Awake in This Life

James Shaheen writes in today’s Tricycle editor’s blog about molecular-biologist cum Tibetan monk, Matthiew Ricard and how he is:

… widely admired for his many talents, among them photography. But Ricard’s life seems best defined by his humanitarian work and devotion to the dharma.

How true. He goes on to point out that through his Shechen monastery in Nepal, he:

has launched two new websites, one devoted to Shechen’s humanitarian projects, along with portfolios of Ricard’s exquisite work, and the other to Shechen’s cultural and spiritual activities and publications.

(Bows, James)

In today’s MormonTimes, we learn of two BYU students who consider themselves Zen Mormons.

“They have things to teach us,” [Zach] Elison said. “Everything I love about Buddhism I find in my own religion, they just emphasize it differently.”

[Brandon] Habermeyer and Elison, both philosophy majors studying at Brigham Young University, got a tip from a world-religions professor at school about the retreat.

They spent two weeks in July under the towering Redwoods of Santa Cruz, Calif., learning and practicing some of the teachings of Buddhism.

Clearly the picture from the retreat suggests that this wasn’t from the Zen tradition, but this is an encouraging sign of integral thinking, especially as it relates to spirituality. Go Millenials!

(Bows to Barbara O’Brien for the heads up on this one)

In a a recent post over at Intent Blog, Deepak Chopra writes about taking a vow of non-violence in his thinking, speaking and his actions in front of an audience of 500 people at a plenary session of The Alliance for a New Humanity.

I told them if they were ready to take this vow, they should stand up.

People stood up, one by one at first, then in groups of twos and threes, and finally in tidal waves, until more than 450 people had stood up and taken the vow.

Following this, everybody agreed to have at least two people in their lives take the vow. The two in turn, would have two others join them in taking the vow. Our immediate goal now is to get 100 Million people across the world to take this vow. In the meantime, we will be setting up ways to measure and support the dramatic effects this tidal wave of shift in consciousness is going to create.

While I have tremendous respect for Dr. Chopra and the work he does, I think he is walking a dangerous line here. Based on his words, he’s conflating his “vow” with “attachment”. And to make matters potentially disastrous, he’s collectivizing the attachment by asking others to stand and publicly make the same vow with him. This tactic usually leads to deeper suffering since the purity of its intention can so easily mask an attachment to an outcome. Of course the goal is a good one. Yet in situations like this, well-meaning but confused practitioners begin to cling to their vows and then turn them in to instruments of what may very well end up looking like Spiritual McCarthyism.

There is a way around this trap. Instead of encouraging people to metaphorically sign a loyalty oath, Dr. Chopra and the rest of us who teach should encourage our students to become deeply intimate with the violence in each and every aspect of life. We should encourage all beings to look carefully at the impulses that lead to violence in our speech, our thoughts, and our actions. Doing so allows us to make vows for peace rather than making vows against violence. Making a vow against anything gives birth to both fundamentalism and war.

This election process has taken a toll on so many around the world. In our sangha, the choices have been at the forefront of several discussions and has ultimately proven itself to be a dharma door for many of Infinite Smile’s members.

It’s also a dharma door for me. Listening to Obama’s acceptance speech broke something wide open in me. I hadn’t realized how much I’d become hooked by the whole process; by the last eight years; by war and economic catastrophe. So often I can hide in my role as teacher, or on my cushion as a meditator. As Obama spoke, I simply held my daughter and wept.

But I worry about the egoic projection of “savior” onto this man we’ve elected. Doing so only distracts us from our journey along the Path. Successful navigation of the Path involves a committment and a practice of no longer clinging to the activity of the mind. The conscious expression of this non-clinging into our day-to-day lives is Awakening.

So when I see comments from people like French intellectual and America-watcher, Bernard-Henri Levi, I worry a little:

“Junk politics and immorality have come to an end.”

Let’s hope. But let’s not get caught by our hope. What kind of attachment must be going on in the hearts and minds of people around the world? Getting hooked by our elation, just like getting hooked by our disappointment, douses the flames of insight. Meeting our elation, or our disappointment, with our full heart and mind, in each moment burns up what we no longer need.

In a recent blog post by Andrew Cohen, he rightly asserts a point so often misappropriated in alternative spiritual circles:

Consciousness doesn’t exist or work in mysterious ways outside of or away from the innermost depths of our individual and collective selves.

In other words, while consciousness is mysterious in the way it unfolds past the mind, it shouldn’t be conflated with pre-rational fairy tales. It’s all right here in front of us.

At the same time, all of us, especially teachers, can unwittingly set up structures that allow the mind to cling, thus blocking the natural expression of enlightenment. This is especially true when an adherence to sins of the past, or salvation in the future, colors spiritual teaching since it puts the ego into the driver’s seat of the process of awakening. Consider his final line:

The more we not only awaken to that fact but take responsibility for it, the more quickly this world will become the paradise that we all long for in our most inspired moments.

Here, here. But let us all co-create the future by loosening the grip we keep on the fairy tails of the past as well as those fairy tails of times yet to come. When teaching people to “become” without first teaching them to just “be” a massive impediment is created thus blocking an authentic approach to what the mind can only refer to as “paradise”.

