Is Obedience Necessary?

I've been wondering, not for the first time, why so many religions, especially those with a monastic component, stress obedience as part of the spiritual path. Of course, if one lives in community, there have to be rules for practical purposes, but most religious communities go far beyond what is practical. Obedience seen as is part of what will bring you closer to God, or spiritual realization as it is conceived in a given tradition.

What are the reasons one would obey another person instead of one's own heart? It seems one must believe not only that another person somehow personifies the goal one wants to attain spiritually but that one does not have within oneself the wisdom one is seeking. I find it hard to believe that there is any way that obedience can come from anything other than denial of one's True Nature.

A Poem on Separateness

"You know, this friend called mind,
it's in a role.
It was given to us
to create identification out of nothing.
It's such an ancient divine servant.
The Self took the form of thought
to help itself play the game.
So could you bow down to thought
as an ancient retainer?
It's the Self in disguise."
-- Pamela Wilson

I hope Pamela doesn't mind my borrowing this moving poem from her website (Pamelasatsang.com). I love it because when we bow down to the separateness, when we stop calling it names but rather honor it, we see that it really isn't separate. 

Is It Ego to Acknowledge One's Awakeness?

Recently, a friend told me that she wondered if she only wanted to go to see a certain teacher because that teacher recognized that she was awake. Was it only her ego that wanted that acknowledgement, she wondered.

I said that since ego doesn't exist, how could that be? Maybe it was just that that which is awake in her wanted t be seen, I suggested.

As I ponder this answer, I don't think it was complete enough.

I always go back to Adyashanti's saying to me, years ago, “Only ego wants to get rid of ego.” This turns the whole question on its head.

I define ego as the thought of separate-hood. We come to think we are separate – perhaps mainly because we see “me” over here and everything/one else “over there.” (This explanation doesn't completely satisfy me, however, because after awakening it doesn't quite look like this anymore. So it seems that this way of seeing is also just conditioned by thought.) Anyway, whatever the reason, there is a “me-thought” and that me-thought is threatened when it realizes it isn't absolutely solid – that it is just one aspect of the emptiness that is everything. So it starts to tell stories that the awakened person, now seeing things from a different perspective, will buy. One of those stories is, “It's egotistic to let on how awake you actually are.” You have to hide your Light under a bush, in other words. So the awakeness gets to peek out once in a while when it is summoned, but it doesn't get to show itself on its own.

The me-thought can't just deny the awake-ness entirely because that won't be believed anymore, so it makes up the story of how owning the awake-ness smacks of ego. Very clever of it.

Altruism and Unity Consciousness

In the current issue (May2015) of The Atlantic, Sam Kean delves into the current research on altruism. It appears that our pleasure centers are stimulated when we give.

I'm not a generous person – I tend to hold onto what I have pretty tightly. But there came a day in 1982 when I encountered a beggar in the financial district of San Francisco. Suddenly I had the urge to give him something.I pondered this unusual feeling, unable to determine where it might have come from, but finally decided to give him just a quarter. Maybe I'd find out, in the giving, where the urge came from.

I did. Suddenly I was thrust below the level of ordinary consciousness, to a realm where the beggar's “thank you” seemed to come from me or through me rather than from the outside. I wrote of this encounter to my first spiritual teacher, in Japan. “You are the beggar,” he wrote back. Indeed.

So I wonder now about this research Kean explores. The possibility of going beyond the separate self into another realm where giver and receiver are not separate doesn't occur to any of the researchers into altruism – nor to author Kean. But because the initial urge when I saw the beggar seemed to be an altruistic one, I have to wonder what changes in the brain when we go to that place where we know unity with another.

Anyone can awaken

One of the myths about enlightenment is that it's very difficult to attain, and that only an august few human beings manage to do it.

I remember many years ago at my teacher Adyashanti's satsang, a man came up to dialog with him. The man asked several questions, all of which were in the vein of, “Can someone who is not awake have a reasonably happy life?” Finally, Adya stopped him because he saw the assumption this young man was making: awakening was impossible for him. Could his life be worthwhile nonetheless, he was asking.

Adya finally stopped the man and said, “Let's see who's here tonight.” He looked out over the gathering, which was small enough in those days that he knew personally most of the people present. “I'd estimate,” he said, “that fifty percent of the people present have had an awakening, so why not you?”

This is the little secret, you see. Most people think that awakening is somehow this difficult thing. You have to meditate for years, or do some other kind of practice, and then maybe, if you are the right kind of person, you will be blessed with a little glimpse of the truth. No! Someone needs to tell the truth: we all have access to this. And there are no preconditions. It is our true nature. How could it not be available to us – whoever we are, whatever our past or present circumstances?

My Will and Thy Will

Recently, I went to a discussion group about Buddhism. I thought I'd like it, but I was bored to tears. For me at least, having found out that words are empty, I can't handle abstractions anymore. I wanted to shout out, “But you don't exist so none of this means anything!” But I knew how that would be greeted. Everyone at the meeting was very nice, and no one would have responded rudely, but they would have just ignored my outburst, perhaps looked at me a bit askance, and then continued on with more abstractions.

I remember how being told that I didn't exist did absolutely nothing for me when I was trying to wake up. What did it even mean?

Similarly, I remember my teacher once giving a talk about how when we are truly awake we have surrendered our will completely to the larger consciousness. I remember thinking, “Then I'll never be awake because my will isn't going to lay down, I'm sure of that.”

This are both aspects of the same issue. Our mind has an idea that we have an identity separate from the whole. That identity is based on a history of experiences which the mind has put together to form an image of “me.” But there is a beingness of ourselves that is deeper than that and this is what those teachings described above point to. Before realization, though, they didn't make much sense to me.

Recently, I came across something in a Christian context: “Thy Will be done.” Same message but it sounds so much better somehow – maybe because it doesn't explicitly oppose one's own will to the larger consciousness. After all, it's all the same will. It's finally just a matter of knowing that – not as a fact, but experientially – and then the struggle ceases. I think for me this happened without my even being aware of it. It hasn't felt that anything was laid down – more like an awareness gradually dawned: my will is also That.

Uses of the Gaze

In nondual spirituality, as well as in some other traditions, an awake person may gaze into the eyes of another person, for various reasons. First of all, it is fun to see the deeper dimension of consciousness in another, beyond the physical appearance. Second, it can be a way of helping another awaken: when that deeper energy is displayed for another, it can help another access it in himself or herself. This is sometimes called transmission, but that is a bit of a misnomer, because really the other person, while s/he may not be conscious of the awake energy, just as surely possesses it as the awake person.

It is a third use of the gaze that I want to speak of here, however. That is to determine to what extent someone else is awake.

A person might say, “I had an awakening,” or “I'm still waiting for my first awakening,” or, “I have no clue what awakening is.” But people can mean different things by these words because the mind has various definitions and stories about awakening. For some, being awake means having reached perfection on all levels of existence. They will see proof of their lack of awakeness in every “selfish” thought they have. For others, of an opposite psychological bent, if they have even had a glimpse of transcendence, they seem themselves as fully awake. Still others may have experienced an awakening but, not having been able to “maintain” it – which generally means staying in the same bliss as occurred when the awakening occurred – will believe that awakeness was in their past but not a current reality.

Thus, because there are so many definitions of awakening held by so many people, it is impossible to know what someone means when s/he says, “I'm awake.” Here is where the gaze comes in – because it removes the mind from the equation. When the awake energy in one being consciously meets the awake energy in another, both are awake; if it fails to meet itself, then one of the two is not.