Following is a transcription of Shawn’s presentation at the April 2006 TAT conference, “What Is Spiritual Action?”
I’m going to start with a quiz, but there’s only one question on the quiz and it’s a multiple choice quiz. The answers… you’ve got three possibilities: answer A is, “on fire,” answer B is, “lukewarm,” and answer C is, “dead cold.” Now, if you would, just close your eyes.
The question is: How would you describe your spiritual search (or your spiritual path – however you want to phrase it)?
If you would answer A, on fire, please raise your hand right now … no peeking! [laughter] I won’t name who peeked, but… Ok. If you would answer B, lukewarm, raise your hand right now. Ok. And if you would answer C, dead cold, please raise your hand right now.
Alright, you can open your eyes.
I’m going to do a little bit like Mike [Gegenheimer] did, in that I’ll start by reading what some other people had to say, and then I’ll talk a little bit about my own experience.
I think the title of this talk was, how do I know that my hair is on fire? Is my hair on fire yet? Something like that. And it comes from an expression that, when I was in the Self Knowledge Symposium, we used to throw it around. That basically some Zen master long ago said that, “You should be searching as if your hair were on fire.” And I tried to find the source of that, I couldn’t find the source for it and sometimes it’s phrased as “You should be sitting (or meditating) as if your hair were on fire.” And the way that we took it is that it conjured up an image of someone who has a problem, an intense problem on their mind, and they’re going to solve it, and that is sort of the “feel” that your spiritual search should have.
If you go through the literature, and I’ll just quote a couple of famous folks right now, like Nisargadatta. He said,
How do you go about finding anything? By keeping your mind and heart in it. Interest, there must be and steady remembrance. To remember what needs to be remembered, is the secret of success. You come to it through earnestness.
When you are in dead earnest, you bend every incident, every second of your life to your purpose. You do not waste time and energy on other things. You are totally dedicated….
To know that you are a prisoner of your mind, that you live in an imaginary world of your own creation, is the dawn of wisdom. To want nothing of it, to be ready to abandon it entirely, is earnestness. Only such earnestness, born of true despair, will make you trust me.
Ramana Maharshi – some guy asked him: “When an endeavor is made to lead the right life and to concentrate thought on the Self, there is often a downfall and break. What is to be done?” Maharshi says: “It will come all right in the end. There is the steady impulse of your determination that sets you on your feet again after every downfall and breakdown. Gradually the obstacles are all overcome and your current becomes stronger. Everything comes right in the end. Steady determination is what is required.”
Richard Rose: “Man must develop a system of work and work with persevering dynamism.”
And even Douglas Harding, you know, the guy who has all these little exercises and experiments that seem quite humorous when you’re doing them. I asked him, I said, “How do you stick with seeing?” And he said, “Determination, passion, and trusting.”
So, back in the day, hearing all this kind of stuff I kind of summarized it here, the message that I got is that these are the things that it takes to succeed: Earnestness, Total Dedication, Determination, Dynamism, and Passion…. And I thought to myself, “Well, I don’t really have any of those things.” [laughter] “And that’s a problem. I’m not like that at all. I’m not a determined or dynamic or passionate person, and I don’t really pursue anything with earnestness. So I’m probably not going to get anywhere.”
There’s not – you know, in retrospect I look at this and I think, well, there’s no great secret here: this is what everybody tells you – that to succeed in anything you’ve got to have these qualities. But in my experience, most people, myself certainly, most people that I know, don’t have these qualities. And especially, those people like Mr. Rose, or Nisargadatta, we think that they had these qualities to the highest degree, and that there’s no way that we’ll ever live up to the type of person that they were, that they represent.
I say that – nowadays I say – that it’s what we do when we are not inspired that determines our success. That it’s what we do when we’re lacking in all these things – that’s actually what determines our success.
