Tag Archives: awakening

Where all things return

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The river, the Tao, the open ground, the source. These are all words, but no thing. Only things have beginnings, or ends. All things (and that includes cats, and people, and impossibly tiny bugs of all kinds) that exist, are. They have being; if they seem to share nothing else, they share that.

The Tao is no thing. It is not a substance. It is without dimensions, without duration, for you can only measure things; but it is. Isness, in fact, is what it is. It can’t have come from anywhere; there is nowhere it could lead. But it is where all things return, even you and I.

The way is empty,
used, but not used up.
Deep, yes! ancestral
to the ten thousand things.

Blunting edge,
loosing bond,
dimming light,
the way is the dust of the way.

Quiet,
yes, and likely to endure…

Tao te Ching, tr. Ursula le Guin

Just get on with it

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Teachings can be most profound, but those who listen may not understand. Never mind. Don’t be perplexed over profundity or lack of it. Just do the practice wholeheartedly, and you can arrive at real understanding—it will bring you to the place the teachings talk about.

Ajahn Chah, Everything Arises, Everything Falls Away: Teachings on Impermanence and the End of Suffering, from an extract in Tricycle magazine

So often on the contemplative path we read different teachings, different people’s accounts of their own journeying, and we wonder, “Am I doing this right? Is there another way I should be walking? Would that work better?” and if we’re not careful we can find ourselves skittering off down another byway, wondering why nothing seems to work for us like it seems to for everyone else.

Really there is no problem. It has taken me years to realise this, but there is no teaching to find, no teacher to follow. There is just the practice. Teachings are good in themselves, but no teacher can teach anything more or less than she has come to experience herself. All she could do was practice, and it is all we can do ourselves.

Just sitting seems too easy. It isn’t. It is the hardest thing we’ll ever have to do; but it is also the simplest, and the loveliest. All the words come down to this: just get on with it.

Sitting by the window in the dusk

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Sitting by the window in the dusk this evening, I kept being drawn back to listen to the rain. It connected itself somehow to my breath, drifted between patches of thought, drew me back to itself softly – trickling in the guttering, pattering in the trees, the shush and splash of tyres out on the road.

Pema Chödrön, writing in Lion’s Roar:

One of my favorite subjects of contemplation is this question: “Since death is certain, but the time of death is uncertain, what is the most important thing?” You know you will die, but you really don’t know how long you have to wake up from the cocoon of your habitual patterns. You don’t know how much time you have left to fulfill the potential of your precious human birth. Given this, what is the most important thing?

Every day of your life, every morning of your life, you could ask yourself, “As I go into this day, what is the most important thing? What is the best use of this day?” At my age, it’s kind of scary when I go to bed at night and I look back at the day, and it seems like it passed in the snap of a finger. That was a whole day? What did I do with it? Did I move any closer to being more compassionate, loving, and caring — to being fully awake? Is my mind more open? What did I actually do? I feel how little time there is and how important it is how we spend our time…

If you take some time to formally practice meditation, perhaps in the early morning, there is a lot of silence and space. Meditation practice itself is a way to create gaps. Every time you realize you are thinking and you let your thoughts go, you are creating a gap. Every time the breath goes out, you are creating a gap. You may not always experience it that way, but the basic meditation instruction is designed to be full of gaps. If you don’t fill up your practice time with your discursive mind, with your worrying and obsessing and all that kind of thing, you have time to experience the blessing of your surroundings. You can just sit there quietly. Then maybe silence will dawn on you, and the sacredness of the space will penetrate…

Another powerful way to do pause practice is simply to listen for a moment. Instead of sight being the predominant sense perception, let sound, hearing, be the predominant sense perception. It’s a very powerful way to cut through our conventional way of looking at the world. In any moment, you can just stop and listen intently. It doesn’t matter what particular sound you hear; you simply create a gap by listening intently.

I have come to love the noises through the window where I sit to practice. They are plain, familiar sounds: traffic, birdsong, the wind in the trees along the back of the garden, voices, the odd metallic clang from the yard by the old reservoir… Early in the morning, or on evenings like this one, they become their own lovely lacework realm of sound, intricate and nourishing, their texture as real as each breath, as the sensations of my body resting on the good floor. What more could one want than what is, in each instant that it’s heard? Everything is here; this precious instant is gift and grace; there is no next or before, and from that all healing springs.

