Dharma Neurosis (and other spiritual trips)

"We feel that we are members of a special club, which is called spirituality, and that it is a little better than the regular club, which is called samsara. However, aside from the labels, there is not much difference in our whole being. Nothing is changing internally. If we become caught up in such patterns of activity, then we are not leading ourselves toward any genuine result or achievement."

From, "Wild Awakening: The Heart of Mahamudra and Dzogchen" by Dzogchen Ponlop.
pg 182 on Not Losing the Way

Since my last blog entry I've been on a couple of retreats in different traditions, as well as a ton of teachings locally.  I'll post more on the teachings, which have been exceptionally excellent, later on. 

But for today's topic, let me start by saying that I've been around people on the spiritual path since 1984 and have come across a lot of examples. Some I follow, some I avoid. The teachers are often great. Their followers are often not. I remember one of my first meditation retreats ever was in the hills above Los Gatos with the guru Roy Davis on Kriya Yoga, back around '85.  Some friends on the path who 'had what I wanted' were into him, so I followed up. I had so many questions and he was so impatient with me. I left with more questions than answers. I'm sure Roy's a great guy, but he was not in the least bit helpful to me.

His group was people from the Paramahansa Yogananda school, "Self Realization Fellowship". It sounds friendly enough. Years later I visited their home base in San Diego, which happened to be on a holiday, Easter or Thanksgiving, I forget which. I was really broken up over a relationship and was needing some spiritual connection. But it was so odd. If you weren't an 'initiate' they put you in a separate room where you could watch the proceedings on closed circuit TV. So I sat in that room by myself, and left with more questions than answers. I didn't get it, because I connected so easily with the Master's teachings, particularly the books, Man's Eternal Quest: Collected Talks and Essays on Realizing God in Daily Life (Collected Talks and Essays) and The Science of Religion.

In the early 80's I did a few AA retreats at Asilomar in Monterey. Those were heavy duty. You got to know a bunch of people and everybody had their own version of a transformative experience. You left with some level of change having taken place. But on the regular daily path, I was still looking for some place to explore the deeper issues of spirituality not directly associated with alcoholism. So I attended some of the Science of Mind, Unitarian and various non-denominational groups, like the Center for Spiritual Awareness.  I went to meditation meetings  at people's houses sometimes. One such group followed this monk who found his calling when he hitched a ride with someone on the way to Santa Cruz and wound up going to India to take teachings, eventually returning to the US to get a PhD in psychology in hopes of merging it with Buddhism. I thought THAT was cool! People I could relate to. So I went to this meeting. Their leader was this lady who sat in a big chair, staring straight ahead, with her hand on a big cane.  I tried to connect and found out that they were really kind of weird and rather unfriendly to outsiders. Go figure. I never returned.

In Long Beach I used to sit with a guy and his wife who followed a teacher from LA who'd started a center in San Diego after some problems with the teacher in LA. They were nice. Once they took me to sit at the center in San Diego, thinking it would be good to connect with the main group. But I really felt like such an outsider, and there were SO many people. Everybody was like, really well dressed and intellectual, but nobody was the slightest bit friendly. The teacher and I got along fine, and still have a relationship to this day, 16 years later. But I never did connect with the students.  I was really surprised how cold they were!

I remember being in Dallas at a Zen center which I frequented, trying to unsuccessfully to make friends, but otherwise loving the teacher, his books and talks. I particularly enjoyed our private 'dokusan' meetings.  But the sangha was like a closed door. I was really depressed, and used to drive an hour at 0700 on Sunday mornings to sit with them. But everybody was so on their own, it was really hard to strike up a conversation. I stuck with that group for at least a year anyways, as I'd more or less quit going to AA at the time and didn't have a lot of options. Frankly, I was pretty desparate. We did one retreat, I think around 1995, where I felt like I connected a little bit with some people, but it didn't amount to any lasting relationships. Although I do email with the teacher about once every few years. He always says, "glad your sitting still and still sitting!". He was a pretty good guy, a former Catholic priest turned married Zen monk. I hear they have a really nice center now. Around 2001 I got a call from one of the sangha. I was so happy to hear from her!  But she didn't call to talk to me, but rather to find this lady's phone number so she could invite her to their center's opening. She didn't mention if I should come, so I didn't invite myself. I was really surpised! But I'm not sure why..

So it goes on like this throughout my journies, and continues to go on to this day. I went to a friend's Muslim wedding last summer, and found the same situation as I had in Catholic churches over the years.  Had to pull teeth to get a smile out of anybody. California, Texas, Colorado. Same. Centers and small groups in Santa Cruz, Portland, Vancouver B.C. Always a similar story. In all of these there are teachers, and there are students. There are books and oral teachings, and there is everyday life. And there always seems to be such a huge gap between them. There's always the 'inside' people, who guard thier spiritual terrain like they do their hippy designed Patagonia knapsack on the bus they take to do their part in the 'alternative' transportation movement on the way to the overpriced all organic market to get a bag of spinach for tonite's dairy free dinner. I know what you're thinking. "Gee Darren, what's the common denominator here?". How insightful! Yeah, give me a little credit, that is usually the first thought on my mind. "There's something wrong with me" or, "Why is this so weird?". And so on. But I've refined my hypothesis a little over 22 years, and I think there's a little more to it.

It has to do with ego identity and the inability or absolute refusal to surrender. Irving Goffman, the amazing sociologist who did his dissertation as an undercover mental patient, transformed my understanding of institutions and the process of institutionalization, in a book called, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. He makes a statement that, when I first read it, I had to put the book down and say, "That's it!".  Well, that was a long time ago, and this is really something that has held true over years of observation. Namely, that people don't change. It's very, very hard to want to change. Even if we want to, what we think we want isn't always what we find that we really want once we find it. Ok, I'm paraphrasing and expanding on his ideas, but hear me out.

