The Water Jar

How do I move from karma to grace?

Imagine that your body is a clear glass jar filled with water. It is graceful, a lovely sight to behold. Even if the class is colored or the shape of the jar is irregular, the light shining through the clear water creates a haunting transparency and clarity that brings peace, and evokes beauty and harmony. At the bottom of your jar there is an inch of silt, or very fine dirt. How it got there, we can’t say for sure, but there are plenty of theories. Some say it’s there because of your family scripting. Others say it was your DNA. Some say it came in with you – you accumulated it in past lives, during between life adventures, or on excursions in other dimensions or other planets. In any case, few would deny that there is more or less silt in the bottom of their jar.

There are, of course, notable exceptions. The very young are not aware enough to see the dirt. If they do, they play in it or eat it. The very narcissistic are convinced that they don’t have any dirt in their jar. They think they are either powerful enough to vanquish all dirt or enlightened enough that the dirt has magically vanished. However, ignorance or narcissism does not change the reality that , if you examine someone’s jar close enough, you will probably find plenty of silt in it. It may be sitting on the bottom or, it may be hanging there, in suspended animation, darkening everything. Most people experience some degree of cloudiness from their stirred-up silt all the time, but they can become so adapted to it that they think their water is clear. It’s rather like drunks whose systems can become so adapted to alcohol that they can drink antifreeze and it won’t kill them. Experiments have shown that you can put glasses on people that turn everything upside down and in a few days their brains have adjusted and perceive everything as right-side up.

For everyone, regardless of how they think about it, the dilemma remains the same: when the jar is not shaken the silt remains on the bottom and the water is clear. They are living in a relative state of grace. Life is clear; things go smoothly; we feel open, light, and expansive. People who radiate clear water are wonderful to be around. We fall in love with people like that; somehow we just don’t see all that silt, just hanging there before our eyes. When life is going well, most of us can at least fake this state of clarity, ease, and happiness. Most of us have been there, know what it feels like, and yearn to get back to such a life. We want to get back to the Garden. The problem is that eventually something in life comes along and vibrates the surface our jar is sitting on, or someone knocks against it, or someone moves or lifts the jar. It could be a failure, a rejection, sickness, getting fired, encounters with the law, the death of a loved one, or divorce. Guess what happens? The silt in the bottom of your jar is immediately stirred up. Your life becomes even cloudier than it usually is. The water is dirty and dark. You can no longer see through the jar. When this happens life is experienced as karmic, as suffering. You experience ourselves as the victims of causal processes that are out of your control. Perhaps you get fired, fail at love and feel rejected and alone. Perhaps you get sick or lose all your money. In time you lose the vigor of your youth and get old and die. All of this is hugely unsettling.  Your jar has been shaken. Clouds of silt are stirred up, muddying the clear waters of your life. You will do most anything, believe most anything, follow just about anything, that convinces you that it will settle those waters and return the silt to the bottom of your jar. In this regard, you live in fear of the next jostle of your jar. To that extent, the true god that you worship is stability and comfort – the ability to insulate yourself from such shocks. And so our cultural heros become those who can and seem to do so: people with money, fame, fortune, beauty, and health. We want to be like them; their jars don’t get shaken! If they do, they recover quicker because they have money and powerful friends or believe the right things. We want to be rescued from the constant threat of the shaking of our jar and the silt being stirred up. We spend our lives looking for solutions to this dilemma, but few of them are satisfactory. If you talk to people with a lot of money you may be surprised that many of them feel less secure than you do. If you closely investigate the lives of those you admire you will find that they are generally faking it, pretending to themselves and others that they are more stable and secure than they are.  Saviors and those we trust to lead us to the Promised Land, such as parents, mentors, friends, business partners, lovers, and mates have strengths and can help, but they cannot rescue you from the dilemma of your jar. Eventually you will find that just like you, their jar is full of silt; they were just claiming that it wasn’t or you were assuming that they are able to provide you with more silt-less clarity than they could.

