Do you pay regular visits to yourself?

  

“We meet at this appointed time.

You’ve read where it says that

Lovers pray constantly.

Once a day, once a week, five times an hour,

Is not enough. Fish like we

Need the ocean around us.

Do camel-bells say, Let’s meet again

Thursday night?

Ridiculous. They jingle

Together continuously,

Talking while the camel walks.

Do you pay regular visits to yourself?

Don’t argue or answer rationally.

And dying, reply.”

 

From The Illumined Rumi, p. 122

 

All traditions claim they have the answers. But those answers must somehow come from within. Answers that come from books or someone else don’t satisfy, they are empty answers. They are somebody else’s answer. 

 

So we die to ourselves, our small selves, as Rumi suggests, and are reborn, in a sense, in present moment awareness. 

 

H.M.L. Poonja is said to have remarked to one of his students: “You visited the travel agent, bought the ticket, packed your bags, now why do you keep getting out of your seat to push the plane? Buckle up and enjoy the ride.”

 

So much of this work is about undoing.  Not pushing the river. We enjoy the ride of the present moment.

 

It’s about releasing resistance to experiencing what is. Subtle agendas so easily creep in to our practice. We release them, too.

 

All we can take care of is this present moment. We simply surrender (and die) to what is. 

 

Meditation is a path of coming home to who we are right now, not getting some mystical or altered states or changing into some fabulous new person.

 

Joy, freedom, truth, beauty is always right here. We relax back into inhabiting what we are, being who we already are.

 

At first we need to establish a regular practice, we pay regular visits to ourselves, as Rumi instructs. Later, we pray constantly, as Rumi suggests, by releasing into the present moment no matter what that’s like.

 

What keeps us trapped are the deeply seated habits of manipulating and resisting our present moment experience.

 

Our lives are like a cocoon in which we try really hard to stay comfortable and cozy and safe. Yet it’s stale in the cocoon. We recognize at some level that we have an ache in our heart that we are holding back somehow, we are not living up to what we are spiritually capable of, by reinforcing this cocoon of the small, fearful self. 

 

Many of us deeply sense this pervasive sense of lack. 

 

This sense of lack is perpetuated by our identification with thought. I can’t remember now who made this remark, but it’s on target: thinking is the ego’s foot soldiers. 

 

We identify with thinking as belonging to us. 

 

At best, thinking is an approximate symbolic representation of reality. The problem is that we often let thinking take the place of reality. 

 

In meditation we clearly see how thought diverts our attention into the past or the future. When we mature in the practice we learn to rest in the present moment, in the heart of reality. 

 

That’s why the core instruction in our practice is to simply recognize thinking as thinking and return to the moment to moment experience of body sensations or sound. Sounds and body sensations are unfolding in the heart of reality. 

 

We just rest backwards into what is. What we seek is what we are. 

 

This essential backward step, as they say in zen, is described beautifully by the poet David Whyte in his poem Tilocho Lake: 

 

“In this high place

it is as simple as this,

leave everything you know behind.

Step toward the cold surface,

say the old prayer of rough love

and open both arms.

 

Those who come with empty hands

will stare into the lake astonished,

there, in the cold light

reflecting pure snow,

 

the true shape of your own face.” 

 

David Whyte, from Where Many Rivers Meet

Twenty minutes more or less

 

 ”My fiftieth year had come and gone,
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop,
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table-top.
While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and could bless.”

W. B. Yeats (1865-1939), in part IV of his poem “Vacillation” from The Winding Stair and Other Poems, (1933)

This poem for me speaks of being surprised by rapture, when the soul is at ease perhaps, or not, of moments where for no apparent reason, we find ourselves relishing the sweet taste of pure, causeless joy.

The poet is sitting in a crowded London shop, could it like sitting in a coffee shop in our day, alone with our thoughts, thinking of the passage of time. His fiftieth year had come and gone. He was reading a book, it seems, and now he has left the pages to allow his mind to wander, to look around, and to take in the sights of the crowded shop. The open book and the empty cup no longer have much pull, as they rest on the marble table-top.

