Wake Up Now (6 page)

At this point, you’re about to set foot on the pathless path home, and you may naturally begin to orient yourself like an animal in the forest, sniffing for the trail and looking around for guidance and support on your journey. If you’re fortunate enough to meet a teacher of the direct approach to truth who tells you to stop, relax, listen to what’s already present, and turn your attention toward the experiencer behind the experience, you may be able to awaken directly without prolonged seeking. But if you’re like most people, you’ll be drawn by the promise of spiritual adventure to thumb through the pages of spiritual magazines; Google spiritual key words; or wander through the spirituality
section of your local bookstore or
Amazon.com
in search of the right book, teacher, or community. The options are appealing and mind-boggling in their number and diversity. Everywhere you turn you’re offered spiritual fulfillment if you’re willing to sign on to a set of practices and invest your trust in a particular approach.

Cultivate mindfulness and loving-kindness with an Asian-trained teacher of Vipassana (insight) meditation, and eventually you may develop the qualities of heart and mind necessary to attain the “other shore” of enlightenment. Chant and pray with a Hindu guru in the Indian tradition of bhakti yoga, and God may grant you the grace of a kundalini awakening. Engage in preliminary practices and deity visualizations under the guidance of a Buddhist teacher born and trained in old Tibet, and you may be fortunate enough to be reborn as a buddha in some future lifetime.

From a direct intuition of the imminent availability of the truth of your being, you’ve been lured into the spiritual marketplace, where well-intentioned vendors hawk their wares, promising enlightenment somewhere in the distant future as the result of years of effort if you’re willing to buy their product, take their course, join their community, and invest thousands of hours of your time. The innocent initial impulse to orient, listen, and move toward truth the way a child naturally returns to its mother or a bird to its nesting ground has been co-opted by an established tradition and turned into a circuitous path to spiritual realization. Welcome to the progressive approach!

Progressive paths are extraordinarily appealing because they’ve been so carefully elaborated, often over many centuries. Bearing the imprimatur of an established tradition, they suggest that if you just follow the instructions wholeheartedly, the results will take care of themselves. If you listen to enough teachings, spend enough hours in meditation, attend enough retreats, cultivate enough of the right attitudes and qualities, you’ll one day discover the truth of who you really are. As inspiration, the progressive scriptures are filled with exhortatory tales of masters who began as seekers just like you and me and eventually achieved enlightenment through prolonged and concerted effort.

The progressive approach can be quite comforting to the mind, which doesn’t like uncertainty and wants to know where you’re headed and how to get there. At the same time, it appeals to the ego’s love of a good struggle. Indeed, the ego—the separate self-sense you mistakenly take yourself to be—views itself as the embattled hero of the drama called life and the spiritual path as the ultimate hero’s journey, with Buddha under the bodhi tree replacing Ulysses or Rocky Balboa. After years of effort, the ego imagines, you too can sit on the pinnacle of realization, in the asana of complete repose, flashing the mudras of fearlessness and peace.

Progression provides you with something noble and meaningful to do, a beneficial lifestyle, a community of fellow seekers, a sense of belonging. You can learn to enjoy a vegetarian diet, participate in the life of an ashram or a
meditation center, reap the health benefits of regular meditation or yoga practice, read Dharma books, listen to spiritual music, feel yourself to be a part of a growing global movement of spiritual awareness. No wonder so many seekers are drawn to enlist.

As benign as it may seem, however, the gradual approach to spiritual unfolding may actually undermine the possibility of awakening right now, for a number of significant reasons. When you’re encouraged to shift your focus from awakening to the practice that will purportedly lead you to awakening, you may end up devoting years to perfecting the form and becoming an accomplished meditator or yoga practitioner without ever awakening to the truth that’s so close at hand. Some Buddhists I know, for example, have spent decades wearing robes, following their breaths, and giving Dharma talks without ever having a convincing glimpse of their essential nature, their original face. The danger of investing your energy in seeking is that you’ll end up a perpetual seeker, without ever finding what you were looking for in the first place.

