Part one ended at the edge of a small square. The four rooms, the line and the corner at 100 and 100 all fit inside it, and then the square shrank to a small gray box in a map a thousand by a thousand. Part two said what the rest of that map is, the road back to remembering that we are one, and step 5 said that what a life gathers carries over, so nobody has to finish the road in one life. Life moves all of us along it anyway, slowly, through the mirror and the turn. It is patient about it. If your life is going well and feels well, you have no need of a method. A method is a way to do on purpose, and faster, what life does slowly.
This part is about walking the whole road in one life, past the small square and into the large one, until we are free of our own limitations. As far as I can see, that comes down to conditions, and I count eight. When all eight are in a person’s life, finishing the road is a realistic plan. When one of them is missing, it gets very, very hard, and each section below says why.
I’m not inviting you to my school, or to anyone’s. The old traditions built every one of these conditions long before us, and they can be found or built in many places. What I’m inviting you to do is think about them, see why each one helps, and notice which ones your own life already has.
The order goes from what only you can supply, through the daily work, to what comes from other people. The wish comes first for everyone. After that the order shifts from person to person, because people arrive from different places.
1. Your wish, and your yes
Think of a time you really decided something: a move, a new job, a person. Before it, every day was a small debate. After it, the days started to line up, and things you had been putting off began to happen almost on their own.
That yes stands on a wish, and the wish is the one condition in this part nobody else can supply. Part two said the whole handed the steering to each point of view, and if you accept that, then nobody can start the return for you. A mentor can point, and friends can lift you, and none of them can want it for you.
People come for all kinds of reasons, and the reasons often change along the way. Some come with questions, such as why we exist and whether this is all there is. Some want to stay calm when the inbox explodes, and to stop replaying the same old conversation on the drive home. Some simply can’t sleep, or are worn out, and want to feel better, which is reason enough to start. And some want to do more with their lives and be someone the people closest to them can lean on. Which one is yours matters less than that it is really yours.
From people's lives · 10 examplesWhat if I’m not sure?
- From the outside:
- For driven people it is usually a crash: burnout, a body that stops cooperating, or a depression that lands right after the goal is reached.
- Something happens to someone close, a relative in the hospital or a partner’s betrayal. Values shift, and for some people that is where this begins.
- Sometimes there is nothing left to try. The founder in Part one kept building up tension until the old way stopped working, and out of options went on a retreat.
- Some meet someone who has what they want. My teacher did, in his teens.
- For one friend of mine it was a single talk. After years of trying everything spiritual, my friend decided it was all nonsense and went into business, and within months felt empty. One talk by my teacher was enough to sense at once that the point was the middle of Part one’s chart, letting go and action together.
- From the inside:
- Some start with questions, the kind that ask why things are the way they are and why we are the way we are.
- Some feel an emptiness that results can’t reach. For me it showed up whenever I had time to myself, and it made the weekends the worst part of the week.
- Others have nothing to complain about. Nothing crashed and everything works, and a quiet question shows up anyway: is this all there is?
- Some reach a plateau, years of calm and comfort with nothing changing, until the calm itself starts to feel pointless.
- And some only feel that something is off. They can’t say what, and there is no event to point at.
It makes no difference whether a person comes through the outside or the inside. Some understand with the mind that this is what they need. Others don’t understand it at first, but they feel it, or they feel that something is not right. Each of the eight billion people alive is unique, and so is the way each of them arrives. How someone comes to this has no effect on how ready they are for it. One of the students I take a lot of personal example from started because sleep would not come. That was the only reason meditation mattered to begin with, and the idea itself met years of resistance. Today I count that student among the most exemplary people I know.
A wish is the wanting, and a decision is the yes that goes with it, the moment the wanting becomes a direction. It can be quiet, a sentence you say to yourself on an ordinary evening. What it gives you is a kind of freedom. You no longer have to bargain with yourself every morning about whether today counts, and the energy that bargaining took goes into living. Many traditions call this the greatest victory there is, the one over yourself, and it often feels like putting down something heavy you had been carrying for years.