Patterns in the stream

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Is it not, then, a strange inconsistency and an unnatural paradox that “I” resists change in “me” and in the surrounding universe? For change is not merely a force of destruction. Every form is really a pattern of movement, and every living thing is like the river, which, if it did not flow out, would never have been able to flow in. Life and death are not two opposed forces; they are simply two ways of looking at the same force, for the movement of change is as much the builder as the destroyer. The human body lives because it is a complex of motions, of circulation, respiration, and digestion. To resist change, to try to cling to life, is therefore like holding your breath: if you persist you kill yourself.

Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

We are, in fact, no thing – in the sense of a static object – at all. We are processes, except that that sounds too sterile, too conceptually fixed; we are swirls, eddies in what happens, in change itself. In that sense the idea of life and death makes no real sense of who or what we are, for we do not begin at birth, or end in death.

Where do I begin and end in space? I have relations to the sun and air which are just as vital parts of my existence as my heart. The movement in which I am a pattern or convolution began incalculable ages before the (conventionally isolated) event called birth, and will continue long after the event called death. Only words and conventions can isolate us from the entirely undefinable something which is everything.

Watts, ibid.

In fact the idea of a fixed and static I (or me, come to that) is entirely an illusion in any case. It is more like a function of memory than an identity. Watts again (ibid.):

In thinking of ourselves as divided into “I” and “me,” we easily forget that consciousness also lives because it is moving. It is as much a part and product of the stream of change as the body and the whole natural world. If you look at it carefully, you will see that consciousness—the thing you call “I”—is really a stream of experiences, of sensations, thoughts, and feelings in constant motion. But because these experiences include memories, we have the impression that “I” is something solid and still, like a tablet upon which life is writing a record.

Yet the “tablet” moves with the writing finger as the river flows along with the ripples, so that memory is like a record written on water—a record, not of graven characters, but of waves stirred into motion by other waves which are called sensations and facts. The difference between “I” and “me” is largely an illusion of memory. In truth, “I” is of the same nature as “me.” It is part of our whole being, just as the head is part of the body. But if this is not realized, “I” and “me,” the head and the body, will feel at odds with each other. “I,” not understanding that it too is part of the stream of change, will try to make sense of the world and experience by attempting to fix it.

It is to this paradox that the whole project of the contemplative life is addressed. To understand the “self” not as a thing but as a pattern in the flow of change is not something that is accessible to the thinking mind; and the only thing to do with the thinking mind is to bring it to an end of itself in practice. Just sitting is the most pointless endeavour: that is the whole point of it. In that stillness, the fractured self (I/me) can begin to heal, and the lovely, fleeting swirl can reveal itself as just the movement of the stream it always was.

Einzelgänger und Einzelgängerin

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Einzelgänger (f. Einzelgängerin) is one of my favourite German compound nouns. It’s usually translated as “loner”, though Google Translate also offers “maverick, rogue, nonconformist”. Literally of course it means “single walker” – and that comes closer to the way I always think of it. There’s almost an eremitical flavour to it…

By nature I seem to be an Einzelgänger myself, though it has taken me a while to develop the courage of my convictions on the matter. In spiritual matters, of course, there is always the strong, and conventionally approved, temptation to declare oneself a member of some religion or other, and of some tradition within that religion. Worse, one may become – especially in most Buddhist traditions – someone’s disciple. I’m not at all certain the guru/disciple (teacher/follower, etc.) relationship is always a healthy one, hallowed though it is by long use. Sam Harris writes:

One of the first obstacles encountered along any contemplative path is the basic uncertainty about the nature of spiritual authority. If there are important truths to be discovered through introspection, there must be better and worse ways to do this—and one should expect to meet a range of experts, novices, fools, and frauds along the way. Of course, charlatans haunt every walk of life. But on spiritual matters, foolishness and fraudulence can be especially difficult to detect. Unfortunately, this is a natural consequence of the subject matter. When learning to play a sport like golf, you can immediately establish the abilities of the teacher, and the teacher can, in turn, evaluate your progress without leaving anything to the imagination. All the relevant facts are in plain view. If you can’t consistently hit the little white ball where you want it to go, you have something to learn from anybody who can. The difference between an expert and a novice is no less stark when it comes to recognizing the illusion of the self. But the qualifications of a teacher and the progress of a student are more difficult to assess.