So now, a little bit about my story. There are three times that really come to mind when those qualities were completely absent, and when my hair was not on fire, and I was about as low as low can get. The first time was back when I was in the Self Knowledge Symposium. I was trying to figure out, well, am I going to move up and live on the farm here with Richard Rose, or am I going to stay down there and work with the group, work with Augie Turak and the folks down there? I could best summarize that as to say that the method there [the SKS] was to make yourself into a person of character – a strong and a willful person. And I pursued that. But at a certain point in time, you make progress and you make progress, then you plateau, and you level out, and you don’t know what to do. And you keep doing the same thing again, and it gets depressing because you’re not getting anywhere, and you just don’t see a way out. The way out, fortunately, was to come up here, and to live on the farm, and to be around Richard Rose.
After a few years living up here, I was meditating as much as I possibly could, I was doing isolations, I was going to visit Mr. Rose – it was just tremendous inspiration. There was inspiration when I was in Raleigh from being around Augie Turak, there was inspiration when I was up here being around Richard Rose. And then, after a time, once again, it’s like I plateaued and I felt like I wasn’t getting anywhere. And Mr. Rose wasn’t able to help me as much after a certain point in time because of the Alzheimer’s disease. I pretty much didn’t know what to do, again. I wound up going down to Florida, and I wound up just in the pit of despair down there in an empty house, by myself. I basically wasn’t eating hardly anything, I wasn’t exercising, and I wasn’t meditating. And if it hadn’t been for a few folks that I was calling on the telephone, I probably would have just thrown in the whole package, let’s say.
But, I suppose that even when I was depressed, even when I thought that there wasn’t hope, I was still going out, and I would go to the library, or I’d go to the bookstore. And I happened to find a little book by Douglas Harding when I was down there, and maybe that was just a little glimmer of hope. Anyway, I made it back up here, and I wound up going to the Linsly Outdoor Center. And while I was there, I started writing poems and started going out in nature, and sort of got re-inspired again and found a place within myself where inspiration came from.
Once again, after a period of time doing that – a couple years, let’s say – I again got to that point of: I’m not getting anywhere, I don’t know what to do next, I don’t know what to read, there’s nobody that can help me, none of my friends can help me, I’ll just throw in the whole thing. I wound up going out to Texas … well, I’ll go back a step, I actually wound up going to visit Douglas Harding, and there was a little glimmer of hope again.
I went out to Texas with the intention of starting a group. Started working on a web page out there – the spiritual teachers web page – and then finally something, let’s say a breakthrough, happened for me. Something happened for me.
The short of it is: the picture of my search is just this wave of inspiration and depression, inspiration and depression, inspiration and depression. And I laid it out over a period of years and it almost looks like in retrospect it was like a 3 year cycle of up and down, and up and down. But the cycle was weekly - that, you know, Monday might be things are going great and by Saturday, things are terrible, and I was just thinking – like I’ve said before – “If there was something else I could be doing, I would be doing it.”
To me, that’s just the way that the spiritual path is. I’m sure it’s not that way for everybody, but from my experience, that is just the way that it is. In any one of those troughs, let’s say, I could have made the decision that, well that’s it, you know, I’m done with this stuff. And it might have been years before I got back to it; it might have been the end of my life before I got back to it.
I have the feeling that a lot of people who get into this, hit these periods, whether it’s occurring on a weekly basis or a yearly basis, hit these periods and they don’t see that they’re going to come out on the other side of it and they stop, and they stop for a long time. And then when they get back to it, they can hardly remember why they started in the first place.
So, what are some practical things that you can do when you wind up in a place like this? And that’s basically the point of this talk – is to say here are a few practical things that I think work and I think worked for me in my experience.
Now these [flips up flipchart paper to reveal a list of items] are not things that I invented by any means. A lot of them are things that Mr. Rose told us and that I just put in my own words, just because it’s easier to remember that way.
Number 1: Just find friends [item reads: “Find friends”]. You know, I can’t tell you the number of times that I was depressed and that all that it took was enough will power on my part to go talk to somebody, anybody, in my circle of the group and just have a conversation. You know, that is, if you want to call it the law of the ladder, if you want to call it the contractor’s law, if you want to refer back to Mr. Rose’s material. That’s spelled out in there.
