I recently read James Finley’s book entitled Merton’s Palace of Nowhere which is, essentially, about James having spent 6 years in a Christian monastery in Kentucky in the US with the Christian mystic Thomas Merton. The book describes his experiences at the monastery and some of what he learned from Merton during that time.
Christian mysticism has fascinated me for some time, as has Sufism (Islamic mysticism) and Kabbalah (Jewish mysticism), because they all have a very different, profoundly experiential perspective on God and the relationship a seeker can have with God. They all seem, on the surface of things, to be very different to the traditions within which these dedicated and fervently practicing Christians, Muslims and Jews sit, but the roots runs deep and there is also shared symbolism and shared language between each. It is the closest, mysticism that is, the West gets to having a first-hand taste of God the way it is described so clearly and experientially by the East through the lenses of Buddhism, Hinduism and Taoism.
I read James’ book after coming across a talk he gave on YouTube and just falling in love with his gentle, non-assuming, sensitive way of speaking and relating. Something about him really drew me in. You can watch the exact talk I first came across here. While reading it and hearing of James’ experience, I realised that it had some parallels with my experience of being part of my spiritual teacher, Vishrant’s, ashram for 8 years. We didn’t live a purely ascetic monastic life in the same way – James describes getting up at 3 or 4 in the morning every morning, living and working in silence, never speaking to another monk unless it was absolutely necessary for some chore they were doing together, praying and studying or doing maintenance work all day and then going to bed only to repeat again the next day – but there are certain overlaps. During my time with Vishrant, I was with a spiritual teacher that I respected a lot and looked up to a lot and I feel that my time there was well spent and I walked away from it a wiser person and more in touch with my own sense of what spirituality means to me in my life.
Vishrant runs a mystery school called the Mystic Heart Mystery School where he holds both public and private satsangs and seva (service days) multiple times a week for his full-time students. The title of this blog post “Vishrant’s School of Nothing” is a play on words given the title of James’ book, but it is also pointing to a core truth in a way. It is a school and it is about nothing. Or, more accurately, realising the no-thing-ness that is at the core of our experience in every moment and is, in fact, who we are, yet we generally assume ourselves not to be that. We take ourselves to be the body and the mind, a human being in the ordinary sense and often don’t examine that assumption or belief very closely, just as our parents likely didn’t.
When reading Merton’s Palace of Nowhere, I can hear the reverence that James has for Merton. It is beautiful. It touches my heart. It is clear that James sees Thomas Merton as a conduit for God. The adoration is so clear and palpable, at times it is as if Merton IS God and James is experiencing him in that way. However, by James’ own admission in the book, Merton isn’t saying anything new, he is simply drawing attention to and, perhaps, describing in a slightly different way with different emphasis, what Christian mystics have been saying for millennia; You can know God personally, now, in this moment. Not only that, but fundamentally, you ARE God. There is a parallel here between Vishrant and Merton because, by Vishrant’s own admission, he isn’t saying anything new in terms of the spiritual traditions he did the work through, namely Osho’s eclectic mystery school and Advaita Vedanta of the Papaji variety and lineage. Vishrant says that he is simply Westernising a traditionally Eastern-based understanding and giving it a modern twist. Vishrant focuses a lot of psychology and witnessing the mind and its inner workings (or mechanics given he’s also a trained mechanic) in his teachings and the ability to take apart and see through the illusions of my own mind is what initially drew me in.
