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Da Avocado(Note: One morning during "Darshan" (spiritual sighting of the Divine) at The Manner of Flowers an avocado fell, without apparent cause, to the floor from a bowl of fruit which was standing on a low table. Everyone's attention was instantly riveted on this strange occurrence. The lively conversation came to a halt. Then a devotee reached down to pick up the fruit. The moment her hand touched the avocado, the Master exclaimed: "Asshole!" The devotee looked perplexed, nervously wiping the fruit and replacing it in the bowl. From the expression on her face it was clear that she had not the slightest idea how she had earned the Spiritual Master's epithet. Master Da began to laugh, and everybody joined in. Some tried to make sense of the incident by speculating that possibly the Spiritual Master had "caused" the avocado to fall to the ground in order to teach that devotee a particular lesson--perhaps that he had meant her to recognize the subtle desire she had for the fruit. What makes this
unexpected and quite remarkable Teaching demonstration so
unique is the fact that subsequently Master Da gave his own
summary and explanation of the incident, using it to make an
important point about our sadhana, or spiritual practice.)
Teaching Westerners Is Like Trying to Teach Dogs to Jump over the Moon MASTER DA: I would like to say something about the avocado situation. A group of about eight or ten of us were sitting basically in a circle this morning. A table in the middle of the room held a bowl of avocados. Suddenly an avocado fell out of the bowl. Nobody had touched the table, nobody had moved, nobody had done anything. The avocado, completely on its own, fell out of the bowl and onto the floor. The falling avocado caught everybody's attention and stopped everybody's mind or flow of attention. At the same moment one of the group reached for the avocado--just as it was hitting the floor, just in that very same moment when all of you were startled, your minds stopped by the falling avocado--and her acting to grab the avocado forced the flow of your attention to continue. Your attention could move again to her action of grabbing the avocado instead of remaining stopped. And just as her hand touched the avocado, I very loudly said "Asshole!" to her. Now, that shout should have stopped her mind. It certainly gave everybody else something to think about! But this great moment was lost on you because of your tendency not to make use of such moments, because you are interested in going on with the mind rather than transcending it. There was no direct connection between that avocado's falling and the woman who picked it up. But the fact that she came into contact with the avocado suggested that she had something to do with it, that she was somehow responsible for it. That is what my calling her an "asshole" suggests, you see. It makes the connection between her and the avocado and forces the implication that she has something to do with it, that she was somehow to blame for it. However, at the same moment that she was feeling to blame or responsible, she was also aware that she had nothing to do with it, that she was not at all responsible for it. The incompatibility of these two focuses of attention should stop the mind. This incident of the avocado has the same quality as the mind-stopping devices that are cultivated in the Zen tradition, where people value what can be intuited when the mind stops. In fact the entire Zen tradition is founded on stopping or transcending the mind. In the Zen tradition it is considered that there is no truth to be realized when the mind is active. Therefore, instead of using the mind in the usual fashion to think oneself to an ultimate position of belief or certainty, practitioners in the Zen tradition practice to bypass the mind. Because the mind is not interested in stopping, Zen teachers perform the service of stopping people's minds in all kinds of ways, through the use of yanas, blows to the head, paradoxes, and elaboration's of the Dharma in general, in return for which people bow and are grateful! Zen practitioners realize satori, or a moment of seeing the space of Consciousness, Transcendental Reality, mindlessness, no mind. And when many such satori have become a profound perpetual intuition, this realization is considered the highest attainment in the Zen tradition. Among the other things that I do, I also perform this mind-stopping service for people. But people in general in this society, without a spiritual tradition of any