Basic Duplicity
Tuesday, February 6th, 2007At some point, we discover a sincere desire to cooperate with life. We discover what Chogyam Trungpa called “basic goodness.” Basic goodness is wisdom in action. It flows from Self recognition. You begin to recognize what you really are, and you are so deeply moved by that recognition, you discover a sincere desire to express basic goodness. We could also call it “basic enjoyment,” or “basic sanity,” another Trungpa coinage.
Until this tipping point is reached, all practitioners are expressing “basic duplicity.”
Basic duplicity is a two-faced approach to Self realization. We have some sincere longing for realization, but we are definitely not sincere about relinquishing our compulsive personality habits.
We want to Self-realize, but we also want to keep hurting ourselves and others. We want to enjoy realization and retain our guilty pleasures of ego. We are in a conflicted, ambivalent state.
Some people go to absolutely extraordinary lengths to integrate ego gratification with spiritual practice. This is the situation of the demagogic Guru.
Most of us creep along, trading little bits of our ego pleasures for little bits of realization.
We secretly, or not-so-secretly, hope that we will magically be permitted to assume the post of The Great Yogi while still holding onto our most treasured ego games.
For instance:
Telling that same, boastful story one more time. Ahhh….it feels so good!
Luxuriating in trance states of self-hatred, or pink-cloud fantasy.
Aggressively pursuing our selfish material, emotional, and spiritual ambitions, aka manipulating, forcing, and seducing others to play the game for our personal benefit. Love it!
If we practice with consistency and diligence, we inevitably spend more time recognizing, exploring, and relaxing in the natural, uncontrived state.
The wisdom virtues of compassion, delight, enjoyment, amazement, devotion, kindness, generosity, intelligence, discrimination, and equanimity emerge naturally from this dwelling.
I registered a shock when I recognized that I no longer enjoyed, or wanted to express, lifelong ego habits, whether they had been obviously hurtful, or had been rewarded in my career or socially.
Suddenly, that “ice cream” didn’t taste so good.
At first, I was amused.
Later on, regret set in.
Dwelling more in the continuity of life, and having opened to greater discrimination and understanding, the effects of my aggression on life could be seen in greater detail.
I felt genuinely sad and worked harder to relax those limitations.
During moments when I moved into synch with basic goodness, there was tremendous relief, gratitude, and sense of ease, even if I was also experiencing some kind of pain. The effort of noncooperation had ceased.
However, I couldn’t sustain this. A long, difficult period ensued of feeling that every movement into greater tension was a “fall from grace,” and every return to greater relaxation a “skin of my teeth” recovery.
But grace flows generously everywhere at all times. The “fall” is only our own plunge into ignorance of our true condition.
One day, I held the young child of a friend of mine in my arms. Now, this child is quite spectacularly tender and joyful. However, in this moment, as I began to hand her over to her mother, her arm shot out, and she hit her mother in the face.
A gap of astonishment was experienced by all present. Then, the child began to weep with regret. The aggression she had expressed was so spontaneous, and the regret, empathy, and recognition so swift and genuine, everyone was moved.
I don’t mean to imply that children are closer to enlightenment than are adults. Far from it. However, this particular child’s sensitivity showed clearly how aggression is also essence spontaneously expressing itself, and that within this play of infinite potential, we are graced with the capacity to consciously embody our continuity with all life.
Watching this scene, I reflected on my own childhood and recovered the memory and the taste of this same strong, unerring desire to cooperate with life that had been directing me since birth and within time for all time. I recovered nonambivalent clarity about, and confidence in, the wisdom of life in every manifestation. Divisions of grace and fall from grace disappeared.
Some might be tempted to label this process “self acceptance,” or “acceptance of life,” but this would be incorrect.
The process of all movement toward Self-realization is that of discovering an embodied understanding of fundamental wisdom expressing in every moment, in every activity, in every manifestation. From one point of view, this embodied understanding is given to us, and we receive it. When the time comes, there is no question of accepting or rejecting. We find ourselves in greater awareness and capacity. And we go on from there.
From another point of view, there is no giving and receiving. We just discover what we are and have been all along. When we are certain of this, even if we are still “coming and going,” even though the inevitable tensions arise, we do not have to suffer from this pulse of the life process itself. Our duplicity finally ends.
OM Shanti,
Shambhavi
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