LOSING YOUR WAY
It is a rare being who can cross the ocean of existence without a boat. Few of us are ready to see completely through ego’s illusion and thereby achieve instant liberation. So we use methods, we use a boat, with the understanding that when we get to the other shore, we’ll leave the boat. We’re not going to portage; we needn’t carry the boat on our heads. We’ll be finished with boats.
But the boat can entrap or liberate. Whether you end up as a boatman or as one liberated depends on your original motive for spiritual work. You can become a connoisseur of boats, collecting the very best. Or you can go to the far shore, beyond beyond: “Gate, gate, paragate, parasamgate, bodhi svaha,” beyond even the concept of beyond.
Whatever you seek—spiritual realization, liberation, enlightment, merging with God, or however you describe it—don’t cling to meditation as a method. At the same time, leave yourself open to any possibilities that come your way. To stand back from any method for fear of entrapment leaves you standing on this side yearning for the far shore. Jump in and trust your inner guide. The purity of your own yearning and of the methods you follow will show you the way.
Methods differ in how big, fancy, or ornate a boat they are. How dependent you become on a method depends on your degree of attachment to stuff, including your method of meditation. You can be attached to meditating on Krishna, chanting to fill your heart with love as the Hare Krishna devotees do. Or you can be attached to the ecstasy that sometimes comes from following your breath with exquisite one-pointedness.
All methods are traps. But for a method to work you must go deeply into it, deep enough to be entrapped. At the same time, trust that your yearning for spiritual self-realization and the nature of the method will ultimately free you from the method itself. For example, a pure guru exists only for your liberation. The guru has no desire to entrap you as a follower or disciple. Yet for your relationship to be productive, it demands your total involvement and surrender. If a teacher is impure, he may want to hold you as a disciple beyond the time you are ready to leave. Then it will be your purity of purpose that turns you away from the teacher.
It’s the same with your relationship to meditation. As you reach each new stage, you cling to new highs. Or you may fear not getting enough after investing much of your time and effort. Or you may make the benefits of meditation, such as greater efficiency at work, ends in themselves. These are dead ends on the path.
How you use a method determines whether it entraps or liberates you. The game isn’t to become a method groupie, but to transcend method. To say I’m a meditator—or I’m an anything—is just another trap.
Some, such as Krishnamurti, question whether meditation actually does lead to liberation. They point out that all methods are just more ways of entrapping awareness. Rather than springing us from the traps of ego, they add yet another bar to our freedom. Proponents, such as Patanjali and the Buddha, say these are tools to be used until there is no longer any need for them. My feeling is that it would be best to bypass methods, but there are few of us capable of such a leap of consciousness. The rest of us need methods. These are traps through which we set ourselves free.
A good traveler leaves no track.
—Lao Tse
Tao Te Ching
As your mind quiets more and more in meditation your consciousness may shift radically. With quietness can come waves of bliss and rapture. You may feel the presence of astral beings; you may feel yourself leaving your body and rising into realms above your head; you may feel energy pouring up your spine. You may have visions, burning sensations, a sharp pain in your heart, deep stillness, stiffening of your body. You may hear voices or inner sounds such as the flute of Krishna, a waterfall, thunder, or a bell. You may smell strange scents or your mouth may be filled with strange tastes. Your body may tingle or shake. As you go deeper you may enter what the southern Buddhists call jhanas, trance states marked by ecstasy, rapture, bliss, and clarity of perception. You may have visions of distant places or find you somehow know things though you can’t explain how.
These experiences may seduce you. If you cling to them, fascinated—whether the fascination be out of attraction or repulsion—you invest them with undue importance. When you’ve had this kind of seductive experience, its memory can be an obstacle to meditation, especially if you try to recreate the experience. To keep going in meditation, you’ve got to give up your attachment to these states and go beyond. If these experiences come spontaneously, fine. But don’t seek them.
I remember taking a fifteen-day insight meditation course. On the twelfth day I experienced a peace that I had never known in my life. It was so deep that I rushed to my teacher and said, “This peace is what I have always wanted all my life. Everything else I was doing was just to find this peace.” Yet a month later I was off pursuing other spiritual practices. That experience of peace wasn’t enough. It was limited. Any experiential state, anything we can label, isn’t it.
