Understanding Grace and Right Effort….

Baba used to say that the bird of paradise has two wings, Grace and self-effort. First, we need the right self-effort to earn Grace. And then, if we fail to continue the right effort, we will squander that Grace.

Right effort ultimately means resting the will in the Heart. This may sound easy, but it is extremely difficult. The Heart is not the physical heart, so to rest in it we first have to find it. We have to give up our beautiful ideas about the Heart. These pleasant feelings, which arise in the first level of practice, keep us swimming in abstract notions. We must be willing to move to the second level of practice, which necessitates deep study, both of tradition and of ourselves. We have to know where we are actually going, not in a vague, abstract way but in a clear, direct awareness of the path we are navigating.

Rigor is critical. Study. Question. We have to know how to drive our intellectual vehicle. And we must also consciously surrender to the shakti. Both acquiring knowledge and surrendering will at first precipitate a tremendous amount of discomfort. We need to put in the effort to become experts. For that, we must have the expert guidance of the Guru.

But expertise can be hard to recognize. How can we tell the difference between a true expert and someone who is just presenting confidently?

One mark of a true expert is that he is constantly learning and loves to expand his knowledge. This means not only encountering new things but also constantly deepening his understanding of what he has already imbibed. At each new step, he goes over what he has already studied. He challenges himself and welcomes appropriate challenges, because an unchallenged expert is not an expert.

To achieve the expertise we need to advance toward the third level of practice—again, resting in the Heart—we have to cultivate the following qualities:

1. We recognize that we have agency.
2. We don’t need others’ recognition.
3. We do what is truly right for us, and that is okay.
4. We do not project onto others or onto situations—instead, we face reality.
5. We are willing to face what we do not want to face.
6. We ask the next hard question of ourselves.
7. We are willing to listen to the answer to the hard question.
8. We know what we know, and know what we do not know.
9. We understand both the intellectual framework of sadhana and the workings of the shakti.

From there, we are able to pursue the gift of Grace at all costs. If we receive Grace in the moment and then intellectualize it, we will lose it; if we receive Grace in the moment and fail to study, we will also lose it. Grace is a spark or ember that has to be tended to become a lasting fire within us.

1. Receive Grace.
2. Know what Grace is.
3. Know who transmitted the Grace.
4. Choose to hold to that Grace without intellectualizing it.
5. Do the work to cherish and nurture that Grace.

Many of us are afraid we’ll be blindsided by something and realize we don’t know as much as we thought. The truth is, we all have that feeling. It does not mean we lack expertise; humility is a necessary condition of real expertise.

But if we haven’t done the work of studying both tradition and ourselves, we may believe we are experts when we are in fact far from it. We will certainly be blindsided with problems and unable to resolve them. We may even choose not to be aware of them until they cause us serious discomfort, and then choose to believe that by making the discomfort go away temporarily we have solved the problem. And when we injure others, we do not recognize what we have done and feel the appropriate discomfort unless someone else has voiced it. That someone is all too often the Guru.

But the Guru’s job is not crisis prevention or intervention. The Guru’s job is to get each of us to take ownership of ourselves by surrendering to being who we truly are, not who we think we are. Many people, though, see the Guru as a resource, not a human being to be cared for. One problem with this attitude is that the goal of sadhana is to become the Guru, and if we don’t care about the human form of the Guru, we are not going to be so eager to become the Guru.

I have seen people living close to a Guru, even living in his house, not get what was actually going on. If we only live on a shallow level and take things in from there, we will think that what we see is all there is to it. We will fail to recognize the Guru for who he is. We will believe we see it all, and yet see so little.

In keeping with the two wings of the bird of paradise, we must welcome and cherish Grace while studying tradition and ourselves with diligence. We have to know the difference, in ourselves and others, between mere potential and hard-earned expertise. We have to know the difference between a mere posturer and an expert. We have to know the difference between a guru and the Guru. And we have to know the difference between a teacher and the Guru in human form. A teacher disseminates information; the Guru infuses information with actual experience of the Reality behind the information. A teacher is just an opening act for a real Guru.