Number 2: Observe moods. Track them in your journal [“Observe moods and track them in your journal. Periodically review journal”]. I’ve said this before, if you’re not keeping a journal, you’re missing out on a major tool. And I add to that that you should periodically review your journal. I would literally go back and look at a whole year’s worth of old entries and look through that and see what happened. At some point I know I went back and I reviewed them all. And this might be four years worth of journals. Now, as Heather said, I’m rather terse, so there wasn’t a whole lot of stuff there. [laughter] For some people that could be volumes, but for me, it was do-able. But you know, it’s something that – it takes some days to do.
But you see – you know, the whole thing that we’re trying to do is just see ourselves, and when it’s out on paper like that, to me it’s so obvious that, we’re these little machines that are walking through an experience, and that machine had enough foresight to record some of that experience for itself and now it can go back and look at it. And you know, and this is the thing, you’ve got to be able to project into the future that the same stuff is going to happen again.
Number 3 (this is my own sort of little personal mantra): Don’t make big decisions in a negative mood. When you’re in the dumps and it seems like nothing’s going to happen for you and there’s no hope, just:
Practice number 4: Wait. Ok. Just wait. And waiting is not a bad thing. In my mind I equated waiting with procrastination, and there’s this very negative connotation with, well, you’re just waiting, you’re just killing time. Well, you’re treading water in a sense until you’re rescued. You can’t swim right now because it’s hopeless, but you can at least make the motions to tread water until something comes down the pike, and something will come down the pike if you learn to wait.
Is this hard? Yeah. I know how hard it is because the whole world looks a certain color and it looks like it will always be that way. And I can’t tell you anything other than you just have to know yourself enough to know – have trust, let’s say – that you’ll come out of this, and you can look back on it.
Tied in with learning to wait, is number 5, which is discriminating between waiting and the paralysis that comes from conflicting desires. Because we get stuck – sometimes we get stuck on the fence, and if we honestly look at why our path isn’t going anywhere, it’s because one half of us is thinking, you know, life is passing me by and my friends are all getting married, or, you know, they got a great job, and I should be doing that. And the other hour we’re reading Nisargadatta and we’re meditating. And that causes a certain sitting on the fence, let’s say, or a paralysis, and that’s different from this [pointing at #5].
Number six: know that inspiration will end. Here’s the thing, when it does, don’t abandon whatever method you’re using, whatever practice that you have. Keep pushing, but also keep looking. So, what I’m saying there, let’s say your practice is effortless mediation, you know. Say a person’s got an effortless meditation practice, and you know, they’re all fired up about it and they’re doing it twice a day, twenty minutes a day, and they do that for six months, and then at month seven they do it, you know, just for one time twenty minutes a day, and at month eight, they’re doing it every other day, and that kind of thing is happening. The inspiration has died away. When you see that happening, don’t just go: “Oh well, ok, that’s that, I’ve got to move on to something else.” Keep pushing, because that’s how you change what you are, let’s say. That’s how you become something other than a machine which is just ruled by its inspiration, or ruled by its moods.
At the same time, though, always keep looking. Like Rose said: be looking under every rock. Be working on your ways and means. What are the things that I’m going to be doing? What are new books that might catch my interest? What are different meditation techniques? Or, who are people that I want to go see? Those kind of things you should always be doing. Because, yeah, at a certain point, I think whatever practice you’re doing, it is actually going to come to a dead end, and you will have to do something different, and hopefully you have explored enough things, you have enough books on your bookshelf, let’s say, that you’ll be able to go out and find something new and pursue that new route.
Last thing, and you know, it’s two words… really this is everything: be honest. If you wanted to say what’s the spiritual path, you could boil it down to those two words – just be honest. You know, if you were just honest with yourself, you wouldn’t need any of this kind of stuff. You would be able to look yourself, as Bob would say, you would be able to look back – you’d be able to retraverse that ray, and you would know what’s back there and you would accept that, let’s say, or that knowledge would be allowed to come through.
