Rock-Bottom Wisdom, Should I Share Teachings, and Intuition vs. Impulse

STUDENT 1
Recently, I've encountered a couple of people who have lived for years houseless, and they lived in really difficult circumstances. They were struggling with drug addiction and mental health problems and things like that.

I know them in a capacity where they're not on those substances, and their mental health is a lot better. They have this incredible wisdom that I've been finding, and I wondered if this was common in the Indian tradition with certain monks or certain people who chose houselessness.

And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what that experience could bring.

SHAMBHAVI
I have a lot to say about that aspect of tradition and practice from India, but I certainly do not want to imply that being houseless is somehow a surefire way to encounter wisdom, or that it's as fulfilling as choosing that path and living a life of a wanderer. Not at all.

One thing I noticed, having also known quite a number of addicts and other people struggling from other things in my life, is that there's a certain thing that can happen when you hit rock bottom.

What do you see in rock bottom? You kind of see how things really are with you. Right? You get this kind of incredible sobriety that just rises up. So you get to see yourself without being able to fool yourself.

People who don't have these kind of extreme experiences, we can see things about ourself, obviously. But then we just blithely go on fooling ourselves in lots of other parts of our lives. We still are cushioned by some degree of fantasy about ourselves, and this creates all kinds of deflections and problems for us.

But what I noticed with some recovering addicts is that they don't have any more cushion left of fantasy about themselves.

They've kind of seen what they could be at their worst, and they've also reconnected with their value. They've done both of those things. And so what I've noticed is there can be this tremendous simplicity, and honesty, and a kind of wisdom that comes from that. Something really beautiful.

I've written a lot about the relationship between addiction and spiritual practice, more from the perspective of longing, that the longing is the same. But I think in a sense, when you do a lot of practice, you also get to that extremely sober view of oneself and also discovering your value.

If you really, really crashed hard when you were an addict and you got to get to this place, I don't think that's the same as doing spiritual practice and becoming self-realized. I don't think it's as thorough. It's not as esoteric.

But it certainly lends this degree of honesty and simplicity and a kind of super sobriety about oneself.

I learned this when I was in my very early 20s, like 21 or so. I was actually dating someone who was an alcoholic and a heroin addict. And he just had this incredible humility about him. And simplicity in a certain way.

He sort of had this knowledge of the things that people go through, and he treated everyone with respect. And it was really very beautiful to see.

But anyway, I don't want to say that there's something for every person of value in being houseless. I mean, you could reach those insights with someone who has addiction or mental health problems while you're actually being taken care of and living somewhere safe. [laughs] I don't think you need to be houseless to come to those realizations.

But in any case, there are several different kinds of traditions in India that involve wandering around. One of them is the tradition of sannyas.

And sannyas can mean a lot of different things, but it's a form of renunciation. It could just mean living in an ashram and taking robes and calling yourself a sannyasin.

But there's a sort of traditional form of sannyas where you just wander around and you're not allowed to stay anywhere for more than three consecutive nights, unless it's monsoon season.

And then you're allowed to have rich people take you in and then feed you and house you for monsoon season, which it turns out takes up quite a big chunk of the year. [laughs]

But anyway, sannyasins the word actually refers to a condition of wandering, sometimes called samsarans, like wandering around.

There's another tradition from India, which is more of a sadhana that you would just do for some period of time, you wouldn't really do this for your whole life, necessarily. Which actually is really, really appealing to me.

It's where you just basically settle your affairs, and then you just go out your door with no money and just the clothes on your back. And you don't eat unless people give you food, and you don't stay anywhere unless people invite you to stay somewhere.

And you just kind of wander around in a very spontaneous way dealing with whatever happens or whatever doesn't happen. That always really, really appealed to me as a kind of adventure to see what would happen.

There's a Tibetan Buddhist teacher who has done this. Mingyur Rinpoche, his name is. I think he lives in the United States somewhere. And he settled all his affairs and went to India and did this for some long period of time. He just said it was a lifelong yearning of his to do this, and he took selfies while he was doing it. [laughter]

I mean, I'm assuming they were selfies, and that he didn't have a companion who was taking the photos for him. But anyway.

