Teachers in the Buddhist Yogacara tradition explain that there is a storehouse consciousness, the 8th level of consciousness, which is a repository of all our memories. Like the Western unconscious, this is a subjective phenomenon that colors everything we do. If ten people look at a cloud, they will likely see entirely different formations- a head, a sword, a cup, or whatever.
This storehouse consciousness is the deepest level of consciousness. The level just above it is ego-consciousness. “This is me. This is mine. This is not mine.” This is belief in a self, which is distinguished from others. Ego consciousness keeps a tight grip on the storehouse, not letting into awareness anything that might be threatening. It stores seeds from previous experience within in it. Whenever we have an emotionally charged experience, that experience produces a perfume that coagulates into a seed. If an older sibling terrorized you when you were a kid, many years later you may have an encounter with someone who reminds you of him in some way. The seed, which has been in your storehouse all these years, causes this projection. Yogacara teachers suggest that our lives are often nothing more than a rushing waterfall of experience, perfume, seeds, experience, perfume, seeds, ad infinitum. When this happens, we experience very little satisfaction in our lives, since we are driven by these projections. Fortunately, in addition to unwholesome seeds per above, our storehouse also contains wholesome seeds based on positive experiences from the past. There are two complementary practices which Yogacara teaching focuses on to liberate us from these negative projections. First, we can introduce more wholesome seeds into our storehouse, through positive intentions and actions. The practice of the paramitas that I talked about in recent posts is an excellent way to do this. We have opportunities every day to practice the first three paramitas of patience, generosity, and morality. In my last piece I talked about a woman who set me off because she had certain similarities to my mother. I had an opportunity to practice generosity each time, noticing when I was being triggered and reminding myself, “Kay is not my mother and she is having a hard time.” Second, though our meditative awareness, we begin to see through the false self or limited ego and get glimpses of our still nature (or Buddha nature), which is at the base of the storehouse. As these glimpses grow, the rushing waterfall of experience, perfume, seeds begin to quiet down. While in most ways the storehouse seems identical to the western unconscious, in this way it is radically different. Yogacara teachers point to an undivided wholeness that we realize when ego consciousness is completely still. This is referred to as “mirror mind.” As the Chinese Zen teacher Shen Hui said, Those who see into the Storehouse have their senses cleansed of defilements, and open to Buddha-wisdom. Yogacara teachers have suggested practice of the paramitas (patience, generosity, morality, persistent effort, meditation, and wisdom) may create positive seeds to add to our storehouse. Recently I supported someone in doing this. Over the course of several months, he developed the ability to plant seeds of patience and generosity each time his negative thoughts/feelings came up. Now let me turn to the process of de-activating our seeds. Let’s say I have a craving for something sweet during my meditation. That craving is by its very nature unwholesome because I lose attention, get distracted, and wish I was sucking on a piece of chocolate instead of staring at a blank wall. All I need to do is: 1.) recognize the craving; 2.) accept/embrace both the craving and my distraction; 3). transform the craving by tuning into my bodily sensations including my breath. As I do this, both the craving and whatever distractions I have been engaging in naturally dissipate. I may even fall into a deep calmness, referred to in the Buddhist literature as mirror mind or beginner’s mind. Through a steady, daily meditation practice, coupled with longer periods of meditation in retreat settings, this process of recognizing, embracing, and transforming happens quite naturally. We find that we are relaxing our grip on our fixations and are able to enjoy our lives from moment to moment in a deeply satisfying way. This change may occur incrementally or through a huge release of all our fixated thoughts referred to as “enlightenment.” My teacher did not put much emphasis on this huge release. But when he was asked directly to talk about an enlightenment experience he had had while a student, he shared the following: While engaged in a retreat of several days, he did his best to follow the teacher’s