Book Review - Your Soul’s Compass: What is Spiritual Guidance
Authors: Joan Borysenko & Gordon Dveirin .
Publisher: Publicist Hay House, Inc.
Available at all bookstores or online at: www.hayhouse.com

1.    There are a lot of books being written today about spiritual subjects. What makes this one different?

Many of today's "spiritual" books are concerned with self-centeredness and getting the goods—how you get what you want. Spiritual guidance, on the other hand, is about tuning into a greater intelligence and willing the good rather than the goods. Rather than focusing your intention on what you want, it is a matter of tuning into what Life wants. When you do that, two things follow. You find inspiration and peace personally, and you're more effective in bringing forth the best possibilities for others—your family, your friends and co-workers, our world. When you get out of the box of "I, me, and mine" it's remarkable how a greater wisdom shows up to guide you.

2.    What prompted you to write about spiritual guidance?

We are living in dangerously polarized times—science versus religion; one religion against another; politicians who believe that they are divinely guided; terrorists who make the same claim. The credibility of external authorities, from corporations to nations to religious leaders is at a low ebb and many people feel disoriented and disheartened. So the question arises, how do we as individuals and groups find our bearings? How do we set our moral, political, economic, and personal compass in a way that optimizes the good?

3.    What is the soul's compass? Is it different from a moral compass?

The soul's compass is magnetically attracted to the True North of the heart's loving intelligence, which is a dynamic relationship to a greater reality that is the Source of all being. When we're in touch with that Source, the soul's compass becomes a moral compass, an economic compass, a social compass, and an overall guide to an intelligent, illuminated life. Whether you're a mother or a father, a sports fisherman or a singer, a student or a corporate executive, you've had the experience of everything coming together in a way that felt right, harmonious, and whole. It's like something greater…a tremendous aliveness... is moving through you and all is well with the world. You're centered, present, effective, and kind. That's spirituality in action, and it arises moment by moment from our connection to that greater reality which enfolds us.

4.    You interviewed 27 Sages—respected leaders from diverse religious or spiritual traditions to help you understand the soul's compass and how using it opens you to spiritual guidance. What did you ask them about?

We asked our Sages who were male and female Christians, Jews, Quakers, Buddhists, Sufis, Hindus, shamans, and even two poets--12 questions. We wanted to know how they defined spiritual guidance, what their personal experience of it was like, what blocks it, what encourages it, what the role of doubt is, how community helps or hinders it, what they thought we're evolving toward as individuals and as a world, and what they would tell world leaders if they had that opportunity. One of they key questions we asked was how to tell the difference between spiritual guidance and your ego's wants and desires on the one hand, and the beliefs and opinions of the group you belong to on the other.

5.    How do you tell the difference between spiritual guidance and your own ego?

One of the Sages, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, laughed when we asked that question and quipped that if we could answer it he would become our disciple. In other words, it's hard to know sometimes who's talking—your wants and fears or a Higher Power--and there are no foolproof formulas for being sure. On the other hand, there are certain metrics (measuring tools) that can help. Every religion has practices that help people orient to the good. St. Paul enumerated nine fruits of the Spirit including qualities like love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, and goodness which are a wonderful help to discernment. Where's the love in this choice? Where's the peace? So, if you're trying to discern whether it's God or some other force urging you to blow yourself up and take out a busload of tourists with you, your decision would fail the test of love and kindness. If what you think is guidance is marked by anger, fear, hurry, or worry, that's a message to go back to the drawing board. Haste, we learned, is poisonous to guidance whereas patience courts it. As the Quakers say, there's an inner light within each one of us, but there's a lot of other stuff, too. But as you practice discernment, little by little you get to know the voice of your ego or false self, and your true Self, your connection to Source. We focused a great deal on discernment in Your Soul's Compass because it is the vital bridge that unites faith with reason.

6.    You characterize your book as an interspiritual dialogue. Is that the same as inter-religious?

Spirituality and religion are related, but different. Religion has been defined as a bridge to the spiritual, which sometimes succeeds and sometimes fails. But the spiritual lies beyond religion. If you ask a spiritual person—whether they are religious or not—to share their lived experience of Ultimate Reality or God (whatever they call Wisdom or the Source of Being)—they meet on common ground. Religions are like islands that, when seen from the surface, appear separate with deep gulfs dividing them. But when we descend to the depths—how they connect us to the Source of Being--it's clear that they all arise from that same Source. The late Brother Wayne Teasdale, who was both a Catholic monk and a Hindu monk, called these depths interspirituality. He believed that dialogue about our most deeply felt spiritual experience could pave the way for developing what he called a global civilization with a heart.

