation, if I concentrate on listening instead of drafting replies in my head, I pick up tone and nuance that paint a fuller picture. For any of us, there is more going on inside than we can express with words. Listening puts me in touch with the person behind the words, and it is the person, after all, I want to understand. It is as if I bring a part of the person inside myself. If I listen well, the other person feels heard. The intimacy between us deepens.

In meditation, my listening begins as auditory, hearing sounds in the room, or the sound of my breathing, but usually shifts to placing attention on my beingness. Listening turns inside itself, an organ or perception that is not physical, an entry into other worlds. The curtains of my inner life rustle. The lesser spaces that are normally unnoticed come into focus and flourish, responding to my attention like plants to sunlight. The physical and nonphysical start to merge. My breath, drifting in and out of my chest and belly, aligns with energies that were hidden. I listen to find what is here, what these energies want to do, if they want to move or remain. Rolling tide or spacious calm; magnetic force or gravity at rest; a fountain of sparks or silence. Moments come when listening is not an action I am doing, the verb and noun collapse, there is only pure curiosity. I sense anticipation, but without the forward leaning I usually add – the urge to know what will arrive and compare it with my expectations.

My identity, which depends so heavily on my need to know, loosens. My self-image was always a bubble, a mental construct that kept essence at a distance. But essence keeps tapping my shoulder, reminding me that my need for certainty is not a need, but a choice. Deep listening leaves me wide open. It is not that the window is fully open, it is that there are no walls to hold a window.

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Knowing the Rightness of the World

My morning ritual usually has a quiet portion where I let things settle and be with myself in contemplative space. I try to set my small, ego self aside while I sit with my higher self, my true essence. It can come quick or slow, skimmingly or in fullness, or not at all. But when contact is made and I fall in, reality opens with a hush. The sky, the window, the table, my body, everything I had assumed to be complete, absorb their own images and become ten times more real.

It can start as a line running down the center of my chest, just under my breastbone, a live current, moving in the same channel as my breathing; cool air coming in, exchanged for the warm breath going out, utterly physical, sensory; then growing to fill my interior, flowing to my arms, hips, legs, my attention merging with my body like water overflowing a cup. I am alive and I know my aliveness. The quiet is unforced, thoughts dropping, drifting as leaves on the surface of water. Sweeping the room, my line of sight stops at the light glinting off a glass vase, shades of gold mirroring the sun rising through the window beyond. The flowers look wild, impossible, as if I am seeing pink and red for the first time.

Alongside this realness comes a sense of rightness, a knowing that the world is sound, doing what it was designed to do, that underneath there is an order, that all will be well. This rightness of the world brings a sense of peace, which is calming to my soul but confusing to my mind.

How can the world be right when children die by violence? How can all be well when war is waged as blood sport? What does rightness mean if goodness seems overwhelmed by malice? Valid questions, but not ones that abide by logic, which by its nature must stay within straight lines and arrive at proofs. Logic leads my thinking to questions that circle themselves: Could there be a world where children do not die? Would I remove from human will the choice for cruelty, and so also banish the choice for mercy? These lead to interesting arguments, but not to answers that satisfy me. I have to seek alternative ways of knowing that are not limited to the lines of logic. The rightness of the world allows that there is something bigger going on, deeper than my opinions and preferences, a basic goodness that outlasts all tragedy, genocide, wars, all suffering, and even death. Because my sense is authentically felt but not provable, it is hard to understand or articulate at the level of the thinking mind.

The rightness of the world contains a promise that the world is good. To the thinking mind, this is an audacious assertion in need of proof. But when I am in contact with my essence, expanded beyond my normal depth, the world revealing itself in multi-colored dimensions, the validity of the promise becomes self-evident. At my core, running directly through my heart, is a fiber that tells me when things are true. I trust the promise because when I tell myself the world is good, the fiber sounds and sustains. If I contemplate a world where we are doomed to cycle through endless swings of power between brutal factions, where we make no progress toward our betterment, where goodness is a fiction, the fiber in my heart recoils.

I also trust the promise because I see sparks of goodness constantly working to show themselves, to break out of the soil and sprout. Perhaps you do too. Each time you give or receive, or even witness, an act of kindness, the fiber in you sounds. When calamity strikes any portion of the globe, whether natural disaster or human catastrophe, people’s desire to rush with aid is irrepressible. The note sustains.

These are more than separate acts of compassion, they are part of a reciprocal drive between Spirit and the world. The Sacred requires our participation to flower, and our participation immerses us in goodness. We are invited into the continuing work of fulfilling the promise. As we each awaken more and more to our essence, I feel the connective tissue of the fiber growing stronger.