kind, are not the slightest bit interested in having the mind stop so that something beyond the mind can be perceived. They are no more interested in stopping the mind than they are interested in all the other aspects of possible spiritual experience and realization. Fundamentally, people in this society are not interested in Enlightenment. They are interested in being the thing that Enlightenment transcends. Thus, it makes no difference how many times a day I stomp on your mind so that it suddenly disappears. You do not use the moment. You do not calmly and tastefully savor it. You do not even notice it! The mind stops for a moment, and then in the next moment it is going again. You are only agitated toward being mind instead of transcending mind. You are agitated to be the body, to fulfill the body's intention, to be the born rascal. But Enlightenment is the transcendence of the born condition. You must "hear" or consider the Teaching about transcending the born condition to the point that you become oriented to transcendence and interested in it. Then you become involved in the practice and the culture of the transcendence of born existence, which includes transcending the mind and all the conditional states. Self-transcendence is what meditation is all about and what the spiritual process is about fundamentally. But until you become so interested, so oriented toward the transcendence of the born condition, you are just inclined in robot fashion to reinforce, repeat, and intensify it. Obviously a Spiritual Master is most auspiciously present around people who have heard the Teaching about transcending the born condition and are inclined toward it, who value his service and the spiritual process, who notice its various moments, who notice its content, and who use the Spiritual Transmission of the Spiritual Master. To bring the Teaching of Truth is a disheartening task to perform in the West, however, because Western culture is above all oriented to and based on the born condition. To try to expand the view of Westerners and Western culture is a profoundly difficult affair. Stopping the mind is for the Westerner like blowing the nose. It is not about anything, so it has no significance because the Westerner is only interested in plugging along, being what he seems to be, being the body-mind, fulfilling the born individual, evolving, going out into space, having pleasures. The Western mind is not about anything else. The most Westerners want when they become a little religious is consolation. They like to believe that there is life after death and that it is going to be pleasant. They like to feel protected. They like good news, they like pleasure" they like "Shalom," or the goods of life. Little incidents like the one we experienced together today, which would be a moment of at least satori in the setting of a culture where there is a basis of wisdom, are not even noticed in this setting. We are lucky that there is any memory of the play at all here or any recording of the Teaching The documenting of the Teaching has basically been done by mechanical devices because individuals find it very difficult to notice and use the very thing they are given in abundance here in my company. So this morning as we were all sitting in a room, sitting in a circle, suddenly an avocado fell out of a bowl. Nobody touched it, nobody moved, nobody got up. An avocado fell out of the bowl and landed on the floor. That in itself" suddenly created a moment of stillness. One person reached over to pick up the avocado, and just as her hand touched the avocado, I said "Asshole!" But she picked up the avocado, and everybody went on chatting. It is not that that moment necessarily should be regarded as a moment of absolute profundity, but it is amusing to me that such a thing would in another culture be accepted and used for satori, because it has the ability to stop the mind. The avocado's falling and the shout as this woman touched the avocado would have been used as mind stopping devices, in fact were intended by me to be that, but they were almost completely unnoticed. Teaching Westerners is like trying to teach dogs to jump over the moon! Many of the traditional mind-stopping devices are little games to give you a feeling for the true nature of Consciousness prior to the mind. I remember hearing of some Tibetan teacher's suggesting that the student think of a square. So--think of a square. Now think of a circle. Now think of a square that is also a circle. (Laughter) You see? You laughed. It is not a joke. (He laughs.) Your laughter is like