Now, that’s it. That’s all I’ve got to talk about, because, you know, I don’t like talking a whole lot. But, if there are things on there that you thought, “I don’t know what in the world he’s talking about when he said that,” I’ll be happy to explain it more, and we might find that this was a better talk for those questions than it would be if you were just listening to me.
Q: I don’t think I know clearly what the difference is between waiting and the paralysis that comes from having conflicting desires.
Shawn: Yeah. On the one hand, you could say, “Well I always have conflicting desires, and I’ll be cursed with conflicting desires until the day that I’m done with my spiritual search.” You could say that, but there are times – and let me find an example from my life, and let’s see if that will clarify it – there’s a time, let’s say, when I feel like, you know, “If I could find another person to share my life with, that that would bring me completeness. I think that that might be what I’m really looking for – it’s just another person. Somebody to love,” let’s say. And, at the same time, a part of me says, “That person won’t be there forever, I may die before that person, they may die before me, it may turn out that they don’t like me at all. And this stuff that Mr. Rose is talking about, you know, finding who I really am, that’s the most important thing.”
So I sort of half-heartedly go about doing both of those things. And I wind up drilling myself into a spot where I’m really not doing either of those things, truly, I’m just sort of torn between those, and that’s a point – to me, it’s feeling paralyzed. I can’t decide. Maybe that’s what I’m trying to say, I just can’t decide between these two things. As opposed to somebody who’s decided that, you know, I will turn my head away from the pursuit of physical love, for a period of time, and I will devote myself to meditation. The mind, I think, just gets bored with things, it gets used to things and the novelty wears off, we wind up in a point where: “I just don’t want to meditate anymore. It’s not like I want to do something else instead, but I just don’t want to sit for 30 minutes every day. I’m so sick of that, and it’s not getting me anywhere anyway.” And that’s sort of a dead end. That’s what I would describe as a point where I’m still going to keep doing that, but it’s a feeling of waiting for something to come to me. I’m not going to make any violent effort to do something radical in my life. I’m going to wait for inspiration to resurface. I hope that made some sense.
Q: Are you defining waiting as a conscious behavior or attitude, and conflicting desires are more like an internal unconscious level?
Shawn: Well, I think if you’re honest with yourself the conflicting desires are pre-conscious.
Same Questioner: So, they’re both?
Shawn: I’d say that, yeah, they’re both – if you are conscious, they’re both pre-conscious, you know. But if you’re kind of “sleepy” let’s say…
Same Questioner: So we are procrastinating it too, because procrastinating might be unconscious – right?
Shawn: Well, again, I tend to want to give you the same answer… but, ok, yeah. Yes. We’ll say yes. [laughter] For most folks they don’t really realize that they’re procrastinating. If you’re doing this, learning to wait, you’ve reached a certain level of awareness, of yourself. That you’re actually able to, perhaps, make the robot do something. [Gesturing up to the balcony] Of course we have no choice whatsoever, but… [laughter] But, damn it I’m doing to pretend like I do ’til the bitter end.
Bob Cergol: You can’t do otherwise.
Shawn: Yeah, I can’t do otherwise anyway. Anything else?
Dave Weimer: Where’d you come up with the “be honest” thing?
Shawn: The “be honest” thing… I mean, that’s everything, you know – that’s everything that – I mean that’s all that… self-honesty.
Dave: …you might have heard of that concept or words before but…
Shawn: Yeah, I see what you’re getting at.
