I have been teaching a class which includes introducing people to practical uses of some of the earliest teachings of Buddhist psychology: seeing through the neurosis of the self by bringing the aggregates into view; getting off the twelve-part wheel of suffering. This piece will focus on the aggregates and my next piece on the wheel.
Most peoples’ lives are dominated by a running narrative about who they have been, who they should be, and how to protect themselves from a world they have been hurt by and that is full of unpredictable events like the coronavirus. This narrative has an important function—in the case of the coronavirus, our individual narrative joins with other people’s to implement behaviors that protect us and keep us safe. Unfortunately, coronavirus or not coronavirus, our narrative spills over everything, impeding our ability to be fully present in our moments and, instead, stay on high alert much of the time. Early Buddhist psychology suggests that this “self” is a fabrication, which consists of a five-part process of internal experience, referred to as 5 “heaps” or aggregates. These five heaps are: form, sensation/feeling, perception, concept, and consciousness. “Consciousness” is the one that dominates our lives as the storyteller. Early Buddhist psychology also suggests that it is quite possible for consciousness to let go of rigid domination by the so-called story teller as we “bring the aggregates into view,” a practice which meditators have been engaging in for hundreds of years. As we develop the ability to do bring these components into view, we find that we are more present for, and intimate with our moments and not captured by before and after and the domination by the fifth aggregate, consciousness. Here’s an example I used in class: As I am talking to the group, I notice someone yawning. I am making contact with the form of this person’s face. Immediately, I have a negative sensation/feeling. (Our root sensations/feelings are all either positive, negative, or neutral). A split second later I have a pre-verbal perception of his yawning expression. In another split second the concept yawning arises. This leads to consciousness: the story-telling narrative and reflections about my experience, which often spills over into everything we do. The problem is that when consciousness takes over, chattering on and on about what we have experienced, we lose the ability to be with the first four aggregates that keep us grounded. These include contact with different forms, the sensations/feelings emanating from that contact, followed by our perceptions, followed by thoughts or concepts. Then consciousness takes over and this entire process happens very rapidly. I distract myself by thinking about whether that person is bored by me and/or I may worry about how to make the class more lively or how maybe I am getting too old to teach, etc. Consciousness serves an important function- we don’t want to lobotomize ourselves. It’s wonderful that we have the ability to think, remember, plan, and imagine (and join together to prevent the spread of a virus), but not so wonderful when this mind of ours goes on and on about everything and we forget to enjoy the intimacy of moment-to-moment living. “Bringing the aggregates into view”can work very well during our meditation. Let’s say there is a coffeepot on in the kitchen and I smell it while I am sitting in the meditation hall. I am making contact with a form through my nostrils; I have a positive sensation/feeling; I have a pre-verbal perception of the aroma; then the thought “coffee in the kitchen”arises. Thoughts begin to take off about my experience within consciousness. But if my meditation is going well a couple of things might happen: 1. I have been so focused on experiencing these first four aggregates that I am not swept away by the fifth. I merely say to myself “Oh, someone is making coffee,” and I come back to my sensations and/or breath; 2. I catch myself after a minute or two of narrative about the coffee and come back to whatever sensations/feelings I am currently experiencing. Of course, it takes practice to learn to do this well, but anything we deeply care about takes practice. Next time I will talk about a practice for getting off the wheel of suffering which is quite similar to the one above. Both of these practices can help us calm down and just enjoy being present, coronavirus or no coronavirus, while prudently following the advice of knowledgeable health professionals. In my second and third pieces on enlightenment, I’d like to focus on the Soto Zen approach, growing out of the teaching of Dogen in the 13th century. Dogen emphasizes marrying ourselves to each activity we do. Enlightenment then, is not a spectacular event. Each activity gives us the opportunity to experience the simple joy of pure engagement. Dogen calls this practice/enlightenment, an ongoing process that never ends.