feeling blamed for the falling of the avocado, whereas the real element of the moment is the stopping of the mind. The Westerner tends to go for the laugh. The Easterner tends to go for the stopping of the mind. The attempt in the mind to make a square and a circle somehow equal to one another, to make the two ideas into one, rather than to maintain two separate ideas, stops the mind. Likewise, the attempt on this woman's part to make her evident non-responsibility for the avocado and her apparent or implied responsibility compatible with one another stops the mind. What I said was just a little Zen shout to stop the mind. But it was not noticed at the time by anybody Not just in Westerners,! but the ego-bound consciousness everywhere is inclined toward the squares and circles and avocados, in other words the "samsaric" or exclusive phenomenal conditions of existence, whereas the spiritual aspirant, not merely the Easterner, is inclined toward the stopping or the transcendence of the mind. Really these two orientations represent two different directions of attention, one based on the bondage of conventional consciousness and the other based on insight into that conventional consciousness. Those who are not involved in the spiritual process are not really inclined toward, the transcendence of the mind. They are inclined toward the indulgence of the mind, or the body-mind and the phenomenal samsaric circle-square-and-avocado world. Because they do not enjoy a basic insight, they have no inclination to rest in or identify with the Transcendental Consciousness prior to the mind. They do not realize where that Reality is. They do not locate it. They have no intuitive sense of it. They still have a need for it, but they relate to it as if it were other than themselves. So they find the Transcendental Reality: as God in the realm of circles, squares, and avocados. They make God into a version of samsara. In effect they make the "Da avocado" into the "avocado God." They make an idol of God out of the conventions of egoic consciousness. The Christians have a long-standing complaint against idol worship, just as the Jews complained about idol worship in the ancient days. Idol worship is a convention of unenlightened consciousness. Idolatry is not merely the making of an image out of clay or jewelry or gold, but the identifying of the Transcendental Reality with conditional or samsaric experience--mocking it up, in other words, in the form of the conventional mind and its presumed objects--whereas the Divine or Transcendental Reality is located in the transcendence of the mind, the transcendence of conditional existence and the conventions of consciousness or of the ego. At least we have a sense of the Divine in the attempt to think of a square that is also a circle. That game stops the mind because the mind cannot make one form out of those two forms, and you glimpse the nature of the Being, the native state of your existence, prior to mind, egoity, and otherness. When this intuition and Identification are perfect, we Realize Enlightenment, the Siddhi or "completion" of understanding. Until such transcendence, we are not really involved with the Divine or the Transcendental Reality, but with conditional consciousness and the flight of the ego. And there is no end to the trouble of egoity, no end to the enumeration of difference. Not even one square is also a circle, but there exist endless squares, circles, ovoid, rectangles, angles, roundness, etc. Involvement in the conditions of existence never comes to an end and it does not realize anything except the next arbitrary moment of limitation. The Divine, or Freedom, is found in the transcendence of the mind. Games that stop the mind are a way of giving us the sense of the Spiritual or Divine Reality, a way of locating it. Inverting attention can give us some sense of it. All kinds of games or processes or methods of attention are used traditionally to help people to have a sense of the Transcendental Condition that precedes egoity and its problems and motions. Some limitation or other is inherent in all those games, however, and in any case they do not produce Enlightenment as an effect. Rather than engage
in such games, we must become involved in the fundamental
intuition, become grounded in understanding, and free the
energy of our attention from the automaticities of
conventional bondage until we tacitly realize the Condition
of existence. Such a practice is not a game, but a profound
spiritual practice that is beyond the problem-solution
techniques of conventional seeking.
