INVISIBLE GURU FORUM

Here are my instructions for how to stop following instructions.

Follow these steps when you encounter a new practice, meditation, or contemplation you’ve never tried before.

1.) Read through the instructions carefully, and try to grok their intended meaning. Many “spiritual” practices are trying to get at something abstract or subtle. Sometimes they’re attempting to guide you to an experience that defies description. So the words are often open to interpretation. Make your best guess, which is usually as good as it gets.
2.) Read the instructions again, trying out each step, awkwardly if necessary. Try to figure out how to put the words into action. Perhaps even read through a third time.
3.) If the instructions already make sense to you at this point, do a little fist pump to celebrate your grasp of the new practice, and enjoy its benefits. If you can discover the real essence of the practice, you can often get back to that essence without needing to go through all the steps.
4.) If the instructions don’t make sense to you, see if you can create a new version that does. Play with each instruction. Tweak them, vary them, and rearrange them to suit you better.
5.) Basically, if the instructions aren’t working for you, stop following the instructions. If the instructions already got you to the intended destination, stop following the instructions.
6.) As a final step, there is no final step, because you should have already stopped following the instructions by now!

The problem is that you really can’t know if you got it right. Even if you think you got it, you don’t know if what you got was what you were meant to get. On the other hand, you may be certain you got it wrong, so you made up your own variation. But that variation may get you closer to the intended mark anyway. You can’t know.

And the real reason you can’t know if you got it right is that the person giving the instructions may not have gotten it right either. Why do you assume they know what they’re doing? Either they just made the practice up, or they learned it from someone who learned it from someone who learned it from someone who just made it up.

The idea that there’s a right way has to be a myth. Just think back to what it must have been like in the olden days.

The first yoga teacher training, as I’m sure you can imagine, was a total bust. None of the asanas had been invented yet, so there was nothing to teach!

The first dude who tried to do the tai chi form kept kicking himself because he couldn’t remember any of the movements. But then he remembered that there were no movements to remember. No one had yet come up with any!

Meditation practice wasn’t any better. Everyone kept looking around at each other trying to figure out if they were doing it right, but there were no instructions yet, so no one knew!

For every spiritual practice that’s been around for years or decades or millenia, someone was the first person to try it. Someone had to innovate every single form of meditation, every yoga asana, every tai chi movement - and every other practice you can think of. To come up with it in the first place, they messed around and experimented and happened upon something that seemed to work.

That was always Jed’s process, and it’s mine as well.

He would be trying to investigate something curious or mysterious. He’d mess around and make up a new practice that was always partially ripped off of something else he picked up along the way. He’d try it on himself, refine it, maybe give up on it and return to it later, and finally try it out on his friends. He didn’t know the one true way. He just came up with one possible way.

Then he was faced with the task of figuring out how the heck to write down the instructions. He’d do his best to craft precise words, knowing they would resonate instantly with some students, not make any sense to others, and be exactly the wrong practice for some people anyway. He almost always emphasized that students are better off reading the instructions carefully and repeatedly. Then at least you have a chance. But he knew the instructions would only ever get them so far.

Just because it worked for Jed, or works for some of his students, doesn’t mean it’ll work for you. If it doesn’t, you can probably come up with a better way.

None of the people who invented any of the practices you’ve learned, including Jed, were any more qualified than you. No one who later improved upon those practices, or came up with interesting variations on them, was any more qualified than you. Everyone is equally qualified to study their own nature, to investigate how consciousness works, to find out how energy seems to move through them when they channel it this way or that. You are as qualified as anyone, and significantly more so when it comes to finding out what works for you in particular.

As a disclaimer, I should probably say that in the spirituality business, a lot of people believe that the only way to get where you’re going is to have a live teacher, maybe one who will transmit something to you that can only be transmitted in person, or perhaps just someone who can correct you individually until you finally get it right.

But I won’t make that disclaimer because around these parts, there is no right way to follow. You have to find your own way. Recruit help from whatever quarters you can find it, but it’s still ultimately going to be your way.

Everyone learns differently. Some people seem to like a lot of guidance and to try to get all their numerous questions answered. Some people like the rules and structure to be given to them by someone in authority. That’s a fine place to start your journey. The journey gets way more interesting, however, once you start to do your own experiments, when you make it your mission to figure out the stuff no one can teach you anyway. It’s always a solo journey that gets you the rest of the way home.

So, when you’re picking up something new, squeeze whatever you can from the instructions as presented. Then stop following instructions and find your own way.

This is particularly true of the instructions I am giving you right now.

Love,
Zara

I am so grateful. Thank You!!!

Thank you, Zara. Love you.

Just as a way of offering admiration and agreement to this advice, I have a really simple change I made once which helped me.

The instruction given was to repeat the mantra "Who am I?"  I actually did understand the whole point of it.  I did want to know the truth.  I KNEW I didn't know the truth of it.  But I kept getting stuck on "who".  What does "who" even mean?  What is a "who?"  How could there be a "who" at the source of anything at all?  A "who" is like a weird modifier reserved only for something like this human domain with unique individual personalities or something like that.  What is a "who" actually anyway?

So I changed it to "what."  And "what" may not be entirely correct either by the end, but it sure brought me a whole lot closer and much more fastidiously than "who" qas going to.  "What" worked for me.  At least I understood what a "what" was.  A "who" seemed too insane to follow.  Who?  What the **** is a who?