You don't exist.This statement may be a bit disconcerting until you go to the mirror and say, "Whew, there I am. That Reid, what a kidder." There is a story (probably apocryphal) of the painter Claude Monet who, upon being told by a young acolyte that he, Monet, did not exist kicked a rock and said, in essence, "There! I do exist, or what kicked that rock, you little ninny?" But we must ask this question of Monet: what if gangrene set into the toe that kicked the rock and it needed to be removed? Would you still be Monet? Naturellement!, he would no doubt reply. What if the whole leg needed to come off? Both? And both arms? What if you were whittled down, Monsieur Monet, to nothing but a brain floating in a jar and you were somehow still sentient? Would you still be Claude?
The question that arises from all of this, naturellement, is, what is your Is-ness? Where do you reside? These are the questions of anatta or non-self. One place this comes into play is when our society engages the conundrum of our attitude and actions toward a person who is demonstrably brain-dead yet whose body continues to thrive. Is this person dead? Legally? Morally? Actually? Where does (or did) she live when she was living? Any of us who have been at the bedside of a person who glides over the divide between dying and dead knows the great mystery of that moment when the body contains the essence of Being and then in a flicker does not. What was that? Where has it gone?
In the discussion of impermanence, we looked at what is never-changing in us, what never shifts and is constant from one moment or one decade to the next and concluded there is no such thing. That things change so slowly we can't detect the change is no proof that they do not; my house is falling down on my head, though it does not appear to be so; the mountains are washing away to the sea and will one day be as flat as any desert. The great ME is no less subject to change and the change occurs much more rapidly. It is visible to the naked eye, but only the eye that is trained to see it. This is one of the cardinal benefits of meditation, to slow our reversion to the blandishments of the ego to a point where we can see the essential impermanence of who we are and, by corollary, of all things.
Because we are by nature ever-shifting and this frightens the ego (or mind), it imposes on this chaos an artificial structure it sees as the lasting world. The mind is not stupid; it readily acknowledges that we age and die, though it prefers not to dwell on these distasteful truths. But as for the daily shifts in the reality of our self-ness, the mind is simply unwilling to bend that far, to see that truth. It does not require much introspection for us to realize that there is nothing very permanent here, that who we define as ME is a shape-shifting wraith and the mind's attempt to pin it down is actually a source of suffering rather than the end of suffering. The mind wants us to believe in this fantasy as a panacea. The mind believes that imposing this order (which it knows deep down is artificial and quite fragile) will be the end of fear. The amazing thing is that most of us persist in this delusion despite the fact that all evidence points to the contrary conclusion: this false order increases fear because what we deem substantial crumbles at the lightest touch. If we have placed any hope of security in these structures we are constantly rushing from one disintegrating reality to the next in a permanent state of frustration. Only fear keeps us on this futile path, yet fear is one of its primary fruits. "In discovering the origins of our suffering, we uncover how the self is created...pain needs our understanding, not our cunning," says Rodney Smith.
Whenever I think of these things, I am reminded of a moment in the film, "It's A Wonderful Life" when Burt the cop is trying to arrest Clarence the angel. Clarence evaporates into thin air and Burt is left scrabbling with nothing where a substantial being was moments before. This is how we are when the mind is left to create these airy castles for us to live in. This realization may make us feel insecure and insubstantial (Ernie the taxi driver needs a drink after seeing Clarence disappear), but is in fact reality; life is a whirling, metamorphosing, kaleidoscopic landscape, nearer Dali than Constable.
So are we simply cast adrift? Not in the slightest. For in meditation, in contemplation of the verities of what incontrovertibly exists, we realize that all of this energy devoted to the creation of a permanent self (what some teachers cleverly term "selfing") is in fact not merely futile but the very source of the insecurity it is supposed to remedy. It is in the letting go of the baubles of substantiality that a deeper awareness emerges. This awareness is without judgment, without form, without substance but nonetheless more solid than any of the fairy kingdoms to which we have pinned our hopes of relief before this realization.
What is this awareness, then? Tara Brach says, "What we are looking for is that which is doing the looking." She compares it to seeing through our eyes: while we are seeing, we cannot see the structure of the eye that is doing the seeing, yet it is there. Just so, though awareness cannot see itself perceiving, we can sense that something is always there under the whirlwind of mind's machinations and meanderings. It is in meditation that this is most readily accessed and it is perhaps the most important aspect of this practice to permit mind states to come and go without interference as a way of allowing awareness to emerge from the semblance of what passes for our day to day reality. Can we put a name or form to this awareness? No, any attempt to make of it a solid entity is the mind slipping in, once again attempting to impose a structure, engaging in "selfing" all over again.
Is this awareness, then, our soul? Is it this that passes from one life to the next, if one is to believe the entire cosmology of the Buddha? Is it this that leaves a body at death, this that we feel departing from the dying as they die? I don't pretend to know the answers to these questions, but I do know this: to cling to awareness as "me" or "mine" is to once again engage in the act of selfing, the attempt to create a lasting version of Who I Am. Awareness is far, far vaster than any such image allows for, is not personal and has no boundaries, most especially including the boundary between a discrete self and a discrete other. Allowing for mystery and not-knowing is a necessary prerequisite to letting go of the mind's urge to creation, thereby entering into a realm of true and lasting peace. Rodney Smith once again: "It feels joyful to be awake, and the mind slowly learns to trust its own quietude and persistently moves into difficult emotional experiences with ease."
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A warning: the ego finds this whole idea very threatening. I began this post a few days ago and have been letting it rest so I can edit before sending it this weekend. That whole time my mind has been struggling to assert itself as being in charge (and being mighty grouchy about it, too). But really, the mind's fears are misplaced. Of course the egoic mind exists; after all, what is writing this post? (What could be more like the ego than to think that such concepts can be reduced to mere words?) What is important to recall is that what we call our "selves" are really just constructs, things we have created to get along in the world. It is not a problem that we have a self that exists in time and space; the problem comes when we believe that it is the primary manifestation of our being. Rodney Smith says that "spiritual growth is a fine-tuning of our ear to the needs of the heart."
The way I look at it, the mind is a tool and a very powerful one. We can take it down from the shelf to pay the bills, do our day-to-day work, plan our week, write our blog, but then it is most useful back on the shelf so we can then spend the majority of our time in bare awareness (a difficult but not impossible aspiration). Mind you, that's not to say there cannot be a great deal of awareness in the mundane tasks of everyday life. But the mind is best suited to these concrete tasks and putting it in charge of everything we think and feel and are is like putting a three-year-old in charge of a nuclear reactor. No wonder we melt down so often. Extending the metaphor of the mind as a power tool, we can imagine that it is a circular saw: very effective at cutting wood, something of a mess when asked to cut birthday cake. Our life is mostly cake; the mind is not the correct tool for comprehending it. Awareness is a way of being that lets cake be cake.
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