Awake in This Life

If a man owns land, the land owns him.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

One does not err by perceiving, one errs by clinging; but knowing clinging itself as mind, it frees itself.

—Zen saying

As our climb up the Mountain of Spirit progresses, some things begin to stand out. First of all, we recognize how our small self works to keep its distance from the broader sense of the Infinite that we call the Big Self so that it can maintain a sense of control. Secondly, the higher we climb, the more we learn that simply watching our small self in action helps us to become aware of its mechanisms of attachment. These mechanisms show themselves as craving and resistance, both of which are simply two faces of the same coin we call grasping.

Buddhist teaching tells us that if we aren’t conscious and accepting of the vast, interdependent, temporary, and totally infinite nature of everything in our lives, then our small selves will naturally grasp at things that arise in our experiences. This happens because our small selves always feel threatened by the chaos that shows up in life, so they grasp at anything they believe will help steady them and defend their positions of perceived power. Despite the fact that these acts of attachment appear to be pretty normal, they are what generate our suffering. This is because as we exhaust ourselves grasping onto a great unreality that holds the material world as the only truth there is, when in fact there is infinitely more to the story. Yes, we have relationships to possessions, ideas, and loved ones that we may cherish dearly. None of these things are much of a problem in and of themselves. But our egos grasp at these things in the attempt to make them permanent, and this always fails. Nothing is ever permanent, so any attempt to establish permanence will be forcibly undone eventually. This means there is no such thing as ultimate security. Too bad for the small self, whose job it is to grasp for things that will make it feel like it can establish ultimate security. Attachment is the small self’s sole purpose for being, and attachment causes our suffering. This means that unless we consciously awaken out of these unwholesome habitual patterns, each of us is doomed to repeat all of our old cycles of unfulfilling action and reaction that we’ve experienced in our lives.

A teacher of mine once gave a talk about this subject right about the time I began meditating regularly with a group. I remember one Sunday morning sitting still for forty minutes in a packed meditation hall. The distractions were enormous but I did my best to stick it out. It was very cold, and the talk that this diminutive woman was giving made little sense to me.

“All of our pain and suffering, arises out of our attachment to things,” she said. Her talk kept repeating this phrase with slight variations. “Your clinging to comfort is what fuels your pain,” she said. “If you are avoiding a situation,” she went on, “you are simply grasping for something other than that situation.” For more than an hour, she kept hammering this point home. “So watch your grasping, especially as it takes its form in craving and resistance,” she said. “Watching your craving and resistance frees you of it.” This seemed to be her prescription to all of us.

At the time, I was busy setting a foundation for an entire life of attaching to goals and clinging to outcomes, so her words didn’t resonate with me at all. I remember thinking that nonattachment might not be so hard if we were able to live in a monastery. Real life, on the other hand, was all about attaching to goals and clinging to whatever might help realize them. Plus, this woman’s ideas of not grasping seemed like an excuse for avoiding what was going on in the world, and I didn’t want any part of a tradition that didn’t focus its energies, actions, and teachings on making the world a better place. Blissing out on one’s cushion seemed to invite more injustice and pain. I didn’t see how any of us could change the world without clinging to, and fighting for, the things that would make it better.

I felt my mind begin to justify my resistance to what I’d experienced that day during the meditation as well as to what she was saying. Why did I need any person to tell me to “let go” when I was trying so hard to hang on? Besides, what about those distractions during meditation? In addition to this teacher’s confusing and, what seemed to me, uninspiring words, the sitting period before her talk was filled with distracting challenges like the cries of children, what sounded like a cat in heat near one of the exits, and a gigantic man sitting behind me who kept directing his sneezing fits at the back of my neck. Perhaps worst of all, the woman sitting to my left was absolutely beautiful and smelled like lightly perfumed, French-milled soap. For much of the sitting, I expended a fair amount of energy fantasizing about how I might ask her out. Where might we go on our date? Is she vegan? Can she dance? Does she have a sense of humor? Is she even single?

At first I seriously doubted that I’d found anything of value on this day in Marin, but as usual, on my drive back to Berkeley, I heard the Zen master’s talk rattling in my head. In fact, for weeks I kept thinking about how my whole life was little more than greed and aversion. By her definition, I was grasping at nearly everything in my life. Could this explain why I always felt that despite my successes, something always seemed to be missing? Maybe the Zen master was on to something that I just couldn’t comprehend. Maybe she was right, and my small self was fighting to defend its position. Regardless, I was hooked.

A deep longing to walk an authentic spiritual path was born in me around that time. Taking those first few steps allowed for several surprising and wonderful things to show up, perhaps none more important than recognizing that the Zen master was right that “all of our pain and suffering, arises out of our egoic attachment to things.” Such power expressed so simply. Of course it took years of study and stillness for me to even begin to recognize what she meant. But despite the hard work, I kept at it. Every time I thought about giving up the climb, something miraculously showed up to entice a few more steps out of me. Sometimes it was something I read that inspired me; other times it was words of encouragement from friends I’d met along the Path; still other times it was direction offered by one or another of what became an amazing stable of teachers. I can’t really explain it, but the higher the climb got, the more the summit seemed to come as a secondary wish to the primacy of climbing. Maybe I’d get to the top, maybe I wouldn’t. Either craving or resisting the summit would keep Awakening inaccessible, or so they told me. So over time I just began to continually practice receiving the open invitation to live each moment as consciously as possible.