From the traditions · 5 passagesThe greatest victory
- In the Dhammapada the supreme conqueror is the one who conquers a single person, himself, and the verse sets that above winning a battle against a million. Another verse says no god, and not even Mara, the tempter of the Buddhist stories, can undo the victory of someone who has tamed themselves (103 to 105).
- In Pirkei Avot Ben Zoma asks who is mighty, a word that can also mean hero, and answers: the one who subdues his inclination. He backs it with Proverbs, which says it is better to have self-control than to conquer a city (4:1, quoting Proverbs 16:32).
- The Jain Uttaradhyayana has almost the same verse as the Dhammapada. King Nami has given up his throne, and Indra, king of the gods, in the guise of a brahmin, tells him that a true warrior would bring every prince who does not acknowledge him into subjection. Nami answers that a man may conquer thousands and thousands of valiant foes, and greater will be his victory if he conquers nobody but himself (chapter 9).
- The Daodejing says that whoever overcomes others is strong, and whoever overcomes himself is mighty (33).
- A hadith in Sahih al-Bukhari reports the Prophet saying that the strong one is the one who controls himself while in anger, which he sets against overcoming people by strength (6114).
The wish has its days. Nearly everyone has days with a lift and days with a slump, and a low day is no ranking of who is better or worse. It’s a day, and days change. The wish also grows. A goal you love, sitting in the background of everything, feeds it, and a bigger wish crowds out smaller ones, so you don’t have to fight the small ones one at a time. What drains it fastest is feeling sorry for yourself, which everyone does, and a half-wish that changes its mind every Tuesday about how much it’s willing to give.
Without the wish none of the other seven conditions can start. So ask yourself, quietly, how much you want this, and take the answer as information. Whatever it says, nothing is wrong with you. Do something concrete, and say yes again tomorrow.
2. A goal, and a reason
Anything that moves needs two things, energy and direction. A car with plenty of fuel and no steering is a bomb with a radio. A car with a perfect map and no fuel is a very well informed parked car. The wish is the fuel, and a goal is the steering.
Part two’s step 4 said that after the turn the old moves stop working, and that the direction gets reported over months, by the compass of how fulfilled or bleak a life feels. A compass needs something outside you to check against. So you set outer goals, and you judge the inner growth by them.
A good goal has three properties. It’s short, meaning weeks or months. It’s measurable, so at the end you can say yes or no. And it’s tied to reality, so it lives in the world and not in your head. Plan the family trip for the summer. Finish a draft of an essay. The outer result is the check on the inner work, because it’s very easy to feel like you’re growing when nothing around you has moved. A calm sit feels like progress whether or not anything has changed, and a goal lets you test it. It also gets your energy moving: a goal you care about pulls effort out of you that plain willpower never would.
Behind each goal sits a reason, and the reason is what keeps you going after the first excitement wears off. The goal can be small as long as the reason is bigger than you, which is the pull from Part one. You plan the family trip because you want your kids to grow up feeling that home is a warm place. You finish the draft because someone out there may need what is in it.
One caution, since the outer goals can turn on you. Results are how you check the work. They are an indicator and never the aim. If you start chasing them for their own sake, you’ve rebuilt the Driven room with better vocabulary. And without a goal at all, the inner work has nothing to be checked against, and it can feel like growth for years while nothing moves.
3. Discipline
Part two’s step 2 ended on a pull that only goes one way. Do nothing in particular and you end up a little more separate every year, because settings that were lowered stay lowered. A pull that never takes a day off can only be matched by something that doesn’t take one either, and that is discipline. Every other condition in this part leans on it, and so does anything else that matters in life. The decision is the yes, and discipline keeps it true on the days when the wanting is quiet.
By discipline I mean something plain: doing what you decided to do after the mood for it has passed. Part one gave a boring test for DO, how well you follow up on your words, and discipline is the same test applied to the words you give yourself. The work is on habits of mind and body, and habits were built by repetition, so repetition is also how they change. Daily practice, from the next section, is a good place to meet it: five minutes that happen because they were planned.
