Spiritual Traps
I think spiritual practice has a few waystations where a practitioner can get stuck. The one I want to write about today is the most common one among practitioners who've already come a long way, and it's very widespread both in the world of Vedanta and in Tantra. I'm talking about the place of pure awareness, and what that actually means.
In the first stages, the beginner is usually in some kind of war within the practice. They struggle to build concentration, the mind flies off in every direction during meditation, emotional and physical difficulties often come up while they practice, and it can feel a lot like drowning at sea.
If they keep going with the work and don't fall away in the hard stages, slowly they start to build concentration and attentiveness, and as these get stronger it becomes easier to deal with the inner experience. Meaning, a difficult emotion that comes up is no longer a knockout that forces you to stop practicing, it's understood as an unpleasant place that, if you use the right tools when it comes up, is something you can work with. And the more a practitioner practices, the less frightening the difficulties become. From a place of stable presence an understanding starts to come, one that comes from experience, that whatever arises is really sensations in the body and thoughts arising in the mind, and from a place of stability it's no more than another passing episode.
Say someone's girlfriend left him, and on an ordinary day he'd go and sink into emotional eating, or into his phone, or take his anger out on her. The experienced practitioner simply has a different way of meeting all of this. He knows it's unpleasant, but even if his mind tells him something out there needs fixing, he knows it's just the mind, and along with the mind there are sensations. And then the problem isn't that my girlfriend left me, it's that there's a stream of thoughts in me saying there's a problem in the world, and some somatic experience that comes along with all of it. And then he sits with the whole thing and just stays in the place of the observer, the same move that's made in mindfulness-based work.
And now I'm coming back to the trap I talked about at the beginning. Once a person has reached this stage, at least some practitioners have a somewhat more open access to pure awareness. Meaning they can dive inward into the sense of a boundless inner subject, and there's a silence there that has none of the world's problems in it. And one of the things that happens is that a lot of practitioners at this stage believe they're enlightened, and some practitioners just settle into that silence and, every time they practice, abandon the space where consciousness does its work, which is the body.
The silence in itself isn't a problem, but it's only halfway (awareness itself holds everything, what gets you stuck is when the silence becomes somewhere to escape to). When you come back to the somatic experience it's sometimes unpleasant, and at this stage a practitioner often has a small kind of ego that keeps trying to steer the movement deeper and deeper into the silence. That isn't really surrender, it's usually more of a withdrawal and avoidance. And if you do it a lot, it can become a skill that lets us escape everything happening in our inner space, and that's one of the forms of spiritual bypassing.
The next stage matters. When we're in the silence and something unpleasant comes up, like the girlfriend who's gone or the neighbor's annoying dog that won't stop barking, that's the time to come back into the somatic experience that's right there in our reality. But it's not just coming back. It's letting go from the place of the absolute and allowing the somatic experience to be as it is within awareness, without trying to pull ourselves out of it. That's where the mind really goes through its processing, and it's also the move we make in Focusing, staying with the sensation in the body from a stable place and giving it the time it needs.
And then, usually, you realize there's still a great deal of work to do, but the work comes from a different layer. It's not standard psychological work, it's the work of recognizing the absolute and from there coming back into the human dimension, which happens especially in the somatic experience, and being with it while awareness is stable and present.
When you come out of the silence and meet something unpleasant, do you stay with it, or run back into the silence?
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