Emptiness Nothing Not
When I first came to Swamiji’s ashram, he constantly made jokes – all in good fun – about my being a proponent of “the void.” I told him in all honesty that I had never heard the term “void” used at the gonpa by anyone. They did, however, talk a lot about “emptiness.” Many agree that this is an unfortunate choice of words to describe something so full, radiant and divine.
Chagdud Rinpoche was famous for his forceful comment, “Emptiness nothing not!!” Since I had studied Kashmir Shaivism with Baba, the concept of the formless absolute or Shiva, was not new. I understood the eternal oneness of form and formlessness, Shiva and Shakti.
The first time I heard, years ago, the famous lines of the Prajnaparamita - “Form is emptiness, emptiness is form. Form is not other than emptiness and emptiness is not other than form.” - I was thrilled. This resonated deeply as the “Truth.” It is the same as the non dual union of Shiva and Shakti.
Baba was a shakta, a worshipper of the goddess, a lover of the form side, a tantric. This too conformed to the teachings I found with the Buddhists. Vajrayana is a tantric path and dzogchen is a purely nondual teaching.
I Want To Taste Sugar
I loved the story of Ramakrishna and Tota Puri. Ramakrishna was a 19th century holy man and saint who was noted for his ecstatic trances and devotion to Kali, the Divine Mother. His position was that he didn’t want to be sugar, but to taste sugar. This is the bhakta’s, or devotee’s, position. When Ramakrishna would experience union with his beloved Kali, she would tell him to come down from the plane of non-duality for the good of the world. So he stayed in a state of dual consciousness, where he enjoyed the worship of God as the Mother.
One day Tota Puri, a naked ascetic and yogi, arrived. He was a proponent of the non-dual path of the formless aspect of the divine - which the Buddhists would call emptiness - and spent long hours in nirvikalpa samadhi which is absorption in the thought free state. He saw that Ramakrishna was a worthy candidate for what he deemed to be the highest path and wanted to initiate him.
As was his practice, Ramakrishna was eager to try a new path, but told Tota Puri that he first had to ask the Mother for permission. It was granted and Tota Puri began to instruct the saintly bhakta. When he had a firm and steady vision of the Mother, Tota Puri told him to cut her in two in his imagination and rise above to the plane of non-duality. Ramakrishna could not do this at first and only succeeded when Tota Puri struck his third eye with a sharp object.
With this push, Ramakrishna was catapulted into nirvikalpa samadhi where he remained for several days. Thus Tota Puri was successful in initiating Ramakrishna into the experience of emptiness. The unforeseen result was that Ramakrishna was also successful in spontaneously initiating the yogi into devotion to the Mother.
Tota Puri began to have experiences of the divine shakti, the Divine Mother, and was filled with devotion. For the first time he experienced the bliss and the truth of the path of form, and he saw that the form and the formless are one and the same.
Who Am I
I once heard Adyashanti say that when a novice or spiritually unsophisticated person is asked to look inside and ask “Who am I?” they will find nothing. It is said that this is because there is nothing there. The novice might then think he has to find an acceptable answer and will begin to manufacture responses, but the initial answer to the question is just emptiness.
I was struck by this because it was exactly the experience I had when first read Ramana Maharshi during our trip to India back in 1970. I tried out his “Who am I?” technique and just didn’t get it at all. It made me feel inadequate for a long time because I didn’t know what the Self was. I just got a blank when I asked the question.
Much later I realized that I had experienced emptiness, the absence of a personal self, but at the time I didn’t think this was the right answer and went on looking for something divine inside me, some special thing or presence that was different from my ordinary sense of myself.
Years later, after hearing teachings on emptiness and contemplating them according to the prescribed methods, I tried Ramana’s technique again. I closed my eyes, went inside and asked the question, “Who Am I?” When I followed the nothingness that inevitably ensued, it led to a wonderful state of peace and awareness.
The true experience of emptiness opens to an experience of fullness, or as the Mahayanists might say, “the vast array of innate purity.” Baba called this sahaj samadhi or the natural state. Even if one is not able to use contemplation on emptiness to achieve this state, still the teachings on emptiness serve as an antidote to attachment, to materialism, to the force of delusion.
Crazy Wisdom was Too Crazy for Me
Although the focus on emptiness and the formless side was a bit dry, I felt that it provided a balance for me. The practices laid out by the mahayana and vajrayana Buddhists are psychologically sound tools for producing balanced, kind, and compassionate human beings who can live in society in a beneficial way. It is certainly not the only way, but its sanity uplifted me. It was the perfect healing for me after the intensity of life in Siddha Yoga with a crazy wisdom guru.
The crazy wisdom method was exciting and fascinating, but it didn’t totally resonate with my heart. I am enormously captivated by it and love to read the tales of crazy wisdom gurus, but in practice, it often bruised my psyche.
When I have been around people who are worshippers of the shakti side or goddess side, which is the side of form, I have sometimes been disturbed by the lack of wisdom and the attachment which is often present. There is a great difference between the shakti side which contains the awareness of oneness with the formless or Shiva - and the shakti side which is unenlightened and is reveling in mere form.
Baba’s lavish and sumptuous surroundings and his uninhibited and free behavior could be a distraction and could, I felt, mislead seekers. It is a difficult task for novices on the path to discern the truth in the midst of tantric display.
There is a story that makes this point. A siddha with a group of his disciples is sitting by the sea. He catches a fish, eats it and later, vomits up the live fish and returns it to the sea. The disciples follow suit and eat fish, but instead of vomiting up live fish, they were only able to regurgitate half digested dead fish. The point, of course, is that one cannot safely emulate the behavior of an accomplished master.
Baba’s worship of the Shakti was sublime. In spite of the fact that it was often invisible to me, I had the faith that he was anchored in his absorption in Shiva. Even with the intellectual grasp of the idea of the oneness of Shiva and Shakti, or form and emptiness, still, a lot of my experience at Baba’s ashram was over my head at the time. It was like being thrown into the deep end of the pool as a way to teach one to swim. Basically, I was so busy trying not to drown or trying to get to the end of the pool first that I didn’t really learn to swim properly.
Ultimately, I suppose, it doesn’t really matter. An austere environment is no greater an impetus to realization than comfort and excitement. Without my experience with Baba, I am certain that I would not have been able to receive what I did from the Buddhists. Life around Baba could be incredibly exciting, but the atmosphere often seemed mayic to me. This was because I was immersed in the maya of my own ego.
I wanted something to pull me out of it. After 22 years in the ashram, I knew that I was not finished. I wanted more. I wanted the experience of sahaj samadhi, the immersion in awareness or rigpa, in the midst of the display or appearance of the world.
Dark Night of the Soul
In working with people who are depressed, I have discovered that often a large part of it is the self-hatred at not being able to live up to some image they have adopted due to conditioning from parents, teachers and/or the society in which they live. There is a dissonance between the expectation and the reality – the reality being an experience of emptiness, of lack, of nothingness.
This very common experience of negative emotion is usually dealt with by the ego in a variety of ways. It is almost universally rejected, either by rationalization, escape, distraction, or projection onto others. It can, however, be used as a way to access the big Emptiness, with a capital E, which is one with the big Bliss, with a capital B. The union of Emptiness and Bliss is, again, the union of Shiva and Shakti.
During one retreat I was reading a book by A.H.Almaas, who is a psychologist and guru. In it he describes the reaction of the ego when faced with the reality of emptiness, of lack, of darkness. This experience moves the ego to pull out all its tricks. It launches into egoic activity which may include planning the future, or throwing oneself at the feet of the guru, or analyzing compulsively, or hysteria, or seeking distraction in all the numerous ways we can distract ourselves. The ego is terrified of this experience of emptiness and will do anything and everything to shield itself from facing it.
His solution is to sit with the feeling of lack, of depression, of emptiness, of psychic pain, of darkness and to feel it fully. If one can do this 100 percent and not merely 99.9 percent, Almaas claimed, then the emptiness will automatically morph into Emptiness/Bliss. As I read this, I sensed its truth and decided to try it the next time I felt a negative feeling.
I didn’t have to wait long. I had a mild negative feeling and decided that I would sit with it and feel it 100 percent. As I sat with this intention, it brought up many other bad feelings from my past going all the way back to my earliest memories. The overwhelming urge was to stop the practice. My mind objected, saying that I no longer indulged those feelings of negativity. I was grown up, in control, mature, together, unneurotic. I didn’t go there. This was my stance.
I had to summon a deep resolve in the face of these arguments of my ego and force myself to continue. As I did it got worse and worse. Everything was dark, bleak, meaningless, futile. I was a totally bad, unworthy failure. I stuck with it. It filled me completely. It was a dark night of the soul, truly horrific, though it only lasted a few minutes at most. Then it slowly opened up and morphed into an experience of wonderful peace, happiness, fulfillment, light and spaciousness - a very powerful experience of rigpa.
I saw that it really did work and decided to do it again. I was never able to do it again with the same intensity, but it showed me the truth about darkness and light, about the nature of suffering. The truth of emptiness was now deeply imprinted on me. It is very hard to understand this without experiencing it. The Christians speak of the dark night of the soul as a precursor to divine union, to divine grace. It is, however, a very difficult path because no one wants to go into such an intense darkness willingly.
One danger is that in embracing emptiness, one may fall into nihilism, which is the flaw of denigrating the world or relative reality. One has to go all the way, so that the negative experience of emptiness morphs into the supreme reality which is the union of emptiness and compassion. To only go part way is truly hellish.
The path of going all the way can be gradual and without trauma or horrific experiences. It really depends on the karma and psychology of the individual. Some lamas are said to have made the contemplation of emptiness their main teaching. Their students practice year after year with no further teachings. Slowly, this practice reveals the highest wisdom. Both the way of emptiness and the way of compassion lead to the same place.
Saturday, May 29, 2010
Saturday, May 22, 2010
Chapter 4: No Self
A Conglomeration
Near the top of the list of things I liked about the Buddhist path was the teaching on no-self. This is the idea that there is not a personal self - that what we think of as ourselves is just a conglomeration of random bits of conditioning, memories, habits, and experiences all held together by the ego so as to create the illusion of a self. The coherence is just a mirage.
Those random bits of mental flotsam and jetsam are just that. They don’t have any inherent cohesiveness or reality, but are, as they say, adventitious. When dreaming or meditating, random bits might float up to the surface and come into consciousness, but they don’t really mean anything about ultimate reality or about who you are. They are just pieces of our ordinary life.
From the little I have read, this seems to accord with current psychological theory about the self. In any case, it was an enormous relief for me. For one thing, it removed the idea that I was to blame for myself - or that I was responsible for making something of myself. It was wonderful to have no self to improve. I could give up all the energy invested in adjusting my persona, which was nothing more than rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, and instead focus on the real goal of human life, which was to be stabilized in my buddha nature.
I was taught that my buddha nature is the same as everyone else’s, that it is always there and shines through either more or less clearly. The task is, first, to touch enlightened mind, then to practice discriminating between the ordinary mind and the awakened mind, always choosing Awareness, until one is firmly stabilized in it.
