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[post_content] => Last week I shared a quote from spiritual teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti: “Do you want to know my secret? I don’t mind what happens.” Then we looked at the differences between an absolute spiritual truth and the relative perspective of most humans. When we encounter an absolute view that we haven’t personally realized and experienced, sometimes it doesn’t make sense or it even has the opposite effect of what was intended.
If we imagine “I don’t mind what happens” to mean “nothing bothers me,” this contradicts most people’s daily experience. But it fits right in with a common perception when we’re evolved or enlightened we’ll be imperturbable. So, without having realized the absolute truth, we might apply it to our relative experience in a way that amounts to denying our humanity.
Buddhist psychologist and author, John Welwood, who coined the term “spiritual bypass,” explained that we have a tendency to use absolute truths of spirituality to dismiss “relative human needs, feelings, psychological problems, relational difficulties, and developmental deficits.” He believed we need to recognize “two different tracks of human development— which we might call growing up and waking up, healing and awakening, or becoming a genuine human person and going beyond the person altogether.”1 Thus, it’s possible to resolve all our psychological problems without achieving a spiritual awakening, and it’s possible to wake up spiritually and still have a highly dysfunctional personality.
So, what is the place of such statements of absolute spiritual truth? In my opinion it’s still useful to expose ourselves to them. We shouldn’t confuse the destination with the path, and we shouldn’t expect ourselves to be able to embody them at will. But they can still serve as a messenger to the soul. When we encounter a statement like, “I don’t mind what happens,” perhaps it’s like a key that unlocks something within us. Maybe it stirs a place in us that remembers this, beneath the slumbering mind, and begins to initiate an unraveling of what has caused us to forget. Perhaps it inspires us to understand what this means, to experience it directly for ourselves. Perhaps it makes us ask, “What would my life be like if this were true for me?”
Meanwhile, what can you do when you find ourselves minding what happens? You’re in good company. Virtually everyone in the world has times when they mind what’s happening. People in pain, people who are afraid, people who are lonely or grieving, people who can’t fall asleep, people witnessing violence or injustice . . . most of them mind what’s happening. So here are some options.
Option one is to suffer. Highly unpleasant but very popular.
Option two is to change something external. Sometimes this is possible and useful, other times it isn’t. If you mind that you’re getting bitten by mosquitos, you could put on bug spray. If, on the other hand, you mind that your government is corrupt, you may not be in a position to significantly improve it, especially if you have a busy life and don’t plant to change careers.
This is where the famous Serenity Prayer by theologian Reinhold Niebuhr is useful – “Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” If you can recognize what cannot be changed by you, it may be easier to let go of the belief that they are your business. If you’re not currently engaged with it, don’t mind it. That is, don’t give your mind to it.
Option three is to change something internal. There are several sub-options here. The first is to deny that you mind what you mind. The main way we do this is through willful ignorance. We often employ willful ignorance as a coping mechanism simply because we can’t take care of all the things that concern us in the world.
For instance, I have a 60-year-old truck that I take out occasionally to get bales of hay for our alpacas, and the exhaust stinks. I know I’m putting carbon emissions into the atmosphere, and I haven’t yet found a way to fix it. So I have to put it out of my mind (i.e., willfully become ignorant of how I am contributing to climate change) in order to lessen the amount of guilt I feel about it. It’s a mediocre way of dealing with minding what happens.
Another way to deny that you mind what’s happening is through spiritual bypass. That is, you employ a spiritual ideal you haven’t actually achieved as a way of falsely transcending your issues. Welwood explained it as using “spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks.”
I think we can agree that denial isn’t the best answer. As a band-aid, it never truly resolves the unsettled feeling that erodes your peace and infringes on your presence.
Another way of changing something internal is to consciously, sincerely explore your relationship with what you mind. Don’t say “I don’t mind” when you do mind. Be honest with yourself. And don’t say, “I shouldn’t mind” when you do mind. Consider this alternative: I do mind, but I am determined not to argue with or depart from reality.
Here we come to what I believe Krishnamurti actually meant by “I don’t mind what happens.” I don’t believe he meant that nothing could bother him. I think he meant that, regardless of what happens, he doesn’t see reality as wrong or feel it should be different. If someone were to come at him with a knife, perhaps he would have found himself knocking the knife out of their hand. This wouldn’t mean that he “minds what happens,” only that he chose to act. Whether he acted or remained entirely passive to an attack, either one would affect the course of events, so neither constitutes “minding” more than the other.