My intense experiences with psychedelics led to very powerful attachments to the memories of those trips. I tried to recreate them through yogic practices. It took some years before I stopped comparing meditative spaces with those of my psychedelic days. Only when I stopped clinging to those past experiences did I see that the present ones had a fullness, immediacy, and richness that was enough—I didn’t need the memories. Later, during intensive study of pranayama and kundalini, my breath stopped and I felt moments of great rapture. Once again, the intensity of the experience hooked me and I was held back for a time by my attempts to recreate those moments. When I saw that I was closest to God in the moment itself, these past experiences stopped having such a great pull. Again I saw my clinging to memories as an obstacle.
You come to see through your attachment to such experiences and find yourself less interested in striving for them. The despair and frustration that come from desiring a fascinating state and not getting it becomes grist for the mill of insight. It’s an irritating process, in a way. You may see things clearly or have a breakthrough into another state for a second or so. But like psychedelics, it leaves you starving. You can grasp it for a moment, but you can’t eat the fruit of the garden.
Meditation is not a matter of trying to achieve ecstasy, spiritual bliss or tranquility, nor is it attempting to become a better person. It is simply the creation of a space in which we are able to expose and undo our neurotic games, our self-deceptions, our hidden fears and hopes.
—Chogyam Trungpa
The Myth of Freedom
In Brindavana, the sacred city where Krishna dances with the gopis, there is a dudhwalla, a milk seller. He’s a true devotee of Krishna. Once he was selling milk, and because of his purity, Krishna with his shakti Radha came right up to the stand, there on the street in Brindavana, and bought some milk. He actually saw them. His eyes are as though they had been burned out by a brilliant bulb. He can talk about nothing but the moment that Krishna and Radha came to his dudhstand. He’s not worried about how much milk he sells any more. He’s had the ecstasy of seeing God in the form of light. And that’s who he is this lifetime. It’s a high place to be.
Shouldn’t that be enough? Won’t you settle for ecstasy? Bliss? Rapture? Hanging out with the gods? Flying? Bet you always wanted to fly. Reading other people’s minds? What power would you settle for? said the devil to Jesus in the desert. You must want something. Whatever you want you get, sooner or later. And there you are. As long as you are not finished with that desire, you are entrapped.
When you are attracted to powers and seduced by pleasures, what had been a vertical path turns horizontal. As long as your goal falls short of full liberation, you will be trapped by these experiences. If you know you want the long-range goal, that knowledge will help you give up the desires for the states along the way. As each desire arises there will be a struggle with your ego. Part of you wants to enjoy the seductive pleasures, part wants to give them up and push on.
One way to handle extraordinary experiences is to be neither horrified nor intrigued by them. The Tibetan Book of the Dead refers to the ten thousand horrible and the ten thousand beautiful visions. In the course of meditation you may meet them all: powers, great beauty, deaths, grotesqueries, angels, demons, all of it. These are just forms, the stuff of the universe. You confront them on the path just as you meet all manner of people when you walk a busy street. Notice them, acknowledge them—don’t deny them—and then let them go. To cling to these heavens and hells, no matter how beautiful, slows your progress. Not to acknowledge them, or to push them away, is just a more subtle form of clinging. Follow the middle way. As stuff arises in your mind, let it arise, notice it, let it go. No clinging.
Many sensations come, many thoughts or images arise, but they are just waves of your own mind. Nothing comes from outside your mind.
To realize pure mind in your delusion is practice. If you try to expel the delusion it will only persist the more. Just say, “Oh, this is just delusion.” And do not be bothered by it.
—Shunryu Suzuki
Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind
That thou mayest have pleasure in everything,
seek pleasure in nothing.
That thou mayest know everything,
seek to know nothing.
That thou mayest possess all things,
seek to possess nothing.
That thou mayest be everything,
seek to be nothing.
—St. John of the Cross
The Ascent of Mount Carmel
Our senses and thinking mind keep our awareness aligned with the physical plane. But there are planes where beings exist other than the physical. If in meditation you enter other states of consciousness, you may meet such beings who seemingly come to instruct or guide you. At first, they are awesome. They seem to exist either in disembodied states or with luminous or transparent bodies that appear and disappear at will. They do not exist for normal vision.