Take this quote from Wild Awakening, mentioned above, "When we start our journey,  our motivation is very genuine, clear, personal and fresh. then at a certain point it becomes a little hazy and we lose our sense of what we are doing. We experience passion, aggression and jealousy towards others traveling on the same path. We develop all sorts of emotional upheavals and disturbances. When we recognize such circumstances arising on our path, we can see that we are no longer following the path of enlightenment.

At that point on our spiritual path, we can fall into the depths of discontent. It is the same old samsaric story of discontent and grasping. We are not happy with what we re doing; we want something more. For example, we may have a good teacher who is instructing us in the practice of shamatha, but we become dissatisfied with our shamatha practice. We feel that shamatha is for beginners, and we want something more. Then perhaps we are given vipashyana meditation and we are still not happy with that.  Next, we might be given a Vajrayana practice to. We do the visualization and recite the mantra, but still we want more and more and more. When we are practicing sitting meditation, we feel that we need to be reading certain books, so we jump from sitting to reading. When we are reading and studying the profound teachings of Vajrayana or Mahayana, we thing, "Oh, I'm missing my sitting practice", and we want to go back to shamatha. We jump around among these activities, fueled by our fluctuating desire and discontent."

This is true of spiritual seekers in centers and groups of all the flavors I've encountered. That teacher in Dallas that I mentioned earlier said something over 10 years ago that still makes sense to me. He said, "if you're looking for something else to add a notch to your spiritual tool belt, you're barking up the wrong tree".  Or something to that effect. But I don't know if it matters as much the specific tradition as much as the actual commitment to the process, which translates to the willingness to surrender. Completely. Entirely. All ego. All the time. Joko Beck, in Everyday Zen: Love & Work puts it this way, if, faced with death "are you willing to climb the cross of the moment, and serve your executioner well?".  Total surrender. Totally. It's a bitch. Not what we want to do. We want to feel better. We want all of the things of mundane life that matter to all of the beings in all of the places, at all of the times. We want to be regarded well, feel comfortable, have friends, be loved, and so on.

One way of looking at this is what I was saying I learned from Goffman.  We can say we want to change until we're blue in the face. But people rarely transform unless faced with a life threatening, monumental, catastrophic event.  Near death experiences, life-threatening illnesses and so on. These types of events reveal our impermanence and question the concreteness of our identities. Without such experiences, we, as seekers on the path, can seldom see how deeply we're suffering. When we get close, we usually come up with distraction after distraction that keeps us looking outward, and therefore render us unable to change. As Bob Thurman says, if we continue to see ourselves as one against a universe of innumerable others, we will always be outnumbered and destined to lose. To see ourselves as part of the whole requires disintegration of the ego. Surrender to reality. And it's the last thing any of us really wants to do. But it sure is a fun hat to wear.

Even when we see the suffering, even when we know we're bound to lose unless we change, and even when we reach out everywhere we can in every way we can...we still don't begin to really change unless we consider the option of continuous, long term, daily surrender. This is the true path of enlightenment. Surrender to what is, no matter how bad it hurts. And the people who have surrendered deeply, and continue to live in a precious, moment to moment process of surrender, are few and far between.

So what do I need to surrender to? The facts, what else? The fact is that most people only think they're spiritual. As a matter of fact, it's pretty commonly said in teachings that when we think we are, we're not. And most people don't even think they are. And most people in spiritual groups who do think they are, aren't. There can be a number of explanations for why, when spiritual centers are supposed to be places of transformation and change, that people can still act the same way they do when you're standing in line at Starbuck's for a double soy latte no foam hold the whip, or trying to reach past a scrambling hand at a %50 off sale, or trying to parallel park downtown. Everybody's in it for themselves. I don't care what they say. I don't care if they wear robes, eastern clothing, are pure vegans or float across the lake on their way home. Most people are in it for themselves and, as the Ponlop says, that is not the spiritual path. Even if we call it the spiritual path.

Some long term practitioners who've been around for a while call this Dharma Samsara or Dharma Neurosis. I call it lack of honesty or more specifically lack of self-honesty. Or pseudo-spirituality. But it doesn't matter, because in fact, it is indeed a reflection of my own mind, and in order to practice what I preach, I have to apply the lesson to my own situation. So how do I do it?

I don't get sucked in. I don't have expectations. I don't make demands. I ask very little of people and try to give more than I take. I try to see them for who they are, and that means looking at who I really am. And, when my feelings are hurt because I'm a little vulnerable or sensitive that day and people are being who they are and not running up to give me hugs or even give enough of a rat's ass to say, "how are you?" then I can work with it and not react, not get resentful, or if I do, I still just try to keep my mouth shut.

In AA we have a saying. "You may be the only 'Big Book' someone ever sees". So be an example. Instead of complaining why it's not the way you think it should be, be part of the solution. Be the change you want to see in the world. Apply the teachings to this moment, which is part of the continual stream of infinite opportunity for spiritual growth, i.e., surrender.

That's the way I'm trying to view it, and the way I'm trying to apply spiritual principles to my own life. Because I don't want to be a hypocrite or another self-centered fake-ass pseudo-spiritual wanna-be in monk's clothing. Not that I wear monk's clothing  and not that all monk's are fake.  I was just trying to think of a good way to close with a bit of clever wit. To be perfectly honest. (-:

As always your comments are welcome here.

-d

Sentient Beings are Numberless
I Vow to Save Them All