Legally, I am the owner of the house. It's a stately and ornate gentleman farmer's house with plenty of room, built in 1912. The story goes that two well-to-do gents had eyes for the same dame, so they each built the nicest house they could. They both proposed to her, assuming that she'd go for the one with the best house. I first heard the story in my lawyer's office at the closing. His secretary was fully versed in my house's history. I waited anxiously to know how it turned out, whether my house won. It did. Sportingly, the other house burned down a few years later.
Good story. If it was made up or amended I don't want to know. I like it just the way it is.
The house is in east central Iowa, about twenty miles from Iowa City and half an hour from the Mississippi River. We're lucky that there's some nice roll to the land here, not completely flat like parts of Iowa can be. We have a few wooded acres and a dozen unwooded acres, a creek (the Minnissippi River), a small pond, and we're surrounded by farmland on all sides. An island in a sea of corn.
The house has wrapping porches, sweeping eaves, and numerous decorative features for which I don't know the correct terminology.
The inside is full of built-in cabinets with glass-front shelving, oak floors, ceiling beams and the kind of detailed craftsmanship that people say you can't find anymore. Anyway, it's an admirable old house and I haven't seen its like during my dozen or so years in Iowa. That's not to say that it's the biggest or the best or anything like that, just that it's unique and special. Most importantly, it's quiet. The nearest neighbor is more than a mile away, and the nearest paved road is five miles away, well out of earshot and eyeshot.
I say I'm the legal owner to make the distinction that I nevertheless feel like a guest in the house. A royal guest, but a guest nonetheless. It's Sonaya's house and has been since the first day she entered it.
She runs it from top to bottom. She manages the food, maintenance, cleaning, and money. She keeps the guests in line. If it weren't for Sonaya, the place would probably have devolved to the condition of a ratty frat house years ago.
It's morning now. I'm sitting in my TV room watching world news. I enjoy watching.
I'm an observer more than a participant. TV, movies, books, news shows—like Chauncey Gardener, I like to watch.
I don't take sides or have any concern for outcomes
, it's the drama I enjoy. I don't watch sports or soap operas because that's basically what the news seems like to me; today's crop of zany soap opera antics.
Martin comes in and takes the other seat. He's not here to watch the news. There's another TV room in the remodeled basement for the guests to use. Mine is on the second floor and is much more comfortably appointed than the one downstairs. They both get satellite, and the basement isn't exactly a dungeon, but my upstairs room is— thanks to Sonaya—more like one of those home theaters the rich folk have. There are only two chairs, matching over-stuffed recliners, and double-thickness drapes to block the light. There's a big screen TV, a VCR, a DVD player, a game console, a surround-sound system, and all the electronic bric-a-brac to run it all. Really a great room, and no doubt unusual for an Iowa farmhouse.
It's generally understood that anyone can come in when the door is open and take a seat in the other chair if it's vacant. Whether or not I feel like talking is another matter and depends largely on whether or not I feel like talking. An interesting news item on Taiwanese independence ends and I surf through the news channels for something else of interest. There's a lot of financial news at this time of day. I don't care for financial news, or any news, really, unless something big is happening. Nothing big is happening. I check the weather channel for typhoons, tornadoes, hurricanes or flooding, but everything is calm. Oh well.
"You're wearing shoes," I say to Martin.
"Oh jeez," he mutters and takes off his sandals. He slips them behind the chair so Sonaya won't see them if she looks in, but Sonaya sees everything and Martin knows it. I may be the great enlightened guy they all come to see, but Sonaya is the all-seeing all-knowing mistress of the manor and even I am just another dull-witted child in her presence.
I'm looking at the TV and Martin is looking at me. He wants to talk. I suppose I should respond negatively to his attempts to finesse me, but there's nothing on TV and Martin can be interesting at times. I give him a mildly exasperated nod and he accepts.
"I've made a lot of progress on the assignment you gave me," he spurts enthusiastically. I balk at the word assignment, but it's actually fairly accurate so I say nothing.
"Remind me," I say, although I need no reminding. Martin has spent more than two decades in the thrall of one of the West's better known spiritual leaders and has come away with a head full of pseudo-Hindu gibberish as fiendishly entangled as the Gordian Knot. I've been trying to ease him toward the Alexandrian solution of slicing cleanly through the knot in a single stroke rather than wasting further decades trying to untangle it, but Martin is slow in letting go of his belief system and the allegiances that came with it.
Last time we met, Martin brought a book and read to me several dozen stanzas from the teachings of his former guru. The words were obviously those of a vast mind expounding upon timeless mysteries and I could easily understand why seekers would flock to one of such limitless insight, but when Martin finished reading I had absolutely no idea what had just been said. More importantly, although he thought otherwise, neither did Martin
To illuminate this point for him,
the "assignment" I gave Martin was to reduce the selection he'd shared with me down to a single, coherent concept—one lucid sentence. The idea for this assignment came to me as I listened to Martin read his former guru's baffling words with shimmering enthusiasm.
