Spiritual Isolation Vs. Spiritual Solitude

For many years, after abandoning the religion of my upbringing, I was not only exasperated with organized religion, I wanted nothing to do with hierarchy, patriarchy, or any "archy" at all. Even more than that, other people being involved in my spiritual life felt ucky. It was too sacred, too private. I wanted solitude. Talking about spiritual things in front of other people felt like being naked in front of strangers--that's weird enough at a hot spring, let alone with people you were going to have to wash dishes and and take car rides with. I wanted to be alone with whatever people call "God," because I was tired of the bad vibes.

But that "solitude" got very limited, and very unspiritual over time.

Because whereas solitude is great for spirituality, isolation is the kingdom where Ego reigns supreme.

With nobody around to check my assumptions, nobody to help me work through the obstacles, nobody to question me, my spirituality had become weird at best and self-deceptive at worst. I wasn't growing. In fact, for a majority of that time in my youth when I was "deeply spiritual" but avoided spiritual teachers and spiritual community at all costs, I was a deeply lost person.

Hence, I started poking around at community again. And thats where I got hurt. Almost immediately. That's where I got disillusioned. That's where I sank thousands of dollars into a long sojourn to live in China, only to have my ass handed to me. That's where, a couple years later, I met my hero(es), and find out they are utterly disappointing. Probably not coincidentally, this is where I grew more rapidly and more radically than I had ever grown before.

It was in spiritual communities, and in relationship with spiritual teachers, that I experienced this perpetual shedding onion-skin of self-concept, interpersonal dramas, projections, expectations, disappointments, and so on.

It was in spiritual communities that I found (and lost) home. Again and again.

Because every relationship, whether it's with a person, an institution, a place, or an idea--it's subject to change and deterioration. Relationships hurt. But we cannot survive, or figure out anything, really, without relationship. We learn a lot of ways, but the first way we learn is always through observation. And it was only in spiritual community that I was able to observe, to monkey-see monkey-do, until I mastered a pattern of spiritual practice, a discipline, and a way of living that gave me a relationship with to the sacred. It gave me a relationship with myself that is dynamic enough to take a beating from life. It gave me a home that I can never lose.