Are You Running on Fumes or Vajra Pride?
Friday, February 8th, 2008Today, the New York Times reported that donors to Hilary Clinton’s bid for the U.S. presidency are concerned that her campaign is “running on fumes.”
They mean that that the Clinton campaign may have more hot air than hard cash.
For our purposes as Tantrikas, “fumes” are the gaseous self-stories and self-images we effortfully erect.
Vajra pride is the diamond-hard, luminous and clear-cutting confidence of life resting in itself with no hype. Vajra pride is cash in the bank. Running on a constructed self-image is running on fumes.
Recently, several people have written to me about their experiences with difficult health situations and a feeling that their lives have crashed, mentally and physically.
A lot of people go through some moment, or even years, when their familiar story about themselves breaks down, and no new story rushes in to take its place. This can be accompanied by a crisis of health, death of a loved one, job loss and so on.
Or you may just experience a fleeting feeling of anxiety, or disassociation. The world suddenly seems strange to you. You seem strange to yourself.
Many people “treat” these moments with a mad scramble back to familiar habits of self-image making. Or they use drugs to antidote the persistent anxiety and depression caused when the knowledge that they are running on the fumes of self-image rises up from the depths of their being, from the inexhaustible wellspring of life.
We do not have the cultural support to recognize anxiety and depression as messages of wisdom, as opportunities to divest ourselves of the habits of body, speech and mind that are damaging our health and hindering our spiritual growth. We think that anxiety and depression and ill health are “problems,” when actually it is our lives that are out of synch with Nature and the natural flow of life toward Self-realization.
Rather than antidoting such experiences with efforts to reconstruct a self-image, Tantrik sadhana is designed to precipitate crises of self-image and self-concept.
Within the context of a loving Guru-disciple relationship and consistent practice, we can discover the wisdom virtues that are expressing themselves through our so-called negative emotions and ill health. We can work directly to discover vajra pride–confidence in life just as it is–and step out of the fumes of compulsive self-image making.
The fumes of self-image can take many shapes: I am this, I am that. My life plan. My accomplishments. My superiority. My inferiority.
Yes, the reason why people with “inferiority complexes” have nervous breakdowns when they succeed beyond their expectations is because their self image has broken down and they experience openness for the first time.
Fumes of any variety create a fleeting feeling of enjoyment. We get high on fumes, so of course, when our fume-producing mechanism breaks down, we crash. Then we think something is wrong. We want to get back on the fumes as quickly as possible. But by doing so, we just sign on for another round of compulsive highs and painful lows.
The only real refuge from this cycle is to relax our tensions, our self-image-making effort, and live in open expectation. We should aim to live like a person who is welcoming to any guest that life brings her way.
This does not mean that we will never experience illness or sadness. These are integral aspects of human life. But if we are not so hard at work creating a self-image, we will not be condemned to experiencing such episodes as attacks.
I had an experience of this the first time I went to India. I had big plans and a big image of myself as the great yogini going off to do “serious” practice in the Motherland. Instead, I got dengue fever and nothing turned out the way I expected.
At some point, I relaxed (but not too quickly!), and stopped fighting the natural course of my life. I was still quite ill, but I remember that my teacher remarked on how well I looked. He said that this happened when you don’t resist life’s ups and downs. I felt weak but surprisingly content.
Slowly over time, I realized that everything is fine. The totality of life and everything it brings our way is unproblematic. This is vajra pride.
In Ma’s love,
Shambhavi
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