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…”

Blink And You Miss It: An Introduction to Momentariness

Today I would like to talk about momentariness.

Actually, I always want to talk about momentariness. I just think it’s cool that Buddhist scholars and yogis knew we were living in a trippy quantum universe 1500 years ago.

Momentariness is one of the most interesting Buddhist doctrines for me. It seems almost too simple but once you start digging into it, it will take you into emptiness, universal consciousness, the quantum multiverse and a whole different way to look at the mindstream.

Let’s take any object, like a pot.

(“Consider any object, such as… oh, I don’t know, just pulling this one out of nowhere… A POT.” – Every Buddhist or Hindu philosopher ever. It’s always a pot.)

Take a look in your proverbial kitchen. Is the pot you bought last year the same as the one you have today?

The one from last year was fresh from Bed, Bath & Beyond. It didn’t have any stains or weird spots or burn marks on the bottom.

Your pot now? Not so much. Pot A (earlier pot) and Pot B (current pot) have different characteristics.

But whatever, you might say, it still works the same, it’s the same pot even if it has a few spots.

Ok, fine. So what if tomorrow it gets a hole in the bottom and you can’t boil water with it anymore? What if the handle falls off? What if you throw it out and it gets melted down as scrap metal and made into something else, or into a new pot? At what point does it cease to be the pot that you bought last year?

We tend to prescribe the existence of an object to its function and, to some degree, its characteristics. When the pot breaks or the pen runs out of ink, it’s not “really” a pot or a pen anymore. This is sort of the basis for the semi-realist take on momentariness put forward by the Gelugpa, especially Je Tsongkhapa and Khedrup Je, but I’ll get to that later.

Let’s go instead to how Dharmakirti – King of Logic and epistemologist extraordinaire – would view the momentariness of all specifically characterized phenomena.

But first, let’s divide all objects into two groups. This will become relevant, I promise. In Dharmakirti’s ontology you have:

·      Specifically characterized phenomena. These are real, individual objects like a pot (yes), a tree, a horse, etc. They are by nature impermanent and always changing.

·      Generally characterized phenomena. Conceptual concepts that don’t exist in any single, specific way, such as “animals,” “being strong,” “old men.” These are mental objects. They’re permanent. Are they real? Do they exist or not? WELL GEE THANKS FOR ASKING. Dharmakirti says no. They sort of blink in and out of existence in as far as they’re expressed in specifically characterized phenomena but they’re essentially fictional, just concepts that we use to organize our perceptions. This puts him in the antirealist camp. (Versus, for example, most Hindu schools which are realist, meaning they ascribe more reality to abstract concepts than individual manifestations. Buddhist antirealism that denies the reality of conceptual constructs in favor of discrete objects leads to a more universal antirealism once we see that these individual objects which we seem to interact with are actually, on our perceptual level, concepts.)

Anyway! We see these mind-concepts at work all the time, creating the commonsense reality that we usually experience.

The Sautrantika school provides the framework for a lot of Dharmakirti’s arguments when he’s not going full-on Yogacara. They show the mind creating solid objects and categories out of perceptions that are ontologically distinct in three ways. There’s a mixture of place, time and nature.

·      Place: you see a pot on your left and a pot on your right. You recognize that they both belong to the category “pot,” so they are kind of “the same thing.”

·      Time: you see one pot in the morning and the evening. You think of it as being the same object. (This is obviously the most important one for momentariness.)

·      Nature: you see a steel pot and a copper pot. Again, you recognize they both belong to the category of “pot,” have the same nature as being pots, and they’re basically the same thing to you.

So are they really different objects? With place and nature, it’s pretty clear that you’re dealing with two separate objects that get lumped into the same category. With the mixture of time… it sure looks like one pot.

Only from the macro view though – if you look at the pot from a microscopic/subatomic level, you’ll see that the particles are in constant motion. The molecules and atoms are vibrating. The electrons are doing their trippy little orbits and the quarks are doing whatever quarks do.

There’s always a level where you can find change. There’s always some difference between Pot At Moment A and Pot At Moment B.

You never step in the same river twice: the water is always flowing.

At this point it looks like momentariness is just another word for impermanence, and there’s definitely overlap between the two concepts. All phenomena have the nature of being momentary because they’re impermanent, changing from moment to moment. But we can go one step further.

