Post #90: “Falling Off the Path”

11 Feb. 2024

“Many people say that they have ‘fallen off the Path.’ What I tell them is that the impurities are having their karmic effect; this too is part of the Path. Once you have begun to awaken, you can’t just fall off the Path again. There’s no way: where are you going to fall to? Are you going to make-believe it never happened? You can forget for a moment, sure, but what you think you have forgotten will keep coming back to you. So, don’t be upset, just go ahead and be worldly for a while.”

—Ram Dass, “Promises and Pitfalls of the Spiritual Path”*

     From the very first post on, my collection of reflections or meditations (I am increasingly confident that “blog” is altogether the wrong word for it) has been devoted to exploring, quite explicitly (as per the heading), where the outer limits of the Path might run once one has begun walking. Since the Dhamma is concerned, first and foremost, with the volitional dimension of our lives, one thing we can say for sure is that you will not be kept on the Path against your will; that is to say, if you no longer have any intention to structure your life along its lines at all, then you are free of it, if that is the right word. No one need fear being a prisoner of the practice.

     But what about those who have taken some steps, tentative perhaps, or more determined but not very sustained, and who have no wish to repudiate anything, but who consider their own efforts too feeble, their direction too uncertain, and their lapses perhaps too recurrent to think of themselves as bona fide travelers on the Path? You certainly will not be kicked off the Path for failing to do your sittings or your retreats regularly enough, but what about breaking the precepts? Would a serious case of lying, or stealing, or cheating, or living by nothing but sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll, not suffice to waive any membership you may once have taken out? Well, well, well. We are not really talking about a club here, nor a spiritual sport with a moral scorecard, as if the point of the Path were to train Dhammic athletes. There are such champions, of course, and all the more power to them, but their ways do not set the terms for the bulk of practitioners.

     Lying, stealing, and cheating, looked at in isolation, are obviously off the Path; but circumstances matter, volitions always count for more than actions, and even in clear cases of willful and inexcusable transgression, nobody can be reduced to his worst deeds. There was a serial killer in the Buddha’s day, Angulimala, who wore a garland of his victims’ fingers around his neck, yet found his way to redemption by the Buddha’s side—attaining full liberation, no less, it is said. Sex has traditionally been considered the one lapse from which monks cannot make a return, and rock ‘n roll would be against their precepts (third, fifth, and seventh); but for householders, sex and worldly entertainments are quite permissible, and the Dhammic challenge would be more a matter of the how than the what. The precept against drugs was written as a warning against the dangers of intoxication by alcohol and the irresponsibility it tends to induce; where it leaves other mind-altering substances with more potentially benign effects, remains debatable.

     There are types of work that look, by their very nature, to be quite incompatible with the Path. Few would question that it is so with hitmen, torturers, or Mafia enforcers, to name some extreme examples. That the lines cannot often be drawn quite so neatly, however, should become evident when we consider policemen, soldiers, or public executioners, the authorized equivalents, under the rule of law ideally, of the preceding triad. These latter agents of violence may perform a needed public service (the Buddha never questioned their necessity), but the problem is obvious: much policework blurs the ethical boundaries, however necessary it may be; soldiers are under orders to do as they are told, and to kill others not so much in immediate self-defense (resisting a robber, shooting an armed burglar, fighting off soldiers raiding your farm in a lawless environment) as in conflicts pitting one people against another, with citizens in opposing uniform who might have no personal grievances against each other at all, to say nothing of where shooting someone in the face, no matter the circumstances, puts you with respect to the golden rule to treat others always as you would wish to be treated yourself. Surely such professions, needed though may be, do not recommend themselves very forcefully on karmic grounds, and one could add a few more that, while not quite as clear-cut, also present serious karmic risks—bar-ownership, for example (think the early Kennedys with their taverns in immigrant Boston, where scarce paychecks were regularly converted into booze instead of food and other basic necessities for the family), or butcher-shops, or brothel-keeping.

