why we need a view

Why do we need to be told what to do?

What about following our inner intuition?

In 1998 I was in a church hall in Cowley, Oxford in the middle of the most baffling and amazing jam, a weird mix of martial arts, dance and play, led by a big black dude who spoke literally no English. We would spend the first half of the class doing cartwheels, kicks and movement sequences, then make a circle and people would go into the middle and have no idea what to. So they would stand awkwardly opposite each other, move with no rhythm (we were English too, remember), do karate by themselves, breakdance, samba, stand on their heads, do the hokey-kokey, feel confused. It was ridiculous. And the teacher, having no English, could only really do so much to guide the flow. Everyone was brand new. I didn't even know what the class was called, or where this guy was from (I guessed Africa), or what the point was. But I knew it was awesome.

This was pre-YouTube-era Capoeira in England. Everyone knows what capoeira is now, but back then, none of us had ever seen a roda (the circle, the actual game). No concept of what it was supposed to be, look like, how we were supposed to interact. We could not have imagined it from the exercises of doing a few cartwheels and crawling on the floor. We could not have imagined how much grace, power, connection and beauty that could exist in such fluidity between 2 people. We could not have come up that unique cultural blend of playfulness, spirit, sexuality, aggression and love that comes from a good roda. That is the transmission of Capoeira. Yes, those qualities come from inside, from universal human spirit. But, no matter what exercises we did, it would not have been possible to bring them out without having a clear transmission of Capoeira, from someone who lives it.

So now we have a similar situation with Spirituality. We have a bunch of methods which are clear and easy to follow - yoga asanas, vipassana meditation, pranayama, qi-gong. But we don't have a clear idea of where they are supposed to lead. Sure we have words like Enlightenment, but all we have is our own best stab ideas at what it is - which are all based on our own limited ideas about happiness, or peace, or transcendence, or something. In the worst case (sadly most cases), we have misleading ideas from well-meaning but ill-qualified people. Without a clear view to follow, it is unlikely that our practices will transmit the intended wayless-way of being.

As the example I most familiar with, meditation. Pretty much 99% of people doing meditation in the UK, Buddhists, whatever, are working with the framework that you are a person, made of matter, living on the earth, and meditation is something you do with your mind, to overcome suffering, or somehow help others. If you have this View, it is impossible for you to reach the original intended purpose of meditation. Not hard - impossible. It is like if someone had told you to play the piano with only your right elbow, not your hands or fingers, then it is impossible that you will ever play the Rachmaninov Concerto like that. Your journey in one-elbow piano may be a beautiful, developmental creative epic, but it will not be anything close to the classical piano that we all know. People in the modern West do not appreciate this enough.

It is probably true that any practice done a bit is a bit beneficial, whether you know what you're doing or not. And it is true that most people have no interest in the bigger picture, they want less anxiety, better health and to make new friends that aren't as irritating as their old ones. But for those that do want more, who want to actually achieve the aim of the old spiritual practices, we need to know the right view, otherwise we are gonna get stuck at some point.