When I was in kindergarten I was taught the Transcendental Meditation technique (TM) by gentle hippies in a duplex in South Minneapolis. They gave me a special, customized, top-secret mantra. My parents practiced the technique, too. They did TM while sitting in comfy chairs with their eyes closed. But since I was only six, the TM people taught me to repeat my mantra with open eyes and while walking. I would tread, round and round, in slow circles in my bedroom, stepping over Legos, GI joes, and little, green, plastic army men.

A few years later, at age nine, I got ahold of a book that taught techniques to learn telekinesis. I would place paperclips on a little table in my bedroom, and squint really hard at them trying to move them with only my mind.

Not long after that, in sixth grade, I got a book on self-hypnosis to help me in my desperate quest to find a girlfriend. The technique was to record my own voice on audiocassettes. I counted slowly backward on the tapes, talking myself down into a drowsy, suggestible state. Then I gave myself post-hypnotic suggestions. I told myself that whenever I was around Lynn Smith or Gail Swanson – two of my very cute classmates at school – I would act as charming and sexy as Hawkeye Pierce on the TV show M*A*S*H.

During this same time period I would often hide out in the woods from my ragey alcoholic dad. Sitting amidst the cattails and milkweed, my two dogs laying by my side, I would practice Krishnamurti’s technique of Choiceless Awareness. I remember trying to look at trees without the filter of thought. 

In 2011-2014 (ish), when my PTSD first blew up my life, I would sit in bed using every flashback-managing, amygdala-taming, nervous-system-down-regulating technique known to man, and I was damned grateful to know about them. 

Point being, I have a long and storied relationship to techniques – spiritual techniques, self-improvement techniques, healing techniques, paperclip-displacement techniques. All kinds of techniques. Consequently, I was none too thrilled when I first ran into Adi Da Samraj’s criticism of techniques in spiritual practice. 

Techniques, He said, may be able to modify the ego, to tinker with the meaty and dying body-mind, but techniques can never radically Awaken us. Because the fictional dream-of-me that we must Awaken from, is the fictional dream-of-me who is strategically deploying the technique. Trying to Liberate ourselves with do-it-yourself techniques is like trying to reach down and pick up a board on which we ourselves are standing.

According to Adi Da Samraj – and countless other God Realized beings before Him – the Way of Liberation unfolds when our heart, the native core of our being, responds to the Divine Reality. This response is primal, as mindless and spontaneous as a plant turning toward the sun. It is a love response. And then you make your entire life out of that response. In many Traditions, and certainly in Adidam, that is what sadhana, or spiritual practice, is.

Traditionally, the way human beings contact that Divine Reality, tangibly, unambiguously, is through the direct Agency of the Sat Guru, the God Awakened Being, who functions as a sort of “laser-like focusing mechanism” for the Radiant Conscious Light in which the whole damned universe allegedly floats. In 1974, Adi Da gave an ecstatic talk, in which He said:

“The Guru is not a human being. The Lord is the Guru. When the Guru appears in human form, it is the Lord…When His devotee surrenders, then the Guru enters His devotee in the form of Light…there is no Yoga if the very cells do not begin to intuit the Divine. 

“Surrender to the Lord, night and day. Think the Lord, speak the Lord, act the Lord, receive the Lord in your body and in your cells, in every function of life…Not as a “technique” – it is the same as when a woman receives her lover. When a woman receives her lover, there is no doubt about it – and she does not have to consult her textbooks. 

“The same is true of True Yoga. When the Lord enters His devotee, there is no doubt about it. There is no “technique”. There is only the continuation of the life of the devotee – because the Lord is the Light that Transcends this ‘world’…There is no meditative “technique” for you to acquire. The Lord must meditate you. The Lord must enter. And when the Lord enters you, He makes you ecstatic. He sifts you out of all your individuality, all of your separateness…He makes you Conscious in the Divine, so that you live your ordinary life aware of the fact that there is only Real God.”

By His Grace, I have tasted these things. They are game changers. Nevertheless, I am a rank beginner as a spiritual practitioner, and my addiction to techniques remains mighty. I constantly try to twist aspects of the Way of Adidam into techniques. Because techniques allow me to remain in control. As if they’re little, green, plastic army men. Egos love control, because egos think control equals survival. Luckily my Guru somehow draws me back, again and again, into the Formless and Unknowable Wilds. And the times in-between are becoming more and more painful to me every day.

There is, however, one technique about which you can definitely celebrate! The technique of subscribing to blogs that rhyme with zion shmabove the grind. And the tangentially related technique of commenting! What’s your relationship to techniques?