Wake Up Now (10 page)

What’s the difference between not knowing
and mental confusion or dullness? Sometimes
my meditations seem to go by in a flash and I
can’t remember a single moment, as if I’ve been
lost in a fog.

The not knowing I refer to is not confused or dull at all; it’s clear and bright, aware and awake to what is, without any conceptual overlay to cloud the experience. Not knowing is a limitless spaciousness beyond the mind, whereas confusion and dullness are merely passing mental states. When you sit, be alert and present for what is, including the mind-states that come and go. By the way, your sitting may also seem to pass quickly when you’re one with what you’re experiencing and there’s no separate little me to keep track.

I feel like I identify more with my feelings than
with my thoughts or beliefs. How does this radical
approach to spirituality apply to me?

If you identify with your feelings, they act as a filter (just as beliefs do) that separates you from a direct, unmediated experience of life. In certain circles, feelings are given more credence than thoughts, but most feelings are based on conditioned reactive patterns we learned as children and on
deeply held beliefs about how life should (or shouldn’t) be. If you feel so inclined, you might try to unearth the ideas and stories beneath your feelings. In any case, not knowing means seeing life clearly, free from both emotional and conceptual filters. Of course, feelings come and go spontaneously like thoughts and needn’t be a problem if you don’t identify with them.

I worry that I’ll have no moral compass to guide
my actions if I abandon all of my spiritual beliefs.
Don’t our ethical principles keep us from acting in a
completely selfish way?

On a relative, everyday level, ethical principles can be helpful in guiding our actions and maintaining social order. But the spiritual beliefs on which they’re based tend to cause more suffering in the long run because they divide “us” from “them,” the good from the evil, the saved from the damned, and set up an ongoing argument with the way things are. Even the most benevolent, exalted beliefs just separate us from the mystery of life as it is. The more you set aside your beliefs and encounter life directly, without argument or struggle, the more you discover a natural responsiveness that’s inherently gentle, loving, and ethical and doesn’t require a spiritual worldview to maintain. Of course, if you’re attached to your spiritual beliefs, I have no intention of separating you from them. I just invite you to examine them closely and see how they affect you.

Wake-Up Call

Who Would You Be Without Your Spiritual Beliefs?

Set aside fifteen to twenty minutes for this exploration. Make a list of your most cherished spiritual beliefs. At first, you may have difficulty identifying them because you don’t consider them beliefs, but rather the truth. However, any view or interpretation of reality you can formulate in words, no matter how true it may seem, is just a belief and open to question.

Now take each of the five most significant beliefs and begin to inquire:

• Can I really know that this belief is true?

• How does attaching to this belief affect me?

• How do I act toward others when I hold this belief? How do I act toward myself?

• How do I feel in my body? Do I feel lighter, freer, more spacious? Do I feel heavier, denser, more constricted?

• What am I afraid of experiencing or feeling that this belief protects me from? (Perhaps it’s an inner feeling of emptiness or lack or a fear of the unknown.)

• How does this belief contribute to a spiritual identity I’ve constructed for myself?

• Who would I be without this belief? What would my life be like, how would I feel, and how would I act toward myself and others?

Ask these questions for each belief in turn, and notice how the answers affect you.

In your absence is your presence.

—Jean Klein

In my early days as a Zen student, I had the opportunity to spend time with three exceptional teachers: Shunryu Suzuki, one of the first Zen masters to teach in the West; Kobun Chino, who helped Suzuki Roshi establish monastic practice at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center near Big Sur; and the Tibetan teacher Chogyam Trungpa, who founded the first Buddhist university in the West. These three masters taught as much through the power of their silent presence as through their words, and each was a renegade in his fashion, open to adapting traditional forms to the needs of contemporary Western students. From Kobun especially, I received the mandate, which I pass on to my own students today, to find my own way and not be bound by tradition. “Never call yourself a Buddhist,” he often said.

One afternoon Kobun and Trungpa, who were good friends and accomplished calligraphers, met in a friend’s living room to drink tea and share their brushwork, with several of Kobun’s students in attendance. As one teacher looked on, the other spread out a large piece of paper, knelt
down, gracefully stroked some words of spiritual wisdom (Trungpa in Tibetan, Kobun in Japanese), and then translated what he had written. After a pause, the other teacher did the same. Before long, the exchange became a kind of playful Dharma combat, the ritualized doctrinal debates common to both Zen and Tibetan Buddhism, with each man responding to what the other had written.

At one point Trungpa, who was dressed in his customary suit and tie, leaned over and inscribed the phrase “Mindfulness is the way of all the buddhas,” emphasizing the cornerstone of traditional Buddhist practice—moment-to-moment mindful awareness. Kobun, with the billowy sleeves of his monk’s robes tucked under his arms, picked up a large brush, saturated it with black ink, paused, and then wrote with a mischievous flourish, “Great no mind.” Everyone in the room broke out in uproarious laughter.

