“Life will be easier if I don’t practice.” Why will it be easier? If we practice we will have to face what we have. But we don’t want to face reality. We are driving a 1950 Buick, thinking we are at the wheel of a Porsche.
Accepting reality begins with accepting our environment and our vehicles for what they actually are, not what we would like them to be. We refuse to see the dysfunction in ourselves and our families. If we are not happy, we believe that is because we are not operating correctly within our system—we conclude that we are not doing it right when we should be questioning the system itself. We therefore believe that if we simply work harder at our system, success and happiness will follow. The problem is we never look at the actual vehicle we are driving to see what its capabilities are and where it is headed. The Buick can never go from zero to 60 in under ten seconds.
Many years ago, I had a conversation in which someone insisted that his first-level practice (using the senses and rituals) would take him to the same place as my third-level practice (reorienting the will). I told him that spiritual practice is not a track meet; the various means are not parallel and equal lanes that arrive at the same destination. In truth, one level of practice will lead into a deeper one; only the deepest practice takes us to the final destination. We may continue observing first- or second-level practices even after we are practicing at the third level, but at this point the deepest level will be informing all the others.
To put it another way, we do not get to decide for ourselves the recipe for spiritual practice. Whoever blindly believes that their habitual way of living is the correct recipe will never get anywhere on the spiritual path. They are simply transposing their family system onto spirituality. They might as well believe that they can come up with a blog post by literally following a pancake recipe. For different undertakings, we have to follow completely different recipes with categorically different ingredients.
People who are committed to their “family recipe” believe that Rohini is just following her family recipe, which she learned as a child, and pushing it on them. They conclude that if they follow what they see as Rohini’s recipe, they will just be at best derivative and at worst obsequious. They will say, “I was raised differently.” What they don’t get is that it is not Rohini’s recipe. It’s the same recipe that has been used for thousands of years in the lineages of many religions. Their recipe will not take them or anyone else where the authentic recipe for spiritual practice leads.
The whole point of seeking a Guru is to uncover, dismantle, and let go of your family recipe as the formula for happiness, and to surrender to the one true recipe for returning Home. This is what I did, and do, with Baba. The recipe I share I learned from him, as he learned it from Nityananda.
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