Awake in This Life

Miriam Greenspan’s article, The Dark Side of the Sacred, comes to us from integral praxis.

Emotions live in the body. It is not enough simply to talk about them, to be a talking head. We need to focus our attention on emotions where they live. This willingness to be present allows the emotion to begin to shift of its own accord.

Her three step process shows us how to free ourselves from their grasp:

1. “Paying attention to or attending to our emotions is not the same as endless navel gazing and second-guessing ourselves. It is mindfulness of the body, an ability to listen to the body’s emotional language without judgment or suppression.”
2. “Befriending follows from focusing our attention and takes it a step further: it involves building our tolerance for distressing emotions.”
3. “The third skill, surrendering, is the spiritual part of this process. Surrendering to suffering is usually the last thing we want to do, but surrender is what brings the unexpected gifts of wisdom, compassion, and courage. Surrendering is about saying yes when we want to say no — the yes of acceptance. This is what really allows the alchemy to happen. We don’t “let go” of emotions; we let go of ego, and the emotions then let go themselves.”

All good, and only slightly different from what I’d recommend. If emotions are essentially the meeting of mental activity in the body, step three should take care of the whole thing? In other words, meeting whatever is arising without moving (neither into nor away from) offers us Freedom. This is letting go not only of any emotion, no matter how dark, but it is also letting go of the ego that gives birth to the emotion in the first place.

What do you think?

Some guy over at Infinite Smile keeps cranking these out:

“Ultimately, it is up to each of us to let go of the world and then engage it from that place of surrender.”

Click here to listen.

Thanks to Digita Dharma for remnding us of Thomas Merton’s contribution to the integration of wisdom beyond wisdom, regardless of tradition. Forty years after his premature death many of us still owe him so much for clarifying the Path.

Merton saw Buddhism not as a substitute for Christianity, but an enriching “way”. Out of the centre of the Catholic Christian tradition, he was able, as one scholar put it, to “engage in dialogue with other restless Catholics, Christians and people of other faiths or no formal faith”…

And I love this:

The biggest human temptation, said Thomas Merton, is to settle for too little.

Cheers.

Buddhaspace offers us a great quote from Master Xu Yun in today’s post:

Step outside of time just once, and all the years you spent in ignorance and suffering recede into vagueness. They’re only something you seem to remember. Your old small self is gone and all his old enemies and friends and relatives and all his old experiences, bitter or sweet, have lost their power over him. They were like a cinema show…believable while he was in the theater, but not when he came out into the daylight. Reality destroyed the illusion.
In Nirvana you’re neither young nor old. You just are. And who are you? That’s easy.
The Buddha.

Can it be that simple? If we can Know that there is never anything other than this moment we are offered amazing opportunities to awaken with all beings? Nice.

In a previous post, I wrote of the dangers of “small self esteem”. Now Shambala Sun Space’s Andrea Miller blogs about her upcoming article:

Gen Me as a whole is caught in what she calls the self-esteem trap and it’s the way we’ve been raised that made us so.

The March issue of Shambhala Sun will feature the conversation I just had with Young-Eisendrath about how we can cultivate true self-confidence in ourselves and how we can best raise the next generation. For now, see this Globe and Mail article for taste of some of of Young-Eisendrath’s advice.

One of the biggest parts of our practice, then, is to neither indulge our feelings nor avoid them. We should just meet them with a committed openness so that we can witness them and therefore become free of our attachment to them. This doesn’t mean that we don’t feel anything. Becoming numb to our feelings isn’t the work. Being free of our attachment to our feelings usually means that they become both more instructive and more vivid. But, our relationship to everything that we feel becomes much less limiting. Whether our felt experiences are enjoyable or not isn’t the point. The important matter at hand is how we are able to function in the world with Awakened bodies and minds.

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Awakening into an enlightened perspective happens when we intentionally open our hearts and minds and let go of all thoughts and feelings that relate to a separate sense of what we’ve always known as a self. This self isn’t anything fixed. It is our mistaken belief that this sense of “I” is the cause of all pain. The source of our suffering isn’t that we have an “I,” or an ego, but rather that our ego’s clinging keeps us blind to our natural state of boundless grace atop the Mountain of Spirit. Ego isn’t the problem; rather its fixations and its inertia are what prevent the Divine from shining through us.

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From the infinitely open perspective of the summit, we realize that we are not what we think nor what we feel. From a limited, egoic view, we are simply an attachment to the activity of our minds, always believing we are only what we think and what we feel. In other words, the very things that arise in the mind are precisely what we are in that moment, yet at the same time we are much more than what is arising. In The Heart Sutra, we chant that, “Form is Emptiness, and Emptiness is form.” Put another way, we are here in human form, yet we are simultaneously infinite Emptiness. Negating this Infinity is at the core of all the thoughts that give birth to our pain and suffering. Negating our conscious expression of Spirit perfectly describes the prison from which we seek to escape.