One seeming exception would be those sources of salvation that are either so shrouded by time that we only have an idealized portrait, as is always the case for incarnate gods, such as Buddha or Jesus, or they are totally supernatural and so, by definition, are perfect, like angels and God. Won’t you resolve your dilemma of the water jar if you just believe and follow them? The various religions of the world offer interesting “solutions” to this dilemma of the silt in the water jar. Hinduism says that this suffering, this karma, is due to the self-created delusion of thinking that we are the jar and its water. When we become one not only with the jar and the water but with the silt, the surface the jar is sitting on, the ground, the air, and the forces that shake the jar, we are no longer the object of suffering. We are free from samsara and experience a state of liberation called samadhi. For Hinduism, any path that expands our sense of who we are to include everything is a good one. This solution to the silt in the jar dilemma, while a very good one, does not change the fact that the jar is going to eventually get shaken, the silt will be stirred up, and there will be cloudiness, murkiness, and darkness in our lives. We will experience karma in a better, more productive way, but there will still be karma.

Christianity says that suffering exists because we haven’t fully accepted the saving grace of Jesus, who has the ability to keep the jar from being shaken, remove the silt, and move us into a realm that is free of jars full of silt. All we have to do is believe in him. If the jar still gets shaken and the water clouds up it is either because God is testing us or because we haven’t fully accepted Jesus as our savior. The problem with this solution is that those who do these things still have silt in their jars. When shaken, their jars become just about as cloudy as anyone else’s.

Judaism says that this shaking of the jar is caused because we aren’t following God’s laws. If we do, the jar won’t shake and the silt won’t rise. When and if it does, if we are one of God’s chosen people – i.e., a Jew, such shaking will be God’s will, which will make injustice, calamity, persecution, and suffering somehow acceptable. But when Jews get their jars shaken, clouds of silt go up. Their pain, misery, and suffering is at least as bad as everyone else’s.

Islam says pretty much the same thing about jars and silt that Judaism does, but with Mohammad taking the role of the Jewish messiah and of Jesus in Christianity.  If you believe in Allah and his Prophet Mohammed and follow the holy scriptures of the Koran, the jar won’t shake. If it does, it will be to the glory of Allah. Allah is indeed glorified for Moslems, who get their jars shaken at least as much as do Jews, Christians, and most others. There is no evidence that they experience less karma and more grace than do others, although they, like members of each of these systems of belief, may believe that they do.

Chinese religion takes different approaches to solving the problem of the jar, depending on whether you are Confucian, Taoist, or a traditional Chinese of the shamanic tradition. For Confucians, fulfilling your appropriate social roles toward your parents, your rulers, and Heaven will instill order that will keep the jar from shaking. For Taoists, the shaking of the jar is part of a bigger reality which, when fully experienced, causes the shaking to be relatively insignificant. For traditional Chinese of the shamanic tradition, the jar shakes because evil forces have been disturbed, the appropriate offerings have not been made, and the forces of good have not been sufficiently acknowledged. So if your jar shakes, it’s your fault. It appears that Chinese, despite their beliefs, are as vulnerable to experiencing a cloudy and dark jar as anyone else.

For followers of new age spirituality the shaking of the jar is all in divine order; it is part of a bigger plan and your job is to make something good out of the shaking. You will eventually get the shit shaken out of you, but that’s OK. Tolerating shaking and darkness is not the same as eliminating it. This is a strategy of accommodation and adaptation, not resolution.

For ecstatic shamanism, whether American, Siberian, or Indian, the problem lies in your normal state of perception. You experience ourselves as the jar and the condition of the water and silt. As a result, when these change, you find yourself victimized, suffering in karma. The solution is to achieve an ecstatic state of trance in which you are full of bliss, consciousness, or beingness. When you are, the shaking won’t affect you. No matter how dirty the water is you are still OK. The object of this approach is to learn how to enter those trance states. There exist many people, like Don Juan, expert lucid dreamers, or Brazilian faith healers, who will teach you how to do so. Few people can remain in trance states. There are bills to pay and you need to go to the bathroom sooner or later. Also, people adapt to trance states. What was once an experience of transcendent honeymoon bliss sooner or later turns into a snoring, kicking bed partner.