Then his body of a sudden blazed. His mind is no longer wandering, no longer seemingly melancholic. And his happiness in that moment was so great that religious tones now appear-he felt in his bones that he was blessed and could bless.

Twenty minutes more or less, to me sounds timeless, and a bit playful.

We could read into this all sorts of things, and it doesn’t matter, really, what actually happened. What matters for me is the evocative quality. Of feeling our aliveness break through the slumber of our humdrum days. We sense this in so-called special moments, of noticing a child’s first tooth, or a sunset, a birth or a death.

Meditation turns special moments on their head. For twenty minute so we explore how it is we succumb to the tranquilization of the trivial, the numbness of the mundane. It turns out we don’t need special moments to do this. All moments are seen as special.

For twenty minutes or so we enter the timeless, we take our seat in eternity.

The poet speaks of his body being ablaze. It’s interesting he doesn’t mention his mind. At the beginning of this excerpt he is self-centered, melancholic. For twenty minutes his body comes alive.

Let’s not underestimate the power of our simple practice. We sit, we become aware of sounds, and then we settle the mind into the sensuous, lush undulations of body sensations. We shift from being a witness to our life to living our life moment by moment within the fold of our life. Within the beating, rising and falling heart of experience itself.

For twenty minute more or less we morph into reality itself, bare, bottomless, and beautiful beyond description.

We allow our body to live its life. And it responds by suddenly blazing into life.

The gateway to the blaze of bliss is simply the willingness to feel. To feel the body just as it is, moment by moment. We can call this willingness to feel openness.

This week I spoke a little about openness, with a little help from the dictionary. One definition of to open is to unclose so as to allow passage. Another is to unlock, to remove the covering. Two others which are particularly appropriate for us are to make known what is happening and to burst and discharge, as in an old wound.

Openness is not a goal; rather it’s a relationship to what is happening as its happening. And since what is happening is already happening, there isn’t much room here for accomplishments, effort or special feats.

I feel we could summarize the whole spiritual path with the acronym O.I. A. – openness, intimacy and acceptance. In the next two weeks I would like to explore with you the remaining two aspects of intimacy and acceptance.

become a wizard of ahs

What happens when we sit down to meditate? We begin to see the movements of mind. Many of the movements are away from the perceived objects of our experience. Let’s call this the movement of rejection.

There’s an itch, or a jarring sound, or an sudden upheaval of thoughts, and if we look carefully there is usually some tiny micro-moment when we say no to that experience.  Huge strata of our personality may be formed by millions of unexamined micro rejections leading to a baseline restlessness as a constant background hum in the mind.

We could also say there are counter movements of rushing after other types of experiences we feel are pleasant–ego aggrandizing fantasies, indulgences, judgments. But every time there is a preference or indulgennce  in one aspect of our experience can we see that there is a simultaneous rejection of another?

When we say this usually inaudible, pre-verbal ’no’ in the mind, it sets in motion a division and sets the stage for inner conflict. We take sides with one of these self-created divisions in our own mind, and it is as seemingly innocuous as a reaction to a sound of a car going by as we settle down to meditate on the breath.

A subtle snowball of rejection can start. There is little psychic build-up and we don’t ant to fell this. So it gets covered up and defended against, and resisted more. You may become aware that you are pushing away  little psychic snowball and reject that you are rejecting.

Welcome to the vicious cycle of rejection, division, and conflict that is our mind. Although the mind couches this all as a rejection of some external thing (the car, our partner, etc), progress happens when we can see this as a rejection of our own experience. It’s a rejection of our-self.

Watching our two children go from little babies into young children has really help me see some of the processes that often go unnoticed in meditation practice. With this cycle of rejection process I recall when our fist child Uila was a baby, how her little body would express the natural tension from hunger or the need to void. Then the flow into tension reduction as Katina or I would help soothe her back into a return to contentment.

Sometimes if there is a delay in tension reduction, if a parent is not available emotionally, the return to contentment doesn’t get established as a norm. There can be a disturbance is feeling an innate confidence in our own return to contentment.

