Brian: I am NOT the Messiah
Arthur: I say you are, Lord, and I should know. I’ve followed a few.

(Monty Python, Life of Brian)

Me too. Followed a few. Didn’t call any of them “messiah” (from “anointed” — the deliverer of the Jews) or Lord. They had names like Jeff, Ray, Pitaka, Seung Sahn, Baba (Hari Das), Osha, Les, Bhante, Stephen, Easwaran, Reshad, Karen. None of them saved me. Or maybe they did — I wrote recently that I honor my teachers by ignoring them.

Spiritual teachers — who have to eat and pay the rent like the rest of us — are businesspeople, no more or less than financial advisers and physicians. I went to them for the same reason I’d consult a stockbroker or doctor: to gain some expert knowledge that I believed would make me happier, less anxious. Unlike brokers or doctors, though, it seems to me now that spiritual teachers have nothing to offer. They’re selling an imaginary product, be it happiness, serenity, understanding, meaning or freedom. None of which actually exist, in any final form, certainly nothing that ultimately satisfies. More happiness, perhaps (but probably not — we’re wired to survive and reproduce, not to be happy), but never “Happiness, period. I’m done. Now I’m happy.” Whatever it is they’re selling is always a carrot in the future. A successful spiritual teacher keeps alive the promise of more of the good stuff still to come. But that good stuff is forever out of reach.

(This is meant as no slur on such teachers — all they have to sell is hope, as much to themselves as to their students, and in a free market economy, they’re catering to our desires.)

Suppose — as I believe — this is as good as it gets, and that there isn’t anything to “get,” nothing to achieve, no lasting happiness. And that all the talk of happiness, eternal life (god, how boring!), bliss, life’s meaning is a chimera. Suppose, instead, that “Life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced,” as Kierkegaard put it. That what’s holding us back from life’s reality is the hope (“the worst of evils” — Nietzsche) of better things to come. In this way of thinking, it’s the search itself that’s the problem. The very best we can do is: nothing.

For years (and years) I believed that unhappiness was “a disease from which we are suffering and of which we need to be cured.” (Barry Magid) Instead of simply (!) accepting that unhappiness is built into the system, and that discontent — our chronic desire for more or different — is nature’s way of keeping us alive. The ancient savannah-dweller who was content with the status quo had a short genetic tree. Those who worried — where the next meal was coming from, whether the tribe across the river would attack, if the water hole would dry up — were the ones whose genes we ended up with.

Cue UG: “When hoping and attempting to understand is not there, then life becomes meaningful. Life, your existence, has a tremendous living quality about it. All your notions about love, beatitude, infinite bliss, and peace only block this natural energy of existence.”