Letting It Drop

Or, Life is better when you're dead

It is a paradox: when we go to our gurus, saints and Mahatmas, we pray so that our baggage will feel light and relaxing; we do not pray that it be removed from our heads. The things that cause all our troubles, these very things we beg from our guru and our divinity.

~ Mahabrabhu Aghoreshwar Baba Bhagwan Ram

The past year and more has been deeply humbling for me in pretty much every single area, and in ways which I have not been able to articulate to the people in my life. My identity has been breaking down day by day as I am forced to re-evaluate who — and what — I really am and might be.The greatest humiliation is the realization that one's experience is not unique. There truly is nothing new under the Sun. But why do we care so much? My suffering is not unprecedented, and this realization causes new (and, ironically, equally precedented) suffering. The moment I acknowledge this, I have a choice: I can insist upon my uniqueness and hold tightly to my mental pain, or I can just… drop it. Drop it and be done.

Leaving a cult or a toxic group is a depressingly common experience. Not depressing because the person gets out, but because it's so easy to get pulled in in the first place. Far smarter people than I have found themselves in the same position. Yet, getting out is an opportunity akin to the one you get on graduating from high school or getting out of a serious relationship — a couple of damning parallels indeed! We get, at those times, to redefine ourselves. Or, if we're smart, to loosen our self-definitions altogether.

Separating from a teacher and lineage is like death. Just like death, it comes of necessity when conditions compound and, while it may be a painful process, it brings relief. And also like death, it brings opportunities for great enlightenment to those who are able to remain aware throughout. It can also, unfortunately, cause conflicting feelings in those left behind. One can only hope that they find their own opportunities through their witnessing.

The greatest opportunity in all this is evaluating what it is you actually care about. Did I ask for initiation because I wanted to have the identity and perceived legitimacy of Nath-hood, or because I saw it as a route to liberation? Well, being honest, it was both. That sort of self-honesty allowed me to separate those two and ask, “Which one is more important?” The answer was very simple: I would sacrifice all shallow social identities and questionable legitimacy for the opportunity to be once again a simple yogi. Do I have a new guru? That's a detail only of interest to myself; if, at this phase, I made a show out of ot and the seeming legitimacy-by-proxy that it lent me in some circles, I’d once again lose my simplicity, I’d be right back where I was. And that's too high a price to pay, trading authenticity for respectability. It's a mistake I plan never to make again.

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