Awake in This Life

Soren Gordhamer, organizer of the Wisdom 2.0 Conference, writes that we need to 1.) know that our external reflects our internal, 2.) do one thing at a time, 3.) invite instead of force, and 4.) know where our attention is most needed. Phrases for any spiritual practitioner to live by.

As a conclusion, Gordhamer gives us this money quote:

In the coming years, the amount information at our disposal is only likely to increase. When Google recently launched Google Buzz, their team addressed the challenges of this information era, saying, “we want to present some tools and techniques to help you manage your attention better.” While this is partly a technological problem, it is also an internal and life balance problem.The challenge of our time is to live connected and use all the great social media available to us, while at the same time harness and direct our attention where it is most needed at any given time. After all, where we decide to put our attention is, essentially, how we choose to spend our life.

Blogger, Matthew Yglesias suggests:

The map lumps the plains states in with the church belt, but if you look at the data more specifically you’ll see that nine of the ten churchiest states are in the south and the remaining one is Utah.

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.

Over at digitalZENDO, there is an great piece on discussing the elusive experience of insight that Zennists call kensho:

Avoiding talking about Kensho, does not make use virtuous or spiritual. Maybe it’s the contrary, it perhaps avoiding a direct conversation that could be valuable.

I actually agree that at times we blow this one. A direct conversation about it is valuable. How we do it, however, really matters. For any teacher to, as an example, to offer up their experience as a model will only generate more attachment among their students. Especially if the students are far enough along the path to be desperate for enlightenment. On the other hand, totally clamming up about kensho generates attachment as well.

Jaye Seiho Morris points out that the work is important and takes guts:

It’s a unswerving and progressive effort towards “full awakening,” at the same time, learning to be helpful as possible to others, without thought to how I might personally benefit. Anything aiming for less than that target is settling.

Settling only results in a kind of purgatory where our egos know enough to be dangerous and our True Nature remains only partially realized. This partiality will always lead to suffering because there is a felt sense of being perpetually incomplete. It is best for all concerned to go all the way with the process of “uncovery” and refuse to settle for anything less that Dai Kensho, or the Great Awakening. At the same time, it is imperative that teachers remind their students that the experience of awakening is not awakening. Clinging to one’s experience of kensho, be it great or not, only lets the ego in the back door of the whole process, thus derailing it.

Last week’s  NYTimes.com posted a nice piece by Norman Fischer:

As most people know, a Zen meditation retreat is not a vacation. Despite the silence and the beauty, despite the respite from the busyness, the experience can be grueling. The meditation practice is intense and relentless, the feeling in the hall rigorous and disciplined. We start pretty early in the morning and meditate all day long, into the late evening. It can be uncomfortable physically and emotionally. And some people find it hard not to talk at all for a week. So, what’s in it for them?

Read on…

Rachel Hiles comments on her twitter reluctance over at Tricycle in a post called  A Buddhist’s Guide to Twitter.

As someone slow to embrace the Twitter phenomenon, I’ve approached the site with great caution, and perhaps a touch of suspicion. I often wondered if I could use Twitter without falling victim to my ego and shamelessly indulging in detailing the ins-and-outs of my day, giving a digital voice to my inner monologue. Determined not to be the last person on earth who wasn’t “tweeting,” I did some research and found the advice of Soren Gordhamer especially helpful. In a recent Huffington Post blog post “If the Buddha Used Twitter…” Gordhamer suggests 5 ways in which the Buddha might have approached Twitter, reminding us that it’s not what we tweet but how we live away from our online worlds that really matters…

Of course you can read on, but make sure you give Gordhamer’s post a read as well.

Bodhipaksa, over at Wildmind has just posted this fascinating article:

People who meditate have bigger brains than those who don’t, say researchers at UCLA.

Using high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to scan the brains of meditators and non-meditators, they found that those who meditated showed significantly larger volumes of the hippocampus and areas within the orbito-frontal cortex, the thalamus and the inferior temporal gyrus—all regions known for regulating emotions.

Read on… here.