Discipline grows from the outside in. A fixed time for practice and a meeting that is on the calendar are the outside, and keeping them is something you can do even on a day when you don’t feel like it. After a while you see what they give you, and the keeping starts to come from you. That is inner discipline, the strength to carry out what you decided, and it is built the way a muscle is, by use, every day and in small things.
Keep it light, and keep it yours: a demand you make on yourself, in a friendly tone. Gritting your teeth through practice adds tension, which is the very thing practice is there to remove, so keep the frame small enough to hold without a fight. Five minutes every day is a frame you can keep, and a frame you keep teaches your mind that you can trust your own word. When a day slips, pick it up the next day without a speech about it.
Without discipline, direction follows mood, and mood brings back the swing from Part one.
4. Work with attention
Part two said the belief that I’m separate is held in the body as tension, and that suffering is the grip we add around the pain. If you accept that, then the most direct work there is happens in the body, with attention, and it has three jobs.
The first is to be here, in the body and in this room, with no detour through later or through the story about it. Part one called the vertical axis BE, and this is its plainest meaning: how much of you is actually present for what is happening right now. It sounds trivial until you try to keep it for a minute.
The second job is letting go of the tension you’ve already built up. Tension sits in the body as clamps, and you can find them: a jaw, a shoulder, the muscles around the eyes. Those clamps are the grip. Attention is the tool. You put it on the clamp and keep it there, like a flashlight held on one spot, and you don’t push, because pushing is more tension. Eventually the clamp goes.
Stillness is the simplest form of this, and you can start tonight, alone. Close your eyes and feel the life in your body. Put your attention on that sensation, and learn to gain pleasure from it. That’s the whole instruction. Start with five minutes. You can sit for as long as you like, and you can do it several times a day. It’s also a good way to start on the question Part two ended with, where the border of you sits. You don’t need to agree with anything in this book to try it, and five minutes will tell you more about it than I can.
Prayer is the same attention pointed somewhere else. In stillness it rests on the body, and in prayer it turns toward the whole, which here means learning to talk with life itself. The point is to lower the wall a little so the conversation is real. One way in is a question: how would you talk if you met God, or whatever you call the source? You would take off the masks and speak as you are. Asking is part of it, for help with that and for other people, and the asking tends to turn toward giving, so a request for yourself can become a wish to help. You can tell the conversation is real the way you can tell a person is really listening to you. And it doesn’t replace doing: prayers alone don’t bring rain, and someone has to dig the ditches for it.
The third job is not to accumulate new tension. This is the one people forget, and it matters most. If you clear your shoulders in the morning and spend the day clenching, you’ve bailed a boat with the hole still open. Not accumulating mostly comes down to small choices. In a conflict, take the first step toward making peace instead of waiting for the other person to take it, say the sentence now instead of carrying it, and don’t rehearse the argument in the shower. Each of them is a clamp that never forms.
Underneath all three there’s a plain skill: seeing your own mind at work. Most of what you do in a day gets triggered, with very little choosing involved. Someone says a thing, something fires, and you’ve answered before you’ve decided to. Mental tools for watching that happen, to see the habit and not run it automatically, are what turn attention from a relaxation exercise into a way of steering. One I use: when something fires, notice where it lands in the body, for example the jaw or the stomach, and look at it there for a moment before you answer. Over time, a few things that usually arrive glued together start to come apart: what happened and the story I tell myself about it, a real danger and an old fear, what I actually want and what someone else expects of me.
Regularity starts with daily practice, every day, even when it’s a short one, because the drift from Part two takes no days off. What matters is that it happens, that you keep wanting to grow, and that you carry the work into the rest of your day, at the checkout and in the argument, so that the daily sit is the smallest part of it. Your family, your work, your health and the people you live with are where the practice really happens, and they’re also where you find out whether anything has changed.
Without the work with attention, you clear the clamps in the morning and build new ones all day, and the drift does the rest.
5. Giving
Giving here means putting effort into the good of other people, or of something bigger than you, and not counting what comes back. An hour of real attention counts. So does using your skills on someone else’s problem. This is where the reason bigger than you from section 2 turns into something you do. Inner work gives you more freedom, and giving is what turns that freedom into something for other people.