Those who investigate near death experiences also think mystical trance states are the key for transmuting karma to grace. They may be Christians, scientific humanists, or new agers, but they generally think that if they watch and listen to enough testimonials by those who have had near death experiences that they will learn to live in a state where they no longer feel the shaking of the jar or not let the condition of their shaken up silt get to them so much. This is a very good goal and a good plan, but it does not stop the shaking or the turmoil of the silt. It does not eliminate the chasm between the state of clear water and the state of dark, dirty water. It’s still there. The difference between cloudiness and clarity, karma and grace is easy enough to dismiss or minimize when the waters of life are calm. However, those distinctions become real enough when things get really confused and painful.

For scientific humanists the shaking of the jar can’t be avoided. It is part of the human predicament, but reason allows you to understand when, how, and sometimes why the shaking happens so that you can prepare for it and insulate yourself from it. You do this by creating a comfortable cocoon for yourself within the jar. This cocoon may in part be your unshakable faith in progress and eventual solutions; it may be your status as an educated, rational, and objective thinker. If you still get shaken, it’s because you haven’t developed a sufficiently broad scientific paradigm to explain and counteract the effects of the shaking. However, any scientific humanist that is rational and not in denial knows, deep down, that at any moment all of that cocoon can be shaken into oblivion.

Atheists and agnostics take a similar approach. However, they are more content to accept the inevitability of the shaking and so focus on what humans can do to not be so bothered by it. In other words, they offer no real solution to eliminating karma and turning it into grace.

If you are a capitalist you calculate that if you have enough money you will be able to buy the best cocoon, so that when the jar shakes, you’ll be OK. If everyone else suffers, well, whose problem is that? If you are a socialist you calculate that if you help enough other people then they will be around to help you deal with the pain the next time your jar gets the daylight shaken out of it. Generally, that’s a reasonable calculation, but it doesn’t change the fact that it is just a matter of time before you get plunged into turmoil, depression or agony. You may be hoping you will die before you experience such a fate, but you can’t be sure.

Integral thinkers like Ken Wilber take an approach that considers all these various systems of belief. It says, “If you take a multiperspectival approach you are more likely to be flexible in response to the jar getting shaken and the silt getting shaken up.” A multiperspectival approach is something similar to what Hinduism teaches when it encourages you to broaden your perspective from that of the jar and water, to include the viewpoint of the silt, air, table, ground, and forces that are shaking the jar. So integral approaches are realistic, in that they do not pretend there is no jar, silt, water, or turmoil. They focus on adaptive flexibility in how they deal with the shaking, something they share with scientific humanists, atheists, and agnostics, but do better than any of those groups, because they are not defined by any one of those perspectives. However, integral approaches don’t stop jar shaking and they generally don’t eliminate the silt from the jar, although they can, as we shall see.

Buddhism, like Hinduism, denies the final reality of the jar, the silt, and the shaking. Belief in their reality is an illusion and delusion caused by ignorance. There is no karma where there is freedom from the factors that cause illusion and delusion. The Middle Way of Gautama teaches that enlightenment comes when you understand the nature of this delusion, which you can and will do by bonding with others who seek the same (the Sangha), following the eightfold noble path, and learning how to meditate.

What happens when you learn to meditate? It depends on the school of meditation, but essentially the shaking of the jar and the presence of the cloudy water won’t bother you any more. It’s mind over matter: if you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter. This is good, but the silt still remains in the bottom of the jar. Meditators know it’s just a matter of time before their jar gets vigorously shaken.