I recently received this in a wonderful letter from one of our virtual sangha members in Germany. It’s a beautiful reminder of how this practice can have profound effects on our families:

Kids develop in phases and each jump to the next level
seems to bring with it both a regression in behavior as well as deep
insecurity shown as uncontainable anger and frustration. As a parent, I find
it very hard to deal with, especially if the phase takes time. Of course
this is nothing compared to real parenting trouble, but a 5 and a half year
old child that is sent into a tantrum over minute digressions from the
24-hour-Club-Med routine she is getting is tough. But tough for whom? Tough
for my ego since my daughter needs to be perfect? Tough for her since she
obviously suffers so much under her own state? Or is it an opening?
Incident after incident I seemed to handle it wrong and say or do the wrong
things. Finally, at the end of my rope last week, I just “sat” with her
anger. I told her I am just going to sit still near her and when she needs
me I am there, with my full compassion. Instead of the usual spiral effect,
after 3 minutes she stopped kicking and screaming and collapsed into a
puddle of tears in my lap. We just sat there for another 20 minutes, holding
each other in silence. There was nothing I could teach her in that moment
that would have helped. No words made sense, just presence. Later on, we
even had a quiet talk about the whole thing.

May we all hold each other in silence.

Over at One City, Julia May Jonas offers Buddhism’s newest celebrity convert (as well as other newbies) some great advice.

Kate Moss, I think this could be a good fit. And to welcome you into the fold, I thought I’d share some tips that might help with your first six months of study. Now I am no Buddhist teacher (far from it), but I have an advantage of having started meditating and studying Buddhism recently and therefore I remember fairly clearly what did and didn’t work. So without further adieu, I present to you, and the rest of the burgeoning dharmic community, my completely unauthorized, subjective and possibly inacurrate top ten recommendations for those beginning Buddhist months:

Read on.

In my experience it is a mistake to equate one’s spiritual path with the pursuit of happiness, as it were. Climbing the mountain of spirit is about becoming increasingly conscious rather than resting in eternal bliss. Mark Vernon writes about this topic in today’s Guardian.

Equating Buddhism with happiness, to stay with that particular association, will dumb it down.

I couldn’t agree more. Equating any authentic path with happiness does the same thing.

Take the Buddhist writer Matthieu Ricard’s book, Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill. This French monk, who has spent years living in Nepal, has also written a sophisticated tome on philosophy and a penetrating volume on the interface between science and religion. But his happiness book is a huge disappointment. It trades in the more or less obvious, and seems mostly concerned to align Buddhism with positive psychology, presumably so as to gain from the good PR of the so-called science of happiness.

The concern is that Ricard knows better. Right at the end of his book he explains why the science of happiness actually won’t do. However commendable and altruistic its goals, he explains, it bases its analyses “on a rather fuzzy assessment of the nature of happiness, lumping together superficial pleasures and deep-felt happiness.”

Could it be that happiness is a temporary state that arises spontaneously out of the trait of the ever deepening awareness brought on by meditation? Happiness ebbs and flows, in other words, while consciousness has the potential to perpetually increase.

Contrast Ricard’s book with Stephen Batchelor’s introductory classic, Buddhism Without Beliefs. Batchelor was a monk for many years too. He speaks Tibetan and reads Pali. He is also heavily engaged in bringing Buddhism into the west. So what does his book have to say about happiness? Precisely nothing. The word itself appears exactly once in his text, and then only to dismiss it.

This is a great point. But this isn’t to say that happiness isn’t a byproduct of an authentic spiritual practice. And what is an authentic spiritual practice? It’s a body and mind that are both committed to meeting stillness, over and over again. Results are best when this practice is coupled with a guide who knows the terraign, a map of the terraign, and a group interested in walking the terraign together.

Living in this way, however, is not necessarily, as Vernon asserts, a “pick’n'mix approach” or a “search for the tastiest bits” of Buddhism or other traditional practice. In fact, while often problematic for seekers, traditions can be helpful in familiarizing us with the terraign of practice as much as it can be a hindrance. Furthermore, cherry-picking from traditions as a way of offering tastes of happiness will always keep awakening to the Truth beyond name and form at bay. But there are many valid approaches to deepening our consciousness that have nothing to do with either dumbing down tradition or selling bits and pieces of happiness.

For those interested in enlightenment, their spiritual work can not be about simply seeking happiness. Rather, it must be about seeing what’s true… even if it hurts. Even if the truth isn’t pretty, even if the mess of it all is overwhelming, the serious practitioner knows that facing his or her life with their full attention, without flinching, is the work. Once this process integrates itself with any serious student, they will find that happiness comes and goes while awareness only intensifies. This intensity brings with it something deeper than happiness; something we might call peace. And that peace has the potential to inform all things with the quiet joy that is always present in every moment.

