Spiritual Life and Extinction

Looking at what needs to be seen. Losing what needs to be lost.

Seeing what needs to be seen

What we call compassion and skill are often quite limited expressions, premeditated and mediated through static rules and habitual patterns of thought and emotion.

Less limited expressions of compassion and skillful action emerge spontaneously when we have direct contact with the vast primordial intelligence, clarity, and fountain-like compassion of the natural state of existence.

Living in a more immediate, receptive, and improvisational way guided by the wisdom of the natural state is the fruit of spiritual practice in many traditions from India and Tibet.

When we, as spiritual practitioners and teachers, find ourselves in circumstances such as a global pandemic or the collapse of empire, or revelations of genocide, we are tasked with bringing these circumstances onto our spiritual paths.

This means looking and seeing and feeling and learning and letting the full reality into our perceptions. It means not turning away, lying to ourselves, defending our positions, numbing out, or indulging in spiritual bypassing, wishful thinking, or fatalism.

If we approach such extreme circumstances with honesty and courage and vulnerability, they become our teachers. The challenges we encounter can relieve us of stale conditioning and open us to greater intimacy with primordial wisdom in surprising ways.

We can become more naturally compassionate and skillful friends to our traditions, our own unfolding, our students, and each other.

Losing what needs to be lost

We live in a comfort-obsessed culture.
But a quantity of ruthlessness is required for spiritual growth.

A wise person once said to me, “Do not become a teacher if you are not prepared to walk away from everything: money, title, acclaim, students, organizations, and security.”

Vajrayana Buddhism teaches that our houses of worship must be built on charnel grounds. In other words, we cannot truly worship unless we are willing to destroy what needs to be destroyed.

These have been important teachings for me. When we are afraid of losing, including of losing our comforting concepts, spiritual growth becomes frozen. We waste our energy and compromise our clarity and integrity in our efforts to maintain a status quo.

The desire to use spiritual teachings to transcend calamity or to cling to comforting concepts and “safe” positions has been especially visible in spiritual communities and among some spiritual teachers since the beginning of the pandemic and all that has followed.

There is no compassion or clarity to be found in fantasies such as “anyone who does mantra will not get COVID.”

There is no compassion or clarity in proclaiming publicly that you are “voting for joy” when you mean a candidate who has participated in the murder of tens of thousands of civilians, some of whom might be the relatives and friends of people in your communities.¹

There is no courage in calls for unity and peace that build walls against the possibility of accompanying each other in the specificity of our histories, anger, and grief.

Being a sincere practitioner means we are willing to engage with what is and lose whatever is preventing us from doing so. It means that we deeply want to grow and be of benefit more than we want some mundane feeling of security or superiority.

It means that we have to be ruthless with our fear of discomfort and loss.

The Friend

For practitioners, it is always extinction time, and this goes doubly for those in the seat of the teacher.

When extinction times manifest in big ways externally, that is an order to stretch our capacity, to let fall away what must fall away in ourselves so that we can meet circumstances with clearer vision and more open arms.

Many practitioners and teachers have called this alive-aware reality the Friend.

One of my favorite definitions of friendship is from the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. He defined friendship as “the willingness to be inconvenienced.”

A willingness to be inconvenienced is required if we are to embody more of the unfettered virtue of the natural state and become true friends to ourselves and others. And this same willingness is what will transform, in friendship, our collective lives together on this earth.

with infinite love,
Shambhavi

Want more? Please join me and the Jaya Kula community for satsang & kirtan every Sunday at 3:30pm Pacific. Come in person to 1215 SE 8th Ave, Portland, OR, or join the Jaya Kula News Facebook group to get the Zoom link for satsang. You can also listen to my podcast—Satsang with Shambhavi—wherever podcasts are found.

1. This isn’t a comment on who people voted for. It’s a real-life example of how some people refused to exercise clarity and how that refusal can affect others.