On Spiritual Aspiration

A student goes to his teacher in old India. He asks, “When will I reach enlightenment?”

The teacher leads him to the river. He thrusts the student’s head under the water and holds him down. When he is choking, about to pass out, the teacher lets him up.

The teacher asks, “What did you feel when you were under the water?”

“Desperation. Agonizing desire for air. Every particle of my being crying out to breathe.”

The teacher says, “When you want the truth as much as you wanted to breathe under the water, that’s when you will get it.”

We don’t want the truth – not yet. We want to want it. Maybe we want to want it so badly we feel like we could die from wanting. But we don’t die, can’t die into it, yet. There’s still a part of us that thinks happiness lies just around the next turn of the wheel.

Look, we’re all spiritual people here. We know happiness doesn’t come from a new car or a better job. But maybe we think it will come from the next retreat, from finding the right teacher or living in just the right ashram, from this or that meditation technique, from learning all the secret mantras and mudras, from hot tantric men running after you all “OM Shakti” and pressing flowers to your heart.

And the wheel turns.

I don’t know why I’m on this spiritual path. If you ask me off the cuff I would probably give you a reason, but when I look a little deeper into myself I find only bewilderment, a million ideas and impulses and in the center, this not-knowing. Void. Awe.

It started out simple enough. I was 24, lost and alone in my “starving artist” identity bubble, digging myself into a hole of psychedelics. I spent one summer wandering around Brooklyn on LSD, pacing the streets at 3am and wondering what I was looking for. Finally that hole went so deep that I popped out the other side. I found myself at a Buddhist center in the East Village and suddenly I was there every day, meditating with the same crazy intensity.

But now there is a light. This is where my life really started, when I saw for the first time.

The thing is that the more answers you look for the more questions you get. This rabbit hole goes all the way down. Following one clue after another into this ever-expanding labyrinth of chakras and nadis, hidden worlds, laws of karma and flavors of emptiness, bodhicitta, Shiva and Shakti and Christ-consciousness, and experiences further and further from what your rational mind can make sense of, and at a certain point you look at all the pieces in your hand and start to wonder what puzzle this is exactly.

You realize this turn your life took is part of something so much more vast and unfathomable than you could have imagined.

And then you realize others feel the same. You’re looking for the same thing that people have been looking for since there have been people. It’s the same thing that deep down everyone still is looking for, that every being on this planet is looking for. The only difference is you have this itch of aspiration, this crazy drive to know. You won’t be content with anything less than the direct experience, with union with this something that is beyond anything.

Many people think that the spiritual life is some sort of escape, like you can’t deal with the “real world” so you go running off to an ashram or a monastery and sit in a little bubble of shanti shanti head-in-the-clouds wishful thinking.

That couldn’t be farther from reality. It’s easy to stay in the bubble of conventional life, working just to keep yourself safe and comfortable, doing what everyone else is doing and ignoring that tiny, precious, terrifying tremble that goes up your spine every so often and whispers “hey, isn’t there something more?”

It takes courage to let go of your trust in the world you came from, to stop believing what you’ve always been told and what your mind tries to tell you.

It takes courage to go head-on with your demons. It takes courage to see how high you can fly. It takes courage to come face to face with yourself.

It takes courage to offer it all into the divine fire.

I’ve been on the road for over a year now. California, Hawaii, Mexico, Israel… The scenery changes but that something in the corner of my eye is always there. I don’t miss having a home or “normal life” or anything, but I feel a fire in my heart, stronger every day. A longing that is so painful and so blissful at the same time.

Last winter I came to Hridaya. Again something cracks open and the light comes in. I do one 10-day retreat and come back the next month for 17 days.

It was so sweet, all those mornings when I woke up in the dark and sat alone until the sun peeked over the horizon. Eagles floating up from the beach in the afternoon. Staring at patterns in the bark of a neem tree. Catching my breath at the beauty of every moment, too precious even to hold onto.

In the meditations I feel myself falling asleep to the outside world and inside, something is waking up. I am curled up in the womb of the universe and I know nothing, I am nothing, there is nothing to know.

Sahajananda reads poems by Rumi and Hafiz before meditation sessions. There is a candle in your heart, ready to be kindled. There is a void in your soul, ready to be filled. You feel it, don’t you? Every night he answers questions that students left on slips of paper in a glass cup by the altar. One night someone writes that she is suicidally depressed. She is alienated from her family and all her friends are drifting away. She says she has lost all her reference points.

“This is a powerful time for you,” he answers. “You can learn from it. If a reference point can be lost, that means it isn’t the ultimate reference point.”

There are times when it all snaps into focus, like for the blink of an eye I can almost see the whole picture but it’s just out of reach. I want to cry and I can’t tell if it’s from joy or heartbreak. Where are my reference points? Who put this magnet in my heart that draws me deeper and deeper into the unknown? What set my life to curve around the divine, like the spirals of a plant or a galaxy reaching for the Beloved?

I pray to God to take everything from me so I can be naked and alone with the truth. Take my mind, take my life. Make me a leaf in Your wind. Make me a finger in Your hand to spread Your blessings. Oh Beloved, take away what I want, take away what I do, take away what I need, take away everything that takes me from you.

At the same time my deep, self-preserving ego prays for the opposite. Lord, keep me safe. Lord, give me long life in this body. Lord, give me someone who loves me. Give me money and sex. Make things how I like them.

And the wheel turns.

Maybe it’s all very simple. Whatever you want, God wants to give to you. If you only want God, if that’s really all you want with every last drop of your being, that’s what you will get.

I keep praying. I keep meditating, practicing yoga and doing retreats. I study. I do tapas. And I listen for that tiny, precious voice that says, “Listen, child, come closer, let me tell you a secret…”