Wake Up Now (21 page)

It depends on what you mean by truth. In my work as a therapist, I encourage my clients to tell the “unarguable truth”—that is, the truth of their experience that can’t be refuted or contested. This truth describes your own feelings
and sensations; it doesn’t make controversial claims about other people or situations. For example, statements like “You’re being abusive” or “You say you love me, but you really don’t” aren’t the truth; they’re merely your opinion and will no doubt prompt a strong reaction in others. If you say instead, “When you talk to me like that, I feel tense and angry,” or “When you forget to call me when you say you will, I feel a pain in my heart and find myself doubting your love for me,” you’re telling the unarguable truth. No one can really argue with these statements, though they may not appreciate the implications. Instead of attacking or defending, you’re being open and vulnerable and available for a genuine, truthful response.

The embodiment process you describe sounds
suspiciously like the progressive approach of
practicing to make myself a better, more effective
vehicle for truth. What’s the difference?

First of all, you can’t do embodiment as you would a practice. Embodiment begins to happen spontaneously as the truth to which you’ve awakened naturally moves to express itself in every area of your life. Once you’ve seen the truth of your being, you just can’t live the same lies anymore, and as you get clearer, the lies become more blatant.

Besides, truth has its own intelligence and moves to free you in mysterious ways, whereas cookie-cutter practices pretend to know what truth will require of you but actually
can’t, because they’re prepackaged and don’t take into account the uniqueness of your being and life situation.

In any case, progressive practices tend to distract your attention from truth and make you a great seeker but an unfulfilled finder. Wake up now, and let the truth embody itself as it will.

But if I practice some of the progressive
techniques before I awaken, won’t the
postawakening process go more smoothly?

Maybe—or maybe not. As I’ve mentioned before, progressive techniques reinforce the belief in a separate self who’s causing awakening to happen, which just makes the belief more difficult to drop. Sometimes people who have practiced meditation for years before awakening have an easier time recognizing and embracing the shift in identity that awakening brings. But such seasoned meditators may also hold on stubbornly to their spiritual beliefs and have a more difficult time letting go and letting truth take its course.

In the case you describe, the mind is preoccupied not with awakening, but with making “the postawakening process go more smoothly,” whatever that might mean. How can you possibly know how the postawakening process should go? Why not leave that to God, who’s in charge of it anyway, and focus your attention on discovering who you are instead?

Wake-Up Call

Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall

Set aside ten to fifteen minutes for this exploration. Begin by sitting quietly with your eyes closed in front of a large mirror. Relax and breathe. After a few minutes, open your eyes and gaze into your reflection. Don’t concentrate or focus in any way. Let your gaze be soft and loving. If you find yourself looking away, gently return to your reflection.

At first you may notice a litany of judgments and comments: “I look old, tired, unattractive. See the bags under my eyes or the sagging beneath my chin. I need a haircut, a shave, a perm, a face-lift. No wonder no one wants to date me.” The possibilities are endless. Indeed, most of us rarely look at ourselves in the mirror without an accompanying story. Notice the commentary, let it go, and continue your soft and affectionate gaze.

Many people report that their parents failed to really see and accept them as they were when they were children. Here you have an opportunity to provide this acceptance for yourself.

As the layers of judgment drop away, you may notice waves of emotions arising—grief for past pain, fear for the future, anger about unresolved injustices. Let these feelings pass through without attaching to them or trying to understand them, and continue to gaze.

Eventually, you may find yourself connecting with the essence behind the appearance, the true self beneath the stories and feelings, the inner light that radiates out through your eyes. You may experience
the form in front of you dissolving into empty space. Or you may realize that the one who is looking is not the person you see in the mirror. Whatever happens, take note of it as you continue your soft and affectionate gazing. When you’re done, notice how your experience of yourself has changed.

This bright Self wants to liberate all of itself and truly love itself in all of its flavors. This brightness comes back for itself, for every bit of confusion, for every bit of its suffering.

—Adyashanti

My first Zen teacher, a gentle eccentric, preferred spontaneous improvisation to traditional ritual and encouraged his students to practice what he called “guerrilla Zen,” that is, meditating on your own, in the midst of career and family and the other demands of everyday life. I loved him like a father, but over the years, I became impatient with his unconventional approach. After all, I’d ordained as a monk, and I was eager to engage in some of the intensive, no-holds-barred Zen training I’d read about in books. I wanted to devote myself to the monastic life, not live out my days meditating in someone’s converted garage in the suburbs of San Francisco.

Eventually, I went off to study with another teacher who boasted impressive credentials (he was recognized as enlightened in three different lineages) and seemed committed to a more traditional approach to Zen practice. Shortly after moving to the center he headed, however, I was surprised to discover that he didn’t live up to my image of how an enlightened person should act. Unlike my first teacher, who was the embodiment of kindness and patience, the roshi was prone to angry outbursts when things didn’t go his way. During breaks in the regular schedule, he would get predictably and often quite publicly intoxicated, and when I became his personal attendant, I discovered that he would give one-on-one interviews with his students while still under the influence. Later I learned that several women left the center after he made sexual advances toward them during interviews. Under the pretense of enlightened behavior, I found, the roshi was acting in unskillful and self-serving ways that caused harm to others.