This was not essentially different from what I learned with Baba, where one had an experience of the Self and then did sadhana in order to become established in it. The difference was Self versus no-self. For me this was more about the stance one took in approaching the path than it was about philosophy. The stance I adopted from the Buddhists was to regard the egoic self as unreal, delusory, a dream from which one can awaken. In many ways, it was helpful to me.
The teachings of Kashmir Shaivism I had learned around Baba had also been helpful. It was helpful to consider the ordinary mind as merely a contraction of consciousness. There the sadhana was to find a way to expand the mind into the consciousness of Shiva, the absolute.
This made sense, but I can’t say that I had any particular practice around it nor did I have the experience. The experiences that I did have of higher consciousness just happened. They didn’t seem connected to my ordinary mind. I never had the experience of my ordinary mind transforming into the divine mind. Letting go of ordinary mind and then experiencing what was behind it or beneath it was a closer approximation of my experience.
No Self Leads to More Compassion
As an astrologer, I had been deeply interested in the variety of human beings. I saw that there are Uranic types, Marsy folk, Saturnine people, Neptunian, Plutonic or Mercurial types and every imaginable combination thereof. I was used to thinking of the uniqueness of each human being. Even identical twins have different charts. This was quite fascinating to me.
I also studied and taught the enneagram and other systems as well. I have had an abiding interest in the varieties of human nature evidenced by the fact that before spiritual life, I was pursuing a doctorate in cultural anthropology.
One of the positive side effects of contemplating the no-self idea was that I began to see all of the human attributes and qualities as more superficial and incidental. The qualities gradually became less fixed, less weighty and less burdensome. When I looked out at the world and people, everything was larger, the differences were contained in a larger field.
This subtle shift felt more compassionate and more realistic than my previous point of view. When I did focus on individuality, which of course I continued to do, there was a subtle difference-there was more of the sense of appearance than the sense of reality.
No Point in Self-Aggrandizement
Because the Buddhists are taught from the very beginning of the path that there is no self, it has an effect on the culture of the sangha, or group. Since there is no self, there is no point in self-aggrandizement, so it is not pursued quite so outwardly. Everyone at least pretends that they are not self-aggrandizing.
Also, with the idea of no-self, there is less frustration when dealing with lack of self esteem. There is not the belief that one must cultivate anger and resentment in order to develop proper self esteem. There is less narcissism. There is less emphasis on romantic love as the end-all and be-all.
While this is certainly less juicy, and less attractive in some ways than the culture at large, it is kinder, less harmful, less aggressive, and less competitive. Buddhists strive to be non-violent and I found it relaxing to be around those who at least hold the value of non-aggression in thought, word and deed.
Although I am aware that ideals held by a culture are not the same as the reality on the ground, still, a culture which holds, teaches and extols virtues, such as patience, humility, honesty, non-violence, and self-discipline, is preferable to me from almost every point of view. I believe there may be less suffering. Perhaps there is not, since humans are the same everywhere. All I can really say is that I resonated with that aspect of the culture.
Contemplating one’s own divinity is a good antidote to low self esteem, but I find that an equally compelling case can be made for contemplating no self. If there is no self then one doesn’t need to be anything or anyone. I find it a great relief to know that the self can’t really have any esteem. I sometimes fear that telling small children that they are special may result in later suffering when they discover that the world may not support this. There are innumerable skillful means to uplift people and whatever works is wonderful. Personally, I have found that my best tactic in all cases is love.
Self versus No Self
The Buddhist concept of no self is always a point of contention with Hindus. After a lot of discussion, I concluded that I don’t hold the Buddhist point of view from a philosophical conviction, but more from a personal bhav or attitude. I just don’t see the need or benefit in positing an individual self or delaring, “I am God,” which feels somewhat narcissistic to me. What does it serve? This is my bias, I admit. I am more inclined to the assertion that everything is God.
One of the mahavakyas or great statements of the Upanishads is “Aham Brahmasmi – I am Brahman.” I think of it as a pointer to one’s own divine aspect, one’s buddha nature. The absolute “I” is not anything like the egoic “I.” I don’t think of the ego as a version of Buddha nature, but more as a dark glass through which one’s Buddha nature shines more or less clearly.
Swamiji recently told me of a story he had heard about the Dalai Lama who was asked, “Is there a Self?” The Dalai Lama replied that there was, but not in the way people would understand. Swamiji and I seemed to accept this as the final word on the tedious debate.
I see that Buddhism deals with the path or the psychology of sadhana. The relevant question is “What is a person’s highest experience?” It may be that the highest experience is something which could be expressed as, “I am God”. However, to express in this way publicly seems inflated and has the possibility of leading one down dead end streets or blind alleys. I have no issue with sharing this experience or perception privately. “I am God” is fine if “and so is everyone else” is implied. My own experience is more along these lines, with my increasingly feeling the same as others.
How to Live in Samsara
Since I had always had the eradication of my little self, the selfish “me, me, me” part, as my goal, it was wonderful to be taught this little self held no reality. For years I found fault with my ordinary neurotic self. I judged myself as venal, petty, judgmental, jealous, calculating and above all, self-centered. I wanted things; I had likes and dislikes. I was never satisfied for any length of time.
Imagine the relief of hearing the Buddha’s teaching that samsara or ordinary life is suffering, that it is incapable of providing real satisfaction. That corresponded with my actual experience in life. The first noble truth rang true. The others were equally reassuring – that there was a cause of suffering, an end to suffering and a path to attain this end.
I had heard essentially the same things from Baba, but other factors had made it impossible for me to take them to heart and apply them as I was able to do with the Buddhists. In addition to my readiness, there was something about the whole system that really spoke to me.
The teachings on no self also provided me with a stance that helped me in meditation. The mind was considered to be another sense, like seeing and hearing or tasting. It is the thinking sense. In meditation I knew that seeing and hearing and feeling did not in way detract from the experience of meditation, any more than did the circulation of blood, or my breathing or pulse. They were just ongoing processes of my body. I liked regarding the movements of my ordinary mind in much the same way. It was there, but not important or relevant to what I was doing in meditation. Thinking was just thinking, like smelling, and had no more to say about my real identity than smelling did.
I continued the slow process of learning not to identify with my thoughts. After a long time, this attitude spilled over into my post meditation life. The focus was on Awareness, whether or not I was fully in it or just hovering around it. It was the goal, the reality, the meaning of everything - and the human body and personality were the vehicles through which it expressed its divine purpose.
The teaching on no self did not affect the interactions between teacher and student in the way one might expect. When I shared about an attachment or a problem, Lama Drimed did not come back with, “All that is part of the small self which does not exist,” or anything of the kind. The people in the sangha did not run around constantly uttering platitudes, such as “The self does not exist, man,” or “Remember, the self is unreal.” It was not mentioned, in the same way that one didn’t hear people around Baba saying things to each other about their mind being just a contracted form of consciousness. It was just a background belief.
This is not to say that spiritual platitudes did not abound, as they seem to do in every spiritual group. Just as there had been the annoying refrain, “Baba says…,” so too we had our fill of “Rinpoche says” or “Lama Drimed says.”
While I didn’t hear, “The self is unreal,” I did hear a lot of “It’s impermanent,” which was used to describe any situation that might provide even a ripple of discomfort or was not to one’s taste. Another recurring cultural artifact was something like, “That’s just a concept, dude.”
The microcosm of samsara that is the ashram or the gonpa always entails dealing with humans and their baggage. In the spiritual community, the oneupsmanship, preaching and mind games just have a spiritual flavor. As anyone who has lived for any length of time in such a community knows, it is not at all an escape from “the world.”
The concept of no self does not deny the world. There is this play, this lila, here in relative reality. It is relatively real, just not ultimately real. In rigpa, one experiences what is ultimately real. The experiencer of rigpa sees through the relative reality, as he or she functions in it. It is just a broader and wider scope.
After realization, the focus is always on conduct, or how one lives in the world. Guru Rinpoche gave the definitive directions on how to live when he famously said, “Though my view is as high as the sky, my conduct is as fine as barley flour.” He is saying that conduct in this relative reality really matters. A realizer in this tradition is enjoined to always serve humanity with great compassion from the highest wisdom.
Near the top of the list of things I liked about the Buddhist path was the teaching on no-self. This is the idea that there is not a personal self - that what we think of as ourselves is just a conglomeration of random bits of conditioning, memories, habits, and experiences all held together by the ego so as to create the illusion of a self. The coherence is just a mirage.
Those random bits of mental flotsam and jetsam are just that. They don’t have any inherent cohesiveness or reality, but are, as they say, adventitious. When dreaming or meditating, random bits might float up to the surface and come into consciousness, but they don’t really mean anything about ultimate reality or about who you are. They are just pieces of our ordinary life.
From the little I have read, this seems to accord with current psychological theory about the self. In any case, it was an enormous relief for me. For one thing, it removed the idea that I was to blame for myself - or that I was responsible for making something of myself. It was wonderful to have no self to improve. I could give up all the energy invested in adjusting my persona, which was nothing more than rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, and instead focus on the real goal of human life, which was to be stabilized in my buddha nature.
I was taught that my buddha nature is the same as everyone else’s, that it is always there and shines through either more or less clearly. The task is, first, to touch enlightened mind, then to practice discriminating between the ordinary mind and the awakened mind, always choosing Awareness, until one is firmly stabilized in it.
This was not essentially different from what I learned with Baba, where one had an experience of the Self and then did sadhana in order to become established in it. The difference was Self versus no-self. For me this was more about the stance one took in approaching the path than it was about philosophy. The stance I adopted from the Buddhists was to regard the egoic self as unreal, delusory, a dream from which one can awaken. In many ways, it was helpful to me.
The teachings of Kashmir Shaivism I had learned around Baba had also been helpful. It was helpful to consider the ordinary mind as merely a contraction of consciousness. There the sadhana was to find a way to expand the mind into the consciousness of Shiva, the absolute.
This made sense, but I can’t say that I had any particular practice around it nor did I have the experience. The experiences that I did have of higher consciousness just happened. They didn’t seem connected to my ordinary mind. I never had the experience of my ordinary mind transforming into the divine mind. Letting go of ordinary mind and then experiencing what was behind it or beneath it was a closer approximation of my experience.
No Self Leads to More Compassion
As an astrologer, I had been deeply interested in the variety of human beings. I saw that there are Uranic types, Marsy folk, Saturnine people, Neptunian, Plutonic or Mercurial types and every imaginable combination thereof. I was used to thinking of the uniqueness of each human being. Even identical twins have different charts. This was quite fascinating to me.
I also studied and taught the enneagram and other systems as well. I have had an abiding interest in the varieties of human nature evidenced by the fact that before spiritual life, I was pursuing a doctorate in cultural anthropology.
One of the positive side effects of contemplating the no-self idea was that I began to see all of the human attributes and qualities as more superficial and incidental. The qualities gradually became less fixed, less weighty and less burdensome. When I looked out at the world and people, everything was larger, the differences were contained in a larger field.
