The Bodhisattva vow continued to arise in my meditation, in my conversations with Eva and when I was contemplating what my life was about. I started to see that it represented the type of ‘calling’ that I had always wanted to guide my life, but had never found. By the middle of September I visited my wise man to ask his advice about it all. Here is what he said:
In a previous life a group of people helped you. They helped you stay alive and ‘wake up’ – but it cost them their lives. You vowed to repay that gift by doing the same for everyone else. After I asked who these people were he said: Some of them are in your life, but it wouldn’t work for you to know who they were. You just have to love everyone – that is the way that karma is repaid – by unconditional love. So you need to regard everyone as if they were responsible for saving you in a previous life. And no they are not the people who wanted to be your students.
I was amazed by this. I wasn’t sure whether it made the vow more or less real for me. I certainly saw that the injunction I received from my wise man – to love everyone as if they had saved me in a previous life – had the potential to transform me. As a result of all this I spent a stoned evening on my own trying to figure out my relationship to the vow. As a result of that evening and my visit to the wise man I wrote a paper setting out my understanding. Here are the relevant extracts for that paper:
For much of my adult life I have been envious of people who have had a clear calling; for example to build an orphanage in Romania, or visit people in prison. This vow, and my understanding of how to fulfil it provide me with a clear ‘calling’. And I can sense a deep sense of peace within myself. Yet I cannot really believe that it is true, that this is really happening to me.
As I write this there are tears in my eyes, I just feel so blessed, I am so grateful – why do I still struggle to accept it? Yet I also understand that in some way that will only become clear later, this struggle that I experience is part of what has to happen. It is part of what transforms me.
One of the reasons that I have taken seriously the possibility of this vow being real for me, is because it explains a number of things about my life. I have always felt driven to work for other people, to make their life better and to increase their understanding and awareness.. My inner experience is that if I can contribute, if I can help, then I do so. There is not a question “should I?”
Another characteristic that it explains is my sense of commitment when engaged with Enlightenment Intensives. From the very first Intensive I lead I felt compelled to do absolutely everything I could to give everyone the very best opportunity to experience Truth. And if I made an error I felt completely devastated. The thought that caused me enormous grief was that in some way I had been an obstacle, that what I did had gotten in the way. I could not stand this thought – such was the intensity of grief it evoked. The vow makes sense of this extreme reaction – indeed I find it hard to imagine any other explanation being as satisfactory.
Quite early in my discussions about the vow Eva observed that this was a bit of an extreme vow. It wasn’t saying that I would work to help people get enlightened. It says that I vow to liberate all beings, without number. This has a ring of megalomania about it. Who am I to imagine that I could liberate all beings? The final piece of the jigsaw fell into place on evening when I was alone and chose to get stoned. I will recount the sequence of what occurred, because it illuminates a number of issues. Here is the beginning of what I wrote that evening.
“Do I still want to change the world? It is so full of suffering and injustice! How can I not want to change it! And yet I am so tired! I’ll have to stop at some point. Do I just continue until I fall over? Or do I stop before that and just rest and be at peace with myself? Have I done enough?
How could I ever do enough to satisfy my vow? It is painful to see this. I am bawling my eyes out. I have taken this profound vow to reduce suffering, to help people into Love, to know the Divine. This is incredibly powerful for me. I have approached this place (inside myself) before, but never been able to fully engage with it. It is the depth of my love for other people. It is really amazing; it is all consuming – in the sense that it consumes me completely. This is the meaning of my life. I know it. What I don’t know is whether I have done enough.”
I then recognised that I had helped a large number of people to really wake up – people who had taken Intensives with me, people whom I had trained to run Intensives – even people to whom I had taught systems thinking and personal awareness. And then I realised that I would be able to stop, I would be able to let go and rest if I knew that some of these people that I had helped to wake up were committed to helping other people to wake up.
What I understood was that the vow is fulfilled, not by me personally liberating everyone, but by my passing on the desire (and understanding of how) to liberate others. At this point I knew that my understanding of the vow was complete. The basis of the vow is in profound love for others and its fulfilment by passing it on to others were the parts that I had been missing, and with it came a deep sense of peace. Interestingly my energy also came back
I also recognised a number of specific things that I wanted to pass on – no, that I needed to pass on in order to be able to stop and rest. The largest of these was how to run Long Intensives. This is the vehicle that I have developed quite significantly over the last 21 years, it is extremely effective at ‘liberating others’. I now find it odd that at the end of the two week I ran in July/August I referred to this vow in a lecture and as soon as I returned home started writing a manual to help other people run long Intensives.
