Buddha, Deida, Self-Improvement, and Self-Love Pt. 2
Love of Self and Discernment
The greatest gift Hridaya has given me is the ability to love myself. At Hridaya, I have learned to peer into my own heart, and like what I see. At my core, I am gentle, sweet, and wise. I am worthy of love, and capable of giving it. Everything in life changes when you love yourself, because then you don’t need to achieve anything. Everything is a bonus to you! If you look, you see this distinction in every walk of life: some people go to the gym because they love themselves, and want to move their bodies about; others go because they hope to look so good in the mirror that they finally fall in love with themselves. Some people work because they have gifts they want to share; others think that if they have more money or success they will love themselves better for it. Some people meditate because they want to sit closer to Grace; others think that only enlightenment would be a good enough excuse to love the person they are.
At twenty-one, I did not love myself. I came to David Deida, as I came to everything, seeking salvation, and threw myself in blindly. Now I love myself better, and I am not in such a rush. I have time to pick through things, and see if they fit me. Every theory is internally consistent, every cult is righteous if you interpret it through the matrix of its own teachings. I am not as smart as I think, and my mind is prone to illusions. I need a compass to help me navigate the world of self-improvement. The compass I have developed is this: with everything I read, and everything I hear, I ask myself: Does this sound like love?
In the teachings of David Deida, many things do sound like love. Looking into someone’s eyes and opening the front of your body when you talk to them sounds like love. Listening into someone, and feeling with them, is sympathy, which is love. That a man should honour a woman, and give himself completely to the people near to him, sounds like love. That he should give his gifts to life unstintingly is love, too.
But the rigidity of Deida’s gender roles always sounds a bit fishy to me. The idea that a woman is just a helpless bundle of irrational feelings who needs a man to steer her through life sounds like condescension. That a woman should always be testing the man in her life sounds like war. That a man should punish himself for not being Unflinchingly Present does not sound like love, nor does it sound like love that a woman should demand such Presence from him.
Love vs Romance
In We, Robert Johnson makes a distinction between love and romance. He says that romance is the projection of our own divinity onto another human, which is a magical and noble thing, but inevitably leads to disappointment. At some point, you discover that the person you believed a god is just a human being. Only then, says Johnson, can you start to love them: to seek out and find the divinity in them, instead of admiring the divinity you have splashed onto them. He calls this love ‘stir-the-oatmeal love’: a mundane, unglamorous, human thing that makes human life worth living.
Most new-age teachings about gender, polarity and relationships seek to enhance romance, not love. You transfigure your partner into a goddess; you cultivate your feminine essence, and enliven your sex life; but at no point do you learn to live contentedly with a human being, do the dishes, pay taxes, squabble, get stressed, go on holiday, have dinner, and love through all of it. There are no courses teaching that. It’s not Hollywood enough to interest us.
In Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, Chogyam Trungpa describes a form of spiritual dead-end in which an aspirant’s humdrum life must constantly be refreshed by states of spiritual ecstasy. I see a parallel phenomenon in the relationships of Deida devotees: they co-exist in a state of tension that must constantly be relieved by intense experiences of union. Intense experiences are all well and good, and can certainly nourish a relationship, but they do not constitute a relationship in themselves. Cracks always seem to appear in such relationships. Human needs arise which cannot be washed away by orgasms. Deidaists are bound to each other not as people, but as embodiments of archetypes. Inevitably they leave each other, and seek for the archetypes elsewhere, where there is less concomitant drama.
Relationship Beyond Ideas of “Man” or “Woman”
This is a shame, I think, because romantic relationships, more than anything else, offer us an opportunity to meet ourselves. Relationships call forth our dragons. A relationship is not a theatre in which to perform a rôle; it is a forum in which to love and grow. There is no script for a relationship; it is something improvised between two people who love each other. Sometimes they’re happy together, sometimes there’s tension; sometimes one listens, sometimes one needs to talk; sometimes you hold the other’s world together; at other times, you have to let yourself break down. There are no rules in a relationship; the only guidelines are that you must be honest, you must forgive, and you must try to see the other’s divinity.
Ultimately, we don’t want Unflinching Presence, we don’t want Passion, and we don’t need to be Sexy Women or Big Men; we want love. Love is something you find when you dig into yourself. And I’m afraid that if you spend all your time swaggering about saying ‘I’m A Man, I’m A Man’, you don’t do much digging.