This subtle shift felt more compassionate and more realistic than my previous point of view. When I did focus on individuality, which of course I continued to do, there was a subtle difference-there was more of the sense of appearance than the sense of reality.
No Point in Self-Aggrandizement
Because the Buddhists are taught from the very beginning of the path that there is no self, it has an effect on the culture of the sangha, or group. Since there is no self, there is no point in self-aggrandizement, so it is not pursued quite so outwardly. Everyone at least pretends that they are not self-aggrandizing.
Also, with the idea of no-self, there is less frustration when dealing with lack of self esteem. There is not the belief that one must cultivate anger and resentment in order to develop proper self esteem. There is less narcissism. There is less emphasis on romantic love as the end-all and be-all.
While this is certainly less juicy, and less attractive in some ways than the culture at large, it is kinder, less harmful, less aggressive, and less competitive. Buddhists strive to be non-violent and I found it relaxing to be around those who at least hold the value of non-aggression in thought, word and deed.
Although I am aware that ideals held by a culture are not the same as the reality on the ground, still, a culture which holds, teaches and extols virtues, such as patience, humility, honesty, non-violence, and self-discipline, is preferable to me from almost every point of view. I believe there may be less suffering. Perhaps there is not, since humans are the same everywhere. All I can really say is that I resonated with that aspect of the culture.
Contemplating one’s own divinity is a good antidote to low self esteem, but I find that an equally compelling case can be made for contemplating no self. If there is no self then one doesn’t need to be anything or anyone. I find it a great relief to know that the self can’t really have any esteem. I sometimes fear that telling small children that they are special may result in later suffering when they discover that the world may not support this. There are innumerable skillful means to uplift people and whatever works is wonderful. Personally, I have found that my best tactic in all cases is love.
Self versus No Self
The Buddhist concept of no self is always a point of contention with Hindus. After a lot of discussion, I concluded that I don’t hold the Buddhist point of view from a philosophical conviction, but more from a personal bhav or attitude. I just don’t see the need or benefit in positing an individual self or delaring, “I am God,” which feels somewhat narcissistic to me. What does it serve? This is my bias, I admit. I am more inclined to the assertion that everything is God.
One of the mahavakyas or great statements of the Upanishads is “Aham Brahmasmi – I am Brahman.” I think of it as a pointer to one’s own divine aspect, one’s buddha nature. The absolute “I” is not anything like the egoic “I.” I don’t think of the ego as a version of Buddha nature, but more as a dark glass through which one’s Buddha nature shines more or less clearly.
Swamiji recently told me of a story he had heard about the Dalai Lama who was asked, “Is there a Self?” The Dalai Lama replied that there was, but not in the way people would understand. Swamiji and I seemed to accept this as the final word on the tedious debate.
I see that Buddhism deals with the path or the psychology of sadhana. The relevant question is “What is a person’s highest experience?” It may be that the highest experience is something which could be expressed as, “I am God”. However, to express in this way publicly seems inflated and has the possibility of leading one down dead end streets or blind alleys. I have no issue with sharing this experience or perception privately. “I am God” is fine if “and so is everyone else” is implied. My own experience is more along these lines, with my increasingly feeling the same as others.
How to Live in Samsara
Since I had always had the eradication of my little self, the selfish “me, me, me” part, as my goal, it was wonderful to be taught this little self held no reality. For years I found fault with my ordinary neurotic self. I judged myself as venal, petty, judgmental, jealous, calculating and above all, self-centered. I wanted things; I had likes and dislikes. I was never satisfied for any length of time.
Imagine the relief of hearing the Buddha’s teaching that samsara or ordinary life is suffering, that it is incapable of providing real satisfaction. That corresponded with my actual experience in life. The first noble truth rang true. The others were equally reassuring – that there was a cause of suffering, an end to suffering and a path to attain this end.
I had heard essentially the same things from Baba, but other factors had made it impossible for me to take them to heart and apply them as I was able to do with the Buddhists. In addition to my readiness, there was something about the whole system that really spoke to me.
The teachings on no self also provided me with a stance that helped me in meditation. The mind was considered to be another sense, like seeing and hearing or tasting. It is the thinking sense. In meditation I knew that seeing and hearing and feeling did not in way detract from the experience of meditation, any more than did the circulation of blood, or my breathing or pulse. They were just ongoing processes of my body. I liked regarding the movements of my ordinary mind in much the same way. It was there, but not important or relevant to what I was doing in meditation. Thinking was just thinking, like smelling, and had no more to say about my real identity than smelling did.
I continued the slow process of learning not to identify with my thoughts. After a long time, this attitude spilled over into my post meditation life. The focus was on Awareness, whether or not I was fully in it or just hovering around it. It was the goal, the reality, the meaning of everything - and the human body and personality were the vehicles through which it expressed its divine purpose.
The teaching on no self did not affect the interactions between teacher and student in the way one might expect. When I shared about an attachment or a problem, Lama Drimed did not come back with, “All that is part of the small self which does not exist,” or anything of the kind. The people in the sangha did not run around constantly uttering platitudes, such as “The self does not exist, man,” or “Remember, the self is unreal.” It was not mentioned, in the same way that one didn’t hear people around Baba saying things to each other about their mind being just a contracted form of consciousness. It was just a background belief.
This is not to say that spiritual platitudes did not abound, as they seem to do in every spiritual group. Just as there had been the annoying refrain, “Baba says…,” so too we had our fill of “Rinpoche says” or “Lama Drimed says.”
While I didn’t hear, “The self is unreal,” I did hear a lot of “It’s impermanent,” which was used to describe any situation that might provide even a ripple of discomfort or was not to one’s taste. Another recurring cultural artifact was something like, “That’s just a concept, dude.”
The microcosm of samsara that is the ashram or the gonpa always entails dealing with humans and their baggage. In the spiritual community, the oneupsmanship, preaching and mind games just have a spiritual flavor. As anyone who has lived for any length of time in such a community knows, it is not at all an escape from “the world.”
The concept of no self does not deny the world. There is this play, this lila, here in relative reality. It is relatively real, just not ultimately real. In rigpa, one experiences what is ultimately real. The experiencer of rigpa sees through the relative reality, as he or she functions in it. It is just a broader and wider scope.
After realization, the focus is always on conduct, or how one lives in the world. Guru Rinpoche gave the definitive directions on how to live when he famously said, “Though my view is as high as the sky, my conduct is as fine as barley flour.” He is saying that conduct in this relative reality really matters. A realizer in this tradition is enjoined to always serve humanity with great compassion from the highest wisdom.
Saturday, May 15, 2010
Chapter 3: Retreat
Dropping Outer Activity
When I first moved into the gonpa, I began to meet regularly with Lama Drimed. He was curious about Baba so I gave him Play of Consciousness, Baba’s spiritual autobiography. When he returned it to me, he told me it was an authentic path, but he couldn’t understand why we did not do retreat, pointing out that Baba did retreat. I had no answer.
Baba had done retreat at his hut in Suki, but no one was encouraged to follow suit. I assumed this was because no one was at the stage where they would have the kind of transformation that he had. I thought that perhaps it would come later.
Baba said that his yoga, Siddha Yoga, included all the other yogas, and that whatever was needed in a seeker’s development would unfold spontaneously over time through the grace of a siddha guru. At his Ganeshpuri ashram people were going through all levels of purification – physical, emotional, mental and spiritual. Many were having kriyas throughout the day. You might see someone dancing in the garden, or another sitting in the hall doing mudras. There were usually a few people here and there absorbed in samadhi. I find it hard to believe now, but I wept daily for three years. It was an intense crucible of sadhana.
When I got to the gonpa, I concluded that my time to do retreat had finally arrived. I was thrilled that retreat was an important part of this new path. Although we practiced daily at the gonpa, the most intensive practice took place in retreat, which I did every summer, usually for 8 weeks.
During my first dzogchen group retreat, there was a period of a few days during which we were dropped all outer practices and just sat. We could eat, walk, sleep and if necessary, bathe – but nothing else. I was in bliss. Lama Drimed told us not even to offer prostrations to him when he entered the room. This was shocking to some, as were the instructions to stop any outer practices which one was holding as a commitment. Some just could not give these up. He was never rigid and seemed to me to always give permission to any exceptions that were requested.
I so enjoyed those few days of dropping all outer actions, that I knew I wanted to follow this pattern in retreat. He agreed and I did my first retreat, soon afterward, for a month. When I was agitated, which was often, I resorted to reading my notes from the six week group retreat with him, which was allowed, or taking walks or daydreaming or fantasizing. I felt guilty and like a failure for not being able to meditate for four sessions of two hours each without these indulgences. It was so obvious to me that I was a complete mess and I despaired. My early retreats involved a lot of striving and suffering. This went on in different ways for years.
Catharsis
Retreat was excruciating – and liberating. The prominent feature of my retreats in the early days was an upwelling of old psychic material. This purification was often alarming and depressing and I would not have allowed it to go on if I hadn’t been instructed to just watch it all calmly, no matter what.
There was sexual stuff that arose no matter how much I hated it. It reminded me of Baba’s experiences in his retreat. Then there were old memories that just insisted on being replayed. It was annoying and also very boring, but apparently there was nothing to be done about it.
I assumed that everything in my ordinary consciousness had to be unraveled. I often wondered if I were doing something wrong, but Lama Drimed told me it was all fine. Over the years this upsurging of psychic material lasted a shorter and shorter time and was less intense. I was also more detached from it year to year.
In the early years, I just kept going without any real clarity. For a long time, I felt that the goal receded further and further the more I learned and looked at my mind. This may be because at the beginning one has no idea of what there is inside that must be purified. For me there was a fair amount of despair, but the kindness of the lama and the teachings kept me going.
No matter what my experience was, I was reassured that it was fine and that I should just keep going. This meant, of course, to keep on practicing in the way one had been instructed. One of Rinpoche’s most common sayings – and the saying on a very popular T-shirt sold at the gonpa - was, “Keep going.” For example, when I told Rinpoche that I had completed my ngondro, he smiled and said, “Keep going.” This was a pith instruction that I took very much to heart.
Lama Drimed often told us that “time in” was a huge component of the path. I believed it when he said to just keep going and things would get better. Still I would worry about whether or not I was doing it right. Perhaps it would improve if I were able to do it right. I would also wonder if I were just fatally flawed and too recalcitrant to get anywhere. Numerous doubts such as these arose. I had no choice but to keep going.
Things did get better, slowly and gradually, and with many setbacks. I think that some of the improvement with my mind was just accepting the process. Even if the acceptance was only due to feeling that I had no choice, still it was acceptance and that is always a good thing.
It was in retreat that I finally had time to let my being settle into its own natural rhythm. Never before in my life had I had days on end all alone, with nothing to do but cook my meals, eat, tidy up, walk, practice and sleep. I didn’t even have to tidy up or walk if I didn’t feel so inclined. It is brilliantly liberating and at the same time excruciatingly revealing.
