Love, Service Devotion: A reading of Ram Dass and Trungpa Rinpoche

When I was int the monastery, I was guilty of “Spiritual Materialism.”  This is when my ego makes the things of the spirit into little merit badges that I go around collecting.  By and by, I realized that, by doing this, I was ignoring a good bit about myself: namely, the way my dysfunctional past was affecting my present, and my own tendencies to addictive behavior.

One of a few “Theses” here at Under the Influence is this: I hear the church’s teachings differently because I’m an addict who comes from dysfunction.  I can enter into its teachings differently because I’m allergic to its most important sacrament, just as some who share my disability are unable to “do,” or to “think about” the church’s ethics.  Furthermore, my annoying daily lot of PTSD and OCD take the dualism of western thought and run with it, making God seem more distant than, if truth be told, he is.

I recently listened to Ram Dass’ lecture series called “Love, Service, Devotion and the Ultimate Surrender.”  On the whole, it was something so rich that I feel multiple hearings are in order.  Ram Dass, however, in speaking about all the spiritual direction he does, bemoans the way “everyone’s got their thing” that keeps them from doing spiritual work.  These hang-ups, he says, ultimately become little things an aspirant clings to.  Along with turning positive events into credentials, the ego turns negative bits of one’s history into reasons to avoid going deeper.

For me, this was convicting.  I don’t want to do either of those.  I don't want my issues to be a crutch, and I’d sooner take down Under the Influence than have it become the sash I sew my red badge of transcendence on.  Furthermore, Ram Dass’ surpassing grooviness is…so right on.  So I wanted to do a post that works in two directions: one, as an homage to some of Love, Service Devotion’s  more useful bits, and two, as an examination of the work Under the Influence is doing—to make sure I’ve not been, as St. Paul says, running in vain.

A good bit of Love, Service, Devotion concerns a dialogue between Ram Dass and Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche.  Ram Dass is keen to say “Hey, man, it’s all about doing less.  Ram is doing everything, and I’m just sitting back in the Atman and watching it happen.”  Trungpa responds “You’re not taking enough responsibility for individual differences.  That’s the work we need to be doing, and it’s constant.”

The balance they ultimately strike—and I find this to be true, even from a Catholic Perspective—is that human life is a “free-will sandwich.”  We’re liberated in the beginning and at the end, but the middle is chocked full of struggle.  We come from God and return to him, and a part of us remembers that with a force that occasionally renders it present.  And we remember too, how St. Paul says “All have sinned and come short of the glory of God.”  Both are right.  Eastern religions call the middle part “our karmic predicament.”  To coin a catholic phrase, we might refer to it as “our purgatorial predicament," a way of doing our purgatory on earth.  In any case, the center is a toss-up between giving up our ego, or allowing it to entrench.  And there are certain laws that govern it.  We christians codify them this way: do, with others, as you’d have them do with you.  As you sow, so shall you reap.  There isn’t a person who’s given everything up that won’t receive a hundredfold (along with persecutions) in this present age.  The Middle is the exile of being particular.  We’re not God, and as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin says, in the middle part of life “union individuates.”  If we’re not careful, we end up simply refining our moral ass-clownery.   But even at best, even the process of becoming divinized is marked by painful separation.  

In the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous, newcomers are commonly cautioned against using spirituality to do an end-run around this pain.  I began this post by admitting I did this for years, with great gusto.  Under the Influence should always be understood as a response to religious self-deception, as an effort to get honest.

A sobriety coin, for me, has two sides: on one, we need to acknowledge what gets in our way.  On the other, we need to realize that the intended end is the emotional sobriety of a non-dual mind: neither naming our pain, nor enlightenment is something that someone called "I" first does, then takes credit for.  For Under the Influence, this is to be understood as a hard and fast modus operandi.  For me, and for those like me, neglecting either side will end in the self-deception of spiritual materialism or weaving an identity from my resentments.