Dave: …probably more profound that…
Shawn: Oh yeah. You know, it goes back to what Nisargadatta’s saying, when he said – what does he say about when you’re truly despairing? Basically he defines earnestness as true despair – that’s when you’re truly earnest – it’s when you know how desperate your situation is. And, you know, that’s when you have the capacity to be honest with yourself, is when you get an inkling of the route that life is going to take you if you don’t do anything. Life has a certain plan in store for you – just physical life, let’s say. And, you know, it all ends the same for everybody. It all ends in a big unknown. Just the thought that “If I could just,” you know, everybody’s saying the same damn thing all day today, “if I could just, in one moment, and the moment is right here, if I could just admit the nature of this thing, then I would know. And I can’t. Because my whole identity is just wrapped up in being.” And all that you want to do is live when it boils right down to it. All you want to do is be. And, you know, that’s the thing – you want to be. You know, Doron wants to be. And we just – we can’t fathom what is on the other side of that – that not being is okay.
But it wasn’t for a long time, Dave, that I really – you know, people talk about giving up and that the spiritual path is – you know, that seems to be the most popular thing these days, is the idea that the spiritual path is the thing that’s keeping you from achieving – the idea that I’m a spiritual seeker. And the problem, as we’ve said before, the problem with these teachings is that, yeah they’re true, but they have to be true for you, in your experience. It can’t be a thing that you read and then you shortcut through and you just say: “Oh, well, my spiritual path, that’s the thing that’s holding me up, and now I’ve given it up, so, now I must be enlightened.” You actually have to come to the point where you don’t care anymore about what you find, and you just want an answer. You just want to know something for certain. And it doesn’t matter what that answer is, you just want to know something.
And that’s a place that any of us can get to.
Q: Was there a point when you gave up completely?
Shawn: There were moments, yeah. You know, where I went “ugh!” Especially just before I moved out to Texas. But, the vector - that Bob was taking about and started to define, you know - that carries you through those moments.
Q: What were you doing in Florida when you were depressed?
Shawn: I was down there to check out some “big spiritual teacher,” Shantung Zuber, who’s on my website. He was the next great hope, because Mr. Rose couldn’t help us anymore. He wasn’t physically able to anymore, and so I didn’t have the capacity on my own to inspire myself – I had to find somebody else. So, he turned out to be a big fraud – but I was stuck down there for a couple months.
Q: So what’d you do? The way I picture it is like: Shawn, it’s dark and cloudy and a hurricane’s on it’s way and you’re going “uhhhh.”
K_____: He’s sitting on a bucket! [laughter]
Shawn: Well, I don’t know how much of the horrid details of the – what my depressions are like, you know.
Kiffy: Well, I’m curious!
Shawn: You know, what did I do? I remember I would go to the library. I remember I would go to some used book stores. I remember that in the evenings I would go out and walk on the beach because the rest of the time, Florida is this horrible, bug-infested nightmare, so you can’t go out during the day; only at night. It’s too dangerous. So I’m stuck inside all day, and it’s too damn hot because it’s August. But I go out at night and walk along the beach and, you know, what would normally be an inspiring scene, it just, it just wasn’t. I just went for exercise. I went because I knew that I was going downhill and I was trying to not go downhill. And you know, that physical exercise can help improve your mood. Reading a little bit.
Kiffy: You weren’t watching TV?
Shawn: Nah. There was no furniture, no TV, no radio. There was nothing in that house; it was totally empty.
K_____: He had a bucket to sit on.
Shawn: Did I have?
K_____: You had a bucket there and you had a bucket in Texas. So I’d say: “What’re you doing?” and you’d say: “I’m sitting on my bucket.” [laughter] Because that was the only piece of furniture you had. And I said: “Why don’t you buy a chair?” and you said: “That costs five bucks.” [laughter]
Shawn: Yeah, I had a 5-gallon painter’s bucket for a chair
Bob C.: If that’s not hard core, I don’t know what is!
Q: Is that where the minimalist definition came from?
K_____: It was a 2-million dollar house.
Shawn: Yeah, it was a nice house. [laughter] You know, and that’s what’s so – you know, when you see somebody that’s depressed, you look at them and you go, you know, “There’s inspiration all around you, but you can’t see any of it.”
