Ego perceives that mystical experience and the clarity that results is the road to its own death.
Since ego cannot have mystical experiences or ‘get’ enlightened, ‘you’ cannot say you are enlightened.
“The ego can only carry the reflection of a spiritual experience.”
Vaughan-lee
Vimala Thakar’s experience: “The content of consciousness in Vimala’s body is ‘nobodyness and ‘nothingness’.How can there be any claim of being a genuine enlightened person or teacher?”
“The true mystic knows that ‘he’, ‘you’ or ‘me’ can never be enlightened.”
Vaughan-lee
Trungpa Rinpoche said the ego wanting to experience enlightenment is like “wanting to witness your own funeral.”
“Addiction to anything but God is a sure path to misery; addiction to God is the only path to happiness.”
The Aghori Vimalananda
“Spiritual materialism is an attachment to the spiritual path as a solid accomplishment or possession. It is said that spiritual materialism is the hardest to overcome. The imagery that is used is that of golden chains: you’re not just in chains, you’re in golden chains. And you love your chains because they’re so beautiful and shiny. But you’re not free. You’re just trapped in a bigger and better trap. The point of spiritual practice is to become free, not to build a trap that may have the appearance of a mansion but is still a prison.”
Judith Leif
“Spiritual materialism: using spirituality for the gratification of ego.”
Reggie Ray
“The soul that is attached to anything, however much good there may be in it, will not arrive at the liberty of the divine.”
St John of the Cross
“Since ego is seeming solid and cannot really absorb anything, it can only mimic. Thus ego tries to examine and imitate the practice of meditation and the meditative way of life. When we have learned all the tricks and answers of the spiritual game, we automatically try to imitate spirituality…However we cannot experience that which we are trying to imitate. We become skilful actors and while playing deaf and dumb to the real meaning of the teachings, we find some comfort in pretending to follow the path.”
Trungpa Ripoche
“What I find dangerous over the years since I’ve been teaching has to do with certain people-usually very intelligent people-who pretend to know and I would say ‘pretend’ in a sincere way, because these people are deluding themselves. They relate to strict, ultimate, non-dualistic teachings in such a way that they think they’ve got it. They don’t go into their own psychology, nor examine their own behaviour. This strategy can be very sophisticated. One man I worked with in a group was intelligent and sophisticated. I couldn’t tell him what he was doing. When I tried to allude to it, he covered it up with sophisticated dharma. It was impossible to pierce him. It was obvious that his whole strategy was remaining in control. I’ve noticed that most of the people who use this strategy are people who have a lot to lose in terms of losing face if they are really confronted as to what is going on within them. These people usually have seen something. It’s not totally false. They have sensed something, but precisely because they are so sensitive, they have taken recourse to spiritual teachings as a survival strategy. They haven’t done the necessary work in order to face the truth about their own psychology mechanisms, and so they want to short-circuit them. If find this type of strategy is far more dangerous than fancy mystical experiences which don’t last. This type of person does a lot of harm to themselves and also sometimes to others.”
Gilles Farcet
One scholar and student of Advaita-Vedanta referred to the type of ego in Farcet’s description as the “bullet-proof ego.” He suggested that when an individual does not have any context for understanding the nature of spiritual experiences and teachings (and even sometimes when they do), the ego takes the experience and teachings it receives, reconstellates them, and orbits them around itself. It then assimilates them into a “bullet-proof ego. When the ego itself is comprised of the experiences and the teachings, nothing save a small miracle is going to be able to penetrate it. All too aware of the insidiousness of ego, Llewellyn Vaughan-lee is insistent that, for the sake of one’s own spiritual work, the individual is better off with an ordinary ego rather than a spiritualised one. Again, the danger is always to spiritualise the ego, to become a “spiritual person.” I always say that it is much easier if you have a good worldly identity because it is much easier to get rid of, but a spiritual identity is difficult to get rid of.
“Self-deception, in this case, means trying to recreate a past experience again and again, instead of actually having the experience in the present moment.”
Trungpa Rinpoche
“Some say that we can free ourselves of the struggle, but for most people, a larger part of the path is a battle between attachment and letting go. Such struggle is the path. The path is working with the agony of not being able to make something a certain way.”
Reggie Ray
If one engages the struggle of clinging and letting go, little by little letting go becomes easier. It lessens up when the individual struggles with attachment and loses so many times that letting go becomes the only possibility for “winning”.
Individuals who have spiritualised their egos are in a very precarious and unenviable situation, though they may fancy themselves the belles of the ball. They have essentially used spirituality as a defence mechanism to protect themselves from exposing themselves as they actually are, which is what real spirituality is about. Their-know-it-all egos have become so well versed in spirituality and created such a solid shell around them that there is almost no way for them to see that they have manipulated their knowledge to their own disservice. Since they know everything-every dharmic explanation, every meditative state- there is no genuine openness for them to see that their “knowing everything” is precisely what stands in the way of their spiritual life.
The Zen masters want no less than for their disciples to realise their own Buddha-Nature, to abide in ultimate Reality and to serve that Reality.
