We are in such a hurry to get it, whatever it is. Gone into go. Greed for speed -- fast food, fast money, fast relationships, fast spirituality. Drive-through divinity with fries and easy-to-swallow highs. Who wants to spend years doing spiritual practices when the same results apparently can -- given a sufficiently open mind and wallet -- be gained in just a weekend? We may even be told that all that can stop such a weekend from giving us the desired results is our belief that it cannot. And so the shearing of the sheep goes. Business as usual.

But the greater our hurry to arrive where we want to be spiritually, the longer it will take. What is spiritually greedy in us -- if permitted to masquerade as us -- weights us down as much as it revs us up, leaving us doing little more than spinning our wheels while we look around for better deals. But in true spiritual hunger, there is little or no wasting of time, which simultaneously means no hurry and no delay.

Spiritual shortcuts, like all shortcuts, are time-defined. But authentic spiritual practice does not primarily take place in time; if we say it takes a long time or a short time, we are only looking at it from the outside, tacking it down onto a straight time-calibrated measuring stick. When we are immersed in spirituality for real, we are not time-bound, even though we take care of business in a timely fashion.

The only spiritual shortcut is letting go of having any shortcut.

When we are sharing deep love with another, where does the time go? When we are really happy, where does the time go? It doesn’t go anywhere. Why? Because in such conditions it simply does not exist, except perhaps in a purely peripheral sense, and thus has nowhere to go. As we become more intimate with the Holy Deep, time -- past, present, and future -- becomes space, and space become Being.

Some may confuse Buddhism’s Sudden School, as opposed to its Gradual School, of Enlightenment with a spiritual shortcut, but the Sudden School actually involves plenty of preparation for the “jump” -- hence its symbiotic link with the Gradual School.

We'll pay so damned much for what we don't really need, and so little for what we really need. We want Freedom for free. A man once asked the Dalai Lama how he could more quickly get to Enlightenment, and the Dalai Lama reportedly wept for him, recognizing how much pain that man must be in to want to get to the big E faster. We think that getting it spiritually will give us immunity from pain and all the troublesome stuff of life -- what a fantasy! Spirituality ultimately means no escape, no need for escape, and utter freedom through limitation and every sort of difficulty.

Shortcuts are time-framed. Short time, long time, etcetera. But Awakening is not time-framed. Being occurs not in time, but in Timelessness. So even to want a spiritual shortcut is but a confession of estrangement from Being.

When the desire to access such a shortcut arises, enter the very feeling of the desire, bypassing its mind, until you are at its core, pressed against its primal pulse. Then let your attention pass through that core-feeling, that primordial ache, until it rests in the feeling of Being. Do so, and notice how your flesh becomes but patterned energy, wearing nothing but the attention given it. No wristwatch. No clock on the wall -- and not just because there’s no wall, but also because there’s no one needing there to be a clock. That in us which functions through time can, of course, continue, but it cannot now masquerade as us. In fact, nothing can.

Gotta run. Busy day ahead. A pain in the ass, but kind of intoxicating, isn’t it, keeping us so damned busy that the mysteries of the obvious go all but unnoticed. But still something gets through the cracks in our amphetamine days, making light of our dreams, asking only for our undivided attention, our time. The door is, as always, already open, even as we do battle over who has the right key. Awakening, we smile with huge compassion upon what we’ve done with our time. The hourglass catches our glance, spinning into a flaming mandala of spilling forms, leaving a timeless clearing that is everywhere at once, inhabited by a gratitude of which these words are but the feeblest echo.