LIFE – Let It Flow Easy!!
We all know that we exist in this materialistic world and are quite materialistic ourselves. We are attached to our possessions, we like to hoard, not share – be it wealth, knowledge, our time. In fact we are generally very miser when it comes to giving our time truly listening to others. So as I progressed along my journey of self-awareness, materialism and my attachments to all those possessions that I had collected, emotional attachments, in fact even how rigid I was with my thoughts, ideologies and how the attachments to those were dictating how I was living my life, creating my experiences of happiness or sadness, it was all definitely becoming more and more clear. However, what was then going to unfold being a seeker on the so-called spiritual path, was something I had absolutely no clue of.
During the initial years of my spiritual quest, I had invested a lot of time reading spiritual texts, the new age authors who talked about self-awareness, spent a lot of time with my teacher, learning about my teacher’s teacher and the spiritual lineage that I had become a part of, a lot of time meditating, trying to learn about the mind game, new meditation techniques, practicing the so called higher meditation practices, like a starved person who was famished and had all of a sudden found this limitless treasure, the key to ultimate happiness and I had to know it all, learn it all. The more I acquired, the more I felt at peace. It was normal to then feel that I had pretty much wasted most of my life learning the stuff that did not necessarily made life blissful and now I had to unlearn all that and learn new things. With the new learnings, also came forth the desire to share that new perspective with friends, family, colleagues. The irony then being that whilst I was practicing awareness, I had without realizing become a hoarder of the spiritual knowledge. And not just a hoarder, but I was constantly judging myself and others through that lens of spiritual knowledge, thinking that through that knowledge I was trying to get rid of my ego but unknowingly I was feeding it even more subtly. I had not managed to convert that knowledge into wisdom yet. I was going through the pitfall of what a lot of seekers go through – a phase of spiritual materialism.
Spiritual materialism is a term coined by Chögyam Trungpa who was a famous Tibetan Buddhist Master. In simple words, it is something similar to the third level of attachment that my teacher had explained – attachment to thoughts, ideas which is literally impossible to see and impossible to break away from unless one is fortunate enough to have a real teacher. It was my biggest blind spot, that I had no clue of – and I had started to suffer even more, was even spiritually depressed because now I had unknowingly raised the bar of how I and others should behave – questions like why people can’t be more grateful for what they have, why is everyone running so much after acquiring success, wealth at the cost of their family, health, environment, why can’t colleagues or even family at home work like a team, why are we human beings so insecure, immoral, judgemental, disrespectful, etc etc etc….The irony was that I was guilty of being over judgemental myself, not having a complete acceptance for whatever was out there ( both in myself and in others). All these thoughts were making me even more sick, angry, less peaceful – even though I thought I was so much more wiser and less ignorant.
The fact was that I hadn’t managed to fully assimilate and absorb all that I had learnt, I hadn’t yet learnt to practice fully what I had learnt, convert that knowledge into my own experience effectively, I hadn’t yet managed to convert the spiritual knowledge into wisdom.
However, once we pass that phase of spiritual materialism, the journey becomes far more interesting, enriching, relaxed with a deep sense of freedom. One is able to then understand what Tilopa meant when he said, “Have a mind that’s open to everything and attached to nothing”. One then truly learns to arouse the mind without letting it rest on anything.