instructions to bring his mind back to “no thing” but continually failed. But this only heightened his determination. Then it was time for him to see the retreat teacher one to one in dokusan. The teacher’s nickname was Tanker, because he was both huge and muscular, built like a sumo wrestler. He took up most of the space in the tiny room he met with people one to one. Suzuki himself was less than five feet tall and very slim. He entered the room, looked at the teacher and saw that, “I am Tanker” and was immediately released all his worries and fears. His sense of a limited, separate self vanished and he felt embraced by all life. Whether we have this kind of experience or not, through our meditation we gradually let go of our identification with the emotional residue which has coagulated into seeds within our storehouse. But as Suzuki said, “Enlightenment is an activity, not an experience.” Stored negative emotions continue to come up as long as we live, which, if we act from, create new negative seeds. If I watch Fox news, for instance, even for a few minutes, I feel anger, which is undoubtedly a combined activation of seeds from the past and sprouting of new seeds as a reaction to something the commentator has said. In any case, in our meditation we have the opportunity to access our negative thoughts and emotions just by paying attention to them. We can let them pass through by merely observing them with no commentary. In retreats as in extended therapy, we may notice forgotten scenes from childhood and jumbled scenes of unknown people or be disconcerted by feelings of rage or grief that appear from nowhere. When this happens, we are allowing negative seeds from our storehouse to come into full consciousness. All we need to do is to open to them without entertaining them and those seeds may shrivel up and die. We can start with awareness of any area of suffering and follow it down into the storehouse. What are the feelings, images, or thoughts that come up? Next we may notice where the emotional coagulation that has risen from the storehouse is felt most strongly in your body. You simply pay attention to these sensations as they grow more acute, dense, or change temperature. In my one to ones with people, I often support them in bypassing the thoughts and emotions, so they can experience a genuine release within their sensate body, where the residue has been lodged. Unlike much therapy, our focus is not on understanding our past conditioning by untangling harmful family patterns. Instead, we merely cultivate awareness of emotion that is arising on this moment. Instead, of passing on negative patterns from generation to generation we can stop hurting others and ourselves. By not trying to suppress or control, we can realize that our individual consciousness is universal consciousness. The energy that creates and perpetuates seeds of illusion is the same energy that is pulsating through all of life. As we tap into the storehouse, we tap into the hidden heart of possibility. Zen Buddhism is considered a self-power or jiriki, form of Buddhism. When we allow deep unconscious parts of our minds and hearts to percolate upward into consciousness, we can tap into a power that we didn’t realize we had. In this piece I am going to focus on the unconscious in general and in the next piece I am going to discuss it from a Yogacara Buddhist perspective. Many years ago my teacher, Suzuki Roshi, gave a talk at the college I was attending titled “Zen Beyond Self-Consciousness.” At that time I had also been doing independent study with a professor on the work of Carl Jung, who said, “My life is a story of the self-realization of the unconscious.” I immediately noticed the similarities.
Western psychologists and Buddhists (followers of Yogacara in particular), agree that our conscious mind is just an iceberg floating in an ocean of being. So much of our experience happens beyond the limitations of the conscious mind. We drive to work every morning, leaving home and arriving at work, but not paying attention to much of anything. Sometimes we don’t even pay attention to where we are parking. Furthermore, we all have thoughts that we aren’t conscious of, many of which may cause painful emotions. These generally come from statements that we heard as kids from a critical parent, teacher, or significant other. We have overlearned them, so they come up automatically in situations of stress. Both Western psychologists and Buddhist teachers commonly understand what I have pointed out so far. Between the Buddhist tradition and the western psychological tradition, there are a fissures regarding understanding the unconscious, although there are many more commonalities. There are also fissures