I first attended a Satsang with Vishrant back in November of 2015 during a personal crisis. I was having a breakdown at work due to burnout and exhaustion. I was experiencing intense anxiety symptoms on the train on the way to work almost every morning and often throughout the work day. I felt palpable relief when I left the office at night to head home. I couldn’t sleep and had severe insomnia for months. I would be in the shower and couldn’t get work out of my head to the point that I was obsessing about it constantly. I was depressed and felt stuck. To the point where, one evening, home alone, I burst out crying, knelt down on my knees and yelled (to whom I was speaking I have no idea) “I DON’T KNOW WHAT I WANT!!!” Looking back on it now, it seems like a moment of total and utter surrender. Not out of any design on my part, just out of coming to a breaking point and not knowing what to do. My life pivoted on a dime at that point and things started changing rapidly. I went to see a psychologist to see if he could help me manage my symptoms and he told me I was having an existential crisis, that I didn’t know who I was and that I needed to find out. He introduced me to Eckhart Tolle’s book The Power of Now, which I devoured very rapidly. He then introduced me to a podcast called Buddha at the Gas Pump hosted by a guy called Rick Archer in which Rick interviewed all kinds of spiritually awake or awakening people and asked them about their lives and backgrounds. Again, I devoured these podcasts and couldn’t get enough. I would chain listen to episodes that were often 3 hours long back to back to back often getting through 3 or more in a single day. Something deep inside of me knew that this was exactly what I needed, but I didn’t know why or how.
Eventually, after making some progress with my psychologist and seeing some improvement in my life, superficially at least, he told me that there was an episode of Buddha at the Gas Pump with an awake teacher living in Perth and his name was Vishrant. On the way home from that appointment, I opened my Apple Podcasts app on my phone and started listening to Vish’s interview with Rick Archer which was recorded back in 2011. It blew my mind and I absolutely wanted to meet this guy. As soon as I’d finished listening to the episode, I went to my computer, opened my internet browser and Googled Vish’s name. I found his website, found his phone number and called it. A woman named Dakini answered the phone – who, at the time, was the Managing Director of The Vishrant Buddhist Society, which is the not-for-profit organisation that runs the mystery school – and I told her I’d like to attend satsang. Dakini gave me a brief screening interview and then we made arrangements for me to come along.
My first satsang with Vish with incredibly powerful. I felt his energy field immediately. The only problem was I had no clue what the fuck an energy field was, so I had no way of making sense of this experience.
At the time, I wrote in my journal “Had an experience at my first satsang ever that was very strange. I was talking to Vishrant having a conversation after asking him a question and he then asked me what I was feeling in that moment and as I was answering him and also listening to him speak and watching his face, there was a light that was emerging in the room and everything faded and went into the background except Vishrant’s face and I felt a strange feeling of tingliness and warmth and it was a really good feeling, almost as if I was feeling his consciousness and light speak to me directly and touch my deepest consciousness. I have had some moments of depth like this while meditating, but none this powerful. It was a fantastic feeling and one that I will be trying to emulate in future meditations.”
When I read that journal entry back to myself, I can’t help but notice the naivety that I see in that seeker as I was back then from the perspective that I hold now. Because I was completely brand new to spirituality at that time, having dismissed it as basically bullshit and identifying as an agnostic atheist primarily up until that point, I’m talking about a feeling and a light and a tingliness and a warmth and feeling good and also talking about trying to emulate that feeling in my routine, morning meditation, but because I have no understanding of energy, I don’t know what actually happened to create that feeling or why. All I know is that I liked it and I wanted it to happen again. Now, I would see it as shakti transmission or just the effects of being in a Buddhafield or powerful energy field, but something about reading the journal entry also makes me profoundly happy. Because, while there is naivety in it, the other side of the coin is an innocence. There is a very pure innocence I see in my scrambling to make sense of the experience I’ve just had and use my very limited vocabulary to describe it. I have to revert to using felt sense terms because there are no frameworks that I was aware of back then within which to couch this experience. I then talk about “Vish’s consciousness” touching into my “deepest consciousness” which is the closest I come to describing how I’d see it now, but still isn’t quite accurate. The innocence in the writing makes me smile.
My second satsang with Vish was about a month after my first and the experience was even more powerful and memorable. I would call it a “satori” of sorts and my first satori experience ever. It is still an experience that I think about to this day and use as a benchmark of what is possible in this human existence. There are many teachings out there that advise against doing this. They say if you come across the Buddha on the path, kill the Buddha. This is a metaphor for completely forgetting about and letting go of any memory of profound spiritual experiences because they will just keep you stuck. I have, to this point, found this very difficult to do.