[end of DVD disc 2]
Shawn: … the dynamic, you’re just kidding yourself. And a lot of people may not like hearing that, but that’s what I think. You’re always doing everything half-heartedly, because if you were doing things whole-heartedly, you would be able to find an answer quickly, let’s say. You’re always torn. And I know a lot of people right now are thinking to themselves “I’m not torn!” and, you know, yeah, I could be wrong. That’s just my opinion.
Q: What did the survey say?
Shawn: Well the survey indicated about what you would think: that there’s a bell curve, and that the majority of people are lukewarm. There were more red hot, on fires, than dead colds.
K_____: Well, the dead cold’s aren’t here.
Shawn: Because – yeah, when you’re dead cold, it is difficult to get yourself to do anything.
Q: It seems like for you, the conviction that there was nowhere else to go, was not from the depression but that was something that was sort of in place beforehand and carried through that too. Is that accurate? It’s not like you were depressed and then went back to nothing’s worth doing.
Shawn: Yeah.
Q: [indistinct]
Shawn: Yeah, when I would be depressed. Well, I guess when I would be depressed, the thought would be that “Yeah, there’s nothing else to do, but I can’t do it.” You know, “The only thing of any hope is the spiritual path, but I’m not going to make it, I’m not going to succeed. I can’t do it, I’m not enough of a person to do it. I don’t have the capacity for it. I don’t have the energy. The drive to do it.” That’s a pretty lousy feeling: when you think there’s only one way out and you think that you can’t make it.
[?]: Yeah, I can see you’re like “well, #$&*@!”
Q: You said there was a time before that where there was…I mean did it take some introspection to see, before you got to the point where you didn’t see another way out, potentially, like with, maybe finding someone to share your life with, at one time that did…
Shawn: Oh yeah, don’t get the impression that for 10 years I thought that the spiritual path was the only thing that would bring me any satisfaction in life. I mean, yeah, you know, making money, and finding a lady and all these sorts of things come up. You meet somebody and they’re really nice, and you think: “Ah, geez. Do I really want to continue to turn my head from that direction?” “Could I go down that path?” And, as you know, my mental solution to that was always to take that path in my head, and project down that life path and see where it would take me. And would it take me to where I wanted to be? If you’re honest: no. Or, if you’re honest, yes, and go down that path.
Q: A comment and a question. The comment is: I was really surprised that prayer wasn’t the first thing on the list. I guess because it was the first thing I thought, so I wanted to hear your input on that. And also, what do you define as progress? I mean, how would you ever know if you’re making progress or not?
Shawn: Prayer was a part of my life, but not necessarily vocal prayer. To me prayer is just longing. And putting words on that longing is a prayer, in the traditional sense of the word, but prayer is very much a thing of the heart to me, and a thing of – to me it’s so tied with meditation, it’s so tied with the deepest form of meditation. They intersect at some place, where both of those are nothing other than longing for that which I do not know, I cannot articulate, but I feel is out there somewhere.
You had another?
Q: Progress.
Shawn: Oh, progress. You know, progress in the beginning, is just being less miserable. I’m better off than I was a year ago, or six months ago. At a certain point, as I’m sure you know, you don’t care anymore, you’re good enough. I’m ok, and I don’t need to be happy all the time, or however you phrase it. I know I won’t be happy all the time – that would be boring if I were happy all the time. I wouldn’t be happy, I’d have to have some greater happiness, and it would never end. An eternal spiral of happiness.
Progress was, I want to say, finding more peace in myself, but not as a goal in and of itself – finding space within myself in which I could look, or in which I could pray, or in which I could meditate. I wasn’t tied up in thinking, but I was finding – you know, Rose describes it so well – it’s peeling back the layers of the onion. We’re this onion, you know, and we’re peeling back these layers, and that’s progress: peeling back those layers. And the way that I felt that, was finding less of me when I looked inside, you know, or a subtler sense of what I am. Shawn wasn’t chattering anymore in my head, I could look past that. And, I wasn’t feeling emotions, I could look past those. And, I want to use the word deeper, but that doesn’t mean a whole heck of a lot – looking deeper into myself.
