Enlightening Nonsense

“WILL THE REAL SPIRITUAL TEACHER PLEASE STAND UP?”

The radio interview is currently being rebroadcast at:

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/Raw-Spirit-Radio/2009/08/05/Raw-Spirit-Radio

I was interviewed on Raw Spirit Radio last night, the creation of Kennedy Carr to not only promote the Raw Spirit Festivals but also to bring together great music, guests and discussion on the topics of raw food and transformation. How did it go? I can’t help but think of Mark Twain’s response to his wife asking how the speech he just gave that night went: “Which one, the one I prepared, the one I gave, or the one I wish I gave?”

Life cannot be prepared, despite what your parents and priests and self-help books tell you. A planned life is a dead life and a dead life is no life at all. So while my opening joke might have been lame and I didn’t get to touch on a few points I wanted to share, it still was what it was and I am glad to have been a witness to it.

Since the first day we crawled and our father told us, “You know, if you put a little more hip into it, you would probably get to the other side of the room faster,” we have been taught that life is about performance and proficiency. Life is a butterfly; it is us who break it apart, tear the wings off, pull off its legs, put it into a centrifugal machine that separates it into carbon and nitrogen and sodium and think we now “know” what a butterfly is. Tell that to the little boy with his net and he will burst into tears.

There are a couple of items we touched upon during my interview with Kennedy and the lovely Kashi Stone, whose unsuccessful lawsuit against Kashi cereal for using her namesake without paying her royalties has resulted in her living out of a box in Allen, South Dakota, that I would like to explore a little further. For respect to my Attention Deficit Readers, I will break up the different points into separate writing pieces. It may require a double-dose of Ritalin for you to make it through but I believe with a little pharmacological help you can do it!

“Who are your most influential spiritual teachers?”

It seems a good question, as often we can tell about someone based on the “company” he keeps. If someone is a student of Friedrich Nietzsche, you can most probably bet that he is a fatalist and if you asked him what restaurant you two should eat dinner at tonight he would probably answer, “God is dead. What’s the point in eating?” If your dinner date is with a student of Osho you could probably bet that you will be getting laid that night; if she went to NYU it is a certainty.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNpHqA9EKHI]

But another challenge is that in the New-Age world the focus becomes less on how you’ve transformed and more on with whom you studied. It is about handing in your spiritual resume, talking yourself up and seeing if you will be accepted for the job, whatever form it may come in—be it a talking engagement, friendship or respect based solely on accomplishments. Most New-Agers list their spiritual resume just to reinforce their egos in both senses of the term, showing us “How great they are” and also identifying themselves as a “seeker.”

Two people needed to go to the bathroom. One said to the other, “I’m going to seek a bathroom.” After 15-minutes the seeker came back to the other, his pants wet and soaked through. “I was unable to find a bathroom in time,” said the seeker. The other looked at him and said, “I just took a piss by that tree”. The seeker said, “If you never search for something better, what kind of life is that?” The other said, “I don’t know but it will be one with dry pants.”

Life doesn’t wait while you’re seeking or, to use the story above, pee doesn’t wait for a bathroom.

Have I gained useful information from books, lectures, workshops, trainings? Sure. But my real teacher is life, not individuals. The lessons I’ve gotten from exploring my frustrations and joys with my dog, with my loving and nagging parents, with strangers who I have talked with on the street who by all definitions would be considered “jerks,” by observing nature—humans, animals, plants, elements—has been far more useful in helping me come to a better understanding of Who I Am than any coursework. As I wrote in “The Soul Family Barbeque” [http://rebelyogi.com/the-soul-family-barbeque], the Universe teaches me by mirroring what I need to know and how I need to grow, often in the dysfunctional behavior of others. Actually, it is not dysfunctional; it is actually quite “functional” for me.

In the realm of “spiritual” teachers, the ones who I have jived with the most are Osho, Swami Satchidananda, Alan Watts, Adyashanti and Jed McKenna.They all seem to express a beautiful awareness without losing their senses of humor. I am no longer interested in listening to a lecture or reading a book from what appears to be a stale, dry, boring “enlightened master.”