Beginners, Spiritual Fans, Enlightened Egos, and Pop Buddhism versus Radical Understanding (note: We would like to begin this section with a request to the reader: Would you please put this book down for a few moments and quickly repeat five times "Bric-a-brac and break your back If this sounds too silly or you are too self-conscious about the exercise, you may feel more comfortable repeating the following: "Puck's Plump Pock Pup." Or perhaps "Love glob--Love glob--Love glob--Love glob --Love glob." These are some of Master Dais favorite tongue twisters, which he creates spontaneously. The point of these tongue twisters is not to strain your oral anatomy or to reduce you to a state of helpless hilarity, but quite simply to stop the mind, the endlessly revolving conveyor belt of thoughts. Master Da has a whole arsenal of such mind stopping devices. One day many years ago, a devotee had a heated argument with another devotee. When he came into the Master's company, he was still smoldering with anger. Master Da welcomed him cordially and promptly invited him to chant the mantra "OMB name Siva" with a feeling of happiness and love. It took three repeats of this exercise before the devotee overcame his emotional contraction and burst out laughing. The unexpected assignment had stopped his mind and self-concern, and he was suddenly able to see the humor of his situation and the pointlessness of his anger. On another occasion several devotees went to a museum in Master Da's company. The group included three children who became a little restless and so were taken outside to wait for the Spiritual Master. When Master Da finally emerged from the building, he asked them: "Do you girls want to go to the beach now?" There was an enthusiastic response. He continued: "And go for a swim?" Again there was a chorus of excited voices. "And then go for an ice cream?" Now the girls responded even more enthusiastically. He added in a low voice: "Or shall we go home and meditate?" There was no answer. "I see," he said, scanning the three red little faces. These are all humorous interludes in an ongoing process of mind stopping, or mind transcendence, which is the essence of Master Da's work with devotees. The transcendence of the mind is equivalent to the disposition of Ignorance, Happiness, or Freedom.) MASTER DA: Because the basic work that I do with people is not noticed by them very well, I must keep reminding them of it. My Teaching Work is not something that I do every now and then when I gather people for instruction, but it is constant. In one fashion or another my influence in people's lives is always interrupting the conventional or karmic motion of the self. I am not motivated to give you, the karmic or manifest self, something to be interested in, to give you visions or extraordinary experiences that pleasurize the manifest self. If visions arise in my company, they arise not to pleasurize but rather to stop the flow of the grosser self. They are possible moments of Awakening. I Teach a Way that enables you to make use of my spiritual Influence, as well as all the ordinary moments of life, as a process of Awakening and transcendence, until attention is perfectly free to directly and intuitively Realize the Condition of existence, or That in which all of manifest conditional existence is arising. Particularly because you are Westerners, you have a sort of dogged interest in perpetuating the egoic state in every moment. The psycho-physical personality is tenaciously reinforced in the state of consciousness to which you have become habituated. No other influences have interrupted the flow of egoity in your acculturation as Westerners. Westerners do not have time for Enlightenment. They generally think of Enlightenment as they think of all the goods of the ego and the pleasures of the manifest self. They view Enlightenment as a big pleasure, one of the delights of the manifest being. For the Westerner, Enlightenment is built upon the conditional self, pursued by the conditional self, and conceived as a state or object of the conditional self, whereas in fact Enlightenment has nothing to do with the conditional self. No "one" is Enlightened. In Enlightenment there is no individuality, no separate person, no separate anything. The manifest conditions of existence may continue to arise, but they are utterly recognizable, they have no binding power, they are tacitly recognized to be merely apparent or unnecessary. Ramana Maharshi is a teacher to whom I frequently point as an example of the sixth- to seventh-stage Adept. You all know the story about how he suddenly became Enlightened when he was about seventeen years old. Even he remarked that people should understand that Enlightenment happened in his case because of preparation in previous lifetimes. Thus, from his early years, his lifetime as Ramana Maharshi is regarded as an Enlightened lifetime, but an Enlightened lifetime that was the result of extensive preparation nonetheless. Just so, there must be preparation in everyone's case and an intense orientation toward Realization. Perhaps the Enlightenment of most people takes many lifetimes--how can we account for it? Fundamentally you must understand the Way as a person who is already born or incarnated egoically. You must be turned about, you must be converted, and you must enter into the stream of preparation. You must use attention and body and mind in a different fashion if you are going to realize Wisdom and Awaken to the Truth that transcends egoity. Without