Using The Alarm Clock To Stay Asleep

Never in history have so many siren songs clamored for our daily attention. From infancy to our deathbeds we are besieged by advertisements and commercial invitations, each one artfully (or not so artfully) spun to conceal their appeal to our vanity, greed and insecurity. The apparatus of marketing has mutated into a pervasive and unassailable net that misinforms all aspects of our lives. This same machinery that seduces us through fear and then sells us a temporary salve is also fully present in the spiritual world. Here sits the great big elephant on the meditation cushion: spirituality is big business. And big business is no different whether it is selling you tobacco or the promise of salvation: it is only interested in profit and growth.

The obvious problem of this marketing model on the spiritual path is that it can offer us many fancy, exotic tools and techniques that don’t help us awaken. To the contrary, they are like beautifully made alarm clocks dispensing a powerful sleeping gas that keeps us comfortable in our spiritual slumber. They might look like the real thing but their effect is just the opposite: consumers of the product are led away from the path. It is like misreading the signposts on a highway and pressing down on the gas pedal; without knowing it, you are getting further away by the minute from your planned destination.

In Buddhism and Hinduism there is a term for our daily material realm: Samsara. It pertains to the life that we are leading—the good, the bad and the ugly. The literal translation of the word means wandering, or passing on, through different states; this traveling refers to the endless cycle of birth, death and rebirth. It is generally not viewed as a positive attribute. Rather, it is the result of forgetting our true Self and the perpetual state of fear that accompanies this illusion of separateness. In case we miss the point, the Buddhists teach that Buddha once asked his monks which was greater, the water in the oceans or the tears that one sheds while passing through life. Of course the answer is tears shed. The only way out of this painful, tear-filled journey is to wake up and step onto the path to enlightenment.

This endless-birth-cycle stuff can sound hokey and turn some of us off. As it should, since we have a hard enough time dealing with the issues in our daily lives, never mind some out-there concept. But anyone with more than a couple of decades under his belt has to confront at some point the tremendous amount of pain that comes alongside life’s joyful pleasures. That pain is what puts us on the journey back to ourselves. In all my years of being a healer I have never had someone walk through my door who has not been compelled to face the reality of their suffering—whether it be physical, mental or emotional. I have never heard someone say that life is wonderful but they want to see what else is out there. Except for the rare spiritually mature person who sets out on his path due to innate understanding, opening up to our suffering usually induces our journey.

The question then becomes, once we become aware of the pain, how do we respond to this rude invitation to walk back towards our Self? Regardless of our spiritual orientation, it begins with a process of seeking. In fact, this process of looking for a way out of the constant underlying anxiety and pain is what consumer culture is based on. We look for the next meal, cigarette, love-mate or sex partner to remove the pain. Every action is based on a selfish motive to push these feelings away, and yet in time we learn that they have no long-lasting effect. From this place of soul malnourishment we set upon our spiritual journey.

As with starting any fire, we first must strike a match to light the flame. Spiritual seeking is this very match—and it is also the place where many of us can and do get stuck. The first rays of our own light reflected back to us by a teacher, a religion or a technique can be magical indeed. Like rainwater hitting our parched lips after a long crawl through the desert, we savor it and soak it in. It points us to a sense of aliveness and peace that had evaded us and yet was right under our noses. However, this is an appetizer and not the main course.

Several things can happen at this juncture. One is that we can get addicted to the initial feeling of connection and start seeking it out everywhere. This is a common pitfall where our ego will enjoy getting its toes wet in the ocean, knowing it is safe in the shallows, but will do whatever it can to avoid diving in. So the process of seeking starts, from teacher to teacher, workshop to workshop or book to book. The function of a match is to start the fire; to keep lighting matches once the fire is started points to deeper psychological issues. The spiritual marketplace right now offers lots of fancy matches, lighters, flammable liquids and flamethrowers. There is no shortage of products or people willing to tend to our pyromaniac tendencies—and make a damn good living while providing the service. The ego quickly falls into the trap, hypnotizing us into thinking that we are doing the work. In truth, we are continuing our bed rest under the guise of awakening. This is a classic case of the alarm clock singing lullabies and trying to keep us in bed. We may no longer be fully asleep but we have no plans of getting out of bed, either. The ego is practiced at soothing us with the promise of creature comforts and round-the-clock room service.

So much of the spiritual industry today serves to coddle us in this phase of our journey. We can place massive Buddhas in our rooms; hang Zen scriptures or memorize the sayings of the prophets. We can compile a spiritual book collection to put any library to shame. But our ego will only feel more smug and pleased with itself. The danger of its annihilation has been averted and the connection with the material world is fully restored.