My journal entry after that second satsang goes “Had another experience tonight that was deeper and more powerful than any previous experiences. I completely lost myself during conversation with Vishrant and the whole room disappeared except for the white of his clothing and even that was way out of focus and I felt more energy than I’ve ever felt before and an experience I’ve never felt before of the room disappearing and it not being there and nothing but white light being in my vision with my eyes wide open. Vishrant then asked me what my experience of myself was in that moment and I replied ‘I’m not here’ as that was how I felt. It was a truly amazing experience that is very difficult to put into words accurately.”
To me, this is someone trying to describe what a satori is with no reference points for it. It was my best attempt at the time. I use the word ‘energy’ here for the first time which is no doubt a term I picked up from Vishrant because I didn’t have that term in my vocabulary in the first journal entry. I remember the satori quite clearly. Everything disappeared. Everyone in the room disappeared. Even Vishrant’s body and face eventually disappeared after some time and it was all consumed in this bright, pulsating, alive, white light. But I hadn’t closed my eyes and wasn’t imaging this happening in my head. This was happening in my field of vision with my eyes open. I couldn’t fathom it being real. But I was experiencing it, so how could I possibly discount it? It has inspired me on the seeker’s path ever since.
I had another experience in my third satsang a month later that has also stayed with me because I think it is a kundalini awakening experience having read about that since, so I want to post an excerpt of that journal entry here too: “Had another satori at Satsang that was more incredible than the others by a long way. The energy had never risen past my chest/neck area previously, this time it rose past my neck and up into my head and I felt a strong pulling sensation on my forehead. It lasted for about 45 minutes and I had my eyes closed the whole time. It was like ecstasy. Like bliss. It was amazing. It started to subside when I finally had to open my eyes and give my report at the end of Satsang as I was called upon.”
I often describe the pulling sensation now as someone having stuck a fish hook inside my forehead and then pulling as hard as they could outwards. It was very strong, but not painful. I would make sense of that now by saying that my third eye was being blown open at the time and the rush of energy through the system as the chakra opens is what causes the feeling of resistance or “pulling.” You can see in my words in the journal that I now have a reference point for what a ‘satori’ is, again, I would’ve picked that up from Vish, so I use that word here.
These three moments had a huge impact on my life trajectory and I spent the next 8 years trying to do the internal work to wake up. There are a lot of obstacles to self-realisation in most seekers and I’m no exception. The work is hard, arduous, intense, scary and painful and it takes a long time. I’m still committed to it, even though there are other priorities in my life now, like being a husband and father and running two businesses, but I’m moving at a slower pace with a backed off intensity compared to when I was with Vish full time and I’m enjoying that.
The 8 years I spent with Vish were incredible. They are the most profound period of my life to date by far. There were incredible, mind-blowing highs and there were soul-crushing, despairing lows. But I wouldn’t change any of it, because it all taught me something about life or myself or showed me something I couldn’t have seen in any other way. In the ashram, we were lay monks, meaning we all lived normal lives, had jobs, had families and other commitments outside of the ashram, but it was a major component of all of our lives for sure. We did seva twice a week, half a day on a Tuesday morning and all day on a Saturday and volunteered our time to help nurture and support the community in which we lived. We went on retreats five times a year, two 7-day retreats and three 4-day retreats every year. The retreats were the most special of all because they were silent retreats, meaning you couldn’t talk to anyone outside of session and you were left with your own stuff (meaning thoughts, feelings, energy, contemplations, whatever was coming up for you) all day, every day. But also, you were fully immersed in the energy field of silence and stillness for the duration of the retreat.
There is so much of value that I picked up from Vish, a lot of it intangible or, at least, very difficult to put into words. But a lot of it can be pointed at with everyday language.
The following is a list of the most valuable lessons I learned from Vish during my time with him:
1) Satoris are fucking cool!
