If you are a regular reader of Living Tantra, you must already be practicing patience (or irony) with respect to enlightenment. After all, you’ll find no stories here of astral projection, kundalini earthquakes, or super-sized orgasms.

Living Tantra is more like a workshop in somebody’s backyard garage. As you walk by, you hear hammering and sawing, a little music playing, and you wonder who’s working so hard in there. Geez, why don’t they take a break already?

Well, I’ll tell you why!

I was surprised a little while ago when I came across a statement by the Tantric Guru , Rudi, about how the process of spiritual growth proceeds by increments. Here was someone with spiritual experiences, and talents, of legendary proportion. I mean, Tibetan mahasiddhas appeared to him in Central Park at the age of five and placed magical ritual objects inside of his body.

Rudi’s “increments” are surely bigger than my increments. But despite this, Rudi had an extraordinarily workmanlike relationship to his spiritual practice, to all of life, that is. In fact, he rarely referred to “spiritual practice.” He just called it “the work.”

One thing I’ve noticed is that people with a high degree of openness (spiritual growth), have generally, almost always, done an enormous amount of sadhana. In fact, in the Tantras, the two, related aspects of human life that are most valued are that we have such wonderful bodies and that we can do sadhana. Human life is the sadhana-doing-realm par excellence.

When I say “an enormous amount of sadhana,” I mean hours a day and long retreats. I mean approaching every particle of your waking, working, and sleeping hours as sadhana, 24/7 for your entire life.

Why don’t we all do this once we have been introduced to the dharma?

Well, on the one hand, this question is unanswerable. We just don’t.

On the other hand, down here closer to the ground, we’re afraid of liberation. Real freedom scares us as much, or slightly more, than it attracts us. Except for a few who tip slightly in favor of freedom-in-spite-of-our-fear.

Real freedom is absolutely groundless. And nearly everyone, including advanced practitioners, is loathe to give up that last bit of ground.

The Buddhists have this way of presenting teachings in which students get the relative, dualistic teachings first and then are slowly introduced to the nondual teachings. After this, I presume, one or two encounter the very very secret teaching about all categories being munched up by “Who the bleep knows, just be with what is.”

In Indian Tantra, as I’ve learned it, we get introduced to these teachings all at once. The idea is that having the largest container possible in which to situate your own life will protect you from losing it to fantasy and other deviations.

Some folks get scared off just by the size of the container. Other folks hear about the vastness of it all and are not really affected at first because it’s too incomprehensible.

But if you keep practicing, eventually vastness and unknowableness, or emptiness and groundlessness, or chaos and openness, or however you want to point in that direction, become more than words. You start to get live downloads of what Chogyam Trungpa called “gaps.”

Gaps are openings to more expanded ways of being in the world. It’s like “Oh, you thought that nonduality stuff was just an idea? Well—here it is, up close and personal.” Or, “Oh, you thought you had your big container all wallpapered and labeled? Well, here’s what’s outside of your container.” Ground Control to Major Tom….

Gaps come in different flavors and sizes and durations. Like earthquakes. Oops, I said there were no earthquakes on Living Tantra! Guess I lied.

How we handle the gap moments, or weeks, determines whether we will be able to grow big enough to maintain the gap in our experiential understanding of reality. If we aren’t, the gap fades, and we end up wondering if it ever really happened at all.

Most spiritual narratives are just a string of gap stories (or exaggerated gap stories). People think that these so-called spiritual experiences are the point, the culmination. This is dead wrong. They are just the beginning. If we want to learn to live in the gaps, we have to approach them as more than just sensory overloads or WOW moments.

The arrival of a gap means we’ve got our little toe onto the ledge of an expanded mode of being. But just our little toe.

When we are graced with an experience of an expanded View (i.e. what it would be like if I were much freer), that’s the time to get down to work. Otherwise, our ego will turn it into another self-image story, and all will be lost.

In order to really assimilate the live wisdom of a gap, we have to consciously work to open and surrender, not rush to tell all of our friends about our great accomplishment.

The other thing about gaps is, they open us to the raw experience of our fear of freedom. We only know how terrified we are until groundlessness presents itself. This is why opening into fear is so key to Tantrik sadhana. We must open right in the middle of fear, consciously relinquish all stories, and cheer as the ground slips away.

So, we move from gap to gap, with lots of hard work in between. It’s like that.

Rudi often spoke about being tested as an important part of this process. If we work hard at opening and surrendering, we might begin to feel that we have indeed made a home in the gap. We might notice that the gap is peeping out around every corner. We might understand some of what we’ve learned from the gap and how that new understanding has changed our day-to-day conduct and experience. This is called “stabilization.” But stabilization is not completion.

Our expanded View does get tested by life and living. We are sure to be tempted to move back into a more contracted state by some life situation just as we are convinced we have opened permanently. These tests are absolutely necessary so that we don’t fall into complacency, conceptual thinking, and fantasy.

The true test of any spiritual growth is our conduct in the world. Any spiritual “accomplishment” that dissipates the minute we leave our meditation cushion, or that leaves us with our ingrained tensions intact, is only a fleeting experience. Our conduct tells us if we have really grown and opened, or not.

So, don’t fret if you haven’t yet come across the secret, all-in-one liberation pill that everyone knows about but you. Inch-by-inch is the way.

OM Shanti,

Shambhavi

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