BYPASSING

Bliss

It seems that everywhere I look these days I run into the term bypassing, which has set me musing.  Bypassing refers to using spirituality as an escape from or rejection of the difficulties of embodied existence.  The bypassing practitioner strives to attain a blissful or transcendental state and avoids dealing with emotional issues.  Current thought deplores this tendency and encourages the integration of so-called spiritual experience with so-called ordinary, often problematic, experience.  I want to explore this idea because it has featured prominently in my sadhana. 

Meditating around Baba was definitely blissful.  There are so many experiences I could relate, but one comes to mind.  It was in the early 70s in India and a group of ashramites were on tour with Baba.  It was extremely hot.  We had gotten up early and boarded busses to take us to where the program for the day was to be held.  After a long and bumpy trip with a lot of jostling, dust and heat, we finally reached our destination and were led to the place where we would be sitting for the program.  Our group of westerners was placed up front near Baba’s seat and we waited and waited.  More and more people squeezed in.  I recall that it was extremely uncomfortable - the noise and crowding compounding the oppressive heat. 

As I sat there thinking how awful it was, I slowly drifted into meditation.  As I went into a deep state, all bodily discomfort disappeared and along with it all my impatience and irritation.  It was a very pleasant trance in which time whizzed by and the outer scenario unfolded at a seemingly great distance. 

After a long wait, Baba arrived.  I was aware of all that was going on but nothing took me out this pleasant meditative state. Various people gave speeches, Baba spoke and there was a very long darshan line.  Throughout the many hours of this program – I seem to remember that it was almost six hours from start to finish - I sat in meditation, sometimes going out completely and then coming back to semi awareness, but never revisiting my initial irritation and discomfort.  I noticed the heat and the fact that my sari was drenched in sweat, but these were just sensations without any sense of suffering. 

I remember being so grateful that I was able to get through this event so easily because of meditation.  It was a bit like taking a sleeping pill or tranquilizer as some of us did on the long international flights between the U.S. and India.  The painful time just passed effortlessly and even pleasantly. 

In the early days in Ganeshpuri before the Second World Tour, it was the custom to drop in to the Meditation Cave whenever we felt upset or stressed.  Going down to the cool depths of the dark room with its velvet cushions, dim blue light and recording of the mantra playing sonorously and softly in the background usually provided relief from whatever was bothering me.   Around Baba this relief was extremely reliable.  It seldom failed to manifest when I sat for meditation during all my years with Baba. 

Awareness

More than a decade later, when I began to meditate with the Buddhists, the approach was quite different.  The idea of just passing out or disappearing into a comfortable trance was unacceptable.  For one thing, we meditated with our eyes open in the daylight.  This was a huge difference at the beginning and it took me years to get the hang of it.  I persevered and did get to the point where I could sit with eyes open and meditate without fighting off the temptation to close my eyes.

Eventually, I found that I liked it and in fact found it to be extremely valuable.  For me it removed the sense of separation between inner and outer and created more of an integration of the two, along with a more powerful sense of being present.  It felt more natural and real in some ways. 

After many years of rigorously avoiding closing my eyes, I slowly began to allow myself to do it occasionally and found that it was helpful in overcoming dryness or a kind of hardness or coldness.  After relaxing into the comforting darkness for a short while, I would spontaneously open my eyes feeling alert and expanded.

The focus of the open-eyed meditation is on rigpa, which in the tradition I studied is translated as Awareness.  It was more like Truth or Reality, as opposed to Bliss or Grace.  It was not nearly as reliable as the meditation I had experienced around Baba, but was much more subtle and elusive.  Very gradually, as I began to experience moments of it, I developed a bit of confidence. 

In some ways it felt that I was doing a more “grown up” meditation – that I had moved beyond a stage of just spacing out or going into a trance of blissful sensations and experiences.  It was also difficult, in that there was no getting away from the feelings of disappointment and failure.  As I gradually learned to touch Awareness, I realized that it had been part of my meditation with Baba as well, though it was not pointed out in the same way. 

