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Interview with David Ings Workshop Facilitator, ECK Writers and Arts Conference
Montreal, June 14, 2000
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I
met David Ings at the ECK Writers and Arts Conference in
Montreal. It was June 14, the opening day of the
conference. I introduced myself, and said that I had
attended a workshop he had given at a similar conference in
Philadelphia two years before. The title of the workshop had
been “Discovering and Adjusting Your Cause Points,” an arcane-sounding
subject. Yet I remembered it as one of the most stimulating
workshops I had ever attended, and told him so.
“I wonder if you would
consent to a brief interview that would explain this topic to our
readers,” I asked him.
“Whom are you writing for?” he wanted to know.
“I’m writing for people who
are open to life, people who consider themselves spiritual seekers or
spiritual adventurers,” I replied.
“And what do you intend for your readers to get out of this interview?” he inquired.
“I would like to get them thinking about life or about themselves in a
way that maybe they haven’t before,” I told him. “What I
remember about the workshop on ‘cause points’ was that it involved
differentiating between a cause and an effect in one’s
life. It seemed to me to be a very interesting idea because
at any given moment we can ask ourselves, ‘Why am I going through
this? Why is this happening to me? What am I
doing here?’ And at any given moment, it could be a cause or
it could be an effect.”
“Yes,” he
replied. The truth is this. We’re spiritual
beings. What we really are exists outside of time and
space. And we’re creators. We can’t help but
create. But where do the circumstances that we create get
started? Quite honestly, if your consciousness is locked
into the lower realm of existence, then almost every cycle that you set
in motion is the effect of something else. So what you have
is a chain of effects masquerading as causes.
“An example,” he continued,
“would be if somebody made you really angry. So you go off
and snap at your spouse or somebody else. The effect of
being angry is that you’re allowing it to be the cause of yet another
cycle. And that cycle is not going to be very productive
because you started it out of anger. That’s a real obvious
one, but there are lots of really subtle things that are not so easy to
see that get going in your life. You might start a web
magazine, for instance. What’s the starting point for that,
truly? The starting point might, in fact, be the effect of
something else.”
His remark had hit
home. “You’re right,” I replied. “I’ve asked
myself quite a bit whether my current endeavor is what I am really
meant to be doing with my life, or if it’s just something I’ve turned
to because various other things I’ve tried before haven’t worked
out. I’m hoping it’s the former.”
“Exactly,” David
replied. “And this is not necessarily a solution for finding
out what you need to do in your life, because I look at that
frequently, myself. The idea behind cause points is being
able to recognize within a given cycle whether you are starting it on
the basis of something that is an effect of a previous
action. Or whether you are, in fact, starting it in accord
with something that is of a pure spiritual nature. That’s
the principle.”
“So how do you make it happen?”
“The only way that I know to
make it happen is through the practice of spiritual exercises like the
spiritual exercises of Eck, and working with a true spiritual teacher
like the Mahanta, the Living Eck Master.”
“Are you saying that you have
to have a spiritual teacher in order to this? Many people,
after all, are familiar with the idea that we are spiritual beings, and
they’re also familiar with the principle of cause and effect.”
“Except that it’s subtle,
because a lot of times what people take to be cause is really
effect. In fact, I’ll make a bold statement
here. Anything that originates in the mind, or the emotional
body, or anywhere in what we in Eckankar call the lower planes of
existence, is effect. Period.”
“That’s pretty sobering to
contemplate,” I commented. “To what extent are even serious
students of a spiritual path like Eckankar living mainly from effect,
and not from cause? It makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”
“Sure,” David
agreed. “And in large measure, most of us live from
effect.
“A true spiritual master lives from cause, am I right?” I asked.
“Yes,” he
nodded. “A true spiritual master lives from
cause. What does that mean? It means that every
cycle that gets set in motion by that individual has its origin in the
heart of God, and not because of anything else. It simply
happens because there is an impulse for it to be created, and a true
spiritual master has learned to be a clear and open participant in that
process.”
“And what about the rest us?”
“People who are in training
to become spiritual masters, and that’s not necessarily everybody on a
spiritual path, by the way…”
“Are still learning?”
“Yes. In Eckankar,
we have two things. First is the company of the Mahanta, the
Living Eck Master, to move in consciousness to the higher planes of
existence. Second is the initiation into these higher states
of consciousness. In the company of the Mahanta, you get to
cross the border. He is a guide with the authority to carry
someone into these higher states. With the initiation, on
the other hand, you go from being a visitor to a
citizen. You no longer need someone to get you across the
border.”
“Are you saying that this is something that only members of Eckankar can do?”
“No. The Eck
masters don’t claim that Eckankar is the only path to
God. But our particular path has very powerful exercises
designed to awaken your spiritual faculties, enabling you to make
choices based on pure cause.
“In Eckankar,” David
continued, “the relationship between the master and the student is that
of a teacher to an apprentice. It’s not a master-slave
relationship, or a relationship in which one individual is higher than
another is. Rather, it’s a relationship to which people sign
on knowing that they’re going to gain their own
mastership. The point is that for those students of Eckankar
who have chosen to accept the support, training, and guidance of the
Mahanta, part of the deal is that the Mahanta helps them to unwind a
lot of the effects that they have taken for causes. So
gradually, the Mahanta helps an individual get out of the cycle of
taking actions based on effects.”
“And in your workshop, you’re giving people a taste of this?”
“No. The workshop
is focused on a progressive sequence of exercises that helps people
come to their own first-hand experience with the reality of what I’m
talking about.”
“As I recall from my
experience of the workshop two years ago, we did an exercise that
involved starting with a particular problem or situation and then going
back in time, looking for the cause of that situation.”
“Except that you’re not going
back in time. You’re looking across planes of
creation. In Eckankar’s model of the universe, there is the
physical plane, the astral plane, the causal plane, the mental plane,
the etheric plane, the soul plane, and so on. And there’s a
universal metaphysical principal: as above, so below. So
everything that is out here, in this world, reflects something that
exists on a subtler plane.
“The chain of cause and
effect really doesn’t exist in time in space,” he
continued. “It isn’t necessarily that something happened a
year ago to cause your present situation. The real problem
is to look at what you’re carrying in one of your inner
bodies. If the anger is still there—the anger that may have
caused you to strike out at a friend or family member a year ago—inside
you, then it continues to create the same conditions.
“In the exercise that you
recall, I believe I had the workshop participants look a particular
event in their life or something they chose to do, and ask: “What was
it that led me to do that, and what was it that led me to do that, and
so on.” That exercise, just by the nature of physical plane
activity, follows a sequence of events, back through
time. But then you can look at that whole sequence, and look
for the common theme. You can say: “If this common theme
reflects something on the astral (emotional) plane, what was
that? If it reflects something on the mental plane, what was
that? By this means, you can track upward to a point where
you see that there is a fundamental assumption or postulate about life,
about yourself, about your relationship to God or other souls that is
creating…”
“This repetitive cycle of conditions in your life,” I completed his thought.
“Yes. You want to
find out where that is and heal it. And the healing is not a
mental thing. It comes from listening to and working with
the sound current.”
I left an explanation and discussion of the sound current for another
day and another time, and thanked David for the
interview. The conversation had given me food for thought
about my own life, and I hoped that it might touch others as well. |
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Date Submitted:
7/17/01 |
Copyright Information:
Copyright © The Spiritual Traveler, 2001 |
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