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When Virtue is Lacking

Some days, I feel I’ve been dropped into someone else’s dream, a world I do not recognize.

Leaders with the judgment and appetites of adolescents wage wars for the sake of ego. Aggression and naked power are rewarded. Respect for the rule of law, even a sense of basic fairness, is eroding. Personal values like character and integrity are mocked as naive. The fever of greed is growing into a cancer. The structures of society are warped when they no longer serve society, but are manipulated to funnel obesity to a few while millions scratch out a bare existence.

And these could be the early days. It sickens me to watch humanity’s slow descent into moral madness. We are capable of being so much better.

I can’t help thinking this is not the game I came to play, that I am living in the wrong time, one not suited to my talents and temperament. My talents are collaboration, friendship, warmth. I am here to foster good relations, positive regard, mutual respect. My temperament is accommodating, inquisitive, willing to overlook false exteriors to see where goodness is hiding. My soft skills seem wasted in a landscape so harsh. I want to call out to the Gods, “Why am I here at this time? What is being asked of me?”

I want a thunderclap, but there is only silence. So I sit with my questions, and my longing, and my aching grief. Silence, actively encountered, is not nothing. It is a void, but it is fertile, a place worth visiting. When I slow my mind, gaps appear. Fresh insights sneak through the cracks, sprouting among my complaints, like this: Perhaps what is being asked of me is to grow.

Our evolution, both personal and cosmic, has never advanced in times of ease, but only in the heat of friction, where our vision of what can be abrades against the world as it is. I have a talent for words, an ability to describe events that sheds light into the corners. My temperament is steadfast, willing to endure. The bag of tools I carry may be exactly what is needed to show what decency looks like, more striking in its contrast. The mirror may arouse kindness in hearts where it lies dormant. The modeling of virtue by people of virtue is its own kind of power.

We are going somewhere. An intuition deep in the grain of my being tells me we are on a path of progress, that our current times are not a devolution, but a temporary backslide, and that we each have something to give that adds momentum to the good. Why, then, would I consider retreating? How can I expand the limits of virtue if I don’t pursue it, if I fade in the face of difficulty to tend my bruises and abrasions? When virtue is lacking in the world, it is needed most from me.

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To See What’s Here

My throat is easy. Cool air falls inside, fills me, then expels. My arms and neck begin to relax just from noticing the sticky points. I am sitting with no other purpose than to see what’s here, to feel the shape of my body as it meets the shape of a living moment. I feel my clothes, my feet. I feel a flake of dust in my nose.

I remember sitting at a retreat years ago in a tired building, dust on the curtains and the sills, dust floating in the light from the window, beautiful but musty. My nose itched, and I was afraid I would sneeze, violating the silence, a bother to everyone around me. How embarrassing for the newbie.

I realize my mind has wandered. I bring it back. Watching my breath, I’m struck by how physical the air feels as it slides along the physical passage of my throat and lungs, a moving volume with substance, brushing against my own substance, my body more real, overly real, because I am aware of the movement. In truth, this is just my body as it always is, but it is a physicalness I usually ignore. To pause and soak it in by concentrating my attention is hypnotizing.

How would I describe this hyper-physicalness? Who would be interested? There is a friend I know who would enjoy the conversation. We would talk about the newness, the freshness, the way our bodies become more alive when we take the time to feel them. We share words, descriptions, an eager back and forth, a conversation about the body that makes me forget my body.

I realize I have wandered again. I come back from the conversation that never happened, all imagined cinema. It appeared real while I was in it, but when I stepped out, it collapsed. The contrast is startling, between the movie in my mind, flat and weightless, and the vibrant fullness of my body when awareness is present. I return to the warmth and weight of my body. I feel my lungs mingling particles of me with the cool air, creating each new breath, alive for a moment and then passed on. The words and descriptions in the movie are still here, floating like dust in the sunlight, but they no longer compel my attention. Even the words I am writing now seem removed, hanging in the background. Awareness has absorbed me – grounded, palpable, vivid. A feeling of pure presence fills my body and the space around my body, expanding outward, brimming, boundary-less. My body is still. My mind is still. The volume, still.

I feel an icy pinprick. My throat catches, my blood runs quick. Something is afraid, a piece deep within me shouts a warning to pull back before I am lost in this uncontained spaciousness. I am confused. The expanding volume is peaceful, blissful, but unfamiliar, and the fearful piece has been trained to treat anything foreign as a danger. I stay. I watch the confusion, I feel the fear, I let it grow. I expect a firebomb, but it pops like a firecracker and is gone.

