The text below is a clarification and an admonition from the writer, spiritualist and lecturer Adyashanty - Steven Gray, in “Selling water by the river”, realized in himself, the encounter with his spiritual Self, the Master inherent in all humans. At the age of 25, while meditating, he “penetrated the emptiness of everything and concluded that the Buddha he sought was what he was”, who dwelled in him, that is, he found the Master within.
When it comes to the spiritual search - which sooner or later should happen - it is necessary above all, “separate the chaff from the wheat”, especially regarding the search for a spiritual advisor. If this so-called advisor, master, guru, etc., do not place into practice and effectively, the complete detachment of his own tyrannical ego, he will not fail to be another “blind guide leading another blind, and both will fall into the pit.”
All those who claim to be spiritual beings, make a naive mistake if they do not abdicate its tyrannical ego, for the ego and the spiritual Self are incompatible as long as they are based on Reality. Both one and the other can even have a harmonious coexistence, where the ego lives to circumvent this Reality, deluded by the reality of the Self, which is divine in every human being. The encounter with the spiritual Self only takes place during an arduous pilgrimage, “because narrow is the gate and difficult is the path which leads to life, and few find it”, and those who find it has discarded their ego because there is no more room for it.
Huberto Rohden, Brazilian philosopher, educator, spiritualist and theologian, in one of his books, warns poetically in the “Life and Death of my Philosophical Pride” the adamant urgency to discard the ego to achieve spiritual enlightenment:
The “I know” feeds my ego,
The “I am” demands the death of this ego
To the Self to be born …
Now, I only have that humble flame,
From my sincere wish,
From my sacred belief,
In the silent expectation of God's grace
May it come with its fullness to
Fill my emptiness …
SELLING WATER BY THE RIVER
“Many seekers do not take full responsibility for their liberation but wait for one big, final spiritual experience which will catapult them fully into it. It is this search for the final liberating experience which gives rise to a rampant form of spiritual consumerism in which seekers go from one teacher to another, shopping for enlightenment, as if shopping for sweets in a candy store. This spiritual promiscuity is rapidly turning the search for enlightenment into a cult of experience seekers. And, while many people indeed have powerful experiences, in most cases these do not lead to the profound transformation of the individual, which is the expression of enlightenment.
In speaking regularly with spiritual seekers, it dawned on me one day how addicted so many of them are to the power of charisma. They swap stories about how powerful this or that teacher is and compare experiences. They get a charge from it, many mistaking charisma for enlightenment. Charisma attracts at all levels: political, sexual, spiritual, etc., and it feeds the ego's desire to feel special. The ego loves getting hits of power — it's like a form of spiritual candy. The candy may be sweet but can you live on it? Does it make you free?
Many mistakes the intoxicating power of otherworldly charisma for enlightenment. To be truly free, you must desire to know the truth more than you want to feel good. Because if feeling good is your goal, then as soon as you feel better, you will lose interest in what is true. This does not mean that feeling good or experiencing love and bliss is a bad thing. Given the choice, anyone would choose to feel bliss rather than sorrow. It simply means that, if this desire to feel good is stronger than the yearning to see, know, and experience Truth, then this desire will always be distorting the perception of what is Real while corrupting one's deepest integrity.
If you start playing the game of being an “enlightened somebody”, the true teacher is going to call you on it. He or she is going to expose you, and that exposure is going to hurt. Because the ego will be there, standing in the light of Truth, exposed and humiliated. Of course, the ego will cry “foul”! It will claim that the teacher made a mistake and will begin to justify itself to put its protective clothing back on. It will begin to spin justifications with incredible subtlety and deceptiveness. This is where real spiritual practice begins. This is where it all becomes very real and the student discovers whether he or she truly wants to be free, or merely wants to remain as a false, separate, and self-justifying ego.
