Writings - Krishna Satsang

Full Enlightenment, Past Teachers and other disappointments

How can I trust that this is really the highest enlightenment?

What if I'm barking up the wrong tree here? What if the experience that you offer is not it? Sometimes I'm incredibly frustrated with the mistakes I've made spiritually. I've wasted my time following paths that did not leave me with the restful satisfied life that was promised. I feel foolish because I've been deceived in the past, how can I be sure that I won't be disappointed again?

Good question. The way I see it, this awakening is bound to be filled with disappointment. Any form of awakening is just a beginning, and the "full awakening" is an ever-receding horizon. All that I have is a Deep Trust In Being. That's why I'm doing what I do. I am already free as the infinite, and totally at rest as That. As the finite I'm a limited being, deepening trust by both embracing and surrendering as reality. Trust continues to be developed through disappointments and an often-difficult honesty with myself. This frees Energy and attention that was stuck trying to avoid experience and releases it into and as Life Itself. That's all I can "promise". And I can't say that this is not a "wrong tree" for you.

Being "Really Enlightened"

You ask: "How can I trust that this is really the highest enlightenment?"

I remember the first teacher of mine with whom I experienced Transmission. It was twenty years ago; I was living in New York City and just getting by, living hand to mouth driving a taxi at night. My teacher at the time was someone who studied with several teachers from both eastern and western traditions, but his appearance and manner were anything but the typical spiritual stereotype. He was a tall stocky white guy with a Jewish background who spoke with a refined but obvious Brooklyn accent. And while he went to an Ivy League school he still had a New York attitude and understood working class sensibilities. Fritz Perls himself had trained him in Gestalt Therapy; he had lived in India for five years and had been on the faculty at a well-known Tibetan meditation center in Berkley.

I came to him mostly to work on my psychological stuff, but I was attracted to working with him because of his spiritual side as well. While he required me to meditate and read a couple of books, during our weekly sessions we hardly ever spoke about consciousness. Mostly we talked about daily life, my mother, and my anger.

During what was the second or third session something strange happened. While sitting there talking about my day at work I noticed that I could quite literally see him more clearly than anything else. It was like the pixels that made up his physical body were more densely packed and more clearly defined. I shifted how I was sitting and moved my head slowly from side to side, blinking my eyes to clear away this visual distortion. It continued unabated. Not only that but it got worse and I began to see something else. On hot summer days sometimes you can see "waves" that radiate off of the streets, a kind of "mirage" and now I was seeing them radiating from his body. "This is weird" I said out loud, "well, I'm a weird guy" he said calmly, "let's get back to your work day". At this point the room seemed filled and I began to feel something "I'm seeing energy coming off of you" I told him. He said, "Energy is just a thing, an object, like the couch or the chair, just get back to the conversation about work".

The whole thing was absurd; this was the first time that I experienced such a thing without any intent or trying on my part, and apparently no trying on his either. No drugs, no meditating, no chanting, no breathing exercises, no nothing. I was having a totally mundane conversation with him. As I tried in vain to ignore what was happening and talk about getting stiffed by another taxi fare, I noticed that I was changing. My breathing slowed down, my voice became deeper and more deliberate and I felt a warm sense of well-being. While I could feel everything, I was somehow watching myself unaffected. I was seeing myself in exactly the same way I was seeing everything and (I later noticed) everyone else, through an "objective", quiet, equal seeing; an equal vision. This was no therapy session; it was more than I had dreamed possible. I had read about such things, but this was the first time I had ever experienced them myself in my own body, right here in New York, with a Brooklyn Jew no less.

I couldn't help myself, I blurted out "Are you enlightened?" While the exact language eludes me, the heart of his answer has never left me. It went something like this:

"Listen to you! 'Are you enlightened?' How would you know? If I think I'm enlightened and if I'm not, I could say, 'I am enlightened', and you wouldn't know. If I am enlightened and I think it's important for you to think that I'm not then I could say to you 'No, I'm not enlightened' and you also wouldn't know. And if I am enlightened and I say to you 'Yes, I am enlightened' you still wouldn't know. All that you can possibly know is if YOU are enlightened. If you are receiving something for yourself, if you have some benefit, some growth from being here then that is all that is important. Even if I were the Buddha himself, if you are not getting anything from being here with me then this is not where you should be."

It's now twenty years later and we've long ago gone our own ways. I've studied with many other teachers and now I also teach, but I'll always remember those words and I live by them. I like to tell this story often, I repeat it so much because it's so important, and it's a kind of key.

You Are The Guru

Don't overlook the obvious. You cannot give over responsibility for yourself to anyone else. Make good use of your teachers and respect the guidance that you've allowed yourself to make use of, but remember that no one can or should imply that they can relieve you of your responsibility for your life.

Today we live in a world in which we are exposed to many traditions of spiritual awakening. There are obviously many examples in world history of great spiritual realizations. The understanding of enlightenment is different in different schools and traditions. Even when someone is a realizer in his or her school there is no guarantee that that form of enlightenment is THE form of enlightenment. You know: "The Super-duper bestest of the best, Highest of the high, really truly enlightenest enlightened twelfth stage supreme state of the really truly truest awakening".