The volume settles back. I invite the fearful piece inside, she needs attention. I sit with everything – the peace, the weight, the fear, the physical intimacy, the breath that seems to occupy the fullness of it all. Time moves unsped, as if through water. I feel no need to strive, to bring about something different. I am suspended in direct experience, unfiltered, conscious.

It is a morning, like other mornings. When I get up to go about my day, this heightened perception will linger. Tomorrow will be different. I will sit again with no other purpose than to see what’s here.

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There Will Come a Day …

I hear a voice calling out, faint, as if from a distance, saying:

“There will come a day when all of this is over. The brutal times will end, sanity will return, at least for a while. We will be moved to see people act with honor and virtue and not think it rare. We will no longer ask, ‘Where has love gone?’ We’ll shed these times like soiled clothes, pile them in a heap, and burn them. We will wash ourselves, then turn to each other, and start the work of rebuilding.”

People have been hearing this voice, or some similar version, for a long, long time, whenever wars, crusades, or other corruptions of the human spirit have run their filthy course. Some of the elders among us can remember the last great ending, when people danced in the streets, kissing strangers in random joy. A heavy curtain lifted and the morning light never looked brighter.

These seem to roll in cycles, times of darkness when humanity fouls itself by forgetting who we are, hearts closed by arrogance and greed, violence and slaughter, followed by a remembering, a coming-to-our-senses that stops the senselessness. We’ve been remembering and forgetting for millennia, for eons, forever, tides advancing and retreating, sweeping away our cruelty only to drop it back into our laps. The numberless oceans of pain that have engulfed us could make a stone weep.

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Tending My Most Precious Resource

The quality of my attention guides the trajectory of my spiritual growth. It’s the beating heart at the center of any practice – watching the breath in meditation, feeling the body stretch and find new shape in yoga, searching inward during prayer. My ability to direct and sustain my attention is what opens all possibilities. Without it, I’m adrift, bouncing between events, controlled by old patterns that no longer serve me.

As I experience it, the major obstacle to shifting the seat of my consciousness are my patterns of past conditioning. I spent my early years learning the wonders and terrors of being a physical being in a material world. My ego learned how to navigate life at the level of survival and acquisition, avoiding what hurt and pursuing what I desired. These ego skills were useful, necessary steps in my development, and I am grateful for them. But they created internal structures of belief that spring into action automatically. I have to encounter and redirect these patterns in order to grow. And I can’t do that if I don’t see them.

My attention is like a tender plant with deep roots. It needs my care. With water, it blooms. Neglected, it withers. All it takes is for me to use it with awareness, to place attention on whatever I am experiencing and let it instruct me. When I do, new worlds step out from the ordinary. A flat curtain opens and the scene gains depth. Colors become colors because I notice. Details share their fullness. Immediate. Intimate. But when I am caught in the old patterns, I lose touch with my attention. My senses retreat, details flatten. Life skims along the surface in a dull, repetitive motion. The sacred evaporates.

In a world of constant distraction, my attention is always at risk. My screens are never far away, calling to me, promising rich experience. But they are engineered by those who know well the patterns of my past conditioning and how to tickle my addictive vulnerabilities. The screens are happy to have me stay, devouring my attention for as long as they can. Luckily, the roots are resilient. It doesn’t take much to strengthen them. Radical abstinence is not needed, there is great value in small steps. Moving the rudder, even slightly, changes where the ship ends up.

I have been trying small steps lately to reduce my screen time. I avoid going to my devices first thing in the morning. I spend the first hour of the day enjoying the analog world. Everything I need will be there later, but the first light of morning will be gone. I’ve gone back to wearing a wristwatch so I don’t reach for the phone to see the time. When I feel an impulse to open my laptop, I spend a moment paying attention to the urge itself. Sometimes I find the need was not so important, that it was more out of habit.

I have not mastered these steps, it’s a work in progress. I try to remember that everything is practice. My response to every occasion leaves an impression, a thumbprint history of my experience. I hold on to as many of the good ones as I can, and let the stale ones fall away.

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Living From My Heart

Things look different when I hold them in my heart instead of letting them roll and roll across the landscape of my mind. My worries, for example.

I worry about the state of the world, whether we are headed toward global conflicts that will engulf us; I worry about the economy and people’s jobs; I worry about the money in my IRA; I worry about my children’s future, will they fashion lives that make them happy; I weep for our democracy and wonder if we will come to blows in civil violence; I worry that our lives are already doomed by the spiraling climate; I wonder whether artificial intelligence will save the day, or run us into the ground.