I like to consider this innate confidence a trust in the natural flow of experience. When there is an erosion of this basic trust we start to lose confidence in our-self. There is a primitive split in the mind. The self is split against itself.

We see this over and over in our mind as we mediate (most of us, anyway,I would say). We replay this dynamic over and over again. Much of meditation initially is watching ourselves get swamped  by the movements of the mind.

We see that although we want to accept our inner experience, it ain’t easy. Much of what we call our self , our ego, was formed by millions of rejections. Rejection is the coin of the realm of self. One could even say that a personality formed as a rejection of the warm, deep expanse of the timeless nature of being. Perhaps.

We need to start someplace in our meditation. We start by seeing that many of our initial experiences in meditation are witnessing attempts at acceptance are actually just more subtle forms of rejection.

There’s a line from Krishnamurti which comes up a lot for me:

“If you begin to understand what you are without trying to change it, then what you are undergoes a transformation.”

The moment you start thinking of changing yourself you are rejecting yourself. This is so clear in meditation.

So what to do?

Simple. 3 points:

relaxation

observation

non-interference.

The skill ids not necessarily to say yes to our inner experiences in meditation but simply o see how we are rejecting them at a subtle level.

(to be continued) ….

dropping into the depths

As we get into our yoga and meditation practice, we naturally start dropping into deeper and deeper places within.  We see how this dropping down requires some initial effort. We become aware of the tremendous hold the “surface” has on us, how it holds us in its web of chatter, worry, anxiety and incessant wants.  

One of the reasons we practice pranayama (breathing techniques) after the posture sequences and before meditation is because it infuses a type of energy (prana) which we can use to break free of this gravitational pull of the surface mind.  Without this prana we are left at the mercy of the mind, and this can be very disconcerting, especially if you are new to meditation. One teacher simply says “assume the mind is mad!”—and by this she means the mind is a maelstrom of often unfettered conflicting impulses, get used to it! 

Thankfully with the aid of the postures (asanas) and pranayama we can ride the prana energy into the deep mind fairly easily. It just takes a little practice. Once in the depths the challenge is to maximize our time there, and to integrate it into our life. 

As we follow the breath, or the silent mantra, within, we sense an inner existence quite different from any other we have ever known. Hang out there. Learn to abide in the depths. Nourish yourself in its healing waters. 

The within has a great power to effect the without. In fact, you may experience what I call a figure/ ground reversal, where you perceive quite vividly and unambiguously that the without is actually contained in the within! 

I am often asked: How can I tell if I am in the depths? What does this mean? What do we sense and feel in the depths?  

Here are a few experiences you may have as you move deeper and deeper within: 

You will feel calm and peaceful. 

In the depths there is a feeling of lightness, softness, and sweetness.  

There may be an indescribably pleasant joy of existence itself.   

As you hang out in the joy within, a kind of placid patience develops. It may feel like an inner poise. 

As someone mentioned tonight, you become more in tune with your intuitive self. 

This inner poise is the wellspring of creativity.

As you learn to go into the depths in your daily practice, it becomes easier and easier to repeat the experience. 

When you go deeper and deeper into the inner depths you connect with the deepest aspects of your soul (let’s not get caught up in terminology, you can call it whatever you like). There you sense the deepest meaning and purpose of your life. 

When you live in the deepest aspect of your soul you easily connect with the world. You naturally and spontaneously feel the global sense of things. You connect more deeply with other and empathize naturally.  

Over time and with practice you connect with the source of all existence. This is called enlightenment, although I have never cared for the word. 

The challenge is to integrate the depths into all aspects of our life. This is a lifetime’s work, not because it is necessarily hard, but because the possibilities are infinite, and infinitely delightful!  

to sit or not to sit

This issue: to sit or not to sit?  

Merely stating this issue brings up a legion of other issues, many of which go unchallenged and unrecognized in the awareness of a potential meditator. To tackle one issue inevitably begs other, lateral questions.  

