I’ve kept my surrender canned up
for too long
and now all I have to offer
are these fermented prayers
Half-heartedly mumbled
forced love confessions
but God only likes sweet things
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Next week I will have my four-year anniversary of living in the monastery.
It’s truly amazing how fast these years have gone. I was 25 when I arrived here and I still remember the day so clearly. It had just stopped raining when we arrived at Audarya, you know how right after a downpour the air and the earth feels fresh and pure. There were puddles of water on the ground and the sun reflected from them and made everything seem brighter. The fog drifted in the redwood valleys around the property, and everything seemed peaceful and right. I was excited about and terrified of my new life. Here I was, on the other side of the world from my familiar surroundings around people who I hardly knew. And at the same time I was confident that it was the right thing to do.
I wrote the following to my journal in my beginner’s enthusiasm on that day:
California, 11th of January, 2005
The landscape was very scenic on the way. Grape fields and forrests and hills all around. And pick-up trucks.
We drove narrow roads up the hill and I was really looking forward to be there already. Finally we came to the Audarya property and it was like from a postcard. What a perfect place for a monastery. We walked towards the house and the cows paced to greet us. (…) I was very impressed with everything I saw. This is how a monastery should look like. And on the background of all of this are the pinetreehills with fog splitting the hills like in old Japanese paintings. Breath-taking. For a city kid like me, it looked almost unreal.
Towards the evening I started to feel restless. People have hard time adjusting to changes. I have read articles where people who have served long time in prison tell how utterly scared they were when they were released. And this is the kind of fear I was feeling. Freedom is a dreadful thing. Conformity follows no reason. It is to be seen wether I will correct my ways and live my life right or succumb to my criminal nature and go back to prison.
I was unpacking my stuff and thinking about my life in Finland. In times of uncertainty this is what seems to happen. But at the same time, I was feeling so much joy for being able to fight my fears and conformity and come here. I have escaped the Alcatraz!
Marriage counselors have a rule of thumb that says, “if in the beginning of your relationship you knew everything that you know about it now, would you go ahead with it?” If the answer is no, they suggest counting your losses and getting out of the relationship as soon as possible. If the answer is yes, then the relationship is on a healthy foundation. Living in a monastery is in many ways like marriage, it’s a big commitment. And if I had to take marriage counseling, I wouldn’t hesitate for a second when answering their question. I’ve had the most difficult times of my life here, but it has been so worth it. Sometimes the best thing is also the hardest. I can’t imagine living in any other way anymore. This is my life.
I’ve been working on musical projects lately and it has made me think of sound and its place in our tradition and in Eastern spirituality in general.
Sound obviously has a huge transformative potential. I think that secular music’s power is based on its close connection with emotions. In the west artists like Elvis, The Beatles, Nirvana or Rage Against the Machine, to name a few, have had a massive influence on the youth. The potency of music to convey emotions is totally mystical in my opinion. Just the fact that by combining certain concepts and ideas in the form of lyrics with certain kinds of tones and rhythms can create such profound and deep experiences, is fascinating for me.
The Eastern mystics have been convinced for thousands of years that sound changes us. I don’t find it hard to believe at all. I remember when my old friend used to work in a plywood factory that was extremely noisy, and he said that after a while it really started making you crazy. He also mentioned that practically all the long-time employees had mental problems, alcoholism and such. Certain types of sounds increase negative and destructive emotions, other kinds of sounds increase constructive and peaceful emotions. And the kind of emotions we harbor mostly determines how our lives will shape up.
Apart from the material effects, I strongly believe that sound has the power to transform us in an eternal sense as well. That’s why the Eastern traditions (and many Western monastic traditions) have such a strong emphasis on mantras. It’s a request and an attempt to try to tune oneself to the frequency of a reality that goes beyond material sounds and the emotions they give rise to. A real suicide soundtrack for the material ego.