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To get a little technical, feelings are deep thoughts. Consider that all of our sensations are energetic bodily states of various levels of intensity that are interpreted and then given a contextual meaning by the mind. For example, if you feel pain, what is actually being noticed by the mind is an intensity that corresponds viscerally to some memory of discomfort. This memory carries with it all of the results of this previous discomfort, whatever they might have been. Because of this baggage, the pain we experience is an imputation, or a script, that ego plays out as something to avoid. The energy from ego’s resistance to this circumstance is a thought we’ve been conditioned to refer to as “pain.” Put another way, pain is the name we give to an intense experience that we are trying to avoid. The avoidance of the intensity gives rise to the mental interpretation of the event as negative, and this negativity manifests bodily as a contracted sense of desperation. While our feelings may vary substantially, this process of recognition followed by interpretation followed by varying degrees of grasping or avoidance applies to all feelings and all emotions. This isn’t to say that our felt sense of things isn’t real. Of course our feelings are real. It’s just that our perspective from the summit of the Mountain of Spirit shows us that our feelings are inextricably linked to egoic patterns of greed and avoidance.

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The heart of man is nearer to the Truth than his intelligence.

—Aurobindo

God is in me or else not at all.

—Wallace Stevens

If you haven’t wept deeply, you haven’t begun to meditate.

—Ajahn Chah

Just as with time and thought, the mind generates scripts to be delivered on the Stage of Mind that are specifically associated with physical feelings and emotions. We can use the same course of examination as we have before to see that feelings and emotions are little more than deeply held energetic states onto which we project our stories. The ego adheres to many of these feelings and emotions, especially the intense ones, with tremendous energy. But since feelings and emotions are simply objects of attachment, we have the opportunity to radically diminish their hold on us. While feelings and emotions are often deeply held by each of us, they are still objects of mind that we can, with practice, choose to meet consciously, instead of indulging or avoiding them. Just like everything else, any object of mind is both interdependent and temporary. In addition, if we look at any object deeply enough, we see that it is mysteriously Infinite at its core. At the summit of the Mountain of Spirit, our view allows for a shift in our perspective that uncovers the Infinite experientially, thereby giving us a chance to meet our lives in ways characterized by increasing levels of openness.

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Only when we ultimately let go of our attachment to our mind and its activity of thinking can we uncover the ever-present Now. This doesn’t mean that we should get rid of any mental creativity we might find or should avoid thought in general. Nor does it mean that having the ability to intellectualize about the Path isn’t potentially a good thing. Thinking, after all, isn’t problematic unless we become caught by the thoughts. So when we practice letting go all of the time, we become more and more comfortable with nonattachment. The view from this height is one that is similar to what is seen by good parents who continually practice letting go of their children as they grow into and through all of their developmental stages. These parents can gain a certain comfort with the instability inherent in rearing children. They find themselves glad when their babies sleep through the night, when they graduate from being terrible twos, when they graduate from diapers, when they graduate from total dependence to ever increasing levels of self-sufficiency.

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An attentive mind is an open mind. An open mind is a surrendered mind—one that neither clings nor avoids—which is the opposite of what minds normally to do. Minds are supposed to categorize and compartmentalize in ways that allow us to create order out of chaos. We get a sense of a surrendered mind when we realize the clarity of experience in the space between our thoughts, where there is no past and no future. We might just as easily call this surrendered mind experience the arising of “no ego” since the ego and the mind are both fueled by past and future. Similarly, we can interchange ego and mind since both are continually oriented in greed and aversion patterns.

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Past and future veil God from our sight.

Burn both of them with fire.

—Rumi

What is troubling us is the tendency to believe that the mind is like a little man within.

—Ludwig Von Wittgenstein

The only version of time that is infused with Awareness is this very moment. The present moment, or the Now, is always here. Always. It is never absent. In fact, there has never been any time other than Now. Something in the past may arise in our minds as a memory, but it still arises in the Now. Something in the future may arise in our minds as anticipation, but even this only ever shows up in the Now. From this moment, the past extends infinitely. From this moment, the future also extends infinitely. Therefore, the present moment is forever at the center of all existence. Just like Awareness, the Now never moves. The causes and conditions that arise in the Now might change, but the Now itself is always simply right here. The present moment itself is simply always, already, forever outside the boundary of past and future, never falling behind or moving ahead. It is in all ways just this. When we connect with this present moment with our full attention, we can actually experience what the Zen tradition calls “No Mind.” No Mind shows itself when the mind lets go of itself and connects spontaneously to the impersonal experience of the Awareness that exists between each and every thought that we might have. In this spaciousness offered by the present moment, we are totally alert yet unfettered by anything personal.

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There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so: to me it is a prison.

—William Shakespeare

So the world, grounded in a timeless movement by the Soul which suffuses it with intelligence, becomes a living and blessed being.

—Plotinus

Key among our efforts to climb beyond both personal and collective suffering is our ability to allow for a conscious opening to the Awareness that is beyond time and mind. To uncover this perspective, it is helpful to imagine that the stillness underneath all that moves is the source of everything that we can conceive in our minds or sense in our bodies. In other words, all things that move are born from and then die into stillness. At the top of the Mountain of Spirit we Know this stillness as the primordial Awareness; the source of everything, including our thoughts and feelings. As the source of everything, it must also be the endpoint of everything, since whatever arises out of it must fall back into it. Whatever is born, in short, must also die. Since this primordial Awareness is the origin of all birth and the destination for all things at death, every single circumstance in the Universe exists as the contents between these two points.

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