Because of the uniqueness of these beings you might put more value on their teachings than is merited. Beings on other planes are not necessarily wiser than those on this plane They may be well-meaning, but they may not know any more than you. Because of the way in which you met them, you are filled with awe and reverence, and you might treat their teaching as truth. All they may have to teach you is their existence itself, which shows you the relative nature of reality.
Some whom you meet on planes other than the physical may indeed come from higher, more conscious realms. They may be masters who exist in order to guide you and come forth at critical moments to instruct you. You needn’t meet such masters to become liberated. They come to you only if your particular path requires their manifestation.
Just as with teachers on the physical planes, be open. Experience each being you meet and sense in your heart—do we have work to do together or not? If that teacher feels relevant to your spiritual journey, work with him or her until you have fully grasped the teaching. Then thank the teacher and proceed. This is true on every plane of existence.
Even the beginnings of an inner quiet and calm allow you to see much more. You get a new sense of how you create and control your universe. You stop reacting to events simply with blind patterns and habits of thought. Your life becomes more creative. Other powers follow this new creativity as your meditation deepens. They become more and more dramatic, and can include psychic powers, astral travel, and even powers on other planes.
These are traps. They are seductive, especially for people who have felt impotent, inadequate, or weak. Because of their attractiveness these powers tend to make you slow down in your journey in order to enjoy them. This is especially likely when they offer more sensual gratification, for example, if you use the powers to attract new lovers for sexual conquests. Power entraps even when it is used to do good. Even if you couch the exercise of power in righteous terms, it still involves you more deeply in ego, since you as a separate entity are trying to manipulate your environment. So it is that powers, just like any of the other seductions along the path, are best noted and let go of, rather than acted upon. It’s better to go for broke than to take a small profit and run with it.
Meditation may attract those who seek worldly influence because of the psychic powers they can develop. Generals take it up to improve their military efficiency, and so meditation becomes part of the Cold War. Some try to develop telepathic powers or the ability to change things at a distance to win wars or control other people or things with the mind. Meditation might bring you this. So what? With the despair that comes from knowing that the worldly dance, including the greatest powers, is not sufficiently fullfilling, you recognize the deeper potential of meditation: nothing short of, not my, but Thy Will, the Will of God, out of which it all came in the first place. Why settle for less?
If you continue this simple practice every day you will obtain a wonderful power. Before you attain it, it is something wonderful, but after you obtain it, it is nothing special.
—Shunryu Suzuki
Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind
A persistent trap all along the path is pride in one’s spiritual purity. It’s a form of one-upmanship in which you judge others out of a feeling of superiority. This ultimately limits your spiritual awakening. You can see many people who are caught in this trap of virtue—for example, in the self-righteousness of some churchgoers. In the yoga scene in America there are many groups of people who dress in a certain way, eat in a certain way, are special in some way that gives them an ego-enhancing feeling of purity.
The harmful effect of this trap is not so much to one’s social relationships—though they may become strained from this display of subtle arrogance—but rather the effect on oneself. This feeling of specialness or superiority inflates the ego and feeds it with pride. The best antidote to pride is humility, which leads to compassion. The sooner one develops compassion in this journey, the better. Compassion lets us appreciate that each individual is doing what he or she must do, and that there is no reason to judge another person or oneself. Merely to do what you can to further your own awakening.
Mad with joy, life and death dance to the rhythm of this music. The hills and the sea and the earth dance. The world of man dances in laughter and tears.
Why put on the robe of the monk, and live aloof from the world in lonely pride?
—Kabir
One Hundred Poems of Kabir
The worst man is the one who sees himself as the best.
—Ali
Maxims of Ali
Whoever has in his heart even so much as a rice-grain of pride, cannot enter into Paradise.
—Muhammad
Perspectives spirituelles et Faits humains
We are to practice virtue, not possess it.
—Eckhart
Meister Eckhart: A Modern Translation
For many of us who have come into meditation through psychedelics, the model we have had for changing consciousness has been of “getting high.” We pushed away our normal waking state in order to embrace a state of euphoria, harmony, bliss, peace, or ecstasy. Many of us spent long periods of time getting high and coming down. It was like the Biblical story of the wedding guest who came to the wedding but was not wearing the proper wedding garments, so he got thrown out. My guru, in speaking about psychedelics, said, “These medicines will allow you to come and visit Christ, but you can only stay two hours. Then you have to leave again. This is not the true samadhi. It’s better to become Christ than to visit him—but even the visit of a saint for a moment is useful.” Then he added, “But love is the most powerful medicine.” For love slowly transforms you into what the psychedelics only let you glimpse.