It starts with the people closest to you, which is also where the cloth from Part two rises first. If you accept what Part two said about the fingers of one hand, then helping you is helping me, as a matter of plumbing, with niceness left out of it. And if love is what the wall dropping feels like, giving is a way to practice it on purpose. The circle widens from there, one step at a time, toward the people who are hard for you.
It has two rules. The first is to give without conditions: don’t demand thanks, recognition or a result in return, and don’t hold the person hostage to the goal behind it, however big that goal is. The second is to give to something bigger than your own comfort. That can be your family, your work, a neighbor or a stranger. While you’re busy with something larger than yourself, there is less of you to guard, and that speeds up the one thing almost nothing else touches, the slow change in the ego. My one-line summary of the whole road, for anyone in a hurry: get over yourself. It doesn’t make you less yourself. What wears away is the part of us that keeps defending, and what is left is what we bring into the world.
Without giving, inner work can go in a circle. You improve your own state, then you improve it more. That has real value, and it can turn into polishing the same stone. Giving sends the energy somewhere, the way the mill in Part two lets the river through, and it is also where the work gets tested, because other people can tell you whether it helped. Part one’s two questions work here too: would you still do it if nobody ever found out, and does it make you gentler with the person in front of you?
6. Mirror work and ego work
Part two said that what happens to you works like a mirror. A colleague’s tone, a partner’s silence, a stranger in traffic: whatever hooks me points at something in me that still needs work. This section takes that seriously as a working rule: I take responsibility for what happens around me. That never means letting people hurt you.
It sounds like an insult and it’s closer to a lever. If I can’t control the world and I can control myself, then the only place I can ever change a result is on my side of it. If a person hooks me, something in me is not in order, and I don’t need to work out whose fault it was. I go first, I say sorry first, I take the step in the conflict, and I check what shifted.
When someone harms you, you react, and sometimes the right reaction is to walk away or even fight back. What the mirror asks about is the state the reaction comes from. Do I do it because I see it as the best course of action, or because hate or fear is making the decision for me? The same step away can be a clear choice or a flinch, and from outside they look identical.
There’s no beating yourself up in it either, because guilt is another clamp. Mirror work is looking, and a person who looks without flinching is in better shape to change than one who is busy punishing themselves. The mirror is something you hold up to yourself, and holding it up to someone else is a way of skipping the work.
The clearest case I have is someone on the path I worked with very closely, and we had regular conflicts. This person was very stubborn and very emotional, and once the emotion rose, nothing I said landed. It happened with many people, but I dealt with this person more than most. In that period I was learning that if we make the internal decision to change our relationship to another person or to a situation, we can change it almost at once, and that learning to make this internal click is one of the biggest keys to growing. I decided to take it seriously.
Then we had an enormous fight. I got crazy angry because once again the other person would not understand what I was trying to say, and I said we should stop and go our separate ways for a moment. I sat in another room, livid, asking how I could change my relationship to this and how I could let it go. It was close to prayer. It felt like the lever on a railway track in the cartoons, the one that is supposed to switch the rails and is so rusty it barely moves, except that this lever was inside me. Moving it was one of the hardest things I have done. After about ten minutes it moved.
I went to find the other person to apologize. Calming down quickly after a fight had never been this person’s way, and the anger could last for days. But by the time I had said my first word, I could see this person was already in a completely different state. So I learned that the internal click is possible and that it works. I did it a few more times over the years, it got easier each time, and it was never that hard again. I haven’t been that angry in many years.
That is also what repair looks like: quick and light. A person who has hurt someone and leaves it for a week has added a clamp. A person who says “I’m sorry, that was me” the same afternoon, without an essay, has removed one. The usual suspects behind the hook are pride, offense and the habit of judging, and the work on them has a name, ego work, which is a grand title for noticing them every time they show up.
Without the mirror the hooks stay where they are, and it’s much harder to use alone: you can’t see which hooks you have until someone leans on them, and the people already in your life do that every day.