In retreat I was faced with all my demons without any means of distracting myself from seeing them. Without the habitual buffers they were felt very intensely. Doing outer practices such as making offerings, sadhana practice or puja, mantra repetition, prayers, study and/or prostrations are a great way to distract oneself from facing the inner chaos, pain, emptiness (with a small e), rage, sadness – and all the other multifarious ways that the poisons of the mind may manifest. This is how it is supposed to work.
If a retreatant is overwhelmed by the psychic eruptions, then the outer practices provide a way to calm oneself or to get more centered and balanced. One can always pray, which is something I resorted to a great deal. As the years went on, the aversion to the psychic eruptions grew less and I found that I even rejoiced in the process, which was certainly not pleasant by ordinary standards.
It was not unremittingly difficult. There were long hours of deep peace and happiness. For example, during my retreats at Rigdzin Ling, I discovered within myself a love of nature. As I sat for hours, eyes open, looking out at a landscape with sun and sky, I found myself totally in love with what I was seeing.
I remember one day in a tent gazing at an entire window filled with green leaves rustling slightly in the wind and being overwhelmed with the beauty of the trees. All I could think was how lucky I was to be there and to be able to see those beautiful trees. How lucky I was to live in a world that had such wonderful things as trees in it! It was a spontaneous and natural experience of the praise of God.
After some time, my critical mind would intervene and ask, “Is this rigpa?” My mind would then go on recalling the instructions to decide whether or not I was doing it correctly. I would also critically analyze my experience to see if it matched the “correct” one. These were my mental/emotional habits and that is what retreat does. It brings them into sharp focus and makes you stew in them, experience the results and then finally decide to give them up.
Long Retreat?
Once in conversation with Khentrul Rinpoche, my philosophy teacher, he mentioned that it took about two months of retreat for his mind to really settle into meditation. I had never done retreat for longer than two months and I wanted to see what happened during a much longer retreat. I figured that for me it would take much longer than two months for what Khentrul Rinpoche had described to happen to me. For a long time I had the goal of doing an extended retreat, maybe even the traditional three year retreat.
Eventually I decided that it was more appropriate to let go of goals that offered only future satisfaction. I began to ask what it was I wanted in the moment. What did I really want? Was it some imagined experience called “mind settling into meditation” or was it something else? In exploring this, I saw that the only goal that gave me real peace was that of being of benefit to others.
All other goals had some subtle feeling of the contraction of ego in them. I knew that I could only serve others well if I were spiritually mature. And so, while I was maturing spiritually, I wanted to interact with others and not sit alone all day in a hut or cave. I felt best suited to a combination of retreat and service, a kind of retreat in the world. It felt more relevant to life in the 21st century.
Retreat is an incredible gift and luxury. I found that it was extremely difficult for me to separate from the obsessions of ordinary life without a period of “cold turkey” in which I could actually experience the alteration in my state and see for myself the negative effects of a totally outward focus.
It is hard to convey the profundity of spending time not communicating with or even seeing people. I remember practicing silence with Hari Dass Baba in my early days in India before meeting Baba. We wrote on little chalk boards hung around our necks. There was definitely a positive energy shift that came from not speaking – and this was in spite of the fact that we communicated constantly on the chalk boards.
I Quit
During my last retreat at Rigdzin Ling, I had the experience of giving up. I could tell the story making it sound more spectacular and “spiritual” than it was, but it really was quite ordinary. It was very real and very intense, but it was not accompanied with great joy or jubilation. One day as I was meditating on my cushion looking out the large window of the Pie, Prema and John’s retreat cabin high up on a hill in the forest, my mind began to come to a point of focus. I suddenly said – possibly out loud – “I quit.” Surprise. Stillness.
Then I asked what I was quitting. The answer was that I was quitting it all, quitting being a spiritual person. I just wasn’t going to do this any more. It was not from any feeling of negativity, but just a certainty. I got up and began to read a book. Later I opened up my laptop and played a game of solitaire. God did not strike me dead. I had to laugh at the shadow of old habits of fear and guilt. But I had given all that up! I realized that my peers would consider my actions as negative, as a failure, as deluded, etc. But I didn’t care. I was finished. It was not that I considered any of it wrong or bad – just that I was done with it.
An hour or two later, during which I felt quite normal, I noticed that I had set up my shrine to make the daily protector offerings. Prema asked me to do this since I was doing retreat on her land. I thought that it wasn’t the protectors’ fault that I had quit, so I went ahead and made the offerings with the appropriate prayers. It wasn’t for me, so it felt fine.
I left retreat a few days later and didn’t tell anyone about my experience until one Open Space some time later. I presented it as a delusion. I really wasn’t sure what it was, but I knew it was very deep and very real. Perhaps it was quitting Rigdzin Ling, which I did soon after. Perhaps it was quitting formal practice. It was definitely quitting seeking. There was the experience, “Whatever I am now is good enough.” I had a sense of satisfaction with myself – not that I thought highly of myself or that I had attained any great height of realization. I knew that the process would continue, but in a different way.
When I first moved into the gonpa, I began to meet regularly with Lama Drimed. He was curious about Baba so I gave him Play of Consciousness, Baba’s spiritual autobiography. When he returned it to me, he told me it was an authentic path, but he couldn’t understand why we did not do retreat, pointing out that Baba did retreat. I had no answer.
Baba had done retreat at his hut in Suki, but no one was encouraged to follow suit. I assumed this was because no one was at the stage where they would have the kind of transformation that he had. I thought that perhaps it would come later.
Baba said that his yoga, Siddha Yoga, included all the other yogas, and that whatever was needed in a seeker’s development would unfold spontaneously over time through the grace of a siddha guru. At his Ganeshpuri ashram people were going through all levels of purification – physical, emotional, mental and spiritual. Many were having kriyas throughout the day. You might see someone dancing in the garden, or another sitting in the hall doing mudras. There were usually a few people here and there absorbed in samadhi. I find it hard to believe now, but I wept daily for three years. It was an intense crucible of sadhana.
When I got to the gonpa, I concluded that my time to do retreat had finally arrived. I was thrilled that retreat was an important part of this new path. Although we practiced daily at the gonpa, the most intensive practice took place in retreat, which I did every summer, usually for 8 weeks.
During my first dzogchen group retreat, there was a period of a few days during which we were dropped all outer practices and just sat. We could eat, walk, sleep and if necessary, bathe – but nothing else. I was in bliss. Lama Drimed told us not even to offer prostrations to him when he entered the room. This was shocking to some, as were the instructions to stop any outer practices which one was holding as a commitment. Some just could not give these up. He was never rigid and seemed to me to always give permission to any exceptions that were requested.
I so enjoyed those few days of dropping all outer actions, that I knew I wanted to follow this pattern in retreat. He agreed and I did my first retreat, soon afterward, for a month. When I was agitated, which was often, I resorted to reading my notes from the six week group retreat with him, which was allowed, or taking walks or daydreaming or fantasizing. I felt guilty and like a failure for not being able to meditate for four sessions of two hours each without these indulgences. It was so obvious to me that I was a complete mess and I despaired. My early retreats involved a lot of striving and suffering. This went on in different ways for years.
Catharsis
Retreat was excruciating – and liberating. The prominent feature of my retreats in the early days was an upwelling of old psychic material. This purification was often alarming and depressing and I would not have allowed it to go on if I hadn’t been instructed to just watch it all calmly, no matter what.
There was sexual stuff that arose no matter how much I hated it. It reminded me of Baba’s experiences in his retreat. Then there were old memories that just insisted on being replayed. It was annoying and also very boring, but apparently there was nothing to be done about it.
I assumed that everything in my ordinary consciousness had to be unraveled. I often wondered if I were doing something wrong, but Lama Drimed told me it was all fine. Over the years this upsurging of psychic material lasted a shorter and shorter time and was less intense. I was also more detached from it year to year.
In the early years, I just kept going without any real clarity. For a long time, I felt that the goal receded further and further the more I learned and looked at my mind. This may be because at the beginning one has no idea of what there is inside that must be purified. For me there was a fair amount of despair, but the kindness of the lama and the teachings kept me going.
No matter what my experience was, I was reassured that it was fine and that I should just keep going. This meant, of course, to keep on practicing in the way one had been instructed. One of Rinpoche’s most common sayings – and the saying on a very popular T-shirt sold at the gonpa - was, “Keep going.” For example, when I told Rinpoche that I had completed my ngondro, he smiled and said, “Keep going.” This was a pith instruction that I took very much to heart.
Lama Drimed often told us that “time in” was a huge component of the path. I believed it when he said to just keep going and things would get better. Still I would worry about whether or not I was doing it right. Perhaps it would improve if I were able to do it right. I would also wonder if I were just fatally flawed and too recalcitrant to get anywhere. Numerous doubts such as these arose. I had no choice but to keep going.
Things did get better, slowly and gradually, and with many setbacks. I think that some of the improvement with my mind was just accepting the process. Even if the acceptance was only due to feeling that I had no choice, still it was acceptance and that is always a good thing.
It was in retreat that I finally had time to let my being settle into its own natural rhythm. Never before in my life had I had days on end all alone, with nothing to do but cook my meals, eat, tidy up, walk, practice and sleep. I didn’t even have to tidy up or walk if I didn’t feel so inclined. It is brilliantly liberating and at the same time excruciatingly revealing.
In retreat I was faced with all my demons without any means of distracting myself from seeing them. Without the habitual buffers they were felt very intensely. Doing outer practices such as making offerings, sadhana practice or puja, mantra repetition, prayers, study and/or prostrations are a great way to distract oneself from facing the inner chaos, pain, emptiness (with a small e), rage, sadness – and all the other multifarious ways that the poisons of the mind may manifest. This is how it is supposed to work.
If a retreatant is overwhelmed by the psychic eruptions, then the outer practices provide a way to calm oneself or to get more centered and balanced. One can always pray, which is something I resorted to a great deal. As the years went on, the aversion to the psychic eruptions grew less and I found that I even rejoiced in the process, which was certainly not pleasant by ordinary standards.
It was not unremittingly difficult. There were long hours of deep peace and happiness. For example, during my retreats at Rigdzin Ling, I discovered within myself a love of nature. As I sat for hours, eyes open, looking out at a landscape with sun and sky, I found myself totally in love with what I was seeing.
I remember one day in a tent gazing at an entire window filled with green leaves rustling slightly in the wind and being overwhelmed with the beauty of the trees. All I could think was how lucky I was to be there and to be able to see those beautiful trees. How lucky I was to live in a world that had such wonderful things as trees in it! It was a spontaneous and natural experience of the praise of God.
After some time, my critical mind would intervene and ask, “Is this rigpa?” My mind would then go on recalling the instructions to decide whether or not I was doing it correctly. I would also critically analyze my experience to see if it matched the “correct” one. These were my mental/emotional habits and that is what retreat does. It brings them into sharp focus and makes you stew in them, experience the results and then finally decide to give them up.
Long Retreat?
