I was driving and listening to Alan Watts the other day. Thank Shiva for podcasts! He was speaking of a peculiarity of the relationship between a Zen teacher and a would-be disciple. It illuminated one of the sticking points I have been grappling with for a while in my current path, the emerging face of Advaita Vedanta.
To whit: The persistent insistence by most vedanta teachers to claim that there is, in truth, no problem to all the seekers who come to listen to them in hopes that they will get help for their problem – the core of dissatisfaction/suffering that seems ubiquitous in their individual lives and the world at large.
Random Un-named Teacher: “Hello. What can I do for you?”
Random Anonymous Truth Seeker: “I am lost and don’t know who I am. I keep getting into all these situations that suck. My life is suffering. It seems the world is arrayed against me. My plate is full of things which I can’t find the time to work on because my plate is too full. I’ve read all the books. I know the teachers say I am perfectly okay as I am…”
R.U.T. : “That’s true, you are.”
R.A.T.S.: “But, I’ve got all these problems…”
R.U.T.: “Do you? Where are these problems now? If you look right here and now you won’t find any problem at all. In point of fact there are no problems anywhere to be found. There are just circumstances.”
R.A.T.S.: “But, I just told you that I have all these problems.”
R.U.T.: “No, you don’t, you are as you are now, and the problems you refer to are just concepts and memories you are clinging to. In truth you don’t have a problem, and never have.”
R.A.T.S.: “Yes, I do.”
R.U.T.: “No, you don’t.”
R.A.T.S.: “Do.”
R.U.T.: “Don’t.”
The teacher sees no problems anywhere. The seeker knows they have problems and if they didn’t they would not be a seeker in the first place. On, and on it goes. The trouble here is not that one of the parties is right and the other wrong. The difficulty is that they are both right.
Were it not for the existence of problems the teacher and seeker would not be interacting at all. If there was an actual problem, there would be no uprooting of the basic suffering of life.
I was at a talk with Paul Hedderman recently and he shared a quote from a woman he had spoken with on the phone. It is a good summation of the basic issue: “My difficulty is that life is how it is, and I think it could be different.”
Most of us get stuck in the “and I can make it different” version of that formula and hence I have a problem. What is happening could be different and could be more in accord with what I want/need.
The person who has looked into their true nature/being inevitably comes to see their lack of any separation with what is. That includes what is happening. They realize that things are as they are at the moment, and cannot be any different. That does not mean that they won’t be different later. That does not mean they cannot work toward making a more whole and complete presentation of reality a greater likelihood. That does not mean they don’t work toward a better tomorrow. What it does mean is that they take up no fight with how things are in this moment. A problem cannot exist when reality is seen to be absolutely as it is, with no possibility of being anything other than what it is.
So we are left with this satsang comedy routine: The person who knows there is no problem anywhere to be found coming to give a talk/experience to help the folks who come to the event bearing their problems squarely on their backs.
There is a problem, and it is that people are stuck carrying problems around. That is the root trouble and the one that any given path tries to get at.