I’ve said before that progress was a refinement of questions. What was the question that I had. And in the beginning, the question is: “Why am I miserable?” or “How can I be happy?” And in the end the question is nothing other than – it’s not hardly even a question, it’s just a longing. It’s just a wanting to know. And in between, there are things like, well, “Why do I react this way?” “Why when someone gets too close to me with their car do I get angry?” Or: “Why am I attracted to a certain type of person?” “Why do I have a certain type of fear?” All those things are – all those self-knowledge things are scattered in between those two points.
Q: If dismantling of the ego is a necessary step to self-realization, is depression inevitable?
Shawn: Is depression inevitable? Well, I think whether you’re in this or not, depression is a part of most people’s experience – at least the people I’ve known… maybe I hang out in strange circles. My mom always says – my mom suffered from depression her whole life – she always says: “There must be people out there who are happy all the time. I don’t hear them talking about things like are happening to me.” If they are, they need to speak up loudly, I guess. I haven’t heard them.
I mean, I see where you’re getting at, that this sounds like a painful thing: dismantling of the ego: “I’m dismantling myself, tearing out my guts.” That sounds hard, and depression must be a part of that.
[Comment from someone]
Shawn: You know, that’s the thing, it’s all so fascinating, and it’s an amazing adventure and it’s this revelation of such amazing material about yourself and about existence. I hate the thought that the search is blood and guts and all that.
But, you know, I’m basically a pessimist, which you should know, so… I think that that any endeavor will be fraught with depression. [laughter] Angst. The loss of will and desire. And we must plow our way through. [laughter]
[Comment from Bob C.]
Shawn: That’s right. [making a rowing motion] That’s right.
So if you find some rapport with that [laughter] then you may get some value from the things I had to say. However, if you think “that poor bastard” [laughter] then you might want to listen to somebody else.
I think we’re about out of time, aren’t we?
Heather: No, eight minutes [laughter]
Q: Did you find a way of checking whether or not you were truly being honest with yourself?
Shawn: Boy, yeah that’s a – you’ve come to the crux of the matter there. You’ve got to refine the machine as Mr. Rose would say, refine the intuition. You’ve got friends who can help you, but, at a certain place, you know, your friends can only help you to a certain extent, and beyond that it’s up to you, or if you’re fortunate enough to have a teacher or someone who you think is a little further along than you, then they may be able to help you. But the problem is, a lot of times they’ll tell you the truth and you won’t listen to them anyways. So, it still comes back to you.
And, yeah, how do I know when I’m being honest? It’s this hard circle of: If I were being honest, I would know that I was being honest, and how do I ever be honest for the first time? What’s the gauge by which I measure my honesty?
I think if you don’t have a moment of rapport, or a moment of a sense that there’s something more, then you would have a hard time judging truth, let’s say. I think you had to have some kind of spark inside yourself. You know, does everybody? Maybe everybody does, but for me, I would say, up until the point that I was 22, I didn’t know anything. As Bart Marshal says, the world was just women and jobs and cars, and that was it. And then I heard a lecture by Mr. Rose and just something about him sparked something in me, and then, it’s like I had the beginning of some kernel of truth inside myself. And if I could just remember that, then that would give me some base-line, let’s say, to judge: What do I really want?
I think honesty – it boils back to knowing what you want. If you don’t know what you’re really after, then it’s mighty hard to be honest – if you’re confused about that point. Fundamentally, what do I want? What do I want to achieve? What do I want to be? And if I get a sense of possibility, then I can ask myself: “Is this action taking me perhaps closer to that or further away from it?” And sometimes you just don’t know, and that’s perfectly valid. I spent most of my life not knowing what in the heck was the next thing I was supposed to be doing. But I could tell what was leading me down another route, you know.
Maybe – well, that’s retroversing the, you know, backing away from untruth. That’s all I’m saying. I did know what wasn’t it. I was pretty vague on what would get me there, but I did know what wouldn’t get me there.
