Episode 061 - Come Back in Two Weeks

Stop Making Yourself Miserable

We’ve all heard the famous phrase, “Do as I say, not as I do.,” and many people take it to be a sure sign of duplicity. Why should I listen to what a person is telling me to do if he or she isn’t doing it themselves? It seems purely hypocritical, and a lot of times it is.

But there can also be some other circumstance for it as well. For example, the person may be telling me to follow his instructions, not his actions, because he is imperfect and makes mistakes. So, he tells me not to model myself after him because of his own shortcomings. Although his advice is good and his guidance holds true, his actions don’t always show it.

I ran into another situation concerning a “do what I say, not what I do,” statement several years ago, that surprised me, when I was taking a round of golf lessons.

By way of context, I’ve always been a fairly decent athlete, especially in the American schoolyard sports of basketball, baseball and football. But I’m a pretty pathetic golfer and I’ve been that way forever. Indeed, the idea of ever being able to achieve mediocrity seems like a distant dream on a hill to me.

But I’m not alone. I’ve got millions of fellow duffers out on the links with me, and comedian Larry David is one of them. He once said that to be good at golf you have to have a knack for it. Then he added, “And I’m knack-less.” Same here, but for some reason I just keep on trying, although I can’t seem to get any better at it. But I can’t seem to give it up either.

Anyway, I had taken a couple of lessons from this one instructor who was a really good player. He had won several local tournaments and had almost made the junior professional tour a few years back. In my first two lessons he had taught me a great deal about some basic fundamentals - how to grip the club, align yourself to the target, and take your stance.

For this next lesson, I had gotten to the range a little early. The pro was on a tee, hitting a few short shots and I watched him practice for a while. He was barely paying any attention to what he was doing, just hitting shot after shot, and they were all perfect. It looked pretty cool, so I started doing the same thing at the next tee. Suddenly he looked up and saw me and stopped short.

“Hey! What are doing? Don’t do that!” he shouted. He seemed perturbed, which surprised me. “I’m hitting like this just to work on my rhythm, but you’re not ready for this. You’re nowhere near it. I’m just smoothing out my flow, but it took me years of practice to get here. You don’t even have the first part of the fundamentals down.” He went back to his routine, hitting perfect shot after perfect shot, with seemingly no effort at all and no focus on anything but the rhythm of his swing.

“Everybody wants to hit the long ball. Everybody wants to win the gold cup. But nobody wants to work on the fundamentals.” he said as he kept hitting. “People always say - Practice makes perfect, but be careful. That’s a dangerous half-truth. Practice makes perfect only if you are practicing the right thing. Keep practicing the wrong thing and you’ll just keep digging yourself into a deeper and deeper hole.” He stopped and looked me in the eye. “So do what I told you to do and don’t try to copy me at this point. Focus on the fundamentals. If you don’t learn them, you’ll always be lost no matter how hard you try.”

So, this was truly a different kind of “do as I say, not as I do” moment because if I did what he was doing instead of what he had been saying, it would have caused me far more harm than good. According to him, I had to get the fundamentals down before I did anything else.

Now I’ve been focusing on consciousness evolution and personal growth for my entire adult life and I seem to always be trying to take things to a deeper level and see the big picture, so with this, I suddenly found myself in a world that had nothing to do with golf and it quickly got pretty deep for me.

I started thinking about the fundamentals of life. The fundamentals of being grateful for the gift of breath, of being kind and compassionate, of growing beyond the limits of ego-driven selfishness into a greater identification with the so-called indwelling God presence. In essence, the fundamentals of growing into a better human being.

Maybe I should focus more on these, instead being so easily carried away by the endless delusions of grandeur, that my grandly deluded mind keeps churning out endlessly. After all, they’re all variations of the same basic theme: all things concerning I, Me, Mine. I, Me, Mine. I, Me, Mine. I’m sure you get the point.

And I’ve come to understand that you never know where you’re going to stumble upon these kinds of insights. The fact that this one came from golf just proves that they can come from anywhere. Wisdom is wisdom, regardless of its shape, form or origin. And one thing I’ve learned beyond the shadow of a doubt: I need all of it that I can get.

So, in that regard, I came upon another remarkable story along the lines of giving advice and setting examples when I was on an extended meditation retreat in India. This one was about Mahatma Gandhi.

I had first studied a little about Gandhi during college in a government course as we were examining the difference between the way that India had broken free from British rule compared to the way that America had done it.

Now, any student of history knows that the American Revolution was a brutal war that lasted seven years and killed about twenty thousand people. It seemed like most of the history that I had studied was about all the different wars that had been fought over the millennia, so I guess I always assumed that this was the way that big change happened. Both sides slug it out until one of them beats the other with better strategy along with a strong dose of cold, hard brute force.