     Once again, however, the Dhamma (like the Devil) is in the details. Barkeepers may act the part of moderators as well as enablers, and what they provide can be a fuel for sociability and enjoyment, not always Friday night calamity. So long as human beings insist on eating meat, which their evolutionary heritage at least suggests, even if it does not altogether require it, there must be butchers too, and it does not solve the ethical quandary around killing animals for food to let others do the dirty work and then pin the karmic blame solely on them (as if karma were a sticking pin to torment others with, or to seal one’s curses with in the manner of voodoo dolls!). The proprietors of brothels cannot expect to be given much of a hearing in Dhamma circles, but even here, much depends on the fine print. (Not all of us are convinced that the horizontal needs of man are any less pressing and vital than the vertical, or that bringing the price-mechanism to bear on the most chronic of all supply-and-demand imbalances is really as nefarious a proposition as moralists have so often preached.)

     Karma is not a social judgment on suspect actors; it is not about optics or ready classification, but a matter of heavy or light intentions, the purity or impurity of heart and mind that expresses itself in our actions. Whatever is done with awareness and love in one’s heart is on the Path, however unseemly it may look to others—which is not to say that it may not still prove a mistake, or a burden. The real Dhammic worth of an action is not for others to judge, but for the responsible parties to live with, for better or for worse.

     The Path does not require perfection, and it does not set a necessary minimum of effort or accomplishment to warrant an extension of one’s membership. Human beings may think along such lines, but the Path is not a mechanism for censure by disapproving neighbors, only a tool for making more sense of our lives and moving them in a more helpful and wholesome direction. The Dhamma is said to be grounded in natural law, but it should serve us not as a judge’s gavel, a policeman’s baton, or a prison guard’s handcuffs, but as a map and a compass, helping us to figure out where we stand, where we really want to go, and how to go about getting there.

     Some pilgrims on the Path will stride ahead more briskly than others; some with more enthusiasm, others with more demurring or skepticism; some more joyfully, others with more cloudy minds and moods; some with more determination, others more lackadaisically. The muscular travelers are no more favorites of the Path than the meek or puny stragglers: the former do not own the journey, any more than the latter shall inherit the earth, by the Buddhist books. They will simply travel together, sometimes side by side, sometimes only visible to each other at a great distance. The miles covered should not be considered altogether irrelevant; they matter in their way, surely, but they are not decisive; the crucial thing is to keep walking, whatever the speed or the vigor of your paces. So long as you mean to continue, even by baby steps, or crawling on all fours for that matter, you are still on the Path. If you really are hellbent on stepping off for a while, your account may get frozen for a while owing to non-action on your part; perhaps inflation will take its toll, if you leave the deposit to sit unattended for too long; but nothing gets canceled or revoked in this currency, and you can always go back to where you left off, with your karmic savings still awaiting you, such as they are.

     Ram Dass may not be everyone’s idea of an incontrovertible authority on all things under the sun (more so on LSD, less on the water supply), but surely he is right on this much: you don’t need to worry about falling off, dropping off, or even wandering off the Path without knowing what you are doing. To get away from it for real, you would need to take a deliberate turn, or jump over its edges even. No garden-variety failure to perform, or to live up to your spiritual potential (whatever that may turn out to be), will suffice; nor a period of indeterminate meandering in uncertain, confused, or unhelpful directions; nor temporary pausing, nor even taking the usual human-all-too-human missteps, so long as there is no sustained method to the madness. A period of unconcern or spiritual lassitude, likewise, won’t do the trick—what you would need is nothing less than a definite intention to break with the Buddha’s guidance, not here a little, there a little, but with genuine resolve. And who, having once walked gladly on the Path, would be ready to take his refractory or recalcitrant spells to quite such levels of orneriness?

*In Spiritual Emergency, edited by Stanislav and Christina Grof (New York: Penguin Putnam, 1989), pp. 184–84.