It may well be that for some people there are those, further along their own chosen path, who can wisely and compassionately provide the most helpful and literally enlightening instruction. Perhaps it depends to some extent on how closely that path happens to conform to one already mapped out – Vajrayana, perhaps, or traditional Advaita Vedanta. But more to the point, I honestly think, is simple temperament.

We are used by now to the way people may be broadly divided into introverts and extroverts, more precisely perhaps into the 16 personalities of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. We may even have stumbled across Elaine Aron and her concept of the highly sensitive person. I think perhaps we should recognise the Einzelgänger or Einzelgängerin as a distinct personality type in themselves. I don’t mean by this a literal loner, nor a hermit in either the religious or the colloquial sense; but a contemplative who finds that they are temperamentally unsuited either for formal membership of some church or meeting, or for the particular relationship of personal discipleship.

I truly believe that I have discovered more, about myself and about the way things are, in the last few years outside of any formal commitment than I had in decades inside. Of course I am getting old, and some might say – with at least a grain of truth perhaps – that this is all a function of age. But it doesn’t feel as though it is just that. It actually feels as though I have finally found the path I should have been treading all along. I only wish – in a manner of speaking, outside the constraints of cause and effect! – that I had had someone to explain this to me long ago: which may be the whole point of writing a blog like this.

The way of persistence

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If there’s one thing that’s truly essential in contemplative practice, it’s keeping on keeping on. Sheer persistence lies at the heart of contemplation: session after session, day after day. Sometimes I think keeping at it is more important than what it is we keep at. Inevitably, over the years, there will be changes – sometimes radical, as mine have occasionally been – more often slight and gradual, as we reveal to ourselves more about the nature of mind, and of the way things come to be.

Importantly, though, we need to understand that practice doesn’t make anything happen. Perhaps though, for me at least, practice does make a place where it is possible for things to happen. Maybe practice functions like cultivating a field. Cultivation doesn’t make anything grow – you need seeds, and water, and warmth for that – but it does make a place where seeds can safely germinate. Awakening itself comes, it seems to me, from some kind of slow, unseen growth or change in the mind itself. Mindfulness, self-awareness, openness to what is – a more religious mindset might call it grace…

Breathing in, where do you feel the breath sensation? Breathing out, where do you feel it? You maintain this sense of bodily sensations that come and go. It’s not imagination. It’s not an image. You’re just learning this art of allowing, which in more religious language would be called surrender. Surrender to what? To what is, to the natural law that the breath is obeying as the lungs fill up and empty.

As you follow this way of practice, you take your seat and you’re upright and relaxed. You’re sitting, breathing, and learning how to stay with one theme: breathing in the context of the whole body. As you do that, of course, the world doesn’t stop. Wherever you are, there are sounds. Some of them are pleasant, like the birds singing “chirp, chirp.” Others are not so pleasant, such as the trucks, cars, ambulances, and police cars that speed up and down city streets. Letting sounds come and go, you’re learning to peacefully coexist with all that’s other than breath…

This comprehensive approach can be especially helpful for intellectual people, because there’s no verbal content; the intellect isn’t being fed. In this approach, you’re not for or against thought. You’re not trying to fix anything, not trying to use the breath as a stepping-stone to get anywhere. Rather, you allow the mind to think itself in whatever way it wishes. You’re learning how to temporarily let things happen. You’re learning how to let the mind do what it does…

Larry Rosenberg with Laura Zimmerman, Three Steps to Awakening: A Practice for Bringing Mindfulness to Life

Slowly, slowly. Sometimes things will happen suddenly – walls will fall, dark places illuminate – but more often, far more often, it will be so gradual that even the practiced attention won’t notice, until one day everything is different. Rosenberg again:

Maybe not all at once, but little by little, as breath awareness becomes more continuous, something very good comes out of it—you feel more calm, more peaceful. There’s joy. Otherwise, why bother doing it? If you haven’t experienced it, you will. It’s not mysterious. As the breath awareness develops, the body starts to relax because they’re all interrelated. Finally, you’ll see that it is just one life happening.