All of these solutions teach you to deal with your dismally cloudy jar rather than how to eliminate the potential presence of that dirt for good. Or they tell you that the problem will magically disappear if you just follow their advice. If you do what the scriptures, wise men, and gurus tell you to do and there’s still dark, nasty, miserably uncomfortable dirt in your life, it’s because you haven’t been doing what you were told hard enough or long enough. You just need to pray harder, give more money, or do more circumambulations around Mount Kailash in the Himalayas. If that doesn’t work, you may have the wrong mountain. Maybe it’s Arunachala or Zhayizhaga, or maybe it’s Mount Tamalpais in Marin county. Perhaps it’s a clockwise circumambulation instead of counterclockwise. Maybe you should have done it both ways, just to be sure. Maybe you didn’t touch your forehead to the ground sufficiently each time you took a step and kneeled in devotional veneration.

There is yet another approach to understanding this glass jar with its water and silt. Death. At death, the jar breaks. The water runs out or evaporates into air, depending on what you believe. What happens to the dirt? It lies there in a yucky pile, no longer able to cloud a jar of water, at least until something happens. What this something is also depends on what you believe.

If you are a traditional Jew, secular humanist, or atheist, nothing happens. The jar breaks, there is no more pain and suffering because there is no more life and no more reality. There is no more anything and there is only nothing. The dirt dries up and blows away.

If you are an agnostic, you don’t know, but you probably hope there won’t be any more shaking or stirred up dirt after you’re dead. Being dead and staying that way is probably the preferred outcome.

If you are a Christian or a Moslem, you either go to a place where there is no more silt or to a place that is one big cloud of silt. The third possibility is that you go to purgatory, a place that sounds surprisingly like our waking world: standing at the corner of Walk and Don’t Walk with clouds of pollution swirling around us.

Buddhists have not one but several of these purgatories, which can either be good (Buddha realms) or not so good (Bardos). So what type of cosmic justice is this? Now we have our silt back but without the benefit of the jar! That is not precisely the case. Buddhists, as well as spiritualists and most Christians, believe that what you have after you die is a finer jar made out of glass that can’t be broken, called your soul. The dirt that was in your earthly glass jar goes with you and continues to poise a threat of potential devastation even after you’re dead.

Maybe you also have your water back in your etherial jar after you die; maybe you don’t, depending on what you believe. Traditional Chinese think that part of you goes to a place that’s only clear water, but where you can still be helpful or get vengeful if you are forgotten by your mortal descendants. Another part of you goes to a place that is filled with stirred up silt, and that part of you is quite demanding. If it doesn’t get placated it will haunt the living and generally stir up trouble, in the form of turbulent silt.

What all of these approaches have in common is that none of them solve the dilemma of the silt in the jar in a satisfactory way. People who accept one or more of these different theories can still have their jar shaken at any moment to such an extent that everything they have built and everything that they think that they are goes away. They either pretend this threat does not exist or they do acknowledge it, yet say it doesn’t matter: either you have the power to ignore your pain or, when you are dead, it won’t matter. There is power in those approaches that promise that they will stop your jar from getting shaken because most people know what it feels like to have their jar really shaken, and they don’t like it. They will do just about anything to keep it from happening again, even trust untrustworthy people, believe in charms, prophecies, or magic.

Probably the most intellectually honest approach to the silt in the jar dilemma is provided by existentialists like Kafka and Camus. They don’t deny that they can be overwhelmed by clouds of darkness at any moment and they don’t pretend that they have a solution to that reality. However, living in a constant state of vulnerability and uncertainty is not preferred by most humans most of the time, because it doesn’t offer any solution, real or imaginary, to the problem of the silt in the jar. Does such a solution exist? If one does, what would it look like?

We have looked at a number of proposed solutions that do not work. The dirt isn’t going to magically go away. Putting the jar somewhere that it won’t ever get shaken is wishful thinking. Building cocoons and learning how to deal with shaking will diminish the impact of a lot of shaking, but it won’t take care of all shaking. Take nuclear power plants, for example. According to scientists and atomic energy regulators, a tsunami like the one that knocked out six reactors in Fukushima, Japan wasn’t supposed to happen, and making the country dependent on that belief was a very, very big mistake.