Once in conversation with Khentrul Rinpoche, my philosophy teacher, he mentioned that it took about two months of retreat for his mind to really settle into meditation. I had never done retreat for longer than two months and I wanted to see what happened during a much longer retreat. I figured that for me it would take much longer than two months for what Khentrul Rinpoche had described to happen to me. For a long time I had the goal of doing an extended retreat, maybe even the traditional three year retreat.
Eventually I decided that it was more appropriate to let go of goals that offered only future satisfaction. I began to ask what it was I wanted in the moment. What did I really want? Was it some imagined experience called “mind settling into meditation” or was it something else? In exploring this, I saw that the only goal that gave me real peace was that of being of benefit to others.
All other goals had some subtle feeling of the contraction of ego in them. I knew that I could only serve others well if I were spiritually mature. And so, while I was maturing spiritually, I wanted to interact with others and not sit alone all day in a hut or cave. I felt best suited to a combination of retreat and service, a kind of retreat in the world. It felt more relevant to life in the 21st century.
Retreat is an incredible gift and luxury. I found that it was extremely difficult for me to separate from the obsessions of ordinary life without a period of “cold turkey” in which I could actually experience the alteration in my state and see for myself the negative effects of a totally outward focus.
It is hard to convey the profundity of spending time not communicating with or even seeing people. I remember practicing silence with Hari Dass Baba in my early days in India before meeting Baba. We wrote on little chalk boards hung around our necks. There was definitely a positive energy shift that came from not speaking – and this was in spite of the fact that we communicated constantly on the chalk boards.
I Quit
During my last retreat at Rigdzin Ling, I had the experience of giving up. I could tell the story making it sound more spectacular and “spiritual” than it was, but it really was quite ordinary. It was very real and very intense, but it was not accompanied with great joy or jubilation. One day as I was meditating on my cushion looking out the large window of the Pie, Prema and John’s retreat cabin high up on a hill in the forest, my mind began to come to a point of focus. I suddenly said – possibly out loud – “I quit.” Surprise. Stillness.
Then I asked what I was quitting. The answer was that I was quitting it all, quitting being a spiritual person. I just wasn’t going to do this any more. It was not from any feeling of negativity, but just a certainty. I got up and began to read a book. Later I opened up my laptop and played a game of solitaire. God did not strike me dead. I had to laugh at the shadow of old habits of fear and guilt. But I had given all that up! I realized that my peers would consider my actions as negative, as a failure, as deluded, etc. But I didn’t care. I was finished. It was not that I considered any of it wrong or bad – just that I was done with it.
An hour or two later, during which I felt quite normal, I noticed that I had set up my shrine to make the daily protector offerings. Prema asked me to do this since I was doing retreat on her land. I thought that it wasn’t the protectors’ fault that I had quit, so I went ahead and made the offerings with the appropriate prayers. It wasn’t for me, so it felt fine.
I left retreat a few days later and didn’t tell anyone about my experience until one Open Space some time later. I presented it as a delusion. I really wasn’t sure what it was, but I knew it was very deep and very real. Perhaps it was quitting Rigdzin Ling, which I did soon after. Perhaps it was quitting formal practice. It was definitely quitting seeking. There was the experience, “Whatever I am now is good enough.” I had a sense of satisfaction with myself – not that I thought highly of myself or that I had attained any great height of realization. I knew that the process would continue, but in a different way.
Saturday, May 8, 2010
Chapter 2: Rigpa/Nature of Mind
Spiritual Initiation
One of the first things that struck me about the Buddhist teachings that I was receiving was that they seemed to focus on the mind almost entirely. I found it odd that the goal was something they called “the nature of mind.” The guru “pointed out” this “nature of mind” to you and then your path began. The initiation into the path of dzogchen was the “pointing out instructions.”
This was in contrast to the “shaktipat” initiation of Baba, but there were some points of similarity. In both cases it was an initiation into the spiritual path. Around Baba, people got shaktipat and had a whole variety of experiences. Some had physical kriyas or spontaneous movements, not unlike some of the manifestations of spirit associated with what we used to call “holy rollers.” Others had more subtle inner experiences. Some experienced samadhi or meditative absorption. Some did not have any perceptible experience, but their lives began to change.
The whole thing was initially quite confusing to me. I couldn’t pinpoint any particular experience of shaktipat, yet there I was living in an ashram and doing full- time spiritual practices and furthermore, I had accepted a guru and aspired to surrender completely. So obviously something had happened. Later, I realized that I could meditate, which I felt I could not before. Actually, I realized that a certain experience which I was familiar with was, in fact, meditation.
Before meeting Baba, we had spent time with a yogi who instructed me in meditation, saying to sit quietly and empty my mind of all thoughts. No matter how hard I tried, I could not eradicate all thoughts from my mind. The idea of meditation as an absence of thoughts lingered in my mind and made it difficult for me to recognize the effortless gliding into an altered state in Baba’s presence as meditation.
It took a long time to reach the conclusion that I was spiritually awakened. It was more subtle than what I had understood it to be. Also, I think it was partly due to the fact that it was not something completely new for me. We learned that if one died after having been awakened, but before attaining realization, one would be reborn and continue on the path. It was called “yoga bhrastha.” It seemed a likely category for me since there was not something new in my consciousness with Baba, but rather a formal entry onto the path.
Ordinary Mind or Awareness
Later with the Buddhists, I learned that their approach is to delineate two aspects of mind. Of course, on any non-dual path everything is ultimately one, but on the relative plane, there are two. One is the realm of “ordinary mind,” which is characterized by the “poisons of the mind” - anger, ignorance, greed, desire, jealousy and pride. It is the world of egoic existence where everything is experienced through the lens of the “little me.”
The other aspect of mind is “rigpa” or awakened mind. This is Awareness, with a capital A. It is the realm of pure experience, of things as they are without the poisons of the mind. It is the “nature of mind,” pure, unsullied, free, clear, enlightened.
When I first heard teachings on rigpa, I saw that I had experienced it, although it is not really an experience in the way so many spiritual experiences are. There is no alteration of the senses and there is no emotional or mental component. It is like seeing how things really are for the first time. It could be described as the lifting off of a cloak of ordinariness to see the clear light of day, or like waking up from a dream and seeing that the dream was not reality.
My first conscious experience of this was my initial LSD trip, which, because it was a drug-induced experience, I felt didn’t really count. As I lifted off, I suddenly saw and felt in a totally immediate way how things really are, how everything is connected to everything else, how everything is magical and radiant and totally perfect and loveable. There were, however, lots of visual manifestations and very definite bodily sensations. It was, after all, a drug. But I knew I had seen the truth and that nothing short of this vision of reality would ever suffice.
This powerful initiation was the impetus for our trip to India in search of a guru. I had another experience of it once in the early 70’s in the courtyard of Baba’s Ganeshpuri ashram late one evening as I sat hoping he would come out. A very subtle but enormous shift suddenly occurred which dissolved all psychic contraction. Everything ordinary and dualistic and problematic just fell away. There I was, fully enlightened. I knew it was the highest experience possible.
During the time it lasted, I knew that I knew everything, although there was no content to it. I sensed that if I had wanted to, I could access any fact, time or place, but there was no need. Things were as they were and it was all sublime, while at the same time completely ordinary. The word that came to mind was “real.” This was the real nature of life. Baba never did come out, but it didn’t matter at all, as all desire had vanished.
Nothing in my visual field was different in any way that I could put my finger on, yet my experience was totally transformed. There was no ego, yet my sense of myself was intact. There was no dissociation or anything the remotest bit weird. There was not a problem anywhere. It lasted about a half hour but changed me forever.
For some reason I did not share this experience with anyone. Perhaps it was because there was not the vocabulary in that culture to share such a thing. When I first heard the teachings on rigpa, the language used rang a bell and I knew that was exactly what they were talking about. It matched perfectly with my experience. It was the experience of my first LSD trip and later, the experience in Baba’s courtyard. For me, it was a kind of clarity, a combination of presence and detachment, and a profound falling away of all grasping.
Having the egoic substratum of my life dissolve was totally shattering – and yet completely unremarkable. It was so strange – a complete simplicity amidst everything as it was. It could be likened to the idea of being the still center of a cyclone. It was Reality without any bells and whistles. There were no colored lights, no angels or celestial choirs or orgasmic waves of bliss. It was the natural state of mind without the so-called poisons.
Resetting the Goal
To hear that this was the goal was a great relief to me. I had spent years trying to attain some kind of spiritual experience which I thought of as necessarily associated with surrender, with bliss, with powerful shakti, with the blue pearl, or with being uplifted to some heretofore unimagined heights.
Now I was told that this simple experience was really the goal. It was a total validation for me because it is what I had actually been told by an inner voice in the courtyard experience. Some soundless voice in my mind had told me that this was the highest, the goal. It took a long time for me to get to the place where my own experience matched what I was being taught.
The formula I had latched onto from Baba was to get shaktipat (or kundalini awakening), and then to continue meditating and having devotion to the guru as everything unfolded automatically. In retrospect this is exactly what happened, though it unfolded in a totally unexpected and unforeseen way.
Although there were a lot of guidelines during the dzogchen retreats as to how to facilitate the awakening to rigpa, eventually I figured out that once again, it was really grace. There are, however, ways to become grace-prone, an expression I first heard from Adyashanti.
The completion of the ngondro, for example, made a practitioner more grace-prone. One of the practices of the ngondro is the practice of guru yoga, merging one’s mind with the mind of the guru. The others are taking refuge, generating compassion, making offerings, and confessing which includes a purification of the effects of non-virtue.
Since I had faith in this path, I was willing and even eager to follow it as it was laid out. I remembered the stories of Sri Ramakrishna and how he had followed the sadhanas of many different spiritual paths, including even Christianity.
Recently Swamiji read from an unpublished talk of Baba’s in which he spoke on the mind, saying that it is another name for the Goddess Chiti. He said that all feelings are the shadow of the mind, which is consciousness. This sounded more like the Buddhist teachings on rigpa, but for some reason I was never able to hear Baba’s teachings in a way that included my experience. I would get hung up on “the Goddess Chiti” and project some kind of extraordinary outer force.
During a study group at Swamiji’s Shiva Ashram, I came across a description of the 4 states which are laid out in Kashmir Shaivism. I had heard descriptions of the waking, dream, deep sleep and turiya states many, many times, but never had I connected my experience of “enlightenment” in the courtyard with the turiya state. But the description fit and suddenly I did make that connection.
It is likely that most of the things that I had gotten from the Buddhists are also present in Hindu philosophy, but they had not touched me in the same way. When I first moved into the gonpa, it seemed that the Buddhists talked about things that I had not heard before, but as time went by, I came to the conclusion that most (but not all) of the differences were ones of attitude, focus, or semantics.
I am reminded of T. S. Eliot’s deeply provocative words: “…the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and to know the place for the first time.” It is an apt description of the spiritual path.
I concluded that it was simply my karma, for whatever reasons, to have finally arrived at the place – with the Buddhists - where I could hear and relate to the spiritual teachings and apply them directly to my life. Although the way they were expressed seemed to be the reason why they clicked, I do believe that it really was a matter of readiness and karma.