2) How to see myself clearly
3) Community is precious
4) Love is beautiful
5) Openness counts for everything
6) It’s all about energy
7) Enlightenment is real
I’ll go through and elucidate each just briefly.
1) Satoris are fucking cool!
Satori is a term from Zen Buddhism meaning a brief, momentary glimpse of our true nature. Satoris can be short and relatively minor or they can last days or weeks and be major, mind-blowing experiences. A short satori might just be finding a bit of silence and stillness where most thoughts subside completely or slow right down in your mind for a while. This is a glimpse of true nature, because true nature is silent and still.
The satori experiences I had with Vish are probably still the most valuable thing to me. Because how do you dispute a direct experience? It’s not a teaching or a statement of fact or a description of how the universe is at its fundamental level, it’s something that is deeply personal to you and that you’ve been through.
These experiences still orient my life to a large degree. Although I try and let go of them and just do my spiritual practices in the here and now and try not to get too attached to any specific outcomes from them, they do serve as useful motivation to keep going when it gets hard.
It’s hard to describe what they’re really like in words. My journal entries do some justice to them, but maybe one way to put it is it’s like the mind just shuts up completely, everything becomes really peaceful and blissful, everything feels full and alive and complete and there is no desire whatsoever for anything to be different than how it is. If you could live every moment for the rest of your life in this state, who would say no to that?
2) How to see myself clearly
By see myself clearly, I mean being able to see what my mind is up to. Part of this is having a meditation practice and finding some detachment from the constant chatter in the mind and being able to witness it from a distance.
Another part, though, is more about psychological understanding. It’s about being able to spot unconscious agendas in ourselves or be clear about why we do the things we do, which isn’t always obvious or apparent on the surface.
Our psyches are deep, complex survival mechanisms which have evolved over millions of years to get really good at keeping us alive and getting our needs and desires met. They can be sneaky and tricky at times and it can be difficult to see through them with transparency without some inside knowledge on how some of the defence mechanisms, manipulations and posturing can operate.
Vish is a very skilled psychotherapist and being with him for so many years, you kind of absorb through osmosis some of the things he can see about his own mind and the minds of others.
3) Community is precious
I hadn’t really ever valued community prior to being involved with this one before.
But I can honestly say that some of the most meaningful and memorable experiences from my time with Vish didn’t come from interactions I had with Vish, but with other members of the community.
Some members of that community, particularly ones that had been there for a lot time or that I looked up to in some way, became very important people in my life over time and I put a lot of stock in their opinions on things. I would also watch their behaviour and actions and try to use them as a model and emulate them if I noticed something particularly helpful.
Beyond that, just being with friends and loving them for who they are in their own ways was a beautiful experience. I got to live with and be around these people in an intense environment for many years on end and, in that kind of pressure cooker, deep bonding is inevitable. I certainly walked away from it with some lifelong friendships that I will treasure forever.
4) Love is beautiful
I feel like this statement seems obvious and doesn’t need any further explanation, but then again, there is love and then there is love. I think prior to coming to satsang full time, I’d hear statements like “love thy neighbour as thyself” and I would think that it was a nice, pithy statement, but it wasn’t profound or deep or important to me. I would kind of gloss over it.
The way Vishrant taught about love opened my eyes to a whole new depth of what love could mean in a person’s life. Vishrant teaches his students to be in service to others and to lift them if at all possible and part of what I picked up from it was the preciousness of each and every individual and just how unique and special they are. This also makes them worthy of respect, care, consideration and also reverence and awe.
There is a depth and beauty to love that I am able to experientially know now that I wouldn’t have had access to had it not been for my time with Vish and, for that, I will always be grateful.
Another aspect of this is the self-acceptance that I learnt from Vishrant. The practice of self-acceptance allows me to see all the broken and hurt parts of myself and my character and my trauma and wounding and history and just love them all to bits. The more I can do that, in my experience, the easier is it to love others outside of me as well and drop judgement.
