A Takeaway for 2023: Are You Seeking Relief or Are You Seeking Shelter?

My Dear Upbuild Community,

I've become much more sensitive to the subtlety of inexhaustible suffering in this world. It’s something I’ve carefully avoided paying too much attention to for fear that it would impede upon my own happiness.

Where I’ve given some room for indulgence into seeing the suffering is in making sure that I’m not an unthinking, unfeeling, ignorant person. For that, I could afford to care about the suffering of others. And the truth is, I’ve always been naturally so sensitive to anyone’s pain as I’m so sensitive to my own. I could never stand that anyone would have to suffer. Which actually made it easier to turn away from suffering toward my own happiness and the pursuit of that, because I really can’t stand seeing or feeling or thinking about the alternative. So better to focus on something less morbid.

As I’ve aged it’s become harder to escape the reality that everyone is suffering to some degree, grossly or subtly, acutely, or silently, consciously, or unconsciously. Our egos always make us suffer and always make others suffer. That’s the law of this world until we cross beyond our own egos.

I’ve been through a monastery in my most formative years. I’ve come out of the monastery for more formative years. I’ve watched the world get older. I’ve watched myself get older. I’ve seen so much pain outside of me and I’ve seen so much pain inside of me, especially from the dreaded Inner Critic we all house within us. There’s really no escape. Besides, I’ve done my best to swear off all the anesthetics long ago. Not just with my strict monastic practices of renunciation externally. But also with the subtler internal approach of drowning out pain through happiness.

Whenever I was down, I used to go out to a movie. That would make it all better. Live a little fantasy for a little while. See some friends. Do something fun. Or go out for drinks and be wild. Or travel and do something exciting. Or contribute something awesome. I’ve done all that in more permutations than I can account for. It doesn’t address my own pain, nor anyone else’s. It’s simply a diversion.

To be steeped in and soaking up pain 100% of the time is not advisable. But making a coping mechanism out of little escapes is not advisable either. And that does sharply solidify into an approach. Let us not fool ourselves into thinking it’s just an innocent, human, little thing. Our little habit of little escapes becomes who we are. Escapists. In fact, my guru, Sacinandana Swami, asks a simple question to convey the implications of this most ubiquitous methodology for dealing with this most ubiquitous experience of life.

Are you seeking shelter or are you seeking relief?

We all must face our share of stress, pain, and fear. There are enough challenges to life without the fact that we will end up losing all whom we care about as well as our own bodies and minds. We won’t be able to take anything with us when we die. How we deal with that reality determines the quality of our lives as well as the quality of our deaths.

Relief is short-lived. Small. Insignificant. Unable to stand the test of time. Unable to touch the vastness of the real self, which is eternal, spiritual, and unsatisfied with any temporal material experience you give it.

I myself have always been a proponent of long-term thinking over short-term thinking. I realize I’ve not actually grasped the depth of what that means. We have to follow the trail to its proper end.

The longest-term thinking is the best thinking, which is the opposite of eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die. It’s living life in preparation for death, as I wrote about in the 2021 Takeaway “Die Before Dying.” It’s being willing to stare death in the face. Seeing our limits and choosing to outlive them by investing in the real self which does not die when the body dies.

It’s giving our everything to our spiritual practice, our sanga or connection with those who can help us on the path of self-realization, and service to all living beings as dear souls, not even discriminating amongst species. Then everything becomes precious.

It’s not creating innumerable throwaway moments. Or memories that won’t travel with us beyond the death that so soon knocks upon our door.

Relief will absolutely never benefit us the way we crave inside. Choosing comfort, familiarity, safety, worldliness, the path we all take which leads only to more suffering when our bodies and minds stop functioning, is really no way to live. Who wants to live for the fleeting, flickering, insubstantial? Most of us say we love life, and especially that we love people, but who would want to give up something or someone if they are truly loving? How can we say it's okay to give them up if we actually love them? That's by definition not loving. It’s only our coping mechanisms that make us go the way of rationalization that the temporary is beautiful. Deep down, we all long for the lasting, steady, substantial. The soul will never let us get away with settling for anything less, no matter how many little escapes we try to heap on it. Whatever the hit of pleasure or the absence of pain, relief just doesn’t work.

And yet, it’s an addiction that we justify through the ideology of empiricism (that what is real is only what I can see) and constantly nurture through our everyday habits. At the cost of what we’re really after. Shelter.

Life is a constant storm of challenges. It tempts us into a game of whack-a-mole. Firefighting. Or cutting the hydra’s head for two more to grow back. Again and again. Ad infinitum. This is what Camus was pointing to with The Myth of Sisyphus. We roll the boulder up the mountain each day only to do it all over again the next day.

While we must address the challenges of life head-on, it will serve us infinitely more to do so with the broader context of who we are and our ultimate reality. Entropy thus turns into intentionality. Temporality into transcendentality. In this way, life is made magical with new, ever-increasing meaning.