One of the simplest influences on my early practice was a line delivered by a very unassuming Zen priest. She told me that unlike prayer, which was like talking to God, meditation involved nothing other than listening to God.

Listen. Listen with your full mind and you will learn exactly what the Universe is trying to teach.

It wasn’t long after this bit of wisdom was thrown at me that I began to think that the whole idea of prayer was a little odd. Why would God care what I wanted? Why ask God for favors? Besides, wasn’t God infinite, and if so, how could He be separate from me? Talking to God, then, is an act of supreme egocentrism.

Anyway, a national day of prayer is about to be celebrated and Deepak Chopra offers up a nice bit of writing on the subject:

Whether or not a national day of prayer is worthy of the name depends on what prayer is meant to be. In the Bush era, public or group prayer followed the pattern set down by Nixon in the Sixties: it was a validation of conservative values. God was for law and order and against hippies. God was against anyone who didn’t believe in him, a ridiculous position when you think about it. Shouldn’t God, of all beings, not need the approval of others? As long as prayer was simply a shout-out to evangelicals and supporters of the current war, I think it had little value as a national activity.

And I love this question; one so similar to the one I asked all those years ago:

… prayer is one process: consciousness interacting with itself. Religions enforce a division between the one who prays and the one who answers, but why?

Over at the Intent.com, Yumi Sakugawa points out something I’ve noticed for some time in our sangha:

In new research highlighted by an article on the ABC news site today, more and more young Americans are less likely to go to church or identify themselves by any organized religion. According to the article, between 30 to 40 percent of young Americans say they have no religious affiliation.

Considering that the percentage of non-religious people generally fell between 5 to 10 percent in the past, this new data may foreshadow tremendous changes in American politics and culture as more and more of these young non-religious Americans grow up to enter the work force, partcipate in politics annd start raising families of their own. It is highly possible that this trend may continue to increase in the years to come.

The Director of the Interfaith Center of New York, Matthew Weiner, offers up some thoughts over at the Huffington Post, where he gives a fairly unsophisticated presentation of karmic consequence.

Barbara O’Brien offers this assessment:

[Mattew] Weiner takes the position that because Buddhism does teach that a life begins at conception, Buddhists are somehow being dishonest with themselves if they are pro-choice on abortion. This is something I’ve addressed in “Buddhism and Abortion.” I agree that abortion has karmic consequences, but so does imposing rigid moral absolutes on women desperate for abortions.

Karma arises out of clinging, according to traditions. Any of us can get stuck in the tangled web of karma when we attach to our egoic views of what is absolutely right or absolutely wrong. Buddhism, as well as the other nondual traditions, show us a path that supports a way of developing an intimacy with our attachments so that we might soften them, thus breaking what holds them in place. In so doing, we step off the Wheel of Samsara, so to speak, and from this place, an appropriate response is always revealed; one that is generous to all concerned.

Michael Paulson and James F. Smith of the The Boston Globe report on the Dalai Lama’s visit to Cambridge:

After the Dalai Lama slipped off his shoes, crammed his crossed legs into a too-narrow chair, and unceremoniously blew his nose, the world’s most revered and honored Buddhist monk offered a bit of wisdom for the sages: Being smart doesn’t make you happy.

This is a great reminder for both brilliant practitioners and wannabe brilliant practitioners. Still we should be careful. It’s important that we not get anti-intellectual about our practice. Dopey, for all his charm, wasn’t necessarily an enlightened dwarf. At least that’s what I was once told by a rather highly regarded Dharma teacher some years back.

The mind, as well as the ego, afterall, are both divine manifestations of the Infinite. It’s in the getting caught by our minds, brilliant or otherwise, that we find problems. Seeing the mind as a tool rather than getting tooled by the mind takes us to the heart of awakening.

Okay, not really, but over at EnlightenNext, Tom Huston points to Howard Bloom’s vision of how we need to mend rather than end capitalism.