As an instructor, I am somewhat aware of the dynamics involved in teaching. If an instructor says, for example, that one must practice meditation 20 minutes a day at least four days a week for several months in order to make progress, all sorts of reactions may begin to occur. Here is a major one (I’m sure you may have many more to add):  

A part of us will rebel against this. (That’s just one reason I sometimes say “don’t meditate” — that way the pressure is off, and you might even rebel against the “don’t meditate” message and experiment with meditation on your own terms).  A part of us may become colonized, ideologically and perhaps even more insidiously, by the meditation instructions and “the path.”  

This is a phenomenon that I became much more aware of when I began teaching meditation than when I was a student. As a student, I would just do the instruction diligently, thinking that the instruction was helping me see things the way they truly are. When I was observing my breath, for instance, I believed that the instruction to notice the rise and fall of my abdomen was getting me to see the fundamental truth of rising or falling, or as my teachers put it, the “arising and passing away of phenomena.”  

It took me a long time to realize that this was just a concept, albeit one that was implanted in the instruction.  

It took me even longer to see more clearly how everything is seen through a lens.  

There are many concepts that are similarly implanted in instructions: being aware of each breath = being in the present moment is a major one. Another one is that staying with body sensations or thoughts as they arise, hang around for a while, then pass away = the purification of the mind, the production of wisdom and the elimination of the grasping ego.  

These and other concepts are as much a part of the instruction as the rules inherent in the instruction–the foremost being something like “don’t break the rules!”  

One reason perhaps why people are reluctant to break the rules implanted in meditation instructions is that he fell that if they do, the promise of realizing the concept embedded in them will remain unfulfilled.  

It becomes almost second nature to think that by dropping the practice of staying with the breath, or that “failing” at the instruction by “wandering off”, that one will never find a way to be in the present moment or know how “the true nature” of things.  

The number of such potentially harmful concepts embedded in traditional meditation instruction in my view is quite large.  

So what to do? 

I encourage independent meditation. I also encourage a return to the relaxed simplicity we knew as children. By independent meditation I mean–do what you feel is helpful, but really examine the process by yourself. Consider the option of meditation when you feel like it, not because you feel you have to. Try giving up all ideas about “discipline” and see how that affects your life.  

Don’t meditate. 

For a long time. 

Then try a period of “free” meditation–ideologically and process wise. Choiceless awareness.  

Some meditators stick by their technique because the feeling of the rightness of the instruction may come from perceived rightness of the concepts embedded in it. The thinking goes like this: If I believe in this particular concept, say that being in the present moment = ultimate reality, then I will learn an instruction that will lead me to being in the present moment all the time. The idea, or promise of the idea, basically sells the meditation instruction.  

Try letting all this kind of thinking go. But to do that you need to be aware that you might have some unexamined “thinking” going on along these lines.  

There are also concepts that operate as instructions on their own: just let go, do not cling to anything, accept all that comes, be equanimous, love yourself, empty your mind, and a whole bunch of others.  

One huge question I have been playing with all these years of teaching meditation simply this: Is it possible for people to meditate without embedded concepts? Is this beneficial?  

I’ll leave this question, in the true spirit of independent meditation, up to you to decide!  

The above thoughts are questions relate to technique and rationale. There are another set of questions that arise at the beginning when the issue arises to sit or not to sit. 

This branch of questions deal with “Why meditate.” Or, more precisely, if the present moment’s experience cannot be improved or changed, what then are we trying to do by meditation? In Zen it is the old question “If we are already Buddha, what are we trying to accomplish by meditating?”  

“From the beginning, all beings are Buddha;
Like water and ice, without water no ice,
Outside us, no Buddhas.
How near the Truth, yet how far we seek?”

Hakuin Zenji (1686 1769) 

I’ve written about this a number of times (see ”Chasing phantom treasure,” “The monkey pod tree in the park” and other essays). This question has been addressed by many traditions and perhaps is the most important of all questions. 

This question is also at the root of what in our group has become known as “Marv’s question ” (Tom says sitting is not necessary, that we don’t need to strive, but Tom himself strove for years, so isn’t the instruction to not strive based on the result of the years of striving Tom did; therefore, given Tom’s unabashed history of spiritual striving, doesn’t this invalidate the instruction for us students, as clearly Tom’s striving allowed him to “reach” some special state?)  