If you’re interested to find out more about the subject of the transformative power of sound and how it ties into spiritual practice, there’s a book called Music as Yoga by Patrick Bernard that I found very interesting.
“Everybody’s got a hungry heart”
but we settle for junk food
I happened to see an interview of the leading “life coach” guy in a magazine. Despite the white-smile-suit-and-tie look I decided to see what he had to say, because being impractical causes me a fair amount of anxiety. Most of it was the typical North American “inner giant” type of self-help that I can’t say I exactly relish but one thing he said really struck me both as a human being and a spiritual practitioner: The most important thing is that you keep your promises to yourself. Sounds very simplistic, but after I started paying attention to that principle in my everyday life, I realized how much we cheat ourselves. “I’ll do it tomorrow”, sounds familiar? So many of the modern lifestyle problems come from not being able to keep promises.
Starting projects, keeping a good schedule, updating your blog, and above all, flossing daily (!) can deteriorate surprisingly fast into a random mass of anxiety-driven last minute frenzy.
Postponing duties and other boring obligations is just another symptom of the 21st century mindset: a search for a quick fix. But I’ve come to realize from erring time after time that a more sustainable comfort and satisfaction comes from self-discipline. This really holds true with spiritual practice as well. It so easy to slap your practice always into the following day, or do a little less every day, or even multitask while “meditating”. But if I don’t keep my promises to myself, I can’t expect too much from anything I do.
It just really seems like our times are plagued with a kind of an instant satisfaction- thinking. Paradoxically it has lead to a massive amount of dissatisfaction and a loss of focus. Especially within serious spiritual practice the effects of the times show, because there are no instant fixes to the problems of material ignorance. I did see an add once that said, “learn to meditate like a guru in 45 minutes!” but that’s just a sad example of how out of touch we are.
To balance this all out, it’s not so hard to go to the other extreme either by making too demanding promises. And in no time the constructive self-discipline turns into destructive self-loathing. I guess my next promise to myself could be that I will be reasonable with myself regarding my spiritual practice. Now that’s a tough one.
I was thinking of you today
How I can’t catch you
and how that’s too much for me sometimes
Like today
And how is it possible that I feel lonely
when there’s nothing (not even loneliness) outside of you?
You are closer to me than I am to myself
but still my thoughts echo
like gunshots in a ghost town
“Ascetics are both the children and elders of society at the same time, childlike in maintaining their idealism and wise as a result.”
-Swami B.V. Tripurari
Idealism is considered to be something belonging to youth, after which we grow over it and get on with the “real world”. I’ve seen so many leave their idealism behind along with their thinning hair, and I’ve left a bundle of it behind myself (both of them, actually). The reality of survival becomes apparent when your parents stop paying your bills. It’s hard to be a dumpster diving squatter if you have three kids to take care of and a mortgage and a student loan. Unfortunately idealism is often no more than a utopia that’s not really grounded in how the world works and that’s one reason why people comply in their adult lives.
There’s something very attractive about the youthful idealism, as much as it can be silly and juvenile as well. Despite being often misdirected and not too well-informed, the feeling of it, the urge to fight and stand for something, is very attractive. Faith in itself is beautiful. To be ready to lay down your life for something, give your all-in-all, is to really be alive. But how fulfilling is it really to reach the goal of idealism that concerns only the material existence? If we’d save all the oceans, turn over all the evil governments, burn down every slaughter house and feed every hungry person in the world, what to fight for then? Would the peaceful dayt-to-day life in the perfect world satisfy us? I know it wouldn’t satisfy me.
The root of exploitation is much closer to us than we dare to think, and social activism doesn’t really have the weeding tools to pull it out. According to eastern philosophy our materially tinged view of reality is the cause of injustice. It’s not a circumstantial problem. We are the problem. So it’s not very surprising that most idealists get totally frustrated and bury their weapons under their couches and home theaters . We’re chaining ourselves to a wrong tree, so to speak.