In the lower schools, and our everyday sense of reality, being impermanent means an object is created, endures for sometime and then decays out of existence. It works in daily life but there are two problems with this.

First, it’s impossible to say when exactly a given object is created or destroyed. Going back to your pot, is it destroyed when it no longer functions? Technically, the object is still there.

Or, take a tree. A seed forms and detaches from a mother tree, falls to the ground, sprouts, sends down roots, sends up a little branch… at what point do we say the new tree comes into being?

The tree lives for a while, then it dies, falls over, starts to rot, eventually sinks into the ground and becomes a part of the soil around it. At what point does this tree cease to be?

You get the picture. This is how fuzzy it is for all physical objects if you look at them closely enough.

There’s another problem. If Pot At Moment A has a certain set of characteristics and Pot At Moment B has a different set, they must be separate objects. You can’t have a single thing with two sets of characteristics.

I already noted that the subatomic arrangement of an object would be different at two different times, but even if that weren’t the case, it would still be a different object. Time is also a dimension. Pot At Moment B is different from Pot At Moment A simply because it is at a different point in its timeline. It is, if you will, one moment farther from its creation and closer to its destruction.

It’s like the object blinks into being, endures for a moment and then blinks out again, replaced by an almost identical object which is one moment older.

Any object you perceive is actually a continuum of these momentary objects, an infinite collection of them, which our mind (running in a straight line along the time dimension) projects as a single, enduring object. An object that seems stable is actually like a film where all the frames are basically the same.

Objects do have the nature of arising, abiding and ceasing, but all three happen in a moment, every moment.

Time, meanwhile, is not moving at all. It’s a condition of the mind that functions once the changes in the objects (including our minds) are dramatic enough for us to perceive them.

This is momentariness in a nutshell. There are a lot of implications and a few problems, such as:

·      If objects have only a momentary existence, how do we have an experience of continuity?

·      How do these moments have any existence, because they must be infinitely small?

·      Since this is true for individual objects, what about the material world as a whole?

·      How does karma function here?

I hope to address these soon but this post is already approaching TL;DR and I have just so much to say about momentariness so I’ll leave it here for now.

Waiting For Krishna

At the end of this summer I stayed with a friend in Ein Kerem, near Jerusalem. I woke up very early for some reason, before dawn. I went outside, meditated for a while and walked up the hill.

It was almost dawn but deep shadows still lay over the valley. The ring of hills faded into the darkened sky.

Everything was very quiet. The sort of profound silence that is humming with awareness. The sort of peace that you feel in a graveyard, or at the end of a long retreat. Nothing to be said, nothing to be done.

I stood there for a while. All of Ein Kerem was waiting quietly.

The air and the trees were waiting, and the darkness across the valley.

I was waiting too.

It was very sweet, waiting together for our Beloved.

Waiting can be an act of surrender. Patience, simple and content within itself, like the patience of plants and rocks within the rhythm of nature. A willingness to be open receive in due time.

It’s an act of surrender to sleep peacefully in this world, knowing our time to wake up will come. Knowing there is void before and after, and the illusion in between is sacred too. Knowing that the universe and your own evolution are moving at a pace which is beyond you, letting go of the ego struggle to make it all happen here and now.

There is only perfection, there never was and there never will be anything else.

If you are patient, if you are willing to put yourself aside and wait, then sooner or later you will come to the beginning and there is nothing but peace.

It’s a strange, wonderful moment when you realize that what you’re looking for is also looking for you.

“Not only the thirsty seek the water, the water seeks the thirsty,” Rumi says.

We are in love with God. I am and you are, every being in this world, everything that has a spark of life in it is drawn towards that bliss. We don’t feel it most of the time because if we did, if you felt your love for God in its full intensity, unfiltered by personality and illusion, you would be drawn into it and disappear like water into water, and the lila, the cosmic dance of being and non-being, would cease.

We are created things, bodies and personalities that run like a program on causes and conditions, and yet this being can turn to God. It has life inside it and that life inevitably will seek itself. That’s the real magic trick of this existence and the joy to its creator.

The spiritual path feels lonely sometimes, like endlessly reaching towards something which is always just out of reach, but remember that the mystical romance is a two-way street.

God is so in love with us, so happy to receive the soul back where she belongs.

The divine and the individual consciousness are of one nature, yes? How could two halves of the same whole not long for each other with equal intensity?