I remember in New York there used to be something written on most of the boxes of pizza to go: "You've tried the rest, now try the best". Of course everyone thinks that theirs is the best. Just saying it doesn't mean it's true, and how would anyone check such a claim?

Can you be at peace with the fact that you don't have the means to validate what is the highest form of enlightenment? That it may be more important to be yourself than to be the Buddha, or that maybe they are actually the same thing?

Coming To Terms With Our Past without sugar coating it

You ask: "Sometimes I'm incredibly frustrated with the mistakes I've made spiritually. I've wasted my time following paths that did not leave me with the restful satisfied life that was promised. I feel foolish because I've been deceived in the past, how can I be sure that I won't be disappointed again?"

Making use of the guidance we receive and respecting it does not mean we always agree with everything that we've learned. Even when we find the need to leave a teacher or school, I feel it's in our best interest to honor that we were led there to learn what we did. Being clear about how we differ with something we previously were involved in is not the same as dishonoring it. It's important to honor our own past and our own inner source of guidance. Regretting how we've lived our lives is easy enough to do, but it's helpful to consider that we were only always doing the best we could with what we knew at the time. That said, let me be clear here, it's true that sometimes we can find ourselves rightfully angry. It's certainly helpful to be honest about wrongs that were done to others and us in the name of spirituality. There are things in life that are not as they should be, to not admit this is to lie to ourselves and candy coat the real suffering we and others experience in the face of promises not kept and exaggerated claims made. And yet, if nothing else our bitter experiences lead us to listen more deeply to our own needs and intuition. Not just with teachers but also with all of life there are grave disappointments and let downs.

Deeply Trusting Life While Being Honest About How Hard and
Confusing It can Be

At the same time events themselves have always been conspiring to point us to that which is trustable underneath everything that isn't. So this is the paradox that I'm always having to come to terms with: I find myself trusting my life through and in the midst of circumstances that are untrustable. It is sometimes just this honesty about what is painful, disappointing and terrible that makes life worth living in the midst of its suffering. The honesty about how false it all is is its truth. When we look at the cruelty in the world and say, "Where is life's heart? How can life be so cruel?" THAT is life's heart, it is Life's Heart that is expressing this pain and outrage through your body and you are that Heart.

Life Is The Goddess Of Limits

You ask, "What if I'm barking up the wrong tree here?"

How it looks to me:

Life can be a bitch, but it's just you and Her, and She only offers wrong trees! For me the question is not: "Is this the right tree?" but rather: "Is this tree you find yourself with now yours to bark up?" Of course it's natural that as soon as we discover that it's the wrong tree we run to the next one... until we begin to have the sneaking suspicion that they're all wrong! Do we then stop barking? Well, yes and no. We no longer bark thinking we've found the big "IT". But you know, dogs...they just love to bark, it's just in their nature to bark. This tree is honest in a way that many others are not, and that makes all the difference in the world. This tree has a sign nailed to it that reads, "This tree and all others are a disappointment, so you can relax as you bark, because "IT" isn't here either". Relaxing as you bark, you find YOURSELF, not "IT". But even then you find that it's your nature to bark. Life is by nature not perfectible, it will never be "right" except for a moment, and then it changes. Knowing this does not take away the urge in life (or us) towards perfection. This is the nature of evolution. Whether we want a better car or we have a burning fire for deeper surrender to The Source of existence, life in form is always about going beyond... It's never enough. When you find that everything lines up perfectly, you can be sure of one thing... it won't last. All of life is the continuous result of this untrustworthy process; isn't that reason enough to trust it? The truth is we only learn to trust life when we feel we have no other options.

I don't find that I have a choice here; I end up trusting life more than I trust my ability to track if life is trustworthy. It seems to me that Life is a living Goddess. Like any living being she shows up in ways that I often don't anticipate, but no matter what choice I make, no matter what road I take, she is always my only partner.

Life On Its Own Terms

So by all means if you think you see a better tree, go for it! There is really no need to limit yourself, bark wherever you are moved to.

Expecting anyone to be able to tell you that you are not barking up the wrong tree is only trying to avoid the facts and makes you susceptible to exploitation. Of course you're barking up the wrong tree! That's all we ever do, it's all we can do. The limited nature of manifest existence is made up entirely of wrong trees. As Suzuki Roshi once said: "Life is one mistake after another". The biggest mistake is to think otherwise.

I am not suggesting that this is the true path. I am also not suggesting that it isn't the true path. I'm suggesting that for many of us it is our truth. For many of us this is the only thing we find we can do. We have given up on finding the right tree and have come to feel that there are only wrong trees. Actually it's not that they're really wrong, it's just that they're always a disappointment. We find that we have no choice but to bark, because that's what dogs, or in this case people, do. We get better and better at a hopeless task. We actually learn trust and brokenhearted humility through barking up wrong trees, and that makes this the right tree for us, and maybe for you. For many people, realizing that all paths or non-paths lead to this is both a great disappointment and a great relief: It's not that we've been doing it wrong, this is just the nature of existence. So no, I will not, I cannot guarantee anything about this. I will share my experience, that's all. And that is this: Even when we are awake to our unlimited nature, which is absolute completeness, we are also simultaneously awake to our limited nature and it longs to be fully lived as well. This life of limits is never enough, it can always be better and our heart yearns to make it so. We can do nothing else; this is our nature.

2004 Krishna Gauci