Everything is Practice
Fly sitting on a leaf
The craving for transcendence
Like many of us, I had this fantasy that by performing heroic acts of compassion or love I would finally transcend the world around me, and awaken. I imagined myself working in a hospice or an old age home helping people but mostly my fantasy involved me feeling good about myself, and convincing myself that I had in fact accomplished some heroic act that made me worthy of awakening. Mind you, there is nothing wrong about helping people, and everyone should help people when they can, but for me the motivation was not about genuine compassion but the desire to create a " heroic” situation that would allow me to transcend the world around me.
This past year I wrote to many old age homes and hospices asking if I could volunteer but received no concrete replies. Last month when I was thinking about it, I realized that my fantasy was just that, a fantasy. As I pondered this situation further, I understood that even the desire to awaken and transcend the world can become a trap. The craving for enlightenment is just that, a craving like every other emotion, and actually causes a further separation from the world around you. Spiritual experiences are not something that one holds on to, but something that you have to let go. Spiritual experiences are like way-posts not another construct for the Ego to hold on to and create a house of fantasies.
Practice begins at home
After this insight, I decided that I would carry this understanding to my everyday life. For a long time I had this separation, artificial as it may be, that my practice was different from my ordinary everyday life. I thought my practice was something special that would help me transcend this everyday existence but now I realize that the transcendent is the everyday life. Your everyday life is your practice and it is nothing special. The impermanent is suffused with the transcendent and co-exist with year other. There is no where to go and nothing to get.
For example, I told my wife that I would wash dishes everyday for month, no questions asked, and I also promised myself that I would not get angry at my kids for a period of two months. For those of you who have kids, you know it is a lot easier to be nice to strangers than not yell at your kids.
It is a lot more difficult to practice equanimity at home, amid the chaos of everyday life, than at a meditation retreat. The real work after awakening begins at home with your family. It is very easy to talk about compassion and love at a meditation retreat but if you are unable to bring that insight back home, that insight is useless. The real practice is embodying that insight in your daily life. There is no special place to practice. The mundane is effused with the sacred.
Life Serves the Self
As I was writing this blog, I remembered the advice that my Vedanta teacher gave me about the importance of practice. I am posting a short summary because it is something I keep coming back to often, to make sure my practice is alignment with my life. In Vedanta, the word Self is the often used synonymously with Awareness.
Life serves the Self. The Self does not serve life. This is just a fact. An inconvenient one for us humans, to be sure, but a fact nonetheless. I was lucky because when I discovered who I am, I was young and did not have a “life” in the conventional sense. I was a leaf in the breeze. I liked it that way because, like a rolling stone, I gathered no moss. My outer life mirrored the freedom I felt as Awareness. It still does today but there is a gradual diminishment of the physical freedom that I once enjoyed. It is okay because nothing can be done about it. You are an intelligent person, so you will have already seen where this Satsang is heading. If the scriptures told us how difficult it is squaring our lives with the truth, we would never seek. Somehow we want the Self to fit into our lives and lift them up. But this is not how it is. The Self does not compromise.
I wish I could say do this or do that. But this is not how it is either. But there is no easy doing or clever spiritual trick to justify your life. My wife says, “There is no essential right or wrong, but if you are unhappy, it is a sure sign that your life is not congruent with who you are.” She calls making your life congruent “facing down Isvara.”
The first step is for you to think about this and see if you can take it on board. If you seek a “spiritual” solution because the idea of changing your life is too painful, you will not succeed. There is nothing more to know about who you are. There is no longer a “spiritual” fix. If this is too abstract it may help to think back to a time when you were really happy and free – as a child perhaps – and capture that feeling, and set the ship of your life on a course directly to that point. The bliss is present. The love is present. It is only hidden by an unexamined life..
Eastern Red Columbine