Awake in This Life

Question: How does one go about dedicating their life to this practice? I’m 25 and don’t have many responsibilities, so I have more flexibility and time to give to it.

Answer: It’s like that old Nike slogan: just do it. There are ways of going about “doing the non-doing” but in the most basic terms, one must fearlessly commit himself to “doing” the path so that the path can, ahem, “do” him.  Once this fiery resolve is born within, the next opening to address is how. With this in mind, I have one bit of advice: go methodically, with care. This doesn’t mean for you to be timid. Instead it means for you to be aware of your steps since desperation nearly always defiles and derails the process. Loosen up while at the same time let the light of your fire show you where you are clinging. Study the clinging with complete curiosity and fearlessness, over and over and over. This is what allows for us to ascend… even as we descend. Weird, but language gets in the way at times.  A word of caution… don’t turn your search into another attachment. Time and again I see people that give up everything to start anew and they burn out after a relatively short time. Your path is wherever you are. Travel won’t necessarily bring you any closer to your own experience. It might, but it’s usually a romantic distraction that serves to only minimally enhance the process of awakening. The real work is right in front of you, right in this moment.  Is there a felt sense of openness and space in your experience right now? If not then there is clinging. Look there and begin the search for a guide that can keep pointing you in the right direction.

Had this enjoyable conversation with Vince Horn of the Buddhist Geeks a while back. Hope you like it.

This week we’re joined by Zen-inspired dharma teacher, Michael McAlister. Michael is the leader of the Infinite Smile sangha, just east of Berkeley, in what Michael calls, “the hard edge of suburbia.” After many years of Zen practiced with the San Francisco Zen Center, Michael set up to teach a form of dharma that wasn't bound by tradition.

via Podcast Episode: Buddhist Geeks: The Mountain of Spirit (Seriously Buddhist, Seriously Geeky.

It’s hard to take much of this too seriously, but I still think two things are amazing:

1. Brit Hume’s views on what Buddhism does and doesn’t offer speaks to a significant lack of understanding, and
2. He does his best to play the martyr here even though an apology might have been the most “Christian” thing he could have done, allowing him to embody his faith.

Question: I’ve got a nuts-and-bolts question about meditation.  There are so many varieties:  following the breath, paying attention to whatever arises,  focusing on something particular (like a prayer), Tonglen, etc.  After years of teaching and practice, which methods have proven most helpful to you and your students? Is it useful to try different types of meditation at different stages?  What are your recommendations for the beginner, as well as the more experienced student?

Answer: This is a great series of questions about what is core to any authentic spiritual practice. So let me first start by saying that the heart of enlightenment, or awakening, or whatever you want to call it, is stillness. We can uncover the stillness that is the source of everything when we become truly still in these bodies we inhabit. Now as simple as this sounds, most of us find it rather difficult to actually become still. There is always a sense of movement, be it in the body or the mind, that minimizes our recognition of stillness. We might recognize it briefly, but then in our excitement we find that it’s gone. So we practice, over and over, moment by moment, year after year, to open ourselves to the deep quietude that permeates and lies beneath all experience, by meditating.

When we start out, we usually find it difficult, so we do simple things like following the breath, scanning the body, or reciting a sacred verse or mantra. All of these are great ways to open our experience to stillness, since they tend to allow our discursive minds to take a break. Suddenly we notice that the chatter has died down and there is a vastness to our experience that we may never have known before. It’s not beginner’s luck. It’s an invitation to the amazing party of authentic spiritual work, a celebration that is at once glorious and challenging.

As we get better and better at stilling our mind, we can begin to use any number of different techniques to train ourselves more deeply, allowing us to explore the various meditative states that are always available to us. However, I’ve seen this exploration lead people astray for years. They become skilled at uncovering various meditative states and confuse these states with enlightenment. Enlightenment is not a state. Rather, it’s the groundless ground of all states that is consciously integrated into the lives of those practitioners interested in sharing it. This is why I prefer to encourage students to simply open to what is showing up in the moment, then watch without commentary as each thought or feeling shows up. Just watch. As this watching continues, a subtle awareness of what we might call the “watcher” develops.  This is a naked awareness that is both still and totally oriented in the present moment. Consciously meeting our lives from this open stillness can’t help but awaken us to what is eternal in us.

Give it a shot… and report back.

I was asked recently after giving a talk on engaged politics, what I thought of peace as a political orientation.

What came out of my mouth made me laugh.

“I’m pro-peace,” I said.

The young man just staired.

I then went off a little bit on how an attachment to peace can be viewed in the same way as one might view an attachment to non-peace. Without going into great detail, the conversation was an interesting one.

Carter Phipps writes of this issue in a recent blog post. The issue of peace versus war

… is one where the Left, with its nonviolent and pacifistic tendencies, too often cedes the wrong kind of ground to the Right, whose enthusiastic embrace of military might too often shows little of the subtlety, nuance, and complexity needed in this age of political self-determination.