I am reminded of a lady who told Jean Klein she worried she was not woman enough. Jean Klein answered that if she forgot about being a woman, the true woman would appear. If she brought herself unreservedly to every situation, then she would react exactly as was required. If a child cried, she would be its mother. If someone needed help holding a ladder, she would be their neighbour. If someone was going through a difficult time, she would be a friend. If a spark flew between her husband and her, sexuality would flourish. But sexuality would not be their only bond. Some nights, she would lie in bed with her husband’s head in her lap, stroking his hair, and telling him about the queue at Tesco.
David Deida encourages us to build identities. If I am a man, I must be Present and Decisive. If I am a woman, I must be sensual and flowy. I end up carrying my gender about like a shell. My personality grows rigid, and I lug it from place to place. It’s facile, of course, but it’s also exhausting. I suffer under the weight of my own rules. If I am honest, I must eventually admit that I’m trying to protect myself. And when the weight of it all gets too much, and I grow more tired than I am afraid, at last I drop my shell, and face the world naked. I empty myself, and let the shapes dance. I let myself be, just as I let the sunrise be. Effortlessly, I find myself, and because it is effortless, I like it. At the end of a long and trying road, I start to love myself. It would all be so much easier if I just loved myself from the start.
Loving ourselves is the goal, but the goal is just the beginning. Life starts on the other side. Shunryu Suzuki said, “Each of you is perfect the way you are, and you could all use a little improvement.” Life is an endless process of development; at the same time, because it is endless, it has no goal. There is no pressure: we just do our best, puttering along, taking one step at a time, growing with each step, and at every step perfect. That is life’s lovely paradox.
We Cannot Pretend Our Way to Heaven
My girlfriend does not like David Deida. She sees truth in what he writes, but reading it makes her skin creep. Deida strikes me as that most unpleasant of all people: the calculating man, the conniver, the one who lives inside a pompous balloon, hemmed in by mirrors, aware of others only in relation to himself, constantly measuring social vectors, and pretending, always pretending, even to himself. His concept of love is selfish; he encourages men to use women as pawns in a war of self-approval. He is an unnatural man, someone who imitates what he thinks he should be. He keeps the world at arm’s length; mimics life, but does not mingle. He has developed a science of appearing natural. No doubt he is comfortable speaking to a crowd, but probably struggles chatting about football on the bus. Everything is a show for him, a performance projected on the screen he erected long ago, before he can remember, to protect himself from being seen. He is a Pied Piper who sings not to men’s greatness, but their insecurity. He calls out to the part of man that wants to be complete already, invulnerable, impervious, aloof from life’s pettiness. Most men dread the quagmire of living, and long to slip off to a place where everything is already done for us. But we cannot sneak back to Eden; we must carry on to Jerusalem! To get there, we have to cross our own desert. Spiritual bypassing consists of skipping over who we are in our rush to be who we might become. We have to start with ourselves, as we are. We cannot pretend our way to Heaven.
Jung said “a man cannot get rid of himself in favour of an artificial personality without punishment. Even the attempt to do so brings on, in all ordinary cases, unconscious reactions in the form of bad moods, affects, phobias, obsessive ideas, backslidings, vices, etc. The social strongman is in his private life often a mere child where his own states of feeling are concerned; his discipline in public (which he demands quite particularly of others) goes miserably to pieces in private.”
The Way of the Superior Man builds such flimsy strongmen. It reads like a guidebook on relationships for people who don’t know how to relate, who don’t feel safe in the eyes of other people and want to build walls of false certainties to protect themselves from the mess of being alive. It talks to that angry little boy who considers every instance of the world opposing his will an attempted castration, and longs to throw a tantrum so big it shatters everything. And it appeals to the part of men that feels threatened by women, that wants to be in a relationship with a muse or a Sybil, but not an equal. It calls out to men who are afraid to be uncertain and weak, but those men are often the weakest of all of us. There is no humility in this book; only vainglory and conceit.
It is not easy to become a man. It takes years and decades of trying and failing, breakthrough and error. You can’t just puff up like a sparrow and pretend to be a big shot. You must be ground down, chewed up and regurgitated. You must be tenderised and softened, worn down to a nub. A real man is humble, kind, as gentle as a summer breeze, and so strong he no longer feels the need to prove it. If David Deida can guide you along the path to becoming that man, then I encourage you to follow him. But you must be honest with yourself about what you hope to find in his teachings. And I would advise you to take him with a grain of salt, if only to keep the taste of sleaze out of your mouth.
Alistair is a student and blog contributor.