We know that breaking the jar is no solution because that’s death. Almost breaking the jar (having a near death experience) or some other type of jar-free revelation, like a mystical experience, can make the dirt seem unimportant by comparison, and therefore much easier to deal with. However, it doesn’t make the dirt in the jar go away. What might work? What if you stuck a hose down into the bottom of the jar and sucked out all the dirt like some cosmic vacuum cleaner? That wouldn’t stir up the water much. While water would leave with the dirt, you could probably get rid of a lot of the dirt that way.  What would the earthly analogy be to this approach? The descent of the Holy Spirit? Christ coming and washing all your sins away? The glory of Allah? Grace through mergence with Avalokiteshvara, the Bodhisattva of the compassion of all Buddhas? How realistic is that?

Being invaded by an outside force, regardless of how benign and desirable it may be, seems like an abrogation of responsibility and a potentially unwise exercise of trust. However, it is understandable that those who are desperate to get rid of the dirt in their jar or have been brought up believing in it, try such an approach. While it might work, Christians after conversion experiences do not seem to have any less dirt in their jars than say, atheists. Tibetan Buddhists seem to have as much karma as anyone else.

What other possibilities exist? One could suck out all the water and dirt, like is done with some blood filtration therapies, and just put back in clear water. However, the water is a metaphor for your life force, so this would be a death-rebirth experience. It seems that most people who have death-rebirth experiences end up with the silt somehow returning to their jar, with the same problem of vulnerability to turmoil existing as before.

There is one solution that makes sense, but it is tricky. What if the jar was put under a tap of running water? The problem here is that this stirs up exactly the dirt you are trying to avoid! It brings more karma and less grace into your life! It brings more discomfort, cloudiness, and darkness to you! What kind of solution is that? It gets worse: If you have too little flow because you want to avoid the misery of the turmoil and darkness, only water will come out; you will expend your life force and eliminate no silt. If you have too strong a stream of water there will be great turmoil and cloudiness before all the dirt is flushed out and the water becomes clear. That turmoil and cloudiness is reminiscent of those who attempt to force enlightenment by extensive meditation or by intense breathing exercises. They can induce a temporary psychosis, the cure for which is generally to back off and meditate less until things settle down.

Placing your jar under a flow of water that was strong enough, but not too strong, would in time clear your jar of silt, but it would mean dealing with much additional turbidity and cloudiness over a longer period of time. Too little water won’t do it; too much water is dangerous. This is analogous to exposure to the clearest, cleanest sources of “water” that we can find. While physical purification helps, the “water” you use needs to have the effect of calming, balancing, and integrating emotions and mental states. This is paradoxical, because you probably do not have enough volume of “water” if you are comfortable with this process; you’ve got to stir up the dirt to flush it out.

Think of it as a process of progressive stagnation that is brought on by a fear of the next jostle of the water jar. In order to avoid pain, suffering, and discomfort we create elaborate strategies to keep things stable and solid. But sluggish water stagnates; frozen water doesn’t flow. This is exactly the opposite of the life we admire in babies and animals like dolphins and dogs. We see freedom, flexibility, and flowing adaptability, with a spontaneous ability to try new things. This is the direction we intuitively know we need to take, but our fear of the next jostle of the water jar limits our options. We don’t try things that could stir up the silt enough for it to flow out of the jar; we don’t try things long enough to bring that silt up and out.

It’s no surprise that most people will look for magic or death before they are willing to attempt this solution. It’s hard. It requires patience and persistence that most people lack. It requires a willingness to be uncomfortable that most people associate with masochism. It also requires a willingness to control the flow oneself instead of going with the recommendations of others. This is where Integral Deep Listening can help. By interviewing emerging potentials on an ongoing basis you can get the feedback you need to stay with the process and stay on course. Parts of yourselves will yell; they are made uncomfortable by this process. What do the parts of you that score themselves high in confidence, compassion, wisdom, acceptance, inner peace, and witnessing say about the approach you take? They personify your inner compass.

