Not a Guru

At the cable access channel I stopped out of curiosity. I had to know why this man was smiling—smiling in a way that I had never seen before. I later found out that the smiling man was Jacob, a spiritual teacher. He did look a little like the Buddha, I thought. But what was he doing? A woman asked him a question, and Jacob’s expression changed. The loving smile was replaced with an intense look, and I heard him ask the woman: What do you really want? She was complaining about not liking her job, but staying for the money. What do you really want? he asked again. If you only had one wish, what would it be? Jacob went on to tell a story of donkeyhood. Most people go through life living as donkeys do: they run away from the stick, and run towards the carrot. Most of us spend our time running away from our fears and running towards our desires. I certainly had spent my life doing that. My biggest fear was not having money, and I had done everything in my power to make sure that I had money. And with this money I chased so many desires! But none of these desires had brought me happiness. Jacob pointed to the possibility of stopping acting like a donkey. What if you turned around and met your fears? What if you didn’t move towards your desires? The possibility was to break out of the life of a donkey—a life of suffering—and instead live a life of freedom. This was the way Home. It was pretty simple. You had to take all of your desires and put them into one desire: the desire for freedom, for truth, for awakening. My mind didn’t understand everything he said, but my heart did. I knew that I was hearing Truth, with a capital T. It was very simple really. All you had to do was: 1. Tell the truth, always. Not just tell the truth to others. It was even more important to tell the truth to yourself. The truth was that I hated working in the business world, and I only did it for the money and the prestige. The truth was that I really wanted to rest; I didn’t want to work. The truth was that I was tired of the rat race. 2. Stop telling your story. We all like to talk about ourselves, analyze things, discuss how we’ve been hurt, talk about our wounds. What if we didn’t spend our energy doing that? What if I stopped telling my story of how my husband left me, how I went through all my money, how I couldn’t find a job, how afraid I was of becoming homeless? 3. Meet what’s here. What if I didn’t spend my time rehashing the past or worrying about the future? What if I just felt the fear? The interesting thing is that the fear dissipated when I just felt it, instead of trying to suppress it or indulging in expressing it. 4. Find out who you really are. One by one many of my identities had dropped away. I was no longer the wife or the successful business woman. So who was I really, at the deepest level? What was it about me that never changed? This is how a New York woman of Greek descent, with an MBA and over twenty years of business experience, met her spiritual teacher.