5) Openness counts for everything
If anyone ever asks me what is Vishrant’s single most important teaching to you, I would say openness.
I didn’t even know what openness meant before arriving at my first satsang.
I was confused by the term and had to ask for clarification on it many times. I think that part of that, for me, was that I had such a large proportion of my awareness focussed on my mind and my thoughts most of the time, I ended up being quite disembodied and disconnected from my emotions when I first arrived, so I didn’t have an embodied experience of what openness felt like. After having practiced it for many years, I now do, and it has become a beautiful source of transformation and unfolding for me in my life.
The way I understand it now, openness is essentially the absence of any defences in the mind and body. So, if defences arise in the moment, the practice is about noticing that in real time and letting that go as quickly as possible. Openness, I feel, can be described as a broad spectrum of practices that include letting go, acceptance and surrender with surrender being the most advanced stage of this where it’s essentially not a “doing” anymore, as such, it’s just a state that is reached where you are open all the time by default. I’m not claiming to be at this place yet, by the way, it’s just an understanding for me at this time.
6) It’s all about energy
Energy was another foreign concept to me. Being a scientifically-minded, sceptical agnostic atheist when I arrived, energy was a struggle for me to accept as real.
Having experienced it first hand now and knowing deeply what it is referring to, I get it and there are many other references to energy that corroborate this phenomena. Acupuncture is one. Tai Chi and Chi Kung are yet others. Taoism as a whole with its concepts of yin and yang refer to energy. Wilhelm Reich’s work on the energy body. Eckhart Tolle talks about the pain body from a slightly different perspective, but this is energetic in nature. Hinduism’s tamasic, rajasic and satvvic energy gradations.
So, although still sceptical, having this many validations of the “idea” of energy allowed me to accept it as a real thing.
One of the biggest things that allowed me to notice my experience of energy in my daily life was a practice of clearing energy by taking cold showers or jumping into a cold pool or the ocean. This shocks the latent dense energy out of the body very quickly and leaves you feeling clear, alive and vibrant. If you do this regularly and attend satsang, you get very clear as satsang with an awakened one will also act as a vacuum and extracts a lot of density out of you and opens you up over time to become more sensitive to this phenomena.
Other teachings of Vishrant’s that support clarity and a clear energy body are present moment awareness or mindfulness and maturity which is essentially taking full responsibility for yourself at all times.
7) Enlightenment is real
Coming back to where I started this blog post, with James Finley and his devotion to Thomas Merton, I came across something James wrote about Thomas that was “The reality of Thomas Merton made God’s unreality impossible to me. That is, Merton’s very reality, was to me, the presence of God as a transformed person.”
This pretty much sums up how I feel about Vishrant. Vishrant’s reality makes God’s unreality impossible to me. I see the presence of God coming through Vishrant very clearly.
The mere fact of Vishrant’s existence means that enlightenment is real and, by corollary, enlightenment is a tangible possibility for me in this lifetime. If Vishrant can do it, so can I. If it weren’t for meeting Vishrant, I don’t know whether I would have ever said it that clearly or cleanly.
That knowing to me, is precious in and of itself.
· The disagreements
There are some things, however, that I disagree with Vish about.
These have all been spoken about publicly by both myself and Vishrant before, so I’m not throwing him under the bus at all by posting this publicly now. Vish has spoken about them here, here and here. I have spoken about them here and here.
When I stopped attending satsang full time, it was largely because my wife was pregnant and I was about to become a father and I wanted to dedicate more time and energy to my nascent family than my spiritual search. I have always had disagreements with Vishrant, both big and small, for the entire time I’d been with him and that had never caused me to leave in the past. Essentially, that’s part of the work for a spiritual seeker, noticing those differing points of view and then working through those either alone by looking at it yourself or with your teacher in dialogue. Eckhart Tolle has a great quote that’s pertinent to this, “For most people, their spiritual teacher is their suffering. Because eventually the suffering brings about awakening.” The first part of that statement, for me, has been true on many occasions. My suffering has been Vishrant because he’s such a strong character and will put forth strong opinions and if I hold differing opinions, there is some working through that’s required there. Either I have to surrender my opinion totally or I have to find out why I have the opinion that I have and how it’s different and try to find some way that either both can be true from different perspectives or, at the very least, how the two can be reconciled and held simultaneously, however paradoxical that may be.