There are other components to my own awakening process that I want to pass on; the role of an intimate relationship and how to make it serve the Divine and real love; how to handle power and authority; how to use ‘drugs’ for personal growth (with the stoned evening reported above being one more example). These were also things that I was starting to document and deliberately pass on to other people without any clear sense of why.
So, there is overwhelming evidence that I am on the right track, that this is not a fantasy. It makes sense of much of my life and a number of things that have puzzled me – and answers my prayers to have a clear idea of what I am supposed to be doing with the rest of my life
The recognition that it is this vow that I need to connect to and pass on to others is really the culmination of all my musings and writings about being, or not, a spiritual teacher. And that journey has unfolded in surprising ways over the last two and a half years. At each stage I thought I had come to some resolution, only to find that it was just the next step in a longer journey. What I find delightful about the journey is that it is unfolding without any guidance from me.
I have communicated the insights and understanding to a number of close friends, including members of my immediate family. When I explain, shyly, my profound love for others they are not surprised; indeed the reaction I have received from all of them is that it is obvious – and that it is about time that I woke up to it. As far as I can tell they see this understanding as the natural unfolding of who I am and how I have been in the world for some time.
And here is an extract from one of the responses I received when I circulated my thoughts about the vow. It is typical of many responses.
The most succinct I can be is to say, I thought you knew, already, about yourself. You’re right that it’s bleeding obvious to anyone who knows you reasonably well. There you are, this sharp, confident, positive, high-energy man, who could clearly succeed at anything he turns his hand to, and, as well as being successful in the world, you’re also, and have been for a long time, giving out Love by the bucket-load in arguably the most humble manner imaginable. You give, Jake; that’s all I’ve ever seen you do. What’s more, you give training in how to give. Teach them how to fish. You don’t just give fish.
And I, for one, am lapping it up – your training, that is, and have been since before I met you (in the form of your book). Your confidence is inspiring. People trust you, and they should. The world needs you. You need to be out there and seen, so that anyone searching, like me, can find you. Practically everything you say rings bells. You are a beacon. You were shining even when you were apparently retired from Els.
What’s particularly nice about you is your very self-inspection, and doubt, and your checking and double-checking everything that comes up about yourself for bias and blind-ego-alleys. Your honesty, in a nutshell. You demand that everyone does this too with any material you present, and I find that extremely healthy.
Good luck to you, Jake.
Whilst reading the papers and journal entries relevant to the vow I found myself in floods of tears. I am as moved by thinking about the vow as I am when thinking about experiences of the Divine. I feel very vulnerable in both contexts. I am also aware that I am nervous about either claiming too much or not owning enough in the context of the vow. There is also the obvious danger that my ego will become involved and pump itself up. I am in no doubt about the profound love I have for others and how it has influenced large swathes of my life. But I do not subscribe to the Buddhist notion of liberation, so to claim any understanding of this quintessentially Buddhist vow seems presumptuous, to say the least. It is clearly work in progress.
Whilst I was pondering the issues around the vow I received a request to contribute to a training course for the National School of Government. The course, the Top Management Program (TMP), was for senior leaders in the public sector and completing it was a necessary step in reaching the top levels of the civil service. I was asked to propose a module for teaching systems thinking to these people, largely as a result of the impact of System Failure. I thought carefully about the conditions under which I would do this. I made it clear that I would require three days in the course. The first day I would teach a number of systems tools and explain how and why they could be used. The second day the participants would address a real and current public sector issue by interviewing people at all levels of the system involved with the issue. The third day the group would use the tools I had taught in order to develop a systemic way of addressing the issue. I also made it clear that to change their way of thinking participants would need to self inspect and develop their self awareness. To my surprise the proposal was accepted in total. So I then spent the next few months preparing all the materials I would need. Personally I had also made a decision that it was probably of more benefit to the world if I could increase the awareness of people with the power to make a difference by even a small amount , rather than help “a bunch of hippies” to have an enlightenment experience. To this end I always included self awareness exercises as part of what I taught – mostly the criticalness exercise and “immunity to change” (which is explained later).
I was extremely nervous presenting of what became known as the “Systems Challenge in TMP”, but it was enthusiastically received and appreciated. The use of a real and current issue as the focus for using the tools and techniques was especially successful. The people participating in the course did not often go out to interview people in prisons, nursing homes or refuges for pregnant teenagers. So they were bowled over by both the content they uncovered and then by the way in which a holistic and multi-perspective approach could provide a clear way to improve the situation. I continued presenting System Challenges for all the remaining presentations of TMP. I only stopped when the coalition government after 2010 decided to disband the National School of Government as part of its austerity drive. In all I presented 16 systems challenges for TMP and another eight for other groups, such as the Scottish Government.