I’ve always thought that spiritual life is the essence and the source of idealism. It’s revolutionary in a sustainable way. Since morality is at its basis, it doesn’t abandon responsibility in the name of a higher ideal (when in a lot of the cases the real motivation may be laziness or selfishness). But when the time is right, all duties in relation to the world will be left behind, and one is free to live exclusively to one’s ideal. The cool thing about Gaudiya Vaishnavism is that it doesn’t suffocate the soul in the name of ending exploitation or suffering. It talks about refocusing our view of what reality is and how we fit in. It’s not as much preoccupied with changing or doing away with the externals rather than expanding our understanding of what we are. Real idealism is actually just about seeing the full picture of reality.
Today I was thinking of how service as a spiritual practice is seen somehow as lower or less spiritual than say meditation or renunciation. Service is considered to be more of a religious practice whereas meditation etc. is spiritual, deeper.
Our tradition very much defies this notion. If service is directed to the center or the absolute, we consider it the height of mysticism and experiential spirituality. It’s all about transcending the mind, the senses and the false identity they afford, but that’s only a side product of connecting with the infinite. Service is a way ( a very powerful way) of connecting with others. Serving others surely brings us closer to them. And when you direct that service towards the center according to the directives set by mystics who have experience of the truth, it will bring you closer to the truth.
Service is understandably hard to recognize as a spiritual practice, though, because a lot of service and worship is done with material motives, and that amounts to nothing more than religiosity. The defining principle is the consciousness you do your service in. If it’s not motivated by material desire or power in the form of spiritual charisma, then it will have the power to attract the mystical reality, otherwise not.
I got back to our monastery Audarya in California a couple of months ago. Costa Rica was quite an adventure, a lot happened in four months. Anyway, this entry is not about that, but about my trip back to the States. Here’s what I wrote at George W. Bush International in Texas during my layover on a beautiful day in September 2008:
Flight CO846 from Costa Rica to San Francisco. I was observing an elderly flight attendant as she was serving out the breakfast plates for the travelers. She tried to smile but it seemed to me like her stomach turned every time she raised the ends of her lips. She seemed disgusted with her job, with people, with those trays and endlessly uttering questions like, “Anything more to drink?”, or “How many persons are in your party?”.
She was serving the passengers, they were enjoying the free drinks and crappy Hollywood comedies. She was biting her lip and trying to forget her aching legs and back by the force of thoughts of the next pay and how she would spend it.
I was thinking of how most of the time we only accept doing service to others because we get some power to enjoy from that. Most work is some form of service. You work for the factory owner; you beep the customers’ groceries at the cashier; you serve your art director’s vision in a design agency; you clean up after people who have more money than you; you drive drunk people around the night-lit cities with a little yellow light on the roof. . . A big part of our waking time is spent working, and we do it all to get money. If you break it down, money really is a form of power. It’s an agreement of society for a concrete symbol of power. You serve(=work) for some time and save money, and then you can have the upper hand for as long as your financial batteries have some juice in them. And then it’s back to the factory again.
Service is seen as something obligatory that we have to do to gain some power to do what we really want to do. Money/power enables us to have leisure, luxury, enjoyment, dominion, freedom.
From this perspective being a servant is the most unwanted thing in the world. It means you’re trapped to fulfilling others’ dreams and desires instead of your own. Being just a servant is the most meaningless, lowest, pitiful position one could imagine.
As these thoughts were bouncing around in my head while secretly observing the flight attendant, I was chuckling to myself. My whole life is about service. I’m a low-life according to a worldly standard! I’m supposed to be miserable and unfulfilled according to how power and happiness are linked together in this world, but I’m anything else but unhappy. What’s wrong with me?
And into the river they drown
the lucky ones
but my false ego makes me float
like a bloated bath duck
and I’m gliding on the surface of life
Let me sink forever
by the weight of the words of the wise
I will learn to breathe water
and never break the surface again.
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