7. Friends on the path
Part two said the world is built to be convincing, so that everything you touch agrees that you are in here and the rest is out there. It also said that a cell stays well only while it keeps listening to the signals from its neighbors. If you accept that, then what you are surrounded by matters as much as what you do on your own, and the strongest help you can have is a few people in your life who are working on the same thing.
This condition matters more now than it used to, and the 21st century turned the convincing world up. Most of us grew up in a world that is always offering us something new and telling us that a good life means getting what you want, and we have been soaking in it every year of our lives. Even a cave doesn’t quite undo that, because you carry it in with you. Some people did go to caves in the past, but they walked out of a much quieter world than ours. So the help has to be ongoing too, people you see every week who want the same thing you do. Most of us have come home from a retreat or a strong weekend lit up, and within a couple of weeks our old habits had quietly put most of it back. A state can change in a day. A way of living changes when the people around you keep pointing the same way, week after week. None of this is new. The Buddhist sangha, the Hindu ashram and the Christian monastery were all built for exactly this.
From the traditions · 4 passagesBuilt long before us
- The Buddhist refuges are three: I take refuge in the Buddha, I take refuge in the Teaching, I take refuge in the Sangha, the community (Khuddakapatha 1).
- In Pirkei Avot Joshua ben Perahiah says: appoint for yourself a teacher, and acquire for yourself a companion (1:6).
- The Vivekachudamani, traditionally attributed to Shankara, names three things that are rare and come by the grace of God: a human birth, the longing for liberation, and the shelter of a great soul (3).
- The Rule of Benedict says that the first kind of monks live in monasteries and serve under a rule and an abbot. A hermit goes out alone only after long probation in a monastery, having learned with the help of many brethren. And of the monks who live without a shepherd it says that their law is the desire for self-gratification: whatever enters their mind or appeals to them, that they call holy (chapter 1).
Two friends doing this together are the smallest community, and it grows from there. In my case it grew into Giving School, a project Genadiy’s students started because we wanted to share what we learn from him with other people, help them become more conscious and take their own steps, and build supportive places for growth, online and offline. There are many communities on this road, and the one to look for is the one that resonates with you, where you feel at home and find yourself growing. Being among people who want the same thing brings everything above together: you work on your attention, you build discipline, you meet your mirror, you pursue a goal and you give, all at once and with other people around.
Friends on the path hold you up in the hard moments. When your mood falls through the floor, your friend’s hasn’t, and two of you hold longer than either one alone. I tend to be the one who holds others, but I have my moments too. Most often it is when I have set myself a goal and haven’t reached it, or a deadline is close and the task looks unmanageable. In those moments I used to get very hard on myself, and my close friends helped me come back to myself, calm down and let it go.
None of this replaces the people you already have. Most of us do it alongside family, old friends and a job, and those people tend to notice the change before we do.
It comes with conditions. The people have to be aimed at the same thing. Friends who simply enjoy each other are a gift of their own, and this condition asks for the other kind too, the friends who help you move. People in a community come with their own words for what they want, and what they share underneath is the wish to awaken more deeply. The group also has to settle its conflicts quickly, by talking them through without attacking anyone, and it has to keep the agreements it makes. A quarrel reverses the effect: the same closeness that lifts a community weighs it down when there is a wall between two of its people.
The people also have to want it, and this is where friends on the path meet the wish from section 1. A community multiplies whatever is put into it, and anything times nothing is still nothing, a fact your math teacher would confirm. A group of people who each really want to move gives everyone in it much more than any of them could find alone.
Friends on the path do something for the wish itself, too. On your own it dies down faster. So friends who want the same thing remind each other what they came for, and when your own spark drops, lighting up a friend gets some of it back. The company of people who want the same thing is one of the best things to feed it. Ananda, the Buddha’s attendant, once said that good friends are half of the spiritual life, and the Buddha answered that they are the whole of it. With them, the wish keeps growing a little every day.
8. Someone further along
Part two said that a limit you are inside of rarely shows up as a limit. That is true of every one of us, teachers included, the way everyone hears your accent except you. It is also the plain reason people learn faster next to someone who has had more time with what they want. A person a few steps ahead can often name in one sentence a habit you would take years to find alone, and you can check it against your own life the same week.