I was struck by the exalted sage's ability to mix a few simple concepts together in such a way as to sound sublimely profound without actually saying a whole lot.
The passages Martin read to me had to do with the tripartite of perceiver, act of perception and object perceived; the three gunas of Hinduism; the benefits of silencing the mind, and something about ascending levels of consciousness, each more wonderful than the last. There was probably some overlighting theme that tied them all together into a unified whole that made Martin shimmer, but what the overlighting theme might have been I can't say because that would have entailed listening much more closely than I actually did. It was clear to me that Martin was trying to display his mastery over some Big Thoughts. He also seemed to think that he was educating me, or, perhaps, acting as self-appointed ambassador to me from his previous teacher. But, like I said, I don't know because I lost track of what he read pretty near the beginning.
All I ever really need from a student at the start of a conversation is a flare—a simple locator beacon. The student is traveling from wherever they are at the moment toward the state of abiding non- dual awareness. That journey is what I help with because I am positioned high above with a clear view of the entire terrain. I always know where the destination is, but I need the student to send up a signal to
show me their current position. I just need to get a lock on their location and I usually have it within the first few words or sentences they utter.
For instance, I see where Martin is and I can see that he has himself twisted up in some brambles. He may feel an urge to describe his current position to me in exhaustive detail, but I already know all I need to guide him out. Martin may want to spend the next twenty years studying the local flora, but I will encourage him to pull out a machete and hack his way out and continue his journey.
Sitting next to me now, Martin reminds me about the passages he read to me and my request that he boil it down. I nod and ask what he has come up with. Martin's interpretation of the text and its value was off the mark in the first place, but this little exercise was not really about clarifying the text for him anyway. Rather, it was about coaxing him toward doing his own thinking instead of parroting wisdomesque concepts and abdicating responsibility for himself to any non-Martin authority. In the course of this process, Martin will probably develop a deeper insight into the knowledge he was twirling and spinning like a fancy six-shooter, but that isn't the point.
And, like I said, Martin can be pretty interesting guy. He's in his mid-forties and he's been to a lot of exotic places and done a lot of interesting things. He's a very large man at around six and a half feet tall and nearly three hundred pounds. He's an expert bodyworker and not a bad cook when Sonaya gives up the kitchen for a meal. He's all or part Native American, played college ball for Northwestern, was a Green Beret for six years and a spiritual renunciate for ten. Overall, he's an impressive and likable fellow. He's been in the house for a few months and is generally able to grasp the things he's supposed to and move on. I've known he was stuck on the outside authority thing since he first arrived, but I had never poked at it directly. The last thing I wanted to do was get in a pissing contest about who had the cooler knowledge, his former teacher being a whole different order of magnitude in the guru hierarchy from yours truly, meaning that if I wasn't careful, I might accidentally send Martin back to the guy who takes twelve hundred words and fifteen references to ancient texts in three languages to say whassup.
What Martin came up with for his "assignment," I realized within a few seconds, was basically nothing more than a simplified rewording of the original text. He was explaining it, not clarifying or reducing it.
"Stop," I say. He stops.
"You're just using different words to say the same thing."
"Well, yeah," he agrees, "but I'm using less words and explaining it in more Western terms."
I flip through the channels and stop to watch Samantha trying to cool an irate Larry Tate. "Why do you think I asked you to summarize the passages you were reading to me, Martin?"
"I thought that, you uh, you were interested in it and might be having trouble, uh, you know, following it," he says.
Larry has stormed out and now Samantha is calling Dr. Bombay, a sure sign that something's amiss, possibly of Dr. Bombay's doing. He probably turned Darrin into a polo pony and now Larry needs Darrin to pitch the big client. Dr. Bombay, however, cannot be reached because he's someplace exotic riding Darrin to victory in the final chukker of the big match. I'm just guessing, of course, but it can't be easy being Darrin.
"Yes, I was having some trouble with it, Martin. I sure was. Now let's try this again. What I'd like you to do is boil this whole complex ganglion of guruspeak down to a single, lucid concept. Summarize it. Hack away at it until you reach the core.
Reduce it like an algebraic equation.
Burn away all the excess and see what's left
."
"Well," Martin begins, and I immediately know we're banging our heads up against his dogged reliance on outside authority.
"I think that what he means is..."
I interrupt. "Why does it matter what he means, Martin?"
He stares at me with his mouth slightly open.
"It's your head on the block, Martin, it's your clock that's ticking." I try a different approach. "What's your mission statement, Martin? What's the point? What is it you hope to accomplish with your life?"
"Freedom from bondage," he replies without hesitation. "Liberation. Oneness with all that is. Unity consciousness."
I manage not to hurl myself out the window. "Okay, okay, that's quite a list, or do you figure those are all different ways of saying the same thing?"
"Well... yes," he replies hesitantly, obviously wondering if I'm an imposter, "those are all different ways of saying enlightenment."
"Really? How do you know?"
"Well, I've spent over twenty-five years..."
"What, Martin? You've spent twenty-five years doing what?"
"Everything. Studying, meditating, purifying myself. Reading, attending lectures, learning everything I could about evolving spiritually. .. "
It occurs to me that this is exactly where Sarah's current heading will take her. Twenty-five years of unfulfilled searching all for want of a little straight talk.
"
What if you were to find out that it was all a waste?" I ask him. He recoils and I sense that he's on the verge of getting up and walking out. "Bear with me here, Martin. We're just talking. Just hypo- thetically,
what if you found out that in order to achieve the enlightenment you speak of, you had to reject all the teachings you've ever received. Could you abandon all this knowledge you've acquired?"
"Well, I don't really think..."
"
What's your priority? Enlightenment or the knowledge?"
"I don't think..."
"
How long has your guru been teaching?"
"Well, uh, over thirty years..."
"And how many of his students have achieved enlightenment?"
"Well, uh..."
"That you know of personally?"
"Well, uh, I never..."
"That you've heard of?"
"It's not..."
"That there were rumors of?"
"I don't think..."
"
What is it they're doing, Martin? The recipe for enlightenment they're promoting—what is it?"
"
Uh, well, meditation and knowledge, basically..."
"And in thirty years they've never held someone up and said 'Look at this guy! He's enlightened and we got him there!' In thirty years, they don't have one? Don't you think they should have, like, an entire army of enlightened guys to show off by now?"
"Well, it's not..."
"
After thirty years they should have a few dozen generations of enlightened people. Even with only a quarter of them becoming teachers, they should have flooded the world by now, mathematically speaking, don't you think? I'm not asking all this as a teacher myself, mind you. I'm just asking as a consumer, or a consumer's advocate.
Don't you think it's reasonable to ask to know a teacher's success rate?
The proof is in the pudding, right?
Didn't you ask them about the fruit of their teachings when you started with them?"
"
Well, that's not..."
"Don't you think it's reasonable to ask? They're in the enlightenment business, aren't they? Or did I misunderstand you? Do they have something else going?"
"
Nooo, but they..."
"If Consumer Reports magazine did a report on which spiritual organizations delivered as promised, don't you suppose that the first
statistic listed under each organization would be success ratio? Like, here are a hundred randomly selected people who started with the organization five years ago and here's where they are today. For instance, thirty-one have moved up in the organization, twenty- seven have moved on, thirty-nine are still with it but not deeply committed and three have entered abiding non-dual awareness. Okay, three percent—that's a number you can compare. But this organization of yours would have a big fat goose egg, wouldn't they? And not just out of a hundred, but out of hundreds of thousands— millions, probably. Am I wrong?"
"You're making it sound..."
"I know I am, Martin, and I know how they respond to this point. They say that everyone is coming up together, don't they? They say everyone's going to burst through at the same time when a certain critical mass has been reached, isn't that it?"
"Well, kind of, yeah, but you're making it sound..."
"
Why do you think that organization isn't up to its ass in enlightened people after thirty years? I would think they'd have storage problems by now. I would think the world would be beating a path to their doors by now. How much time do they need?"
"It's not exactly..."
"Yes, Martin, it is exactly. That's the point. It couldn't be more exact. How is it possible that after thirty years the only case of enlightenment is the one that started the whole thing?
I know he's a big deal, Martin. I know the teachings. I know the breadth and scope of this guy. I agree that he's an elevated being, whatever that means. If I were in his presence I would fall to my knees and touch his lotus- strewn feet. He's great, I know it, but we're not talking about someone else, we're talking about you
.
We're talking about you doing... what? What'd you call it? Breaking free from bondage? I don't see anyone in this guy's organization breaking free from bondage, Martin. Do you?"
I wait. Nothing.
"Can you offer an opinion as to why that might be?"
Martin is silent. He is clearly battling a lot of internal stuff. He looks at me to see what's coming next.
"Martin, I think you might consider the possibility that there's a serious flaw in that organization. Something near the core. Do you think it's unreasonable of me to say that?"
No reaction.
"
Do you think it's at least reasonable to ask? To at least consider the possibility?"
He nods almost imperceptibly.
"
My own awakening ran its course in less than two years, Martin.
And that's without any living teacher to help me
.
I've never heard of the process taking longer than that
. I really don't see how the process could take much longer than that."
When I say this, I don't mean that it only takes two years from the first spark of spiritual longing.
I mean two years after the point when the process of awakening actually begins; the primary epiphany, the first step.
Let's capitalize that—the First Step
.
I know that many people spend many years in meditation and spiritual practice without achieving full awakening, and I know that they think it's because they haven't crossed the finish line yet, but it's actually because they haven't crossed the starting line yet: The First Step.
I continue.
"It's a process and it takes a certain amount of time. About the same as the gestation period for a baby elephant."
Martin is too polite to ask the obvious question: How many cases of enlightenment could I take credit for? The answer is an average of one or two a year since I began teaching—a dozen or so total. I can't really take credit for them, of course, but it was to me that
the universe guided them at critical stages in their journeys.
A couple of them are trying their hands at writing or speaking now, but most are just getting the hang of it. I can see two students in the pipeline at the moment who are going to make it, who've taken the First Step.
Once the First Step is taken the rest of the journey is sure to follow, unless you die or sustain a massive head wound.
"Martin?"
"Yes."
"Would you agree that there might be a flaw in a teaching that
doesn't produce any graduates?"
He hesitates, then nods.
"If so, it would be a pretty serious flaw, huh?"
He nods.
I nod. "Well, that's an interesting possibility. Maybe you could think about that a bit and let me know what you come up with. Okay?"
He nods.
"Martin?"
He nods.
"I already know the answer. This is for you, okay?"
He nods.
Allegiance to any spiritual teaching or teacher—any outside authority—is the most treacherous beast in the jungle. The first thing we want to do when we begin our journey is find the companionship and validity that comes with an established group, and in so doing
we effectively end the journey before it begins.
Martin is a perfect example of this, and perfectly typical. He set out twenty years ago in search of something higher, and now he's forced to confront to fact that all the effort and all the heart he's poured into his search for all those years has not carried him a single step forward.
Twenty years he's spent digging himself into a hole, and now he has to climb out and begin the journey.
Which he'll almost certainly not do.
The power of our devotion to teachers and teachings is not a reflection of their value, but of ego's will to survive. It's ego—the false self—that exalts the guru and declares the teaching sacred, but nothing is exalted or sacred, only true or not true.
Anyone familiar with the process of deprogramming someone who has been brainwashed by a cult will be able appreciate what's really involved in breaking free of this kind of allegiance, but there's really only one real cult—the Cult of False Self—and everyone is a fanatically devoted member.
Awakening is the process of deprogramming. Enlightenment is the unprogrammed state.
I explain all this in gentle terms to Martin, appealing to his mind, his reason, and watching his discomfort as heart and mind struggle against each other. In my preferred version of The Mahabharata, Krishna and Arjuna are discussing the war that is soon to begin.
Arjuna asks if the war will take place on the battlefield or in his heart.
"I don't see a real difference," replies Krishna.
I don't want Martin to think I'm picking on his group and guru in particular. I don't see any reason to distinguish between one and another. There are any number of reasons why a spiritual organization might not be pumping out the enlightened in droves, not all of them readily visible. One very good reason is that, unbeknownst even to themselves, the members of any spiritual organization may be quite satisfied to simply pursue enlightenment. Dedicating one's life to lofty spiritual ideals is every bit as life-defining and purpose- giving as the quest for heaven or power or money or love. Just because there's a flashing neon sign above the door that says "Free Enlightenment! The Shortest & Easiest Way! The One True Path!" doesn't mean that what goes on inside is really about enlightenment, or that the people who go in really want it.
Quite the opposite.
In nearly all cases, the enlightenment being bought and sold is not truth-realization at all, but a state of consciousness so crazy-ass wonderful that you'd have to be an idiot not to want it. So insidiously wonderful, in fact, that its radiance has blinded untold millions of seekers to the fact that it doesn't exist.
So maybe Martin's former organization is more into the talk than the walk, but I don't believe that they're perpetrating any sort of intentional fraud. I think they're just as convinced as those they convince. In these cases, it's not likely to be anything sinister so much as an organization behaving like an organism that seeks to survive, adapt, and grow. Maybe the organism seeks liberation for all beings or world peace or the expansion of its own doctrine, or simply its own exaltation and empowerment. Maybe the enlightened guy at the top just wants to get laid, or maybe he lost control of the organization to the unenlightened guys below. Or maybe the enlightened guy at the top isn't enlightened at all, but something else. Something truly wonderful, perhaps, but not awake—not truth-realized.
Or, hey, who knows? Maybe Martin's former group will reach their critical mass and they'll all burst into permanent super-happy consciousness together. (Boy, will I have egg on my face when I'm knocking on their door asking if it's too late to sign up!)
The point is that there's really no point in trying to figure out all the possible reasons why seekers don't find. It's just another distraction, and there's no shortage of those.
The point is to wake up, not to earn a Ph.D. in waking up.
Simply put, as Sarah surmised, waking up is job one, and then,
if you still want to liberate all beings or promote
world peace or save the whales, great—lucky beings, lucky world, lucky whales. But the bottom line remains the same:
You're either awake or you're not.
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