The possibility that one can fall asleep even after awakening is uncommon knowledge among many spiritual students. Just as Jai Ram Smith was disillusioned when E.J Gold told him that he wasn’t in the awakened state all the time, most people tend to think of awakening or enlightenment as an “all or nothing” deal. But Cohen suggests that one can awaken and then fall back to sleep. In fact, Lozowick says, people wake up all the time, only they are unaware of it.
Spiritual comfort is available on all levels-even in heaven. Therefore, one should never consider oneself free from the need to be aware of all forms of seduction. As long as any traces of identification with ego remain, any state or attribute-including humility, generosity, service and even liberation itself-can be a point at which the aspirant gets stuck.
There is always a danger because it is very difficult to know that there are no traces of remaining identification of ego. It is all very subtle, very tricky and freedom from such dangers cannot be presumed.
“Contemplation and direct Realisation of the Absolute is the most demanding and all consuming form of meditation that a human being can pursue. It is so dangerous, because of the perfectly immaculate nature of the Absolute Realisation. Any trace of self-interest of any kind in any form instantly corrupts that most perfect purity and automatically, although usually imperceptibly, taints its reflection. How to realise everything and remain untouched even by that? How difficult it is to remain free from all the temptations that direct Realisation invites. Even those who do know and have Realised usually allow themselves to stop far short of that immaculate and perfect death that casts no reflection and recognises only itself. Any trace of self-infatuation, including even infatuation with Self, taints the possibility of the attainment of pure perception undefiled by any notion of Self. Infatuation with Self also indicates the likelihood of a subtle, yet profound, self-centred fixation on the absolute, the existence of which obscures the perception of a vaster perspective of reality in which the absolute serves as a foundation of perception and understanding rather than an end in itself.”
Andrew Cohen
“Some masts (person in high state of absorption) get stuck on the inner planes. They are overpowered by the inflow of grace and love and get into a state of divine stupor. They are entirely absorbed in the ‘beatific vision.’Some masts are completely stupefied by the psychic somersault precipitated by an entry into the new plane of consciousness and cannot find their bearings in the midst of their new environment, new duties and new powers. Some masts find their insurgent powers uncontrollable and are faced by new insurmountable temptations. They can make no further advancement through their own unaided efforts and have to avoid the possibility of a precipitous fall through indiscriminate use of occult powers. In short, in spite of having attained a high spiritual state, many masts on the inner planes need real guidance and help from a Perfect Master….one of the most difficult things for a mast is to come out of the self-sufficiency of his state. He may be so immersed in bliss that he may experience no need within himself to get linked with anyone. He may have no wants, and need have none. Just as a mast becomes completely indifferent to his own body or to the physical conditions of his life, he can also become indifferent to the physical and spiritual conditions of others. When a mast gets walled-in by his own self-sufficiency and desirelessness, only the master can draw him out of the isolation of his choice, by awakening within him the expansive love that breaks through all limitations and prepares him for shouldering the important responsibility of rendering true service to others who are in need of spiritual help.”
Meher Baba
“This is indeed your bondage that you practice ecstasy (samadhi).”
Ashtavakra-gita
Ego inflation is to be expected and prepared for. The fortress of the True-Self must be strengthened over time to withstand the onslaught of the ego interference.
“The intuited spiritual truth is that we are no-one special and in fact we are no-body at all. Ego, in its resistance to this fact, fights to be somebody.”
Andrew Cohen
The point of spiritual practice is to know the ego, to become intimately familiar with its workings, and to diminish or strengthen it as needed in order to handle the power of the forces one is likely to encounter as spiritual work deepens.
The dangers of ego inflation
The story is told when Carl Jung went through a crisis of (ego) inflation he actually had a pistol in his bedside draw. He said that if he didn’t resolve the crisis he was going to shoot himself. Carl Jung knew how dangerous (ego) inflation is.
The Guru Gita in the Sri Skanda Purana says: “Due to inflated ego and pride, (even) those equipped with the power of austerity and learning (continue to revolve) in the vortex of worldly life, like pots on a water wheel.”
Carl Jung warns: “The man who has usurped the new knowledge suffers, however, a transformation or enlargement of consciousness, which no longer resembles that of his fellow men. He has raised himself above the human level of his age (“ye shall become like unto God”), but in doing so has alienated himself from humanity. The pain of this loneliness (aloneness) is the vengeance of the gods, for never again can he return to mankind.”
“Any sense of personal realisation and personal functioning must disappear.”
Lex Hixon
“My teacher, Vimalananda, always used to say, “accumulating shakti is not difficult…His point of view was that most people are leaking energy in all directions. So if you do nothing but stop all the leaks, you start accumulating shakti. The difficulty is how do you digest it and what to do with it? If the person has become very firm and stable in themselves, then shakti can simply circulate inside the organism and there is no need for it to go anywhere else.”
Robert Svoboda
Arnaud Desjardins told Gilles Farcet, “Fortunately, I have my wife and my son living close to me who don’t spare me. When they don’t like something, they tell me very straight-forwardly, and most people wouldn’t do it because I’m a master. But he’s my son and she’s my wife, and they just tell me and it’s good for me!” Either a spouse, a child, an illness or a small accident will give a warning sign when they are getting off track, even if they are not entirely ‘inflated.”
