Silent Musings

For those of us who have enrolled ourselves in the process of spiritual cultivation there is an inevitable result that few ever imagined at the beginning of the quest. Failure. Boldfaced, with a capital F. After all, when we think of cultivating our authentic selves, we are inclined to see spirits growing and blossoming into beautifully enlightened beings, wonderful sights for the sore eyes of our humanity. We certainly don’t envision a painstaking process of withering and dying, of burning up the vestiges of our forsaken selves.

Life can be a cruel teacher. She entices us with grand visions, and occasional flashes of luminous brilliance. In those flashes we imagine that there is some sustainable state of pure knowing and loving being. We imagine ourselves as that being. Conceptually, we may even believe that this is true, and yet somehow this vision remains tantalizingly out of reach. So we seek the correct path toward a permanent merger into our birthright. We may even find at times that we think we’re there. But then it’s snatched away again ever so torturously. What are we to do? Many of us wander this landscape for years and years.

Failure is not easy to take, especially not for the precocious such as we are. It is a total devastation of the constructs of our collective mind. It may not sound like much, but in fact, it’s everything. Our entire world collapses into death, moment after moment, ad infinitum. We must learn to let go of everything. Over and over again, until we are no longer capable of holding on. Completely adrift, we may find ourselves washed upon the shore of a strange new land. It is only here that we find real freedom. Not the concept of liberation that we’ve been pursuing all these years, but rather the complete willingness to die over and over again. To embrace the fullness of our failure, not identifying with it or anything else. Knowing nothing.

Worry not about the path that you are taking. The Beloved will destroy you eventually.

The way of love is not
a subtle argument.

The door there
is devastation.

Birds make great sky-circles
of their freedom.
How do they learn it?

They fall, and falling,
they’re given wings.

-Rumi

When I observe the world and its characters, it seems everyone is after something. Even those who seem to have moved beyond the superficial goals of the common culture are still in pursuit. Contributing, creating, expressing, manifesting … becoming. Seeking. Call it by any name you want, it ultimately begins and ends with the same conclusion. This isn’t it.

Eventually, we may come to realize the bankruptcy of our ways and begin to question the need for seeking altogether. We conclude that seeking would best be dropped, and thus we make silent vows to ourselves to let go, and may even fool ourselves into thinking we’ve succeeded. But sooner or later we realize our folly. We notice ourselves grasping at our goal, seeking non-seeking. What a cosmic joke this movement becomes!

All the while, a curious thing happens beneath the surface. Some kind of mysterious physical manifestation takes root, and begins to burn the seeker away through a process of internal combustion. This slow death is paradoxically painful, agonizing, and frustrating, as well as blissful and beautiful. Right down the the last cell of the body. Many have tried putting the experience into words, but it cannot possibly be explained. Each surrender seems so final, and yet the barely detectable remnants of the seeker remain, maintaining some identification of the me in all of this, the continuity holding it all together.

More and more, the fatigue of failure and holding on begin to wear us down, to erode us ever so slowly, like a rock at the bottom of a flowing river. One day, finally we give up, realizing that we are helplessly and hopelessly lost.

Now what?!?

This is where the real mystery begins …

I’ve looked under chairs
I’ve looked under tables
I’ve tried to find the key
To fifty million fables

They call me The Seeker
I’ve been searching low and high
I won’t get to get what I’m after
Till the day I die

-Pete Townshend

There are thousands if not millions of books, businesses, internet sites, television ads, blogs, magazines, and people on the street who will inform you, sometimes for free but usually for a price, about ways that will allow you to acquire whatever you desire. Sometimes the lure toward acquisition is straightforward, such as “how to get rich by buying and selling real estate,” or “you can lose 5 pounds a week on the Atkins diet,” but often the pitch is more subtle. If you don’t believe so, then consider the millions if not billions of man-hours that have been invested in the development of effective marketing techniques. Do you really think that investment has gone into figuring out how to give you exactly what you want or need, including more freedom of choice? Are you foolish enough to think that those techniques don’t work?

