Wake Up Now (9 page)

Recently, I responded to a flyer announcing a gospel music festival near my home in Austin, Texas. After I arrived, I quickly realized that I had stumbled on a revival meeting in disguise, and that the audience was a relatively close-knit group of evangelical Christians who regularly convened for music and prayer. The people I met were friendly and kind, and the singing was filled with heartfelt love and devotion. In my ecumenical way, I found myself grooving on the good vibrations as I translated the references to Jesus into more generic references to the Divine. Soon, however, the performers began interspersing their songs with hostile comments directed at those who didn’t share their conservative political views. The love and devotion never stopped flowing, but now it was being filtered through layers of judgments and beliefs. If you didn’t believe
in old-fashioned family values, support the Republican Party, and above all put your faith in Jesus, you were undeserving of love and destined for damnation.

More than their judgment of others, though, what struck me about these lovely, heartful men and women was how judgmental they were of themselves. Considering the commentary that accompanied their songs, they seemed to be struggling mightily to be good Christians and resist the temptations of Satan because they believed that they were inherently flawed and unworthy and that their natural insights and impulses were misguided. Their faith provided them with the possibility of salvation, but it also kept them bound by their sinfulness. I could understand why they held so tightly to their religious beliefs. Without the reassurances such beliefs provided, they might have to face the uncertainty and self-doubt they were trying to overcome.

Fundamentalists aren’t the only ones who feel inadequate and attempt to compensate by adopting the right attitudes and beliefs. As a psychotherapist, I’ve found that just about everyone I’ve counseled believes at some level that he or she is inadequate or unworthy, and many approaches to therapy attempt to bolster people’s self-esteem by substituting positive beliefs for negative ones. The problem is that no amount of bolstering will ever completely reassure the ego, the apparently separate self, that it’s adequate because it knows at some level that it’s just a construct, a collection of thoughts, memories, and feelings, without any substantial
existence. In the words of Ramana Maharshi, the ego is just a “shadow cast on the ground” by being. No wonder it feels inadequate—it doesn’t really exist!

Developmentally, the ego arises in childhood when you’re given the message that you’re not enough just as you are and that you need to act in certain ways to win love and ensure your survival. For example, your parents may tell you, with the best of intentions, that good girls don’t get angry, they’re cheerful and accommodating, or that big boys don’t cry, they hold their feelings in and tough it out. Then they give you positive attention when you act in certain acceptable ways. As a result, you start pretending that you’re happy or strong even when you don’t genuinely feel like it, and a split develops between your inner experience, which is deemed unacceptable, and your outer persona, or ego. If you’re like most folks, you may spend the rest of your life attempting to win love and approval or ensure your survival by pretending to be someone you’re not, while deep down feeling inadequate because you never succeed at living up to the image you project for yourself.

There’s nothing wrong with this process—indeed, it appears to be unavoidable—but it can cause quite a bit of suffering. Many people, for example, turn to addictive behaviors in a futile attempt to fill the hole or vacancy they sense inside themselves with alcohol, drugs, antidepressants, food, sex, material possessions, and, yes, spiritual beliefs. The inner emptiness can seem so terrifying and overwhelming that they’ll do just about anything, including indulging in self-destructive behaviors, to avoid facing it.

Spiritual beliefs provide the ego with a more positive identity to layer on top of the hole and compensate for the feelings of inadequacy. “I must be a good person,” you may think, “because I follow the words of the Gospels, the teachings of the yogic sages, the sayings of the Buddha.” Over time, you fashion these beliefs into a comforting inner world with a more exalted, more spiritual you at the center, but this world is just a fantasy, another construct, more sweets for the ego, and it won’t bring you any closer to genuine spiritual awakening.

Breathe and Reflect

Even this book is filled with words and concepts that can be confusing or misleading. Don’t take them seriously or try to hold on to them. Just let the words resonate inside you, then throw them away. My deepest wish is that you put down this book knowing less than when you picked it up. The process of unknowing is the path to wisdom.

Radical spirituality burns down the walls of your fantasy world and invites you to face your feelings of lack and inadequacy directly, without conceptual overlays. In the light of present awareness, you come to see that the separate self is just a construct and the feelings are just that—merely feelings—and have nothing to do with who you really are, which is the limitless space in which thoughts and feelings arise. “Give up the tendency to define yourself,” says Nisargadatta Maharaj. “Whatever concept you have about yourself cannot be true.” Indeed, the feeling of inner emptiness, which may seem so threatening, actually points to the
radiant emptiness or void at the heart of existence. As you penetrate the many layers of belief and self-concept, you may feel moved to ask the deeper questions that can lead you to a direct experience of this radiant void: What is life really about? What’s the point? Who am I really? (For an in-depth exploration of self-inquiry, see
Chapter 5
.)

Even the most spiritually correct, nondual concepts can be co-opted by the ego and turned into a comfortable spiritual identity. I know people who regularly attend spiritual gatherings and retreats, read the works of the Zen masters and Advaita sages, speak nondual jargon, and spout the philosophy (“I am consciousness. There’s no division between self and other. The separate self doesn’t really exist.”). But they’re merely repeating dead words rather than expressing their realization, and the ideas and beliefs to which they’re so attached just hinder clear seeing and may ultimately act as obstacles to awakening. As Nisargadatta says, “The most accurate map is still only paper.”

