Mystic Mantra: The leonine self

Some years ago, while discussing gender in spiritual traditions with an elderly female Sufi practitioner, I asked her a somewhat indelicately direct question, given the mystical tone and tenor of our conversation until then. How did she feel about not being able to enter the shrine of her beloved Pir in Delhi? She said something that was, on the face of it, not a straightforward answer: “My teacher used to say, when a lion walks in the jungle, the question of its gender does not arise. All you see is a majestic lion.”

But what did that woman mean? I turned to another woman, who lived in her guru’s traditional Hindu ashram for years, where her identity as a white European rendered her “lowest of the low”. The first thing she was taught there was not any grand spiritual truth, but the dictum — “do not touch anything”. How did she deal with that?

“There was prejudice, and it’s not such a bad thing to be on the receiving end of prejudice. You see, the spiritual path is about the ego. Thinking of ourselves as the body is what keeps us away from God. So any type of hatred, any type of prejudice towards our individuality is wonderful! We have to beat down this ego. So I was in this wonderful position of being an absolute pariah.” According to this essentially Vedantic perspective, what hinders a direct experience of all-pervasive divinity is too close an identification with individual self-identity, the ego. It includes one’s physical form and its characteristics, such as race, religion, gender, caste and so on.

So if one is attempting to erase that ego-identification in order to transcend a limited way of being, prejudice directed at the ego might actually be a useful tool. The act of transforming experiences that are unpleasant for the ego into means of eroding it is integral to Vedantic spirituality. While we must continue to strive for social change to create an equitable society for all, within our own selves we can learn to use the slights meted out to the ego in a way that cuts away at our identification with it.