In the midst of our current financial crisis, it may seem natural to cast doubt on the entire enterprise of Western capitalism and wonder if its basic tenets of progress and production have led humanity astray. But according to avant-garde cultural theorist Howard Bloom, writing in EnlightenNext back in 2005, such dismissals tend to overlook the true evolutionary significance of our economic system:
The problem does not lie in the turbines of the Western way of life—industrialism, capitalism, pluralism, free speech, and democracy. The problem lies in the lens through which we see. Capitalism works. It works clumsily, awkwardly, sometimes brilliantly, and sometimes savagely. So we need to dig down to find out why. We need to reveal the deeper meaning beneath what we’ve been told is crass materialism and see how profoundly our obsessive making and exchanging of goods and services has upgraded the nature of our species.

This is a topic I’ve touched on several times in this blog. It’s also fascinating that these basic ideas of retooling capitalism were hinted at by a German named Friedrich List way back in his 1837 book, The Natural System of Political Economy. For those interested, James Fallows covers this topic extensively in his Atlantic article, “How the World Works” .

Fallows writes that List’s alternative economic view offers a way through the obvious “market failures” that old-school, Adam Smith-style capitalism can foster. Could any of us say that Friedrich List was Buddhist in his leanings? Probably not. But as opposed to the dominant Anglo view of economic reality, List’s alternative rests on interdependence rather than what Adam Smith referred to as an invisible hand. Once List’s style of interdependence begins to influence policy, the market can’t be mistakenly seen as God. Furthermore, like Howard Bloom’s some 170 years later, List’s version of economic reality shows us that markets are merely reflections of how we cooperatively meet each other and meet ourselves.

At last night’s sitting, I read one of my favorite poems. The intent was to clarify what this Path is really about. So often, deep spiritual work is seen as a way to escape from what is going on when in actuality, awakening involves nothing less than an intimacy with what is going on. The Invitation nails this. I’ll share it here:

The Invitation

by Oriah Mountain Dreamer

It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living.

I want to know what you ache for, and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing.

It doesn’t interest me how old you are.

I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dreams, for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon.

I want to know if you have touched the center of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life’s betrayals or have become shriveled and closed from fear of further pain

I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it or fade it or fix it.

I want to know if you can be with JOY, mine or your own; if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, be realistic, or to remember the limitations of being a human.

It doesn’t interest me if the story you’re telling me is true.

I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself; if you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul.

I want to know if you can be faithful and therefore be trustworthy.

I want to know if you can see beauty even when it is not pretty every day, and if you can source your life from Its presence.

I want to know if you can live failure, yours and mine, and still stand on the edge of a lake and shout to the silver of the full moon,”Yes”

It doesn’t interest me to know where you live or how much money you have.

I want to know if you can get up after the night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone, and do what needs to be done for the children.

It doesn’t interest me who you are, how you came to be here.

I want to know if you will stand in the center of the fire with me and not shrink back.

It doesn’t interest me where or what or with whom you have studied.

I want to know what sustains you from the inside when all else falls away.

I want to know if you can be alone with yourself, and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.

May all beings uncover the truth beyond the matter.

via Infinite Smile.

There has been an aspect to dialogs within the Infinite Smile Sangha recently about how much of this work is about “going it alone.” While this phrase is fairly inaccurate, at least in the ultimate sense, no one will do any of this spiritual heavy lifting for any of us. It is up to us to do the work. There are no shortcuts, other than a committed practice of stillness and a fearless, and continual, study of what is True.

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.

If we find ourselves in situations where we just can’t let go, we’re in good company. Even the Buddha himself went through a rather significant process of clinging when he began to deny his body through extreme asceticism as a way of reaching what his ego defined as Awakening to Truth. His intention was to get past the desires of the flesh by starving it into submission. The problem was that his choices were killing him, thereby undoing his intention of becoming Awake in this life. Over time, a realization arose pointing out that this denial was yet another attachment, and as such, it was an inappropriate response to what was being offered. He chose to let go of his attachment to this particular view, and the surrender of this view allowed for an even deeper opening within. The Buddha’s experience offers each of us a great lesson on how we are led astray when the process of spiritual evolution becomes ego driven. Whenever we think that some activity, vow, or choice will show us a shortcut to Spirit, we will perpetually miss the mark, or “sin,” as the archers of old used to say. All spiritual work, be it meditation, chanting, prayer, silence, or anything else, is offered to us so that we can ultimately see that we are not separate from God, nor have we ever been. God, like the present moment, like our breath, like our beating heart, like Infinity, is always right here.

And yet there is such blindness regarding this point. Truth, in other words, is always at the core of all things. Truth is never apart from what is happening right now, as you read this. In fact it is what is prior to the reading; prior to the cognition; prior to the sense of Being. Realizing this, we realize Freedom.

