Dragons

Isn’t it wonderful when you do something well, when you bring forth your creative or caring potential; you’re really on the ball and you get a result that you’re pleased with?

Arts, crafts, pulling off the good deal, scoring the goal – this is the sweet spot that we will sacrifice hours of time and most of our energy for. We light up. And the bigger the field that we affect, the brighter the light. ‘A thousand  people came to my talk, ten thousand people came to my performance, I have a following of twenty-thousand! But so and so has a following of a million – so I have to try harder.’ (Ah yes, the pleasure and the glow are dukkha too. They arrive at no final satisfaction and require stress to keep them going.)

Take a look around at dragon careers: politicians and celebrities are immersed in that energy; those who are captured by it will even die for it. Gaddafi was still glowing with righteousness up to the moment they dragged him out of the drainage channel; rock stars survive on drugs and rehab to keep their dragon flying. And when it comes to the spiritual arena, the same creature can spread its glorious wings.

The way it goes is that through spiritual practice you develop some skills, your mind deepens and your clarity improves. You feel you’ve learnt a few things and yes, out of compassion and concern, and often on the invitation of others (or encouraged by your teacher), you attempt to teach. It isn’t great, but somebody appreciates it, and you get invited again, and somewhat encouraged you try again…and over time you get ‘better’ at it and more people express appreciation.

Meanwhile of course, this encourages you to deepen and intensify your practice and so this is all good stuff.  At a certain, unspecified point however, you’re likely to ‘become’ somebody. Your name starts to attract people. Still, you allow that, because it’s good if people have some example that they can feel trust in and get inspiration from. And you like to help. (Or maybe by now you have a mission.) Anyway there’s a point where supporting the public persona becomes more important to you than meeting the realities of how much it’s costing your private person.

Dragons demand a lot of energy; they don’t want to bother with looking after your body and with doing the laundry of life. They don’t want to meet others out of role. They don’t want to deal with petty details; consequently, it gets so that you only feel assured and in the right place when your dragon is out there in the public eye pouring out the grand vision with limitless compassion and so on. Eventually there isn’t the time to do the practices that you started with; you get cut off from your fellows in the practice and there isn’t the requirement of critical (or concerned) feedback.

Have you ever met someone on a dragon high? Notice that they can’t really hear what you’re trying to say; that every topic is referred to through their own perspective. And that, sometimes with calm and effortless logic they demonstrate that how right they are, or what kind of a person you are, rather than address your concerns. Pretty weird and frustrating isn’t it?

The best thing is to avoid a challenge or confrontation (dragons have a lot of energy, and a wounded dragon is very nasty), remain non-committal on what they’re getting off on, and, if there’s an opening, ask, with some concern, how they’re feeling. You may reach the human who’s carrying it all.

This reflection by Ajahn Sucitto is excerpted from the Reflections blog post Cooperation: Taming the Dragon, Friday, 6 January 2012.