within the Western tradition itself. One of the main ones is disagreement about the degree to which automatic/unconscious processes are accessible and changeable. In Freud’s view, not only is the unconscious impossible to directly observe, we are generally at its mercy, which is why so much time needs to be spent with a therapist “on the couch” allowing unconscious material to rise spontaneously into conscious awareness. In contrast to this, therapists from the Jungian tradition as well as modern psychodynamic practitioners believe the unconscious can be accessed in a variety of ways and we can develop insights into how negative material effects us so we aren’t plagued by it. Memories and emotions that we have repressed too often appear in the form of trauma, anger, sexual frustration, and other fears, including death. And they can spill out into our lives in all kinds of ways that inhibit our ability to be fully present in our lives. When I was a young program director in a non-profit agency, we had an office manager, who would sometimes have angry outbursts that I found frightening. As my thoughts and feelings about her came up in my meditation, I realized that she had some similarities to my own mother. A simple grimace of hers put me on guard, ready to freeze or flee (fighting was too scary). Often it seems that we cannot control emotions that come from childhood projections, but if we see both where the projection comes from and what the trigger is, we can become free of them. Fortunately, I was able to do both of these things. Modern psychodynamic therapists who have been influenced by people like Carl Jung and Milton Erikson believe that we can access the unconscious quite easily and simply without spending “days on the couch.” As we learn to open to it and draw from it, we become more authentic. Followers of Jung believe that there are two levels of the unconscious: the personal and the collective. This collective unconscious is common to all humanity. It is a shared storehouse holding latent memories from our ancestral and evolutionary past. For Jungians, therapy, dream interpretation, active imagination, and meditation can all be avenues for exploration. Others, like Milton Erikson, trauma therapists, and proponents of EMDR think that the best thing to do may be to bypass the conscious mind entirely. Only through directly accessing our unconscious thoughts, feelings, and sensations, we can experience some genuine liberation. We can train ourselves to be more open to this deeper part of ourselves, allowing hidden thoughts and feelings to flow upward. Inventors do this, as well as explorers, artists and scholars. This is what creativity is all about. Many of us are familiar with the story about the famous Greek mathematician, engineer, and inventor, Archimedes. He had been struggling with a deep problem for some time and couldn’t seem to make any headway on it. So he gave up and relaxed into a bath. As he noticed the water level rise, he suddenly understood that the volume of water displaced must be equal to the volume of the part of his body he had submerged. He also realized that the volume of irregular objects could be measured with precision, leapt out of his bathtub and ran naked through the streets of Syracuse, exclaiming “Eureka… I have found it!” When we calm our conscious minds and internal chatter no longer impinges on us, deep insights may emerge at any moment. They are always near and available to us. All we need to do is notice them and take them in. When we do this with meditation or some similar activity we are able to both bypass the left hemisphere of our brain, which is logical, analytic, mathematical, and tap into the right side, which is silent and yet is the seat of unconscious awareness. Focusing attention in the present suspends left-brain executive functions so that the resources of the unconscious can be quite easily accessed. We develop capacity of the right hemisphere to “read” and delight in the textures and patterns of world beyond language: When Priest Yaoshan was sitting in meditation a monk asked, “What do you think about, sitting in steadfast composure?” Yaoshan said, “I think not thinking.” The monk said, “How do you think not thinking?” Yaoshan said, “Non-thinking.” This is, as my teacher said, when he gave a talk at my college many years ago, “Zen Beyond Self-consciousness.” In my last piece I quoted Russian ballet star Nijinsky’s comment, “It’s really quite simple. I merely leap and pause. Leap and pause.” Without the pause, the leap loses its connection with reality. We might say that Buddhist meditation is nothing more or less then learning how to pause, so that we are not swept away by a mind that goes on and on and on.