So this idea of being a wanderer is really strong in India. And in fact, I have a hard time staying in one place, or I did until recently. And it's much more profound than that, which is people who look at my astrology chart say that I was wandering around in other lifetimes and that this is a samskara from other lifetimes.

And one time, one of my teachers said: you were a sannyasin, just get over it. [laughs] In other words, that was then, this is now.

STUDENT 2
Interesting that in India, they're revered or it's a respected tradition.

SHAMBHAVI
Well, actually, these days not so much. There's a swath of Indian culture that thinks that these sannyasins are just freeloaders. You'll see them being railed about in press and things like that.

I was shocked, when I was much younger and just starting out in this tradition, and I was just all about doing it in this traditional way. And when I first found out that there was people that complained about sannyasins freeloading, I was just deeply shocked. [laughs]

Ma wandered for 50 years. It's a long wandering. But she always had people taking care of her. She was never wandering alone. She might have wandered with a smaller entourage.

STUDENT 3
I've been feeling an inner desire to do certain forms of spiritual practice with friends, but I'm unsure how to proceed in terms of what I should and shouldn't share.

My feeling is I definitely wouldn't share anything that I learned exclusively through teachings from you, but I was wondering if you had more to say about what might be appropriate, not appropriate to share with others. I was thinking of doing things like mantra chanting.

SHAMBHAVI
Well, here's the problem. You've only been practicing in this tradition for a second. And if you set yourself up as a teacher, which is what you're describing, giving words of advice, chanting mantras with people, you're going to hinder your own practice.

You can't predict what will happen in that circumstance, how you'll feel, what you'll do, how people will relate to you, what expectations people will have, how you'll respond to that. And you can really get into a whole knot of karma with this.

You've just been my student for a few years, right? And you only started doing a lot of practice fairly recently, so I'm not for it.

That being said, you can do whatever you want. But a lot of things can go awry, especially the advice-giving part, sounds like red flags up for me.

Lots of people chant mantras together, like in yoga studios and stuff like that. There's all kinds of mantras that are on CDs that are more kirtan-like, and certainly any of that is fine to do with other people.

But once you stray into what you just described, which is really being a teacher, I just have red flags about that. I think for the progress of your own sadhana it's not good, and it seems way too soon to be doing that.

But just getting together with other people as friends and singing kirtan or chanting things in a more kirtan-like way. That seems fine.

But from what you described, and maybe I'm misinterpreting, that you were kind of positioning yourself as a teacher, and I don't think that's right.

Then I'll just say that I am incredibly on the extreme end of this. If over here is, everybody's a teacher, and here is, you really need to have some training, I'm way over here. You better be fucking realized to a good degree before you start teaching.

So, you can just take that for what it is. That's how I am. I've accepted it. [laughs]

The reason is because of the reason that I'm even doing this. The reason is that I know the power of these practices. And I don't want anybody to be cheated out of an opportunity to realize the actual power of these practices by being trained by someone who doesn't know that through their own experience.

So, you'll notice with Jaya Kula, I've NEVER authorized anyone to teach other than the few people teaching nadi shodhana. Why is that? These traditions are transmission-based. If you don't have serious accomplishment, you can't do transmission.

And I don't know. I feel like everybody else can be less hard-line than me. Someone's got to hold up the other end. [laughs] And it's gonna be me. [laughs]

My acupuncturist asked me if I had named a successor. And I just said no, and I don't really care if I never do. If someone comes along who has that capacity, I'll be happy to say, hey, take over Jaya Kula when I die. Right? Happy to!

But I'm also happy to just have the community continue practicing together with no leader. There's no point being led by someone who actually can't transmit the practices. There's no point to that as far as I'm concerned.

So I just caution you, if you want to do it as a friend thing in the way that I describe, that seems completely fine. But not as a professional thing where you're setting yourself up as an expert.

And it's beautiful to want to be of service, but the minute people start feeding your ego, how readily are you going to give that up?

