I abandoned patience in search of freedom

"Well, screw this."*

I switch off the computer, stand up, and walk away from my desk with the smoldering dignity of someone whose computer crashed and erased three hours of work.

I was frustrated. Borderline angry.

Okay, I was angry. Thoroughly pissed off.

I wanted to throw away my computer and be done with technology altogether. It had gotten the better of me, yet again.

A few minutes prior, a wildly different scene was unfolding.

Yogi Dan was sitting quietly and patiently in front of his computer, watching a progress bar inch its way across the screen, seemingly willing to sit there all day.

I’ve always had a long fuse; I’m a patient guy. Which is why I sat there waiting for my computer to do its thing, channeling my inner Buddha, telling myself that I would sit and wait patiently for as long as it took for that progress bar to reach 100%.

At the time, that felt like total non-attachment. I was prepared to sit and wait as long as it took unt… WAIT, it FAILED?

But I was ready to sit there and be patient! I was planning on being yoga-like and righteously contemplative for what could have been an hour! Or two!

I felt cheated, like God was playing a sick joke on me—like Ram Dass saying his guru dressed in drag whenever there was something in his life that upset him and quietly whispered, “oh, you think you’ve got it, do you?”

The thing is, I wasn’t cheated at all. I was tested, and I failed. I forgot an important lesson in non-attachment:

“Your right is to the work alone, never to its fruits.
Let not the fruit of action be your motive, nor let your attachment be to inaction.”
Krishna, Chapter 2, Verse 47

Translation: my job was to wait for the progress bar to do whatever it was going to do, not necessarily ending in success.

Other translation: I needed to find the joy in waiting for the progress bar, no matter the outcome.

But, as it happens on this particular day, I forgot this sage advice. I had things to do, dammit!

So, I waited for the progress bar to complete. Patiently.

And look how far it got me.

Am I patient, or am I unattached?

When I say I’m patient, to me, that means I have a wide set of expectations around when I’m going to get what I want. It could come now, or a week from now, or a year from now, and I’ll be just as content. That’s patience.

The thing is, there’s an implicit expectation inside of patience: the expectation that whatever it is I’m waiting for, I will get it.

My patience has, baked into it, an expectation that what I expect to happen will come to pass. It’s not a matter of if, but when.

Which is great, as long as I always get what I want.

Not a great plan if I’m trying to occupy more transcendent levels of peace (or get creative work done).

Having spent my entire life being told (and believing) that patience is a virtue, it’s felt a bit like I’ve walked myself deep into a maze in search of a hidden treasure—only to realize I’m in the wrong maze.

That’s not to say patience isn’t a virtue. It may very well be. But it won’t get me to enlightenment. I’ll never experience the “ever-new bliss” that the saints and avatars throughout humanity enjoyed if I’m patient. I’ll get close, but I won’t get there.

In order to get there—to moksha, or samadhi, heaven, whatever you want to call it—I have to release the attachment to the thing for which I’m being patient in the first place.

And in order to do that, I first have to back myself out of the maze.

For me, that means I have to constantly remind myself of the cosmic joke: that I chose this life and all of its challenges and triumphs. To get upset about any of it, or to push any of it away, or to hold on to any part of it, completely misses the point and turns my boat against the flow of life.

I have to remind myself, every moment I’m able to, that life is happening for me. No matter how long the progress bar takes to load, or if it loads at all, or how many people cut me off in traffic, or how much money I have, or how many people are happy or upset at me, I have to remember that it’s all part of the karmic dance, equally predestined as it is chosen by me in every moment. It’s all under my control and also not at all, all at the same time.

So what do I do? How can I transcend patience, or any of the other mazes I get myself into, without playing by the same rules that bind me to the maze?

Turns out the answer is simple:

I have to die.

The games of our own making

Most of my life, I’ve been playing games throughout my life—or, I should say, games have been playing me.

Games whose rules require money, work, and commitment to certain standards of behavior. Games whose consequences seem drastic and catastrophic if I lose. Games which permeate my state of awareness and make it seem like, in the moment, the game itself IS life.

• I call one game entrepreneurship, the goal of which is to figure out how to make money on your own and be your own boss.

• I call another game marriage. The objective here is to be in love with my wife and show her that love in every moment possible.

• Then there’s the game called health. The idea here is to take care of my body so I live a long time.

Every game runs the risk of creating attachments. Entrepreneurship can create an attachment to money. Marriage can create codependence. Even being health-conscious can create unhealthy attachments to certain diets or foods.

