Kshama prepares for Sunday service at Ananda Sangha in Palo Alto, California. Photo by the author.
A long-time friend sent me a manuscript and asked if I could help him turn it into a publishable book. Our emails wandered into other topics, and I shared some insights I’d gained about dealing with my mistakes and imbecile proclivities. (For privacy, I have changed his name.)
Tom,
I’ll share some thoughts not related to the book, but to something you said about a temptation to feel “judgy.” I’ve had to find ways to deal with my own feckless tendencies, if only because there are so many of them. However, I did learn something long ago that might be worth sharing.
There was an elderly nun in Paramhansa Yogananda’s ashram whose name was Durga Mata. She was a tough and earthy person. In the 1920s or 1930s Yogananda gave her the job of constructing the world’s first motor home, by welding a travel trailer onto a truck bed, so he could take it on his speaking tours.
Durga was a liberated soul, a jivanmukta, and she was a formidable presence. She had a close friend and disciple with whom she often shared her precious counsel. Something she told her has been useful to me over the years: “The first thought isn’t yours.”
Translated: if we have an unfortunate thought, what matters isn’t that our inner idiot has once again burped forth a priceless howler. It’s what we do about it. “Oh, hm, get a load of that, my inner imbecile just belched out a gobsmackingly stupid pensée about an imagined feature of someone’s makeup that, even if it’s true, it doesn’t remotely define them in their soul nature as a beloved child of the living God.”
We don’t make more bad karma by having contractive thoughts, unless we deliberately engage with them, making them our own and welding them firmly in our consciousness where they risk defining us.
But if we set about breaking the welds of those thoughts by splitting them apart with fierce and caustic analysis in a spirit of“bemused detachment” as a friend of mine likes to recommend, we can gradually get over the tendency to react with judgment. Better to laugh at our mistakes than glue them to us with too much sticky fretfulness.
I’m particularly interested in this, because it was a lesson that people tended to learn early and often when they came to live at Ananda Village. I learned that if I judged someone, even very mildly, I risked rousing the Divine Mother’s fierce and terrible irony. It was deeply instructive to realize how enormously important God seemed to consider it that we treat each other well.
I tended to be a lightning rod for a small subset of folks who reveled in their judgments, probably because I was a geek and a weirdo and definitely not everybody’s cup of tea. In time, I counted eighteen people who let fly their negativity in my direction, and who would subsequently have left the community within no longer than three weeks. I figured that God chose me because I could take it. I was doing lots of chanting at the time, and feeling a powerful flow of love and soul-fulfilling happiness that nourished and protected me from inside.
Some left the community, but some stayed: the ones who knew they had a fault and were working sincerely to overcome it. I learned that if I would take the time and trouble to plow under any temptation toward resentfulness, self-justification, a smart-mouthed comeback, or a carefully reasoned explanation, and instead raise crops of pure love, kindness, and healing, the critics invariably became friends. It was viciously hard spiritual work, but then, nothing else was nearly as effective. I found that it was better to roll up my sleeves and dig a well of love and joy from the hard rock of my stubborn and resisting heart, than to lounge in the frail and shaky, fetid hovel of the ego.
As for those who left, I eventually stopped counting. It got to a point where, whenever someone would share their less than savory insights on the topic of me, I would recall a song by Woody Guthrie, “So long, it’s been good to know ya!”
I once told Seva, the head nun at Ananda and a treasured model on the spiritual path, that I had done something wrong, and that I was quite surprised to realize that God seemed not to care at all. Without a moment’s hesitation, Seva replied, “I don’t think God even notices our faults.”
In the first days of my spiritual search, I made some species of goof that loomed like a big sad clown in my sad and regretful heart. In meditation that evening I prayed, “Well, Divine Mother, I guess You’ll have to accept me the way I am.”
I’m not given to spiritual experiences, but I instantly heard Her reassuring voice, as of a bustling Mother, natural and intimately familiar: “I am not interested in your faults. I am interested only in your continual improvement!”
I am happy to report that I am filling the limited days remaining to me with lots of mistakes and feeling hardly troubled by them at all.
— Rambhakta