So why is it that so many seemingly enlightened masters get into so much trouble? If someone Awakens, we might imagine that he or she is beyond all of the bad stuff. Unfortunately, this isn’t true. I guess the answers to these and other questions about harmful choices made by teachers depend on what we mean by “enlightened.” On the one hand, if particular individuals no longer identify with anything other than the spaciousness of the present moment and they act from this space, then they might be considered enlightened by many people. After all, they can talk the talk and seduce the masses with the beautiful ways in which they reflect the sacred back toward everything and everyone. In order to accomplish this seduction, these “teachers” probably had an experience of a still and silent unity pointing out that there is no self, no body, no time, and no mind, but then they mistakenly chose to reconfigure this new perspective into some method of teaching reflective of a kind of personal attachment. Their insights into the nature of Emptiness may have been profound, but their integration of them into the world of form was only partial. This lack of integration is what gets the teachers, the teaching, and entire communities into trouble, and this problem always comes from a deluded view that sees itself as an embodiment of Truth.

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Choosing to become intimate with Awareness requires a constancy of both attention and intention. Neither the attention, nor the intention, is a fixed entity, and yet they can easily become attachments if we aren’t careful. On the other hand, if we don’t get hooked by them, they can be seen as manifestations of surrender supported by the ever-present Awareness of Spirit. This practice of being unhooked is exactly what keeps our vows from becoming rules that generate fundamentalist blindness. Allowing this free-flowing dance of ever-present Awareness to guide our choices radically diminishes the strength of ego’s grip on our responses to life.

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I’ve mentioned that I began my meditation practice asking teachers if there might be a shortcut to any of this work. The answers I got all came down to what I’ve so often repeated in these pages: simply practice a deep surrender into stillness and then let your activity consciously arise from this place. The thing in me that wanted the shortcut is the thing in all of us that wants to manage the experience of Awakening. No matter how great our teacher, how extensive our reading list, or how supportive our spiritual friends, no one can do any of this work for us. This means that we must orient all of our choices around the generous intention of letting go of everything, including whatever spiritual flavor we like the most. This takes courage, fortitude, and discipline.

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Grapes want to turn into wine.

—Rumi

When making your choice in life, don’t neglect to live.

—Samuel Johnson

When we begin to commit ourselves to integrating the teaching into our lives, we become clearer about how we can consciously choose the ways in which to meet each situation we face. For example, we know that our preoccupation with satisfying the needs of the small self only leads us into trouble. We begin to see that anything in our experience that we can recognize as personal must be tied directly to the satisfaction of ego. This helps us to realign our lives in ways that are deeply impersonal, and as a result, all the life that we begin to touch becomes imbued with the expansiveness of Spirit.

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It took me years to commit formally to a practice. Something about me just thought that the whole idea of taking vows and committing to a way of living was merely window dressing to mask the seriousness of one’s practice. So I chose to sample a bit here, a bit there, read a little of this and a little of that, thus gaining vast amounts of experiential square footage. I had traveled to where the ancients had taught and sat with masters in different cultures and countries, but I hadn’t formally taken on the vows. It got to the point where people around the Zen Center were surprised to learn that I had not gone through the precept ceremony. I laughed it off and made some comment about how I simply was too much of a renegade to settle into the dogma of any tradition.

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The Chinese Master Yunmen referred to the most profound Buddhist teachings as simply being “an appropriate response” to the circumstances of our lives. Any time we see egolessness in action, we are looking at an appropriate response. Whenever we can watch someone act without wanting anything in return for his or her action, we are seeing an appropriate response in action. Essentially, an appropriate response is participation that arises from a space of non-resistance. Unlike the reactions of resistance offered by an ego that thinks it’s enlightened, an appropriate response is unimpeded, open and unattached to any outcome or agenda, just like any of us might return a heartfelt smile or help someone who is struggling with his grocery bags and car keys. Since any of us can meet our circumstances like this as long as we show up to what is really going on in our lives, each of us can express the Awakened capacity that has always been available underneath all of the interests of our small selves. This is what is meant when the sages of today as well as those of old say that we are already enlightened.

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Only a Buddha with a Buddha realizes enlightenment.

—Lotus Sutra

All real living is meeting.

—Martin Buber

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.”

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The only difference between us is that I am aware of my natural state, while you are bemused… We discover it by being earnest, by searching, enquiring, questioning daily and hourly, by giving one’s life to this discovery.

—Nisargadatta Maharaj

Those who enter the gates of heaven are not beings who have no passions or who have curbed the passions, but those who have cultivated an understanding of them.

—William Blake

If you gaze long enough into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

The commitment to walking along the Path of Awakening challenges us in ways that most of us don’t expect. Truly dedicating ourselves to anything is hard work, but this is especially true for this process. Devotion to deep spiritual work is perhaps one of the most treacherous areas for any of us to explore since it involves nothing short of an all-encompassing promise to live our lives as profound expressions of the Truth that all the great spiritual teachers, whether they be Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Christian, Buddhist, or anything else, have been pointing out over the course of human history.

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