“The ego has to become nothing, so it doesn’t think it is having the experience. That is why there is this very gradual process. For most people, it takes years of annihilation, of the ego slowly being made less and less and less, so that you can contain these experiences without thinking that you are God. Then you can go into the states of oneness, you can go into the level of the Self and then come out of them and get on with your ordinary, everyday life, and look after the kids and do the shopping.”
Llewellyn Vaughan-lee
For people who are perhaps more resistant to the subtler circumstances of life that call them down from their ego inflation, circumstances will be more severe.
Credit is due to God or truth or the impersonal force of consciousness that exists in the world, not the teacher.
“The teacher is nothing, like a crystal upon which the light shines and then is refracted in a certain way. But the teacher is nothing and the more that I or any of us think that we’re something, the less helpful it is.”
Reggie Ray
Dis-identifying with the experience is a conscious, deliberate and disciplined process. It begins with acknowledging that we are not the source of our experiences and at the same time, admitting that we probably do not really know this and must be reminded of it again and again.
There are times to talk about significant spiritual experiences, but rarely are they when one is sitting in a special chair in front of a room full of hundreds of people or writing a magazine or sharing in a personal growth seminar.
“Regardless of what happens, no matter what experience I have, no matter how high I feel I’ve gone, am I prepared to live the rest of my life in obscurity and anonymity if that is the most beneficial use of this experience?”
anon
Would one be willing to never speak about the experience-ever-if that was the most beneficial use of that experience?
“Try for a moment to accept the idea that you are not what you believe yourself to be, that you overestimate yourself, in fact that you lie to yourself. That you always lie to yourself every moment, all day, all your life.”
Jeanne De Salzmann
“Until you can see yourself clearly and constantly for what you are really like, you have to rely upon the assessment of a teacher.
Idries Shah
There’s nothing that wakes you up more than your own mistakes.
Vaughan-lee
The perils of the Advaita-shuffle
These days, is the absolute view usedas an excuse to avoid waking up fully?
(Published in what is enlightenment? Magazine Jan 1992)
“Many mistakenly feel relieved from the burden of responsibility for their own behaviour because of erroneous conclusions drawn from their spiritual experiences of no-separation. Realising that “everything is the self,” they concluded that therefore there was nothing and nobody to be responsible for. In this way of thinking, responsibility implies duality, and any notion of responsibility is therefore seen to be an expression of ignorance. In this view almost any form of conduct becomes acceptable-when one proponent was asked why he habitually acted rudely and with dishonesty, he said “Oh, that’s not real, that’s just my personality.” Another student said, “Nothing matters because it’s all Self.” Others have answered with incredulity when asked about responsibility for behaviour, “How can there be responsibility in freedom? Who’s responsible?”…..Many people do have profound experiences when exposed to such teachings, but the teachings usually have the effect of enslaving a person to a deluded view that they are completely free simply because they have had a glimpse of the fact that there never could have been a separate entity who could be bound in the first place. It is at this point the Advaita view, as it is frequently proclaimed these days, becomes patently ridiculous. Such a view can make a person extremely confident, because any difficulty that one is faced with, from within or without, can be “Advaited” by saying that it is all unreal or all the Self anyway….. However, this confidence becomes a form of arrogance, a form of self-delusion, when it is used to avoid one’s own difficulties or areas of avoidance in order to obliterate the uncomfortable, dualistic facts of one’s own situation. The Advaita view can paralyse a person and prevent him or her from sober self-introspection because to consider one’s “self” is to entertain illusion, is to deny one’s own realisation, is to embrace the falsity of dualism. In this way, the opportunity to truly be free to face any difficulty or imperfections in one’s own character is destroyed. Any desire to change anything, in this view, is seen to be coming from the ego, from ignorance, because change implies separation and only ego could want change.”
“I certainly hope that everybody who claims to be enlightened actually is enlightened.”
Robert Svoboda
Unless a person is perfectly, fully and finally Liberated by these (Advaita) teachings (a very rare event) their lives will be to some extent an expression of duality and an expression of ignorance.
What it actually means to not exist is a very delicate thing to understand.
Andrew Cohen
Ultimately, our goal is to live by the inner voice, the inner guru, to learn from all of life, and to dwell in the realisation of the non-dual perspective that “all is one.” The fact that these realities are often manipulated and used in service of self-deception does not negate their true value.
Power and corruption
Spiritual power easily plummets into the bowels of self-obsession, the ego becoming fat on it’s own glory.
Only one who has been given countless opportunities to be corrupted and has turned their back on all of them can say that they are likely to be trustworthy in the face of being given tremendous power.
Your medicine is in you, and you do not observe it. Your ailment is from yourself, and you do not register it.
Hazrat Ali
So never rest. Never stop practice. Never make assumptions about your level of practice!
Lee Lozowick
“Self-deception seems always to depend upon the dream world, because you would like to see what you have not yet seen, rather than what you are seeing.”
Chogyam Trungpa
Thus, one’s practice should be to assume that one is corrupt, and be gracious if one is fortunate to never express it.