But let’s bring this back to an application for someone who hasn’t yet realized the absolute truth of not minding what happens. First, there is a difference between minding what is currently occurring here and now versus minding something that is neither. The latter is what I mean by “departing from reality.” If it’s not currently happening, see if you can bring yourself back into the present experience.
There is also a difference between minding something but accepting it versus minding something and insisting that it shouldn’t be happening. “Shouldn’t be happening” is an exercise in futility. It’s an argument against reality. Removing your resistance from the equation (to something that cannot be changed by resisting it!) reduces your suffering; and it doesn’t mean you don’t care or that you’re giving up.
Jesuit priest and author Anthony de Mello defined enlightenment as absolute cooperation with the inevitable. This is the opposite of resistance and a necessary first step before diving deeper into your relationship with what you mind.
Diving in is acceptance in action. Generally, you must set aside time and space for this. It entails meeting the inner discord with sincerity, being willing to see, hear, feel, and understand it in its entirety. It also entails a willingness to recognize how the conflict degrades you and limits your freedom. Try to maintain an attitude of openness and innocence throughout the process. This work can unravel long-held beliefs and patterns of constraint. It can enable you to move forward with constructive action, if that’s what you choose. And it can facilitate an expansion from your relativistic thinking about the issue to a more transpersonal perspective. This may not always get you to a place where you can honestly say, “I don’t mind what’s happening,” but it will bring greater clarity and peace to your experience of it.
Be well,
Peter
1Fossella, T., 2011. Human Nature, Buddha Nature: An Interview with John Welwood. [online] Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Available at: <https://tricycle.org/magazine/human-nature-buddha-nature/> [Accessed 27 April 2022]. Welwood cautioned, “When we are spiritually bypassing, we often use the goal of awakening or liberation to rationalize what I call premature transcendence: trying to rise above the raw and messy side of our humanness before we have fully faced and made peace with it.”
[post_title] => It's Okay to Mind What Happens
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[post_content] => Have you had an experience of awakening to something that feels more real than ordinary reality? I remember the first time I heard Zen-inspired spiritual teacher Adyashanti refer to these moments as “gaps” in everyday awareness, when we stop focusing on our own mind and experience the world as it really is.
I’d had some of these expansive periods but felt a great letdown when I returned to ordinary reality. This is sometimes referred to as the “I get it! I lost it” phenomenon. It was relieving to hear Adyashanti describe these moments simply as windows through the dominant narrative. He explains that when we’re adamant about finding the truth, the gaps tend to get longer and more frequent. He also observes that what we find there isn’t usually what we expect it will be.
When the gaps run into each other and become our abiding reality, this is often referred to as spiritual awakening or enlightenment. It’s natural to imagine that something that sounds so grand and mystical must be a state unlike anything we’ve ever felt – maybe even a condition of perpetual ecstasy.
This makes it highly appealing to the ego, which often tries to take over the mission. It can easily turn spirituality into a competition and a source of identity and approval (“I’m woke AF!). And it may desperately hope that it’s finally found the thing that’s going to make us happy.
Happiness is a noble pursuit, but it’s not necessarily the same path that the question of “What am I really?” takes us on. Likewise, while I believe the “What am I?” path does eventually lead us to happiness – true, causeless happiness, in fact – there’s likely to be some unhappiness along the way, which is generated by the ego’s unwillingness to get out of the driver’s seat.
Spiritual awakening shrinks the ego to irrelevance, and this idea is about as scary as actually dying. The ego – the mental construct of personality, feelings, memories, and intellect that we’ve cultivated and reinforced since childhood – dominates our inner and outer experience of life, and in this way confuses us into believing that it is who we are. It’s been this way for so long that we may have forgotten what the unfiltered, egoless experiences (i.e., gaps) feel like. The ego isn’t malicious; it’s just trying to survive. But to the extent that we believe our ego is who we are, we’ll find it impossible to circumvent – because how could we get away from ourselves?