There seems to be a whole army of seasoned spiritual veterans, many now in middle age, who have had profound spiritual experiences in their lives but who, for one reason or another, did not nurture or pursue their quest. The weight of our materialistic culture is a heavy burden on any questioning soul. But there are also laziness and lack of discipline that lead us astray. Walking the path is a choice that we have to make on a daily basis: are we chasing after the elusive ego power or are we dying to the outer and waking up to the inner?

A useful analogy is what happened to the Sixties generation and the great social awakening that happened in the United States. After an initial explosion of energy and transformation, the great nap slowly came back into effect. Some of the era’s most radical proponents of change became the biggest champions of the status quo. So it is with spiritual awakening: there is an experience of opening and possibility and then the old patterns seep back in. Vigilance is the only means to ensure the deepening of the process. Many paths teach us to always remain novices—to cultivate ‘beginner’s mind’—because this bestows the humility necessary to constantly seek and move towards our goal. It ensures that we do not confuse the initial opening for the destination.

Another peril on the path is confusing the stick for the moon. Remember that Zen story? The teacher or technique is the stick, a tool to point us towards our Self (the moon). Holding a feeling of gratitude towards a teacher or technique is a part of our nature but can also be a barrier. The Zen Master Lin Chi’s warning “if you meet the Buddha on the road kill him” pertains to this specific dilemma. It teaches us that we should not place anyone above ourselves since the truth is not only within us but is in fact us. Why would you want to kill the being that has helped you on your path? This is not about violence or rage but a dispensing with a feeling—gratitude—that has become a hindrance. The function of training wheels on our bicycles as kids was to teach us balance. We don’t keep them on when we have learned how to stay up, nor do we encase them in gold and jewels and place them on an altar. We simply remove them and move on to riding without them. And yet this sort of idol worship is exactly what holds many of us from moving forward.

This problem is compounded by our culture of personality worship. We can laugh or look with horror at North Korea and its finely honed cult of leader worship. But all it takes is to stare at a magazine stand or one of the many TV shows which cover “famous” personalities to realize that we are steeped in that thick fog ourselves. The spiritual life of a culture always holds some aspects of the broader, public unconscious. So it is second nature for us to turn our teacher into a celebrity idol—and to do so without examining the parental wound that motivates our celebrity lust to begin with. An inescapable part of this projection is the feeling of ownership: the celebrity guru is our guru, which in turn leads to a further aggrandizement of the ego. And thus we lose the truth, which is that we are all one, and therefore have no reason to put another person above us. We might be terribly grateful to the taxi driver for driving us to our destination but we surely don’t prostrate ourselves in front of him for the rest of our lives. It is the capacity of all great teachers to communicate their oneness with us. Conversely, the sign of uncooked teachers is their constant assertion of their superiority over us.

We are all endlessly tricky beings with an ability to use any device or teaching to fortify our egos. We might hide in a holy robe, a yoga practice, in therapy or shamanic rituals. Anything that fortifies our sense of self is an enemy and a hindrance. So much of what passes for ‘self-help’ is pure ego candy; it exists to stimulate and flatter our sense of self-importance as seekers on the path. Our reaction to life is the greatest test of how we are really getting along. Are our preferences and aversions to what life brings us strengthening or weakening? Are our judgments fading and our tolerances growing? Are we building bridges between our daily meditation practice and our behavior at work and with our partners? Our souls cannot be mocked; the divine cannot be punked. It emanates its grace by first gently and then violently pulling the rug from under our feet.

On the spiritual path as well as in world at large, “isms” can be a curse, for they keep strengthening the inherently untrue but deeply held sense of separation that we all suffer from. We have to become honest in finding and following the path to our awakening. Intellectual knowledge and concepts are useless here. They are not grounded in experience and as such can lead us astray. Architectural drawings and a finished house are two different things: one can be a precursor to the other but until we roll our sleeves up, the drawings are useless in providing shelter. We have to let go of all our stories to be able to get a glimpse at the real thing. If you are reading this, the alarm might have gone off for you already. Perhaps you are still in bed wondering if you should get out, even though there are bedsores covering your body from lying down for so long. Maybe you got out a long time ago and then fell asleep on the couch. Or maybe you have been fighting the good fight and are solidly awake on your feet. Regardless, let us hold each other to dying a little more today, letting go a little more and remembering a little more.