Recently, I have been talking about how simplifying our lives can help us discover and live from what T. S. Eliot calls, “the still point of the turning world.” Regardless of how fast things are moving and how dizzy we feel, we can always follow Thoreau’s advice: “Simplify, simplify! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumbnail- simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real. Probe the earth to see where your main roots run.”
Those of us who are committed to a spiritual practice have to continually think about what things, activities, and people help us return to these roots where we discover this still point, so we can step back from those activities that cause our mind to become dizzier and dizzier. Can we step back without isolating, without acting against our core value of being open, generous, and embracing folks who are in pain? That’s a skill that I think can only be developed over time. I am not suggesting we make a religion out of simplicity- that can be a little dangerous. At times Thoreau seems judgmental and a little misanthropic, treating money and ownership as if they were innately bad. Instead, I am talking about disengaging from those things or activities that do not support our commitment to living from this still point. I have talked in the past about having to disengage from my own father during my early years of my Zen practice to protect myself from his negative vibes about the life choices I was making. Later, when I felt steadier in my practice and life and he had a chance to cool off about the poor decisions he was convinced I had made, I was able to engage with him again. If we divest ourselves of those things, activities, and relationships that don’t support our spiritual quest, we may experience a deep loneliness, a loneliness that I experienced in my early years of Zen practice. And it can be disappointing to discover that the feeling of loneliness can be heightened through a sitting practice. For me, at first there was a honeymoon period in both my sitting practice and my feelings about my teacher. But after a while there was just the bare wall and me, day after day, week after week… and my teacher’s words didn’t seem so compelling any more. He seemed to have no interest in the enlightenment experience I pined away for, referring to it as “giving candy to a baby.” My sense of loneliness only increased when in 1966 our little Zen center purchased and made plans to open the first Zen monastery in the U.S. at Tassajara Springs south of San Francisco. After this happened, it seemed like I couldn’t get much of my teacher’s attention and I felt jealous of all the interlopers who were flowing in. I was lonely enough that I might have abandoned my practice, but instead I increased the amount and rigor of my meditation. One evening after completing my evening sitting I happened to notice the following poem by Basho: On this road walks no one this autumn eve At that moment Tim’s so called loneliness died, and Tim did too. There was a feeling of being embraced by all of life. It reminds me of the historical Buddha’s statement, “Only I, alone and sacred.” Some Christian mystics refer to this as being alone with God, but Meister Eckhart’s, “In the godhead there is no trace of God,” is closer to my own experience. But even to call it “my own experience” doesn’t feel quite right, because it’s only when there is no sense of “my” that there is a freedom to enjoy each aspect of the turning world, no matter how crazily out of control it seems to be. As I share this with you, I do it with a little hesitancy. My own teachers didn’t talk much about these experiences, but sometimes a little candy is what we all need to sustain our commitment to tasting the sweetness continually emanating from this still point.
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The 18th century Zen adept Ryokan has some wonderful poetic expressions, which have inspired practitioners over the years. One of these is “just naturally find joy in the ever-changing flow.” To find this joy, it’s important to become adept at two types of meditation. The first type is focused meditation (the last step on the Eightfold Path), where we limit our field of awareness, using our breath, a word, or phrase that we repeat over and over, or something similar to this. The second type is bare awareness meditation (the 7th step on the Eightfold Path) in which we broaden our field of attention to include any and all sensations and feelings we are experiencing in this moment without judgment or commentary.