“Those who would complain that hypocrisy and corruption in spiritual authorities is too easily accepted, tolerated and even condoned, must look deeply to find out what degree of compromise and confusion they are willing to hide behind in themselves.”
Andrew Cohen
Mutual complicity
Mutual complicity is a sophisticated aspect of spiritual corruption in which both teacher and student participate, often unconsciously, in the co-creation of circumstances that are corrupt and impure, but also mutually beneficial.
Projection is the source of much of our illusory world. Aspects of oneself that are either unconscious or denied get transformed onto an external circumstance or individual. The person who is projecting believes that his or her projection is true, and through the power of projection can create a reality that didn’t exist previously.
“The trap for the teacher is, “Ah. I’m being loved. I’m being admired.” That is a very subtle trap because a lot of times we acknowledge that.”
Gary Mueller
Eventually, the idols of transference must be smashed. It is a very delicate thing to do, because there is a level of projection and transference which is valuable-maybe even necessary-and if you smash the idols too soon, you also smash people’s chance of transforming.
Everything happens in relationship to everything else. When one realises the undeniable truth of this, it raises some real questions about corruption in spiritual life.
“Students deserve the teacher that they get. Cosmic forces draw different people into different situations to go forward from, to stand on. You see so many different people with so many different teachers. The student deserves the teacher they get and the teacher deserves the student they get. But also, if they are real seekers, they’ll use everything and they’ll grow from it.”
Kwong Roshi
The only way that spiritual students and spiritual teachers can guard against the forces of projection and mutual complicity is through ruthless self-honesty, uncompromising vigilance and a willingness to break habits and admit to mistakes.
Jungian analyst Marion woodman says that reaching your human maturity means being able to withdraw projections. Thus, students who realise that they are involved in a mutually complicit situation withdraw the idealised projections that they placed onto the teacher and replace this vision with a realistic perspective (and in so doing may find that the reality of the situation is far more rich and “ideal” than their projected image.)
Detect first what is false or obscure in you and persistently reject it, then alone can you rightly call for the divine Power to transform you.
The Mother
“A sadhu must be always alert. His path is slippery and a slippery path has to be trodden.”
Sarada Devi
“Like attracts like. Corruption attracts itself. A seeker who is willing to settle for less than everything will seek a mentor who would need the shelter of that kind of corruption. A seeker who wants to go all the way, who cannot settle for less than everything, would never be able to bear shadows of impurity, just as a mentor who has truly gone all the way would never accept willingness to compromise in a seeker who claims, “I want to be free.”
Andrew Cohen
Half-baked teachers produce half-baked students
“Ardha-dagdha=half-baked”
The student of the half-baked teacher does not understand that awakening is a context and not the ability to deliver a series of exalted dharmic speeches.
Half-baked teachers who presume to be fully cooked are in a precarious and problematic situation, for they have taken themselves out of the transformational fire that would eventually burn their presumptuous ego to ashes. To be fully cooked is not to be juicy, charismatic, plump pot roast-it is to be nothing-and many stop far short of this complete annihilation.
“Spiritual practice can never be fulfilled by imitation of an outer form of perfection. This leads us only to “acting spiritual.”
Jack Kornfield
While many masters and teachers say that enlightenment or liberation is not a pre-requisite for becoming a spiritual teacher-particularly if the new teacher is operating under the guidance of his or her own master.
“Once you become too well-known and too acclaimed, you actually can’t do the work anymore.”
Reggie Ray
E.J Gold talked about the idea of “enlightened idiot”
“The guru introduces you to ultimate, absolute consciousness, and that consciousness is the thing that runs your existence, instead of your own preferences running your existence.”
Robert Svoboda
“In the reflection of the true teacher you see two things: one, you recognise who you really are- your own self-that self where there is no mind and there is no time, no notion of individuality or separate self whatsoever. Also, in the reflection of the teacher’s calm abidance in that natural state, one’s own lack of naturalness, one’s own pretence, fear, resistance, pride, ambition, selfishness and impure motivation will stand out in stark contrast and one will do whatever is necessary to destroy the gap between oneself and the teacher.
Andrew Cohen
One needs the teacher because the ego won’t orchestrate its own undoing.
“Guru droha (offence or treachery against the guru) is so terrible because it is a rebellion against the authority of Reality.”
The Aghori Vimalananda
“Before coming to Zen I was a self-indulgent, self-centred person. I did what pleased me, indifferent to the effect that my pursuit of pleasure had on the lives of others. Instead of being the master of my life I was its slave and didn’t know it. But my Zen teachers knew it and keen judges of character that they were, they gave me precisely the kind of treatment I needed. Besides bringing home truths about myself never before realised, this treatment gave me a sorely needed measure of humility.
Roshi Philip Kapleau. Zen: dawn in the west
“The students need to relate with a spiritual friend….you cannot start even at the beginning of the beginningwithout relating with a person who has gone through this particular journey and achieved results.
Chogyam Trungpa
“Journey without Goal” by Chogyam Trungpa
Robert Svoboda says: “In Vimalananda’s opinion, the thing a good guru will do is make sure that your ego is pretty well flattened, well rolled out, ironed and then fried-all to make sure that it will be under control.”