Expanding My Mind
When I first heard about rigpa and the pointing out instructions it all seemed quite clear and understandable, but for many there was the same kind of vagueness and confusion that I had experienced when I first began with Baba. People attended a retreat during which pointing out instructions were given, but then they were not completely certain about what it was or if they had really experienced it. Many assumed that they did, since they had gone through the outer initiation. I harbored doubts, however, based on my observations that the initiation didn’t seem to have changed them.
This was my critical and judgmental mind at work. My reasoning was that if a person really had that experience, then how could he or she behave in unenlightened ways? If they really knew the truth, why didn’t they apply the wisdom of the experience to their lives?
This was really a judgment of myself. I believed that I hadn’t gotten what I wanted from spiritual life when I first moved into the gonpa because I still behaved in negative ways. For me “getting it” didn’t count unless it changed things on the ground, in ordinary life. I knew I was still proud, angry, jealous, greedy and ambitious. And so, of course, I saw these qualities in others.
I took my first dzogchen retreat during the summer of 1997, having completed the required set of practices called the ngondro. This retreat included receiving the pointing out instructions from Lama Drimed, and also teachings on what that meant and how to proceed. According to the new formula I had now adopted, I focused on accessing rigpa using dzogchen techniques. Fortunately I knew what I was going for, but that certainly didn’t mean that accessing it was easy. It had eluded me all the years since that courtyard experience in Ganeshpuri back in the early 70’s.
I knew that I was still full of striving and effort, although I understood that rigpa required a relaxation of the mind. Sogyal Rinpoche calls it spaciousness, a wonderful description. I began to make efforts to expand my mind – to make it more spacious - which were fruitful. As the mind becomes larger, it loses specificity, just as the details of the ground change when one is taking off in an airplane. The lack of harmony and the clutter of the airport and environs disappear as one rises. The higher you get, the more beautiful everything looks.
The irritations, desires, and sadness over past hurts slowly began to fade away as my mind relaxed and expanded. I began to look at surrender in a different light. Rather than surrender to an outer guru, to a set of beliefs, to specific conduct, to particular practices – all of which felt limiting to me - I could surrender to a more spacious version of my own mind, or as they say, the nature of mind.
One of the first things that struck me about the Buddhist teachings that I was receiving was that they seemed to focus on the mind almost entirely. I found it odd that the goal was something they called “the nature of mind.” The guru “pointed out” this “nature of mind” to you and then your path began. The initiation into the path of dzogchen was the “pointing out instructions.”
This was in contrast to the “shaktipat” initiation of Baba, but there were some points of similarity. In both cases it was an initiation into the spiritual path. Around Baba, people got shaktipat and had a whole variety of experiences. Some had physical kriyas or spontaneous movements, not unlike some of the manifestations of spirit associated with what we used to call “holy rollers.” Others had more subtle inner experiences. Some experienced samadhi or meditative absorption. Some did not have any perceptible experience, but their lives began to change.
The whole thing was initially quite confusing to me. I couldn’t pinpoint any particular experience of shaktipat, yet there I was living in an ashram and doing full- time spiritual practices and furthermore, I had accepted a guru and aspired to surrender completely. So obviously something had happened. Later, I realized that I could meditate, which I felt I could not before. Actually, I realized that a certain experience which I was familiar with was, in fact, meditation.
Before meeting Baba, we had spent time with a yogi who instructed me in meditation, saying to sit quietly and empty my mind of all thoughts. No matter how hard I tried, I could not eradicate all thoughts from my mind. The idea of meditation as an absence of thoughts lingered in my mind and made it difficult for me to recognize the effortless gliding into an altered state in Baba’s presence as meditation.
It took a long time to reach the conclusion that I was spiritually awakened. It was more subtle than what I had understood it to be. Also, I think it was partly due to the fact that it was not something completely new for me. We learned that if one died after having been awakened, but before attaining realization, one would be reborn and continue on the path. It was called “yoga bhrastha.” It seemed a likely category for me since there was not something new in my consciousness with Baba, but rather a formal entry onto the path.
Ordinary Mind or Awareness
Later with the Buddhists, I learned that their approach is to delineate two aspects of mind. Of course, on any non-dual path everything is ultimately one, but on the relative plane, there are two. One is the realm of “ordinary mind,” which is characterized by the “poisons of the mind” - anger, ignorance, greed, desire, jealousy and pride. It is the world of egoic existence where everything is experienced through the lens of the “little me.”
The other aspect of mind is “rigpa” or awakened mind. This is Awareness, with a capital A. It is the realm of pure experience, of things as they are without the poisons of the mind. It is the “nature of mind,” pure, unsullied, free, clear, enlightened.
When I first heard teachings on rigpa, I saw that I had experienced it, although it is not really an experience in the way so many spiritual experiences are. There is no alteration of the senses and there is no emotional or mental component. It is like seeing how things really are for the first time. It could be described as the lifting off of a cloak of ordinariness to see the clear light of day, or like waking up from a dream and seeing that the dream was not reality.
My first conscious experience of this was my initial LSD trip, which, because it was a drug-induced experience, I felt didn’t really count. As I lifted off, I suddenly saw and felt in a totally immediate way how things really are, how everything is connected to everything else, how everything is magical and radiant and totally perfect and loveable. There were, however, lots of visual manifestations and very definite bodily sensations. It was, after all, a drug. But I knew I had seen the truth and that nothing short of this vision of reality would ever suffice.
This powerful initiation was the impetus for our trip to India in search of a guru. I had another experience of it once in the early 70’s in the courtyard of Baba’s Ganeshpuri ashram late one evening as I sat hoping he would come out. A very subtle but enormous shift suddenly occurred which dissolved all psychic contraction. Everything ordinary and dualistic and problematic just fell away. There I was, fully enlightened. I knew it was the highest experience possible.
During the time it lasted, I knew that I knew everything, although there was no content to it. I sensed that if I had wanted to, I could access any fact, time or place, but there was no need. Things were as they were and it was all sublime, while at the same time completely ordinary. The word that came to mind was “real.” This was the real nature of life. Baba never did come out, but it didn’t matter at all, as all desire had vanished.
Nothing in my visual field was different in any way that I could put my finger on, yet my experience was totally transformed. There was no ego, yet my sense of myself was intact. There was no dissociation or anything the remotest bit weird. There was not a problem anywhere. It lasted about a half hour but changed me forever.
For some reason I did not share this experience with anyone. Perhaps it was because there was not the vocabulary in that culture to share such a thing. When I first heard the teachings on rigpa, the language used rang a bell and I knew that was exactly what they were talking about. It matched perfectly with my experience. It was the experience of my first LSD trip and later, the experience in Baba’s courtyard. For me, it was a kind of clarity, a combination of presence and detachment, and a profound falling away of all grasping.
Having the egoic substratum of my life dissolve was totally shattering – and yet completely unremarkable. It was so strange – a complete simplicity amidst everything as it was. It could be likened to the idea of being the still center of a cyclone. It was Reality without any bells and whistles. There were no colored lights, no angels or celestial choirs or orgasmic waves of bliss. It was the natural state of mind without the so-called poisons.
Resetting the Goal
To hear that this was the goal was a great relief to me. I had spent years trying to attain some kind of spiritual experience which I thought of as necessarily associated with surrender, with bliss, with powerful shakti, with the blue pearl, or with being uplifted to some heretofore unimagined heights.
Now I was told that this simple experience was really the goal. It was a total validation for me because it is what I had actually been told by an inner voice in the courtyard experience. Some soundless voice in my mind had told me that this was the highest, the goal. It took a long time for me to get to the place where my own experience matched what I was being taught.
The formula I had latched onto from Baba was to get shaktipat (or kundalini awakening), and then to continue meditating and having devotion to the guru as everything unfolded automatically. In retrospect this is exactly what happened, though it unfolded in a totally unexpected and unforeseen way.
Although there were a lot of guidelines during the dzogchen retreats as to how to facilitate the awakening to rigpa, eventually I figured out that once again, it was really grace. There are, however, ways to become grace-prone, an expression I first heard from Adyashanti.
The completion of the ngondro, for example, made a practitioner more grace-prone. One of the practices of the ngondro is the practice of guru yoga, merging one’s mind with the mind of the guru. The others are taking refuge, generating compassion, making offerings, and confessing which includes a purification of the effects of non-virtue.
Since I had faith in this path, I was willing and even eager to follow it as it was laid out. I remembered the stories of Sri Ramakrishna and how he had followed the sadhanas of many different spiritual paths, including even Christianity.
Recently Swamiji read from an unpublished talk of Baba’s in which he spoke on the mind, saying that it is another name for the Goddess Chiti. He said that all feelings are the shadow of the mind, which is consciousness. This sounded more like the Buddhist teachings on rigpa, but for some reason I was never able to hear Baba’s teachings in a way that included my experience. I would get hung up on “the Goddess Chiti” and project some kind of extraordinary outer force.
During a study group at Swamiji’s Shiva Ashram, I came across a description of the 4 states which are laid out in Kashmir Shaivism. I had heard descriptions of the waking, dream, deep sleep and turiya states many, many times, but never had I connected my experience of “enlightenment” in the courtyard with the turiya state. But the description fit and suddenly I did make that connection.
It is likely that most of the things that I had gotten from the Buddhists are also present in Hindu philosophy, but they had not touched me in the same way. When I first moved into the gonpa, it seemed that the Buddhists talked about things that I had not heard before, but as time went by, I came to the conclusion that most (but not all) of the differences were ones of attitude, focus, or semantics.
I am reminded of T. S. Eliot’s deeply provocative words: “…the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and to know the place for the first time.” It is an apt description of the spiritual path.
I concluded that it was simply my karma, for whatever reasons, to have finally arrived at the place – with the Buddhists - where I could hear and relate to the spiritual teachings and apply them directly to my life. Although the way they were expressed seemed to be the reason why they clicked, I do believe that it really was a matter of readiness and karma.
Expanding My Mind
When I first heard about rigpa and the pointing out instructions it all seemed quite clear and understandable, but for many there was the same kind of vagueness and confusion that I had experienced when I first began with Baba. People attended a retreat during which pointing out instructions were given, but then they were not completely certain about what it was or if they had really experienced it. Many assumed that they did, since they had gone through the outer initiation. I harbored doubts, however, based on my observations that the initiation didn’t seem to have changed them.
This was my critical and judgmental mind at work. My reasoning was that if a person really had that experience, then how could he or she behave in unenlightened ways? If they really knew the truth, why didn’t they apply the wisdom of the experience to their lives?
This was really a judgment of myself. I believed that I hadn’t gotten what I wanted from spiritual life when I first moved into the gonpa because I still behaved in negative ways. For me “getting it” didn’t count unless it changed things on the ground, in ordinary life. I knew I was still proud, angry, jealous, greedy and ambitious. And so, of course, I saw these qualities in others.