Focused meditation is necessary so we can cut through our obsessive monkey mind activity and tap into the quietness of the space between our thoughts. Many years ago when I was sitting in a long retreat with Suzuki Roshi, he made the following comment as we were sitting facing the wall with a fast flowing creek just outside the meditation hall. “It only takes one rock to disturb the natural flow of the creek. All you need to do in your zazen is remove that one rock.” As we become proficient in our focused meditation, we learn to dislodge one rock and then another one, whether it is an obsession, worry, fantasy, or something else. As Ryokan points out in another poem, we can overdo our focused meditation, however, trying too hard to achieve some quiet state: “The water of the valley stream never shouts at the tainted world, ‘purify yourself.’” In bare awareness meditation, instead of trying to remove the rock, we can quite naturally open our ears and hearts to the singing of the water as it moves around the rocks without trying to altar the flow at all. I spent my first couple of years as a meditator sitting in at rush hour in a building by a very busy street in San Francisco. For the first several months I struggled to block out the sounds of the cars rushing by. One morning this struggling faded away and I found myself enjoying the noises. I learned that if I welcomed the river of noise, I could enjoy floating on it and naturally let go of my thoughts and concerns. Once we have learned to practice with bare awareness of our senses, we may be ready to open our screen of awareness to whatever thoughts and feeling are circling through our minds as we meditate without judging or analyzing them. Focused meditation and bare awareness meditation can complement each other. Early in my career as a meditator I experimented with doing the two different forms. I found that bare awareness worked in some contexts, but any time I was obsessing about something, I needed to do focused meditation to calm myself down before attempting bare awareness. I still find that is the case. These days I support many of my students in doing one particular kind of focused meditation: loving kindness toward themselves. Each of us has to learn to love ourselves if we are going to be there for others in the deepest sense. And, of course, in the deepest sense, self is other and other is self. Sometimes when practitioners have extreme difficulty sending loving vibes to themselves, I encourage them to think of someone they have real affection for and invite them to sit close to them in their imagination as they are meditating. Then I encourage them to invite them to sit in their laps, continuing to send their loved one affectionate vibes. Once they have done that for a while they are often ready to show affection for themselves, and if they keep doing this practice daily they may find themselves dropping into a space of deep and powerful inner quietness. The inner critic/tyrant leaves the scene and other mental baggage falls away as well. Here’s a final poem from Ryokan, illustrating what happens when our meditation practice develops this depth: Like the little stream making its way thru the mossy crevices, I too, quietly turn clear and transparent. Both of my teachers, Suzuki Roshi and Katagiri Roshi, had a slightly different take on enlightenment than the traditional one I talked about in my last piece. This take came from the 13th century Soto Zen pioneer, Dogen.
For Dogen, enlightenment is a process rather than a spectacular event. It is not something that may happen later on. All we have to do is completely give ourselves to an activity and we will immediately experience a sense of intimacy with our activity and the world surrounding it. He calls this “practice-enlightenment.” As each event occurs we completely engage over and over with what is happening. Practice-enlightenment enables us to approach each activity with what Suzuki Roshi calls, a “beginner’s mind.” As I write these lines, if I am absorbed in my writing, it engulfs all other activities and swallows up past and future. This is what Dogen means when he says, “The time when continuous practice [gyoji] is manifested is what we call ‘Now.’” Consequently, there can be no practice without enlightenment and no enlightenment without practice. As we engage in each activity over and over, endlessly, we begin to experience each activity in selfless openness. And this is our natural way of being. “Intrinsic enlightenment,” says Dogen, “is wonderful practice.” The smallest details of meditation, ritual, manual labor, eating, bathing, and social engagement are all opportunities for practice-enlightenment. Meditation is totally stripped of its older, traditional, “in order to” function. This seems to be particularly hard for Americans, who are so result oriented. But it works! Whether we are meditating, eating, going to the toilet, or planning our day, we have the opportunity to feel a deep freedom which comes from simply giving ourselves to each activity. In our meditation practice this means, as Katagiri Roshi used to say, “not kicking out” any thought or emotion, but just shining our gentle, nonjudgmental light on it, i.e. enlightening each delusion, with no hint of comparison or judgment. Through this radical acceptance of what is, we tap into heart-mind, that still dynamic center of being, with its two gates, the gate of spaciousness and the gate of compassionate engagement with the world around us. Enlightenment! That’s been what most committed Buddhist meditation practitioners have aspired to since the historical Buddha had his awakening under the “Bodhi” (enlightenment) tree. In this piece I am going to discuss enlightenment as it is typically understood, and in my next piece I am going to discuss it from the stance of the founder of Soto Zen, Dogen, and those who have followed in his footsteps.