Think of how someone becomes a blacksmith. There is no syllabus. The apprentice stands next to the smith for years, doing small jobs and watching how long the iron stays in the fire and what the smith does when a piece comes out wrong. After a few years the apprentice can do things nobody ever explained, and if you ask how, they shrug.
Learning from someone further along works the same way. It runs on personal example, and it is closer to a workshop than to a classroom. Most of what you are learning is hard to put into words anyway: how to stay steady when a plan falls apart, how to say sorry first without making a ceremony of it. You can read about those, and you pick them up by being around someone who does them.
A mentor is simply a person who has had more time to practice what you want. What they say matters less than you would expect, and only a small part of it is telling you what to do or where you are right or wrong. When they do say something, it is short, and it comes from having stood where you are standing.
The biggest effect is that you get to feel what it is like to be a person a few steps ahead: how they sit through a tense meeting, how fast they come back from a bad day. It is one thing to be told that something is possible and another to sit across from someone for whom it is ordinary. You could call it osmosis: nobody sets out to copy anything, and after a while your own reactions have moved toward what you have been around, the way you pick up an accent from a roommate without trying and without the roommate noticing. It is a big part of why people mature much faster with a mentor than alone.
A few steps is the useful distance, close enough that you can see how they got there and far enough that you want what they have. It might be someone in your community who started a few years before you, or someone outside it who has had more time with what you want. You have probably felt a small version of this already: an afternoon with the calmest person you know, and you leave a little calmer without having done anything. Look for that on purpose, and do your own practice in between visits.
A community has energy, and it can still be going in a circle. A teacher, someone who has walked much more of the road, can see where it is growing and where it is stuck, which is hard to see from inside. What a teacher does is easy to describe. They don’t walk the path for you, and they can’t create your wish to walk it, which stays yours. What they can do is point out where you have drifted, and give you something to try on Monday. On the hard days they help you remember what you came for in the first place, as a good coach stands by an athlete through a bad stretch. A good teacher also has a steadiness that spreads, the way a calm, experienced guide on a mountain path steadies everyone walking behind. With someone further along, you get to see past limits you would otherwise have taken for the way things are.
My own storyMy teacher and I
- Anyone who reads this far wants to know, sooner or later, what it is about my teacher that makes me follow what he teaches. Part of the answer is something anyone can see. I met his students first, and they were living proof of what they were talking about, which is what got me interested. Over the years I’ve watched a lot of people change around him, and some of them have written down how. One person describes going from sharp, arrogant and quick to flare up to calm and caring, and says it shows at home, with the family. A couple who had spent many years together without real closeness describe a deep connection with each other now. When I met him myself, I felt a kind of positivity coming from him. The click itself came in a more personal way.
- It started with a plateau. After years of putting most of my time into my career, I felt I had reached a certain limit. I wanted deeper answers, and I didn’t know anyone who could help me find them. My Reiki teacher had taught me a lot of good practices, though not that kind of knowledge. After a while I realized that the only real way was to find someone who actually knows the way, a real teacher. A few months before COVID I read a memoir by a student about life with his teacher, and it put words to something I wanted before I even understood that I wanted it. I wanted a teacher for my life, the way the author had one.
- A few months later I met students of Genadiy who were leading a workshop in Israel. By then I had a tendency to feel people. For years I kept checking how often those feelings turned out right, and eventually I had to admit that they were quite accurate. About these people I felt something good, and I spent time with them at a retreat and then a course. None of it answered my real question, which was whether Genadiy is the real deal or one more of the many people who teach and help. I had asked for a teacher, and this was what life gave me, so I went to meet him myself and stayed on to learn from him directly.
- A few months later, one night, something inside me went click. I have no idea how to explain it, and I wish I could give you a more logical version, one step after another. It’s a bit like falling in love. You can list plenty of reasons why the person is great, and oddly enough, why you fell for them is the hardest part to explain. Something in me simply knew that this was the teacher I had been looking for, and it felt obvious. I don’t think most people come to it this way, and many come to their decision in a completely different way. I do see how much people’s lives change with this knowledge. None of that ever affected me as much as that moment did, and I’m extremely grateful for it.