So, all that is to say that these disagreements that I have with Vish, had I not left, likely would have formed the basis for further spiritual work on my part. However, they are now largely left unprocessed for me currently and are still how I see things, whether that is accurately or otherwise.
The disagreements are, firstly, that Vishrant uses the discontentment of his students as a motivation for them to find truth. Often, this just isn’t using latent discontentment that already exists within the student, but involves actively setting up ‘devices’ or contrived situations in which the student is likely to react, close, contract and have something arise with which to practice surrender and openness. Gurdjieff used such devices. As did Osho. The disagreement is that I don’t think spiritual teachers should use devices or discontentment is this way to ostensibly help their students to progress on the spiritual path. I think there is generally already enough motivation in a seeker to do the work through their innate human desire for self-actualisation and the evolution of their own consciousness. If not these things, there are myriad other motivations for doing the work. Certain students might want to open their hearts and experience more love, certain students might just want to discover their true nature, others might want to hone themselves as an instrument in the service of others or seekers may simply be curious and wish to know what is at the top of this mountain we call higher consciousness. Suffering and the avoidance of suffering does not have to be the only form of motivation to push a student along. When I’ve spoken to Vishrant directly about this, on several occasions both privately and publicly, his response is always the same, that discontentment was a significant motivator for him on his spiritual path and that it is the only motivator that works for most students, so it should be harnessed as needed.
Ok, so that’s the first disagreement that’s still live for me. The second is that Vishrant does not create an environment of safety around him. By safety, I mean, safety in the way of knowing that I can be around someone without them intentionally trying to hurt me. The two issues are tied into one another, because as long as there are devices being setup, there cannot be a sense of safety in the student. When I’ve spoken to Vish about this, he says that it is the ego that wants safety and it is the ego that is in the way. I can see that perspective and appreciate where he’s coming from with that and perhaps, in truth, safety and freedom are mutually exclusive at the highest levels of consciousness (the razor’s edge as it’s often referred to), meaning you can only have one or the other, but not both. But, for me, in my personal experience, safety is important and feeling unsafe is often not conducive to my growth. I don’t think that creating a safe environment within a spiritual community necessarily needs to be a hindrance to that community being effective for its students. Far from it, actually.
So, these are both still active opinions that I hold at the time of writing. There is, however, still some doubt swirling around the legitimacy of both positions and that is something that I continue to contend with internally. I’m not completely clear about what is driving the doubt, but I do certainly acknowledge that it’s there. My best guess as to what is driving the doubt is that I believe that if I take these positions to be fixed and rigid opinions with certainty, then I may potentially be unwittingly limiting my own growth and possibility of enlightenment if I am, in fact, wrong about them or not seeing something as clearly as I might. Hence, for me, it is useful to hold these positions lightly and continue to be willing to look at them over and over again with fresh eyes as long as is necessary or as long as they keep presenting themselves in my awareness.
The new spiritual path I have chosen for myself is the Diamond Approach founded by a spiritual teacher by the name of Hameed Ali or more commonly known by his pen name, A. H. Almaas. Pursuing this path allows me to be a family man, run two businesses and also be a spiritual seeker because the time commitment and overall intensity is dramatically reduced as compared to being involved with Vishrant’s sangha in a full-time capacity. The reason I mention this is that, very recently, actually two days ago or so at the time of writing, I came across a passage written by Almaas that I found pertinent to these disagreements I’ve outlined above and I’d like to reproduce it here for you.
The passage goes:
“AH Almaas: Today I want to discuss the relationship between truth and compassion. It should be useful to everyone. We’ll elucidate the meaning and significance of each of these concepts. Before we go on, does anyone here know the color associated with compassion?