In the good times, those attachments can make us feel really, really good. In my case:

• When the money is flowing, I feel significant and capable

• When my relationship is thriving, I feel appreciated and loved

• When I’m in great physical shape, I feel euphoric and strong

But in the bad times, those attachments can bring us down just as far as they pulled us up in the good times:

• When the money stops, I feel insignificant or depressed

• When the relationship is going through a tough period, I feel disconnected

• When I’m sick or in bad shape, I feel weak and depressed

So my emotional life turns into a roller coaster, with the highs feeling amazing and the lows feeling terrible.

The Second Noble Truth in Buddhism states that the cause of all human suffering lies in attachments, or cravings. When we crave any pleasurable element of life, we inherently create a polar vacuum wherein a negative emotional space is created.

For example, if you had an expectation that your spouse would do something thoughtful for you, and there was realistically a 10% chance of that thing happening, you have a 90% chance of being disappointed. Even if it’s a high likelihood, there’s still a chance you’ll be let down.

Extrapolate this into your financial life. Or your relationship. Or your health.

Are you setting yourself up for failure? What expectations have you set for yourself? Are they unrealistic, or even ridiculous?

Well, I took a look at my own life, and I was surprised that the number of things that I would have put under the label of ridiculous were actually a lot lower than I thought.

Most of them went under the label of bat-shit crazy.

Turns out I have a lot of attachments. I have expectations around money, my wife, how people should be driving when they’re within 40 feet of me on the highway, how people should generally behave, how the country should be run, and probably five thousand other beliefs about what’s going to happen and how I’m going to get what I want.

And you know what? Most of those expectations never come true. Big surprise! In fact, if we tallied it all up, I’d probably be getting about 0.5% of what I want at any given time.

That’s a whole lot of disappointment—and I set myself up for all of it.

So what’s the alternative? Pare it back to just the basics? Just give up needing things? Hindu and Christian texts are pretty clear about the latter: the less stuff you need, the happier you’ll be.

“Keep your lives free from the love of money and be content with what you have”
— Hebrews 13:5

“That which is called desire, the all-devouring sinful enemy of this world, destroys knowledge and discrimination; thus it should be slayed with the weapon of detachment.”
— Bhagavad Gita 3.38

But I had another obstacle to get past before I could even consider giving up all of those attachments.

“Who would I be,” I thought, “if I didn’t need anything?”

Who am I without my attachments?

As I pored over this question in my mind, I went through all of my games, imagining what it would be like to lose at all of them, all at the same time.

Who would I be if I lost my business, my family, my marriage, my money, my reputation, my friends, and my health?

The answer seemed pretty simple: I’d be miserable. Or dead. The “lows” would just add up and be too much to handle.

And that freaked me out. I was clearly too attached to things in order to be enlightened. All of those yogis had it right, after all; I guess you really had to live in a cave secluded from the world in order to find God. It all seemed so exhausting to come back from—like I was in too deep.

It wasn’t until I took a trip to Denver with Melanie and spent some time with a wise friend name Marie. We were hanging out on her couch one night and I brought up my predicament:

“If I’m supposed to release my attachments to everything, then what is left to live for?”

In other words, I was asking how I could enjoy life without being attached to anything. I felt like non-attached living was akin to living on antidepressants, not letting anything “touch” you emotionally:

Marie responded immediately, clearly having chewed on this one before, and the truth she shared was as powerful as it was succinct:

“You can enjoy something without needing it”

I repeated what she said in my head, slowly:

You can enjoy something… without… needing it.

Well, yeah, I guess that’s true, I thought. I did that all the time. I enjoyed sunsets but I didn’t need them. I enjoyed looking at art but I didn’t crave it like a smoker craves a cigarette. I enjoyed things without needing them every day.

So, I figured, my job is to turn all those games into things that I enjoy without needing them. I need to “kill” the part of myself that believes I can’t survive without the game. Or the part that believes that I’ll die if I lose the game. My objectives are to:

• Feel just as happy with a little money as I do with a lot of money

• Feel just as much connection with my wife when we’re disagreeing as I do when we’re totally aligned

• Feel just as much love for my body when I’m out of shape as I do when I’m fit and feeling vibrant

If I can regulate my satisfaction for every game I’m playing, I’ll remove the need for the “lows” and turn wherever my emotional state is at any given point into my natural “high.”