As of this writing, my ego is alive and well, and my gaps are fewer and farther between than I would prefer, but I’ve spent enough time cultivating gaps that I hope I can share something worthwhile. In my experience, though I have had moments of true ecstasy (while completely sober!), the most striking surprise is the incredible familiarity and closeness of the transcendent experience. I think this is what Adyashanti and other teachers are getting at when they say, “It’s not what the mind thinks it’s going to be.”
While we may imagine that spiritual awakening is like acquiring new powers, I believe it’s more of a remembering. It’s like having your head in one of those old-school arcade machines, gripping the joystick, munching pellets, running away from the ghosts, believing “this is what life is,” and then pulling back and taking in the true surroundings. The surroundings were always here, and so was the consciousness that the game wasn’t reality, but you were so immersed in it you forgot.
In one of these gap experiences I actually found myself saying out loud, “Ohhh! It’s THIS! It’s THIS!” The best I can explain it is that I suddenly noticed something that had always been in the background – always, always, always there for the entirety of my life, but so constant as to be disregarded. It wouldn’t call it mystical, but it was incredibly relieving.
Upon tuning in to it and recognizing it as part of myself, that “background” immediately expanded, rendering all of “Peter’s life stuff” relatively small and insignificant. In that state I remembered that I had previously been afraid that letting go of my “small self” would mean that I’d stop caring about my loved ones. But in this expanded awareness, I saw that this was just a fear my ego came up with, and if anything I was able to love people more completely than ever.
I wish I could say I stayed there forever, but my conditioning crept back in. I was able to see myself, little by little, choosing smaller points of view, picking up my phone for no good reason, and shrinking my field of awareness. But these experiences change us even if they’re not sustained forever. They give us a glimpse that’s not easily forgotten.
So, how do we remember? A good starting point is to ask yourself, What has been with me ALWAYS? Or, Who is that consciousness that has been watching my life, that has been there all along, never departing, even while my body grew and my life circumstances changed?
As Meister Eckhart wrote, “The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.” What happens when you try to see the one who’s doing the seeing? What happens when, as Adyashanti says, you “turn Awareness upon itself”?
Here’s to more and longer gaps. And feel free to share about your gap experiences in the comments section.
Be well,
Peter
[post_title] => Opening Up the Gaps in Ordinary Reality
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[post_content] => As a young adult I often stayed at the beautiful Marin Headlands hostel just north of San Francisco. I was there one weekend while a large group of missionaries was passing through. We were all sharing the same kitchen space and I was chopping some broccoli when a cute young woman around my age approached me. We started talking and I thought it was going well. I have always enjoyed conversing about spirituality and religion, even with people of different beliefs than my own.
At the time I was immersed in learning about Advaita – nondualism – which was blowing my mind. Nondual philosophy asserts that, although we perceive many things that may feel separate, in reality everything is an expression of a single Oneness experiencing itself in infinite ways.
Some people call this Oneness God or Goddess or Source or Divine or Dao. What’s important isn’t the name but the experience of this connection, and how it redefines how we see reality.
I had in my suitcase a book called Aghora in which an eccentric spiritual teacher explains that since everything is God, both sex and eating are simply acts of “putting God into God.” So, when this missionary woman asked me what I was doing, I guess I thought I was being clever by replying, “Oh, just chopping up some God.”
She was clearly taken aback, so I explained that if the whole universe is an expression of one God, then broccoli was of course included, and therefore I was chopping up some God to put into God (myself). She was speechless for a moment, then said – a bit louder than was called for, I thought – “God is not broccoli!” and walked away.
There were several lessons for me in this story, starting with (1) nobody likes a smug person pushing their buttons, and (2) if you truly want to make a difference in the world you need to meet people where they are. But aside from my social failure, maybe the most important lesson was that there’s often a huge difference between the description of an experience and the experience itself. In other words, to understand something intellectually tells us nothing of how we’d be affected by experiencing it.
In lectures, I used to explain how physics seems to “prove” nondualism, hoping that even the nonspiritual types in the class would be won over. I’d point out that while each of us feels we’re separate from everyone else in the classroom, we and the world around us are all just different configurations of the same fundamental stuff – subatomic particles or even more fundamental fluctuations of energy. It’s a powerful idea, but I doubt it’s caused many people to conduct themselves differently towards their neighbors.
