The above quote came as a result of some facebook chatter that intrigued me (yes, you can learn things on facebook almost 5% of the time). The issue with any spiritual teaching/dharma practice is whether or not what it points at speaks to ultimate reality and how one should live.
There is a lot of confusion in this space. Let's take Buddhist emptiness practices as an example. Emptiness is an unfortunate word, but in essence it is a pedagogical device to point out there is no intrinsic reality to our cognitive structures. Unfortunately, this often gets conflated with deconstruction philosophy, where all concepts have no ultimate meaning and are devoid of richness. After all such destructuring you are left with a void of nothing, however, this is not how the fruition of emptiness practices are perceived by a spiritual practitioner. Instead, an openness to our structures are revealed as a more vivid reality (or the inseparability of emptiness and clarity).
The peace of mind that comes through spiritual teachings also get distorted when conflated with reality. Peace as inner experience should not be taken as a position for all outer experiences. But we still see this pedagogical idea espoused by pacifists, even when conflict is inherently unavoidable. One quote I really like comes from the book Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals:
“Peace is not just about the absence of conflict; it's also about the presence of justice. ... A counterfeit peace exists when people are pacified or distracted or so beat up and tired of fighting that all seems calm. But true peace does not exist until there is justice, restoration, forgiveness. Peacemaking doesn't mean passivity. It is the act of interrupting injustice without mirroring injustice, the act of disarming evil without destroying the evildoer, the act of finding a third way that is neither fight nor flight but the careful, arduous pursuit of reconciliation and justice. It is about a revolution of love that is big enough to set both the oppressed and the oppressors free.”Some Advaita schools (more so with the Shankara lineage and today's neo-advaitists) take their pedagogical approach, that the world is an illusion, to be real. As such, life is not taken as an important quality of the ultimate. All realizations then become about the release (or liberation) from life, and ultimately there is no self to be released. Yet, even Shankara ran from a stampeding elephant, and was then questioned by a student as to why this was done since isn't the elephant an illusion. He had the nerve to respond, “My dear friend, you saw me running…who said that was the truth. It was also an illusion.”
(Two hundred years later, Ramanuja saw the flaw in this orientation, and posited “that there exists a plurality and distinction between Atman (souls) and Brahman (metaphysical, ultimate reality), while he also affirmed that there is unity of all souls and that the individual soul has the potential to realize identity with the Brahman” (wikipedia).)
So what was the beef with Mr. Carriera's pointer? He stated, “When you practice the subtle art of not making a problem out of any part of your experience you sink into the profound recognition that contentment is always already yours.” A friend of mine rightly acknowledged that problems are not just psychological. Jeff followed up to note that this is true and that problems are real, and “at the same time their existence does not mean that something is wrong. Problems exist because they are part of reality. In this way these instructions do away with the illusion that there is some problem-free heaven that is the real reality.”
Spiritual practice is not ontology, however, a darn good method can point beyond itself.