However much Shakti yearns to be reunited with Shiva, Shiva is yearning to unite with her.

When Radha dances for Krishna, Krishna watches with love and desire. The world is enchanted by Krishna and Krishna is enchanted by Radha.

When you are very quiet and your heart sings into the void, the void will sing back to you.

When Yoga Turns You Into An Alien

I lost my keys.

I lost my sweater and my good bra. I lost my flip-flops.

I wrote notes to myself so I would remember things and I lost the notes.

I lost my temper too.

I left my wallet on Fire Island.

I leave a door open and the cats get into the room they’re not supposed to go into. My spell check app doesn’t work and I send an article full of typos to my boss. My boyfriend asks me to help with some errands and, somehow, I mess up every single one. “Floaty yogini,” he says in dismay.

I’m sorry to everyone who’s suffered from my negligence. Believe me, no matter how frustrated you are with my inability to hold onto things, stick to a schedule or follow basic directions, I am twice as frustrated at least.

I wasn’t always like this. That’s what I envision myself shouting as I plunge into an abyss of missed deadlines, lost items, bad decisions and stunning miscommunications.

The fact is that my connection to the material world, always a bit tenuous, has faded in the past few months, and my spiritual practice has a lot to do with it.

It hurts me to say this, because I would never want to say anything that might discourage people from practicing yoga and meditation. I’ve heard many spiritual teachers promise that meditation won’t make you weird and spacey, I think mostly not to scare people off, because it really can make you weird and spacey. At least for a while.

At least for a while, you might feel like your whole life is falling apart. You might feel like the light inside is shining stronger and stronger, and on the outside everything is slipping away.

It’s part of the path, I think. It’s from the same reason that meditative states sometimes feel like a very blissful type of dying.

Think of it like a movie projected onto a screen. Usually, we have our backs to the projector so we only see the image, all the different colors and shapes, and we don’t see the single beam of white light that they come from. In meditation, you turn around to look into the projector beam. The colors and shapes are there inside it, but you only see white.

Going deeper into meditation is a path of uncreation. Reversing the process of manifestation that generates our incarnated experience.

This is the 36 tattvas in Kashmir Shaivism, the branching path through which the divine descends into material reality and the human being ascends to the divine.

The pure “I am” splits into internal and external, the external splits again and again, more concrete with every movement away from the source. The Self identifies with its creation and becomes limited.

And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day. You know this story already.

When you go back into the “I am” you are retracing these steps and erasing them behind you. The infinity of creation which emerged out of consciousness dissolves back into it.

It’s not the end. On the tantric path it’s not enough just to melt into oneness, you have to bring oneness into creation. This world is only samsara if you have a samsaric mind; if you have a divine mind, it is Shakti. The mountain peak, where you leave the world behind and fall into God, is one stop on the road, and from there you turn around.

But it’s a place we all have to go. We have to go alone and we must be prepared never to come back.

For now, I’m not able yet to transform this reality but I’m too bound to it to transcend it entirely. The dim lights of this world lose their color and blur together, but the bright light still seems so far away.

It’s like in the Torah, if you look at the story of the Israelites as the journey of the soul. We go out from Egypt, slavery to the ego, towards the Promised Land of enlightened consciousness. Between those two poles, there’s the desert. The vast open space. No markers, no path except what’s right in front of our eyes.

This is the space of spiritual development. Sometimes things seem more clear, sometimes less so.

Things are less clear for me right now. I walk around like a foreigner in the places most familiar to me, talking to people I’ve known for years and wondering, who are you?

I can’t bring myself to care about the things that most people care about. I meditate in the morning and everything comes together into a single point of clarity, and for the rest of the day I blunder around feeling like I just landed from another planet and I have a map from the wrong decade. I barely recognize my own life. Everything I try to do veers off in the wrong direction.

I see now that I can’t trust my own mind. My emotions do strange, crazy things and I’m not in control of them, I have no part in them except what I give to them. The sense of control over my life, the ability to manage things for myself, is a ripening of a certain karma. It’s a grace.

I’ve neglected and disregarded the material world in the past, and so now I experience the ripening of a different karma.

And that’s also a grace.

The times when things seem clear are more dangerous, I think. We’re in the desert here – if you see an oasis, good chance you’re heading for a mirage.

When you’re lost, you can be humble. You can be in that sacred space of bewilderment where everything is possible and all you can do is laugh.