Knocking on heaven’s door
By Louis Cortese
We are all knocking on heaven’s door—most of us, anyway. In hordes we rush up to it and knock on it loudly and expectedly, hoping that it will open up wide to let us in.
I’m not using the phrase as Bob Dylan does in his brilliant song. With apologies to him, knocking on heaven’s door as used here is a metaphor for the yearning to enter that metaphysical place that exists beyond our everyday world of pain and suffering. It’s a mad rush to get on the other side, where relief or at least some meaning to the numbing madness of life awaits.
So we chant; we contort our bodies; we sit still in meditation as a means of knocking on that door. We’re knock, knock, knocking on heaven’s door with a burning desire and so-called love in our hearts.
Except, those of us who are contorting and meditating don’t call it heaven. We call it Samadhi. It’s the same door, same numbing life we’re trying to escape from, and the same so-called love in our hearts, same story, just different mise-en-scene.
We are susceptible to the romantic notion of it all, to the goodness that seems inherent in it all. How can all those wonderful sensations we get in yoga class, of communal love and peace and brotherhood toward one another be wrong? We use words like grace and oneness to describe it. Namaste: I see the divinity in you and I salute it. We are all one. This is what it’s all about. This is why we meditate and sit cross-legged every day. It will open the door to integration with the one consciousness. That’s why we keep knock, knock, knocking on heaven’s door.
But what if there’s nothing on the other side of that door?
What if the door doesn’t really exist? What if all the talk of oneness is mental gymnastics, conjured up to satisfy a desire for something better than the stark reality of life?
Perhaps all the contorting and meditating and chanting are just empty activities, mere ceremony. They may instill a calm and peaceful effect to our neurophysiological system, providing a much-needed respite from the stresses of everyday living, but nothing more. Or worse, they are manifestations of our greed, a selfish desire for spiritual power.
I could be wrong but here in my theory of what’s going on. We come out of yoga class, having fired up a storm of endorphins doing backbends, and we’re floating on this great high. Or we spend a weekend meditating in a bucolic setting away from the maddening world that is part of our everyday lives, having ratcheted down our nerve impulses from the typical everyday frenetic levels. Add to that: yoga instructors or spiritual coaches who talk to you of lovely notions of universal consciousness, integration into the whole, living in the moment, heart perception, love as the life force. You feel so good about the world now. It’s so intoxicating. But what if it’s just a matter of social influence or receptive conditioning to something that feels good, but has no real basis? Or to put it in terms that other contributors to this blog might prefer, it’s all bullshit, but it feels great so we buy into it all the way.
Once we’re hooked, we keep going back for more and we start to incorporate the spiritual terms into our vocabulary. And because we never really truly experience oneness or self-realization or seeing the divine in our boss who is the biggest dick, we start sounding embarrassingly phony.
It’s my experience that being an awakened person in the spiritual sense is an extremely rare thing.
In all the years I’ve spent around spiritual environments, from Zen Buddhism to yoga, I have never met anyone who was a realized self. But the way people throw around these terms of what it means to be enlightened, you would think that it’s as common as a 200-hour teacher certification from Yoga Alliance.
There is a huge difference from describing what you have personally encountered to what you have come to understand intellectually. Most people understand with their minds the concepts of kundalini rising or the eight steps to Samadhi or universal consciousness, but never come close to experiencing one iota of it. Krishnamurti, who was said by all who met him to have the presence of a sage, said: “It doesn’t matter who says it, the moment he says, `I know,’ he does not know.”
We become enthralled by ideas and concepts, which are described in poetic fashion and held up to us as romanticized ideals to strive for, in the same way we strive for everything else. Except, in this case the object of desire is considered to be on a higher plane because of its so-called spiritual nature.
But just like the crowds who line up in the pre-dawn hours on Black Friday, pushing up against the doors of department stores waiting to be unleashed into shopping nirvana, we keep knock, knock, knocking on heaven’s door. What we don’t realize is that what we’re really doing is banging our heads against the wall of futility.