All by itself

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The way gives them life; Virtue rears them; Things give them shape; Circumstances bring them to maturity. Therefore the myriad creatures all revere the way and honour virtue. Yet the way is revered and virtue honoured not because this is decreed by any authority but because it is natural for them to be treated so.

Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching (51)

This passage, among others, has given rise to the Taoist concept of ziran, “just-so-ness” (Suzuki). The way goes on; to be truly human is to walk in the way, to “accord with the Tao”: “Therefore there is such a thing as aligning one’s actions with the Tao. If you accord with the Tao you become one with it.” (Tao Te Ching tr. Muller).

It is so simple, but how can it be done? Like Jiddu Krishnamurti’s teaching on choiceless awareness, it can be frustrating to read words like this, with little or no indication of a practice. (There isn’t one in either Krishnamurti or in the Tao Te Ching.) I have often written of shikantaza, the Sōtō Zen practice of “just sitting”, in its simplicity and quiet; but I have also found myself drawing parallels with the Eastern Orthodox practice of hesychasm, and with the Pure Land practice of the Nembutsu. Both of these can of course be seen as a variety of prayer, and many of their practitioners would argue strongly that this is so. But the repetition of a short phrase, either the Jesus Prayer or the Nembutsu, has a quality of practice that is not quite expressed either by the word “prayer” or the word “mantra”, as I understand it.

Let me try and explain. The Nembutsu in particular, often transliterated “Namo Amida Bu”, is usually translated, “I take refuge in Amitābha Buddha”. Amitābha is a compound of the Sanskrit words amita (“without bound, infinite”) and ābhā (“light, splendour”). The recitation of the Nembutsu is seen, in Jōdo Shinshū, as the practitioner’s response to tariki (“other power”) – the power of Amitābha, sometimes expressed as simply “the way things are”. The practitioner does not cause anything by their practice, nor do they plead for anything to be done for them: they merely acknowledge its having been done. They “accord with the way”. As Shinran, the founder of Jōdo Shinshū, wrote:

For myself, I do not have even a single disciple. For if I brought people to say the nembutsu through my own efforts, then they might be my disciples. But it is indeed preposterous to call persons “my disciples” when they say the nembutsu having received the working of Amida.

The beauty, it seems to me, of practices such as hesychasm and Nembutsu is their extreme simplicity, coupled with their explicit renunciation of any sense that it is the practitioner’s hard work that is at stake in the process of awakening.

(It’s important, too, to recognise that, despite all our acceptance of the way, of “other power”, this is not a way of passivity – an accusation often levelled at Christian Quietists from the C12 Beguines right through to William Pollard and Francis Frith among C19 Quakers! To walk in the way may at times be active indeed; the point being to walk in accordance with the way, not to cease walking altogether!)

It seems to me that any practice, like its practitioner, needs simply to disappear in contemplation. How this is to be achieved is indeed a paradox: the falling away of purposive action isn’t an achievement at all. An achievement would be the result of purposive action. Enter a practice of total simplicity and poverty of intent, such as either the shikantaza, “just sitting”, or the Nembutsu – the total “hands-off” (shinjin) entrusting of oneself to the way.

Be still

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Everything is because of something. Every cause is the effect of a cause. It goes on. That we do know. It goes on. There is no such thing as “the same”.

Time seems to be like this – it is just what we call the succession of things, the order of cause and effect. The night sky is like this too. The unchanging stars are no such thing. They come and go, live and grow, change and die, and the star nurseries of the unthinkable nebulae bear more – it’s just that we are such frail and transient scraps of life we don’t see it, outside of the great observatories, the university astrophysics departments.

Jane Hirschfield once said, “Zen pretty much comes down to three things – everything changes; everything is connected; pay attention.”

When we pay attention, when we start awake in the midst of the dream, we can see it – and the cold of the vast stellar winds touches for a moment our warmth and our littleness.