When you consult respected others, your inner compass, and then use your common sense to set your course, you can solve the dilemma of the silt in the jar. You can slowly but steadily flush the karma out of your consciousness. You can replace it with the pure waters of life. Note that the more dirt you flush out, the stronger the flow of water can be. When there is no dirt left you can blast a jar with a powerful stream of clear water. You will get bubbles and froth and great turbulence, but you will not get dirt, cloudiness, or darkness.

What this means is that there exists a genuine path forward for you that will free you from suffering. You can do this. Your challenge is to not fear the dirt, the turmoil, or the discomfort of stirring up all the decaying, stagnant pollution that is stinking within you. It’s OK. If you feel worse, if you smell worse because of this process, it is only because of what is coming to the surface to be flushed out. There is not an infinite amount of the crap inside of you. There is a basement. When you clean out that basement, it is clean. Sewage cannot and will not threaten to bubble up into your house.

What sorts of things can you try that will stir up the silt enough for it to flow out of the jar? What sorts of things create a healthy, non-masochistic, discomfort? How long do you need to do these things in order to bring that silt up and out?  Regarding length, a lunar cycle of twenty eight days is a good goal to shoot for. It is long enough to overcome most of your resistances to change, but not so long that you are making yourself miserable forever if you really do not like the strategy you have chosen. Less than twenty-eight days can mean that you are talking yourself out of something that is good for you just because it makes you uncomfortable. If you decide to keep the activity after twenty-eight days, keep only part of it, or discard it, you are more likely to be making the decision based on something more than discomfort and emotional reactivity.

Regarding what to do that will stir up the water enough ,but not too much, there are guidelines. First look at your addictions. Start there. If you are a meat eater, become a vegetarian for twenty-eight days. If you are a compulsive internet surfer, put yourself on a media diet for a lunar cycle. If you don’t like to exercise, start a program of some sort. If you have to answer the phone when it rings, practice “not being home” and just letting it ring. Observe what comes up in you. If you fear loneliness, do some things designed to get people to reject you for twenty-eight days. Be purposefully stupid, ignorant, forgetful, intolerant, or embarrassing. If you have a sex addiction, find a tantra yoga group. If you are addicted to a substance like caffeine, nicotine, or chocolate, stop for twenty-eight days. Then start again if you want to. If you are into drama, ask those around you to tell you when they see you playing rescuer, victim, or persecutor. There are many other possibilities. You do not have to re-invent the wheel on this.The methodologies of self-help have been well thought out many times in the past and many resources exist to help you. A very good place to start is with Integral Life Practice by Ken Wilber, et.al. 

Most such life changes get the water unfrozen and liquid; they move your life from stagnation within the ritualized, habitual, dreamlike patterns of your everyday thinking, feeling, and behavior. Meditation takes the process to the next step; it starts that water overflowing your jar. Effective meditation will wash out many types of silt. If you are emotionally reactive or can’t turn off your thoughts, learn to meditate.  If you are self-critical, by all means learn cognitive behavioral therapy, substituting healthy, reasonable statements for those thoughts that create depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem. Reading David Burns. Feeling Good is highly recommended in this regard. Tapping into sources of internal self-nurturing by interviewing high scoring emerging potentials using IDL is also extremely helpful. Don’t worry about meditating correctly; just start any practice for twenty minutes at any regular time in your day and keep at it for twenty-eight days. Then evaluate, modify, and improve your practice.  To get started you need a plan for meditation that is designed to make you uncomfortable, but not for the sake of being uncomfortable. Breaking up your sleep by getting up and meditating every two or three hours or so is very effective, but will kick up all kinds of silt inside your jar! However, you will win no badges of honor by martyring yourself. The discomfort needs to come from exposure to clarity, purity, aliveness, and pure experience. IDL offers such an approach to meditation. You also need a plan for dealing with the drama that this process will evoke in you. IDL also offers an effective way to recognize and defuse that drama.

The dilemma of how to change karma to grace is a fundamental, perennial challenge for all human beings. There is a path forward that works. Remember the Silt in the Jar analogy. It can help you sort through who to listen to and how best to focus your energies on your own personal path of transformation.