The Three Aspects

One of the Buddhist teachings which I found fascinating was about the three qualities that inevitably arise in meditation.  These are stability, clarity and bliss.  Although these qualities are signs of meditation, it was taught that it is dangerous to indulge in them since they are not the goal.  The risk is getting stuck in them, which can delay or sidetrack one’s progress on the path. 

Stability is the quality of steadiness, immovability, stillness, or pure being.  It is that quality I experienced on that tour with Baba when I happily sat for six hours in the hot and crowded place without moving.  It is the experience that young Ramana Maharshi experienced as he sat in the temple in Arunachala.  It is said that people had to feed him and that birds nested in his hair.  Both nirvikalpa and savikalpa samadhi involve the quality of stability.

Clarity is the quality of awareness, wisdom, or knowing - but knowing without any particular content.  The mind is expanded beyond its usual limits of discursive thought and concept.  This space of clarity is the source of wisdom, the light of consciousness.  I remember hearing a story about Anandamayi Ma in which she was visited by some monks who were scholars and who asked her questions about esoteric points of philosophy and practice.  Although she had never been exposed to philosophy of any kind, it is said that she answered their questions brilliantly and they left quite satisfied.  I would call this the clarity or wisdom quality.  Clarity is also the experience of clairvoyance in which one can see future events or know the minds of others.

The third quality, bliss, refers to any pleasant or comfortable sensation.  It is not necessarily ecstatic or orgasmic, but can be a merely pleasant sensation or even the absence of suffering.  It is related to bhakti or divine love.  It can be quite subtle and manifest as a sense of well-being – or it can be very strong and lead the meditator to spontaneous song and dance.  Baba’s quality of bliss was very strong.  I remember his writing and speaking about the bliss which arose during his days of sadhana and which was so strong that he would spontaneously dance or embrace trees.  He powerfully conveyed this quality to others, merely by his presence.

These three qualities are the same ones used to describe the Divine in Hinduism where they are known as Sat, Chit and Ananda - Being, Consciousness and Bliss.  In the early days of my sadhana in Ganeshpuri, these qualities were admired and even worshipped.  It was much later that I heard that they relate to experiences which necessarily arise in meditation but which can be traps or pitfalls if one becomes attached to them.  

There are stories of yogis who get trapped in Being, or stability, and spend years cultivating stillness, silence or immobility - to their detriment.  It is said that if they die while still attached to this quality, they will take rebirth in a formless realm where they can spend huge lengths of time reaping the fruits of this karma.  During this time they are not progressing towards enlightenment.

Those who become attached to Chit or clarity may be yogis who strive for siddhis of clairvoyance or those who become psychics.  I knew a woman quite well back in the early days in Siddha Yoga who had been a practicing psychic.  When she met Baba, he told her to stop doing that work.  I believe that he wanted her to avoid the pitfall of attachment to any siddhi which fell short of the mahasiddhi of full enlightenment.

The attachment to bliss is seen in those who are so satisfied by their love and their bliss that they fail to develop the higher qualities of mind and to reach full enlightenment.  We can all think of examples of the attachment to bliss.  It reminds me of the story about Mother Theresa’s diaries, which were published after her death.  They created quite a stir since it was revealed that she had gone through an extended dark night of the soul, in which her experience of the presence of Christ had disappeared.  The experience of bliss in which she communed with her Beloved, Jesus Christ, had sustained her for many years, but around the time that she began her ministry in India, it vanished.

The scandal was that during her long ministry which was so moving and inspiring to the world, she was without the blissful inner relationship to Jesus Christ which had originally inspired her.  The diaries relate that she was very upset and consulted many priests asking for help and advice.  Her previous experience apparently never returned and she did all the work for which she is famous without this inner support. 

When I first read about it, I felt immediately that she had been moved to a higher state which involved a closer identification with Jesus.  When she began her work with the dying in India, she had in effect become Jesus.  She could no longer taste sugar, but had become sugar – to use the metaphor of which Sri Ramakrishna was so fond.  Although Ramakrishna was constantly being taken up to the experience of Oneness, he preferred to remain in the state of duality – in effect, to taste the sugar.  It was very sad to me that there was no such understanding of these higher yogic states among the confessors and guides that Mother Theresa consulted in her despair. 