We are born to see things, hear things, touch things. Be still.

Among the points of light that come to be, that which does not seems dark; dark to all our senses, dark to all we can think.

Be still. Only in the stillness that underlies thought, that precedes perception, can we see that the glittering changes are the passage of things, like wavelets across the deep pond. The wavelets are water, but the water is boundless. The points of light are only light. All that is, that comes to be and then passes into something else, is. Before  (through, beneath, among) the beings, the ground.

The ground is no thing. Before being, isness. Be still.

Choiceless awareness

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[One] mindfulness meditation technique is termed choiceless awareness or bare awareness. In this technique, we begin by paying attention to the sensation of the breath (this settles the mind and body), but then the instruction is to let our attention rest on whatever is most prominent in our field of awareness. This is… awakening by engaging the whole of our experience fully, however it presents itself. In the quotation that begins this chapter, Indian spiritual teacher and philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti uses the word “freedom” to describe this awakening. As a meditation practice, choiceless awareness is similar to the Zen meditation technique known as shikantaza, which roughly translates as just sitting. I love the idea of just sitting, although for me, just lying down will do—which takes me to my number one rule regarding meditation: be flexible.

Toni Bernhard, How to Wake Up

Gradually I have come to realise that the phrase choiceless awareness is not just yet another technical term for one technique among the many kinds of Buddhist or related meditation, but a vital descriptor of what actually happens when we sit in stillness. Choicelessness is the open and unreserved receiving of whatever arrives – be it bodily sensation, sound, thought, desire, emotion or whatever – as simply an arising within consciousness. It is the grounding of our own awareness in the ground of being itself. There is nothing else, nowhere to go, no thing to find.

Krishnamurti himself did not prescribe a practice, or technique, for achieving choiceless awareness; in fact he actively avoided doing so. He was strongly opposed to any suggestions that the path to this open awareness might be marked by stages of realisation: he believed that choice – in the sense of selecting any object of attention over any other – should just stop. When I first encountered the teachings of Krishnamurti, in my twenties, I found this fiercely frustrating. I thought I needed instructions, techniques, a programme. “Just tell me what to do!” (Perhaps this was one reason among several that I so readily fell in with the Christian contemplative tradition when I encountered it in person a few years later.) But, unsurprisingly, Krishnamurti was the wiser…

This journey I am proposing that we take together is not to the moon or even to the stars. The distance to the stars is much less than the distance within ourselves. The discovery of ourselves is endless, and it requires constant inquiry, a perception which is total, an awareness in which there is no choice. This journey is really an opening of the door to the individual in his relationship with the world.

Jiddu Krishnamurti: Madras, 7th Public Talk, December 13, 1959 Collected Works, Vol. XI

As Toni Bernhard suggests in the passage above, shikantaza is perhaps one way to square the circle. Brad Warner puts it like this:

When we do nothing but practice sitting still for a certain amount of time each day, it becomes clear that past and future are an illusion. There is no past. There is no future. There is only this moment. This one tiny moment. That’s all there is.

And in this moment what can you attain? You have what you have right now. Maybe in the future you’ll get something. But that’s not now.

Attainment always happens in the future or in the past. It’s always a matter of comparing the state at one moment to the state at another moment. But it makes no sense to compare one moment to any other moment. Every moment is complete unto itself. It contains what it contains and lacks what it lacks. Or perhaps it lacks nothing because each moment is the entire universe.

Brad Warner, The Other Side of Nothing: The Zen Ethics of Time, Space and Being

Into the light

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Dr. Welton assigned me to the newest body, where dissection had just begun, and specifically to the left hand. He wanted tendons and ligaments exposed. Day after day, I took my tools and sat alone beside the table and carefully opened the hand, following diagrams in a thick book. I did a good job. I gradually came to understand that hand, and all hands, in a way that remains with me now. But I came to understand something else as well. One day, I had almost finished exposing the tendons. I found that by pulling on them gently, I could move the fingers one by one. I had never been uneasy in that room, but that day I looked up the length of the body, naked except for the covered face, and all at once I was covered in goose bumps.

