The Tantras and teachers regularly tell us that even one moment of absolutely pure surrender or pure devotion will bring us instantly into the open state of Self-realization. But for most of us, devotion and surrender are shot through with all kinds of tensions. It’s another one of those Tantric paradoxical zingers: one of the fruits of dedicated practice is greater sensitivity to subtler and subtler expressions of our own insincerity.

What is the nature of this insincerity? Chogyam Trungpa, the crazy wisdom guru and mahasiddha, famously called it “spiritual materialism.” In its grosser forms, spiritual materialism manifests as the desire to use spiritual practice to get stuff: money, friends, lovers, jobs, the slow, painful death of your boss, a new ipod, whatever.

When it comes to getting spiritual “stuff,” we can be just as materialistic. We cut deals with our God-concept. “I’ll do this if you give me that.” We want powers or special signs of our spiritual fabulousness. We try to cut deals for spiritual experiences and so-called enlightenment itself.

All the subtler forms of insincerity have this flavor of the deal, although it gets harder and harder to recognize. We are doing practice for a boost in our identity. We rack up mantras so that we can be the One who racked up those mantras. Whether we are shoring up our sense of superiority or abjectness, it’s all the same: we’re cutting deals.

Let’s face it: we enjoy entertaining the notion that we are actually in control and that, just this one time, the deal might come through.

And the deal just might come through if the only thing you want is to get what your limited, tension-filled self imagines that it wants. You might get exactly that and miss the whole game: Openness to Reality just as it is. Liberation.

At certain points in our practice we recognize that all these
enjoyable-horrible tensions are seriously getting in our way. We are
desperate to change our compromised situation, by extreme force if
necessary. But we don’t actually have to perform tons of work fixing our
propensity for deal-making insincerity. We have to do something much less ordinary: fully recognize it and then leave it alone
and feel for a wider, more open view.

The truth is, we all have authentic longing for freedom, no matter how veiled. The longing for freedom is one of the foundational aspects of this world, and it always points us in the right direction. In order to nurture that longing, we need to continually remind ourselves that following our tensions cannot help us to relax and surrender to essence, to open, groundless, boundariless freedom. Even though we enjoy our tensions, even though we enjoy the drama of reviling our tensions, we have to stop identifying with them and with the supposed rewards they will bring.

A good analogy for this might be a little boat just heading out to sea. A rock appears in the path of the boat. Now, if the passenger (you) totally ignored the rock, your boat would be destroyed. You’d be left treading water, or worse, and complaining about your fate. If you tried to “fix” the situation of the rock being in the path of the little boat, it would be rather ludicrous. You could spend a lifetime trying to get a rock out of the ocean and never notice that there is open water all around you. Luckily, there’s a third choice. See the rock and yourself in relation to the rock, then head for open sea. Once you get further into open waters, you can scan the whole scene and see that the rock is just one tiny aspect of a much larger View. You might even realize that the rock isn’t as permanent or scary as you once thought. Nothing teaches us more about the impermanence of rock than open, moving water.

Happy boating.

OM Shanti, Shambhavi

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