Varanasi Lights
Tuesday, July 5th, 2005When I was in Varanasi last February, I met the teacher of a friend of mine. Everyone in the neighborhood called this man “Guruji.” One day, I asked my friend to tell me his Guru’s proper name. I wanted to write it down before I left India.
“I don’t know,” my friend answered. “I just call him Guruji.”
“Well,” I continued. “Does he work?”
“I don’t know,” my friend repeated.
“Is he married?” I persisted in my questioning.
“I don’t know,” came the answer again.
I tried one last question. “Where does he live? “
My friend sighed. His annoyance was evident.
“Somewhere outside of Varanasi, I think. I don’t concern myself with such things!”
Sheesh! Can you even imagine? Probably not.
Most of us have grown up in a culture that is obsessed with creating and telling the stories of our lives. We analyze our own stories. We talk about the stories of our family and friends. We watch television shows dedicated to the flaunting of our life stories. We hire doctors to fix our life stories when they are “broken,” and lots of other kinds of professionals reward us when our life stories are working well.
Whole careers are dedicated to the pursuit of defining, analyzing, displaying, discussing, disputing, fixing, tweaking, provoking, and purveying the stories of our lives. I bet if Americans were as uninterested in life stories as my friend in India, our entire economy would collapse.
Really, what would we even talk about, think about, or care about if it weren’t for such stories? Our days would be empty. Our minds would be flapping in the wind. We would fall into the void. Uh oh… doesn’t that sound like…????
The Tantric Buddhist teacher, Ngakpa Chogyam, makes a useful distinction between personality display and personality habit patterns. You can recognize a personality habit pattern by these characteristics:
You think it is you.
You guard it with your life. (Because it’s “you.”)
It repeats.
It repeats often without you being able to do anything to stop it.
You talk about it. Over and over again.
You experience it through habitual feelings of pride, shame, jealousy, anger, sadness, frustration, victimization, and even pleasure. Especially pleasure.
Yeah, we relentlessly finger and stroke our life stories, like the girl in seventh grade who compulsively twirled her hair.
A personality display is light flickering on water. It flashes. It moves. It appears and disappears. It adapts to changing conditions. It has a feeling of transparency. It is potent, playful, soft, sharp, watery, fiery, airy, earthy.
A personality display is difficult to obsess about because it doesn’t stick around long enough. It has nothing to stick to: no constructed, congealed “self” to call its own.
Personality display doesn’t really need any attention or coaching from us. It arises and subsides all on its own. It is the beautiful play of a cosmic aurora borealis diffracted through the lens of an individuality
Personality display is utterly uncontrived.To live an uncontrived life is one good way of defining moksha or liberation.
Most of what we call personality is contrived. It takes effort to maintain. It is even possible to contrive a “personality display,” just like it’s possible to turn any spiritual concept into a behavior pattern when we don’t have real spiritual accomplishment. You know, the whole “acting spiritual” thing. When you meet someone who is that open conduit for the cosmic aurora borealis, though, you know it can’t be faked.
Through practice, and with guidance, we inevitably begin to experience more moments of freedom. Peversely, our reward is that we also start to notice the energy drain that results from the effort to maintain our “self.” Layers and layers of contrivance begin to be revealed for what they are in the cutting-through light of greater freedom. It’s really not that much fun to come face-to-face with the depth of one’s own inauthenticity.
This is why, one of the main capacities that we need in order to follow through with an authentic spiritual practice is a fierce desire to live in Reality, no matter how ugly and painful it seems. Without this fierce desire for the Real world, all of it , without exception, we will always figure out a way to preserve our buffering mechanisms—the main buffering mechanism being our habitual personality pattern. The full, free play of personality display will never get to shine through.
As the Masters have said: it is best not to begin, but once you have begun, it is best to finish.
OM Shanti, Shambhavi
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