So Ram Dass is right. We’re all trust-falling into our Atman and smiling back up at the world while Ram soul-trains his way through his many incarnations.  We are slowly being divinized, and it is all God’s work.  But Trungpa is also right: we have a responsibility to face and individuate from our ego, or else live blind-folded while we whine about wanting to see.

Other than the above, Under the Influence has no spiritual method.  Ram Dass said, and this blog resoundingly echoes the assertion that all methods are traps.  It’s the spiritual equivalent, not of a doctor’s amoxicillin, but of a 1960’s harvard professor’s psilocybin.  If you’re here and you’re like me, you do what you do, you see what happens.  Faced with a panoply of divine remedies, you are honest about your symptoms—you take what works and discard what proves itself a placebo.  St. Paul boasted only of his shortcomings.  I’d chose a different verb for myself, but he was basically right on.  Under the Influence isn’t written to lay any variety of religious trip on anyone.  It’s written each week in the hope of making non-judgmental space for self-work.  It aspires to become non-dualist: to balance the “self” and the “doing” with “non-self” and “not-doing.” Spiritually, then, our shortcomings and our gifts aren’t good or bad.  Methods aren’t better or worse.  Saying that would be bowing, again, to dualistic thinking.  All these things just are.  They might have a particular purgatorial result or karmic effect in our lives, but God has that amply accounted for, and we needn’t be too worried.

I close with two little anecdotes.  In the first place, when I was a monk, I travelled to Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky.  While there, I met the Buddhist Monk Tsering Phuntsok.  He was a delightful bloke, doing the speaker’s circuit in the States to raise money for improvements to his monastery back home.  I was struck by Tsering’s kindness, sure, but also by his gratitude.  Life in his home monastery was sustained by a diet of roasted barley and tea.  The brother’s eyes got Christmas-day wide the first time he went through the serving line for Gethsemani’s main meal.  Compared to tibetans, American monks lived high on the hog indeed.  This didn’t strike me as particularly kosher, so I gave what pocket money my monastery had given me to fund the improvement of Tsering’s.  He was moved, and fishing through his bag, he produced a dried leaf.  His holiness the Dalai Lama, he said, had planted the tree it came from, and had blessed the leaf.

The point is, I had that leaf for years.  It was, far and away, my “holiest possession”—I’ve never even owned a papally blessed rosary, but I had a leaf blessed by the 14th reincarnation of Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion.   When I left the monastery, I had the choice to either take the leaf with me, or leave it there.  Ultimately I decided to let it go.  I figured I had a greater gift from His Holiness in my detachment than I had in the leaf.

That leaf is everything, and everything is that leaf.  Which is to say, it’s just a leaf, as impermanent as our earthly existence or our ego, our spiritual methods or our value judgements. 

 Secondly, in a certain sense, I always dug the monastic habit a bit too much.  People had a whole host of assumptions about it: everything from the belief that my wearing it implied spiritual proficiency, to thinking I knew Kung fu.  For years, I would overtly admit I had clay feet, and that I wasn’t a Shaolin Buddhist.  Covertly I would enjoy the automatic assumption that I was a badass.  All the while, I wasn’t admitting how much I wanted people to see me instead of my clothing, and I wasn’t conscious of the ways I had yet to face myself. 

The last thing I want is for Under the Influence to become a virtual costume.  At the risk of filling my readers’ heads with cheeky little taboos: I won’t adopt a Franciscan Spirituality, but the Franciscan slogan applies here—nudus nudum Christum sequi.  If those to whom this blog appeals are like its author, they “nakedly follow the naked Christ.”  No, I don't intend to reduce life to a rock concert whose attendees dance best when they're naked and high.  I simply know my ego fits too tightly, and I hope to shed it.

In a sense, I’m sure I was born in the wrong generation.  Luckily, we don’t have to, as Joni said, “get ourselves back to the garden.”  God works to get us there, if only we admit we’re lost.  Quick, someone tell me to look inside of myself, before I start thumbing it to Woodstock.