One of the things that I think is absolutely indispensable is you have to be willing to walk away from everything. If you aren't willing, for the sake of your own realization, to walk away from everything, you shouldn't be teaching.

If you get attached to the money and the position and the admiration and the whatever you're getting from students. And you're dependent for your career on that. And you get to a place where your actual own realization is blocked by all this and you're not willing to drop it, then what?

Everything just starts getting rotten from the inside. It's very easy to get hooked on this stuff.

STUDENT 4
The Mormon Church in the past 10 years or so got rid of all their cleaning crews, and they now assign cleaning to the members. But it feels like they're taking advantage of people. I find in some cultures and in some communities, it feels like the real act of giving. And I can't put my finger on what the difference is.

SHAMBHAVI
Well, they've been ordered to do it. They haven't been given a choice, right? I mean, they do have a choice, but then they would be disobeying the church, right?

STUDENT 4
Yeah.

SHAMBHAVI
That's the difference.

STUDENT 4
They're kind of assigned slash requested.

SHAMBHAVI
Volun-told?

STUDENT 4
They change up the phrasing. Yes, volun-told.

SHAMBHAVI
Well, I think a lot of religious traditions are kind of like that. At least in this tradition, it's understood that everything's based on your desire. And if you don't want to do something, then you're just not going to do it. [laughs] That's the end of that, right?

It's an interesting phenomenon because, of course, there's the other discourse around people who are working with the teacher in a more full-on way and are supposed to do everything the teacher tells them to do without question.

Of course, it's never without question. People always argue with their teachers, even with the greatest teachers. People argued with Ma all the time. She told them to do something. Some people obeyed instantly, but other people would argue with her.

So, a lot of the things you read in the books about this are just way too simplified and...or monolithic.

But nonetheless, even if someone were to have this profound understanding of the teacher-student relationship, and even if they are obeying the teacher's every order, even then it's understood they're doing it because they want to. Not because the teacher told them to.

And in any moment, if someone said, I don't want to, and they really meant it, it wasn't just, like, a momentary hissy fit, then that would be that!

No teacher who understands the dynamic would try to force someone to do something they really don't want to do.

And the other aspect of that is, sometimes people come in with a lot of faux devotion or faux obedience. And they say, oh, I want to obey you, I want to do this, I want to do that. And you can tell within half a second that they don't really mean it, and they don't really understand what they're saying.

And so there's the other side of it, which is people can profess a certain devotion, but also it's up to teachers to know when that's actually real and when it's not.

Again, because there's no value in forcing people or trying to force people to do something that they don't really have a desire to do. There's just no value to it.

So there's a value in recognizing that someone has real devotion, that there's just stuff in the way, and trying to encourage that. There's a value in that.

But there's no value in literally forcing people to do something they actually have no desire to do. Then you have to think about the self-interest of the organization. That they're doing it for their own self-interest.

People don't realize on the teacher's timeline, they realize on God's timeline. [laughs] The teacher is just one little factor.

STUDENT 5
Could you talk about intuition versus impulse?

SHAMBHAVI
If intuition means I have contact with wisdom and it tells me something, it's not going to repeat over and over again.

Our habitual impulses just repeat over and over again. So they have a stale quality, and they also have a degree of unconsciousness related to them, that we're not really making any decision. It might seem like we are, but we're actually impelled or compelled in some way.

Whereas wisdom is more like something very simple and clear and doesn't have a lot of emotional charge.

When you feel like you're pulled, what you're calling intuition, and it's not just impulse or habit pattern, it has this kind of clean, simple, un-hyped quality about it. And you can either follow it or not.

But if you don't follow it, it's because of all the other stuff getting in your way. And then it doesn't just keep repeating over and over again like a maniac. [laughs]

The intuition that's actual wisdom has a very different feeling tone. It doesn't have any narrative or explanation that comes with it. It's just, boop, this is what seems the best.

And then all of our other stuff just has all kinds of, well, you know, he did text me at this time, but then he didn't text me the other time, so I think I should text him back this time...

And it just goes on and on and on and on and on. There's a lot of anxiety attached to it, generally. Or some sort of heavy emotions.