Stickiness on the Spiritual Path
Sunday, September 4th, 2005A spiritual teacher who is a friend of mine once remarked: “I don’t know how you’ve done it, but somehow you’ve managed not to get stuck in all the ways spiritual aspirants usually get stuck.”
This is no mystery. I had a teacher prying me loose at every sticky turn.
The American Tantric, Rudi, was famous for saying “A dead teacher can’t kick your butt.”
Neither, in general, will your fellow aspirants. Or your so-called “inner guru.”
Your friends certainly won’t.
99.99999% of us need a live, in the flesh, in our faces, butt-kicking teacher to keep us from “sticking.”
Stickiness is attachment to people, experiences, and concepts. Ok, ok. And dogs. It all adds up to one big sticky gumball: your self. All attachment is an attempt by ahamkara (loosely, “ego”) to keep itself stuck together in a more or less static form. No shame. No blame. This is just what ahamkara does.
Big Note: Detachment does not mean numbness or whateverness. You can love your dog. But if you don’t love everyone and everything else, you still need a teacher.
I came into this world with attachments and developed new ones along the way. Many of our attachments are obvious. Some are very subtle. Treading the spiritual path can be like spending years trapped in a fun house. If you are practicing well, all of the fixations you never knew you had will pop out, do a scary dance, and laugh a scary laugh.
A Tantrik teacher will actually provoke your reactivity so you can see it. BOO! This is why they call Tantra “the fast path.” It’s not for everyone.
The special stickiness my friend was talking about is attachment to spiritual concepts, projections, and experiences. This takes so many forms, I hardly know where to begin.
How about that special spiritual dream you had three months ago that you are still talking about? Or the special spiritual voice you talk in to let everyone know you are spiritual? Or the fizzy sensation you once had that you worked up into a “kundalini” experience. And now you refer to it as “my samadhi?”
These are gross forms of spiritual fixation. These are obvious ways that ahamkara condenses around spiritual stuff. Same old ego, just different stories. This sort of indulgence will not free you.
But all spiritual practitioners, even sincere ones, can easily get stuck. We get stuck because we are not taught proper View. We get stuck because we don’t have a large enough perspective on Reality to guide us past our incipient fixations. We absolutely need View, and imparting View to a student is the most important job of any teacher.
The Sanskrit word for View is “darshan.” Darshan has many, many meanings. You might hear people talking about “getting darshan” from a teacher. This means seeing a teacher and receiving a transmission of the essence state. The essence state is View.
“View teachings” are oral transmissions of the structure of Reality, of Nature and how it works. You and your spiritual practice fit right into this structure. You are it; it is you. So to receive View teachings means that you are given the full perspective on how spiritual practice, and all of life, works.
For instance, the statement “meditation is without meditating” is View teaching.
The teaching of the stages of spiritual life is View teaching, too. That’s where you learn that sensations in the energy body are not enlightenment. And that samadhi is just another available state in which you can participate. No biggie. You learn that any time you hold onto a certain stage of development or experience, you are in danger of organizing it into another self-concept and of ceasing to grow.
View teachings guide you through times when you are in danger of falling into mistaken ideas and practices due to your attachments and ignorance of Nature. Ignorance of Nature is nothing but non-realization. Realization is nothing but living the View or knowledge of Nature.
When you hear it said that so and so is “living the View,” it means that person’s conduct flows spontaneously from the essence state, unimpeded by fixation.
The head of my lineage says wisely that vairagya (detachment or dispassion) is a myth. There is no such thing. Why? Because we are all naturally attached to freedom. Our desire for freedom is the expression of this attachment of essence to essence. Attachment to freedom is equal to the movement toward freedom.
Basically, our sticky attachments are expressions of the same more generalized, expansive capacity to attach that guides us to freedom. See how the world works? Gorgeous!
Attaching to our Guru and Ishta Devata (tutelary deity) is the leap that we make when we are moving to a less contracted, self-limiting state of attachment. The world, in its infinite grace, gives us these manifest freedom guides to attach to so that we can cultivate our own freedom, which is ultimately groundless.
True Gurus and Ishta Devatas are natural spiritual technologies, not saviors or slaviors. (Like that?)
OM Shanti,
Shambhavi
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