You'll admit all of the compulsivities: using relationships, psychedelic chemicals, spirituality, sex and food to self-soothe. You will cop to being a people pleaser, and realize that you modify your consciousness more to comfort a sore ego than to learn how to use it differently. You'll fess up to seeking heaven because you can't deal with earth, to looking for God because you shirk personal responsibility. You'll admit that you use sex to end-run around truly internalizing the teacher's power, and feel bad about subtly asking your lover to cooperate in your self-deception. You will face the fact that you eat your feelings. You'll feel silly and immature and ashamed and simply exhausted. And you'll ask me to give you the resources to quit the whole business.
But I won't. [bxA] Listen: you can perhaps hear me speaking. You have perhaps had spiritual experiences. You may even have given all that you have, many times over, in an effort to find answers. But you still have a great deal to learn about how to encounter your needs consciously. All of the unmet yearnings (for others, for comfort and for egoic transcendence) that those things provide--their deficiencies are a great poverty, and that poverty is neither a problem nor a crisis. Remember: I am asking you to see what you lack as cause for a kind of "celebratory finding the others"--because the bounty of the infinite cosmos makes beggars of us all. I'm asking you to treat your suffering with curiosity and fascination rather than dread.
You are still learning how to notice the dread in the first place. You need a great deal more work in being able to watch non-judgmentally as that dread changes to opportunity and the energy runs its course. You are by no means a realized being. You are a student, and a student works with a curriculum. Get over yourself. Of the Teacher, you have heard it said "his yoke is easy and his burden is light." Asking to bear nothing will simply increase suffering. But if you work at it patiently, you might perhaps find serenity.
Celebrating your poverty is a wedding feast of empowerment and joy. You must wear the festal garment of non-self to enter. And you keep entering the party and then leaving again--that's okay. In and of itself, it's not a big issue. You are in a world of people who wear their egos like winter coats in summer time: you will have to learn to assume your ego when you need to, and to drop it when you can. But you come and go compulsively, in a way that's driven by fear and insecurity. Remember the book: it said I will go forth from God's mouth and not return to him empty. I am teaching you to come and go, to wear your ego and be humble, as God wills, not as you will.
And don't worry: that process is supposed to feel like whirlwinds in your chest and burning coals in your throat. You are every prophet that was ever martyred in Jerusalem, and Jerusalem is your own body. I'm asking you to be so attentive to the sensations that, like the teacher before his accusers, you get quiet.
I don't know. Maybe egos just need to know what "spending all you have fruitlessly" feels like, before the hem of the teacher's garment looks appealing. Maybe using blame and resentment and defeatedness to cope needs plenty of space to get old before you're willing to try something else. Maybe there's a yoga to the years of sitting lame before the Teacher tells you to take up your mat and walk. The patriarch Joseph wasn't given all the power in his prison on the first day. Before the end, you will realize you love the time you have to practice, and you'll suspect you've spent lifetimes thinking it only just occurred to you. As the upa-gurus of this generation say, "You didn't need a long time to realize this. You only needed now."
There it is. First, be here now. Then, put on some music. And go clean your messy apartment.
No comments:
Post a Comment