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On a sunny Saturday in Santa Cruz,
California twenty years ago I experienced one of the most instructive
disappointments of my life. It began with signing up for a workshop with
a mystical teacher whom I knew only through his books and the glowing
reports of a friend who had spent a few months in the teacher's esoteric
school.
At the time I was hardly living a
spiritual life. Having ended my fledgling career as an investigative
reporter a few years earlier, I was running my own graphics business and
dreaming of the day I would have enough money saved to write full-time.
Unfortunately I was a break-even businessman at best, and I didn't
know what I would write about anyway. So it seemed I was working hard to
go nowhere, and my life sometimes seemed pointless.
While I kept telling myself and my
friends that I was going to the spiritual workshop on a lark, I was
privately imagining a much more dramatic scenario. Somehow I expected
this teacher to notice and confront me -- to deliver some kind of
spiritual shock that would finally get my life going in the right
direction. In short, I anticipated that I would get all shook up. And
something deep within me said that it was about time.
But nothing turned out the way I
expected. From the very beginning of the day, I felt like I'd dropped in
on a New Age revival meeting peopled mostly by the teacher's veteran
students. As a newcomer I received lots of attention, but I sensed an
agenda of attracting new students for the teacher's school. The teacher
didn't show up for the first couple hours so I had to listen to a series
of syrupy testimonials about how wonderful he was. And when he did show
up he looked and sounded drunk -- slurring his words and rambling
incoherently about spiritual ideas he had expressed more clearly in his
books. The day turned into one long, expensive exercise in absurdity.
Driving home that evening I was furious, alternately cursing and
laughing about what a waste of time the workshop had been.
Strangely enough, I stayed angry about
this experience for months. My life hadn't been changed by the workshop,
and I just couldn't let go of my disappointment. Then one day it hit me:
I was all shook up! The workshop had delivered a tremendous spiritual
shock after all by demonstrating an unexpected lesson: Do not expect
others to do your spiritual work for you. When I attended another of the
teacher's workshops about a year later -- this time with much lower
expectations -- it turned out to be one of the most insightful
experiences of my life. The teacher seemed steady, sensible, even
brilliant. To this day I wonder who had changed more since I first saw
him -- the teacher or myself?
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