The Perfection of Nothing: Reflections on Spiritual Practice (Paperback)

The book is written in four main sections in a `journal entry' style. The first section was a little hard to get through but it was worth it because as I continued reading the journal entries became more vivid and practical. There is definitely some great writing in this book, although that's not the point. I believe sincere practitioners of any discipline will be able to use this book like no other.

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Dotted with humility and humor (e.g., the term "driveway improvement plan" used to describe what most people seek in their "spiritual" strivings--namely, a shorter route to inner glory), this four-part collection of observations, rooted in the author's endeavors toward authentic wholeness, smacks of Zen, Watts, Krishnamurti, even Taoism; and yet its clarity lends it a remarkable availability to those not familiar with the spiritual traditions.

I particularly enjoyed the critique of common workshopy/self-help offerings as "not-good-enough-ism." Whether perfectionism shows up in the bank account, the office to-do list, expectations about one's mate, or supposedly spiritual activities, the real object of worship is still perfectionism, the shaming, controlling, super-organized constriction of naked suchness.

To write such a book involves a struggle to reach as wide an audience as possible while doing justice to one's felt sense of the divine Other. A question for me was whether the numen and the mainstream really have much to do with one another, and if so, how.

As a man who has practiced psychotherapy from a depth perspective, I couldn't subscribe to the metaphor of our psychological makeup as a pitted driveway down which we make our gradual way Home--the idea being neither to speed up the drive (yes, I can see that) nor to focus so much on the bumps (hm...). It seems to me that when we substitute attentiveness for wallowing or victim-thinking, we find in those inconvenient and efficiency-impairing bumps what we banish from our ego-dominated daily consciousness. As Jung pointed out, gods and goddesses--marginalized meanings and secret magic--dwell in our wounds and weaknesses. While there's much to be said for mental and spiritual health, I'm no more a fan of the "work through and transcend forever" paradigm (which one sees far more often in theory than in life) than I am of the rather Freudian and Americanized Far Eastern view of the unconscious as a dusty warehouse to vacuum out and purify, whether through meditation or psychoanalysis.

Nor does such a paradigm offer anything to the homeless person, the victim of violent crime, the pregnant teen who can't read, the patient suffering from a severe personality disorder. They must get their fulfillment elsewhere, and very often more heroically, if less consistently. Such people tend not to be taken into account in those developmental schemes of spiritual evolution which become popular and lucrative; and it's to the author's credit that he gives some space to gently explaining some of their rather arrogant shortcomings.

Fragmented, distressed, or relatively intact, we are always somewhere within complex and image, psyche and stress; the beauty is in how we come to terms with that and even draw on it in our yearning to host the Sacred shining through it. "You can make the move to Nirvana," Hillman writes, "but the gods always find out where you go."

A danger I see in most spiritual practice based on Eastern meditative work is in its purity-loving haste to regard what in the West we think of as "negative" emotions as fleeting states to be observed inwardly and released. Take anger. If a boss or a husband or a family member is crashing your boundaries or even mistreating you, feeling through the anger isn't enough. You have to stand up for yourself. You have to either kick some ass and change the situation or leave it behind. I didn't see this addressed by the author, but I can't tell you how many people I've met who believe they can find peace by "changing my attitude" or "becoming mindful." It's nice to simply be, but sometimes the way to handle a dilemma is by taking it by the horns. ("Nothing was ever achieved in this world except by direction action." -- Gandhi)

The book is particularly valuable as an antidote to so much of the get-there-quick, pie-in-the-sky, manically optimistic fast food on the market today. The fact is that being spiritual is hard, hard work, effort beyond effort. There's no way around it, and the author is well aware of that. As the Buddha pointed out, living means conflict and pain; but as in alchemy, where the gold hid precisely in the filth of the opus, conflict and pain needn't be a full-time career. Our redemption, personally and collectively, may well be in how we make meaning from what limits us.

I'll end this with a quotation that challenges the reader to move beyond traditional conditioned concepts of what might be up with the divine, and with us, suggesting that spirituality is less a question of self-improvement (can you imagine Jesus or Muhammad touting self-improvement??) than of a wholehearted enrichment of our relationship to a God who indeed participates in our living and loving "over here":

"Lust, greed, anger, fear, sentimentality--all are only sockets in the wall that we can plug into as a fuel source...This is exactly what a human being is meant to do. It is the highest possibility and perfect destiny of a human being: to become a transformational agent in service to God by plugging into these raw and gross energy forms which God cannot access in any way through us...."

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Lewis's collection of reflections might be read as the journal entries of a man struggling with his spiritual practice. His writing here is insightful, often challenging, at time humorous, and rich with fresh metaphors and analogies. The book is organized into four sections, "The Context of Transformation" (pp. 1-56), "The Nature of Mind" (pp. 57-86), "The Way of Body" (pp. 87-136) and "The Truth of the Heart" (pp. 137-161). "The essence of any real spiritual work or path," Lewis writes, is to travel from our unexamined assumptions about the way life should be to "how life is, accepting it as it is" (p. 10). Escaping "the kind of madness one can see any day of the week on the street, on a television, in a newspaper, at the mall" (p. 83), and then "to see and admit who we are--is 99.9 percent of the spiritual quest, the .1 percent of the work that's left to do after this is the most important, significant, and mind-blowing part, and this, fortunately gets done by God" (p. 13). While "so much of modern day spirituality is nothing more than the activity of denial, the attempt to avoid what is Real based on the conditioning to reject parts of our psychophysical makeup . . . this is never and cannot be God" (p. 45). Through his own practice, Lewis encourages us to "get as close as you can to life, and you will become undefeatable" (p. 17).

Meditation, Lewis observes, "can anchor a fully awakened, fully integrated awareness that lives, breathes, and acts in the world (p. 86). It is "persistence and consistency that counts" in spiritual practice, "time after time, hour after hour, day after day" (p. 122). "We must pay attention," Lewis writes. "But the degree to which we must pay attention to enter the kingdom of God is not one for which we have a reference. When it is said that we must pay attention, most people think the level of attention required to keep a car on the road while driving, or to avoid harming ourselves while using a sharp knife. The amount of attention that must be paid is all our attention. This comes by completely and totall re-owning, re-assuming, and recollecting all the attention that we normally disburse to various manifestations throughout the universe through the activity of the mind, which is responsible for interpreting, judging, commenting on, assigning meaning to, resisting and desiring more of 'what is.' If any of this is done to 'what is,' then we have lost the attention required for entry into God's kingdom. When we cease any activity except the activity of being--that is, being with 'what is,' feeling every facet and nuance of 'what is' with no addition, subtraction, or distortion--what we get in return is the kingdom of God" (p. 134).

Lewis's book has a heart and soul all its own, and it reveals the engaging "real work" of an ordinary man, a husband, and a father, necessary to maintain an extraordinary spiritual practice.

G. Merritt

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