Because I was hungry for the Dharma and the promise of spiritual “advancement” he offered, I managed to avoid confronting my concerns and remained for nearly five years before putting aside my robes and leaving to study Western psychology. In the end, I came to the conclusion that if this teacher was the role model for what Zen had to offer, traditional practice alone wasn’t going to make me a saner, wiser, more compassionate, and less reactive human being; I felt I needed to learn more about the workings of the human mind and heart before I taught others. Two years after I left, the center disintegrated when the roshi was caught lying
about an affair with one of his senior students and alcohol rehab didn’t seem to change his fundamental disposition. I’d experienced my first lesson in the potential consequences of spiritual bypassing.

Spiritual bypassing is the tendency to hang out in the spacious emptiness of the upper chakras (see
Chapter 8
) and use the nondual language of spiritual realization as an excuse to avoid or ignore the troublesome behavior patterns or challenging psychological or emotional issues that prevent us from living this realization from moment to moment. In essence, spiritual bypassing is yet another, more sophisticated way for the ego to maintain its control over our lives.

For example, people who bypass may act thoughtlessly or insensitively but refuse to examine or take responsibility for their actions, because they claim awakening has freed them from the constraints of conventional behavior (an argument frequently advanced in defense of the roshi). Or they may be prone to intense emotional outbursts that they dismiss as merely passing phenomena with no abiding significance—despite the impact these outbursts have on the people around them. Or they may remain on the periphery of life because they’re afraid of engaging, claiming it’s all just a dream, so there’s no point in getting involved.

Meditation centers and ashrams are filled with spiritual bypassers who sit blissfully on their cushions in a kind of manufactured
samadhi
(one-pointed attention) or move fluidly and radiantly through their yoga routines, then go
home and yell at their kids, get regularly stressed out about money or work, or have difficulty functioning in everyday life. Does any of this sound familiar? Needless to say, the roshi was just a more visible example of tendencies to which all of us are prone.

Breathe and Reflect

Stop and consider your own favorite brand of spiritual bypassing. How do you use your spirituality to avoid the complexities of your human embodiment? How do you forsake your vulnerability for spiritual defensiveness, your tenderness for detachment, or your natural engagement for an artificial transcendence?

By its very nature, of course, spiritual awakening inevitably involves a certain measure of spiritual bypassing. When you awaken to your essential, undivided, spiritual nature, you leapfrog over your conditioning and realize yourself as the silent presence that is untouched and undisturbed by any thoughts or emotions, no matter how challenging they once may have seemed. Now your conditioning arises and passes away in the vastness of who you are and no longer appears problematic. Now only the timeless dimension exists, and the time-bound, phenomenal realm is experienced as merely the play of the Divine. Because awakening generally eliminates at least a certain amount of conditioning and leaves you freer and less reactive, you may believe that your journey is complete. But the lifelong process of deeper embodiment has usually just begun.

At this point, you may be tempted to turn awakening into a fixed position or point of view, a new identity to which
you become attached, another filter through which you relate to life. “After all, I’ve spent years in search of awakening,” you may think, “and I’ve finally attained it. Awakening belongs to me, it defines who I am. I’m an awakened person now, and I’m free to do what I wish.” Traditionally, this fixation on awakening as an identity is known as Zen sickness, and it’s notoriously difficult to cure, since it’s so seductive and self-fulfilling. In Zen sickness, the ego once again coopts awakening and turns it into its own little fiefdom. By contrast, genuine awakening is the complete absence of any fixation or identity and can’t be turned into a position or point of view.

Spiritual bypassing is an inevitable phase and only becomes problematic when the awakened position (an oxymoron if ever there was one) becomes entrenched. Teachers are particularly susceptible to spiritual bypassing because they’ve established themselves as the purveyors of spiritual wisdom, and their power and status depend on maintaining and defending their authority. Several years after I left the roshi to study Western psychology, I happened to meet him at a conference, and he invited me for tea. After some initial pleasantries, our talk turned to the breakup of the center, and he became visibly angry and defensive. When I gently suggested that he might still harbor some feelings about what had occurred there, he heatedly countered that it no longer bothered him in the least.

Most nondual spiritual traditions inadvertently encourage spiritual bypassing by providing little or no guidance for embodying the profound shifts and insights that accompany
awakening. These traditions are primarily concerned with revealing the eternal and tend to let the mundane concerns of everyday life take care of themselves. For example, the teachings of Advaita Vedanta, which emphasize that there’s no separate doer and that every occurrence is merely the play of the Divine, offer welcome relief for those who have spent their lives on an endless treadmill of efforting and self-improvement. Finally, you awaken to the realization that everything is perfect just the way it is, nothing is lacking or out of order, and the you who keeps practicing to make yourself better is merely an illusion. But Advaita’s focus on inherent perfection can leave the mistaken impression that spiritual transformation is complete once an initial awakening has occurred, and everything you do thereafter, no matter how unskillful or self-serving, is a perfect expression of the Divine. One contemporary Advaita teacher, obviously laboring under this misconception, made sexual advances to his students, then refused to take responsibility, claiming that the body-mind mechanism was merely acting according to its conditioning and he had nothing to do with it.