Perhaps even more fundamentally, the very premise of the progressive approach—that you need to engage in certain practices over a period of time in order to realize who you are—reinforces the belief that your true nature is deeply concealed and requires protracted effort to uncover. I spent many years on my meditation cushion, sitting with upright posture and clasped hands, struggling to catch a fleeting glimpse of my true nature, as if it were some rare animal or bird hidden behind the tangled undergrowth of thoughts.
Eventually, after giving up the effort and the formal practice of meditation, I met a teacher who told me, “The seeker is the sought; the looker is what he or she is looking for.” My mind couldn’t wrap itself around these words, but one day soon after, in a moment out of time, the seeker and the sought collapsed into one another, and I knew who I was once and for all. The one who had been looking so hard for true nature was the very true nature I had been looking for. Truth had been playing hide-and-seek with itself. As long as I continued focusing so much effort on searching, I couldn’t possibly stumble backward into the silent presence that was the source of all searching.

Did my years of meditation make me more susceptible to awakening? It’s impossible to tell. I do know that the awakening happened after I’d stopped meditating regularly. Proponents of the progressive approach generally claim that their particular technique—whether it’s mindfulness meditation, mantra recitation, or hatha yoga—has been refined over centuries by countless masters and teachers as a vehicle to bring you closer to truth. As evidence, they point to the many enlightened members of their lineage. But what about the thousands of nameless and faceless practitioners who spent years in the monastery and never had so much as a glimpse of enlightenment? Or by contrast, the many great spiritual adepts who woke up without any techniques or methods? Ramana Maharshi, the world-renowned twentieth-century Indian sage, pretended he was dying at the age of sixteen and within a half an hour had dropped his identity as a separate self and awakened as the Self of all. (Interestingly
enough, he never prescribed this practice to others.) Hui-neng, the Sixth Patriarch of Chinese Zen, became enlightened shortly before entering the monastery, upon hearing a verse from the Diamond Sutra. Even the Buddha’s enlightenment did not result from arduous practice, despite what tradition suggests. On the contrary, it apparently occurred only after he gave up his ascetic practice, accepted some nourishing food, and sat down on a comfortable bed of grass in the shade of a tree, vowing not to get up until he reached the end of his search. Clearly, progressive practices are not necessary for awakening to occur.

In fact, the prolonged practice of a particular technique may have the opposite effect, deadening and habituating the mind, rather than making it more open and accessible to truth. If you want to know how a progressive path might affect you, spend some time at one of the tradition’s residential meditation centers or ashrams. Do the longtime practitioners appear happier, freer, more peaceful, more enlightened? Or do they seem rigid in their adherence to structures and rules, lacking in spontaneity, proud of their spiritual progress or stature, addicted to control? Every center, tradition, and practitioner is different, of course, but many of the ashrams and monasteries I’ve visited lack the joy and aliveness one would expect to find there; instead, they exude a quality of emotional repression and subservience to form.

Now I’m not suggesting that spiritual practice isn’t enormously beneficial at many levels. Studies have shown that the regular practice of meditation, for example, can reduce
your heart rate, lower your blood pressure and cholesterol levels, boost your immune system, increase your longevity, and enhance your overall enjoyment of life. The problem lies not with the technique, but with the attitude or orientation with which it’s practiced. If you view your practice as a gradual means to some distant and lofty goal, you may lose your initial passion, enthusiasm, and curiosity and miss the open secret of your true nature in your dogged determination to accumulate spiritual experiences and become a more spiritual person. My teacher Jean Klein used to say, “Don’t make meditation a habit,” lest your practice become lifeless and dull. Instead, enter your meditation as you would a laboratory, with the express intention of finding the meditator.

