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IN 1973 I found myself sitting on a hilltop in Nepal overlooking a lakeside village called Pokara. Before me was a spectacular range of jagged peaks central to which was one nicknamed the “fish tail,” or Annapurna. While I looked out across this breathtaking sight, inside I was in utter turmoil.
I had, some days before, inquired about a month-long meditation course to be held at a Western Buddhist center called Kopan, close to Kathmandu. The principal teachers were two Tibetan lamas I had never heard of, but whom many people had described as seriously evolved beings. I knew that if I enrolled in the course it would be a significant and possibly life-changing decision. I was terrified to step through this door and commit myself to something that could have such a profound impact.
I realize I am not alone in this fear. I see it in many of those I work with in therapy and during meditation retreats. In my own journey, I have had to step across this threshold of commitment several times. Each time required its own period of soul searching. A year following my first taste of the Kopan meditation course, I returned for a second time and stepped through another doorway, taking bodhisattva precepts. Again the sense of trepidation was there. Some years later, when receiving my first Higher Tantra initiation, I had the same mixture of fear, resistance, and excitement. Later still, while living in India, I met another threshold, which proved to be one I would not cross. I looked long and hard at becoming a monk.
Many of us reach a point in our spiritual journey where we recognize that we must commit ourselves, even though the process of commitment can be highly emotionally charged. We may have drifted around exploring a bit of this and a bit of that, finding much to stimulate our thirst for interesting experiences and knowledge. Then there comes the recognition that we may have a breadth of knowledge gained from different traditions, but no depth of genuine transformation. We may even have accumulated great intellectual understanding of the path and all of its permutations and flavors, but no actual inner taste. Even the great yogi Naropa, a revered sixth-century adept from Nalanda in India, was once challenged by a manifestation of a dakini 36 as to whether he genuinely understood the Dharma he studied.37 It was this question that eventually led him to leave the monastery and go in search of his teacher, Tilopa.
We will almost inevitably come to a point where we are asked to take a step that truly commits us to a process of transformation. The alternative is to remain only partly engaged, even though we may have much knowledge. The metaphorical meaning of the alchemical vessel is that it is the container that holds us through a process of transformation. To step into this vessel is to commit ourselves.38 We make a choice to no longer drift around, wriggle away from full engagement, or avoid facing ourselves.
Often the process of commitment feels like stepping off the edge into the unknown. It requires a willingness to let go of the safety of what was familiar yet limiting. Commitment may evoke the fear of a restriction of apparent freedom, seeming like a loss of options. What commitment usually brings, however, is a loss of the freedom to not be fully responsible. I recall how, when taking certain vows such as the bodhisattva and tantric vows, I felt that I was at a point of no return. Once the vows were taken, I was in it for life and there was no release. I was reminded of a visit I once made to a Christian closed-order monastery in Sussex. This was a place where monks would live in silent seclusion in cells for life. I have a vivid memory of stepping through the door to one of these cells as a monk showed me around. The sound of the heavy wooden door closing behind us sent shivers through me. This is for life, it echoed. There is no escape.
Commitment is a profound decision to take our own journey and spiritual life seriously. We alone must take responsibility for what evolves in this life, and until we step into that process with true engagement, we will be halfhearted. Commitment in this sense requires heart; it requires courage and the readiness to see that life is too precious to simply mess around frivolously. Commitment is about more than joining a club or enrolling in some external course of training: it is a dedication to our true nature or true potential.
If this is so, why does it feel so frightening? Perhaps because we know somewhere that there is no escape from the reality of our life. We are masters of avoidance and take refuge endlessly in relatively meaningless things that provide an illusion of safety, ease, and happiness. We may work incredibly hard to create this security and yet eventually see through the illusion. Commitment to a spiritual path is a deep-rooted turning around in our life to see that what leads to liberation is living with full awareness.
In Buddhism a significant threshold in the journey is crossed when we “take refuge.” The term “taking refuge” in Tibetan is kyab su chi wo which has been translated by Alex Berzin as “to take a safe direction.” In this respect, to take refuge is to change the very nature of the direction we face in life. It is to reorient our sense of what is meaningful and what brings peace and happiness away from the conventional worldly refuges that tend to anesthetize us from our life troubles. Taking refuge is traditionally described as refuge in the Triple Gem: namely, the Buddha, the Dharma, and the community of practitioners, the Sangha. This is often translated into a commitment to a teacher and his teachings and even to a spiritual organization that we join. While an understanding of the qualities of the Buddha and the significance of his teachings is important in this process, the ultimate meaning of taking refuge in the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha is that we turn inwards towards our true nature as the touchstone and inner resource. This implies learning to live with an awareness of the quality of our innate Buddha nature, recognizing this as the true source of peace and liberation from our life struggles.