About Louis Cortese
Lou , in his life, has been a precocious young boy in an anachronistic town in the mountains of Sicily, an immigrant at the age of 8 arriving by way of an ocean liner to the shores of the west side of Manhattan, a guido from the Bronx, a hippy, a Zen Buddhist, a businessman, a yogi and a conventional family man with three sons and two grandchildren, among other things, none of which describes his true self and all of which in the aggregate do not give a full account of him. If his story is not he, then what is? He’s still looking. Lou’s musings can be followed on his blog http://louiebop.tumblr.com/
16 Comments !
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Vanessa says:
‘Krishnamurti, who was said by all who met him to have the presence of a sage, said: “It doesn’t matter who says it, the moment he says, `I know,’ he does not know.”’ Thank you – lovely stuff : warms the cockles of my heart.
sashina says:
I love thinking about things like this. Thank you Lou! I have met 3 enlightened/self-realized/saints in my life, and to be in their presence and observe their state of being is enough to make me want to keep banging my head on heaven’s door with the hope of attaining even just a wee bit of their peace. But lately I’ve been feeling a different spin to this quest—-that we’re all, already enlightened & what is preventing us from enjoying our natural state of delight is our conditioning—our ridiculous culture, the sense of right/wrong, good/bad that was literally poured down our throats as babes. As we shed these beliefs that are not truth /(purify our nadis)/lovingly disintegrate our egos/care for self & others with compassion not compulsion/ then we can see what was there all along. I get little hits of it now and then and it feels like Magnificent, LOVE. oxox
Magweni says:
thank you! very well put Sashina, less head banging and more faith in the practice of gently refining and reducing the conditioning that prevents us from experiencing our true essential being… what a wonderful journey it can be when we are not expecting to arrive in heaven.
Mrkarnial says:
A lot of these companies have the same ownres and underwriters. Sounds like you are already in over your head. These are designed to put you in a trap that will be very hard to recover from. Pay off your first loan ASAP and never get one again.
Dani Nefussi says:
Pois é, eu também nunca conheci um iluminado desses oficiais, mas para mim, pessoas como vc de pensamento livre, ou livres do pensamento, estão mais próximas do que eu sinto ser o tal Nirvana, Céu ou Iluminação. Pra mim, tá bom assim.
Enlightened Asshole says:
Thank you! I have sat at the feet of 3 so called enlightened masters.
They have made me bark and snort like an animal, spit out garbled nonsense, and dance around like a jerk for over an hour. I think they’re all laughing at me somewhere. Never again! I claim myself an enlightened asshole! Namaste Fuckface!
Sebastien says:
Lou,
The beauty with your little text, is the simplicity it puts it all and the fact that there is always the option that nothing happens.
In fact, there is clearly the option that there is not even a door to knock on.
But what is new about that? For every established religion, you will find at the bar close to the place of worship, the atheists or nihilists either giggling or simply getting stirred up about the lots of worshippers.
The thing that differs tho, is the lack of dogma in the teachings of meditation and in fact in yoga as well.
Why does it matter if there is something behind this door, if this door exists?
The practices you described do bring a sense of betterness (I didn’t mean bitterness, you recovering yogis you) which infuses in the days of the practitioner and the ones he/she interacts with: this is now something that is way more tangible than any vocabulary or expressions such as Namaste or anything related to the field of yoga/zen and other spiritual culture: New Age is clearly has been in everyday life and we should get on with Life without trying to create a new layer of concepts to conform with.
So, my dear friend, do you feel and witness that the people who do sit regularly to meditate have less suffering in their lives and contribute to the happiness of people around them?
Do you think that yoga practitioners get blissful right after the asana practice?
If you do think that it these things do happen thanks to the practices the Indian fellows brought to us and that we bastardized then you have to agree that there is a door to knock on.
Is there something behind this door?
I do not care, because I think there are no walls around that door anyway: you are already inside and outside the room: leave the door open or close for it does not matter.
Only the every seconds of your everyday matter since these are the only ones which which will add up to a happy life or not.
Leave the door alone, and just breath for F… sake.
Louis Cortese says:
I am not typically a cynical person. I find myself drawn towards heaven’s door. I do however, question and doubt the many detailed prescribed paths that are proffered as a means of entering a transcendent state. I find that it is easy to get caught up in the ideas and concepts and methods and disciplines, which I feel are all in the field of the known and therefore can never give anyone any insight into the unknown, if there is the unknown?
sebastien says:
Louis,
i have to agree with you on the fact that many ‘gurus’ offer some very complicated means of reaching, eventually they say, Enlightment. People do get caught up in the hows rather than simply dos…
Now, if you look at what it boils down to, how difficult can it be?
