Being a bit of a spiritual forum geek, I often get to observe various “whose path / technique / teacher is better” arguments. Patiently reading each side, at some point I can’t help feel that my understanding of the most important thing is very different than what I am seeing represented by most participants. I admit, sometimes I find myself smiling and feeling, humbly, like I am watching children play fight with big colorful toys in a park sandbox. Or ultra-serious film students, berets prefectly cocked, arguing over who is the best French director of “all time”. What concerns me is that, unlike fun threads on, say, choosing deodorant or debating nutrition, in these threads some poor souls invariably imagine this stuff has a higher claim on anything to do with the Tao. Of course on some level it does, as everything in our experience is inseparable from the Tao. But beyond that … well, my felt sense is that there are deeply flawed assumptions going on here.

I like what Wayfarer on TTB said recently about how something crucial really goes awry when we strive beyond our given capacities. My preferred frame is that, in every single moment, each of us is one hundred percent enough, one hundred percent free, one hundred percent loved and getting exactly what we want down to the very last detail. This perfection includes all of the ways we convince ourselves otherwise and play unpleasant games with our freedom. A particularly unpleasant game is to believe there is anything fundamentally missing from what you truly are in any moment. And then how much more amplified is this unpleasantness, this disconnection from Truth, when this game is magnified — when the game says that not only is there somewhere to go other than here, but we must to travel to the other side of the world, be celibate for a quarter year, pay thousands of dollars, learn secret techniques, submit to Masters, shock people with elite chi and all before “level four”. All of this, of course, way before one is permitted to breathe the air of Truth that is already the very fiber of our Being. WTF? It’s like dying of thirst while in a beautiful freshwater lake, and then deciding you need to swim vigorously toward a mirage of water you are hallucinating as a rare and priceless magic-wine. Just drink the fucking water! The Way puts banana peels in the path of elitism, ties the shoelaces of qigong fetishists, giggles at a concept of tommorow and is at home for everyone right now. Young, old, lazy, rich, beautiful, brilliant, stupid. Seeking and expecting to find anything fundamentally different than what is available in the moment is a dis-ease. Our egos think there is a to-do-list for enlightenment because we are terrified at just relaxing into and being swallowed by the fullness of emptiness in this very moment.

All of us really, have probably created spectacular to-do-lists of our own before “then get enlightened” even shows up. Just a few more things to do first. But awakening happens in spite of ourselves, not as a result of a perfect formula. There is no fucking formula! The Guru is within you. Awakening is a sort of happy accident, and all the “best” technique in the world can do is make you accident prone. It’s up to you to finally trip up and fall. I really, sincerely hope our paths finally crack each of us wide open from all this nonsense and we can smile and realize that there are little old white ladies on crutches hobbling home from church that know the same exact undisturbed Truth that brilliant, mathemetically sophisticated Kabbalists are seeing and that perhaps Taoist human immortals from afar are embodying and on and on. I believe there are thousands and thousands of enlightened humans, most of them quite ordinary without any draw to teach.

The most fantastic path is The Way which is moving us Now. Anything that obscures that clarity disconnects us from Truth. PLEASE, follow your bliss. If it takes you to the Post Office for work everyday, or to this teacher down the street, or that teacher in a remote cave in China, or wherever! But find a higher vibration if for one second you feel the least bit bad that where you are at right this second lacks anything fundamental, that your path is somehow wrong because it doesn’t have pretty mandalas like so and so path or doesn’t develop cool X-Men powers like this other path. It’s not True. Every step of the Way is about what feels the highest, deepest, most important, most loving, most free to you. Could it be any other way?

Sean

“The heart of our [Taoist] view is the human relationship with Nature. When we self-reflect as human beings, we discover that being human is nothing extra-ordinary and, even more importantly, we discover that our existence doesn’t need to be repaired, fixed, or reunited with Nature. It is immutably part of Nature. It’s no use to imitate saints or act in a way premature to your own experience. Simply remain in your experience and feel its real quality. This is the path of immortality. In the West we are extreme idealists, expecting too much and in a constant state of failure because of it. We aspire and hope and fail. When we reflect and discover our own energetic reality, we can see that everything we do has transmission, has energetic effect. We needn’t struggle to be good rather than real, to remain young rather than growing old, to avoid making mistakes. The only point is to appreciate our actions in their largest context, without measuring them or looking beyond them to something better.” - Liu Ming