Dissection is more a psychological experience than an intellectual one for many people. I found it to be both. I remember more about how it felt to be with the dead, to touch and open a body, to see what happens to bodies, than any details about the insertion of the latissimus dorsi muscle. (I learned that, too, in a way I could never have learned from books.) Working with cadavers makes it clear what death is. A subject becomes an object. A person becomes a body. And, miraculously, turns back: this body, this firm, immobile object, is, was, a person, a warm, breathing person. A body is not an ordinary object—can never be an ordinary object. This particular object had once been awake.

With a jolt, I realized that what I was cutting apart had been a living hand, just like mine; that it had been pliant and animated. It had held a pen, shoveled dirt, bathed a child, stroked someone’s hair. That it was like my precious hands, which until that moment had simply been part of me. Alive. I realized, This man is like me. I already knew that this body was like my body; I could label its parts. But suddenly I knew that this man was like me. And that I would be like this man.

Sallie Tisdale, Advice for the Dying (and Those Who Love Them): A Practical Perspective on Death

Sallie Tisdale’s recollection of her Anatomy and Physiology course is one of those passages that is especially precious to me. I cannot quite remember – it was long before my formal split from Christian faith and practice – precisely when it was I realised for myself, with perfect immediacy, that I was my body; my body was me, and one would not survive the other. It was sometime during the period when I was very ill with coronary heart disease, certainly, and, with the utter sense of reality that seems to characterise such times, I saw that death was no more than a dissolution into light – the safest, most natural consummation imaginable. (This was no intellectual exercise, but a vivid, real experience more certain than life itself.)

Throughout Buddhist literature in particular there are many intimations of this “clear light”, most notably I think in Dzogchen, where it is an attribute of the Ground (gdod ma’i gzhi). (I have long felt that Tillich’s phrase “the ground of being” was perhaps closer to expressing the irreducible Istigkeit than anything else I’ve read.) The ground of being is there, and only there, when we come to an end of ourselves. It lies far beyond all we know as self, or other – though it can appear to us so utterly other that we are tempted to hide from it – and yet the way to it is inward, into the extreme depths of what we are.  The ground of being is no thing: it precedes thingness.

The ground is the end, that to which all things return. Kathleen Dowling Singh:

[Death] is the experience of ‘no exit,’ a recognition of the fact that the situation is inescapable, that one is utterly at the mercy of the power of the Ground of Being… Love is the natural condition of our being, revealed when all else is relinquished, when one has already moved into transpersonal levels of identification and awareness. Love is simply an open state with no boundaries and, as such, is a most inclusive level of consciousness. Love is a quality of the Ground of Being itself. In this regard and at this juncture in the dying process, love can be seen as the final element of life-in-form and the gateway to the formless.

Of course one cannot practice for death, at least not intentionally. But one can practice with death in mind. To sit in the bright stillness of shikantaza is no more than that.

That everything is included within your mind is the essence of mind… Even though waves arise, the essence of your mind is pure; it is just like clear water with a few waves. Actually water always has waves. Waves are the practice of the water. To speak of waves apart from water or water apart from waves is a delusion. Water and waves are one. Big mind and small mind are one. When you understand your mind in this way, you have some security in your feeling. As your mind does not expect anything from outside, it is always filled. A mind with waves in it is not a disturbed mind, but actually an amplified one. Whatever you experience is an expression of big mind…

Before we were born we had no feeling; we were one with the universe. This is called “mind-only,” or “essence of mind,” or “big mind.” After we are separated by birth from this oneness, as the water falling from the waterfall is separated by the wind and rocks, then we have feeling. You have difficulty because you have feeling. You attach to the feeling you have without knowing just how this kind of feeling is created. When you do not realize that you are one with the river, or one with the universe, you have fear. Whether it is separated into drops or not, water is water. Our life and death are the same thing. When we realize this fact we have no fear of death anymore, and we have no actual difficulty in our life.

When the water returns to its original oneness with the river, it no longer has any individual feeling to it; it resumes its own nature, and finds composure. How very glad the water must be to come back to the original river! If this is so, what feeling will we have when we die? I think we are like the water in the dipper.

Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind