“May I be a protector to those without protection,
A leader for those who journey,
And a boat, a bridge, a passage
For those desiring the further shore.
May the pain of every living creature
Be completely cleared away.
May I be the doctor and the medicine
And may I be the nurse
For all sick beings in the world
Until everyone is healed.”
Shantideva
Sometimes I feel like a badly broken bodhisattva. In Buddhism, a bodhisattva is a person who devotes their life to become spiritually enlightened for the sake of all beings.
When I was a child of seven or eight, of course, I knew nothing of Buddhism. What I did know is Superman and I wanted to be him (who didn’t?). Deep in my little kid soul I wished and prayed that I could be that guy. Completely good, infinitely strong, cool powers, especially the flying! And the x-ray vision (and yes I thought about using that to see through girls’ dresses – please forgive me).
It is not unusual to want to be the hero. Many of our movies are based on that premise. We identify with Clark Kent or Peter Parker because they are just normal people who secretly become Superman or Spiderman – extraordinarily and powerfully good. Deep down some of us wished we could be them. We aspire to be heroic, not for the fame or adoration but because we feel the world’s pain and anguish and desperately wish to heal it. Many of us are helpers, fixers, healers and solvers. Our joy comes in surrendered serving and we never get enough. It is our welcome addiction.
I was pretty young – maybe 10 or 11 – when I was talking with my mother about what I wanted to be when I grew up. It is possible I told her I wanted to be a writer because that fire was lit in the third grade but what I remember from that conversation was what my mom suggested. She asked me if I ever thought about “theology” as if I should know what that word meant (I didn’t).
I remember asking her what it was and I recall she explained it meant being a minister in a church. But it tells you something about my mother that she would think of that for me. Why theology of all things? Why not the usual – fireman or policeman?
I’ve had moments throughout my life when I would find myself sobbing uncontrollably because I was horrified to think that I might waste this life and “fail God.” It is tragic to be completely ordinary and carry an unrealistic and outsized burden of mysterious expectation for yourself.
I know I am not the only one. As teenagers, some of us dreamed that perhaps we might achieve greatness in this life; that we might grow up and actually bring peace to the world or at least to parts of it like Northern Ireland or the Middle East. That may sound absurd, grandiose and verging on delusional even, but it is a fact that many feel that itch, urge or calling to achieve something greater than themselves but never quite figure out how to do it.
When I discovered Zen Buddhism in my adolescence and read Alan Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity, This is It), Ram Dass (Be Here Now) and Paul Williams (Das Energi), I began to understand. It isn’t through saving the world that we realize our destiny; it is through realizing our destiny that we save the world. Or at least the part of it that we inhabit.
Our destiny is to be completely who we are, without clinging, fear or resistance. And realizing our destiny always involves inner, spiritual work. What do we do when we feel called? It is about our choices and actions. What we do determines who we are and who we become.
We live now. We choose now. And we don’t change or heal others directly as much as others around us are transformed or healed as we fully accept and take radical responsibility for our own healing in this moment. A bodhisattva is motivated by tremendous compassion for others to seek enlightenment for self to benefit all precisely because of an awareness that Self is All and All is Self.
Adyashanti asks, “Can you imagine if you really let it in that you are not a problem to be solved in any way? Imagine you knew that anything that would tell you otherwise is just a movement of thought in the mind that says ‘Whatever is, isn’t the way it is supposed to be.’ So the biggest act of compassion starts within. And when the self is no longer seen as a problem, this is called ‘the peace that passes all understanding.’”
I consider myself a badly broken bodhisattva because I am still clumsily trying to figure out my role here and how to get my own soul straight. In certain ways we are all broken because we are confused, flawed and imperfect and yet each of us is also whole and unbroken.
The bodhisattva is possessed with the unquenchable thirst for spiritual enlightenment, what Watts describes as “a vivid and overwhelming certainty that the universe, precisely as it is at this moment, as a whole and in every one of its parts, is so completely right as to need no explanation or justification beyond what it simply is.
“Existence not only ceases to be a problem; the mind is so wonder-struck at the self-evident and self-sufficient fitness of things as they are, including what would ordinarily be thought the very worst, that it cannot find any word strong enough to express the perfection and beauty of the experience.”
Watts writes, “The central core of the (enlightenment) experience seems to be the conviction that the immediate now, whatever its nature, is the goal and fulfillment of all living.”
Our purpose here seems to be awake and part of that process involves accepting the fact of our slumber. As we look at the diamonds of luminescence in the night sky or a field of red and purple flowers, or the energetic, visible god of ocean, churning and turning like a dancing poem of light and foam, we might glimpse our own oneness with all that is. We might just exit the thought train long enough to experience eternity and realize the blissful, perfect being we have always been.
As Adyashanti reminds us, “There is only being living itself through you, as you, and as all that exists.”
Be well. See. Be.
Doug Craig graduated from college in Ohio with a journalism degree and got married during the Carter administration. He graduated from graduate school with a doctorate in Psychology, got divorced, moved to Redding, re-married and started his private practice during the Reagan administration. He had his kids during the first Bush administration. Since then he has done nothing noteworthy besides write a little poetry, survive a motorcycle crash, buy and sell an electric car, raise his kids, manage to stay married and maintain his practice for almost 25 years. He believes in magic and is a Sacramento Kings fan.