Attachment to Experience

The warning about not getting attached to the three qualities is meant to keep one from getting sidetracked on the path of meditation.  I took it very seriously and for years, I would not allow myself to spend any time in the stability or the bliss in which I once had reveled.  I followed the advice to break up the experience of meditation so that it does not become stagnant.  The metaphor here is that the running water of a mountain stream is the freshest water since its flow is constantly being broken by flowing over rocks.  Without this dynamic flow with its breaking up, water – and meditation – becomes dull and stagnant.

I think that in my eagerness to practice properly and well, I sometimes shot myself in the foot, so to speak.  As I sat in meditation, sooner or later some of these signs of stability or bliss would arise.  My habit was to immediately break it up.  Out of curiosity I once decided to stop interfering and to just let it happen.  As I watched the familiar experiences unfold, I saw that I didn’t get carried away and after some time I found that I could still hold the Awareness while experiencing these fruits.

As I write this, I can’t help but notice that I have left out the sign of clarity.  I know that I never rejected or turned away from insight or understanding or wisdom as it dawned in meditation.  Rather I welcomed and explored all experiences of clarity.  Perhaps I was and still am addicted to this.  In contemplating this, I have concluded that I use this quality in my work.  I want to be of benefit to others and feel that one way I can do this is to use whatever understanding and insight I might have in counseling and teaching.  This perception has led me to conclude - hopefully - that it is when the attachment is primarily for oneself that it is problematic. 

In any case, it is obvious that each of us has different karma and different ways of contributing to the world.  The yogis who sit motionless for years in caves can serve humanity in their own way, as can ecstatic bhaktas who might contribute devotional music, dance and love for the upliftment of humanity. These three are divine qualities, after all, and always confer benefit.

The issue is really attachment, which can easily lead a practitioner to mistake the experience for the final goal.  How many really want the final goal?  How many settle for something along the way that feels like the right thing at the time?  It is said that we are all addicted to samsara, which makes sense to me.  We cling to and grasp at the things we like about embodied life, things which seem comfortable and familiar.  I believe that clinging and grasping must go if we are to live in the moment, without control or manipulation, truly experiencing all of life – just as it is - as perfect and divine. 

Addiction, which is just a word for very strong attachment, is of particular interest to me since I have an addictive personality.  I suppose I come by it naturally, since it runs in my family.  When I was young, I used to worry that I too would be or even was an alcoholic like my parents.  Several psychics have reassured me that I am not, but still I know that I can easily fixate compulsively.  Perhaps it is due to the preponderance of fixed signs in my astrological chart.  Whether I call it addiction or fixity, there is an aspect of my nature that grabs and hangs on. 

Integration

Meditation is a perfect realm in which to explore and learn to integrate this tendency.  The key is letting go – letting go, in fact, of grasping and holding at all levels.  This includes letting go of the attachment to bliss and also to the concept that I must let go of it.  I began by grasping at it and welcoming it, and then I practiced rejecting it and breaking it up.  Eventually I found a balance in which I could let it arise and enjoy it without getting sidetracked by it.  It is a very subtle and tricky negotiation.

This negotiation is the work of integration and is the solution to the problem of bypassing.  The issue isn’t about the qualities or experiences, but about integrating or joining them to the vaster awareness.  In Siddha Yoga we called it the Self and the Buddhists might call the No Self.  It does not matter what it is called – spirit, mystery, God, essence, being, consciousness, awareness or the peace that passeth understanding. 

It is our true nature, who we really are.  It is vast, limitless, empty and full.  It is right here all the time and yet can seem so far away.  It contains stillness, clarity, bliss and also agitation, darkness and pain.  It embraces and holds everything and is at the same time beyond everything.  It is what is.  Baba called it sahaj samadhi, the natural state.  Poets describe it best.

While on the path there is benefit in practicing various methods.  They make the mind supple and fluid.  They help us explore our nature and discover for ourselves who and what we are.  They even out our imbalances.  I applaud all methods and skillful means on the path. 

