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.