He goes on,

… for all the failures of war, peace hasn’t always been a good alternative. Krishna knew it 2500 years ago, and it is still true today. Witness the tragedy in the Balkans or Rwanda, or the slaughter in the Sudan, or World War II not that many decades ago. No one has yet convinced me that there is or was a nonviolent solution to those conflicts, as much as we would like there to be. In the long term, of course, anything is possible. But we can’t allow our dreams of peace tomorrow to cause us to make fatal and disastrous mistakes today. Obama spoke directly to this in his speech. And moreover, I’m convinced that the very idea that peace should be the goal of our human endeavors—politically, socially, and even spiritually—represents an outdated context for our moral and philosophical life. And this is where I would take a step, philosophically and theologically, beyond what the President offered.

via Peace Is Not Enough: Thoughts on Obama’s Nobel Speech.

Here’s an argument that I’ve danced with for years: where do we draw the line on the Buddhist precept of not killing. Having just gone through a round of anti-biotics, I knowingly killed lots of things in my body.  The name of the drug regimen “antibiotics” even means “against life”. What’s more, I’m glad that I’m now better able to care for my kids because I was aided in “murdering” the bacteria that was flattening me. Violation of the first precept? I wonder.

And what about my Vedanta friends who don’t eat anything that has a face? Or my Dharma friends who smugly proclaim their vegetarianism on ethical grounds yet dig into tuna fillets that have been seared rare on an open grill, but won’t touch any lamb? Is it the cute principle? When I ask they can’t really say.

Whatever your stance, it’s a great place to observe our attachments.

…before we cede the entire moral penthouse to “committed vegetarians” and “strong ethical vegans,” we might consider that plants no more aspire to being stir-fried in a wok than a hog aspires to being peppercorn-studded in my Christmas clay pot. This is not meant as a trite argument or a chuckled aside. Plants are lively and seek to keep it that way. The more that scientists learn about the complexity of plants — their keen sensitivity to the environment, the speed with which they react to changes in the environment, and the extraordinary number of tricks that plants will rally to fight off attackers and solicit help from afar — the more impressed researchers become, and the less easily we can dismiss plants as so much fiberfill backdrop, passive sunlight collectors on which deer, antelope and vegans can conveniently graze.

via  Another Challenge for Ethical Eating – Plants Want to Live, Too – NYTimes.com.

In this talk, Michael asks the question: “What is it that you want from others?” In his explanation, he points out that if we find ourselves caught by the answers to this question, we discover that we are locked in suffering. The way out of this trap is to uncover our deepest sense of generosity and then express it fully in life.

via Infinite Smile » ISmile240 – Being Generous.

When suburban youth deliver…

Originally uploaded by Michael G. McAlister

30 local families are getting gifts this season because of these kids.
Bows.

In this talk, Michael weaves his talk around the issues of greed and karma in our daily lives.

via ISmile238 – Simple But Not Easy.

In this talk, Michael weaves his talk around the issues of greed and karma in our daily lives.

via ISmile237 – On Greed and Karma | Infinite Smile.

Sisters

Originally uploaded by Michael G. McAlister

The Littlest Buddha

Originally uploaded by Michael G. McAlister

Miss Mave Harper Storm McAlister

In this talk, Michael continues his discussion of the temporary nature of all things. As we begin to practice with this fundamental truth, we find that we can begin to accept what is and move from negativity into freedom.

via ISmile236 – Turning Spiritual Lead Into Gold | Infinite Smile.

Big Sky Mind

Originally uploaded by Michael G. McAlister

Gotta’ love when the earthquake of Awakening rattles and rolls everything we’ve ever known to be true…

Question(s):

As I sit, all that comes within my attention, or where I choose to turn my attention, exists because I’ve turned my attention on it. Then, when I turn my attention on “the one” who is attending to everything else, then that exists because my attention is on it. Is this what we call “the I”?

What about what’s behind where my attention is? How can the one perceiving know it? This perceiver has never experienced what’s at its source, never felt it, seen it, never, until now, been made aware of it? So if I am also that thing behind and outside of everything that has a boundary, then I am also somewhere within that thing, being perceived.

It feels like some thing breaking apart, and it’s kind of scary (that’s an understatement). Though exciting and interesting at the same time. Where am I? Every spiritual tradition says keep asking the question “Who am I?” But should I just stop trying to answer, and rest in the wonder-awe of it, rather than this feeling that I have to grab onto fistfulls of whatever I think will keep me bound and thus connect me
to what I have known as real…at least identifiable and familiar? Explaining here is impossible.