Although it is true that many practices can provide a complete path to enlightenment, it is also true that doggedly sticking to one technique out of misguided loyalty or a strong self image can hinder growth.  In general, I think that as one progresses on the path, one’s practice – or one’s approach to one’s practice - becomes less specific, simpler, and subtler. 

Two Aspects of Meditation

In teaching meditation these days, I am drawn to a two part approach.  The first is the experience of the Self.  Through guided meditation I invoke and point to this place so that students have some frame of reference for the path.  This is the realm of spiritual awakening – that mysterious catching fire which is the work of grace or blessings and from which everything on the path unfolds.

The second part is a focus on what keeps us from experiencing that awakening and in fact living from it.  I call this aspect “dealing with one’s stuff.”  The stuff can be on any level - physical, emotional, mental, karmic, environmental.  In a way, it is all of our unenlightened habits.  Including this part means that there is less chance of bypassing.

To integrate our stuff with the Self, I use a variation of tonglen which is a traditional compassion practice.  The variation involves working with one’s own suffering, rather than the usual format of breathing in the suffering of others.  I find that doing this first makes it easier to practice the traditional tonglen, which involves breathing in the darkness and suffering of others.  This extremely counter-intuitive practice can be terrifying or at the very least off-putting, until one discovers that it is not as dangerous as it appears.  If one begins, however, with one’s own suffering, it can be easier since the darkness is already there.

In this variation, one breathes in one’s own suffering and gives it space.  The attitude to be cultivated is one of curiosity, openness and compassion.  As one breathes in the suffering, there is no rejection or repression or fixing, but letting whatever arises just be.  The focus is on allowing it as much space as possible, which one can imagine in a variety of ways.  Then on an outbreath, one breathes out light and compassion to the feeling of suffering.

At the beginning, it is nearly impossible to do this usefully with each and every breath, so the instruction is given to first let something arise naturally and then on an inbreath, breathe it in and give it space.  Then, whenever ready, on an outbreath, one breathes out light and compassion to the feeling of suffering.  For severe trauma, it is enough to just focus on the outbreath for a time.

In dealing with one’s “stuff” in this way, there is no antidoting, no repression or rejection of the dark, but an integration of darkness and light.  With practice, various kinds of resolution can occur.  One may see the block or stuckness in a new and different light.  The block may morph into different forms bringing up old traumas and repressed emotions.  It is an exploration of one’s inner psyche, with compassion always applied to every situation. 

It can be very revealing, sometimes leading to the perception that darkness and light are ultimately one, or that self and other are the same, or that all is constantly changing, or even that suffering has no real  existence outside of the mind. 

In a group, after a short period of this practice, students are guided to drop it and once again meditate on one’s essence.  In this way the “work” is sandwiched between periods of meditation and is done from the frame of meditation.  In individual practice, one can just follow what arises, using the variation of tonglen whenever anything one might label suffering arises.

In every case it is the feeling or energy of the suffering which is breathed in and not the story.  It is the feeling behind “I’m angry” or “I’m bored” or “I hate this,” which is used in the process.  It is not the pain itself, but the suffering with which we habitually overlay it.  It is not a strict formula, but can be adapted to one’s temperament and mindset.

The Dance of Life

After practicing in this way for a long time, I find that I have developed a habit of breathing in everything that I experience whether it is good, bad or ugly.  If I am feeling anxious, irritated, overwhelmed or sad, I just remember to breathe it in and let it be, as it is.  At one point I was surprised to find I did it with very positive feelings too.  Baba’s teaching to regard everything as the play of the Goddess Kundalini fits perfectly with this adaptation of tonglen.

As one is breathing, the world is passing in and through one’s being.  One is part of all that is without separation.  Whether painful or pleasurable, there is bliss in all of it. This is the bliss that transcends the plane of duality.  It is the bliss of awareness of it all – the bliss in just being.  It is not the kind of bliss that prompts tears or dancing, but a subtler bliss of life, as it is, without resistance, without interference or manipulation.  It is the naturally grateful and graceful state of an authentic human being.