- That night settled the question of whether he was my teacher, and I still disagreed with him at times. Once I suggested a few terms he should stop using when he explains things, because they confused people. He thanked me, said it was probably a good idea, and stopped using them.
A note on community and the teacher
Of everything in this part, community and the teacher get the most criticism. I’ve met it with almost every person I’ve talked to about this, and I understand it. I grew up with a strong sense that I should get to do what I want, and in high school I was very much against the whole school system.
The fear behind it is natural. What if I meet a teacher who is very convincing, and he uses me? The internet is full of stories like that, and some of what happened in those groups was really bad. The good examples rarely make headlines, since nothing happened in them. I don’t know of a checklist that tells the two apart, a list of criteria where you tick the boxes and can then trust someone. All you can go on is your own experience. Does this person know more than I do? Does this group actually live the values it talks about? Can I say I disagree and still be welcome, could I leave without a fight, and do I grow when I listen to this teacher? When the answers keep coming back yes, you’ll find you want to be around them. People do leave our community, too. Some go on along their path in new ways, and some come back after a while. We stay friends, and whenever we meet again it’s a pleasant time, whatever they chose.
There will be moments, plenty of them, when what you think is very different from what you’re offered to try, whether it’s a task, an exercise or a challenge. That creates discomfort in every person who has ever walked this road. It comes whoever the teacher is, and whether or not you have a teacher at all, or a community, or just one friend who tells you honestly what you’re doing well and what you aren’t. For me there is one way to tell growth from something being wrong. The discomfort of growth always comes together with an emotion in my body, so I don’t decide anything while the emotion is still there. I live through it first, and then I look at the disagreement again with a clear head. Usually most of the discomfort has gone with the emotion. If some of it is still there after that, then something is wrong, and that part I take seriously. Whether that’s a reason to stay or to leave is up to you, and I won’t make that decision for you.
What I can tell you is what happened to me. There were moments when I disagreed or saw things differently, and I used the same test. Often the disagreement came with a strong emotion, and when I looked at it again after the emotion had gone, the disagreement had gone with it. Other times something still stayed, and then I said so, and people took it up.
The hardest thing to convey is the inner decision that this is a person whose view of me I trust.
So how can you make sure? Only through your own experience, I’m afraid, and that part I can’t do for you. It comes down to the people you meet and how they affect you. And you don’t have to have a teacher at all. You can think it through for yourself.
What you can check
Start with a count: which of the eight conditions does your life have now, and which one is missing? After a few months of practice, alone or with friends on the path, ask: do you produce the thing you said you would? Does anything outside you change, and if it doesn’t, why not? How fast do you say sorry first now? Over the last year, are you more fulfilled, or more bleak? Are you clearer than you were a year ago, steadier, more honest, easier to work with? Put the answers on the chart from Part one, and ask again a month later. Look at the people a few steps ahead of you, too: do they live the way they talk?
And one question for the road: who in your life could tell you honestly how you have changed?
Sources
1. Your wish, and your yes
- Dhammapada 103 to 105 (Sujato’s translation, SuttaCentral).
- Pirkei Avot 4:1 (Kulp’s translation, Sefaria), quoting Proverbs 16:32 (Jewish Publication Society translation).
- Uttaradhyayana Sutra, chapter 9 (Jacobi’s translation, Sacred Books of the East, vol. 45).
- Daodejing 33 (Legge’s translation).
- Sahih al-Bukhari 6114.
7. Friends on the path
- Khuddakapatha 1, the Three Refuges (Sujato’s translation, SuttaCentral).
- Pirkei Avot 1:6 (Kulp’s translation, Sefaria).
- Vivekachudamani, verse 3 (Sanskrit text with Madhavananda’s translation, Advaita Ashrama).
- The Rule of Benedict, chapter 1 (Doyle’s translation).
- Samyutta Nikaya 45.2, the Upaddha Sutta (Sujato’s translation, SuttaCentral).