I took my first dzogchen retreat during the summer of 1997, having completed the required set of practices called the ngondro. This retreat included receiving the pointing out instructions from Lama Drimed, and also teachings on what that meant and how to proceed. According to the new formula I had now adopted, I focused on accessing rigpa using dzogchen techniques. Fortunately I knew what I was going for, but that certainly didn’t mean that accessing it was easy. It had eluded me all the years since that courtyard experience in Ganeshpuri back in the early 70’s.
I knew that I was still full of striving and effort, although I understood that rigpa required a relaxation of the mind. Sogyal Rinpoche calls it spaciousness, a wonderful description. I began to make efforts to expand my mind – to make it more spacious - which were fruitful. As the mind becomes larger, it loses specificity, just as the details of the ground change when one is taking off in an airplane. The lack of harmony and the clutter of the airport and environs disappear as one rises. The higher you get, the more beautiful everything looks.
The irritations, desires, and sadness over past hurts slowly began to fade away as my mind relaxed and expanded. I began to look at surrender in a different light. Rather than surrender to an outer guru, to a set of beliefs, to specific conduct, to particular practices – all of which felt limiting to me - I could surrender to a more spacious version of my own mind, or as they say, the nature of mind.
Saturday, May 1, 2010
Chapter 1: Self Effort
If the Buddha Could Have Enlightened You, He Would Have
The first time I met Chagdud Rinpoche at a book signing in the Bay Area, he said in his talk, “If the Buddha could have enlightened you, he would have, but he couldn’t. You have to do it for yourself.” I felt an electric thrill as I heard these words and knew that this was a message for me. What he was saying pointed to a very different focus from that which I had experienced in my 22 years in Siddha Yoga, where the prevailing idea was that the guru will take you across the ocean of samsara or worldly life.
Although Baba often spoke about self effort, still, there was a pervasive notion that reliance on the guru’s grace was the key to all attainment. Everyone takes away their own message from any spiritual teachings, and for whatever reason, what I heard around Baba was that once I received shaktipat or spiritual awakening, everything would unfold automatically. All I had to do was surrender, have faith, and follow the directions of the guru.
During that first meeting with Chagdud Rinpoche, I immediately intuited that he was the real thing and so I took to heart all that he said. Here was an enlightened guru saying that it was up to me to take responsibility for my own liberation. Although Baba spoke of disciple’s grace along with guru’s grace, the emphasis of the culture around him was that guru’s grace was the main thing.
When I heard Rinpoche say that if the Buddha could have enlightened you, he would have, but he couldn’t, there was a visceral feeling that it was now time for me to do whatever it was that was needed. Something from my own mind and my own psychology were now required.
It wasn’t that I rejected Baba’s teaching that once grace is received everything unfolds automatically. It was part of that automatic unfolding that the opportunity arose to proceed in a new way. This new direction was an aspect of the original initiation I had received. It was a reinvigoration and took me back to the early days with Baba when I was full of enthusiasm. I was eager to do whatever this new path required.
At the beginning of my time with the Buddhists, the efforts required were quite physical and external, e.g. 111,000 prostrations, but at a certain point, I began to make more subtle kinds of effort, ones that involved acute mindfulness, honesty and self-awareness. This was where the real growth occurred.
When I moved to Rigdzin Ling, the North American headquarters of Chagdud Gonpa Foundation, in 1996, I felt uncooked, raw with unprocessed pain. I wasn’t satisfied with myself or the spiritual work I had done. The Buddhists provided me with a graduate course on the path. There were a number of things that I found different and wonderful. In all fairness, there were also things I missed, but here I want to paint a picture of what I got from the Buddhists.
Beginner’s Mind, Once Again
This story is autobiographical and is not about the pros and cons of the two paths, even if it may appear so. It is a sharing of what happened to me. As Shakespeare said, “Ripeness is all,” and that is the real story here. Just as in ordinary life, one moves on from life with one’s parents to form other relationships where one, hopefully, has more mature experiences, so too in spiritual life, there is a natural growth process. The unfolding never ceases.
I immediately was drawn to Rinpoche’s idea of self effort and felt that I could begin again and perhaps recapture beginner’s mind. I knew that I was not enlightened. I felt that nothing I had done so far had fundamentally changed me. The efforts at chanting, seva (selfless service) and meditation had not completely transformed me. Although I had learned a lot and was firmly on the path, I was not where I wanted to be. So, immediately, one of the things I got from my first meeting with Rinpoche was a new idea of spiritual practice.
I had spent a lot of time in my life making efforts and striving, but the striving I had done around Baba and Gurumayi was more along the lines of getting acceptance, attention, recognition and love from them. Because I had been so caught up in the draw of the outer life of the ashram, I hadn’t succeeded in what I felt was the deeper inner work on myself. I intuited and also hoped fervently that the Buddhists would lead me in this direction.
As time went on and I began to do yearly retreats, I found that it was more than the different focus on self effort that I appreciated. The culture at the gonpa was also focused on results. There was hands-on guidance, an inquiry into where you actually were in the process. In meetings with the lama there was always inquiry into what was going on for me personally, which I greatly appreciated.
Near the end of my time at the gonpa Lama Drimed began to focus on the psychological aspects of spiritual life. This felt right to me. I had adopted the eastern attitude of denigrating psychology and it took a while to make a shift. I discovered that for some time the field of psychology had also been developing along more spiritual lines and that there were now a considerable number of reputable psychologists who were practicing meditation and the spiritual path.
This integration continues to take place and is, I feel, a necessary aspect of the way that eastern thought will impact the west. As Buddhism and Hinduism are integrated into western culture, they will necessarily integrate science and psychology since these are the “religions” of western culture.
One aspect of the focus on self-effort that was helpful to me was the shift from the need to surrender to the guru, to the need to find my own experience of awakened mind. When I met Baba, I felt great relief in the feeling that all I had to do was surrender to him and everything would be taken care of.
I went through the process that psychologists would call transference. I meditated on pleasing Baba, on getting validation from him. And of course, in time I got angry. Since I had made the effort of surrendering to an ideal of perfection, every aspect of life around him that I judged to be insufficiently ideal or perfect was a cause for inner turmoil.
It seemed that no one ever pointed out to me what I was doing or how to overcome this problem. For many years afterward, I blamed Baba and Gurumayi and the ashram for my own lack of maturity. I lived in a self created world in which I didn’t attract to me any kind of advice or guidance that would shatter the myths I was clinging to. My growing up came agonizingly slowly. Such was the strength of my ego-clinging.
I once asked Khentrul Rinpoche, my philosophy teacher at the gonpa, what my biggest obstacle was. He didn’t want to answer but I pressed him. He finally said, “Grasping.” At another point, Lama Drimed said the same thing. Perhaps he used the word “fixation,” but it is the same quality of attachment. I am stubborn and change course slowly, like a huge battleship. I can do the kind of effort that requires dogged perseverance, but I needed to discover a more subtle and relaxed kind of effort that arose from a wider perspective.
After leaving Siddha Yoga, I spent years recounting to myself the flaws of the path and the gurus, completely ignoring my complicity in the game I had been playing. When I came to the Buddhists, I was more mature and had a different attitude. Perhaps it was the result of all that suffering, combined with time and its natural maturing effect.
A Model for Life
I was happy to discover that in Lama Drimed, I had found a teacher who had a natural reluctance to play the traditional guru role. I thought that it might be related to the fact that we both have Uranus in the 7th house, the house of relationship. Uranus carries great democratic force. It is anti-hierarchical and is considered the destroyer of structures. Again, it might have been the fact that he was an American and younger than me.
In any case, he allowed me to relate to him as an equal. He listened patiently to me, never pulled rank, never even hinted that I should be more cognizant of the difference in our positions. He was unfailingly kind, compassionate and honest. For all of this I am enormously grateful.
He provided me with a model of how I could be. I could never be like, nor did I ever want to be like, Baba or Gurumayi. They simply were not models for me. The guru’s primary job is to model the highest state, the enlightened state, but I think that the human element is also important. At least it is for me. I always wanted a model I could relate to, to emulate in a human or outer way, as well as in a purely spiritual way.
Swamiji had found this in Baba. On our final walk before setting off to Ann Arbor to start the ashram, Baba stopped and turned to him, saying, “Imitate me and everything will be fine.” In spite of this, I had never really liked it or understood it. I had a revelation one day in Australia that Baba had provided the perfect model for him for his life. He wanted to be just like him from day one. When I asked him about this, he affirmed that it was so. He always felt that Baba was perfect. He appreciated and even reveled in his human side in a way I never could.
It seems evident that one does not have to be like one’s guru, or find a guru like oneself, in order to attain the goal. The stories of great beings make this abundantly clear. The need for a model is more psychological. It is what a parent provides – a human model of what it is to be a human being. If one needs reparenting or remedial parenting, then one may look to the guru for this.
I think this is one of the reasons why Lama Drimed and also Adyashanti shy away from the traditional eastern model of the guru/disciple relationship. Although this relationship often begins with projection and transference, I think that it has to grow beyond this, at least for westerners. This focus is one of the things that I so appreciated about Adyashanti. He taught that the student first looks to the teacher for the experience of buddha nature, and then later discovers that the real job is to find it in himself or herself.
It was very important to me to find a teacher who encouraged me to let go of projections and look within for the truth. At one point in my relationship with Lama Drimed, I told him that I was no longer in love with him. He was very pleased – and so was I. This was the kind of model that really worked for me. I always wanted to be the kind of teacher who does not rely on one's students to fulfill one's needs., but holds their progress as the goal of all interactions.
Honor Yourself…
Baba always said, “Honor yourself, love yourself, worship yourself; God dwells within you as you.” I thrilled to this teaching, but at the time I was not ready or able to embody it. I didn’t have any idea who I could be if I were not serving him. All of the rewards in the life around him appeared to me to be associated with closeness to the guru.
It wasn’t until my time with the Buddhists that I began to glimpse for myself how I could apply this teaching of worshipping myself. I was very fortunate to find myself in a small retreat center which had no calling to attract new people or proselytize in any way. It was meant for retreat and was very quiet except for three times a year when huge ritual retreats, called drubchens, were held.
I didn’t have to subscribe to a cause or be part of a movement. As a new person there, I was at the bottom of the class, with a low or non-existent profile. My ambition lingered, but there was no field in which I could exercise it. I knew this was a very good situation for me. I didn’t have any image to uphold or to buttress. I could fall apart without ruining any image. I could be an anonymous seeker and focus on inner growth. Whenever I felt twinges of ambition, I would remind myself of these benefits.
When I first told Lama Drimed that I wanted to move to the gonpa, right after the ngondro retreat I took with him in August, 1996, he said, in effect, “Rinpoche now lives in Brazil. I am not him. This place is boring. You have a life. You wouldn’t be happy here.” I didn’t argue, but I knew that I didn’t have a life and furthermore, that I wanted a life more boring than my life had been in Siddha Yoga. I moved in and even though it may have been boring a lot of the time, it was less stressful and provided the environment I needed to grow. I developed a taste for what I used to call boredom which has served me well.