I grow tired of the many stock, almost hackneyed answers to this important question. I find these type of answers jumping out of modern day teachers of nonduality, in the abstruse zen lore of old and in the tantric teachings.  

Please consider a totally fresh take on this by Genpo Roshi, an elder statesman of North American Zen, who has produced two excellent DVDS entitled “The Big Mind Process.” I had put these on suggested viewing list over a year ago on the website. I will make copies available on to the Wednesday group now that we have a new DVD burner. Genpo Roshi does an excellent job of settling this. He answers the seemingly unanswerable “Marv’s question.” I highly recommend these DVDs. 

After all, it will only be answered in your own direct experience of the spacious immediacy of that which is before good and bad. Or as Hui-neng (638-713), asked “Without making good or bad in that moment, what is your original face before your parents were born ?” 

not knowing is most intimate

Some thoughts about the essence of our meditation practice. An exchange between Zen teachers old (9th century China, I believe).

Fayan was going on pilgrimage.

Dizang said, “Where are you going?”

Fayan said, “Around on pilgrimage.”

Dizang said, “What is the purpose of pilgrimage?”

Fayan said: “I don’t know.”

Dizang said, “Not knowing is most intimate.”

This points to the essence of our meditation practice. When we sit and settle our body and begin to explore that unique space that opens up when we close our eyes, the tactile dimension of pure body sensations, the sonic realm of sounds arising and passing in the tropical coolness of early evening or morning, and the mental landscape of memories and chatter, can we just be present with life just as it is in this moment?

This opening and letting be reveals our essential innocence. An innocence of preconceptions and expectations, judgments and opinions. Suzuki Roshi called this “beginner’s mind.” Here is his line from his book “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind’.

“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”

Beginner’s mind is just to be present to explore and observe and take in things as they are. I am reminded of beginner’s mind many times a day being a dad to our four year old Kupai and our eight year old Uila. There is this simple curiosity and fascination kids have with things we adults take for granted and even label “concrete thinking.” Sitting in his car seat Kupai asked us the question many parents hear dozens of times a day “why?” It could have been a why that arose in his mind when we were talking about needing to get to the ATM, or the gas station. One of us asked him “Did you say why again?” He replied, “No I didn’t say why again, I said why.”

Meditation is more about the simple open ended question of a four year old — why? But in our case we let go of the need, the compulsion, for an answer, and simply rest in the asking. In this resting we relax into the curiosity and wonder and amazement of a four year old child.

Can we live our lives this way? Meditation is an invitation to regard all of the aspects of our lives with beginner’s mind.

We all have a hard time doing this as we have acquired habits of fixing, holding and controlling life. Children begin to lose this innocence, and I can see this process now in our eight year old. We all want to know and have the power we think comes from knowing.

Dizang said, “Not knowing is most intimate.”

In meditation we allow ourselves to be intimate with ourselves. Meditation reveals how many fixed ideas and opinions we have. How much judgment, expectation, and how much preconception we carry around with us all the time.

There’s another old Zen story that I like very much. A monk comes to the monastery of Zhaozhou and asks for teaching. The master asks him, “Have you had your breakfast?” The monk says that he has. “Then wash your bowls,” is the teacher’s reply, and the only instruction he offers.

Zhaozhou wants to bring the monk down to the immediate present moment, as if saying “Don’t look for some profound metaphysical or yogic instructions here. Be present to this moment.”

But we seem to be looking for something other than what’s right here in this moment. This moment is often seen as a barrier to overcome so that we can at some later moment get whatever it is we thought we were looking for when we got into this meditation stuff. But at some point it begins to dawn on us that there is no other moment.

Then everything becomes very simple. We sit with awareness of the body, or the breath. We let thought and feeling come up but we don’t make a big deal out of anything. We let whatever comes up to come up naturally, without resistance. Stuff comes up, and we appreciate it, and we let it go. We don’t get tangled up in a web of complication. As we sit this way, judgments begin to fall away. We allow ourselves to fully be who we are. And we realize we are profoundly happy.

Dizang said, “Not knowing is most intimate.”