Sitting in this chair, sipping my jasmine green tea with my left hand while my right one rests on my keyboard, looking out my window at the morning sky- all other activities that happened in the past and might happen in the future are swallowed up by just being here. As Dogen says, “The time when continuous practice is manifested is what we call ‘Now’.” Regardless of what we are doing or what’s going on with us emotionally, we have the opportunity to do practice/enlightenment over and over, free from self-obsessions. “This is wonderful practice,” says Dogen. As long as the activity is not harmful to others or ourselves, it doesn’t matter what we do. In Soto Zen, meditation is totally stripped of its older traditional form in which we meditate to experience calmness or change our state of mind in some other way. All we need to do is participate wholeheartedly in each activity as we release our thoughts about anything else. We can experience intimacy in virtually all our activities- including everything from planning our day to deeply listening to others who might need support. And in our sitting meditation, we have the opportunity to be aware of each thought and emotion, positive or negative, without kicking out anything. The year or two before my father died my thoughts about him continually came up during my meditation, including all of the words, said and unsaid, that formed my attitude toward him. Rather than dissing my thoughts as they arose, my practice/enlightenment gently allowed them to be, including all the different emotions that gave them energy and force. This level of intimacy with my own process can only happen when I don’t suppress or repress any thoughts or feelings that come up. Each of my thoughts and feelings about my father deepen my realization of my relationship with him. My second teacher, Katagiri Roshi, used to say, “Whatever comes up, just digest it without judgment or evaluation.” A wonderful benefit of this process is that our ongoing intimacy with whatever comes up has warm-heartedness as a by-product. A feeling of kindness toward my own process and my father’s, including where we completely missed each other over the years, emerges on its own, as I fully accept each/thought feeling. Dogen called this, “going beyond Buddha.” This effort is motivated, according to Dogen, by the dream of enlightenment. And of course, trying to bring this dream or aspiration to life is another form of practice/enlightenment in and of itself. In the case of my father and me, my practice-enlightenment included an aspiration to be intimate with my thoughts and feelings about him as he approached death. At Zen Center we chant, “sentient beings are numberless, I vow to free them” in the mornings. It’s so important that we included ourselves in this vow. If the aspiration to be intimate with my own process is wholehearted, I am enlightened already and my enlightenment spills over into my relationship with others. Zen first developed based on two underlying premises: 1.) Buddha had an experience of enlightenment which radically changed his life and became the basis of his teaching over the next 40 years; 2.) If we practice meditation with continual effort and determination, we can both have this experience and develop the ability to act out of our so-called Buddha nature, our quiescent nature, which is our true home.
We are so caught by the elaborate structures of habit that we create palaces and prisons for ourselves. These palaces and prisons exile us from an awareness that our true home, bodhi, in Sanskrit, is always at the center of our being and all being. When we have tapped into bodhi, oranges still taste like oranges and harsh words are still harsh, but we’re aware of how everything permeates everything else, lit from within by same light. The moon is a frequent symbol of enlightenment because of its warm, calming glow. In China, and later in Japan, it became the custom to write an enlightenment poem. Here is one from a Japanese practitioner in the 12th century. Watching the moon at dawn, solitary, mid-sky, I knew myself completely: no part left out. —Izumi Shikibu When we have this kind of experience our sense of being isolated, limited, within our own hard shell, is replaced by feeling joined to all life. This can only happen when this fear-based self cracks open. As Nagarjuna said, When buddhas don’t appear And their followers are gone, The wisdom of awakening Bursts forth by itself. This “wisdom of awakening” occurs in all meditative traditions. I am especially fond of the following story from the pre-Buddhist Vedas: A doll of salt, after a long pilgrimage on dry land, came to the sea and discovered something she had never seen and could not possibly understand. She stood on the firm ground, a solid little doll of salt, and saw there was another ground that was mobile, insecure, noisy, strange and unknown. She asked the sea, “But what are you?” and it said, “I am the sea.” And the doll said, “What is the sea?” to which the answer was, “It is me.” Then the doll said, “I cannot understand, but I want to; how can I?” The sea answered, “Touch me.” So the doll shyly put forward a foot and touched the water and she got a strange impression that it was something that began to be knowable. She withdrew her