I have received benefit from the teachings of Jiddu Krishnamurti and do recommend checking out his teachings, as he had a brilliant mind and really challenges some of the ideas that we hold for truth. But while most who watch one of his free hour-long lectures on Google Video will only be listening to his words and perhaps taking notes so they can later quote him on their “job interviews,” what I observed in both Krishnamurti—and in everyone in the audience—was a lack of joy, a lack of laughter. I already experienced enough of that listening to boring lectures tedium in college. Turning spirituality into deadpan information, philosophy and technique is just throwing the butterfly in the scientific blender—tastes great but it doesn’t quite fly.

Osho

Osho wants to help us live up to our full potential as “Zorba the Buddha,” having the deep connection to Who We Are of the Buddha, while at the same time enjoying and savoring every morsel of life with the passion of Zorba the Greek. I connect with his being more than I do any other. This comes not from the thousands of pages of his words I have read or the dozens of hours of video I have watched of him or the hours and hours of his meditations I have experienced or from being a guest at his meditation resort in India, or the communications we continue to have…but from love. Maybe it is narcissism, as I believe him and me to have a nearly identical soul matrix pattern.

Swami Satchidananda

Swami Satchidananda, who founded Integral Yoga and who opened the famous 1969 Woodstock Festival with a talk, was my first “spiritual” love. Instead of talking in New-Age platitudes of “We are all One” and “Love is the only answer,” he talked like a regular guy, giving practical, funny stories to help illustrate the teachings.

I saw one of his last live speeches by closed-caption (I showed up a little late and the room he was in was full) at the Integral Yoga Institute. I was only going because the massage therapist who I had just finished doing a trade with for energy healing work told me she was going and I thought this may help get me laid.

He told the story of Adam & Eve with a different flavor. “God created Earth and the oceans and the plants and animals. But he was bored. So he created Man to help provide him with some amusement. He told him, ‘You can eat from anywhere in the Garden—but don’t eat from that tree,’ the Tree of Knowledge. Now of course he knew Adam would eat from that tree. Try doing that with a small child. Tell him that he cannot eat the brownie in the refrigerator. He’s going to eat it.”

It was only after his talk that I realized why his name sounded so familiar to me—I had been using a quote of his in my energy healing and herbal medicine brochures for years: “Nothing can bring you lasting happiness, but you have that already if you stop disturbing it.”

Alan Watts

Alan Watts was an English Zen teacher, which probably mean that he would drink Earl Grey tea while his students stared at a blank wall. I used to see his name in the Spirituality section in the bookstores but never really gave him a read. The company Sounds True [www.soundstrue.com] has recordings of his talks and when I plugged in my first CD, it was love at first listen. He is funny, insightful and doesn’t take himself or life too seriously. I felt truly humble and blessed that through technology I am able to time travel 46 years and sit in the classroom with a beautiful man and share in his teachings and essence.

One of the teachings he shares is that there are two ways to live life: either distrusting or trusting. If you live life distrusting, you will lock up all your valuables, carry a gun, constantly be looking over your shoulder and always plan for—and somewhat expect—things to go wrong. Your life will be safer but it will definitely come with a price.

On the other hand, if you look at life with trust, yes, on occasion you will find yourself being burnt. You will have people periodically take advantage of you, like the guy who “needs money for the train home“ because he “just got mugged,” when the real mugging being done is to your gullible self. But you will not carry the burden of distrust as a heavy weight on your back wherever you go. If not for you, at least consider your spiritual chiropractor in your decision.

Adyashanti

I discovered Adyashanti also through Sounds True. He is a meditation teacher and was discussing “true meditation,” beyond technique and alliances. He is a regular guy—if you can consider a guy who is living enlightenment among the crowds of sleepwalkers “regular”—and says he still gets together with his buddies to play poker. He really does a great job of demystifying what “enlightenment” is from all the fantasy, New-Age fluff.

On the back cover of Adyashanti’s latest book, The End of Your World, is a beautiful hard-hitting quote about real enlightenment:

“Make no mistake about it—enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or being happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It’s seeing through the facade of pretense. It’s the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true.”

