What it Means to Really Change
People resist change because the ego wants life to appear a particular way and we cling to what we know. We want to remain in this comfort zone, even if it isn’t always that comfortable!
My experience as a teacher is that people often leave a spiritual practice when they come up against something that needs to be profoundly changed within them. Instead of surrendering their tensions and making that change, students begin projecting that there is something wrong with the teacher or the practice. I have watched this for forty years.
You have to be conscious and aware. This is why Rudi spoke about “work” and “tests.” We work and work, and then we are tested to see if the deepening awareness we made contact with is really our own. Higher awareness is only ours if we can express and exhibit it in the face of any condition. Everything is Divine. It is a question of whether we recognize it.
Change Requires Flexibility
My teacher Rudi told a wonderful story about a train ride he took in India with one of his first teachers, the Shankaracharya of Puri. They were to spend the night in a section of the train that had many berths closely packed together, separated only by curtains. Rudi put the Shankaracharya in one of those beds and he slept some distance away. In the middle of the night Rudi heard a truly horrible sound, rather like a cow dying, which he soon realized was someone snoring. Rudi couldn’t sleep. He got up, went searching for the offending party, and as he zeroed in on the berth and opened the curtain, he realized it was the Shankaracharya bellowing away—and Rudi instantly switched gears and thought, “What a sweet sound.”
We need to develop the flexibility to disengage from any ruts we have dug for ourselves. Tibetan traditions talk about the wheel of samsara, the repetition of misunderstanding that we are trapped in, lifetime after lifetime. When we pull back from the particulars of this life, we can see that we’ve been perpetuating the same patterns since time immemorial. From the inception of individuated life, the cycles of desire and misunderstanding arise, causing us to run like blindfolded hamsters on a wheel.
Samsara happens through the power of Consciousness to create illusion and misunderstanding and is perpetuated by the nature of our limited mind. Underneath this obscuration is the power to recognize the illusion, and to get off the wheel. We can reverse the process and turn the manifest awareness back into Itself. The practice of spanda is one of recognizing the point where awareness turns into thought—and from there we can stop feeding that energy and thereby stop feeding the arising of form and separation.
Change Requires Discipline
There is a dual process happening in us. One part of us is unfolding and expressing higher Consciousness. We know, “There has to be more to life than this.” Another part reflects the mind’s desire to perpetuate itself, and it digs in to maintain the status quo. It takes time to grow spiritually because the mind, the instrument of the ego, has as much power as Divine Consciousness to create our experience.
We have a lot of obstacles and resistance to burn through. It takes a while to dissolve all these inner barriers, and every time we think we have gotten past a few levels we will forget for a second—and our resistance rises up and gets bigger again. That’s part of the journey, and it’s why discipline is required.
In time, we are able to recognize some runaway energy while we are still centered in our heart. From there, we can witness the mind starting to spin out and stop it before things get out of control. So watch your emotions, watch your thoughts, because otherwise they will build in intensity and run you over. Be aware of what’s happening, but don’t give it life or validity. Everything that emerges from the mind is inherently mired in illusion and misunderstanding, because the mind has a limited perspective, a limited capacity to experience higher awareness.
The Illusion of Duality
“Illusion” does not mean that something is not real. It means that when we perceive something as “not God,” we are simply expressing our misunderstanding that anything could be separate from God. Illusion here means concealing the true nature of existence. We, unfortunately, want to take the profound gift of life and make it about little mundane details. Then, we get so caught in those things that we completely lose ourselves and forget that the purpose of our life is to experience Divinity.
The details of life include our mental and emotional constructs, including self-rejection, self-doubt, and all the other psychological limitations we feel. They are real on their own level, and yet none of them have to be changed in order for us to make contact with our Self. Altering our psychology will not affect whether or not we’re connected to our Source. We don’t have to understand every aspect of how and why we feel as we do, or what caused us to misunderstand the nature of life; we just have to get in contact with Spirit. Otherwise, we can get stuck in the quagmire of our personal issues. So we must be willing to surrender every last bit of our limited perspective.
If we can deeply penetrate into our Self, our psychological problems will disappear, because they no longer have anything to grip on to. They cease to bind us. Spiritual life is about penetrating through the surface level that is creating a problem and transcending to a deeper place within us.
Healing comes through surrender. Practically speaking, that means we stay centered, don’t allow the mind to develop runaway thought constructs, and tune in to the part of us where nothing ever needs to be healed. Source comes through and we change our resonance. We didn’t fix anything. We didn’t change anything. We just tuned in to the purity that heals everything.