For me and most people I know, life changes have come through direct experiences of this Oneness in non-ordinary states of consciousness facilitated mainly by meditation, yoga, ritual, self-inquiry, immersion in nature, music, acupuncture, art, pain, dance, conscious breathing, interpersonal connection, and entheogenic substances. Ordinary reality (even with impressive-yet-unactualized spiritual concepts) appears random and soulless by comparison.
I didn’t have the chance to ask, “If God is not broccoli, what is broccoli?” We tend to draw vague, subjective lines around life and then deem one side worthy of our reverence and the other unworthy, but the abolition of such lines isn’t automatically liberating. I’ve seen people, myself included, latch onto the idea that everything is Divine and then fall into nihilism. Because, if it’s all God, why try? Why care? Why choose one path over any other?
This kind of thinking is a sure sign that we’re operating from a mental concept and not actually experiencing what it represents. It would be similar to take a psychedelic mushroom and hold it between your teeth, telling yourself, “So this is what psychedelic mushrooms are all about. Meh.”
Your homework is to determine whether or not broccoli is God. Since “God” is a spiritual concept, it can’t really be assessed in ordinary reality. Everyday thinking needs to fall away. You can get there using any of the approaches I mentioned above.
Be well,
Peter
P.S. I’d like to share one of my favorite quotes on nondualism from Tantra scholar Christopher Wallis in Tantra Illuminated (slightly abridged for space):
“Since reality is One, and everything is equally an expression of the one divine Light of Consciousness, every experience by definition is an experience of God… If we propose that some things are more God than others, like concentrated orange juice versus watered-down orange juice, then we must propose the existence of something that is not God that waters down divinity. But no such thing can be found, at least in this philosophy, because 1) the definition of God here is the unbounded Light of Consciousness, 2) everything that is known to exist is an object of experience, and 3) every experience is by definition pervaded by consciousness. Therefore, this – whatever is happening right now – is as God as it gets. Now, if you are in a miserable or banal life situation, you may be disappointed by this announcement. But notice I said, ‘This is as God as it gets,’ not, ‘This is as free as it gets.’ Freedom means actually experiencing the divinity in each moment.”
[post_title] => Is God Broccoli?
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[post_content] => Last week I shared a quote from spiritual teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti: “Do you want to know my secret? I don’t mind what happens.” Then we looked at the differences between an absolute spiritual truth and the relative perspective of most humans. When we encounter an absolute view that we haven’t personally realized and experienced, sometimes it doesn’t make sense or it even has the opposite effect of what was intended.
If we imagine “I don’t mind what happens” to mean “nothing bothers me,” this contradicts most people’s daily experience. But it fits right in with a common perception when we’re evolved or enlightened we’ll be imperturbable. So, without having realized the absolute truth, we might apply it to our relative experience in a way that amounts to denying our humanity.
Buddhist psychologist and author, John Welwood, who coined the term “spiritual bypass,” explained that we have a tendency to use absolute truths of spirituality to dismiss “relative human needs, feelings, psychological problems, relational difficulties, and developmental deficits.” He believed we need to recognize “two different tracks of human development— which we might call growing up and waking up, healing and awakening, or becoming a genuine human person and going beyond the person altogether.”1 Thus, it’s possible to resolve all our psychological problems without achieving a spiritual awakening, and it’s possible to wake up spiritually and still have a highly dysfunctional personality.
So, what is the place of such statements of absolute spiritual truth? In my opinion it’s still useful to expose ourselves to them. We shouldn’t confuse the destination with the path, and we shouldn’t expect ourselves to be able to embody them at will. But they can still serve as a messenger to the soul. When we encounter a statement like, “I don’t mind what happens,” perhaps it’s like a key that unlocks something within us. Maybe it stirs a place in us that remembers this, beneath the slumbering mind, and begins to initiate an unraveling of what has caused us to forget. Perhaps it inspires us to understand what this means, to experience it directly for ourselves. Perhaps it makes us ask, “What would my life be like if this were true for me?”
Meanwhile, what can you do when you find ourselves minding what happens? You’re in good company. Virtually everyone in the world has times when they mind what’s happening. People in pain, people who are afraid, people who are lonely or grieving, people who can’t fall asleep, people witnessing violence or injustice . . . most of them mind what’s happening. So here are some options.
