The Spiritual Essentialist
The essentialist is good at saying no and prioritising the things that matter. They're all about leveraging The Pareto Principle and doubling down on the 20% of actions that account for 80% of the results.
Personally, I'd be tempted to go further and say it's 10% of the things you do that accounst for 90% of your results. It probably depends on how wide your interests are spread.
I went to a mandala offering retreat on Sunday, and after flailing around for the first 40 minutes (it was unguided) I managed to vaguely figure out what was going on. One of the residents generously gave up some of their time in the break to explain how to do the ritual. It's said that Je Tsongkhapa, founder of the Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism, made the mandala offering his main spiritual practice. By the sounds of it, he was somewhat an essentialist.
There's alwyas been an undercurrent telling me that the spiritual path has to be made up primarily of meditation, but my recent exploration of Tibetan Buddhism has opened my eyes to other possibilities. Acts such as mandala offering, mantra recitation, taking refuge, prostration and prayer are things I alwyas thought to be inferior to practicing meditation. I seemed to think that because meditation was the most challenging (for me, anyway) that it would lead to the greatest level of self-realisation.
For the past seven years, it would be fair to say that I've been highly essentialist in my spiritual practice, or sadhana to use the correct term. I treat meditation as the one and only path. But my experince on Sunday made me realise that it could be time to experiment with something else. An idea I've been contemplating recently is that what got you from A to B, won't necessarily get you from B to C.
Meditation has certainly moved me forward from one place to another, but it could be time to put my faith in something else? My spiritual pen pal recently told me of the value of prostrations in working through karmic energy. I could never understand people doing prostrations when I went to classes at my local Buddhist centre. I mean, why repeatedly put your head, hand and knees to the ground, repeatedly, in from of a big lump of inanimate metal?
I still haven't tried prostration, but my experience of the mandala offering made me feel more open to trying new things. Furthermore, my recent understanding of karmic relationship to our actions, speech and thoughts has deepened in the past year. When these are combined into an act such as mandala offering or prostration, it creates 'good' karma. How? Because when we make such offerings, we are not just doing so to a piece of metal or mental image. The image or statue of Buddha does not represent an entity seperate from ourselves.
One of the fundamental beliefs in Buddhism is that of buddha-nature. This is the innate potential of all living beings to relaise their true nature of boundless consciousness, free from mental afflications such as attachment and aversion. In the aforementioned acts, you're paying hommage to the great beings that have walked this path and attained these realisations. But more importantly, you're paying hommage to the buddha-nature within yourself.
An intellectual understanding of this is not enough to attain self-realisation, and physcial offerings accompanied with mantram and gestures are all ways that drill these idea deeper into your subconscious mind. Freud said the mind is like an iceberg, with the conscious element only making up a minute proportion. The rest of the subsconscious mind makes up the majority. Although we can’t see it, it is responsible for more of our programming and experience than we may ever care to imagine.
I've become pretty attached to my meditation practice in recent years. It's one of the only things that has kept me sane through some of the most challenging years of my life. However, I’m now considering if this a time to try something different?
It’s tempting to try and fit it all in, but I’ve made that mistake before. Trying to do everything can be real unrealistic for most people holding down a home and a job. If you try spreading yourself too thinly, you end up barely scratching the surfaces with any of your practices. It’s good to have an understanding and experience of others, but with limited time, it’s best to pick one sadhana and go deep with it.
Whether I choose to stick with meditation or experiment with something else, this is a reminder to myself not to get carried away in trying to it all at once. It’s a reminder to be a spiritual essentialist and give which ever practice I commit to its due diligence.