MOUNTAIN VIEW: The pursuit continues

This is the essence of the spiritual life: the simple discovery that all of us are one. When we dislike others, we are violating this fundamental unity, the law of life. All we need to do to grow spiritually is to love those around us more than ourselves, and let that ability guide our every action.

--Eknath Easwaran

Just after I’d finished my pre-Christmas columns on “happiness,” Eknath Easwaran’s newsletter arrived from Blue Mountain.
Now here was a man who understood happiness, in his long and fruitful life. From his early years teaching English in California universities, he was fascinated by the human search for happiness that pervaded all the world’s literature, the great religious texts—and the American culture around him.
Why was happiness so elusive to humankind?
Growing up in India, Easwaran had been taught by his wise grandmother to meditate, concentrate, and apply the precepts of India’s great spiritual classic, the Bhagavad Gita. —That is, to put others first, see God in everyone, and practice compassion.
As Easwaran would later point out, these precepts could be found in the teachings of every great tradition, from Moses to Buddha, Socrates to Jesus. Yet rarely did people apply them.
Easwaran recognized a deep spiritual hunger in the campus culture of California in the 60’s and 70’s, and began teaching meditation and spiritual precepts as a university course. Realizing then that people from all walks of life—not just young students—were seeking this wisdom more than diplomas or business training or bigger salaries, he established a teaching center where he lived out his years writing and offering to students a practical training program—the kind to be applied daily, not just read-about-on-Sundays.
Easwaran’s “eight-point program,” assembled from the common suggestions of the world’s great religions, includes such counter-culture practices as meditation and prayer, slowing down, one-pointed attention (versus multi-tasking and distractedness), putting others first, spiritual reading, and “training the senses.”
The last practice was the focus of Blue Mountain’s December newsletter.
“If we could listen to the mind’s internal monologue, we would be astonished to hear a constant background refrain: ‘I like this; I don’t like that. I like him; I don’t like her.’ It means we are constantly judging and dividing—and the goal of the spiritual life, in every tradition I am familiar with, is to go beyond divisions and judgments to discover that all of us are one.”
Though we think we are free, in America, to choose what we like and discard what we don’t, “paradoxically,” says Easwaran, “the more likes and dislikes we have, the smaller the range of things we can actually enjoy.”
“As we go on splitting hairs about what we like and dislike, the range of what we can enjoy becomes more and more constricted. Increasingly, things have to be the way we like. We must have our particular chair, our parking space, our favorite brand of cornflakes. We can read and listen to only those opinions we agree with.”
So Easwaran used to teach his college students to practice enjoying things they disliked. Hate liver? Ask for some in the lunch line! Detest jogging? Go do it with gusto! Hate cold weather and rain? Shove on those boots and walk right into some! Irritated by your gum-snapping neighbor? Invite her to supper! He even advised students, upon visiting ice cream parlors, to choose their least favorite flavor—just to practice freedom.
It’s the same comfort-zone-cracking idea Eleanor Roosevelt conveyed in her practice: “The thing you most fear to do—that is the very thing you must do.”
For this reason St. Thérese started her chores each day with the most odious. When she served the older nuns, she devoted the most energy and time to the grumpiest, meanest nun who barked at her and had bad manners. She practiced loving those who were least lovable, as she figured God loved her despite her own failings.
In fact, dropping the attachment to our personal likes and dislikes “prepares us for the larger task of looking for the Divine within people around us,” writes Easwaran.
Moses said it and Jesus reinforced it via the second commandment: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” It is amazing to notice how we growl and shove, argue and sue and hate each other over the right to display the Ten Commandments in a courthouse or school, while forgetting to display the second commandment in our lives.
If we did so, who could feel blue at Christmas? Who would lack for someone to help, company to enjoy, some merriment to feel grateful for, weather to feel invigorated by—even if it wasn’t one’s top fairytale of a preference?
Happiness depends on us, not on getting our way. —Not on avoiding grumpy kinfolk or looking perfect in a holiday dress. We neither have to pine for the perfect setting of elegant Williamsburg lights each Christmas, nor bemoan a neighbor’s gaudy inflatables and crash of bizarre colors.
“It’s perfect!” I hollered and waved one evening this week, passing a neighbor’s display lit-up like Dollywood on the Fourth-of-July.
The homeowner thanked me happily, apologizing for a missing string of lights no one could have noticed in that confused mass of color.
And as I stood there in the blinking brilliance, the jumble of reindeer and elves and angels glowing into the night—something they’d put an entire weekend and their hearts into creating for the happiness of others—I realized that in fact, it really was perfect, and that I was indeed happy.