At an even subtler level, despite the words to the contrary, the emphasis on conceptual knowing just reinforces the seeming solidity of the knower, the separate someone who thinks it knows. “Cease to be a knower,” says Ramana Maharshi. “Then there is perfection.” I often tell my students that I hope they’ll leave my talks and intensives knowing less than when they came, and I encourage them to forget the words and let the truth behind the words continue to resonate inside them, beneath the level of the mind.

In any discussion of spiritual beliefs, the New Age deserves special mention for its tendency to take fundamental spiritual truths and enlist them in the service of the spiritual ego. Read an author like Deepak Chopra, for example, and you’ll find the most profound spiritual principles articulated with utmost clarity—until you get to the part about how you can use the techniques and teachings he espouses to increase your wealth and maximize your longevity. Suddenly the nondual teachings have been turned into a treatise on self-improvement, which is fine if what you’re looking for is a better, healthier, wealthier you.

Not long ago, friends and clients were urging me to watch a movie called
The Secret
, in which a series of New Age teachers bears witness to the power of a metaphysical principle known as the “law of attraction”—essentially, the belief that you create your own reality through your thoughts, feelings, and expectations. According to this principle, which is central to New Age philosophy, if you envision wealth, health, and happiness, not only with your mind but with your whole being, the universe will cooperate, and you’ll inevitably get what you want.

The problem is that life doesn’t necessarily work that way, except in the broadest of outlines. Yes, it’s true that if you act loving and generous, for example, you’ll tend to attract love and generosity in return. But will you inevitably get the Porsche, the big house with the pool, or the ideal
mate just by wanting them intensely enough, as several of the presenters suggest? It doesn’t appear to be so. There are simply too many factors involved in life’s unfolding on the material plane, most of them well beyond your control: genetics; family circumstances; physical limitations; karma from past lifetimes; issues of race, gender, and socioeconomic status. I watched one of my spiritual teachers die a painful death from stomach cancer, another drown in a pond while attempting to save his young daughter, and a beautiful awakened friend succumb to brain cancer just a few days shy of her forty-second birthday. Had these deeply spiritual beings merited such difficult or untimely deaths by doing something wrong or thinking the wrong thoughts?

Some New Age teachers would contend that they could have prevented or at least forestalled their deaths by envisioning good health, but this argument raises the issue of New Age guilt. If you create your own reality, the argument goes, then you must be to blame if you’re suffering. Following this line of reasoning to its logical conclusion, you’re left with the belief that all those who are poor, hurt, sick, or lonely have failed to envision a better life for themselves with enough clarity and heart, which is patently absurd.

Besides, who really knows what’s best for you? Although you may hunger for the big house, the fancy car, and the successful career, there’s inevitably a vaster, more complex, and more mysterious order at work that the human mind can’t comprehend—and that may not include the results you desire. “If you want to make God laugh,” the old saying
goes, “tell her your plans.” When the virtuous, prosperous, devoutly religious Job loses everything he’s cherished—his wealth, his health, his children—and laments his losses to God, complaining that he doesn’t deserve his fate, God appears to him in a whirlwind and reveals the unfathomable immensity and profundity of the Divine. Job is so overwhelmed and humbled by this vision that he falls to his knees in awe and supplication. “Do you think you know what’s best?” God seems to be saying. “What hubris! Only I have the omnipotence and the omniscience to make the heart beat and the planets spin in their orbits, to give and take away, to create and destroy.”

You may want to substitute
consciousness, being, Tao, or Buddha nature for God
, but the point is still the same: the little me you take yourself to be doesn’t really know what’s best for you and has only very limited control over the circumstances of your life. The point of spiritual awakening is not to maximize your assets and minimize your losses, but to be free of attachment to gain or loss and to be peaceful and joyful in the midst of whatever life brings.

Perhaps the deepest question raised by the belief in the law of attraction is “Who is the you who supposedly creates your reality?” When you awaken to your true nature, you can say with utmost confidence that you’re the source of your own reality—not you as the limited body-mind, but you as the vastness of being, the Tao, the current of life, which is constantly creating and destroying in its own mysterious and unpredictable way. At this stage, you come
to realize that you want exactly what life brings, because you’re not separate from life and not attached to having it any other way.

Needless to say, in the relative world of cause and effect, certain kinds of knowledge are invaluable. If, for example, you’re a doctor, lawyer, teacher, computer programmer, or mechanic, you need to have access to a vast reservoir of information to do your job properly. If you want to answer e-mail or surf the Web, you need to know enough about computers to get you there. By contrast, conceptual knowledge won’t reveal to you who you are, but it may help orient you in your search.

Jean Klein used to say that conceptual understanding can afford you a “geometrical representation” of truth, by which he meant an accurate road map of the territory, a clear pointer to the truth beyond concepts. Ultimately, however, this map can take you only so far—to the threshold of realization but no further, to the precipice over which you must fall in order to awaken—and then you must be “taken” by the truth itself in a moment out of time. When you awaken, your conceptual understanding dissolves in “being understanding,” the living, nonconceptual knowing of the heart.

Ramana Maharshi puts it simply: The teachings are like a stick used to stir a fire and keep it burning. Once the fire is raging and needs no tending, you can throw the stick into the flames and let it burn as well. So books like this one have some value if they ignite the fire of truth in your heart and help keep it ablaze. In the end, however, you need to let go
of all concepts, even the most accurate ones, and die into the deepening wisdom of the heart.