7.    Trusting the unknown is a theme you return to many times in Your Soul's Compass. Since most of us are frightened by the unknown and go to great lengths to avoid it, why should we court it?

Fundamentally, because what we think we know is often the cause of our ignorance. The veil of the past, of memory, often hides from us the fresh, new, and surprising revelations of the present moment. When that happens we mistake the menu for the meal, or the map for the territory. One of our Sages, Swami Adiswarananda, a Hindu monk in his eighties, called life The Great Adventure. But you can't have an adventure if you already know everything. That's called a rerun. The spiritual journey begins when, as the Swami says, a crack appears in the wall of your knowing. That crack might be an illness that radically shifts your priorities, a financial reversal that forces you to reorganize your life, or falling in love. It lets in new light, unknown possibilities. The fact is that life wasn't created as a done deal. It changes moment by moment even when we're hanging onto the status quo by our fingernails. Surrendering to the mystery of the unknown, to the continuous evolution of Spirit, encourages curious, open engagement with life. Rather than skimming along the surface like sleep walkers, adventurers wake up to the depths. Like an indigenous person on a vision quest, the person seeking spiritual guidance has to be in a threshold stance— alert, responsive, and open to the possibilities of the moment.  

8.    If we're continuously evolving, what are we evolving to?

What a great question! We asked the Sages the same thing. What would a fully developed, or at least a more fully developed, human being look like? We would certainly be more kind, creative, and a lot less self-involved. But to find out who we really are at both a secular and a spiritual level we have to be free inside. We know what it is to be free externally, but interior freedom is just as important. After all, you can be at home in your living room, warm and well fed, but still a prisoner of the stories you tell yourself about life. As Reverend Cynthia Bourgeault, one of our Sages put it, changing one letter transforms the closed box of  "my story" into the open field of "mystery." That transformation brings us into present time—this moment. Not the one just past, not the one yet to come, not the one that happened 20, 30, 40, 1000, or 2000 years ago. We may not be able to see very far down the road of our own evolution, but we can see the next step as it opens in front of us. So is there a goal that we're evolving to? In the most practical sense, it's to be here now as willing channels of what one mystic called "the creativity of the heart."

9.    Do you offer the reader any practical tools for following spiritual guidance?

Yes we do, and many have to do with being present. This requires cultivating a quiet mind. We live in such a noisy world, filled with distractions and bright lights—both inside ourselves and in the outside world of chatter, busyness and information overload. We have to learn how to dim those lights if we are to connect to the stars of the Great Mystery that can guide us. Meditation, yoga, chi gong, walking in nature, sitting in beauty. All these are portals to the present that invite a quiet mind. Paying attention to the body is also a key. Check in with yourself. If you're feeling tense and contracted, you're more available to your noisy ego than to the still, small voice. On the other hand, when your body feels relaxed, peaceful, open, and receptive there's more availability to wisdom. Just monitoring your body several times a day and stretching if you're tense or taking a walk helps quiet the mind and creates more openness to guidance.

10.    Joan and Gordon, you're husband and wife. How did writing this book together affect your relationship?

Writing this book was first and foremost about listening. We spent a great deal of time listening to the Sages we interviewed, listening again to the recordings, silently reviewing the notes and finally—most deliciously—listening to each other as we conversed about the common threads of what we were hearing and the insights coming alive for us. Through this, we centered ourselves in what felt like a living community of inquiry focused on vital spiritual questions such as Who are we? And Why are we here? that continue to engage us as we hope they will our readers. This process of inquiry--this great adventure—makes our marriage extraordinarily exciting and meaningful as we grow together. Of course, writing a book is also trying at times. Our styles, our interpretive and expressive modes, are very different and we had to reconcile them to create a unified work. But what brought us back together, time after time, was our shared love of the truth. That's what spiritual guidance is all about—listening, being present, inquiring into what emerges, discerning, and finally acting compassionately in a way that enhances the freedom and dignity of one's self and others.

|