Recently I was reading a book about Hinduism and Buddhism in which the distinction was made that Hinduism is a religion whereas Buddhism is not, that it is a philosophy or a way of life – or as one writer put it, a “thought-complex.” This points to the fact that Buddhism focuses on the individual psychology and is, in a way, a program of self-help – the goal being happiness.
There came a time when that was exactly what I needed. I had been awakened, had immersed myself in traditional ashram life and had practiced yoga and meditation. What was needed was purification of the personality, or what Adyashanti called the process of embodiment. This is the integration of the spiritual vision and values with the human side of life and it was this effort at integrating that now consumed my interest.
The first time I met Chagdud Rinpoche at a book signing in the Bay Area, he said in his talk, “If the Buddha could have enlightened you, he would have, but he couldn’t. You have to do it for yourself.” I felt an electric thrill as I heard these words and knew that this was a message for me. What he was saying pointed to a very different focus from that which I had experienced in my 22 years in Siddha Yoga, where the prevailing idea was that the guru will take you across the ocean of samsara or worldly life.
Although Baba often spoke about self effort, still, there was a pervasive notion that reliance on the guru’s grace was the key to all attainment. Everyone takes away their own message from any spiritual teachings, and for whatever reason, what I heard around Baba was that once I received shaktipat or spiritual awakening, everything would unfold automatically. All I had to do was surrender, have faith, and follow the directions of the guru.
During that first meeting with Chagdud Rinpoche, I immediately intuited that he was the real thing and so I took to heart all that he said. Here was an enlightened guru saying that it was up to me to take responsibility for my own liberation. Although Baba spoke of disciple’s grace along with guru’s grace, the emphasis of the culture around him was that guru’s grace was the main thing.
When I heard Rinpoche say that if the Buddha could have enlightened you, he would have, but he couldn’t, there was a visceral feeling that it was now time for me to do whatever it was that was needed. Something from my own mind and my own psychology were now required.
It wasn’t that I rejected Baba’s teaching that once grace is received everything unfolds automatically. It was part of that automatic unfolding that the opportunity arose to proceed in a new way. This new direction was an aspect of the original initiation I had received. It was a reinvigoration and took me back to the early days with Baba when I was full of enthusiasm. I was eager to do whatever this new path required.
At the beginning of my time with the Buddhists, the efforts required were quite physical and external, e.g. 111,000 prostrations, but at a certain point, I began to make more subtle kinds of effort, ones that involved acute mindfulness, honesty and self-awareness. This was where the real growth occurred.
When I moved to Rigdzin Ling, the North American headquarters of Chagdud Gonpa Foundation, in 1996, I felt uncooked, raw with unprocessed pain. I wasn’t satisfied with myself or the spiritual work I had done. The Buddhists provided me with a graduate course on the path. There were a number of things that I found different and wonderful. In all fairness, there were also things I missed, but here I want to paint a picture of what I got from the Buddhists.
Beginner’s Mind, Once Again
This story is autobiographical and is not about the pros and cons of the two paths, even if it may appear so. It is a sharing of what happened to me. As Shakespeare said, “Ripeness is all,” and that is the real story here. Just as in ordinary life, one moves on from life with one’s parents to form other relationships where one, hopefully, has more mature experiences, so too in spiritual life, there is a natural growth process. The unfolding never ceases.
I immediately was drawn to Rinpoche’s idea of self effort and felt that I could begin again and perhaps recapture beginner’s mind. I knew that I was not enlightened. I felt that nothing I had done so far had fundamentally changed me. The efforts at chanting, seva (selfless service) and meditation had not completely transformed me. Although I had learned a lot and was firmly on the path, I was not where I wanted to be. So, immediately, one of the things I got from my first meeting with Rinpoche was a new idea of spiritual practice.
I had spent a lot of time in my life making efforts and striving, but the striving I had done around Baba and Gurumayi was more along the lines of getting acceptance, attention, recognition and love from them. Because I had been so caught up in the draw of the outer life of the ashram, I hadn’t succeeded in what I felt was the deeper inner work on myself. I intuited and also hoped fervently that the Buddhists would lead me in this direction.
As time went on and I began to do yearly retreats, I found that it was more than the different focus on self effort that I appreciated. The culture at the gonpa was also focused on results. There was hands-on guidance, an inquiry into where you actually were in the process. In meetings with the lama there was always inquiry into what was going on for me personally, which I greatly appreciated.
Near the end of my time at the gonpa Lama Drimed began to focus on the psychological aspects of spiritual life. This felt right to me. I had adopted the eastern attitude of denigrating psychology and it took a while to make a shift. I discovered that for some time the field of psychology had also been developing along more spiritual lines and that there were now a considerable number of reputable psychologists who were practicing meditation and the spiritual path.
This integration continues to take place and is, I feel, a necessary aspect of the way that eastern thought will impact the west. As Buddhism and Hinduism are integrated into western culture, they will necessarily integrate science and psychology since these are the “religions” of western culture.
One aspect of the focus on self-effort that was helpful to me was the shift from the need to surrender to the guru, to the need to find my own experience of awakened mind. When I met Baba, I felt great relief in the feeling that all I had to do was surrender to him and everything would be taken care of.
I went through the process that psychologists would call transference. I meditated on pleasing Baba, on getting validation from him. And of course, in time I got angry. Since I had made the effort of surrendering to an ideal of perfection, every aspect of life around him that I judged to be insufficiently ideal or perfect was a cause for inner turmoil.
It seemed that no one ever pointed out to me what I was doing or how to overcome this problem. For many years afterward, I blamed Baba and Gurumayi and the ashram for my own lack of maturity. I lived in a self created world in which I didn’t attract to me any kind of advice or guidance that would shatter the myths I was clinging to. My growing up came agonizingly slowly. Such was the strength of my ego-clinging.
I once asked Khentrul Rinpoche, my philosophy teacher at the gonpa, what my biggest obstacle was. He didn’t want to answer but I pressed him. He finally said, “Grasping.” At another point, Lama Drimed said the same thing. Perhaps he used the word “fixation,” but it is the same quality of attachment. I am stubborn and change course slowly, like a huge battleship. I can do the kind of effort that requires dogged perseverance, but I needed to discover a more subtle and relaxed kind of effort that arose from a wider perspective.
After leaving Siddha Yoga, I spent years recounting to myself the flaws of the path and the gurus, completely ignoring my complicity in the game I had been playing. When I came to the Buddhists, I was more mature and had a different attitude. Perhaps it was the result of all that suffering, combined with time and its natural maturing effect.
A Model for Life
I was happy to discover that in Lama Drimed, I had found a teacher who had a natural reluctance to play the traditional guru role. I thought that it might be related to the fact that we both have Uranus in the 7th house, the house of relationship. Uranus carries great democratic force. It is anti-hierarchical and is considered the destroyer of structures. Again, it might have been the fact that he was an American and younger than me.
In any case, he allowed me to relate to him as an equal. He listened patiently to me, never pulled rank, never even hinted that I should be more cognizant of the difference in our positions. He was unfailingly kind, compassionate and honest. For all of this I am enormously grateful.
He provided me with a model of how I could be. I could never be like, nor did I ever want to be like, Baba or Gurumayi. They simply were not models for me. The guru’s primary job is to model the highest state, the enlightened state, but I think that the human element is also important. At least it is for me. I always wanted a model I could relate to, to emulate in a human or outer way, as well as in a purely spiritual way.
Swamiji had found this in Baba. On our final walk before setting off to Ann Arbor to start the ashram, Baba stopped and turned to him, saying, “Imitate me and everything will be fine.” In spite of this, I had never really liked it or understood it. I had a revelation one day in Australia that Baba had provided the perfect model for him for his life. He wanted to be just like him from day one. When I asked him about this, he affirmed that it was so. He always felt that Baba was perfect. He appreciated and even reveled in his human side in a way I never could.
It seems evident that one does not have to be like one’s guru, or find a guru like oneself, in order to attain the goal. The stories of great beings make this abundantly clear. The need for a model is more psychological. It is what a parent provides – a human model of what it is to be a human being. If one needs reparenting or remedial parenting, then one may look to the guru for this.
I think this is one of the reasons why Lama Drimed and also Adyashanti shy away from the traditional eastern model of the guru/disciple relationship. Although this relationship often begins with projection and transference, I think that it has to grow beyond this, at least for westerners. This focus is one of the things that I so appreciated about Adyashanti. He taught that the student first looks to the teacher for the experience of buddha nature, and then later discovers that the real job is to find it in himself or herself.
It was very important to me to find a teacher who encouraged me to let go of projections and look within for the truth. At one point in my relationship with Lama Drimed, I told him that I was no longer in love with him. He was very pleased – and so was I. This was the kind of model that really worked for me. I always wanted to be the kind of teacher who does not rely on one's students to fulfill one's needs., but holds their progress as the goal of all interactions.
Honor Yourself…
Baba always said, “Honor yourself, love yourself, worship yourself; God dwells within you as you.” I thrilled to this teaching, but at the time I was not ready or able to embody it. I didn’t have any idea who I could be if I were not serving him. All of the rewards in the life around him appeared to me to be associated with closeness to the guru.
It wasn’t until my time with the Buddhists that I began to glimpse for myself how I could apply this teaching of worshipping myself. I was very fortunate to find myself in a small retreat center which had no calling to attract new people or proselytize in any way. It was meant for retreat and was very quiet except for three times a year when huge ritual retreats, called drubchens, were held.
I didn’t have to subscribe to a cause or be part of a movement. As a new person there, I was at the bottom of the class, with a low or non-existent profile. My ambition lingered, but there was no field in which I could exercise it. I knew this was a very good situation for me. I didn’t have any image to uphold or to buttress. I could fall apart without ruining any image. I could be an anonymous seeker and focus on inner growth. Whenever I felt twinges of ambition, I would remind myself of these benefits.
When I first told Lama Drimed that I wanted to move to the gonpa, right after the ngondro retreat I took with him in August, 1996, he said, in effect, “Rinpoche now lives in Brazil. I am not him. This place is boring. You have a life. You wouldn’t be happy here.” I didn’t argue, but I knew that I didn’t have a life and furthermore, that I wanted a life more boring than my life had been in Siddha Yoga. I moved in and even though it may have been boring a lot of the time, it was less stressful and provided the environment I needed to grow. I developed a taste for what I used to call boredom which has served me well.
Recently I was reading a book about Hinduism and Buddhism in which the distinction was made that Hinduism is a religion whereas Buddhism is not, that it is a philosophy or a way of life – or as one writer put it, a “thought-complex.” This points to the fact that Buddhism focuses on the individual psychology and is, in a way, a program of self-help – the goal being happiness.
There came a time when that was exactly what I needed. I had been awakened, had immersed myself in traditional ashram life and had practiced yoga and meditation. What was needed was purification of the personality, or what Adyashanti called the process of embodiment. This is the integration of the spiritual vision and values with the human side of life and it was this effort at integrating that now consumed my interest.
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