A similar phenomenon occurs when the desire is not to acquire, but rather to let go and lighten our load, getting rid of much or all of what we have that burdens us. Although it may seem to serve a “higher purpose” to simplify our lives and leave more room for “spiritual” activities, the process of letting go is as influenced by the forces of manipulation as the compulsion to acquire things. In fact, it’s really no different. Now we are “acquiring freedom from our possessions” …

Manipulation of the human mind takes place on many levels. It is as present in everyday cultural values as it is in the latest offerings from Madison Avenue. Television news used to be more subtle in its manipulative ways, but today it is just outright blatant. The first mistake we make in dealing effectively with all the manipulation that surrounds us is to believe that we are above it. Sorry, but it just ain’t so. You and I, we’re tools, to quote the vernacular.

Even though it might seem simple, losing everything is more elusive than it sounds. Sure you can declare your intentions to renounce all of your possessions and desires, even going so far as donating all your money to charity and dropping off all of your personal belongings at the Salvation Army. But letting go of the compulsion to reacquire all that has been lost is not nearly as easy as the romantic mind would like to believe.

Maybe losing everything is no better an idea than trying to acquire what we perceive as lacking. It’s exactly the same thing when you get right down to it.

Where do we turn then? I’m afraid I don’t have an answer for you.

What I can offer, though, is a radical notion for most. Get to know and love the strategist within you. Yes, that one, the one who causes all your pain and suffering. The one to whom you may deny acknowledgment or acceptance. The one who compels you to do (or at least consider doing) all kinds of crazy shit, even though you can’t seem to find any good reason. Most of us work hard every day trying to get rid of this devil, or barring that possibility, trying to hide its existence from ourselves and others.

Sorry, but it will never work. There is no strategy that can defeat the strategist. Learn to live with it, to love it, and most especially, to love the strategist in others as well. When such harmonious coexistence is finally achieved, then … well … there you Are. As Lovely as a human devil can be.

The personality is but a product of imagination. The self is the victim of this imagination. It is the taking yourself to be what you are not that binds you. The person cannot be said to exist on its own rights; it is the self that believes there is a person and is conscious of being it. Beyond the self lies the unmanifested, the causeless cause of everything. Even to talk of re-uniting the person with the self is not right, because there is no person, only a mental picture given a false reality by conviction. Nothing was divided and there is nothing to unite. - Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, from I Am That

It’s been a fair while since I last wrote. I can’t say why, exactly, because from time to time I have had a strong urge to communicate regarding this or that topic. For example, I spent this year’s Thanksgiving week in Taiwan, and had much to say about my experience there. I have also been ruminating a lot about what gets written and said about spirituality, in particular, how much one’s own personal viewpoint colors the conclusions. But mostly, I’ve been wanting to find some way to express the vastness of beauty that I find in almost every detail of life lately. One of the “problems” with beauty is that it is so inexpressible, and yet here we are as humans desperately trying to hold on to it in the form of words, pictures, music, art, poetry, and so forth. Remarkably, these feeble attempts somehow do at times capture an aspect, which is its own little miracle that can be shared amongst us. But in the meantime, between the verbal expressions written here, I find myself sitting in Silent appreciation of all that Is. Nothing in particular to say, nothing in particular to do.

It’s so difficult to describe exactly what I felt and experienced in Taiwan, for example. It was my first time visiting there, and in many ways it was exactly what I expected - noisy, busy, crowded, full of air pollution and commercialism, lots of decrepit-looking buildings … you know, the typical Asian big-city experience. And yet, there was something remarkable lurking beneath the surface for me. As I walked the streets of Taipei at night watching all the scooters whizzing by, I felt such a profound affinity for all the people I saw, and for the culture as a whole. Even the ridiculously commercialized yoga studio I visited there had a mysterious attraction to it, despite the fact that I could find no rational explanation for my experience. My girlfriend and I also spent a whole day in Kenting National Park, where the experience of peace, beauty, and love was far more expected. But even there I was completely overwhelmed by the depth of my love and appreciation for a few moments of just Being there.

I had a big realization recently. You know, the kind of realization where you already got it in a conceptual way a long time ago, but somehow didn’t realize that you hadn’t completely gotten it until right now. It goes like this. There have been countless descriptions said and written about spirituality, many of them quite beautiful and even helpful in our struggle toward awakening. And yet, what I saw is that all those descriptions of the spiritual experience simply aren’t true. Every experience is unique, and defies any and all attempts at classification. To conclude and be completely clear, if you read it in a book (or blog), you can be sure of only one thing … that it isn’t true. What is true, then? Well, I’ll leave that to you to discover for yourself. The only thing I can say is that inexpressible beauty will somehow find it’s way into the picture, eventually if not right away.

