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In the article "The Source of Values - Part 1", I wrote about the source of values, and the importance of discovering our authentic values through illuminating and living from your authentic Self. From there, the values you hold become obvious, natural and life affirming.
One question that came up for some readers was, "How do you resolve the relationship between the values you inherited from your religious/spiritual tradition and what you discover as authentic values for you?"
Some believe they must either compromise their own experience of their core values or reject completely the inherited values in order to resolve any perceived conflicts.
One reader asked me to respond more fully to this statement that I had made in the last article: "Values mandated from the outside as family, society or religious 'hand-me-downs" ---even if these "values" are positive--- can become instruments of philosophical, societal or political constraint. They become moral straitjackets of ideals and beliefs that often encourage us to react to life with resistance, guilt, shame, and blame."
The reader said that she felt that the path of enlightenment does not reject traditional teachings to rely only on one's personal experience, but that it can be a powerful synthesis of the two ----using the wisdom of the great spiritual traditions as a tool to question and to illuminate one's own direct experience.
I agree with this, and realized it was worth further clarification in Core Wisdom On-Line. Below, I am reprinting for you a part of the response that I sent her.
Dear Barbara,
What you say is accurate.
I did not mean to suggest, "Throw the baby out with the bath water."
Much of what I have learned on my own path I first learned from teachers and guides. some still in their body, and some who had long before passed on, leaving their words and practices for us to wrestle with and make our own. These are principles and values that were espoused by spiritual masters, mystics and enlightened beings of various traditions who lived from the light of what they taught.
What most of them urged was not that we thoughtlessly inherit, swallow and believe what they said, but that we have the courage to try on their wisdom for ourselves, and directly experience it in our own life. When Jesus said, "You shall know the Truth, and the Truth shall set you free," the key word he used was "know." He didn't say believe, he said, "know." We only need to believe something if we don't know it directly. For instance, I don't believe I love my daughter, I KNOW it with every fiber of my being. When we KNOW something rather than merely believing it, our actions resonate with it. When I said that even positive inherited values can be constraining, I was referring to when those values are taken on in a rote way, rather than with awareness and openness that allows those values to reveal themselves within our inner wisdom. When we are open to receive the light of these principles and values, when we will allow them to shake us awake to our true nature, they are not constraining platitudes, but giant searchlights within our own soul that now have the power to light our way.
One of my teachers was a wonderful healer named Dr. Hazel Parcells, who passed on a few years ago at the age of 106. Dr. Parcells insisted that her students not believe what she said, but take it and try it on in their own experience. Only then would it be theirs and not a 'hand-me-down." In her healing classes, when a student would ask her if a certain thing would happen if they did a certain procedure, she would very often look at them with her mixture of intention and compassion, and say, "Try it for yourself, and see what happens." As someone who had healed herself from a life-threatening illness, after all the doctors had given her up for dead, Dr. Parcells knew first hand the difference between belief (knowledge) and direct experience (knowing).
There are great principles and values that have been passed down to us from remarkable beings. Taking on those values at the level of belief is insufficient (look at the world ---all the people who are quoting the masters but acting antithetical to their teachings). Take those same values, however, hold them close, examine them, test them in the fire of your own life experience, and they can be a compass and beacon that guides you unfailingly to walk the path of love, joy, gratitude and compassion.
-- Hal Isen
From Core Wisdom On-Line Number 17 - Apr. 2, 2002
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