S: Green.
AH: It’s important to know that, so that we can understand this story. In Sufi lore Khidr means “the green one.” You have heard the story before, but today we’ll look at it from a different perspective. It’s called, “The Land of Truth.”
The Land of Truth
A certain man believed that the ordinary waking life, as people know it, could not possibly be complete. He sought the real Teacher of the Age. He read many books and joined many circles, and he heard the words and witnessed the deeds of one master after another. He carried out the commands and spiritual exercises which seemed to him to be most attractive. He became elated with some of his experiences. At other times he was confused; and he had no idea at all of what his stage was, or where and when his search might end. This man was reviewing his behaviour one day when he suddenly found himself near the house of a certain sage of high repute. In the garden of that house he encountered Khidr, the secret guide who shows the way to Truth. Khidr took him to a place where he saw people in great distress and woe, and he asked who they were. “We are those who did not follow real teachings, who were not true to our undertakings, who revered self-appointed teachers,” they said. Then the man was taken by Khidr to a place where everyone was attractive and full of joy. He asked who they were. “We are those who did not follow the real Signs of the Way,” they said. “But if you have ignored the Signs, how can you be happy?” asked the traveler. “Because we chose happiness instead of Truth,” said the people, “just as those who chose the self-appointed chose also misery.” “But is happiness not the ideal of man?” asked the man. “The goal of man is Truth. Truth is more than happi-ness. The man who has Truth can have whatever mood he wishes, or none,” they told him. “We have pretended that Truth is happiness, and happiness Truth, and people have believed us, therefore you, too, have until now imagined that happiness must be the same as Truth. But happiness makes you its prisoner, as does woe.” Then the man found himself back in the garden, with Khidr beside him. “I will grant you one desire,” said Khidr. “I wish to know why I have failed in my search and how I can succeed in it,” said the man. “You have all but wasted your life,” said Khidr, “because you have been a liar. Your lie has been in seeking personal gratification when you could have been seeking Truth.” “And yet I came to the point where I found you,” said the man, “and that is something which happens to hardly anyone at all.” “And you met me,” said Khidr, “because you had sufficient sincerity to desire Truth for its own sake, just for an instant. It was that sincerity, in that single instant, which made me answer your call.” Now the man felt an overwhelming desire to find Truth, even if he lost himself. Khidr, however, was starting to walk away, and the man began to run after him. “You may not follow me,” said Khidr, “because I am returning to the ordinary world, the world of lies, for that is where I have to be, if I am to do my work.” And when the man looked around him again, he realized that he was no longer in the garden of the sage, but standing in the Land of Truth. (Idries Shah, Thinkers of the East, pp. 66-67)
AH: I keep rereading this story-just as I’ve read it to you many times—because it is the single most important truth we have to work with and because it is a truth that people keep forgetting. Not only is it the single most important truth, it is also the most practical truth, the most helpful truth, and the best advice I could ever give you for absolutely all situations.
As Khidr said, he lives in the ordinary world, what he calls “the world of lies” where everybody embraces their lies and turns away from the truth about themselves and others. We have a tendency to regard truth as our enemy, and we usually think that lies are our friends. We try to avoid truth at all costs because we think truth will hurt. We think that truth will take things away from us, that truth will deprive us of things, that truth will put us in unpleasant situations, so we try to protect ourselves by using lies. When we do that, we live the life of lies; we live in the world of lies.
So let’s see more about truth, lies, compassion, and the relationships between them. I think we know more about lies than anything else. Everyone’s an expert at lying to himself and others. We’ve been doing it for years and years. It’s important to see the attitude we usually hold, which is that truth is our enemy. That’s why there are such things as avoidance, repression, and resistance. If we didn’t think truth was our enemy, we wouldn’t resist and repress our emotions; we wouldn’t try to avoid seeing the truth. But usually we aren’t aware of the fact that we reject the truth and fight it. If you can see that you resist truth, already one layer of the lie is removed.