leg, looked and saw that her toes had gone, and she was afraid and said, “Oh, but where is my toe, what have you done to me?” And the sea said, “You have given something in order to understand.” Gradually the water took away small bits of the doll’s salt and the doll went farther and farther into the sea and at every moment she had a sense of understanding more and more, and yet of not being able to say what the sea was. As she went deeper, she melted more and more, repeating: “But what is the sea?” At last a wave dissolved the rest of her and the doll said: “It is I!” We all have the capacity to crack open our small selves and experience this kind of awakening. “There is another world,” Paul Eluard said, “and it is inside this one.” Chinese Zen stories in particular often have as their climax the awakening of a practitioner when she unexpectedly sees or hears a natural phenomenon like the tok of a stone hitting bamboo or the sudden appearance of cherry blossoms across a ravine. However, having an opening like this doesn’t necessarily mean that much in and of itself. Some people have openings and still behave like jerks. The glow of the moon has to both penetrate us completely and spill over into our everyday lives. Real transformation can only take place as we let life teach us how to embody this wonderful glow. My teacher said, “There are no enlightened people, only enlightened activity.” The test for anyone who has this experience is whether or not it enables them to be both more compassionate and more resilient. We still have delusions, butthey’re no longer capable of binding us to their limited view. They arise; we see them for what they are and feel compassion for our own limitations as we do for others. And we still face conflict and have bodies that break down or wear out. Many people misunderstand what enlightenment entails. Japanese scholars who have studied his life and writing have debated whether Ryokan was a true Zen master, since he did not transcend normal emotions and instead wrote openly about his moments of both sadness and loneliness. But Ryokan’s transparency about his own emotional vicissitudes make him, at least for me, more enlightened rather than less. I ended my last piece on trauma by saying that it’s never too late to untangle us from ancient, twisted, karmic knots that exist in our body/mind. Psychologists suggest that we all need adequate nurturing, protecting, initiating, and empowering, to do this successfully. If we didn’t get this as kids, we can create or move into an environment in which we can get this now.
Nurturing And Protecting Did one or both of our parents celebrate our birth and support us and nurture us when we were growing up? If not, we may have not developed a sense of self-worth, which includes the capacity to experience joy in our selves and others. But its never too late to see through the superficiality of whatever story we are telling ourselves about being stuck or permanently damaged by our past. The first treasure in Buddhist teaching is Buddha, and by Buddha we don’t mean some perfect being, we mean a spiritual friend/teacher who will both nurture us and protect us. He or she does this by being available to listen to us and support us as we engage in serious meditation practice. Although my own teacher did not generally offer to hear my problems, I sensed that he was continually in the background cheering me on and offering me protection from my own worst impulses. When he noticed that I was being seduced by another teacher who was offering me all kinds of promises of ego death and enlightenment, he merely said, “you have a great treasure. Someone may try to take it from you. Don’t let anyone take it from you.” He was reminding me of my own still, quiescent Buddha nature, which is the ultimate protector of a Zen practitioner, whether she knows it or not! Regardless of what happened to us as kids, through our meditation we can tap into a feeling of intrinsic safeness, referred to in Buddhist teaching as Trust in Heart/Mind. In your meditation a memory of some traumatic event or environment, may surface at any time. That’s fine. All you need to do is note the feelings, the thoughts swirling around them, and keep returning to you breathing and other bodily sensations until the former fall away- and they will. There’s no magic bullet here. We just open up to whatever comes up (sometimes nothing at all) until our obsessive feelings and thoughts lose their intensity. And if the inner tyrant starts taking over by trashing us, then a few repetitions of, “May I be safe, may I be protected, may I feel love…” can help turning this negativity around. Initiating Initiating is a process of leaving home. A key component is realizing that we each are a valuable and welcome member of a larger community that includes both the human and natural world. If things go well, a mother does this with her daughter by welcoming her into womanhood and a father does this with his son. Initation may include a formal ritual or it may just involve behavioral role modeling. But when it doesn’t happen, we generally remain enmeshed in our own family or cut off from them completely. Or we may substitute a false initiation, like joining a gang, doing drugs, or embracing fundamentalism. When choosing