Everyday Life as "Reverse Spiritual Practice": A Confusion of Feelings

Feeling, mindfulness, and clarity are a way of life rooted in spiritual practice. Yet in everyday life, people reinforce confused feelings, immerse themselves in distracting thoughts, and cultivate bad habits and ingrained patterns. They live a life of “anti-practice.”

Social life: Immersing themselves in poor-quality, chaotic, distorted emotional relationships: fair-weather friends, companions who serve as emotional dumping grounds, emotional affairs, casual hookups and promiscuity, hypocrisy, sleaziness, chaos, and distortion. To the point that they can no longer recognize and choose quality relationships.

Studies: A mixture of arrogance, inferiority, and self-doubt; fantasies, ego, dwelling on the past and worrying about the future. One page of studying, two dramas playing out in the mind.

Career: Growing accustomed to poor work habits and workplace cultures, deception and fakery, shirking work, sucking up, fawning over superiors and bullying subordinates. So immersed in the palace intrigues of *Empresses in the Palace* that they cannot pull themselves out, while both competence and integrity fall into ruin. Fantasies, ego, psychic vampirism. Sinking into despair and dejection.

Body: Growing accustomed to poor lifestyle habits: staying up late, binge eating, junk food, lack of exercise, excessive gaming and phone scrolling. Sinking into exhaustion and depletion.

Mind: Chaos, unreliable feelings, overthinking, inferiority, arrogance, self-attack, and self-destruction. Sinking into depletion, bewilderment, dejection, and despair.

People are like drunken acrobats, flailing about in a frantic scramble, juggling five or six balls while walking a tightrope. Everyone knows the saying “Follow your heart,” listen to your feelings, but their hearts are blind and hungover. A blind rider on a blind horse, at the edge of an abyss at midnight.

Anti-practice begins in one’s “formative environment” (family of origin, formative school environment, formative workplace), where one begins to drift away from a child’s simple innate wholeness, feelings, instincts and intuition, unpretentious sincerity, and fresh, unencumbered simplicity.

Anti-practice is the beginning of turning toward darkness. Most bad people probably started out as ordinary people. The evidence is, first, they cannot all have been born that way; second, the 21st century is much better than the 18th, and the future society of the Internationale will be much better than today’s. The first step in becoming bad is “anti-practice.”

Cultivate the true and break through delusion: counter anti-practice, embrace radical simplicity, and settle into profound truth and uncarved simplicity.

p.s. What prompted me to write this. Over these past few years, I have seen remnants of anti-practice everywhere: confused feelings. I have also often felt the radical simplicity, clarity, mindfulness, and high frequency of a life of spiritual practice. The contrast is striking. Sudden awakening, gradual cultivation; ingrained habits are hard to shed. Keep putting the practice into action, keep progressing.