understanding the Spiritual Master, valuing such Awakening, and entering into the stream of practice, there is no such thing as Enlightenment, and Enlightenment will not be true of you. There is no Enlightenment, no Awakening, without fierce practice. You must practice fiercely, not because what is to be Realized is not already your Condition, but because through lifetimes of repetition you have reinforced mechanical states of attention. Because you have bound the consciousness and energy of being to the conventions of conditional existence, there is no residual attention to enable consciousness to stand apart from manifestation sufficiently to realize its own Status. Rather, consciousness is wasted in the repetition of states of attention that are fixed in the process of conditional existence. Spiritual practice must therefore be so fierce as to provide the basis for a natural Awakening so that we may release attention from the bond of conditional states. In the process of practice, the Spiritual Master serves you in all kinds of ways, one of which is to stop the mind through verbal Teaching, through gestures, through Transmission of Spiritual energy. Through the Spiritual Master flow all kinds of instructional means that are encountered by people who respond to the Spiritual Master and the Teaching, who are practicing daily, who will use the spiritual Influence and not merely notice some parts of it here and there and every now and then while otherwise basically oblivious to it. Devotees are supposed to be those who have attention available for the Spiritual Master and the spiritual process, which is the process of transcending conditional existence, transcending the body-mind-self, transcending attention. If you are not oriented or inclined to transcendence, then of course no amount of help in that direction will be of much use to you. These little satori of the momentary stopping of the mind are not of any ultimate significance either. Much is made of them at the popular level of the Zen tradition. On some level Zen is a kind of "pop" Buddhism. Its satori are for the common people who are very busy in their minds. The highest form of Zen is that which is applied by people who devote their entire life to its practice. For such people satori are not sufficient. They are drawn to go beyond the moments of the stopping of the mind and glimpses of the space of Consciousness to Realize the Transcendental Condition of existence. Just so, you must also realize more than moments of experience, moments in which the mind stops, moments of meditation. I know how fierce the mechanics of the bodymind are. I have had to deal with them all my life. Even though I possessed the capacity for Enlightenment at birth, my life became a fierce spiritual practice based on a spontaneous but profound commitment to Realization. Such commitment is absolutely essential for spiritual practice, which cannot fulfill itself without such commitment and which likewise must be fierce and profound. You cannot be forced to practice, nor can your practice be guaranteed. What there is of Awakening in your case depends on your commitment. You must really practice. You cannot mechanically repeat yourself. If you are basically inclined to ordinary consolations and fulfillments, hopeful of being happy in this world, then when you feel so fulfilled, you step out of the stream of the spiritual process. You have bought and signed for consolation on the dotted line. If self-fulfillment is not sufficient for you, however, then you keep going. You persevere in the practice and you move on to the higher stages. Some may seem to move more quickly to the higher stages of practice. The fact that they seem to have more talent and natural ability for it is probably a reflection, not only perhaps of their commitment during this life, but primarily of their preparation in previous lifetimes. They too will reach their cutoff point, the point where they will tend to stop, the point where practice tends to be sufficient for them or where further effort is too frustrating and too offensive. Everybody reaches the point where he or she tends to withdraw from the stream of practice. Most people reach that point even before they begin the practice. Either they are never moved to find anything greater than ordinary ego-fulfillment in the world, or they are just "fans" of spiritual life. They like the books, but they basically resist and even resent the interference represented by a Spiritual Master and a Teaching and the idea of practice. The world is not organized around Enlightenment Wisdom, which is struggling to survive in our time, even though paperback books about spirituality and so-called spiritual teachers are springing up everywhere. The Enlightenment or Wisdom Tradition is struggling to survive. Spiritual life is mocked everywhere, and the culture of materialism is dominant. The politics of egos, with its materialistic force, is in charge in this world, and it always has been. The motive to Enlightenment has always been rare. The motive to God-Realization has traditionally been a cultural premise and many people have responded to it in one form or another, more so in the Orient than in the West. Even so, the spiritual cultures have tended to rise and fall, or become weak or conventional, or be reduced to at most a fourth- to fifth-stage esotericism, and the practitioners within those cultures have tended by and large to be ordinary people. Only those who have accepted the discipline of religious or spiritual