So, it surprised me to learn that while Gandhi had led the critical revolt for independence that finally terminated British rule, it was done by a largely non-violent form of civil disobedience. The power of non-violent disobedience: What a remarkable idea! I subsequently learned that Martin Luther King, Jr. had modeled much of his civil rights approach based the teachings of Gandhi.

So, I knew that Gandhi was a man of great political and social stature but when I was on this retreat in India, I learned that he was also deeply spiritual as well. He used to attend prayer and meditation meetings on a regular basis, all the way through to the end of his life. In fact, it was at a prayer meeting where he was assassinated.

This story about Gandhi giving advice took place at one of these prayer meetings several years prior to his death. Apparently, as these meetings, Gandhi would set aside some time at the end, where he would be seated in a certain place and people could come up and speak to him on an individual basis. Usually there would be a long line of people waiting to see him. One day, a woman approached, accompanied by her son who was a young teenager.

“Mahatma Ji,” the woman said. “Please tell my son to stop eating sugar.”

Gandhi looked at the woman for a moment, then looked at her son for a little while and then turned back to her. “Come back in two weeks and talk to me then,” he replied, and the woman left. Sure enough, two weeks later, she returned. After waiting in line for quite some time, she finally approached Gandhi.

“Mahatma Ji, I have returned,” the woman said. “Do you remember that I had asked you to tell my son to stop eating sugar and you told me to come back in two weeks?”

“Yes, indeed, I do remember you,” Gandhi replied.

“Well two weeks have gone by and I have returned,” the woman said.

Gandhi then turned and faced the boy and looked him straight in the eye. “Son,” he said kindly. “You really must stop eating sugar. It does a lot of bad things to you. It won’t be easy to do. In fact, at first, it’s going to be really hard. But if you stay with it, after a while, you’ll be able to stop. And once you do, not only are you going to feel better, you’ll be able to think better as well. It will be a big benefit to you, both in body as well as in mind. It might be hard to do at first, but trust me, it will be well worth the effort.”

The boy thanked Gandhi sincerely for his advice and said he would try. The woman then looked at Gandhi with gratitude, but also with a little confusion.

“Thank you so much, Mahatma Ji,” the woman said. “But with all due respect, I have to ask you, why didn’t just give my son your advice when we were here last time? Why did we have to leave and come back after two weeks just to hear what you could have said to him back then?”

“Because two weeks ago, I was still eating sugar,” Gandhi said. “And if I had spoken to him then, my words would have had no power. Now I am speaking from my own practical experience rather than from just theoretical belief. Now I really know what I’m talking about and that makes all the difference in the world.”

Even though it’s a rather simple story, it’s quite moving. I’ve told it to many different people over the years and everyone seems to have the same reaction. Most people don’t say anything. They just silently nod their heads and smile. It seems to universally ring that certain inner bell we all seen to have within us.

So that’s a tremendous story about the congruence of word and deed. Now to close, let me tell you another quick story that’s always been a favorite of mine. It’s a little different from the one about Gandhi because that was a story about someone who knows that he knows, and this next one is about someone who knows that he doesn’t know.

It comes from the writings of Carlos Castaneda, an author I’ve mentioned in a few earlier episodes. He was extremely popular during the late 1970s and one of his main characters was someone called Don Juan, who was a shaman and a practitioner of an esoteric South American form or sorcery.

By way of context, in many spiritual and esoteric traditions from every culture around the world, there is a great reverence paid to people who are considered to be “masters.” In general, the term refers to a man or woman who has attained a certain elevated state of consciousness and has the ability to help others attain it as well. Again, it is an extremely highly regarded title.

Don Juan had always referred to himself as a warrior. He had given Carlos tremendous insight and advice over the years and had also performed a number of seemingly miraculous feats. Carlos always had enormous respect for him and one day, after witnessing many awesome examples of his sorcery, Carlos asked Don Juan, “Are you a master.?”

Don Juan just smiled and with a clear look in his eyes said, “I don’t even know what that word means.”

I always loved his response because there is not even a hint of pretense to it. Now the finite mind usually likes to pretend that it knows more than it does, but here was someone who knew what he knew, and was what he was. And he had absolutely no reason or desire to claim otherwise. This kind of humility is more rare than we realize.

So, to sum it up, we started with the golf teacher who taught me to focus on fundamentals, rather than trying to imitate him, who’s skillset was far beyond my reach at the time. Then we went on to Gandhi who taught the value of really knowing what you’re talking about because you are speaking from your own practical experience. And we finished with the Don Juan, the Yaqui sorcerer who exemplified the difference between knowing what you know and knowing what you don’t know.

Personally, what attracts me about all these stories is that they are all examples of being authentic, which is a quality that we all love. There’s something so genuine about it.

Well, there’s been a lot to think about here, so let’s let this be the end of the episode. As always, keep your eyes, mind and heart opened, and let’s get together in the next one.