Q: [indistinct] Maybe it has something to do with the thinking in negative moods, too. Because there are decisions, ideas that come to mind sometimes, that I think “maybe I should go this way” and I think I could have done stuff. Could have been some other desires that I have. What do I do? I don’t necessarily have to hate me for a direction.
Shawn: Um-hm. I think if you could actually tell a friend those things or could write them out in the actual words of “what is it” that you might – that you would see. That’s just my sense.
Q: When you mean “be honest” do you mean thoughts to yourself? I mean, it’s not so much honesty with other people? [laugher]
Shawn: Well, I don’t know, what do you think? [laughter]
Q: I mean that the way I said it.
Shawn: Are there any other questions? [laughter]
Bob C.: Why did you move to Texas, Shawn?
Shawn: I moved to Texas because the East Coast had become associated with failure to me. That, at the time the farm was to me disintegrating, there was no one here, Mr. Rose was gone, everyone was moving away, I wasn’t getting anything more out of working at Linsly and doing that type of work – the adventure-ed stuff. Being out in nature wasn’t really doing anything for me, and my relationships with people had come to a dead end. That classic solution that many people employ: go somewhere.
Bob C.: Why did it end up in Texas instead of Des Moines or Indianapolis?
Shawn: I took a trip a few months before because you know how Mr. Rose said that he would have a sense if a city had potential – that it would be a spiritual hot-spot. I thought, well, I don’t want to move somewhere like Des Moines that’s going to be a spiritual dead-end, I want to find some place that feels like there’s potential to do something, to have a group. So I just went from city to city, and I had some places in mind, and just see what they were like. You know, I went to Boulder and Denver, San Antonio and Austin and those places are by each other. I visited some people, too. I drove through Memphis on the way, visited Dave. I went to Charleston, no not Charleston, Charlottesville.
Bob C.: Is that when you came to Raleigh?
Shawn: I think I came to Raleigh too, yeah, just to see if I could see: well can I feel, you know, a place to go. And as best as I could tell, Austin seemed to be the place, and I guess it turned out ok.
Q: When you asked the question “is there more to life than material career, wife” obviously you came to an answer which said, yeah there’s something else. So you took the same question and apply it to the spiritual search: is there more to life than the spiritual search – what kind of vision did you have? What were you looking for? What is it that you wanted at that point at your spiritual search?
Shawn: That’s a great question, and again, it’s a progression. I very much see a progression in my questions and a progression in what I wanted. And again, in the beginning, I just wanted to be well, or to be happy, and that was as much as I could conceive – you know, enlightenment, and these sorts of things, you know – which is not to say that I didn’t have a sense of something deeper, but what I wanted is what you’re asking, and that’s what I wanted. And I went through that phase at a point where I wanted to be a teacher – I don’t think I phrased it really as that – I wanted a community. You know, I wanted to have a place like the farm where people could come and be in isolation, because I don’t like talking and I don’t really like people all that much. [laughter] I like being by myself.
Q: A hermit.
Shawn: But I do like the community aspect of it, to a certain degree, so you know, have a place and I’d be doing something for other people; something of value. Eventually, like I said, at some point, it’s just – certainty. Wherever that was. Something solid. Because nothing is solid. Nothing was – who said generate the doubt sensation? Was that you Bob, taking about – yeah. Everything was that. Including enlightenment, and the idea of a path – it was all on the table. I always say you have to be able to seriously consider that this is all B.S. and that we’re nothing but biological organisms and when you die, that’s it. If you can’t consider that you’re kidding yourself, you’re not being honest because you don’t know anything for certain. And to have that thought throws you into a place where, whoa, talk about the mind being unsteady, well everything that I think is important is actually on a big sand castle by the beach.
Q: So?
Shawn: Well, my last thing of certainty, that was the final thing that I wanted from my path: certainty. That was the thing when I was in Texas. If I would have articulated “what am I looking for?” and I’m really not doing much looking, it was just certainty.
From a presentation given at the April 2006 TAT conference “What Is Spiritual Action?” Thanks to Dan G. for the transcription.