Then again, we can screw it up pretty easily:

If there is any attachment to the idea that freedom exists as any external circumstantial form instead of as an internal release, then enlightened awareness will be profoundly hindered by ego. This hindrance is exactly what forces us into the role of seeking. As long as we perceive enlightenment—God, Allah, Brahman, or Spirit—as existing outside of our experience, we will never Awaken to the Truth from which our experience originates. Similarly, if our intentions and corresponding choices are driven by anything other than deep generosity for all beings, we are hindering everyone’s potential for this very realization. If there is a deep longing to Awaken arising within you, this is wonderful. But do not get caught by this longing. Don’t deny it and don’t look for shortcuts, but rather choose to become intimate with the wanting. Then vow to live a life from that open, surrendered observation. Living in this way, of course, is infinitely supported when we sit still with a committed generosity of purposeful choosing, when we don’t harm, and when we can allow ourselves to be deeply curious about every circumstance that we meet.

To the curious… Cheers! Gulp.

I recently had a conversation with a person about the practice of stillness and how one reconciles non-attachment with things like, say, personal wealth.

It only took a few words to provoke an interestingly vehement response from this person. He argued that despite abundant wealth, he and others like him, were paying too much in taxes; carrying too much of the burden.

His sentiments were echoed yesterday in the WSJ by former Bush press secretary, Ari Fleischer, and while I tend to leave political and economic blogging to professionals, I thought it might be a nice stretch to offer something about this here.

Anyway, so I let this person rant a little. Then after he stopped for air I countered that as a proportion of income, his argument falls flat if we divide a household’s federal tax liability by its income. Doing so we get the following graph:

Ezra Klein writes about this in The American Prospect:

When you look at percentage of total tax liabilities, the rich do in fact bear a heavier burden. But it’s because they have so much more money. They are not bearing a heavier burden as a percentage of their incomes. They’re bearing it in relation to everyone else’s incomes. Indeed, it’s only because the sheer levels of income inequality in this country are frankly unintuitive that Fleischer can even write this sort of dreck. People hear that the top 20 percent pay almost 70 percent of the country’s income taxes and nod their head. That’s unfair! But it mainly seems unfair because people don’t know the top 20 percent accounts for almost 60 percent of the national income.

More time on the cushion. Breathe in, breathe out. Money in, money out.

___

Update: My old friend, Justin Fox (aka: the Curious Capitalist), has offered a far more sophisticated (and interesting) slam of Ari Fleischer’s argument. Like I said, I should leave the econo-blogging to the professionals.

I recently took some good-natured swipes from one of my more “fundamentalist Buddhist” friends, who struggled mightily with my assertion that reincarnation didn’t matter in terms of Awakening.

I’m sure many of my more traditional Buddhist friends will disagree with me, but to debate whether or not something is true in relation to any tradition, dogma, or scripture misses the most sacred aspects of any great spiritual teaching and certainly misses the point of Awakening into an enlightened perspective. Freeing ourselves from the entire cycle of birth and death is available to us in this lifetime at this moment. No one needs, therefore, to bother with any future speculation of rebirth as we walk the Path.

I go on:

…when we attach to the faith and religiosity of any wisdom tradition, we diminish its ability to assist us on our climb. This weakening occurs because when we are caught by any attachment our limited egoic view begins to think of itself as something Infinite. For example, consider how the view “I get to live another life all over again” can be a wonderful place for ego to maintain a perceived sense of control over the ultimate chaos of death. The sense that an “I” exists is the very unconsciousness from which we wish to awaken. Awakening, in this sense, is seeing beyond all that the mind, or small self or ego, offers. In the most common views of reincarnation, this delusion of the fixed, and persisting “I” is bolstered by the belief that something separate survives the clutches of death when, in reality, all objects of the mind are subject to time and therefore must succumb to the clutches of death.

Here’s a plug for the book Saltwater Buddha from theworsthorse.com:

You can pre-order the book from Wisdom Publications here. And having read the book back when I was the marketing and publicity guy there, I’d say you might really wanna do that. Plus, you get to support a truly cool not-for-profit publisher dedicated to the preservation of the Dharma. A good deal, right?

I’ve got to admit that I’m a little biased when it comes to meeting the sea as a source of spiritual inspiration. Can’t wait to read the book.