“With a genuine spiritual master, surrender means presenting oneself in a completely honest, naked way, without trying to hold back or maintain any façade.”John Welwood
The presence of the teacher is going to continually nag the student’s conscience, and the teacher is going to see past all of the student’s clever forms of self-deception.
“Many scholars who can lecture at great length have reached nowhere. Therefore, I advise you to be careful. When you talk about teachings it is not what you say but how you have gained your knowledge that is important. Your speech must carry the blessing vibration of personal experience and convey that energy to your listeners.Lama Thubden Yeshe, ‘The Tantric path of purification’
Testing Enlightenment
Masters of old lashed out at those who claimed to be enlightened yet refused to be tested, calling them “earthworms living in the slime of self-validated satori.”
Philip Kapleau Roshi
Though a threat to the ego, the testing process actually honours the individual’s highest spiritual potential by clearing away the egoic desires to settle for less than the ultimate demand of liberation.
“Testing enlightenment comes through everyday practice. The students practice together for years. Everyone knows who everyone is. You don’t have to test their practice or test their understanding because you are so close to each other. Testing is not something I think about because practice is always being tested. Everything is a test. Whatever you do, it’s a test. So a good teacher can tell where the student is just by seeing the student-the way they walk, the way they eat, the way they perform their daily activities. You know where the student is."
Mel Wietzman
“Most of humanity do not know what it is in their interest to know. They dislike what would eventually benefit them.”
Al-Nasafi
All the great masters have stories of their students who entered what they believed to be permanent enlightenment and eventually fell.
Psychological purification is the cleaning and shedding of psychological appendages that have been accumulated through a lifetime of unconscious living, and of psychic debris that has been amassed through lifetimes of karma. Through this process of purifying and casting off excess and incorrect understandings and perceptions, that which is essential and always pure becomes conscious and manifest.
“It became clear that if people didn’t work with their psychology, no matter how devoted and sincere they were, they were effectively blocked at a certain stage. If we don’t efficiently deal with our psychology, we can forget spiritual work.”
Lee Lozowick
Psychological work is about the psyche and the psychology of the human being, and spiritual work is about God or Essence.
“Shadow work-going into the depths of the unconscious and accepting and integrating the dark parts of oneself-is an important preparation for creating the pure inner space that allows for an experience of the higher self."
Llewellyn Vaughan-lee
“There’s no end. There’s no end my dear friend." Trungpa Rinpoche, the lion’s roar
Sadhana, matrix, integration and discrimination
“Everything that you encounter, everything you do from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to bed, is for the purpose of training and purifying the self-a seamless, uninterrupted practice from morning until night.”
Danan Henry
All great masters and thinkers, as well as the great spiritual students who have tried to take the easy way out and failed, consistently call for the need for disciplined spiritual practice.
One practices precepts or commandments in order to align oneself with the enlightenment perspective, not for self-imposed moralistic or fear-based reasons.
Buddhism or any spiritual tradition, is not about reform, it is about living out of truth and the precepts are just the way that a truly enlightened and developed person lives quite naturally. It is the behaviour of someone who has reached complete Buddhahood.
Danan Henry
“Practice is in no way a condition for experiencing grace, or for the existence of grace at all. Grace doesn’t care at all whether anyone practices ever, or ever brings it to the world. It exists unconditionally and will always exist. But if we’re concerned with the evolution of this layer of reality that we live in, then practice is the duty we inherit along with that aim. Here we are. We’re in a body and we have to work through the body in order to transform our lives. It is only possible through body, through physical efforts, mental efforts, working with our emotions, feelings and ideas about ourselves….The connection, or reconnection, to Source just ups the necessity for practice in ordinary life. In a way, the experiences do nothing but give a greater necessity to practice.”
Female Anon
Reality is the motivation to practice. Practice itself reveals what Gurdjieff called “the horror of the situation” (reality). As spiritual practice strips away all the pretensions and presumptions that one carries around about oneself, God, Truth, enlightenment and spiritual life and reveals the destruction that the dominance of ego brings to one’s own life and the lives of others, practice becomes the only viable option.
There is no more demanding sadhana than to live consciously and intentionally.
The discipline of practice is also an anchor so that when grace streams in, instead of getting blown away and potentially becoming non-functional or unable to integrate it, there is a body of practice that is strong enough to handle the experience.
Anon
“One reason the spiritual path takes a long time is that the mind has to learn to function in a different way, otherwise it gets shattered by a higher vibration of the self and becomes very fragmented. This is one of the reasons that you need to spend many years meditating and doing spiritual practices: to prepare the mind that you grew up with to learn to function in a different plane of reality and to function without interfering.”
Vaughan-lee
“In our tradition, foundational work serves to harmonise each of the centres, or bodies-the emotional body, the physical body and the intellectual body. This is necessary so that when one is from essence, that essence is balanced and harmonious. It is possible to realise the Self and enter essence without having done this. Gurdjieff called this “crystallising on a wrong foundation.” It is much more difficult to make foundation level changes later on. It’s sort of like playing Russian roulette: you’ll be fine for awhile, but then you’ll come upon that one bullet. You’re not prepared to deal with it because you didn’t do the preparatory work properly.