The two levels of non-attachment

But here’s the important part: This doesn’t mean that I’m always happy—it means that I’m always satisfied and content with whatever emotion I’m feeling.

As Michael Singer taught us during a visit to the Temple of the Universe a few weeks ago, if I were to go to a funeral smiling and laughing, people would think I was a sociopath. And maybe they would be right.

Non-attachment to outcomes

Non-attachment isn’t about burying or changing our emotions. There are levels to it. The higher level of non-attachment is to outcomes in general, such as my progress bar or making all green lights on your way to work. This higher level is the one that affords us the most freedom, but it’s also the most difficult level to maintain.

Non-attachment to emotions

The lower level of non-attachment deals not with outcomes but with our emotions. When we encounter an emotional situation, even though we may recognize that we’re being sucked in by illusion, we experience emotion.

• A friend says something hurtful, even though you know it’s about them

• A loved one dies, even though you know it was their time to go

• You quit your job because of a toxic work environment

When we end up being affected by such things, we will experience feelings. It’s totally natural. But we’re faced with a choice when we feel things. We can:

1. Fully feel our emotions, or

2. Hold on to or push away our emotions, in which case they’ll stay in our body for days, months, or years until we allow ourselves to process the emotion.

This second level of non-attachment means experiencing the entirety of your emotional range, but without holding onto any of it or pushing any of it away. This is what it means to be unattached. You allow yourself to fully experience the emotion, and when it’s over, you’re free of it.

Either of these two levels of non-attachment afford us the perspective of the witness, in which our emotions live inside us instead of us living inside our emotions. One of the most valuable way this has unfolded in my life is in my marriage.

Conscious codependence

Melanie and I have talked about non-attachment in marriage quite a lot. My marriage is the most important game I play and the one I would lament losing most, so we talk a lot about how we love each other.

She and I have discussed the idea of loving without needing: of being consciously codependent with each other.

When someone gets married, they know they’re making a choice to be with that person. But as the years go by, they can forget they made that choice. The decision is absorbed into the status quo, and when that happens, fear of abandonment, complacency, and other insidious effects start to take hold. Conscious codependence is the act of constantly reminding yourself and your partner that you’re choosing to be with them, choosing to be attracted and attached to them, and choosing to ride the emotional roller coaster that inevitably ensues.

That awareness is coming from a place outside and beyond the relationship itself. You are no longer living within the relationship, but your relationship is living within you, and you see how it affects you and your partner from an objective standpoint. You also become more aware of the relationship’s benefits and negative impacts on your life, making you more capable of managing the relationship effectively.

This has the effect of deepening your trust in one another, aiding in communication during conflict, and having a stronger sense of engagement with your relationship. Couples who are consciously codependent can more easily admit when something is wrong, more easily ask for what they want, and be more silly, creative, and sexually free with their partner.

This separation of need from want is exactly the same as the type of separation needed in order to free one’s self from the boundaries of a game. By emancipating yourself from the game and allowing the game to still exist within your life, but according to your rules, you create a new kind of emotional state within yourself: a kind of no-man’s land outside of want and need, where you neither push away or cling to something, but instead you’re simply with it in a state of peace, acceptance, and enjoyment.

Desireless desire

Yogananda calls this the state of desireless desire.

Desireless desire is, by definition, a paradox. How can you want something without wanting it? But inherent in this paradox, if you look closely enough, is the path to enlightenment.

The concept of desireless desire is a challenge to occupy a state of mind in which duality doesn’t exist. In this state, everything is in abundance, so there is no need for desire, only the experience and enjoyment of creation.

Are there any areas of your life in which you can say you have desireless desire?

Okay, here’s an easier question: are there areas of your life in which you can say you enjoy something without needing it?

It’s easy to find those areas which have little to no consequence on your level of happiness. For me, you could say I have desireless desire for french fries, tv shows, and coffee (although that last one took a bit to separate from). It’s similar to indifference, with one big difference: I’m enjoying myself.

On the other hand, if you asked me about spending time in nature, traveling with my wife, or quality time with friends, things change quickly.

If I imagine my life without any of those things, suddenly my ego roars to life and screams:

YOU CAN’T TAKE THAT AWAY FROM ME!

Like a child, my psyche tries to save the things I enjoy from being taken away. Which is, on one level, totally natural. We like things that bring us pleasure and we want to maximize pleasure. This is true from relationships to creature comforts to physical belongings.

But there is a cost to that attachment: when things change, as they always do, so too do our possessions. In the good times, we accumulate more things that we like, and in the bad times, we lose those same things.