In view of his words, when I reflected on my trips with LSD and other psychedelics, I saw that after a glimpse of the possibility of transcendence, I continued tripping only to reassure myself that the possibility was still there. Seeing the possibility is indeed different from being the possibility. Sooner or later you must purify and alter your mind, heart, and body so that the things which bring you down from your experiences lose their power over you. Psychedelics could chemically override the thought patterns in your brain so that you are open to the moment, but once the chemical loses its power the old habit patterns take over again. With them comes a subtle despair that without chemicals you are a prisoner of your thoughts.
I recall vividly a very powerful experience in 1962 in the meditation room of our house in Newton. For several hours I sat quiescent in a state of ecstatic transcendence merging into the universe. As the chemical began to wear off, I saw a blood-red wave rolling down the room toward me. In it were thousands of images of me—all of my social and psychological definitions of self. Me on a tricycle, giving a lecture, making love, and so forth. It was as if this wave was about to overrun me and carry me back into myself. I recall putting up my hands, trying to push away the oncoming wave and desperately searching my mind for some mantra or technique that would hold off this incredible force bearing down upon me. But I had no such charm or spell. The wave poured back over me and I came back into my old familiar self. In recent years I have learned how, when the thoughts arise that were contained within that wave, to use a meditative stance to witness them. This gently loosens their hold and brings me back into the moment. Then I see there’s nothing special about the high, nothing dreadful about the thoughts in the wave. Just stuff.
The trap of high experiences, however they occur, is that you become attached to their memory and so you try to recreate them. These memories compel you to try to reproduce the high. Ultimately they trap you, because they interfere with your experience of the present moment. In meditation you must be in the moment, letting go of comparisons and memories. If the high was too powerful in comparison to the rest of your life, it overrides the present and keeps you focused on the past. The paradox, of course, is that were you to let go of the past, you would find in the present moment the same quality that you once had. But because you’re trying to repeat the past, you lose the moment.
How many times have you felt a moment of perfection—only to have it torn away the next moment by the awareness that it will pass? How many times will you try to get high hoping that this time you won’t come down—until you already know as you start to go up that you will come down? The down is part of the high. When in meditation you are tempted by another taste of honey, your memory of the finiteness of those moments tempers your desire. More bliss, more rapture, more ecstasy—just part of the passing show. The moment in its fullness includes both high and low and yet it is beyond both.
Paradise is the prison of the sage as the world is the prison of the believer.
—Yahja b. Mu’adh al-Razi
De l’Unité Transcendante des Religions
Though the numbers are proportionally few, many thousands of us have, through discipline and persistence, arrived at a view of our lives that is open, clear, and detached. In this new space we have a lightness, an ease in carrying out our daily lives, an ability to keep a certain sense of humor about our predicaments. We find that because of the quietness of our minds it’s easier to relate to acquaintances, to family, to employers, to friends. It’s also easier to bring together our economic scene and the other aspects of our lives.
We begin to feel a little bit like gods on earth, for where we see sadness and suffering around us, we are able to empathize and still feel lightness and joy. It’s as if the world is made for our delight, and even our own troubles become a source of amusement. When we look one another in the eye there is clarity and honesty. We have a certain degree of inner peace. Many of us never thought possible this feeling of equanimity, fullness, and delight in life. We have a sense of self-acceptance, spaciousness, and fullness in the moment that makes each day enough. In many ways it seems like liberation.
As I look around at people I know who have been working intensely on themselves for some time, there is a dramatic change. I see beings who were initially preoccupied with their melodramas, whose bodies were their enemies and who were attached to spiritual melodrama, now bright, clear, and strong. Their lives have come together, they have relationships that are fulfilling, moments that are enough, a lightness in their faces. To see them this way fills me with happiness.
Yet I see that this stage is but a preparation for the ultimate climb that leads in the end to total liberation. This stage has a danger: It is too comfortable. It’s like a beautiful mountain pasture: there are tents in the pine grove and streams to sit by and plenty of fuel and food. The air is clear, the view is grand. There are birds and wildflowers. These pleasures are a trap.