Robert Ennis
It took Meher Baba seven years to even be functional following Babajan’s blessings and his spiritual development certainly continued to develop subsequently.
“The ego has to surrender because it is no longer in control of your life. It takes a long time for the ego to surrender so that the higher self really guides you and it isn’t just the voice of your own spiritual fancies or desires. That takes years and years of training.”
Vaughan-lee
In fact, many people are either unaware of or choose to altogether ignore the necessity for integration, though it will eventually occur of its own nonetheless. They go straight from enlightenment to teaching and proselytising without realising that their experience has not deepened, rooted and been fully assimilating.
Following this first movement is an interval (twenty years in my case) during which this union is tested by a variety of exterior trials….then, too, it is a period of becoming acclimated to the relative difference between life with the old, easily-fragmented-self, and life with the new self that cannot be moved from its centre in God….I might add that these intervening years between movements are also largely ignored in contemplative literature; their importance is highly underestimated due to the failure to realise that this interval is actually the preparation for a great explosion (a quiet one, however) that ushers in another major turning point. It seems that at the end of this period a point is reached where self is so completely aligned with the still-point it can no longer be moved….. from this centre. It can no longer be tested by any force or trial, nor moved by the winds of change.
Bernadette Roberts, “The experience of no-self”
“One of the points is to integrate this energy throughout the whole body so that it affects everything, rather than keeping it to the spinal cord and the brain, where it may have some effect on the mind but has little or no effect on the rest of the body. If you have a supported system, then somebody can tell you, “Okay, three hours of ecstasy in the morning, then work.” It forces the energy into your hands…The point is to bring your attention here, instead of allowing your attention to be wandering around the universe in some bliss soup.”
Lee Lozowick
“Discrimination comes from keeping watch over oneself by ongoing self study, ongoing reflection of one’s experience, the intimate sharing of one’s experience, and letting others in if you are part of a spiritual community.”
Claudio Naranjo
To become aware of the subtleties of the ground that lies between complete cynicism and ignorant naiveté requires work. It requires challenging oneself both internally and externally- applying the capacities of the mind, taking risks, and immersing oneself in the insecurity of spiritual life and of life itself. Discrimination only comes through dedicated efforts of self-observation, self-questioning, and ruthless self-honesty.
Since discrimination is not a linear thing-there are no rules to go by and its application is different in each situation-students learn discernment by observinghow their teacher embodies and expresses this qualities. They can also test their own capacity for discernment by questioning the teacher about how their ability for discernment has expressed itself in tasks they have been given, decisions they have made, situations they have responded to.
“I am not more gifted than anyone else. I am just more curious than the average and will not give up on a problem until I have found the proper solution.”
Albert Einstein
True teacher or false
“There are two reasons why I teach. One is that I’ve suffered so much and I’ve been helped by teachers. The second is that I feel gratitude to those who have taken the time to teach me and out of that gratitude I want to give away what I know to others”.
Joan Halifax
It is impossible for one who is lodged in mundane consciousness to evaluate definitively the competence of any guide to transformation and transcendence, without having already attained to an equal degree of transcendence. No number of objective criteria for assessment can remove this “catch-22.”
The true teacher is the ego’s worst enemy, a direct threat that ensures its eventual death. The ego wants a juicy false teacher. When one moves about from teacher to teacher, it is usually because there is an inner split between the true calling for the teacher and the ego’s attempt to sabotage that calling.
“Disciples of all eras have had to confront the possibility that their teacher may not be authentic or sufficiently qualified to guide them. But beyond any personal liabilities that a teacher may have, his or her very role is hazardous to the ego-personality that likes to dabble in spiritual matters but really resents and resists interference, divine or otherwise.”
George Feuerstein
“If you seek a teacher, try to become a real student.”
Idries Shah
“People think that a teacher should display miracles and manifest illumination. But the requirement in a teacher is that he should posses all that the disciple needs.”
Ibn Arabi
“I call people asuras when even though they have the desire for sadhana they cannot seem to follow the basic rules of discipline….. Because asuras are egotistical they conclude, as soon as they learn a little, that they know everything…… I am willing to try to help such people out, but most of them are by no means ready for spirituality yet and I grow tired of them too.”
The Aghori Vimalananda
Real spiritual teaching is not safe, it is very dangerous, and will never pass the safety standards of ordinary, linear thinking.
The true spiritual teacher who abides in the context of enlightenment is humble to the degree that he or she no longer cares for the stature and power of the position.
Written in 1235, Zen master Dogen defined a master as one who is fully enlightened, who lives by what he knows to be the truth and who received the transmission from his own teacher. By these criteria only a few roshis anywhere can be considered a master.
“People who are close to the master can help others on the way on the condition that it is always referenced to the master and the lineage.”
Marie-Pierre Chevrier
“Sometimes it takes a misguided or a false teacher to create a wise student.
