Tag Archives: Laura Zimmerman

Contemplative Reading

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I was at a loss to think how to title this blog post. If you Google “spiritual reading” you will immediately be flooded with psychic suggestions, tarot divinations, horoscopes and astrology, interspersed with the occasional Catholic site recommending “reading [the] lives of saints, writings of Doctors and the Fathers of the Church, theological works written by holy people, and doctrinal writings of Church authorities.” None of these are what I was looking for, you may be pleased to know.

If you are a member of a monastic community, Buddhist, Christian or whatever, you will probably find that daily study of some kind is part of the discipline of life, or, if you are a Benedictine, that in accordance with Rule 38, “Reading will always accompany the meals of the monks.” But leading a secular contemplative life comes with no such in-built reminders that practice shouldn’t take place in an intellectual vacuum.

I have found that regular reading from what is actually a fairly small list of contemplative writers has become an indispensable part of my own practice. Readers of this blog will likely know who they are already, but people like Toni Bernhard, Tara Brach, Pema Chödrön, Daishin Morgan, Larry Rosenberg, Alan Watts have become my companions on the way, and I keep returning to their books over and over again.

I’ve not yet made a time and a place in my day for this kind of regular reading, but it occurs to me that perhaps I should. It is too easy to get sidetracked into reading only more speculative or philosophical writings, and think that’s the same thing. It isn’t; and that’s just the point. Something in the heart – mine, anyway  – gets dried out and brittle without the companionship of those who are also following the contemplative path.

A (very) short booklist:

Toni Bernhard, How to Wake Up

Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance

Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart

Daishin Morgan, Sitting Buddha

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

Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

Eternal life?

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In Three Steps to Awakening: A Practice for Bringing Mindfulness to Life, Larry Rosenberg ends his chapter on choiceless awareness with a Q&A session. One of the questioners asks:

Q: Ideas and beliefs about rebirth are often mentioned in dharma books. I wonder if you could tell us whether you believe in rebirth.

A: If you are a person brought up in a culture that has believed in rebirth for thousands of years, such as in Tibet or Thailand, the answer is obvious. I’ve known wonderful Tibetan teachers who look at me with sympathy when I say I’m uncertain about rebirth. On the other hand, many professors in the sciences might look at you like you’re crazy if you even mention the subject. All I know is that I am open to the idea but honestly don’t know!

One of the reasons I no longer profess to be a Christian, and could never be a Buddhist in any formal sense, is just this question.

In Christian doctrine God is held to be eternal – though opinions vary as to whether this implies that he exists outside time altogether, or whether he exists simultaneously in all dimensions of time, past, present and future. To die as a Christian is to possess eternal life (John 10:27-28) through knowing God (John 17:3). The only way I could ever make sense of this was to think that the instant of death must somehow be atemporal, and that in that moment outside time one might meet God. I have never been able to make any sense of the idea of a portable plug-in soul that could somehow be translated to a land beyond the sky. Maybe I never was a “proper” Christian.

Similarly, any idea of rebirth runs into the same problem, only worse. Not only is there the question of what might constitute the soul to be reborn, and where it might be located, but Buddhism explicitly, and cogently, states that there is, in a living person, no permanent unchanging self or essence (anātman). So what is to be reborn?

The metaphysical mechanics of life after death don’t make any sense to me, however they are expressed. That there is life after death – that the human race will go on, and so will all the other forms of life – is undeniable; but my life after my death? I’m not sure that idea even makes sense.

Cause and effect is another matter, maybe. Things have consequences; they are themselves always consequences. There is no discernible beginning or end to this chain of causation (karma), short of cosmological speculations about the “beginnings” of time. I was born as a result of certain events in history – my mother and father met; they met because of their work during WWII; there was a war because of certain political, economic and military factors, and so on and so on, back into time – and there will be certain limited consequences of events in my own life that will outlive me. But this is not the same as me in some way continuing, or recurring into the future.

But things exist. They are. There is a ground of being – Istigkeit, Tao – from which, in which, all things arise.

The way that can be spoken of
Is not the constant way;
The name that can be named
Is not the constant name.
The nameless was the beginning of heaven and earth;
The named was the mother of the myriad creatures.

Tao Te Ching

Things go on. Where they come from, where they go – I’m not sure those are questions that mean anything in the context of being itself; hence the “nameless” in the Tao Te Ching.

All we can do, all we need to do, is sit still. Daishin Morgan:

A theme I return to again and again is to just do the work that comes to you. Such an attitude is open-ended in the way that life itself is open. If you give yourself to the way, the way appears and that way is always changing.

The dear breath

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Remember, you have been learning to allow the breath to flow naturally without imposing a model, form, or ideal on it. Now, with the same art of allowing, you open to your own life, your own experience, and watch everything reveal itself. As you sit, the entire mind-body process displays itself from breath to breath, and you watch it all arise and pass away, come and go. You are learning to refine the art of seeing, which is nonreactive and equanimous—a clear mirror that accurately reflects whatever is put in front of it…

There’s no such thing as a distraction, because whatever happens—that’s it. The same emotions that you see in your sitting meditation—whether peaceful, anxious, or full of doubt—provide you with the perfect materials for practice. What arises will vary from moment to moment. The breath, however, remains constant. Even when a powerful energy such as loneliness or agitation visits, the breath remains present. Perhaps it is in the background, quietly, in-out, in-out, while your awareness is mostly involved with loneliness or whatever it is that has naturally captured your attention. In this method, you take advantage of the breath’s constancy. It is such an obvious fact, and yet one that most of us often forget.

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

Contemplative practice is an odd activity – it is so easy to fall into what we have learned to call distraction, and yet it is even easier to judge ourselves for becoming distracted. “Call yourself a meditator?” we sneer to ourselves, “you couldn’t concentrate if your life depended on it!” And yet, as Rosenberg says, really there is no such thing as distraction. There are only thoughts, that come and go, because that’s what minds do: they think. We have only to observe – and if we find ourselves tempted to follow trains of thought, to observe the temptation. Soon enough, the mind distracts itself from its distractions – and if not, the faithful breath is waiting for us to come back.

As long as we are alive, the dear breath is with us. There is such comfort in knowing this, if only we can remember. There is nothing, save gentle death itself, that can take the breath away from us: not illness, not sorrow, nor even happiness or anticipation. Always the breath is waiting, infinitely patient and kind. It is the soft weight of life itself, our companion from the minute we are born. All we need to do is trust it, like the steady tide on the wide shore of being.

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.