On the path of awakening, it is quite common for people to spend too much time on the non-essentials, and thus, not enough time on the essentials. This is why it’s so easy to get sidetracked.
One way of getting sidetracked, which I see all the time on awakening-focused sites and forums, is the perpetual debate over the superiority of one awakening tradition over another. Some examples are…
- True Self vs. No-self
- Hinayana vs. Mahayana
- Buddha Nature vs. No-nature
- Awareness as Ground of being vs. awareness as transient consciousness
- Already awake vs. not yet awakened
- Practice vs. no practice
- Sudden awakening vs. gradual awakening
- Buddhism vs. pick-your-favorite-religion
- etc. vs. etc.
People spend HOURS spinning round n’ round over this stuff. And where does it get them? Nowhere.
And then there are those meditation gearheads, who spend all their time talking shop. They endlessly describe their experience to others, in the most technically precise terms they can think of, down to the tiniest little flickering phenomenon. But this becomes a sort of “who can see it better?” contest. This, too, is a big fat waste of time, and therefore, another way to get majorly sidetracked.
Your preferred tradition doesn’t matter, nor do your superior perceptive abilities matter. It’s not that either are total roadblocks on the path of awakening, but they are superior time wasters. They are activities in which we engage to (albeit unconsciously) put off getting to the task at hand.
Get over your tradition. Get over your wicked skills. Practice as best you can, look reality square in the face, and forget about defending a tradition or showing off your knowledge and/or skills. In doing so, you’ll avoiding getting sidetracked, and will eventually awaken to what you’ve been avoiding for so long – the truth.
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June 25, 2010 at 4:53 pm
Monkey Mind
Good rant.
I’d add the sidetracks of “I can’t become what I already am” (and hence don’t need to practice), and the endless fascination with the weird side-effects of meditation – “I might not be getting enlightened, but wow! these astral voyages/blissful states/psychic phenomena are trippy!”
One pattern I see emerge here is lack of confidence that it actually can be done and is done today by ordinary people – a sense of unworthiness, a lack of “license” to be allowed to do it.
It’s very powerful to be told by some normal, non-idealized person that they have done it, and thus, so can oneself. If that’s not available, it can be awfully hard to come to terms with the fact that it’s really okay to do it, that reality can take it if I look at it hard.
In the absence of this confidence or license, the ways you list of people getting side-tracked are really refuges for the disappointed, some kind of second best offering: “I may be unworthy of enlightenment, but I can show my worth in preserving this beautiful ancient tradition, or I can smite the unbelievers with endless explanatory arguments about the superiority of my opinions (even if those opinions didn’t deliver what I’d hoped of them).”
In the light of all that, I find that the meditation gearheads have the largest success rate of the lot, as they at least are doing some practice (or else they couldn’t obsess about it with the other geeks). But then, that may be my skewed view of the matter, since I’m very much a meditation geek myself.
Anyway, cheers for that lovely rant!
Florian
June 25, 2010 at 11:42 pm
Sam Watts
That’s a great point, Florian. I really feel that a lot of people are too insecure to believe that they can actually awaken. And so, they downplay it all and take the consolation prize of participating in a spiritual lifestyle. They should know that they can live the spiritual lifestyle AND wake up, if they so choose.
You’re right about the gearhead mentality being a better position to take than the just-give-up position. There are still some aspects of this way of practice that can trip people up for a long time. You get some teacher who thinks they’ve mapped human consciousness better than anyone has ever before. If you don’t see things that they see, they’ll tell you that you’re not doing it right, and that it should like blah blah blah. It’s often best to just move on. That’s why I promote the freestyle approach.
June 26, 2010 at 12:43 pm
Monkey Mind
Yeah, the freestyle thing has its advantages. On the other hand, doing freestyle practice has its share of pitfalls, too. Say, a difficulty develops – is it a problem with the method, or something to be expected? Is there a well-known way of dealing with it? And so on.
I tend to do well in the company of like-minded people, myself.
Cheers,
Florian
June 28, 2010 at 8:33 am
Sam Watts
But that is the freestyle approach. Is there an effective (perhaps not always well-known) way of dealing with a present difficulty? If so, do it. There’s no reason to devote one’s self to a single technique, or even a single tradition, if awakening is the sole aim of one’s practice.
This only works if someone is willing to confront things head-on. I’m not saying people should chase what feels good. But they should feel free to employ whatever technology is going to get the job done. Why dig with your hands when you can use a shovel? When walk when you can catch a bus?
June 29, 2010 at 12:08 am
Monkey Mind
Yep. That’s the essence of the approach. Free-style or traditional are different forms of expressing it.
Cheers,
Florian
October 6, 2011 at 5:25 pm
dominic724
Dude, your rants have more wisdom in them than some entire spiritual books. Keep telling it. This is a resource. – Kind Regards, – dn
December 4, 2011 at 11:10 am
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