a spiritual teacher, we may want to ask whether she creates an impression that she has superior understanding and we should surrender to her. We should ask ourselves whether a specific initiation inhibits or enhances our ability to move on to genuine self-empowerment. Indigenous communities all had initiation rituals. I have been initiating folks into Zen Buddhism for many years. A key component of this is “home leaving”, a metaphor for breaking out of the confines of your own protective shell to commit to opening to genuine self-empowerment. Two main components of this are sewing a mini-version of a Buddhist robe and being given a name by your teacher. Empowering As we begin to feel nurtured by a spiritual friend and if we are fortunate, have been through a positive process of initiation, we begin to feel more empowered. Our mother or father may or may not have empowered us. A good teacher will, however. She will applaud us when we make effort in our meditation, and fully accept us regardless of how many times we screw up. She will even be happy when her student equals or passes her in their “enlightened” activity. I call this “turtle practice” because the process of dis-identifying with internal negativity is very gradual. But sooner or later each of us can settle into a happiness that is not dependent on conditions. Wisdom comes from having to cope with difficulty. Rather than viewing our trauma negatively, it can give us the motivation to stretch our heart/mind and we realize that deep happiness is not dependent on the external conditions of present, past, or future. Each of us has the capacity to embrace whatever wound we have so it becomes a doorway to great awakening. I want to discuss how to understand and work with our inadequacies. Dogen says, “A greatly enlightened person is nevertheless deluded. To understand that is the quintessence of practice.”
This reminds me of an experience I had with my acting teacher in college. I told him that I was frustrated playing the despicable character parts he was giving me. He said, “Tim, I thought you were a spiritual seeker. Don’t you realize that you can never really achieve liberation until you have explored the deepest and darkest recesses of your being?” The paradigm of the wounded healer has made good sense to me for years. This is a time in our history when many, many people are uncovering and becoming aware of hidden trauma. And we all have karma knots from our past that we can release. Through our meditation practice we can gradually experience an unwinding that allows whatever difficult experience we have to complete itself. We don’t know exactly how this post-traumatic growth happens. And we don’t need to know. All we have to do is trust the process of non-judgmental awareness within our meditation. None of us had perfect parents. They may have been absent or overbearing or inappropriate in some other kind of way. My mother doted on me, but I realize that I experienced secondary trauma, as I watched helplessly as she punished my sisters. (What was called “corporal punishment” many years ago would often be called abuse in our modern vernacular). Childhood trauma leaves a scar or weakness in our body or emotions. If you don’t acknowledge and make peace with it we may stay caught forever. But during our meditation it’s possible to open up to any and all thoughts and feelings about an injury from our past. We can develop a new relationship with it and find inspiration from the unwinding of the knot that holds it in place. In both daily and extended meditation, you may learn to notice those times you find yourself caught in clinging to certain constellations of thoughts and/or pushing others away. If we can be with this urge to push or pull with openness and compassion, our heart softens, we are able to open to deeper levels of awareness and the healing process happens quite naturally. And little by little we become less reactive and more flexible. When a trauma first presents itself, your feelings may not be at all clear. But luckily all emotions are felt in the body, so if you stay with your sensations, not your old stories or your interpretation of how your childhood was supposed to be, the knots from the past begin to untangle. Opening up to the pain of our wounds hurts, but its completely necessary if we want to make more than superficial progress in our meditation practice. The dharma teacher Phillip Moffitt suggests that there a three factors which impact our effectiveness in dealing with trauma: first, its severity; second, the context of the wound; third, whether the trauma leads to strength and wholeness is entirely dependent on how it is handled. You might even ask yourself whether the wounds of your friends make them any less attractive? I am inspired any time a student or friend handles theirs courageously. Its such a simple process making them the object of our bare awareness process, throwing in a little of loving kindness when we begin to come down on ourselves for the toxic thoughts and feelings which come up and stick around. But it’s never too late to untangle ourselves from ancient, twisted, karmic knots which exist in our body/mind. |
AuthorTim Burkett, Guiding Teacher Archives
April 2022
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