Still tripping on Bob's question about cognitive dissonance, I thought I'd rap for a few minutes in my neighborhood Zen garden about the value of *inviting* cognitive dissonance.
Maharishi's path -- as I see it...YMMV -- was largely a path based on sutra. There was a Big Book Of Rules (several, actually), and liberation was to be found in following them. Breaking them was Off The Program; even thinking about breaking them could lure you Off The Path. And, since we had all been told that it was the Highest Path, to court being "off" of it was spiritual bad news. You really didn't want to go there. I studied with a few teachers who were more tantric. They saw a value in rules, but also saw a value in breaking them every so often, to break oneself out of ruts, and to hopefully precipitate major shifts in one's state of attention. In the Rama trip, for example, there was a general rule that students didn't get involved romantically. It started as a rule to keep meetings from turning into cheap beer night at the All The Wrong Places Saloon, with everybody hitting on everybody else. But like all seekers in all times, many took a rule originally designed to keep meetings from becoming a meat market and tried to extrapolate from it bigger and better rules. Some decided to become celibate. Others avoided relationships like the plague, not only with other students, but period. Women began to avoid men in meetings and elsewhere, and vice-versa. It developed into what IMO was a fairly unhealthy dynamic, a rut. This dynamic was only considered a "rule" for a short time, but the effects of the overreactions to it lasted much longer. Some former Rama students carry this mindset with them to this day. Suffice it to say I was never one of them; I saw who I wanted to see and slept with who I wanted to, with the sole exception being any of my own students, during the time when I was teaching meditation. So the avoidance of sex or the avoidance of relationships never became much of a rut for me, and neither did its opposite. I wasn't a total horndog, like I'd been at times in the TMO, but I wasn't averse to a little fooling around, either. But some folks got really rut-ized behind all this stuff. When Rama noticed, he began to give talks on what he called "tantric inversions." That's where you take something you believe to be true -- a "rule" or a prescription for how someone "should" act as a serious student of enlightenment -- and go out and do the opposite. Just to see what happens. For example, there was one fellow who was the very model of spiritual diligence and one-pointedness. He did everything he was told to do, to the letter, and if you'd asked any of his fellow students, they would have put his photo in the yearbook labeled Most Likely To Become Enlightened. Yet I knew this guy, and got to hear some of his offline comments about how miserable and how "stuck" he felt in his spiritual progress. One day Rama walked up to him and out of the blue said, "You should go get laid." No pretty words, no beating about the bush, just "You should go get laid." The student in question had been celibate for years, so this advice, coming from the spiritual teacher whose advice he had thought he was following by being celibate, struck him as kinda odd. But, being in that bhakti "gotta do what Mastersez" mindstate, he did exactly what he was told. He stopped ignoring the cutie who'd been hitting on him for months where he worked, and asked her out. Try to imagine what a challenge "going on a date" must have been for someone who hadn't done it in years. Things progressed, and one night he...uh...followed his spiritual teacher's advice. The result? He flashed out while they were making love, and started having what TMers would consider #1 experiences, enlightened states of mind, 24/7. And they persisted. Go figure. Since sex and relationships were clearly not my particular rut, Rama had other tantric inversions in mind for me. Left to my own devices, I would have stayed a tech writer for years, working for a low salary, just enough to pay for my life. His challenge to me was to go out and double my salary, within a month. I considered it impossible, but I did it. It surprised the hell out of me, and broke what I had imagined as fixed boundaries that were limiting my life. As a result over the next few years I quadrupled my original salary, and more. Once the "rut" mentality of not making money had been broken -- once I'd gotten over the cognitive dissonance that still somewhere inside me considered earning money not consistent with earning spiritual brownie points -- I had no trouble continuing to do so. So I think there is a value in following rules. But I also think that there is a value in breaking them from time to time. That's one reason I have respect for those on this forum who have broken one of the cardinal rules of the TMO, "Thou shalt not date other spiritual teachers." Those of you who have done this, think back to the moment you first "saw another teacher." Was there some fear going down there? Were you terrified of being "found out" or reported to the Powers That Be? Did you think that maybe you were about to fuck up this whole incarnation and possible incarnations in the future, forever? But more important -- whether you liked the teacher or not -- how did you feel after the talk or satsang or whatever it was you attended? Didn't part of you feel liberated? Didn't you feel GOOD as a result of having made your *own* decision for once? I guess that my suggestion, bringing this back to Bob's original question, is that to some extent I think that this GOOD feeling happens as a result of *embracing* cognitive dissonance rather than denying that the dissonance exists, or trying to push it away. Sutra tells you one thing; but your own intuition -- an integral part of the path of tantra -- tells you another. Which do you follow? I think that there is a value from time to time in ignoring the sutra roadsigns that say "No Left Turn" and taking the path of tantra.