This crossroad inevitably comes and is always challenging. It separates the true seeker from the false one. The true seeker will be willing to bear the grace of humility, whereas the false seeker will run from it. Thus, begins the true path to enlightenment, granted only to those willing to be Nobody. Discovering your “Nobodyness” opens the door to awakening as Beingness, and beyond that to the Source of all Beingness. Ego is the movement of the mind toward objects of perception in the form of grasping, and away from objects in the form of aversion. This fundamentally is all the ego is.
This movement of grasping and aversion gives rise to a sense of a separate “me”, and in turn, the sense of “me” strengthens itself this way. It is this continuous loop of causation that tricks consciousness into a trance of identification. Identification with what? Identification with the continuous loop of suffering. After all, who is suffering? The “me” is suffering. And who is this me? It is nothing more than a sense of self, caused by identification with grasping and aversion. You see, it's all a creation of the mind, an endless movie, a terrible dream. Don't try to change the dream, because trying to change it, is just another movement in the dream. Look at the dream. Be aware of the dream. That awareness is It. Become more interested in the awareness of the Dream, than in the dream itself.
What is that awareness? Who is that awareness? Don't go spouting out an answer, just be the answer. Be It.
Enlightenment means the end of all division. It is not simply having an occasional experience of unity beyond all division; it is actually Being undivided. This is what nonduality truly means. It means there is just one Self, without a difference or gap between the profound revelation of Oneness and the way it is perceived and lived every moment of life. Nonduality means that the inner revelation and the outer expression of the personality are One and the same.
Fewer seem to be interested in the greater implication contained within profound spiritual experiences because it is the contemplation of these implications which quickly brings to awareness the inner divisions existing within most seekers. Enlightenment has nothing to do with states of consciousness. Whether you are in ego consciousness or unity consciousness is not the point. I have met many people who have easy access to advanced states of consciousness. Though for some people this may come very easily, I also notice that many of these people are no freer than anyone else. If you don't believe that the ego can exist in very advanced states of consciousness, think again. The point isn't the state of consciousness, even very advanced ones, but an Awake Mystery that is the source of all states of consciousness. It is even the source of Presence and Beingness. It is beyond all perception and all experience. I call it “Awakeness”. To find out that you are empty of emptiness is to die into an Aware Mystery, which is the source of all existence. It just so happens that that mystery is in Love with all of its manifestation and non-manifestation. You find your Self by stepping back out of yourself.
Ramana Maharshi's gift to the world was not that he realized the Self. Many people have had a deep realization of the Self. His real gift was that he embodied that realization so thoroughly. It is one thing to realize the Self; it is something else altogether to embody that realization to the extent that there is no gap between inner revelation and its outer expression. Many have glimpsed the realization of Oneness; few consistently express that realization through their humanness (Christlike by its very own nature). It is one thing to touch a flame and know it is hot, but quite another to jump into that flame and be consumed by it.”
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“Selling water by the river” is a famous phrase said by a Zen Buddhist master to describe his forty years of teachings.
Why buy water from someone by the river, when you could easily put a bowl in the river and collect the water?
In Zen school, this figure of rhetoric represents a circle where there is absolutely nothing to achieve and nothing to obtain. Man looks for something he misses without realizing that everything was offered to him. It came complete and whole, despite going through several stages of development, and goes back to the beginning, where all started, under the illusion that he was incomplete.
Disappointments and doubts are normal, and this is the factor that must awaken man to Reality, to the search, to knowledge and final self-realization. To realize this is to realize that there is always one that is incomplete and imperfect, along with one that has never been anything less than perfect, competitive and complete from the beginning.
Striving to communion with God is spirituality. But when one realizes that man is intrinsically in divine communion, there is no longer any need for spirituality. Just like an ocean struggling to be water, but by nature, it has always been a manifestation of water. Therefore, the effort is debatable. Alan Watts, an English writer and communicator, expressed it perfectly when he said: “Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while you are peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is simply peeling potatoes.” Or TS Eliot, Anglo-American poet and writer, when he said: “The end of all our exploration will be to get to where we started and see the place for the first time.”
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