Hindu and Christian cultures are based on the concept that if we can release our attachments to the things we gain and lose in the good and bad times, we can occupy a space of being totally and completely happy no matter what circumstances we find ourselves in.

This is how we get to living on that green line:

As Krishna tells Arjuna on the battlefield:

“The one who, abandoning attachment, dedicates all actions to Me is not tainted by sinful reactions, just as the lotus leaf, though resting in water, remains untouched by it.”
Bhagavad Gita: Chapter 5 Verse 10

I can’t stress enough how much meaning there is in this passage. I’ve kept this one sentence in the back of my mind for years, thinking about how much closer I can become to that lotus, becoming untouchable—unf*ckwithable—by the outside world.

Since that evening with Marie, my work has shifted. My focus is no longer on letting the games play me, but on playing the games in total awareness of their purpose and temptations.

Games of temptation & the nature of evil

The games are nothing more than delivery methods for temptation—including marriage and love. As jaded as that might sound, stick with me for a moment and you’ll understand where I’m coming from.

The material world exists as a place for us to work out our karma, and the way we work out our karma is by eliminating attachments to things that tempt us away from a state of peace.

Sacred texts from almost every major religion describe attractive forces of temptation in different ways. They’ve been anthropomorphized in Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Norse Mythology, and Greco-Roman Mythology as characters named Mara, Satan, Iblīs, Samael, Loki, and Circe, respectively. The full list of names is long.

Each of these characters throughout history represent the same thing: the delusion that the games are all that exists.

• The game of science can delude scientists into thinking what we can see and measure is all that exists.

• The game of business can delude businessmen and women into thinking money can buy happiness.

• The game of politics can delude politicians into thinking political power equates to personal significance.

• And the game of marriage can delude partners into believing that their own happiness lies in the other person.

Where there is light, there is also shadow. It’s up to us to find the shadow, understand it, and master it. Only then can we make friends with the shadow and eliminate the need for the polarity of right vs. wrong, good vs. evil, and us vs. them.

Tie thee to a mast

It’s not enough for us to just decide to not be tempted by things. Karma doesn’t work like that. You, me, and every other human being on the planet (other than those who’ve reached enlightenment) have spiritual bonds toward certain people, objects, and experiences that can only be released when we have either experienced an event, healed a wound, or performed an act that proves we’ve learned a lesson required in order to advance our level of consciousness.

For example, an alcoholic has a karmic bond to alcohol. He has a lesson to learn about willpower, self-control, and restraint. He won’t resolve this karma in this lifetime or the next unless he faces his addiction head-on. It’s not enough to keep alcohol outside of arm’s length: he must face the music eventually, and his karma will lead him into tempting situations until he is truly free.

Homer’s Odyssey is the story of Odysseus, King of Ithica, and his ten-year journey trying to return home to his wife Penelope. Over the course of his travels, he’s met with monsters, magic, and temptation, all of which he has to conquer if he’s to return home.

When Odysseus’s ship sails to about the halfway point, he encounters one of the most cunning adversaries of the entire epic: the Sirens.

Circe, an enchantress and previous adversary of Odysseus, warned Odysseus of the island of the Sirens ahead of time. She told him that the Sirens’ song is so irresistibly beautiful that any sailor who hears it will follow the song to their death.

Following her advice, Odysseus fills his crew’s ears with beeswax so they cannot hear the Sirens’ call.

Odysseus, however, wants to hear the Sirens for himself. So, before the crew plugs all of their ears, he makes them tie him to the mast of his boat and swear an oath that, no matter how much he begs or promises them to let him go, they will not release him until they’ve rowed far past the Sirens and their song.

As they approach, the Sirens’ voices drift over the water, luring Odysseus with promises of secret knowledge, glorious fame, and the sweet remembrance of every lost love. Already bound tightly to the mast, he strains and pleads to his crew, asking to be set free so he can follow the Sirens—and the intensity of his struggle almost succeeds in overpowering his reason. Were it not for his preparation, he would have succumbed to the Sirens and perished.

But his crew, who are deaf to the Sirens, keep him tightly bound until they are clear of the island and the reach of the Sirens’ song. Only then do they release Odysseus, who by now has regained his control, emerging victorious against the Sirens’ temptation.

Flying close to the sun

I don’t know about you, but that story rings pretty true to my own experience with temptation and pleasure. From alcohol and psychedelics to money and fame, I can point to all kinds of games I’ve played which sought to convince me to abandon my true path and sail straight for the Sirens.