A few days ago, one of my friends posted the video below to YouTube. The subject matter is suicide, which recently claimed the life of a close friend of the two young women (one of which is my friend) in the video. While watching it, I found myself so deeply moved by its intent, its simplicity, its expression of the human condition. I don’t really know what else to say, other than that the Heart is so vast, so fragile, and yet so accepting and resilient. I find every concept of myself completely shattered.

Where do I start? Well, as my friend Walt is fond of saying, “Start at the beginning, proceed to the end, and then stop.” Fair enough. Unfortunately, this story has no beginning, nor any end for that matter. But nonetheless, there is a certain beauty to its timeliness that cannot be denied, no matter when it occurs. Perhaps I should just start from the middle.

Much of the time, I ride the train to work, the L.A. Metro Rail Gold Line to be exact. And as you might imagine, or perhaps have seen firsthand, the insides of those light rail trains are not designed to be particularly attractive from an aesthetic viewpoint. Lately however, I have found the nondescript floors of the train to be more than satisfying to the eye, in fact, to the entirety of Being. As I stare at the Blackberry/iPhone/iPod carrying crowd deeply engaged with their fantasy worlds, I choose the floor, the walls, the windows … the whole train as my venue. As I take it all in, I find myself laughing silently, the kind of laugh that also wants to cry, the kind of laugh where the floor laughs back at me. I am on a train after all. Might as well be where I am.

Some years ago I experienced a series of awakenings, which spurred me to explore the world of self realization with a fervor rarely expressed in search of Truth. Back then it seemed every spare minute I could find was dedicated to the pursuit of that something that I couldn’t quite identify, and in my foolishness I was certain that I would know it when I found it. Meditation practice occupied several hours a day as a regular habit. After some years, my passion softened somewhat, and single-mindedness naturally expanded into a more whole-life encompassing view. With a delicate subtlety, love, compassion, and beauty turned the game around, and gradually I became aware of their seeking me. Day by day, almost imperceptibly, I surrendered to their pursuit. And as I shared a laugh with the floor of the train one morning last week, I realized that I had given up completely.

The world of spiritual cultivation is filled with overt and covert promises of becoming supernatural. And in our fantasies, we envision ourselves expanding beyond the perceived boundaries of the Cosmos, being One with All of It. Even if we’ve experienced such expansions in meditative absorption, it’s not enough, we must find them again. We’ve even invented a whole vocabulary to describe these images - samadhi, kundalini awakening, opening the third eye, … blah, blah, blah. I’ve got a secret for you - it’s all a big Fantasy. Sorry, but we spiritual seekers are not any different than our fellow rail commuters, desperately clinging to their gadgets so that they don’t have to deal directly with the fact that they are on a train.

Surrender means giving up the pursuit and accepting, done to the bone, that you’ll never get anything from meditation or any other spiritual practice, other than being right here exactly where you already are. Mundane, of the world, form is emptiness, and emptiness is form. If you actually give up, and aren’t just fantasizing about surrender, you may find a profound beauty in the simplicity of the floor beneath your feet. And perhaps you will find yourself laughing/crying, as the floor laughs back at you for the foolishness of all those years of seeking.

It is important to see that the main point of any spiritual practice is to step out of the bureaucracy of ego. This means stepping out of ego’s constant desire for a higher, more spiritual, more transcendental version of knowledge, religion, virtue, judgment, comfort, or whatever it is that the particular ego is seeking. One must step out of spiritual materialism. If we do not step out of spiritual materialism, if we in fact practice it, then we may eventually find ourselves possessed of a huge collection of spiritual paths. We may feel these spiritual collections to be very precious. We have studied so much. We may have studied Western philosophy or Oriental philosophy, practiced yoga, or perhaps have studied under dozens of great masters. We have achieved and we have learned. We believe that we have accumulated a hoard of knowledge. And yet, having gone through all this, there is still something to give up. It is extremely mysterious! How could this happen? Impossible! But unfortunately it is so. Our vast collections of knowledge and experience are just part of ego’s display, part of the grandiose quality of ego. We display them to the world and, in doing so, reassure ourselves that we exist, safe and secure, as “spiritual” people. -Chögyam Trungpa, from Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism