Reveal thyself

There is a sort of situational irony that seems to happen the moment we reach a point of commitment. I can’t help but smile while thinking back on all the times I made a definitive decision to some particular food protocol or cleanse and then watched the unending lavish invitations begin to pile up, the dinners out and the gatherings and the parties, every one of them built around its own elaborate ritual of celebration and food. And I still laugh to this day over the secret formula industry joke in the acting world that if you really want to book a job, make an airplane reservation, a nonrefundable one, and almost in sync your agent will call with an outstanding audition opportunity or a booking timed with your departure.

A similar thread exists in my favorite line from A Course in Miracles, which says that love brings up everything unlike itself. Through my lived and growing understanding, I have come to see that if I commit to a path of love, if I decide to be an advocate for pure divine love, then everything that has lain dormant in my interior world, everything in the subconscious that has been conveniently unchecked and unthreatened, is suddenly given permission to swing the doors wide and bubble up. It isn’t to bring suffering into my advocacy, but to help me see that if I really want to be in integrity with what I am professing, with what I am leaning more deeply toward, then there remains untangling still to do, some shadow and resistant justification that needs to be noticed and recognized.

More than ten years ago now, on my first travels to India, I willingly let myself get lost within the ancient alleyways of Benares (officially known as Varanasi), one of civilization’s oldest inhabited cities, arriving, in what I can only describe as divine navigation, to an unassuming temple once the residence of 19th-century yogi Lahiri Mahasaya, now dedicated to Babaji and to Yogananda, and part of the famous lineage of Kriya Yoga that Paramahansa Yogananda brought to the West, a story he told beautifully in his classic Autobiography of a Yogi. If you know anything about that endless maze, you know it does feel like something divine has to lead you there. Wandering in and finding a mat for devotion, I kept gazing at the quotes framed on the walls. At the time I had no idea they were attributed to U.G. Krishnamurti. U.G. is not the same as the famed Jiddu Krishnamurti, but evolved as a critic of the devotional path and of meditation practices, with a jarring and anti-guru approach to awakening.

So I was quite surprised to learn that the words pictured below and hanging on the sacred walls of this Babaji temple are writings by U.G. merged with the Upanishads. Reviewing them again and again, I now recognize how strange it is to find the Yogananda lineage, with all its structure and devotion, having these merged words, so characteristically U.G., so counter to devotion itself.

Unless there is an awakening to the fact that a strange benevolent energy with a tremendous brightness of understanding encompasses every minute thing in the universe, there is no way one can come out of the cycle of birth and death. There is no other way, no other way, no other way. Unless the fact that the Unknown can never be known within the dimension of the apparatus, the mind one has got, there is no other way one can come out of the cycle of birth and death. There is nothing to be done. Just be.

So the paradox is even deeper than a counter-devotional voice hung in a devotional room. The panel takes the oldest devotional scripture, the Upanishads, and lets U.G., the man who spat on all of it, deliver it. I doubt the temple was being careless. I’d like to believe that whoever made these knew exactly what they were doing, hanging these particular words, the placement of U.G. Krishnamurti, in one of the most legacy-filled temples of the Yogananda tradition, a room built for devotion and meditation.

More now, within these current cyclically filled days of situational ironies, paradoxes, and seemingly unrelenting chaos, am I beginning to understand more deeply that the paradox is, and has always been, around me. Even contained within a photo of a quote I took more than ten years ago. And only now, after so many years on the devotional path, can I begin to respectfully hold the deeper awareness of paradox - that the words of U.G. are leading to the very same place, that at some point we must drop our control, our resistances, our carefully painted pictures.

I write this while moving through an arduous human quest of getting one Western medical department to speak to another, of honoring a body that has been uncharacteristically tired, of sitting with the things in it that are not yet resolved. Underneath all of it I do not want to lose the one question that finally matters. Can you trust that the benevolence is there always and in all ways?

And I see how much of what we commit to, whether it is a specialty diet, or a devotion to love, or a profession so tangled up in unpredictable timing and waiting, becomes the place where the outer world begins to dance a little playfully with all of our structure and all of our craving for outer resolve. Almost as if it leans in and says, so you want to see the strange benevolent energy, the tremendous brightness of understanding that encompasses every minute thing in the universe, even when every minute thing seems to be battling the very thing you long for? Then try this!

Because unless there is that moment’s pause, that willingness to just be and look at the circumstance, the situational irony and find the humor in it, find the paradox in it, see that nothing is actually working against me, then I will miss it. It is, as Ram Dass taught, grist for the mill, and I begin again to find the beauty and the blessing even in the apparent absences.

I recently walked the gardens at Yogananda’s original location on the Pacific Ocean in Encinitas, California, the grounds where he first built the Golden Lotus Temple and where he actually finished Autobiography of a Yogi. The temple itself is gone now, lost to the cliffs, but the gardens remain, and his writing room remains. I walked there, arriving at a kind of pinnacle point in the paradox of my health and the urge to spiral into fixing and grasping. I walked and stared out at the water and remembered Yogananda’s lesson to his students, to keep repeating the mantra, reveal thyself, reveal thyself.

There was something about my current physical condition, the cross-battling of different medical departments, the fatigue in my body, that summoned that particular teaching back to me. Yogananda’s version, reveal thyself now coupled with U.G.’s plain offering just be. So lately, as I go to bed and as I get up, committing myself again to the availability of solution, committing to stay open to whatever I am meant to move toward or be drawn to or work on, not only for this body but for the work at hand, it has all become simply reduced to that. I can pause, be and watch the meticulous revealings of the benevolent energy.

I look at the picture taken of me in that temple, my first year in India more than ten years ago, and I look at that quote on the wall, and the adventures that have widened, and the miles that have increased, and the peaks and valleys that keep rising and falling, just as they always will in this human world. And I remember there is no finish line. The ultimate paradox, perhaps, is that it is a pathless path, no protocol set in stone. There is only finding the voice, the passage, the teacher, the saying that will look at us plainly and remind us that unless there is an awakening to the fact that a strange benevolent energy with a tremendous brightness of understanding encompasses every minute thing in the universe, there is no way one can come out of this cycle of birth and death.

And so my current reveal thyself commitment is exactly that. To reveal the tremendous brightness of understanding. To stay open to the strange benevolent energy, the one that sometimes feels oppressive, that sometimes arrives as physical conflict, and that somehow, some way, keeps leading me to new vistas where I see again that all along the only thing to do was just be. There is no other way, no other way.