I’m a mental person. My normal mode of operation is to think things through by turning them over in my mind. But the whole backdrop shifts when I settle into my heart. I literally allow my awareness to descend from my head to my chest. My heart becomes the center of gravity of my consciousness. Dropping into my heart doesn’t void my reasoning faculties (I don’t go into a trance), but my thinking mode is joined by other faculties, fresh channels of sensation and information. I start to feel my body, which I had forgotten entirely – its pulsing warmth, the pace and volume of my breath, the aliveness of the currents running through, from, and around my body. My heart is bigger than my head. Much bigger. Given room, the tired fragments spinning in my mind have a chance to come to rest.

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The Currency of Truth

There is a beauty in our common connective tissue. Even though we are distinct, each with a unique personality and purpose, we share a common ground where our perspectives overlap. We don’t always see it, distracted by the noise and busyness of life, but when the lens opens, we see something in each other that we recognize as us. In that flash of recognition, a live current flows between us, closing the gap. The current feels true.

I’m concerned that our common ground is eroding because we are losing the ability to discern what is true. When any image, video, or newsfeed can be faked, whole landscapes of reality fabricated, we become disoriented. I fear we are fragmenting from each other, reality fading into a blurry background where truth is whatever volume of opinion is shouted loudest. We risk losing the fragile beauty of our human connection, a loss that is hard to replace.

We need to step back and consciously assess how we value truth. In our chaotic times, it‘s natural that we grasp for any handhold to understand what is going on. Unfortunately, the sources of information we reach for are the ones being manipulated. Our screens have become so useful, so embedded, we turn to them instinctively, hoping they will answer our questions and our worries. There is useful information there, but it is awash in an ocean of debris. I want to stay informed, but information is not enough. I need to find the deeper currency of truth that not only guides my actions, but refreshes my humanity. For me, this means developing an inner way of knowing, a complementary faculty to fact-finding and analysis.

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Choosing the Stance of Love

During my short ride on this planet, I want my efforts to add weight to the sum of goodness. At the deepest bedrock, I sense that life is more than a competition for possessions and comforts that feather my nest at the expense of others, that I am here to help shape a world that is better for my having walked here. I want my basic orientation to be one of service, helping, and healing. I would call it a stance of love. I am not alone. Most people share this desire, want to know they are contributing to something bigger. The drive to foster love is a human fundamental.

I feel momentum behind this stance, a wind at my back. It is more than an accumulation of separate people, however numerous, making individual moral choices. Taking a stance of love seems to align with forces flowing through the fabric of existence, like the gravity that pulls the planets through the heavens. Every act that furthers love is rowing with the current; every act in opposition struggles against the waves.

How do I know this? I take a reading from my internal compass. When I give or receive a kindness, I feel the flow, a palpable warmth surging through me. Conversely, I recoil from unkindness. My compass recognizes what is alien, a foreign body my spiritual immune system must reject.

But what about that other human fundamental, the drive for survival that runs on fear and warps our minds? In its more distorted phase, we could call it evil. Here is the sticky point, the question I cannot answer: if the cosmos is built on an architecture of love, why does cruelty seem to flourish? How can weeds of poison, noxious and rotting, grow from a soil meant to flower? I want to believe in the underlying stream of empathy, compassion, and care that calls to me. But I am enraged and repelled by heartless acts of brutality, war, and genocide, suffering at a level that pierces my soul and leaves me bleeding. How can I act with love toward those engaged in greed and power? What does loving action look like in the face of evil? To do nothing seems weak, an act of apathy or acquiescence. The anger in me wants to meet fire with fire, but I know if I pick up a hammer forged in that furnace, it will burn me. The flames will only grow.

Over the years, I’ve learned I can’t argue myself into an answer with these impossible questions. The process is not mental. Thinking just spins me in place, screwing me deeper into nowhere. I have to call upon a different faculty to suss it out. As best as I can fathom, a stance of love requires meeting the world with an open heart. Not a metaphor, but an actual feeling of warmth and receptivity in the center of my chest. Curious. Alive. It is wicked-hard to remain there when I want to scream or cry. So I scream or cry, but stay as open as I can. As I do, the warmth gets stronger, fresh insights offer up.

My choices are always wiser when my heart is open. At a local scale, people around me can sense that I am loving, not hateful, and the chance for something new increases. At a global scale, I hope my small opening widens in the stream, gathering with others, adding to the flow. If we are connected in the ways that I believe, then I have done my part by dampening the flames, not stoking them.

Am I right? How can I be sure I’m not placating my fears with pleasant dreams about a universe that is loving at its core? More questions to which I have no answer, but I’m not sure I need one. I’m willing to allow an open heart to be my guide because it’s working.

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