And sometimes I have—I’ve let myself get too engrossed in one game or another, forgetting the real objective of my life, and allowing my short-term pleasure to override a long-term perspective.

I’d drink too much and pay for it the next day.

I’d accept a client I knew wasn’t right for me and end up stressed out and overcommitted.

I’d fight with my wife to win an argument only to realize, once again, that if I win, I still lose.

It’s in these moments that the Sirens “kill” us and we (hopefully) realize we were suffering under some kind of delusion. And it’s in these moments where we can learn to avoid succumbing to the temptation the next time.

Because in real life, there isn’t just one island of the Sirens. There are an infinite number of them, and we’re passing by them all the time. The biggest ones are the islands of Money, Power, and Sex.

Odysseus had the presence of mind and wisdom to prepare ahead of time for the Sirens, but still he exposed himself to the struggle.

Why?

It reminds me of Icarus, the Greek character given wax wings by his father, who warned him not to fly too close to the sun or his wings would melt. But temptation got the better of Icarus, and as he approached the sun, his wings melted and he fell into the ocean and drowned.

Although Odysseus didn’t fall to his doom in his own journey, he seemed to be tempting fate by exposing himself to temptation.

Why go through the struggle?

If you ask me, there’s a very good reason.

Resistance and willpower are muscles, and if we don’t train them in controlled scenarios, when we’re met by unexpected temptation, we have a higher likelihood of caving to our baser desires. Better to practice restraint in a controlled scenario than get caught off-guard.

Science backs this up, too. There’s an area of the brain called the Anterior Mid-Cingulate Cortex (aMCC) which has been shown to be the seat of willpower in human beings. The more you do things you don’t want to do, the stronger this area becomes, leading to reduced brain atrophy, slowed aging, and better stress management.

Cognitive challenges, physical endurance tasks, and delaying gratification are all ways of strengthening this part of the brain—and the more we do it, the easier it gets.

As I’ve started to see the games for what they are, I’ve learned what it means to have the games live in me rather than have me living in the games. Instead of playing the games as if my life depended on them, I tie myself to the mast.

• I set boundaries around my consumption when partying

• I stay emotionally distant from financial swings, reminding myself there are certain things outside of my control

• Most importantly, no matter what happens, I remember that whatever happens in my life has been special-ordered for my highest and fastest growth, and if I embrace it with enthusiasm and satisfaction, the next moment will be easier, and the moment after that will be easier, until I’m living in perpetual flow

I’ll still run my business, eat food I like, party with my friends, and get in trouble in all sorts of ways, but I’ll know why I’m doing all of it and that it might not work out the way I expect. In other words, I fly just close enough to the sun to feel its warmth, but not close enough for my wings to melt.

While this strategy requires a lot more willpower than outright renunciation, it does allow me to enjoy the world at a deeper sensory level than if I simply swore off everything that felt good. As Ram Dass says in Becoming Nobody, renunciation has created a handful of enlightened beings and a whole bunch of horny celibates.

That said, as the legend goes, the Buddha only became the Buddha after he turned down all the beautiful women in preference of his own inner bliss. Only then did Mara present himself to Buddha in his true form and the two sat down together as friends. So the question remains: will there be a point where my own inner bliss will be so powerful that I’d turn down sex, drugs, or rock and roll, even in moderation?

Do you have to be a prude in order to be enlightened?

On one level, I know that the yogis and monks who live in caves are perfectly content with their inner bliss. There’s nothing wrong with that, and I don’t judge them for it. They’ve chosen a direct path to God that involves disconnection from bodily pleasures.

Maybe it’s because I’ve grown up in western culture, but I believe that Earth exists for more reason than a classroom to teach us how not to enjoy things. I believe abstinence is an effective way to avoid temptation, but it comes at the cost of an uneventful life.

My work continues in discovering how we can have the best of both worlds: of how we can walk around in total inner bliss all of the time. This is known as nirvikalpa samadhi, where we exist in a state of total God-absorption while also consciously interacting with the world.

In my opinion, there is no higher goal to strive for, and I’m convinced you don’t have to live in a cave to reach it. There is so much more, and the learning continues. I’ll continue posting what I find. In the meantime…

Question: What is your experience with temptation?

How have you navigated the waters around the island of the Sirens? What have you found works—and what doesn’t work?

I’d love to hear your stories and insights. You never know—you may hold the key to someone else’s breakthrough!