Jack Kornfield
Disillusionment, humility,
and the beginning of spiritual life
We should consider ourselves fortunate if we are disillusioned countless times on the spiritual path, for otherwise we remain prisoners of unreality and live and die under the same spell of illusion that has hypnotised all of the sleeping world, including its pseudo-teachers and pseudo-students.
The sadhana of disillusionment is the practice of continually opening oneself to the deepening realisation that things are not as they seem.
“The first thing you learn in life is that you’re a fool. The last thing you learn is that you’re the same fool. Sometimes I think I understand everything. Then I regain consciousness.”
Ray Bradbury
“If you think that you’re doing ok, that’s a big danger signal. If you’re not sure if you’re doing okay and if you feel like things are very shaky, that’s good, that’s fine. Then you’re on the path.”
Reggie Ray
“Most people don’t want spiritual work because they don’t want this slow process of being ground down. It’s very unpleasant. Very painful. That’s what the suffering on the path is, the ego giving up its belief in autonomy, its belief that it is the ruler, that it exists.”
Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
If one wants Reality, Truth, God, then one wants disillusionment because there is no other way.
“Once we commit ourselves to the spiritual path, it is very painful and we are in for it. We have committed ourselves to the pain of exposing ourselves, of taking off our clothes, our skin, nerves, heart, brains until we are exposed to the universe. Nothing will be left.”
Trungpa Rinpoche “cutting through spiritual materialism”
Trungpa Rinpoche says that the state of hopelessness that arises when all of one’s egoic armour and agendas are left behind, when one has been left broken by the shattering of one’s illusions, is actually a very desirable situation, for even “hope” belongs to the ego, and spiritual life is devoted to the process of learning to bear true hopelessness.
“Sudden enlightenment comes only with exhaustion.”
Chogyam Trungpa
“Is the ageless goal of union with God-which we might call the final and permanent shattering of the illusion of separation-worth the complete surrender, even the obliteration of all you now know, feel, think and assume? Yes, and not just yes, but yes without question. What else is there to do?”
Lee Lozowick
Genuine spiritual life has never been popular, never will be, because most people are unwilling to open to and accept pain.
“Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.”
Kahlil Gibran
“All men know the utility of useful things but they do not know the utility of futility.”
Chuang-tzu
“Authentic spiritual masters unlike the mass leader who seeks an appearance of infallibility and cannot admit error, are not concerned with winning or losing. They have already won or some masters would say already lost.”
Frances Vaughan
What happens is this: We err, and frequently. In unnoticed, insignificant moments, again and again we err or forget or delude ourselves. Minutes or decades later, we may realise what has happened, become conscious of it, catch ourselves. At that moment, we experience a sudden, sharp awareness of our infallibility, our lack of attainment, our weak attention, the crudeness of our understanding. We sustain a humiliation and shock in these moments, making them unwelcome to the ego, skilled as it is at preventing such feelings from entering awareness. Frequent inner failures of attention and discrimination are inevitable; conscious recovery from them does not automatically follow. The capacity to feel these highly instructive and corrective humiliations and to allow them to inculcate a genuine humility, is in our view crucial to the practical art of spiritual inner development.
Jacob Needleman from “spiritual choices”
Therefore we cannot assume that one learns from one’s mistakes simply because one makes them, but rather that mistakes provide an increased possibility to observe the self-deception that lies at the source of the error.
Failure is one of the simplest ways to destroy the ego.
Anon
“If you’re a real teacher, working with students, the impossibility of transformation must diminish you. You could not be anything but humble if you were looking at what you are up against as a teacher, because you’re up against the impossible.”
Lee lozowick p461
“Even if somebody has committed a hideous crime, I just can’t muster up any personal animosity because I’ve seen enough about myself and my own failings and weaknesses.”
Danan Henry
“The enlightened adepts of humanity represent a principle that runs counter to conventional life. Their very existence is a threat to the ordinary person who has no time for spiritual matters and spiritual masters but rather seeks egoic autonomy.”
George Feuerstein
The immensity of our resistance may be uncomfortable to acknowledge, for it is easier to feel like a victim than to realise that it is oneself who is resisting that to which one claims to aspire.
In “enlightenment is a secret”, Andrew Cohen writes: the mind will try to pollute anything and everything. Even the most sublime realisation, the mind will try to corrupt, taint and destroy. This is not the mind’s fault. It can’t help it. It doesn’t know how to do anything else. Unfortunately, most people unwittingly participate in this process. It is because of this that they get lost again and again.
“We devour a tremendous amount of energy being unhappy with how we are in the moment, struggling to be someone else.”
Lee Lozowick
Enlightenment is only the beginning
“When ordinary things become extraordinary, and extraordinary things become ordinary, then enlightenment has been glimpsed.”
Lee Lozowick
“The egoless condition has been mistaken for the end of the journey for a number of reasons. One is that the final revelation of the divine centre and the true self has a definitive sense of ending as well as a sense of a new beginning. This end, of course, is the ending of the egoic state and the beginning of the unitive state. From this particular position we do not see anything further to be attained in this world; nothing else is wanting. With the divine we have everything; we are home free. So what do we do now? The path ahead is to live this egoless condition to its fullest unitive potential, a potential we cannot know until it has been lived.
Roberts “what is Self?
