The New Disciples

Barefoot on Holy Ground: Twelve Lessons in Spiritual Craftsmanship
by Gloria Karpinski

Spiritual seekers in the 21st century take many forms, from the visionary and futurist to the social activist and rebel. Yet whatever your inner calling, writes internationally renowned teacher Gloria Karpinski, you can benefit from the practical guidance of other seekers on how best to manifest your spiritual intentions in the nitty-gritty reality of everyday life.

A new companion for traveling purposefully on the path, Barefoot on Holy Ground helps you learn how to call forth the good in every circumstance and use it to further your mission and consciousness. Through numerous enjoyable, effective exercises and meditations, you will learn how to integrate your inner and outer resources of mind, body, emotions, finances, and careers into your personal practice. This will free you to become a disciple-in the modern sense-to your own higher calling and service to the world.

Drawing on the wisdom of ancient scriptures and contemporary thinkers from many world traditions, tapping into her own and other disciples' real-life stories and insights, Karpinski shares the Twelve Lessons of Spiritual Craftsmanship that are essential to the disciple's path.

These easy-to-follow lessons are divided into three parts: Knowing the Way explores the ways we recognize and understand our mission through Knowledge, Revelation, Body Wisdom, and Discernment; Becoming the Way illuminates the fundamental building principles of strong discipleship: Love, Will, Faith, and Power; and Fulfilling the Way reveals the practical process through which we bring our journey to fruition by Creating, Transforming, Enduring, and Serving. Integration, balance, and wisdom are the benefits of the twelve lessons, the treasured syntheses of yin and yang, light and shadow, heaven and earth. Full of exciting, effective spiritual exercises, Barefoot on Holy Ground leads readers purposefully along the path to Conscious Evolution so that they can embrace their higher calling.

Chapter 1

All the way to heaven is heaven.

- Catherine of Sienna, fourteenth century

As we move into the twenty-first century, spiritual inquiry has entered a phase of ripening maturity. Today a large number of seekers have abandoned the glitz and glamour of so-called spiritual trappings. They are more sober and realistic about the quest, better educated, less naive about quick weekend fixes, and generally less argumentative and resistant.

Over the last three decades, more and more of us have become aware of the interconnectedness of mind, body, and spirit. We've been rebirthed, reparented, rolfed, and realigned with acupuncture, chiropractic, homeopathy, therapeutic massages, and energy work. We've been recovered and 12-stepped, cleared and cleansed with everything from colonics to sage, sweats to primal screams. We've learned to find shadows, codependent patterns, past lives, and lost inner children. We've given up cigarettes, hard liquor, and red meat and taken up veggies, flower essences, and herbs. We know our cholesterol levels and our heart rates. We know where the sun and moon are on our astrological charts, the number personal year we're in, our enneagram and Myers/Briggs acronyms.

We've gone to workshops for our souls, our sex lives, our aura, and our finances. We've filled countless notebooks from more lectures than anyone can name and spent weeks in ashrams, convents, monasteries, and retreat centers. We've meditated, recycled, networked, drummed, danced, inner-journeyed, and chanted in a dozen languages. We've listened to gurus, shamans, channelers, visiting lecturers, and a multitude of teachers who act as escorts through our passages.

And now are we all saints and masters? Probably not. Are we more awake? I think so. Are we more prepared to carry out our missions? Probably. For all the flaws and missteps, the dabbling and psychobabbling, and in spite of the ever-present potential for narcissism and inflation, through the process many of us have been made ready for our assignments in the world.

A new breed of spiritual seekers has emerged in the last sev- eral decades. I call them disciples-awake, aware, committed, and global in worldview. They have been identified by many names, among them Transitionists (journalist Marilyn Ferguson), Enzymes (futurist William Irwin), socially transcendent (author and business consultant Marsha Sinetar), preservers, promoters, and prophets (minister and author Louis Richard Batzler), new world servers (the Tibetan channeled through Alice Bailey). They come in many forms and from many backgrounds, and these new disciples are all rolling up their sleeves to do the work they came to do.

At first I hesitated to use the word disciple in this book. Perhaps what seemed most risky about the word is that it has usually meant devotion to one particular spiritual or religious tradition, but it also holds creative, active energy of consciousness. A disciple is one who recognizes, commits to, and is obedient to the promptings of his or her inner spiritual imperative and chooses to bring that consciousness into every aspect of life.

Disciples are responsible for themselves, knowing they are always in the process of growing and choosing to shape their personalities to serve their spiritual intentions. Disciples tend to be open, flexible, and teachable, inclusive in their worldview and dedicated to participating in the healing of planetary challenges. In the movie City of Joy, one of the characters says there are three ways to go through life: run, observe, or commit. Disciples commit.

Disciples are found everywhere and are identified by their being, not necessarily by their doing. Disciples tend to call forth the positive and the good in every circumstance. One by one they discipline their resources-body, mind, emotions, money, careers-and these resources become their servants, not their masters.

Disciples struggle under the weight of rules imposed by external authorities but gradually grow freer by their obedience to inner guidance. So whenever you see the word disciple in this book, put in parentheses in your mind freeman or freewoman.

Disciples have matured in consciousness from "saving the world" into serving the world. Some are true visionaries, often appearing hundreds of years ahead of their time. They bring the first hints of changes to come. Today they are sometimes just minutes ahead of the rest of us because the lag time is closing between those who sound the call and those who respond. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is an example of a true visionary who saw and spoke the dream for those who would follow.

Next come the rebels. Their job is to disturb the status quo, and they usually do. They push against boundaries wherever they focus their attention, challenging systems, exploring, even demanding new possibilities. Whether they question health care or education, a scientific assumption or a local environmental problem, they challenge our conceptions of reality at the nuts-and-bolts level. They are innovative, creative, and sometimes downright outrageous. Suffragettes and their sisters who followed are examples of rebels who challenged accepted societal myths.

Some disciples are here on assignments of preservation. The job of the conservationist disciple is to hold on to the accrued good we have already learned and attained. When they do their job well, they keep us from enacting changes too quickly during a transition. Those who defend the Constitution, especially the Bill of Rights, are an example. Even as we have to adapt and redefine our understanding of those documents so that all people benefit from guaranteed rights, we have to maintain the stability of the document in the first place.

Some people are bridges who grasp the new vision and figure out pragmatic ways to make it work in the material world. They may come up with practical new ideas for elder care or offer new plans for integrating non-English-speaking students into a public school. An example of bridge building is reflected in the new forms of mediation, for example, in settling differences between industrialists and environmentalists.

Whether we are here to dream, preserve, disturb, heal, implement, or model, modern disciples learn that the dreams in our hearts have to be matched by our craftsmanship in the world. No matter what role we are chosen to play, the important thing is to realize that we are neither the role we are playing nor the play itself. We are the playwright, the creator behind all the drama. The more clearly we know that, the better we play our part.

Even so, each disciple faces the challenge of how best to play the part he or she is assigned. A letter from a friend who accepted a major new appointment in her profession characterizes the initial difficulty. "Oh, Gloria," she wrote, "how does one wear the purple?" She meant, how do any of us step into our roles with authority and humility?

Copyright © 2001 by Gloria Karpinski.