I have been toying with the idea that many experiences that look like spiritual failures are actually opportunities for progression along the path.
A Recipe for Liberation
When Machig Labdron, a Buddhist adept who introduced the Chod practice, asked her teacher how to find freedom from suffering in order to help others, her teacher gave her five slogans. Among them: “Go to the places that scare you,” and “Approach what you find repulsive.”
If these two slogans are any indication, the path for me requires that I confront who or what I am when I fail miserably at happiness.
The Places that Scare Me
The institutions, roles, procedures, and chemicals created to manage people in the West who suffer emotionally. The condition of losing my perspicacity, my dignity, my control over life. Being judged inept, weak willed, and guilty of failing to pull myself up by my bootstraps. Spiritual failure.
What I Find Repulsive
Emotional weakness in myself, and the sort of emotional weakness in others that leads to very hurtful behavior. When people behave with strong emotions and confusion, especially when that behavior becomes hurtful, we are quick to call them “mental” or “ill.” The words fly out like expletives. “He needs help!” we might say, not with compassion but with disgust and disdain. Suffering is heavily embedded in a moral context, and moral disgust, the topic of my dissertation, is potentially anathema to compassion. For me, given my dedication to a career in psychology, an inability to overcome suffering is the greatest failure and a cause for shame.
My fears and aversions center around self control, specifically the self control necessary to maintain one’s emotional well being. If I lose that, I lose everything, so it seems. I must fight to keep it together. That seems the sensible approach and one for which I must have free choice.
What ho! The perfect recipe for my spiritual growth seems to be the experience of falling apart.
Free Will
A lucid dream once gave me a strange new perspective on free will. In my dream, I was a snake with an overpowering urge to bite. I saw a tail dangling in front of me and bit it with gusto. A few seconds later, pain flooded my awareness. D’oh! I bit my own tail. The dream rewound and played out again. This time, when I saw the tail dangling in front of me, I bit gently. I still bit my own tail, but the knowledge that it was my own tail moderated how I acted on my urge. I did not need to repress my urge. Instead, the knowledge and the urge naturally harmonized and led to balanced action.
The aspect of my dream that struck me most was that I acted, but I had the distinct feeling that I was watching a movie, as if someone else were biting the tail. In other words, I was both an initiator of action and a mere witness of the behavior. My actions felt like a demonstration presented to me for learning purposes.
I had gone to sleep that night asking the universe to teach me about karma. I was on the verge of divorce but scared of causing harm and reaping the consequences later. The dream helped me understand by using my own will as a communication tool.
Imagine that. Just when you think you know who and what you truly are and why you do the things you do, something comes along and turns it upside down. You think you are a “real boy,” but the strings are still attached (c.f., Pinocchio).
We argue about whether or not free will exists, but we rarely argue about who it is that actually has it. Who was pulling my strings in my snake dream? Why, the real me.
Attachment to Mind
I often fear losing the ability to choose my own thoughts and feelings (a.k.a. losing my mind). But what I call my mind may not be entirely mine to begin with. Derren Brown, an illusionist who hosts the show Mind Control, adroitly exposes the degree to which our ordinary mental activity is determined by things outside of us. The performances of this skilled puppet master are staggering. In one episode, he asked advertising executives to design an ad for a taxidermy store, complete with imagery, store name, and tagline. Before they began, he placed his own ideas in a sealed envelope and left them in the room. After thirty minutes, he returned to inspect their work. The ad created by the executives was nearly identical to the ad created by Derren Brown. How did he know what they would come up with? Watch the video. The executives were shocked to find that all of their creative ideas were completely determined by suggestive materials lining their path to Derren’s office.
If I am to wake up, which is to say, become the awareness that is actually pulling the strings, perhaps I need to let go of my attachment to what the Zen masters call “small mind.” The point of resistance is really the only zone of suffering. When I really let go, I find sanity. In losing my small mind, I find Big Mind. What a paradox.
But the spiritual path is full of paradoxes. My favorite is from Matthew 10:39: “He who seeks his life will lose it; and he who loses his life for my sake will find it.” And maybe He who seeks his small mind will lose it; and he who loses his small mind for the sake of the Great Mind will find it.