One of the surprises emerging from System Failure was a deeper appreciation of public sector leaders, and this was strengthened and affirmed by my teaching on TMP. Prior to knowing the individuals involved I imagined that Chief Constables, very senior Civil Servants and people in charge of large public institutions were rather mechanical, distant and rigid people. To my surprise and delight I found the stereotype completely wrong; they were warm, intelligent and pretty aware people. They liked the combination of challenge, providing tools for thinking and self-awareness and support for the public sector that I presented.
The astute reader will have noticed that although I notionally ‘retired’ in 1999, by 2006 I was still extremely active in a number of different domains. I continued to contribute to the business, I was still running Intensives, albeit a lot fewer than previously, and I was solidly involved teaching systems to Demos researchers, the Metropolitan police and public sector leaders. I frequently exhausted myself. And as I aged it became clearer and clearer that I did need to let go and retire more. When I self inspected about my lack of retirement I found that I still enjoyed appreciation and acknowledgement and I also wanted to communicate and pass on what I had learned. With this last thought in mind I invited a number of people to join a group where I would attempt to pass on the version of systems thinking that I had started with System Failure and was now developing teaching TMP.
To my delight all the people I invited accepted. I felt honoured that such a smart bunch of young people were willing to learn from me. We met once every 6 to 8 weeks at a venue in London, sometimes at someone’s house, and spent a morning or afternoon either discussing systems concepts or using the concepts to address a problem that a member of the group was confronting in their life. But what pleased me even more was that a significant number of the group went on to use the ideas in their work, indeed two underwent a career change that involved making systems thinking a core part of their everyday activity.
When I was starting the systems group, Fanny applied to join the group. I refused her, largely because I felt her presence would be disruptive. She became very unpleasant when I refused her, which confirmed my decision. However, it also made me face up to the state of my relationship with her and Harry. In intimate relationships I have a strong belief that each partner has 50% responsibility for the state of the relationship. However, in a parent-child or teacher-student relationship my belief was that the person with the greater awareness and power has most responsibility for the state of the relationship. In the case of me with Harry and Fanny that meant I carried most of the responsibility. So I made a point of visiting Harry and Fanny and apologizing to them for my part in the distorted relationship. I was also open to doing whatever was necessary to ensure that the history between us did not leave them with problems or distress. In the event I did not find anything that would help – other than agree to become Fanny’s spiritual teacher! I made it clear that this was not something I would do and that understanding the Bodhisattva vow enabled me to see that my path was one of service to others rather than establishing myself as a teacher.
Early in 2007 Eva was 60. We had a great party with a dozen friends over three days at our house. A few weeks later we had a much bigger party at a venue in London. We borrowed what we had learned about good parties from Golden Delicious and Kimberley and had more than two hundred people dancing the night away. This was the first of a series of really good parties that we threw for our family and friends in London.
A few weeks later I finished writing the manual on how to run long Intensives. No one had attempted to do this before and I recognized that it was something to which I had made a significant contribution. It was also something that I wanted to pass on to others because it was long Intensives that had transformed me and my life and that I had witnessed doing the same for many other people. I sent a copy to Charles Berner. Although he remained opposed to long Intensives (on the grounds that surrender meditation gave faster and more lasting benefits) he included the manual on his website which provided information to people wishing to run Intensives. In my correspondence with him I argued that surrender meditation and the renunciate path was only ever going to appeal to a minority of people. For the majority being able to have a deep enlightenment experience and remain engaged with the world was far more attractive. I also told him that the work I did with TMP, raising the self awareness and perceptions of senior leaders by an increment, was probably the most important work I had ever done.
Around this time I also wrote a paper about trusting myself in response to several people running Intensives were struggling with the issue. Here is the part that surprised me the most.
When I started thinking about the factors that contributed to me trusting myself, ‘Behaving well’ was the first that arose. And it was a surprise to me. A surprise both that it was the first factor that appeared and that it should have appeared at all. I have been pretty scathing about people who behave well according to some code of behaviour that has been given to them – as opposed to discovering it for themselves. My antipathy is in part a reaction to what I perceived as the hypocrisy associated with many religious people. In public they would ‘behave correctly’ – but in private they would succumb to their dark side and mistreat many who were close to them. So I discounted behaving properly as a path to self improvement or trust. But I was wrong.What I have discovered is that if I consistently make the effort to behave better towards others then that effort pays off in that I am changed. When I Master an Intensive I communicate this to people by saying that each time one gives in to one’s ‘ego-mind’, the ego- mind becomes stronger and the self is weakened. Each time that the self exerts control and refuses the ego-mind, the self becomes stronger, and the ego-mind weaker. And it is this process that leads to real improvement through behaving better. Indeed, I have come to the conclusion that this is the only way that some aspects of my ego-mind can be tamed.
Next.
A Master's Path 