When asked: What happens when you become a fully enlightened Buddha?”
“That’s just the beginning” Trungpa Rinpoche responded.
“Spiritual life is full-time work, twenty-four hours a day. This is why most people don’t want to do it.”
Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
“Enlightenment is more like a circle: enlightenment, then delusion, then enlightenment again, then delusion again. We become enlightened by delusion and then we’re deluded with our enlightenment. Then we are again enlightened by our delusion. There is no beginning and end. So the adept or the true seeker, will always continue.”
Kwong Roshi
“It is a cardinal tenet of Zen that kensho is never final but can be deepened and refined without end.”
Andrew Rawlinson
Enlightened duality is a re-entry into the world, following an experience of non-duality, in which one functions in the world on the basis of one’s realisation.
“The Zen man of the highest spiritual development lives in the mundane world of form and diversity and mingles with the utmost freedom among ordinary men, whom he inspires with his compassion and radiance to walk in the Way of the Buddha.”
Kapleau Roshi
“After enlightenment, the external life may be totally the same-nobody notices, and why should they? It’s your business, your relationship with God.”
Vaughan Lee
“Until you can step back into the phenomenal world, and experience it from the vantage point of that place of eternal serenity, that place which is unborn and undying; until you can live your life out of this understanding, it is not enlightenment.”
Danan Henry
“I think it is much better to retain consciousness on this plane while you shift your main focus to other realities. Here I am playing chess with you, but as I play I can go to America to check on how your parents are doing, or can visit Patala (the underworld) or the planet Venus or my Guru Maharaj or whatever I please and still sit here acting as if I know nothing….. Awareness on all levels at all times-that sort of enlightenment has some use.”
The Aghori Vimalananda
“In the Work one receives his reward from the moment in which he takes action and is present. Humanity cares nothing for your efforts, and in fact will not only do nothing to assist you in carrying them out, but will, through ignorance and fear, try to destroy you and your work….Your devotion, your efforts and your constant and unfailing sacrifices for the common good will go unheeded in Heaven and on Earth.”
E.J Gold “the joy of sacrifice”
Jack Kornfield quotes Suzuki Roshi as saying, “Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as an enlightened person. There is only enlightened activity.”
Master Bhai Sahib told Irena Tweedie, that she must become less than the dust at his feet-that she must rid herself of all pride, vanity, selfishness and beyond that, become nothing-before she could be a human being.
“The more genuine humility there is in a human being the deeper the impact the initial experience of enlightenment is going to have…… A proud person will soon be left with only a memory of the great event. When profound humility is present the transformation will remain and that human being’s behaviour will demonstrate something very precious and rare.”
Andrew Cohen
“In the end, you know, it is such a relief not to be. You can finally relax when you go into that space when you are not, when you take off the clothes of this world that are so burdensome-the burden of your own identity and of what people project onto you and all of that. You step outside of that and just dissolve, not be. It is such a relief. It is such a burden to have to carry this identity around with you all the time, to prove yourself and all of the games that people play. It is such a relief just to be empty, to be nothing, to be lost in God.”
Llewellyn Vaughan-lee
Surrender and service are closely linked. Those who are surrendered serve. The Reality they are surrendered to, either directly or through the lineage of masters before them, cannot do anything but serve and thus they too must serve.
“Sahaja Samadhi is equivalent to “Liberation while being alive”, and that the yogin who lives in sahaja-samadhi lives as it were in both worlds (the dimension of unqualified existence and the dimension of relativity.)”
George Feuerstein
What they are recognising is their own organic innocence, the Reality that is always present beneath the many veils of illusion.
The surrender that is demanded is exactly that: the complete abandonment of our entire identity, everything we know to be true about ourselves and our world, all the emotional attachments. Everything must be given over, even if it is then given back.
“God demands nothing less than complete self-surrender as the price for the only freedom that is worth having.”
Mahatma Gandhi
“It may indeed be that one’s very life, as one has known it, may need to be questioned in its every aspect to such a degree that it may literally dissolve into emptiness before one’s very eyes-if one truly wants to go ALL THE WAY.”
Andrew Cohen
People wander the spiritual circuit for twenty years complaining of disillusionment, giving up on spiritual teachers who ask too much and give too little, writing off their once-true aspirations for fulfilment, while never realising that it is they themselves who will not give.
Recommended reading:
Andrew cohen, Autobiography of an awakening, 1992, Enlightenment is a secret, 1991
An unconditional relationship to life, 1995
Arnaud Desjardins, the jump into life, 1989, toward the fullness of life, 1990
Roshi Philip Kapleau, awakening to Zen 1997.
Lee Lozowick, the only grace is loving God, 1982, The alchemy of transformation, 1996
Andrew Rawlinson, the book of enlightened masters 1997
Bernadette Roberts, the experience of no-self, 1993, the path of no-self, 1991, what is self, 1989
Robert Svoboda, Aghora 3 the law of karma, 1997
Chogyam Trungpa, cutting through spiritual materialism, 1987, journey without goal, 1981, the lions roar, (an intro to tantra) 1992, Meditation in action 1970, the path is the goal, 1995.
