your career as a spiritual teacher

Q: Hi again, Robert. I trust life is treating you well.

I read your Q&A regarding awakening (or whichever term one prefers) occurring only through luck.

You gave an example of finding a lottery ticket vs buying a lottery ticket and the obvious differences in the chance of winning.

I've said above that my own path has been one of facing and dissolving emotion, making it conscious. And I suppose this would be like buying a lottery ticket, greatly increasing one's chances. And the more one does it, the more lottery tickets one is buying.

Despite your assurances that it would be fine, I don't feel it's appropriate to be seen as contradicting you in your own group. And if I was persuasive enough (haha), and anyone in your group liked what I said, surely it would only confuse them.

So I just wanted to touch base with you here to again offer an alternative experience that there is indeed something one can do to further so-called spiritual development.

What do you think?

Construction Workers' Crash Pad, Todos Santos, 2018

A: Hi, and thanks for the good wishes.

As for contradicting me, I have no desire to express my views in a protected milieu. Surely not everything I say is perfectly true and mistake-free. If someone can poke holes in a statement of mine and show me where I have gone astray, so much the better for me, so have at it to your heart’s content. The few times that I have blocked communication with someone were not due to disagreement, which I welcome, but disrespect or lack of ordinary civility, which I will not tolerate.

As for someone in my group becoming confused if your objections happened to sound persuasive, I don’t have a group. Unlike you, I have no students and don’t want any. Nor do I aim to persuade anyone of anything. This page is purely a space for self-expression and replying to questions from my personal point of view.

I am willing to say that I am awake, but, other than clearing away some of the bullshit that seems often to arise in discussions of spirituality—whatever that is—I do not have the foggiest idea of how to teach awakening. I have no methods, no procedures, none of that.

From my point of view, most of what people call “spirituality” appears to be nonsense, and I am willing to specify. If hearing that perspective provides a wake-up to someone who is hypnotized by the idea of the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, wonderful. I am happy to serve as an alarm clock. But beyond that, I have nothing to offer.

To be clear, I was not saying that awakening occurs only through luck. I was saying that everything occurs only through luck. To put awakening in a separate category only beclouds the matter.

Now you might disagree with the idea that whatever occurs is due to luck alone. Perhaps you object on the grounds that without effort, nothing one wishes to happen will happen. You might say that even if effort will not ensure the occurrence of some desired outcome, surely effort will make that outcome more likely than if one does nothing.

This is a familiar argument among spiritual teachers whose stock in trade, after all, is offering their students methods and procedures aimed at “awakening.” The noted Buddhist teacher, Jack Kornfield, made that argument quite cleverly when he wrote, “Enlightenment is an accident, but spiritual practice makes you accident prone.”

That may be true, or perhaps not. Frankly, I have known many spiritual practitioners, both students and teachers, and only a very few of them were what I call awake. Very few. The rest seemed hypnotized by the quest and the special feeling of “meaning” that following a path seems to provide in a life that otherwise might seem to lack meaning.

In my experience, religion and spiritual practices can serve as pretty good hiding places for people who are disinclined to consider the apparent emptiness and existential pointlessness of the human condition, but who would rather imagine goals and paths to those goals in a situation—this aliveness--that may actually have no meaning. So perhaps spiritual practice works against awakening as much as or even more than it does to foster it. But that is a different matter.

The point of the conversation about which you are asking was this: you may find yourself seeking enlightenment, or, as in your case, teaching others how to be what you imagine is “enlightened.” But if you do, that role in life happened purely by chance. You never chose it. It happened. It occurred. If you had been born into different circumstances, you might be making other efforts entirely, and making those efforts would seem as natural as your effortful career as a spiritual teacher does now.

Seeing that is the very essence of what I mean by awake. If you don’t see that—that there is no doer of all this, no chooser, no decider--there is no “enlightenment.”

I call it luck because you did not choose your body, your brain, the country where you were born, the historical era of your birth, your parents, the neighborhood where you grew up—-none of it. All of that comes upon us like fate. There was no choice involved in any of it, nor any basis for praise or blame. What is, is, and arises as it does.

Perhaps you would be a one-star general in Iraq, a drug dealer in Bolivia, or a woman giving birth to her tenth child in Somalia. It’s all luck. Can you not see that? If you desire to be enlightened, that desire is nothing one can choose. You either have that desire, or you don’t. You can’t pull desire out of your ass. I don’t know how to make this any clearer.