Recently, I reconnected with an old Buddhist friend who exemplifies some of the pitfalls of the progressive approach. Originally drawn to spiritual practice by her intense desire to transcend her suffering, Michele spent years studying with a particular teacher while raising two children and working as a chiropractor. As she developed into a seasoned meditator, she also became entrenched in a particular identity as a senior student in the hierarchy of the tradition, one who had logged a certain number of years on her cushion and supposedly reached a certain level of spiritual maturity. Although now in the position of guiding others, she has never had more than a fleeting glimpse of true nature herself, and she no longer has access to her teacher, who died more than ten years ago. In a sense, you could say that she’s reached a dead end on the progressive path. After so many years, she has become a better person—calmer,
more self-aware, less emotionally reactive or stressed out, more content—but she hasn’t experienced the realization she originally sought. In fact, she’s given up believing that the practice she spent so many years cultivating can actually bring her the profound peace and joy that the Buddhist stories promise. But she’s a teacher herself now, a senior student, and doesn’t feel comfortable leaving the fold and exploring other approaches or meeting other teachers. So she soldiers on with a certain measure of disappointment and resignation, secretly convinced that deep and abiding awakening isn’t possible for her.

Michele’s initial urgent impulse to awaken was channeled by the tradition into years of devotion to a path that in the end did not fulfill its original promise. In the process, she imbibed a system of beliefs about what awakening looks like and how it’s achieved that just made it seem like a distant, unachievable goal—and made it more difficult for her to open to the possibility that her true nature is ever-present and readily accessible right now. If only she could complete these practices, solve these riddles, master these texts, she was taught, then she could discover who she really is.

Over the years, Michele focused her energies on becoming a better person by gradually calming her mind and cultivating more spiritual qualities like patience, equanimity, loving-kindness, and generosity, with the understanding that such qualities would bring her closer to enlightenment. But no amount of effort can bring you closer to who you are—after all, it’s your nearest, as intimate as breath—and the belief that you need to effort just takes you further away
because it causes you to stray from what’s already so close at hand. “Don’t you see,” asked the Indian teacher Nisargadatta Maharaj, “that your very search for happiness is what makes you feel miserable?” The cultivation of so-called spiritual qualities just plays into the mind’s most cherished assumption—one that receives widespread reinforcement in our self-improvement culture—that there’s something wrong with you as you are, and you need to become a better you before you can be the real you. Deep down, you believe that you’re inherently flawed, especially when you compare yourself to the great exemplars of your tradition, and you keep efforting to live up to some image of how you think you’re supposed to think, feel, and act. In Zen, this attitude is called putting another head on top of your own, rather than enjoying the perfectly good head you already have.

Perhaps most insidious, years of dedication to gradual cultivation just strengthen the grip of the seeker—the separate someone who negotiates the path, attends the retreats, accumulates the insights, has the experiences, racks up the spiritual points. Ironic as it may seem, spiritual people who are apparently devoted to releasing the hold of the ego and experiencing the emptiness of self can, in the process, develop enormous spiritual egos that lie hidden and unexamined in the shadows. “Look at how calm, centered, loving, and peaceful I’ve become,” the little voice whispers as it charts your progress. Or on a more negative note, “I just can’t seem to get the knack of meditation. Even though I’ve been practicing for years, I don’t seem to be making any progress.” Once this seeker identity has become deeply entrenched, it
can be extremely difficult to see clearly and release, because the practices of the progressive approach tend to reinforce it by encouraging you to become a better, more spiritual you. Even the ultimate fruition of the progressive approach is inevitably dualistic, because it’s claimed as an experience that belongs to the me—and the seeker never really dissolves, it merely becomes a finder.

Breathe and Reflect

Take a few moments to reflect on your own approach to seeking. If you’ve followed a progressive path, consider how it has affected your attitude toward spiritual awakening. Do you find that the practices have brought you closer to truth? What kinds of beliefs and stories do you tell yourself about the path you’ve chosen? If you’re not currently pursuing a particular path, consider what draws you to spiritual seeking.