Is this why we seek connection so ardently?  I have held on to things and people (even harmful ones) for this unreal connection to life. The illusion really is that I’m alone in this expanse since I can’t really know it. But as there are no boundaries to it, the “I” must be there, along with every one and every thing. And w/in the boundaryless, the I has no boundaries either. (however, when a cat chews into my toe unexpectedly,
damn cat, as he did just this second, I feel I sharply and definitely here – boundaries defined again? I don’t get that.)

The pain is disconnection and flying apart (non-being) …and deeper … is total connection, past words, thoughts, sensations and opening into infinite inclusion.  When I was meditating earlier, there was only the breathing left. Where did fear go?

I thought if I stepped back enough, and widened my zoom, and kept doing that, I could fit everything.  It’s way too big…so the only choice is to open completely to the seamlessness and let myself be unknown, seeing that there are no edges.

Answer:

Nice bit of expression there. I’m not sure anything needs to be said at all, but I’ll throw this out there for fun:

So yeah… Who is it that is paying the attention? Indeed. Who is it? Does it even have a name? Does it move? Ever? Or is it just the ever-present spaciousness that sources all creativity from its depths? And what’s in it for any of us?

The Surangama Sutra does a great job of telling us that we can’t see our seeing or hear our hearing in the same way that the Seer of experience can never be seen. And yet everything arises within the open space of the Seer. Nothing is outside of the Infinity that we are. And we get most intimate with it when we can simply rest in the middle of our wonder, since the answers can never come close to apprehending all its Grace. Doing so is the same thing as ditching the camera and just being the expanse.

The teachings surrounding wisdom have been popping up around Infinite Smile recently. So here’s a re-posting of part of the chapter on this subject from Awake in This Life:

As the audience, or Witness, of the illusory and repetitious charade of ego on the Stage of Mind, we suddenly have an empowering choice offered to each of us in every single situation that we might encounter. In this choice we always uncover a chance in each moment to surrender any and all forms of attachment. Wisdom comes from our ability to watch without judgment and therefore see through the various levels of our clinging until we are confronted with the profoundly obvious Truth that every thing that can be conceived is merely a ripple in the totally unified, oceanic expression of Emptiness. Truly seeing that all things are an expression of this Oneness is wisdom.

(more…)

Leading retreats for Infinite Smile can be very sweet at times. Of course I miss sitting myself, but it’s amazingly gratifying when I get to participate with practitioners who are working really hard to uncover Truth.

In addition to some locals making the trip down to the Santa Cruz Mountains, people have flown in from Idaho, Montana, and Munich, Germany. Humbling, to say the least. And the Mount Madonna Center is stunning.

I got an email recently that was pretty cool. In it the anonymous writer rather pointedly suggested that I was wrong to suggest that Alan Chapman’s self-professed “full” enlightenment, documented over at his site, Open Enlightenment, was at best an example of a “partial awakening, not fully integrated.”

To be fair, I have no way of judging whether Alan is enlightened or not, nor does it concern me. Nor am I interested in jousting with people, especially anonymous emailers who are interested in defending a person they obviously admire. However, I do think that I should set the record straight as far as my critique of Alan’s position is concerned.

I have repeatedly made a point as a writer and as a teacher that an authentic awakening is radically compromised whenever it is viewed as a personal attainment. Doing so merely confuses the map with the territory, to borrow a phrase. There is nothing personal about enlightenment.  On the other hand, enlightenment happens in whatever body we find ourselves in at any given moment. Still, when we start confusing or conflating a personal experience with an embodied awakening ego is suddenly let in through the back door of the process and does its best to manage enlightenment. Ego (or we could also say ‘the mind’) derails things by mistaking the experience for what the experience points to. When this occurs, we can find ourselves walking around as enlightened egos; entirely limited and yet believing ourselves to be Absolute. I’m not trying to be patronising or smug since I know how much these qualities annoy Alan:

I’ve been on the wrong end of a patronising postmodernist a few times, and I’ve been so enranged [sic] and sickened by his or her unexamined smugness, that I’ve responded by informing them that, actually, I’m at a level of development above and beyond theirs, and so they’re just incapable of understanding me. Ha!

(more…)

“When I see that I am nothing, that is wisdom. When I see that I am everything, that is love. And between these two, my life flows.”—Nisargadatta Maharaj

When there is a meeting among beings grounded in the commitment not to harm, Spirit enriches everything. This enrichment happens because unattached Knowing supports the dissolution of clinging with its infinite field of helpful compassion. In any place that is consciously free of clinging, there is a chance to meet, as we say in the Zen liturgy, “an unsurpassed, penetrating, perfect Enlightenment.”

via Showing Up | Awake in This Life.

In this talk, pulled from a half-day intensive, Michael discusses the gift of curiosity and how it frees us from feeling a sense of lack.

via ISmile235 – How to Meet Total Fulfillment | Infinite Smile.