In addition to being a classic example of the brotherly one-upsmanship so common in Zen stories, this exchange points to two fundamentally different attitudes to spiritual unfolding. According to the traditional Buddhist view, you need to practice mindful awareness of each moment with great dedication and diligence, gradually developing the penetrating insight necessary to see through the illusion of a separate self. In the process, you’re expected to cultivate positive qualities like patience and compassion and minimize or eliminate undesirable emotions like anger and fear. Gradually, with enough mindfulness meditation and the cultivation of enough virtue, you transform yourself into a buddha.

But from the perspective of the direct approach often (though not always) encountered in Zen, you’re already a buddha just as you are, and meditation is an opportunity to express your limitless, radiant, innate Buddha nature—what Kobun referred to as “great no mind.” (By the way, Kobun and Trungpa were not polarized on this issue but shared a mutual appreciation of both perspectives.) The distinction finds expression in countless koans and stories. Consider, for example, the following from China’s Tang dynasty: When Master Nan-chuan saw his student Ma-tsu diligently practicing meditation hour after hour, he could sense a certain ambition and end-gaining in the young monk’s demeanor, so he sneaked up behind him and asked, “What are you doing?”

“I’m trying to become a buddha,” Ma-tsu replied proudly.

Nan-chuan then picked up a stone and began rubbing it against a spare tile from the monastery floor.

Hearing the sound, Ma-tsu asked, “What are you doing?”

Said Nan-chuan, “I’m trying to make a mirror.”

As often happens in such stories, Ma-tsu had an awakening. Just as a tile is what it is, not a mirror in the making, you are already just what you’ve always been, and you don’t need to practice to become it.

The exchange between Kobun and Trungpa also points to two very different approaches to working with the mind. In
the practice of mindfulness—which is quite popular these days in the West not only as a spiritual path, but also as a secular technique for reducing stress and enhancing well-being—you pay careful, deliberate attention to your experience as it changes and unfolds from moment to moment; it’s sometimes described as a cat tracking a mouse or a mother attending to her newborn child. After months and years of regular practice, the mind becomes accustomed to releasing its preoccupation with past and future and centering itself in the experience of the now.

But attending to the particulars of experience in this way runs the risk of becoming effortful and laborious and, as its name implies, strengthening the illusion of the separate self that’s looking down on reality from a distance, trying to be mindful. In fact, being mindful (“mind-f”) can just energize the localization of energy and attention in the witnessing mind and accentuate the gap between subject and object, self and other, that awakening is intended to close. The mind may become proficient at paying attention and fancy itself an accomplished meditator. In reality, however, true meditation, which has nothing to do with the mind, is always occurring and merely needs to be allowed, not created.

After spending years on my cushion efforting to be mindful of my breath, I eventually developed the capacity to sit with unwavering focus for hours at a time, but my sitting was lifeless and dry, like a withered branch. No sign of insight, awakening, or spontaneity in any direction. “In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities,” Suzuki Roshi said. “In the expert’s mind, there are few.” In the process of
becoming an expert meditator, my mind had gradually become more rigid and narrow, and I’d lost the innocence, openness, and aliveness of beginner’s mind, which had delighted and nourished me in my early days of practice.

Breathe and Reflect

Begin by sitting quietly for a few moments. Now open your awareness wide and welcome whatever arises without judgment or resistance. Don’t try to control or manipulate your experience in any way, just let everything to be as it is. You’re relaxed yet alert, present but not fixated in any way. You may be completely unfamiliar with this way of experiencing reality. Spend a few minutes sitting in silent presence. Notice how it affects you.

During one particular retreat, I can remember exerting my usual concentrated effort to pay attention and suddenly finding the whole process so amusing that I burst out laughing. Here was my mind, busily struggling to meditate, and all the while I was being embraced by a silence so deep I could feel it in my bones. The meditative habits of a lifetime fell away like an old skin, revealing the raw immediacy of the moment. I didn’t need to meditate; meditation was always happening, I just needed to let go and join it. There was no place to go, nothing to do, no more tricks up my sleeve, just the indivisible and ineffable Now. At last, my mind had given up trying, if only for an instant, and I had happened upon the doorway to true meditation.

When I finally awakened to my essential nature, I looked back and realized that the innocent, open awareness with
which I had begun my practice was in fact identical with the expansive, all-inclusive awareness that had subsequently awakened to itself through me. Indeed, this one undivided awareness was the natural state toward which all meditation points, the profound silence I had stumbled upon during retreat. It was not something I could possibly fabricate or develop, but the very consciousness that had always been looking through these eyes and hearing through these ears. Yet I had taken an extremely circuitous path to discovering it, spending years cultivating mindfulness in order to reveal the “great no mind” that had paradoxically never been absent even for an instant.

As I ultimately discovered, the mind can’t possibly meditate, though it may manage a good imitation. In its ongoing struggle to remain in control, the mind will read the books and become adept at the practices, ironically succeeding at “quieting” itself. But in the end, the states that the mind creates or achieves—the stillness, the peace, the compassion, the insight—are just forms of mental activity and have nothing to do with the true peace and stillness of your essential nature, which is beyond the mind and can only be revealed, never developed. “You are awareness,” said the Indian sage Ramana Maharshi. “Awareness is another name for you. Since you are awareness, there’s no need to attain or cultivate it.” In other words, you are the welcoming space in which reality reveals itself. Without this awareness, nothing would exist.