Cutting the cake

A carpenter spent the morning cutting planks with his circular saw. In the afternoon he was called into the house to celebrate a birthday. Someone asked him to cut the cake. His first thought was of the morning's task of cutting, so he ran to the shop and got his saw.

The mind is a power tool. It is very useful. One could not cut the planks of a daily life without it. But it does rather make a mess of cake. And here's the thing: most of life is cake. Which is to say, most of life is not subject to being helped or influenced by the mind. But the mind is seductive. Because it is very effective in solving the mundane, we can end up living in the nearly universal hallucination that it is useful in every situation, when in fact most of the time it is either useless or makes an entire muddle of things, destroys the very cake it had intended to make more palatable.

If you are deciding what to have for dinner or driving a car or planning a wedding, the mind is essential. But if you are contemplating what your life means, the mind is almost entirely useless. One of the primary ways in which meditation is useful is as a reminder that there is more than one tool in your shed.

I had a bit of a crisis last week, and fortunately I had already arranged to speak with a spiritual adviser who has been helping me for several years. She reminded me of the many tools I have available to me, but her most important nudge was to realize that I need not stay in the Small Mind, that a broader perspective, a bigger container, is always available to me. The mind tries to solve problems it cannot solve, tries to use it's power to overwhelm that which is not responsive to this bullish approach. The mind seems to reason that, since it can solve a quadratic equation, it really ought to be able to solve a human life, to resolve the problems of others, and make sense of everything in the world. It blindly thrashes about in these swamps and (most amazing of all) never concludes that it is incapable of doing anything constructive there, despite the fact that it never does.

The essence of the Buddha's teaching is that we live in misery as long as we subject ourselves to the deluded reign of the Small Mind, but that we can be free in any moment. This amazes me. We can actually choose in any moment to be entirely free. We can reach Nirvana right now, if only we are willing to give up our addiction to that small sense of self. But, oh, how powerful the hold of that wily monster! If only I can figure this out just so, if only I persist in seeking my goals, if only I make one more push to make life perfect, I will get over the wall, come out on top, be the man I want to be and then and only then will I begin the work that will lead to freedom. But that day never comes. There is always another day of striving and then another and then we die. And in the Buddhist cosmology (whether we choose to believe in this or not), when we die we get up and do it all over again, until we finally, finally have enough experience of the futility of dependence on the Small Mind that we give it up and reach for the only thing that can give us true freedom, which is immersion in the larger consciousness that does not need to control outcomes or reactions, that can accept this moment as the only time there is, as it is.

Easier said than done, of course. I understand all of this intellectually, yet here I am. There are very few contemporary people who claim to have reached enlightenment, yet there are millions who have a profound understanding of what it would take to get there. Though I believe with all my heart that it is simply a matter of making a decision to live entirely within the here and now that leads to complete freedom, this decision is analogous to leaping off a cliff because you have been told by trusted teachers and have thoroughly come to believe you will fly when you do. It's one thing to believe it with all your heart; it's quite another to jump.

Because to make this leap is to leave this life behind. Not in the flesh, but in the mundane way I live day to day. I would never be the same. I would feel a joy beyond measure and would know no fear. I would have everything I require and want for nothing. I would be free in a way I have never known, or known only fleetingly.

But it's a lot to give up, to no longer believe I can solve the world like a crossword puzzle, to stop believing I can build a successful life on a foundation of profound thought. It can't be done, though. We can't think our way into freedom. Even the wry commentary going on in my head right now about how the Small Mind rushes in to fill every void is the Small Mind rushing in to fill a void. This is why meditation is so important. There is a mistaken impression among many people (some of them quite experienced meditators) that the purpose of meditation is to tame thought or keep it at bay, that thoughts are the enemy of lasting peace. Nothing could be further from the truth. What meditation teaches us about thought is simply that there is something other than thought. We can go entire days, weeks, months, or years—an entire lifetime, even—living in nothing but thought, to the point where we come to believe that thought and the products of thought are all there is. Meditation tells us otherwise. If we can contemplate the fact of thought and allow it to pass, there must be a consciousness that is capable of viewing thought without being thought. This is a profound and necessary realization. This way freedom lies.