If you look at the work you’ve done in this group so far, it’s essentially uncovering the lies and seeing the truth. We understand that the lies of the personality provide valuable clues to the hidden truths of Essence. I don’t need to say much to you about the importance of the truth for understanding oneself, one’s realization, or one’s freedom. We all know that, even though our unconscious may still resist.
I think you also know the importance of compassion. Let’s talk a little more about what compassion means. Usually compassion is seen as a desire to alleviate someone else’s pain; compassion is experienced as the desire to help. We feel compassionate when we see someone hurt. Rarely do we feel compassionate when someone isn’t hurting. So we connect compassion with pain and hurt. However, this is only the elementary level of compassion emotional compassion. Remember the story. Khidr, the green one, is the symbol of compassion. Was it his role to alleviate pain? What did he do?
S: He told the truth.
AH: Yes, he told the truth. And that’s the real function of compassion. The point of compassion is not to eliminate suffering, but to lead a person to the truth so that she will be able to live the life of truth. This is an important fact that we tend to not see because our ideas about compassion are not accurate. Look for yourself. What kind of compassion have you believed in and acted from? For most of us, it’s obvious where our prejudice lies. Our compassion has not been on the side of truth; it has been on the side of feeling good. This is not the compassion of Essence; it is the compassion of emotions. It is understandable that it hurts to see someone hurting. You may also feel compassionate towards yourself when you are hurting; this compassion helps. So what is the relationship between hurt, truth and compassion?
Compassion is a kind of healing agent that helps us tolerate the hurt of seeing the truth. The function of compassion in the Work is not to reduce hurt; its function is to lead to the truth. Much of the time, the truth is painful or scary. Compassion makes it possible to tolerate that hurt and fear. It helps us persist in our search for truth. Truth will ultimately dissolve the hurt, but this is a by-product and not the major purpose of compassion.
In fact, it is only when compassion is present that people allow themselves to see the truth. Where there is no com-passion, there is no trust. If someone is compassionate toward you, you trust him enough to allow yourself to be vulnerable, to see the truth rather than reject it. The compassion doesn’t alleviate the pain; it makes the pain mean-ingful, makes it part of the truth, makes it tolerable.
This way of viewing compassion makes a tremendous difference in our lives. Seeing compassion as a guide to the truch rather than something to alleviate hurt can change the way we behave toward ourselves, our friends, everyone.”
So, from this passage, it is entirely plausible Almaas, if asked, might agree with Vishrant that discontentment can and, actively, should be used by a spiritual teacher in order to help their students with motivation on the path and, also, that safety is unnecessary or, even, in the way.
If we are to see compassion as simply telling the truth and holding the truth as paramount at all times, it looks very different to molly-coddling or changing how you are or what you say in order to avoid triggering someone’s wounding. This view of compassion is different to the one most people would ordinarily hold, but if we looked through this lens, Vishrant’s opinions on the subject may be seen as more accurate or holding more weight.
The most important thing for me, among everything, is being able to appreciate the value that I did receive from Vishrant over many years while also being able to pull apart and let go of the stuff that I’d prefer to leave behind. The disagreements are there and the challenge I have for myself is whether I can bring acceptance to all of this. Acceptance that there are differences of opinion. Acceptance of myself just as I am without needing me to change in any way. Acceptance of Vishrant just as he is without needing him to change in any way. Acceptance of the situation as it was over the years I was a full time student. This is not an easy thing to do as it’s so much easier to just close off to someone and write them off. It feels more comfortable that way. It’s then done and dusted and can be put behind you so that you can move on. But I do feel strongly that if there is anything in life that can’t be accepted, that is generally the place we need to have a closer look as it likely where the next stage of the work lies for us.
Anyway, I wanted to just share my latest thinking on the subject as a way to round out the blog post.
Hopefully, if you’ve read all the way through it to this point, you’ve gotten something useful out of it. If you did, I’d love to hear what that is for you in the comments.