It is all about breathing, and the awarness in this breathing.
Once you have said ‘breathe’ you have giving all instructions required.
Is there an unknown?
Does it matter to know that before starting a practice that beautifies your every days?
Why not making every day happier and then see if eventually the Veil lifts and gets you to know the unknown?
Please blog about it when you are there!!!!
Jenifer says:
So what?
At the most basic level, when people ask me why I practice (whatever I practice), I tell them it’s because I enjoy it.
Sure, I can tell them about all kinds of benefits. But I don’t get myself embroiled in the spiritual babble. I’m not interested. I don’t really want to speculate.
And I don’t care about samadhi or heaven or hell or enlightenment. All I have is here and now, and if my practices make my now better, and have the potential to help me out in the next few moments, then that’s enough.
Why does it need to be more?
Louis Cortese says:
I certainly appreciate your perspective, Jenifer. But there are a lot of us who wonder if there is something more than our experience, something that is at the ground of everything. Maybe there is, maybe there isn’t. I was just questioning the certainty of the answers that are tendered and the methods offered in order to realize those answers.
Jenifer says:
And certainly, there’s nothing wrong with questioning everything. I think that’s healthy.
It’s hard to explain in 1000 characters. I certainly believe that there is something more than our experience, but I’m not necessarily looking to ‘achieve’ it, nor ‘worrying’ over it.
I guess the best example I can give is from law school. I went to study group just once, before realizing it wasn’t helpful. Instead of the task at hand, the group spend most of the time worrying over how hard law school is and how much studying they had to do and how unfair it all was and how they were scared about the tests and grades.
I opted to study alone, because I found that just 1 hr per subject for homework plus and additional hour per subject at the end of the week was enough for me to consistently learn the material. Not knowing what the exam would be, I felt no need to worry over it — just learn the material as best I could. And I got the grades that I got.
I take my practice the same way. I don’t worry over whether or not I’m achieving or even if there is something to achieve. I just do the task at hand, and if enlightenment exists and I experience it, then fab. And if it doesn’t, then that’s ok too — it’s nto wasted time.
It’s never wasted time.
Niki says:
This was so very good – something I consistently think about, much to the detriment of myself. While I do not actually practice yoga, I am constantly on “the path” of wanting to understand and know the unknown and the unknowable. It bounces around in my head daily. And I wonder, and know, that anyone who says they know… does not know. What could they know? I sit on the fence of forever and look both ways, wondering what lay in the abyss besides carbon, dark matter, and gravity.
JJ says:
Bob Dylan sucks ass…
Angie Brazzale says:
The difference between ‘knowing’ and ‘knowing about’ is a big and deep discourse, of which maturity plays no small part.
I constantly self-disclaim in my classes: I’m teaching you this, because it’s what I learnt. But I can’t remember who taught me, and I have no idea who taught them. So take it for what it is. All the traditional yoga texts are very, very old, and who knows how much is lost through translation. Feel things out for yourself. I can only teach you what I know, what I have embodied, but of course my perspective is limited and subjective.
I asked them once, Has anyone ever felt a chakra? No. So, do they exist then? Everyone is going on about the chakras, but I’ve never met anyone who actually feels them. Except myself. But maybe its not the chakra’s I’m feeling. Maybe it’s endorphins, and my mind just wants to believe that they are chakra’s, because that would be cool.
I was pleased to attend a workshop with Godfrey Devereux this year, to find he expresses these sentiments and observations clearly and ironically.
With regards to Krishnamacharya, of whom I know no more than what I’ve read on Wikipedia, I have the feeling that he was indeed a man of certain consciousness. I don’t believe for a moment that Iyengar or P.Jois reached /have reached anywhere near the realizations of their master. (Of Deshikar I don’t know). Hence the problems inherent in today’s teachings, following the same model as the fall of Christianity… teachers who ‘know about’ trying to impart the ‘known’ of the great master. And hence the gradual loss of truth.
With honesty, we do our best, reassured that we are not alone in trying to maintain a certain level of professionalism and integrity!
Louis Cortese says:
Well said, Angie. I like your making the distinction between “knowing” and “knowing about”.