Many beings tarry here in this role of God on earth for many lifetimes. But ultimately even this heaven is not enough. For there is another path that leads from this pleasant pasture to still higher slopes. There is the final journey.
You should feel no guilt about where you are in your spiritual path. Wherever you are, be it at the beginning of the journey, well on your way, or resting comfortably at some height, you must acknowledge where you are, for that is the key to further growth. You should keep some perspective about the entire journey so that you will not sink into complacency, feeling you have finished the journey when you have not even begun to approach liberation.
The Sage does not talk, the Talented Ones talk, and the stupid ones argue.
—Kung Tingan
Our deep conditioning from school exams, grades, and the like gives us the habit of looking at every achievement competitively, in terms of where we stand. How are we doing: Are we better, equal, or worse than others on the same journey? Such evaluation of our position becomes a real obstacle in spiritual life, for it constantly leads us to look at spiritual evolution in comparative terms. Someone tells you they have visions of lights when they meditate. You never have had such a vision. This fills you with feelings of inadequacy and jealousy. On the other hand, you may sometimes feel yourself leaving your body when you meditate. Your friends don’t experience this. This fills you with a subtle spiritual pride that feeds your ego.
In 1970 I traveled around the world on a lecture tour with Swami Muktananda. In his teaching he transmits shakti, or energy, to his students. I recall vividly a living room in Melbourne, Australia, where twenty people were gathered in meditation before him. It was late in the afternoon and he sat crosslegged on a love seat at the end of the room, with eyes closed behind sunglasses, a knit hat on his head, idly strumming a one-stringed instrument. The room was quiet.
Slowly, one by one, the people in the room started to behave bizarrely. One portly gentleman in a darkblue suit with a watch fob suddenly began to do mudras, traditional Indian hand positions. I recall the look on his face of consternation and perplexity—it was apparent that he knew nothing of these mudras, and was certainly not doing them intentionally. Next to him a gentleman dressed in a tweed jacket and gray flannels with a pipe in his pocket, obviously the perfect professor, suddenly got up and started to do formal Indian dance. Again the look of perplexity, for in no way was he responsible for what he did. Near me was a girl who had come not to see Swami Muktananda, but to be with her boyfriend, who was interested. Suddenly she began to do intense, automatic breathing. Her rapid breathing got to such a height that she literally bounced across the floor of the room with the breaths. Again I saw the look of perplexity.
I watched more and more people experience the touch of Swami Muktananda’s shakti, but never felt it myself. None of these things happened to me. I was concerned. After all, if I was “evolved enough” to lecture with Swami Muktananda, why shouldn’t I have these dramatic signs of spiritual awakening? The seed of jealousy sprouted in me. Though I didn’t admit it, I did my best to induce these symptoms of awakening.
Later I learned that these sometimes bizarre manifestations of shakti were the result of various blockages in people and were in no way necessary on the spiritual path. As time has gone on, I have learned that there is no experience, no symptom, no sign of spiritual growth that is absolutely necessary. Each of us has a unique predicament that stretches back over many lifetimes. Each person is drawn to a different set of practices and responds in his or her own way.
Individual differences are not better or worse, merely different. If we forgo judging, we come to understand that each of us has a unique predicament that requires a unique journey. While we share the overall journey, everyone’s particular experiences are his or her own. No set of experiences is a prerequisite for enlightenment. People have become enlightened in all ways. Just be what you are.
The experiences along the way are not enlightenment. So if you don’t see lights or meet remarkable beings on other planes, or if your body doesn’t shake, or if you don’t feel the greatest peace, or even if nothing seems to happen in meditation, don’t compare or judge. Just keep going. To compare yourself with others is to forget the uniqueness of your own journey.
Always repenting of wrongs done
Will never bring my heart to rest.
—Chi K’ang
170 Chinese Poems
He who realizes the Lord God, the Atman, the one existence, the Self of the universe, neither praises nor dispraises any man. Like the sun shining impartially upon all things, he looks with an equal eye upon all beings. He moves about in the world a free soul, released from all attachment.
—Srimad Bhagavatam
The Wisdom of God
