Where Are You Going? (1 of 2)
Do you know what you want out of life and do the things you do produce it?
I hit my first major spiritual bottom when I was nineteen. It was a few months after cutting an around-the-world bike tour short. I was living in my dad and stepmom’s basement. With no adventure, school, job, friends, or a girlfriend for direction or distraction, my life devolved into series of activities —mostly bong hits, strenuous exercise, and all-night Charles In Charge marathons —intended to numb me from my shit reality. In my morass, and devoid of better ideas, activities, or money, I decided I might break from my dad’s atheism and give “spirituality” a try.
After scanning a copy of Be Here Now, I ended up at Boulder’s Transcendental Meditation center. T.M.™ offered personalized mantras whose vibration would bring me unending peace and contentment —just what I wanted! And for only six hundred dollars! Since I had neither the money nor confidence that that money would pay off, I took my dad’s suggestion and connected with a friend of his involved with a free meditation group.
The group, Siddha Yoga, is a westernized Hindu sect with sangha (communities) around the world. Like most eastern sects, leadership is based on an intimate relationship with the guru. Then, as now, Siddha’s guru is a woman named Gurumayi Chidvilasananda (made semi-famous a dozen years later as Melissa Gilbert’s anonymous guru in Eat, Pray, Love). Boulder’s sangha held their satsangs (meetings) in an anonymous seventies office building behind a grocery store plaza. The main congregating area was a small, warm, low-lit, and incense-soaked little room with rows of chairs and cushions oriented toward an altar littered with food and other offerings, pictures of the Gurumayi, pictures of the gurus before her, and Hindu deities.
At my first satsang, a sangha member gave me the book Where Are You Going, by Swami “Baba'' Muktananda, Gurumayi’s guru who died in 1982. I don’t recall exactly what Baba wrote—and the book bears rereading —but it changed my life. I don’t think I actually considered where I was going in life prior to reading the book . I just went. Though I may not have said as such at the time, I viewed happiness as some future state that would eventually show up after I’ve done the stuff that makes people happy. Once I did the stuff, I would become happy. Any day now.
I vaguely sensed my approach, generally known as a “hedonic treadmill,” was a set-up: Non or partial attainment of an object of desire —e.g. an aborted bike trip —makes one a failure. Attainment—e.g. the epic tours I later completed —only provides temporary satisfaction , not actual happiness. More often, attainment of one thing makes one desire new, shinier, bigger objects. Baba helped me start seeing how my objective, i.e. happiness, was inconsistent with my methodology, i.e. constant striving for some imagined, future state. Baba offered freedom from this set-up, replete with a robust set of no-and-low cost ways to get there.
In tomorrow’s newsletter, I will further explore the universal question of “where people go.” Where are we going individually? Where are we going as a society? Do our desires match our actions —are we getting what we need and want?