Part of the shift of direction that occurs in taking refuge is the recognition that, firstly, things are not what we would like them to be—they are not reliable, solid, and safe—and, secondly, that the ego does not have much actual control over reality. Our emotional need for security in a potentially chaotic world leads us to constantly try to control our environment. We have in our culture many sophisticated ways in which this control is expressed. Commitment to the Buddhist path implies relinquishing control—a kind of surrender. The ego will usually fear this surrender. It is used to getting its own way and finding the safest option to avoid suffering. Seldom would it choose a path that leads to its own demise. To commit to a spiritual process such as Buddha Dharma is, however, to ultimately confront the ego with its own demise. Although this may not be obvious, on some level we know this to be so, which is why these moments of commitment can be so disturbing. In this sense commitment is a giving up—a letting go or surrender of what we held to be unchallengeable, namely, the ego’s need for control.
The intellect is one dimension of this ego control that dominates many individuals, particularly men. This form of ego control can be expressed as a kind of arrogance that believes that it is always possible to find an intellectual, scientific, rational answer that will give a sense of security. When the intellect provides a rational answer to what is going on, it creates a sense of being in control and, therefore, safe. Refuge in the intellect serves us to some degree but eventually becomes painfully inadequate. One man I know who suffered this habit was able to use his intellect to rationalize every aspect of his emotional life in such a way that he had created an intellectual armor that was almost impenetrable. His capacity to intellectually dodge and weave to avoid real contact with both his feelings and his existential fear gave him a sense of invulnerability. The challenge came when his intellectual defense began to show its limitations. As he looked through the cracks that appeared, he could see that in order to resolve his emotional and existential predicament, he would need to simply surrender his ego’s precarious position. Suddenly he could see that all of his Buddhist understanding was actually an obstacle to direct experience. He stood on the edge of a precipice and knew he needed to leap. His intellectual knowledge had pushed him up to the edge and left him stranded.
This was his moment of surrender, when he knew he needed to actually let go and jump: he needed to commit himself to the process. He could see that his intellectual knowledge was a defense against real commitment. To step across this threshold, however, required that he relinquish his pride in the capacity to always find a solution that closed even the smallest chink in his reality. Essentially his intellect was finally failing him, which was terrifying. As his mind began to release its grip, rather than going insane, as he feared, he did not disappear. He felt that he began to open to a more relaxed, more present, more spacious quality that could bear the paradoxes of his existence without panic.
The threshold of commitment is a point of letting go we may encounter many times on our journey. As we go deeper, we reach new levels of commitment that can demand still more opening. In this sense our understanding of refuge goes deeper and deeper. Once we step across this threshold, something dies and is renewed, and this happens in each crossing. In the process of making this transition, we must leave some things behind. We cannot take our old habits and refuges with us. We cannot close our eyes and hide once they are opened. Sometimes people say they wish they had never started when they realize how hard it is to no longer be able to run away. It is seldom comfortable to realize that the only solution to resolve life’s problems is to go further, deeper, to become even more committed and wake up.
The point of commitment can, however, bring a great sense of relief. It is the ease and openness that comes when, to use Jung’s terms, the ego finally lets go of its need for the dominant position in the psyche and gives way to the Self. The shift from “I will” to “thy will be done” brings trust in a process that we can only partly comprehend, but this is part of the mystery. As a Buddhist, one can see this as a trust in our true nature as personified by the Buddha: our Buddha nature. This is not a trust in something to cling to, like a god or a savior, which from the Buddhist perspective would be to trust in an illusion. When we can let go and commit to the process, we are changed, and we do not need to try to change as much as to allow what is to unfold. This process will not be easy. When we enter the alchemical vessel we begin to cook, and this cooking brings to the surface what we must begin to transform. According to Jung the first stage of this process is known as the nigredo 39 during which the Shadow is gradually revealed and transformed. Only once we are truly committed to this process will transformation fully take place. One of the hazards of any process of this nature, however, is that we may choose to go into what might be called a kind of spiritual flight.