Taking shelter means running toward refuge not diversion. Running toward the only real shelter, the only thing that provides lasting, substantive, protection from the storm of the material. The spiritual is the only thing capable of giving true shelter. But forever busy in search of infinite forms of relief, we dismiss the only actual shelter.

To deal with an endless relief-seeking addiction requires an honest admission. I’m an addict. I’m dependent. I don’t have it all figured out. And I need help. This is the AA mindset that has helped countless addicts and what Gabor Mate declares we can’t afford to think doesn’t apply to us, whether we’re substance abusers or straight-edged. But amidst our addiction to temporality, suppression, and escapism, today I find the distinction between shelter and relief that Sacinandana Swami illuminates to be more vital than ever.

How will we know who we really are if we forever settle for relief? The approach of taking shelter in the true self is a night and day difference. It’s one that I’m feverishly trying and praying and seeking guidance to cultivate with greater and greater effect.

As I reflect back on this year and how my mind has worked through the course of it, I can see how subtly I seek relief. Yes, I’ve given up many external habits. But have I really given up the mentality that binds me to my ego and all temporality?

I found myself more often than not hesitant to pick up my meditation beads, practically wishing for some diversion. Amping up my sense of urgency to do many other genuinely urgent things. Creating highly reasonable and good justifications that steered me away from the core of what connects me with me. Again and again.

If I just do this one thing, I’ll feel a little better. If I just do that one thing, I’ll feel a little better. My head will be clearer. I’ll be more focused. It will only take two minutes. Five minutes. 30 seconds. 30 minutes. Moreover, one thing I’ve realized about this material world is that everything always takes longer than you think! And creates momentum where context-switching gets harder and harder. What to speak of if it involves a screen. Or another human being. Especially if you want to do it well, genuinely connected, with your heart and soul.

Because I’m blessed to have found a higher taste in serving rather than wanting some flickering stimulation and because I find the spiritual more satisfying than the material, there’s a safety net that I have which I pray always remains. That is the grace of my guru’s teaching and example which has impacted and transformed me to this point. But if I don’t want to get stuck where I am, I better change. If I want to actually realize the self in full, not partially or theoretically or ethereally, then I better change. To use a framing that my guru directed at me when I was a monk which I can never forget:

Pick up an axe and carve out your life. Not tomorrow. Not the day after. Now.

I decided the popular adage of “first things first” deserves some fresh attention. I’ve found there’s a lot more to be gleaned by re-examining this principle if we look harder. By getting the rush of taking care of something, being active, being dynamic, experiencing relationship, knocking something off my to do list, creating plans that make me feel organized and give me something to look forward to, I’m putting the cart before the horse! These are fantastic things to do. Necessary things to do. Nourishing things to do. Spiritual things to do if done with a spiritual motivation as I earnestly try. But I’m clutching to them as a crutch because I’m too pained to think about confronting my uncontrolled mind in meditation. Too enmeshed in the stress of life to follow the impulse of grasping at relief. I do my practices as staunchly as I know how every day, without fail, yet I still manage to rob myself of greater gains.

And that seemingly tiny, human, forgivable, justifiable delay of my practice, is the symptom of something so much larger. Something that I came into the world with and I came to the path of self-realization with. An addiction to relief that dies hard.

So do I think I’ve found my fix and I’m soon to be done with all relief? No. It’s not so easy! But am I onto myself? Yes. Will I work through this? Yes. Will I make progress in 2024? I certainly hope so! I already began at the end of 2023 rethinking things and trying new habits that have profoundly affected my well-being. Just a few little glimpses into what that looks like: Putting more faith that if I fulfill my commitments to my practices and needs for spiritual nourishment first through mantra meditation and reading sacred texts, I'll be better equipped to serve everyone and do all I feel called to do in service. Not doing certain things after 9:30 p.m. as far as I have control over. And endeavoring as far as possible not to organize myself, get on my laptop, plan, or answer messages until I've completed my practices.

First things first really works. It’s not a miracle that ends the game of whack-a-mole or cuts every hydra head. The stress, pain, and fear will still live. But this approach is an immeasurable boon that leads us out of the suffering we keep running from.

Then taking shelter of 1. our spiritual practices, 2. the sanga of fellow journeyers who can support us to self-realization, and 3. service to all with a divine lens, brings us something extraordinary. Then, in spite of all the ups and downs, the summit we long for of living as the real self comes more and more into reach. Then nothing will be able to shake us from our steady ascent to that most glorious destination. Nothing will be able to divert us. We’ll be fixed in determination and carried by grace. Sheltered. Fully secure, at peace, and enthusiastic, through everything life throws at us and beyond. For this, I’ve seen enough from those who’ve made it, and gotten enough tiny, mounting tastes of my own, to have complete conviction.

What will you do now to move from seeking relief to seeking shelter?