The promise of enlightenment is a promise that we can return to our own home, tapping into a calm sense of spaciousness that the complexities and entanglements of our mind cause us to forget. Through our meditation practice we can let go of those elaborate structures of habitual thinking and reacting, the palace and prisons in the air that we spend so much of our time living in. I have been enjoying reading the new book of talks by Katagiri Roshi, the founder of our Zen Center, called The Light That Shines Thru Infinity: Zen and the Energy of Life. Enlightenment is the way each of us thinks, feels, and acts when we’re aware of and participating in this huge energy manifesting as us. But enlightenment isn’t something that can be obtained, as this ancient Vedic story points out: A doll of salt came to the sea and discovered something she had never seen and could not possibly understand. She stood on the firm ground 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 her foot forward and touched the water. 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. 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!” When this happens, we tap into a natural empathy, which Tolstoy described as, “the day I came across my own inside, I came across everybody’s inside.” Our life doesn’t necessarily change that much afterward. Bananas still taste like bananas and harsh words are still harsh. But we’re aware of how everything permeates everything else and how everything is lit from within by the same undivided light. We still have bodies that break down and we still face conflict. We still create palaces and prisons in the air through our limited thinking. But Tim (or Zentetsu, my dharma name) no longer is confined within with his palaces or prisons. Instead, the melting of his limited identity enables him to fully appreciate and participate in the dynamic flow of life. In Zen parlance we refer to this as opening to heart-mind. Heart-mind is said to have two gates: the first opens to vastness, and the second to compassionate engagement. Only by continually going through the second gate (what I call turtle practice) do we learn to embody the sense of interconnection with everything and everyone which the salt doll discovered when it dissolved into the sea. Lately, I have been thinking about the emphasis that my root teacher, Suzuki Roshi, placed on embracing “things as it is.” To do this we need to relinquish our hold on an image of how things need to be, or should be, or might have been. By practicing not resisting what is over and over again, we begin to say “yes” to life as it is unfolding.
The well-known psychiatrist Milton Erickson referred to this as the “yes set.” In his work with clients who had an overall negative attitude, he found that if he could get them to say “yes” once, that single utterance could be an entrée into a series of yeses and that series could result in the individual beginning to say “yes” to life. Suzuki Roshi used to talk about the expectation in some Zen monasteries that a student immediately say “yes” to whatever his teacher asked him to do as a way to move out of yourself and fully embrace whatever activity is at hand. Saying “yes” can be a powerful spiritual practice. Embracing “things as it is” doesn’t mean bypassing our disappointment, sadness, or anger about something that has happened. It means accepting both the situation and the negative feeling we might have about it, without suffering about our suffering by talking to ourselves about it, which drains our energy and is a total waste of time. Suzuki’s combination of the singular and the plural in “things as it is,” while grammatically incorrect, underscores his teaching that everything is separate and yet undivided from everything else. Take the poem by the Japanese Zen master, Ryokan: the thief / left it behind, / the moon at the window Ryokan had lost all of his belongings in one fell swoop. And yet, rather than needlessly complaining about his loss, he used it as an opportunity to poetically express his embracing of “things as it is.” The moon is often used in Zen as a symbol of the enlightened mind. This mind is like the moonlight that enlivens everything it shines on. Everything is separate, and yet everything is undivided since each object bathes in the same warm glow. The neighborhood around Zen Center has become somewhat gentrified in the last couple of decades, so that it has become almost impossible to find an affordable place to rent. Someone said to me recently, “I can’t stand that our neighborhood has become so chi-chi. It shouldn’t be this way,” and then went on and on about how unfair it was. But his ranting and raving was not getting him anywhere and I began to feel exhausted listening to him. So both of us began to suffer needlessly, rather than saying, “Yes, this is the way things are,” what some Vipassana teachers have referred to as radical acceptance. Radical acceptance does not mean being a doormat, however. Once we have fully accepted something, we can move on to decide if we want to try to modify it in the future. “Yes, the neighborhood has become chi-chi and I feel sad about it, but instead of complaining I am going to do something to try to make it more livable.” Even the term “radical acceptance” is insufficient to express the warm, calming glow we can all feel when we fully embrace "things as it is." |
AuthorTim Burkett, Guiding Teacher Archives
April 2022
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