Tag Archives: Spiritual Awakening

Old, Alone and Broke

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I read a memoir of a man who was born in poverty and achieved unimagined wealth at a young age. He also burned out young and left the world of capitalism, competition and the constant drive for love via success: “If I am successful, people will love me.”

He hired a psychologist to help him understand himself, began to eat healthy foods and learned meditation from spiritual advisers around the world. After he figured life out for himself, he now lives out a great life.

I am often skeptical of those who take the spiritual road after getting rich (or to get rich) along with pride and arrogance in my journey’s more humble beginnings.  After a good start to my adult life, I crashed and my spiritual quest began in the depths of alcoholism and a month in a tough treatment center where I wondered if I would ever be able to create a good life.

Twenty years later, after a successful corporate career, I left the organizational world to go out on my own to use my life as a learning laboratory and to “live a life of emotional, spiritual and intellectual adventures and to share what I learned with others.” I also wanted to take part in a leadership movement I was sure would transform the way we lead, follow and work in organizations.

Along my journey, I made a stop on the side of a mountain near Ouray, Colorado where I lived, read, wrote, consulted and thought for a year. After I arrived on the mountain, I was flooded with anxiety and feared I would end up old, alone and broke (see my post, Did I Do the Right Thing?).

Old age approaches now—it scares me and I am glad to be alive. I’m not alone and I’m not broke. I have a wonderful life and my development continues with as much intensity at almost 70 as it was when I came out of the treatment center at 29. I’ve studied and made proactive and anticipatory changes in my life over the years and I’ve also learned from losses and mistakes along the way. I expect I will continue that learning for the rest of my life. I grow spiritually a bit at a time and become more human as I seek physical, spiritual, emotional and intellectual health (a lot harder than it sounds). I am still learning to live and haven’t figured much out other than how small I am in the cosmos and how little I know.

And my sometimes disdain towards those fellow travelers who get rich first and then turn spiritual says the most about me:

I have more work to do.

Plato’s Cave

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Each of us has the Plato’s Caves   of our lives  —  places where fear, habits, wounds, denial, conformity, ignorance, manipulation, and even a cherished way of life blind us to greater insight, awareness, authenticity, and possibilities. Caves are places where we mistake false appearances for reality. We literally “don’t know what we don’t know.”

(Click the above link and see the inside of Learning to Live: Essays on Life and Leadership to read the entire essay on Plato’s Cave at no cost.)

But every once in a while, we get pushed, dragged  —  or even venture willingly  —  out of one of our caves. For example, the alcoholic on his deathbed is forced to make a choice of life or death. If he chooses to stay in his cave, he will die. If he chooses life, he must then see himself as he is  —  always the first step of change  —  not as his delusions and self-deception tell him he is. At first he is as mad as can be at this forced change. It is always painful to be confronted with our false realities. But he slowly becomes acclimated to a new reality. Increased self-awareness and new knowledge bring forth new ways to live with meaning and purpose. This transformation is often called a spiritual awakening.

Modern-day physicists experienced and described similar dynamics as they leaped from one understanding of life to another. Quantum theory presents a strange, unexpected, paradoxical reality utterly different from Newtonian physics. The early scientists who studied quantum theory were like those who leave Plato’s Cave. They found they lacked the thought processes and language necessary to understand their new observations and experiences. Emotionally this change confused, frightened, and required an inner shift in scientists to make sense of what they saw in the subatomic world.

Like drunks and physicists, everyday people have their caves too. Some never leave the caves of their lives and live what Thoreau called “lives of quiet desperation.” Others may leave a cave or two and then stop  —  content with their lives. Still others understand that our worlds have many caves in them. They know they’ll never run out of caves to abandon in search of greater aliveness. They are determined to seek out the caves of their lives and leave them proactively  —  because caves always eventually confine or threaten their spirits.

Despite the loss and fear of change, these seekers choose intentionally to jump into new situations, new learning, and diverse adventures to expand their empathy, experience, and understanding. These people don’t stop leaving the caves of their lives until they die  —  and no one knows what happens after death; perhaps the adventures continue. Whatever the circumstances, leaving a cave involves an inner shift that brings forth a deep examination and change of values, beliefs, and assumptions that evolve life.

The spiritual awakening of the alcoholic, the existential crisis of the quantum physicist, the insights of everyday people, the enlightenment of the seeker, and the moment of metanoia  —  a change of the inner person, like former Chairman and CEO of Perot Systems, Mort Myerson, who exclaimed in a moment of insight, “Everything I thought I knew about leadership is wrong”  —  are similar, as each requires a temporary surrender of the ego, a re-ordering of the psyche, and a fundamental shift of perception.

No one who experiences this transformation will ever see the world in the same ways again. We should not be too proud of our initial inner expansion for we will be called over and over again to leave cave after cave, and journeys always humble the traveler.

Excerpt from:  Learning to Live: Essays on Life and Leadership