As hard-hitting and no-bullshit as Adyashanti may seem to be from my excerpting him, he comes across as a sweet, gentle man. He serves me as a balance to my general fondness for the “bad boy” spiritualists. He may be a rebel in his hope to destroy a false system, but he will talk softly to you and hope to convince you to do the work and see for yourself why the system is false. The “bad boys” douse the joint with gasoline and throw a match on and say, “This joint is no longer in business.” Truth be told, I have a gallon of gasoline and a fire starter always at my disposal.

Jed McKenna

I talked about Jed McKenna in my piece “Jed McKenna Is An Arrogant Ass” [http://rebelyogi.com/jed-mckenna-is-an-arrogant-ass.html]. His understanding of waking up is exactly like the quote from Adyashanti above only he doesn’t seem to share his teachings with love like Adya, but more like a robot who says, “Wake up. Don’t wake up. I am only following my programming from the universe. Danger! Danger, Will Robinson!” [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RG0ochx16Dg]

He has some funny moments but he doesn’t seem like the type of guy I’d like to enjoy a beer with. I mean, I don’t really drink beer but you get my point. Jed shines a light on how much done in the name of spirituality is just plain bullshit. I like to believe he does this not so much just to rag on the ridiculousness of all these paths and practices but to help the few crazy people out there who care more about waking up than adorning their costumes with beads and crystals with the fancy names of “Compassion” and “Oneness. Then again, maybe he’s just a prick. Regardless, I dig him.

I just know that if I were with Jed I would probably ask him, “Hey, you want to drop water balloons from that building on those people’s heads?” and he would respond, “Does not compute. Does not compute. The universe does not want me to do this. Does not compute.” While if I were hanging out with Osho, my cheeks would hurt from the big smile on my face from the river of mischief into which we were constantly immersing ourselves.

I would be remiss not to mention my reiki and ARCH teacher and dear friend, Laurie Grant [www.lauriegrant.com], who I assisted for years when she was teaching on the East Coast. She has taught me more in our frustrations—which has amounted to quite a bit—than in the classroom. Unfortunately, she’s an “Everything is Bliss” teacher and so what I see as great lessons, she sees as an annoying prick keeping her from appreciating the Oneness of it all. At the moment we’re in an “off” phase of our relationship but she is one of my soul friends and will always be near and dear to my heart.

Now I know human nature, or in the case of “seekers,” non-human nature. Reading the above all you will do is go to the library or to Sounds True with a new list of distractions to occupy you and totally ignore the Buddha hidden in plain clothes in your own neighborhood. If he was wearing a robe and had a begging bowl you would respect and honor him. But if he is wearing dirty, ripped clothes and picking out of the garbage can, you look at him in disgust. Until you transform yourself, all these words—whether from a Jesus, Buddha or even me—will not convey the meaning they are intended to convey but only provide you with fancier terms and expressions to continue to live the lie you’ve been living or, in “sweeter” terms influenced by the Adyashanti-ness in me, you will be living further from your authentic expression of Who You Are. You see, I can play nice, too!

If you are like most and believe that life is about accumulating more crap, then you read Jesus and see his words as a lesson in how to get more and more, seeing Fairytale Heaven as the ultimate possession. Rather than erasing your own ego story, you take the words of the Buddha and stuff them in among all your empty posturing, posing and pontificating. And if your computer’s memory starts to run low, the Buddha’s words will be the first among the deletions.

One of the best teachings you can take from this piece is to honestly reflect on your first instincts while reading it. I am guessing more of you were thinking, “Maybe I’ll check out Alan Watts the next time I go to the New-Age bookstore,” over, “Rather than sleepwalking on my way to ‘get’ somewhere today or in life or in my spiritual seeking, I think I will remain open to experiencing life as it is, learning from all the unknown teachers with whom I am graced to share the streets.”

If for no other reason, it will be a pleasant change from the feeling of nausea that usually overcomes one on completion of one of my pieces.

“The role of the teacher is to provoke the student into teaching himself.”

—Plato

“Learning and teaching do not provide the student with new information. They only prod him to recall that what he already knows.”

—Plato

“Those who know how to think need no teachers.”

—Mohandas Gandhi