In my piece I also talked about various forms of focused meditation and how important focusing is so we can move to bare awareness (unfocused meditation). Some common places of focus include breath, specific bodily sensations, counting, mantra, lower abdomen or hara, hand position, or phrases of self-compassion or loving-kindness. Now I would like to touch on four ways to practice bare awareness. They include: 1. Letting go, or just letting be; 2. Opening through the center; 3.Expanding our field of attention; 4. Cultivating a full awareness of feelings. First, Letting go, or just letting be. Most of the time when we are practicing bare awareness, since we have no activity to distract us, we layer one story one top of another. Often several vie for our attention simultaneously. Some are more colorful; some are juicy, others are drab and repetitive. As we begin to let go, we discover a realm within our consciousness that is bigger, wider, and deeper than our incessant chatter. If we just let go a little bit, we can experience it a little bit. Or we can let go a lot and experience it a lot! But sometimes when we try over and over to let go of our stories and broaden our awareness, the noise just becomes louder. Then we may think we are a failure as a meditator. But it’s not possible to “fail” at meditation. Instead, we can follow Paul McCartney’s advice, “Mother Mary comes to me whispering words of wisdom, let it be.” Evidently, Paul was referring to his own mother, who was non-judgmental and accepting regardless of what he did. If we just let our incessant chatter talk itself through in a non-judgmental way, in most cases, we can begin to experience a wonderful spaciousness that surrounds and engulfs it. Second, opening through the center. Sometimes we can’t let go of our stories and when we try to let them be, they just gain power and momentum. Then we can practice opening up through the center of both the story and the emotion, which keeps it revved up. We might notice how strong the pull is to get away from the emotional core. We might also notice all the different ways thoughts and feelings reverberate to keep whatever story we are telling ourselves vibrantly alive. After I had been practicing at San Francisco Zen Center for a little over three years, our teacher replaced the American style eating we had been doing with nested eating bowls, called oryoki, which are used in Japanese Zen monasteries as part of a highly ritualized practice. I was not happy about this and wondered how such a thing was even relevant to Zen. We were told there was no latitude in how the ritual was performed—left-handers like me had to do it in the prescribed right handed away. I was particularly annoyed, because I had been slightly traumatized in the first grade, before my parents’ intervened on my behalf, since my teacher insisted that I learn to write with my right hand. The leaders’ at the Zen monastery changed their minds and decided left-handed people could do it differently, but it was still very hard for me. I couldn’t get my corners straight and seemed always to be the last one finished. Time after time, I opened to the center of my frustration, staying close both to each movement. I gradually opened to the center of my frustration until it disappeared completely! The seven-day retreat, called Rohatsu, is coming up shortly, as I write this and many people will experience boredom at some point as they sit facing the wall hour after hour. If they can’t find a skillful way to face our boredom, they may spin through one new daydream or thought pattern after another. But they can short-circuit all of this, by merely open up through the center of the boredom, itself. Here’s a poem by John Berryman, which I am particularly fond of: Life, friends, is boring, we must not say so. After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns, and moreover my mother told me as a boy (repeatedly) “Even to confess you’re bored means you have no Inner Resources.” I conclude now I have no inner resources, because I am heavy bored. People bore me, literature bores me, especially great literature, Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes as bad as Achilles, who loves people and valiant art, which bores me. And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag and somehow a dog has taken itself & its tail considerably away into mountain or sea or sky, leaving behind: me, wag. ―”Dream #14,” 77 Dream Songs Here, Berriman recognizes that boredom manifests itself as a self-centered dream in which he is caught. He recognizes that there’s a picture of how things ought to be and how we’re supposed to respond to them: great literature, great art. Bored by it all. Even bored by his alter ego Henry, with all its plights and gripes and complaining. At the end of the poem, boredom suddenly drops away, and he ends with an exclamation of radical acceptance, a moment of Zen: Me, Wag. Third, expanding our field of attention. So often in meditation we are stuck in one dimension, whether it be pain in the body, or some feeling we have, or some thought. Here’s an example from a woman, who an Insight Meditation Teacher worked with several years ago: “During retreats Jan was often physically nauseated. I coached her to expand her attention beginning with her body and moving beyond it to her feelings. As she opened to those, she began to notice feelings she had never been aware of which were accompanying the nausea. As she OPENED INTO CENTER she realized the nausea was covering up her fear of abandonment, had never dealt with the pain of losing him. Gradually, she was able to stay longer in retreats, close to the painful emotions of loss and grief. As the intensity of her strong emotions increased, the nausea decreased.” Jan realized later that her general attitude had been that she had no one to love and that she herself was unlovable. She had not even been aware of this attitude. It was covered up by the feelings of restlessness and worry that she held in her body. Expanding her field of awareness beyond her body enabled her to see it. I have helped many practitioners over the years do a similar expansion. Fourth, cultivating a full awareness of feelings. We can move from the actual sensation to experience a panoply of feelings connected to a sensation. It’s possible to fully experience the feelings and sensations involved with each of the places of stuckness that come up in our meditation practice. Lets focus on the sensation of desire. We may cultivate a full awareness of feelings surrounding and underlying a specific desire. As we become more aware of the uncomfortable, even painful, sensations associated with a given desire, we can experience the stillness that is also present and not be tossed away by the desire, regardless of how strong it is. If we practice each of these four ways of broadening and deepening our awareness in our meditation, we can begin to enjoy the pauses that Nijinsky is referring to without even one lesson in ballet. The more we are able to appreciate and enjoy these pauses, the more we will also be able to enjoy lead after lead after leap. This will be my last post on the paramitas or “gone beyonds.” As I mentioned in a previous piece, “gone beyond” refers to their uniqueness as spiritual practices. We are encouraged to practice them by going beyond the conventional meaning of each to include its opposite.