Option one is to suffer. Highly unpleasant but very popular.
Option two is to change something external. Sometimes this is possible and useful, other times it isn’t. If you mind that you’re getting bitten by mosquitos, you could put on bug spray. If, on the other hand, you mind that your government is corrupt, you may not be in a position to significantly improve it, especially if you have a busy life and don’t plant to change careers.
This is where the famous Serenity Prayer by theologian Reinhold Niebuhr is useful – “Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” If you can recognize what cannot be changed by you, it may be easier to let go of the belief that they are your business. If you’re not currently engaged with it, don’t mind it. That is, don’t give your mind to it.
Option three is to change something internal. There are several sub-options here. The first is to deny that you mind what you mind. The main way we do this is through willful ignorance. We often employ willful ignorance as a coping mechanism simply because we can’t take care of all the things that concern us in the world.
For instance, I have a 60-year-old truck that I take out occasionally to get bales of hay for our alpacas, and the exhaust stinks. I know I’m putting carbon emissions into the atmosphere, and I haven’t yet found a way to fix it. So I have to put it out of my mind (i.e., willfully become ignorant of how I am contributing to climate change) in order to lessen the amount of guilt I feel about it. It’s a mediocre way of dealing with minding what happens.
Another way to deny that you mind what’s happening is through spiritual bypass. That is, you employ a spiritual ideal you haven’t actually achieved as a way of falsely transcending your issues. Welwood explained it as using “spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks.”
I think we can agree that denial isn’t the best answer. As a band-aid, it never truly resolves the unsettled feeling that erodes your peace and infringes on your presence.
Another way of changing something internal is to consciously, sincerely explore your relationship with what you mind. Don’t say “I don’t mind” when you do mind. Be honest with yourself. And don’t say, “I shouldn’t mind” when you do mind. Consider this alternative: I do mind, but I am determined not to argue with or depart from reality.
Here we come to what I believe Krishnamurti actually meant by “I don’t mind what happens.” I don’t believe he meant that nothing could bother him. I think he meant that, regardless of what happens, he doesn’t see reality as wrong or feel it should be different. If someone were to come at him with a knife, perhaps he would have found himself knocking the knife out of their hand. This wouldn’t mean that he “minds what happens,” only that he chose to act. Whether he acted or remained entirely passive to an attack, either one would affect the course of events, so neither constitutes “minding” more than the other.
But let’s bring this back to an application for someone who hasn’t yet realized the absolute truth of not minding what happens. First, there is a difference between minding what is currently occurring here and now versus minding something that is neither. The latter is what I mean by “departing from reality.” If it’s not currently happening, see if you can bring yourself back into the present experience.
There is also a difference between minding something but accepting it versus minding something and insisting that it shouldn’t be happening. “Shouldn’t be happening” is an exercise in futility. It’s an argument against reality. Removing your resistance from the equation (to something that cannot be changed by resisting it!) reduces your suffering; and it doesn’t mean you don’t care or that you’re giving up.
Jesuit priest and author Anthony de Mello defined enlightenment as absolute cooperation with the inevitable. This is the opposite of resistance and a necessary first step before diving deeper into your relationship with what you mind.
Diving in is acceptance in action. Generally, you must set aside time and space for this. It entails meeting the inner discord with sincerity, being willing to see, hear, feel, and understand it in its entirety. It also entails a willingness to recognize how the conflict degrades you and limits your freedom. Try to maintain an attitude of openness and innocence throughout the process. This work can unravel long-held beliefs and patterns of constraint. It can enable you to move forward with constructive action, if that’s what you choose. And it can facilitate an expansion from your relativistic thinking about the issue to a more transpersonal perspective. This may not always get you to a place where you can honestly say, “I don’t mind what’s happening,” but it will bring greater clarity and peace to your experience of it.
Be well,
Peter
1Fossella, T., 2011. Human Nature, Buddha Nature: An Interview with John Welwood. [online] Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Available at: <https://tricycle.org/magazine/human-nature-buddha-nature/> [Accessed 27 April 2022]. Welwood cautioned, “When we are spiritually bypassing, we often use the goal of awakening or liberation to rationalize what I call premature transcendence: trying to rise above the raw and messy side of our humanness before we have fully faced and made peace with it.”
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