Awake in This Life

To myself I am only a child playing on the beach, while vast oceans of truth lie undiscovered before me.

—Isaac Newton

The Four Noble Truths: Suffering; the origin of suffering; the cessation of suffering; and the Noble Eightfold Path, which leads to the cessation of suffering.

—Dhammapada

Most of us have a deep and resonant longing to live lives of balance, yet we tend to get blown around continually by the winds of circumstance. Some of these winds are positive and fulfilling, some are not. Either way, these circumstances tend to push us off center and keep us from living lives that are informed by peace. At least, this was my situation when I first entered a meditation hall. I was about to graduate from college and was living a life filled with anything but peace. My day-to-day experience was totally out of balance, and I had no idea how to fix it. More than anything else, I just wanted a break from all of the stress that I was feeling. What should I do about getting a real job? What should I do about the unhealthy patterns that keep showing up in each of my relationships? What should I do about all the pain I’m feeling as I watch my parents divorce? These and other questions puzzled me. What was going on within me was in torment, and this torment seemed to be brought on by situations outside of me that I couldn’t control. I felt like I was being torn apart, and I craved some kind of internal and external stability.

After sharing my dilemma with a friend, he suggested that I go out to Green Gulch Farm Zen Center in Marin so that I could simply “sit still with all of it for a while,” as he said, and then listen to a lecture on Zen Buddhism. I took his advice and drove to the beach from Berkeley early one sunny Sunday morning. Spring was alive as I walked onto the temple’s grounds. Birds sang in the trees, frogs croaked in the pond, deer quietly grazed on the hillside, and flowers bloomed everywhere. The scene was a powerful reminder of the beauty and peace that my life seemed to lack. After wishing to myself that I could hold onto what I was witnessing, I walked into the meditation hall and took a seat on one of the sitting cushions, next to an old man in a black robe. I must have looked like a beginner since he stared at me as I awkwardly crossed my legs. Without saying a word, he offered two additional cushions to support my knees.

After I got settled, he leaned over and whispered, “Just sit still and be quiet after the bell rings. That’s it. That’s all you need to know. If your mind is chattering, count your breaths until it quiets down.”

The moment he finished speaking, a bell rang three times, signaling the start of the meditation period. I closed my eyes and listened to a deafening silence. Upon realizing that my mind was trying to fill the quiet with its own chatter, I counted my breaths, just like my neighbor had told me. It didn’t do much good. Whether I counted my breaths or not, my mind danced around constantly, distracting me from any meaningful focus. Maybe this Zen stuff was simply beyond me.

Once the meditation period was over, a little bald man, dressed in flowing black robe with a brown sash, sat in full lotus at the front of the hall. The lecture that the Zen master gave that day ironically dealt with what he called our “unconscious, habitual dualism that divides everything between the ‘in here’ sense of self and the ‘out there’ sense of everything else.” As he went on, I felt like he was reading my mind even though I couldn’t really understand what he was saying. It was like poetry of some kind with his words and phrasing continually hitting me on deeper and deeper levels. I remember being both taken and confused by his assertion that the division I was feeling was “precisely what generates all of our suffering, and yet nearly all of our activity in life is informed by this felt sense of separation.” Maybe I’d get it later, I thought. Whatever the case, I knew I’d be back.

As time on my meditation cushion and spent around this particular teacher increased, I became aware of some interesting insights. My teacher suggested that if we simply look at the ways in which we categorize and compare ourselves, both with and against, everything else, we can get an idea as to how imbedded this process of separation is. For example, I am a human being, and that over there is a fish tank. Or, I am a believer, and that person is a non-believer. I am kind as well as intelligent, that person is really obnoxious and stupid, and I wish he’d stop being such a jackass.

This sense of separation, and the process through which it develops, is totally natural but it gets in the way of any meaningful peace that we might be able to feel. Instead of uncovering that which makes us feel at one and in turn at peace with everything, we spend our time defining what makes us distinct. Those of us who are parents know how our favorite two-year-olds do this all the time. They tirelessly work to prove that they are indeed distinct and special and deserve to be heard. And yet even as they grow out of this stage, they won’t leave their sense of being distinct and special behind. In fact, they bring this sense of being separate, distinct and special along with them as they, and the rest of us, continue to develop stronger and stronger senses of identity. From this activity of becoming a separate and special somebody we begin to interact with the world as an entity that we call the “me,” or the “self,” or the “I,” or the “ego.” We use these words interchangeably as a way to point out our most basic sense of being a separate entity in the world. To be clear, this impulse to be something separate and special is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it gives life color and variance. But in the context of climbing the Mountain of Spirit, our tendency to think of this sense of separation as the full story of our reality is precisely what distorts our view as we attempt to get to the top.

Most likely each of us can remember an experience that helped this process of separation along. For me, it was getting laughter out of people at a very young age. It just didn’t take that much effort, it seemed, to crack people up—especially if I made funny noises. Of course, I was reminded rather forcefully at times that timing was worthy of careful consideration.

“Michael,” my father would say, pounding his fist on the dinner table, making his knife and spoon rattle and bounce, “that behavior is way out of bounds.”

My three younger brothers would do their best not to snicker at his outbursts, and on most occasions, I could tell by the twinkle in my father’s eye that he found my behavior at least mildly entertaining. Regardless of his scolding, over time I began to incorporate into my identity the idea that my “good sense of humor” could help me keep threats at bay. Once again, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but when any of us clings to qualities that make us feel special, we are in essence identifying with what separates us from the deep singularity of the Universe.

Living from this place of division and separation causes constant insecurity, because we’re vulnerable either to those “other” things or people we fear might overtake us, or to those “other” things or people we think might offer us protection from threats. In other words, when we live from a sense of separation we will act, in varying degrees, either defensively or aggressively. Whether our defensiveness or aggression is subtle or overt, this perpetual fight-or-flight position is psychologically exhausting and eventually runs us down emotionally, leading us down the path of suffering. While a good fight or flight response may help us maintain the depths of the gene pool, it won’t allow for either peace to be felt or balance to be incorporated into the ways that we live.

We see that from our “normal” position of separation, our day-to-day lives can feel extremely unstable, and the ego (in here) will compensate for this perceived instability by pursuing the things (out there) that it believes will stabilize experience and somehow support perpetual peace and restfulness. How many times have any of us felt like we’d be able to find peace in our lives if only we had some more money to spend, or better furniture, or a Ph.D., or better relationships with significant people in our lives? Any one of these examples might be helpful to our sense of self-worth and stability in the short run, but in the long run each of these potential acquisitions can act as a distraction from facing what appears unstable and lacking within us. Will any of it ever be enough?

Unfortunately, if we don’t face what is going on within us, we will tend to find ourselves in unwinnable contests of unconscious grasping and avoidance patterns. These patterns prevent us from ever finding the connections we desire. The higher we climb in our journey the more we gain new, more open, perspectives on our assumptions. The more perspective we gain, the greater our sense that there is hope for us, as individuals and as groups, not only to break this cycle of “normal” dissatisfaction and aggression but to rewire our neurological habits of selfishness that so often push us here in the first place. This rewiring helps us to act from places of clarity, and in doing so, we become engaged and helpful to all those whose lives we touch.