The final two paramitas are meditation and wisdom. The key practice within the Zen tradition is meditation, which is what the word “Zen” originally means and a serious Zen practitioner makes meditation their core spiritual practice, as I have done for most of my adult life. But meditation, like the other paramitas, is only of real value if it includes its opposite, “no meditation.” What’s the deal here? The deal is that if we do meditation as a means to an end, our energy is always going to be somewhat split. Instead of being where we are, we will always be focused on trying to change ourselves. Yet, genuine transformation can only take place when we completely embrace what is. This radical acceptance allows us to equally value the opposites of meditation and no meditation. As we do this, we begin to replace experience our fixations on specific thoughts and/or emotions and instead enter a world of infinite possibility. The final paramita is wisdom, prajna in Sanskrit from the root “pra” “before” and “jna” “knowledge.” From a Christian perspective, we have all eaten the apple of “the knowledge of good and evil” as Eve did. By eating this forbidden fruit she lost her innocence and became a sinner. This loss of innocence is somewhat parallel to the Buddhist concept of avidya or original ignorance. The first link in the chain of “dependent co-arising” shows a grandmother who has lost her original vision of her indivisibility from all of life and lives not in sin but in avidya- meaning, “ignorance” or “lack of vision” in Sanskrit. Since she has lost her vision, she is afraid, isolated, and lonely, and attempts to control the world around her. Alas, this is doomed to failure, as she tries to get others to affirm her and admire her. But the wisdom which she is seeking, needs to include its opposite “no wisdom” which can only be manifested when she stops dividing things up. This wisdom is sometimes called resting on “don’t know.” Dizang asked his student Fayan, “Where are you going?” Fayan said, “I am wandering aimlessly.” “What do you think of wandering?” said the teacher “I don’t know,” Said Fayan. “Not knowing is most intimate,” said the teacher. If we can learn to rest in “don’t know” our life starts to work, as we not longer feel cut off from others or the world around us. Instead of trying to self-consciously focus on being generous, moral, patient, or wise, we don’t know and we don’t need to know. And it is possible to sink so deeply into don’t know, that we can JUST BE. Instead of worrying about being a sinner or about our identity we begin to feel supported by all life. To move from avidya to vidya we need to penetrating the levels of attention that overlay our natural ability to see clearly. When we do this, we no longer spend most of our time squandering our attention on, 1. Ideas, images, memories, and evaluations. 2. Instinctual urges that we’re unaware of, and 3. Moods, which are more subtle and long lasting. Through our bare awareness process gradually we become familiar with these layers and the feeling-tones that they arouse in the body. As the mind slows down, clarity arises, and the mind naturally frees itself. When this happens we clearly see that generosity-stinginess, morality-immorality, patience-impatience, effort-no effort, and meditation—no meditation are undivided from each other and we begin to deeply enjoy our lives. |
AuthorTim Burkett, Guiding Teacher Archives
April 2022
Categories |