renunciation sufficiently to release attention from the bond of the mechanics of ego or body-mind can practice the conscious process in its radical form. The radical process of spiritual practice can be described to people, and I have written a great deal about the radical form of the conscious process. It need not be kept secret particularly, but it cannot be practiced fruitfully by an individual in whom attention is not fundamentally free. One cannot simply communicate to people in general a sixth-stage teaching, for instance, such as the teaching of Advaita Vedanta or the mindfulness discipline of original Buddhism, and expect that everybody will therefore be able to practice it. Most people must engage preliminary or supportive practices. Most people should approach the radical Way through the lesser stages of life, because one cannot practice the advanced levels without an increase of available energy and attention. To realize profoundly the mysticism of the fifth stage of life, for instance, you must demonstrate a great deal of free energy. Energy cannot be locked up in the vulgarities of the physical, outer-directed personality. Only free energy floating in the brain permits the subtle phenomena to arise. Likewise, you must realize free attention to invert beyond the outer-directed mechanics in order to focus in the phenomena of brain and higher psyche. Just as the fifth stage is an advance over the lesser stages, likewise the sixth stage is an advance beyond the fifth, requiring attention free even of the subtle bond of energies and mechanics. Thus, this radical practice that I communicate based on the seventh-stage disposition is not something that people can rightly, truly, fully, and fruitfully practice without preparation, without available energy and attention. Therefore, I have also communicated the forms of spiritual practice that basically represent the preparation for the most radical practice, preparation that releases energy and attention for the conscious process, which is the fundamental process I consider. That process in consciousness cannot really be engaged until there is free attention, because in that process attention itself is encountered and transcended. If you cannot enter into the consideration of naked attention itself, the fundamental mechanics of the being, then you cannot practice in the radical sense. Most people cannot. The attention of most people is wandering in the conditions of the body-mind and is not free to inspect and transcend itself. Therefore, I have engaged this ten-year display of Teaching Work, and I have written this literature and related to people in many different ways, in a tremendous struggle with people who are basically disinclined to the very process I am considering with them by virtue of the fact that on the one hand they are Westerners and on the other hand they are mechanical beings or egos. Such a struggle with egos is inevitable wherever the Teaching and a Teacher appear. But it is particularly disheartening to spend a decade at it and not have at least some mature practitioners who are sufficiently committed and prepared to practice in the radical sense. Such freedom for the radical process is not easy to find. It never has been easy to find in any cultural setting, yet it seems that there are remarkable impediments in the West. Still, because of the change in our time--worldwide communication, political changes, suppression of the Orient through political, social, materialistic, and technological movements--because of all that the technological twentieth century has created, it is necessary that the Dharma appear in the West, which is also the source of the materialistic movement that is overcoming the world. That a Spiritual Master be born in this setting and do this work is therefore necessary. In a few more decades there may not be any such thing as the Orient anymore. There will basically be a worldwide culture, and the esoteric and transcendentalist cultures will perhaps fundamentally have been suppressed in the part of the world we call the Orient. Then the Teaching must take hold elsewhere. Orientals themselves are moving all over the world. The traditional homes of esoteric and transcendentalist schools or movements are being overwhelmed by the materialistic politics of our time. The Tibetans were suppressed by the Chinese, Communism is taking over in Southeast Asia, and materialistic social movements are overcoming India. The break in the Transmission must be mended, and the Teaching is appearing in the West through my Work. But my Work is obviously immensely difficult and not a very rewarding task, if we can use the word "rewarding" in discussing the Work of Spiritual Teaching. You should see in yourself your mechanical disinclination to the very thing that is brought to you every day of your life. Not so much through an intentional will, but via the mechanics of your own born personality, you find one way or another to bypass the Divine Influence and the obligation to practice in every moment of your life. This sidestepping of responsibility is Narcissus, the self contraction. To break the cycle and even glimpse the transcendental circumstance of the ego requires great intelligence and fierce commitment. The Siddhi or perfect fulfillment of that process is rare and remarkable, but you are given all the arms for it, all the Help for it, all the Teaching necessary for it. How well you will use the opportunity is to be seen. |
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