Delight

I think I missed the point of my own post last week. I knew what I wanted to say when I started, but then lost sight of it. It goes something like this:

What we need to work toward is taking delight in the everyday. This is the very nature of nirvana. When we think of the mundane as a drag, as things to be gotten through so the Real Living can begin, we miss out on the treasure hidden within every moment.

There is a story of a man who went all over the world seeking riches, yet when he came home, broken and old, he was told by a deity to dig beneath his house, where he found a box full of the greatest treasure he could imagine. At which (so the story goes) he promptly died. A little heavy-handed, perhaps, this tale, but you get what it's saying. When we ignore the treasure in our midst we live our lives in the grasp of greed, the constant seeking for something other than what we have. The treasure of meditative awareness is contained in every minute detail of our lives; it is always and forever available to us.

Nothing could be more mundane than the breath, yet this is what many of us choose as the focus of our meditation. It is prosaic and boring, ever-present and mostly unvarying (at least we hope so!) Yet think of where we would be without it (well, we wouldn't be without it, of course). Another story: a young Zen monk sitting by the shore of a river with his master was complaining that the breath was boring, that he couldn't imagine spending the rest of his life contemplating something so unbearably common. Without a word, the master grasped the young man and thrust his head under water (in these stories, Zen masters are always incredibly strong), holding him there just long enough to make his point, then asking, "Now, my brother, what do you think of the breath?" Which also reminds me of the comic in which a young monk is sitting next to an old monk and the latter is saying, "What do you mean, 'what next?' This is it."

Which is not to say we should set out to glorify the breath. It truly is simply a part of being, with us from birth to death, constant as a metronome and about as interesting. What we need to do, though, it take this as our cue to elevate everything we experience to the level of valued teacher. Every meal we eat, every heartbeat, every step we take, each tick of a clock, every horn honking in the street; sitting, standing, lying down, toileting, bathing, brushing our teeth, walking down stairs, taking out the garbage—all are grist for the meditative mill, if we allow them to be. I have seen this shift occur in me in the middle of doing something I consider boring or merely necessary—when I wake up to the meditative possibilities, it transforms the event into something holy. Pretty neat trick to play when picking up trash or washing the dishes. Suddenly my every motion becomes a dance, where every step is known, not just taken.

Instead, what we most often do is dismiss these as the bridge between meaningful activities, missing the value of the breath, the treasure under our floor, right under our noses. While we wait for the gift to be delivered, we fail to unwrap the hundreds we already have. But how does one do this? In any moment, we can stop. Unless the house is literally on fire, we can stop, just for the moment it takes to bring awareness into what we are doing. It changes everything.

This is, I think, what I was trying to say about meditation in my last post. When I think of myself as too busy (or too tired, bored, or important; what have you) to sit in meditation, I am exhibiting this very dismissal of the gifts in front of me. It's not that meditation is a brief foray into the spiritual; rather, it is a training ground for all of life, a reminder that the normal, the everyday, is where enlightenment lies. The most significant moment in my meditation is the moment I decide I will sit, for in that moment I have come to a recognition of the value of the practice and have shaken off the imperious voice of my mind telling me I have more important things to do.

This does not mean that all of  life must be mundane in order to find awareness; on the contrary, few things could be more meditative than those that are exciting or daring. The concept of "flow" teaches us that some of the most clearly concentrated moments of our lives are when we are thoroughly engaged with an activity, and nothing demands this of us quite so clearly as the extremes. You had damn well better be thoroughly concentrated when rock climbing or hang-gliding, or you might not survive the experience! But to seek these adrenaline rushes as the be-all of our lives is also to miss the point. All of life has the mundane in it, and all of the mundane has the Buddha in it. It really is no more complicated than that. We would like it to be more complex, because that would make us Important, but, truly, one may find ultimate peace and harmony while dusting the furniture. It's up to us.

Eightfold Path: more thoughts on Wise Mindfulness

There is a story about Sylvia Boorstein, who once asked an Asian scholar-monk, who had been studying the dharma for many decades, if he could encompass the teachings in one sentence, what it would be. The bhikkhu promptly replied: "Know what you're doing."

Another story: Joseph Goldstein was teaching a retreat and a young man came to him and said something like, "My shoulders are so tight and I know it's because of my job and my relationship..." and on and on and on. Joseph said, "You mean your shoulders are tight." "Yes," replied the student, and then launched into a historical analysis of what in his childhood and young adulthood might have lead to such a state of being. Joseph replied, "You mean your shoulders are tight." Apparently this exchange went on for quite a while until the young man suddenly realized the truth in what Joseph was saying: what was really happening was that he was experiencing a tightness in his shoulders and that was all. The rest is what in Buddhist circles is known as "proliferation", an attempt to explain, analyze, justify and solve what is happening. It's not hard to see that awareness of the physical sensation is the work of consciousness and proliferation the work of the overactive mind.

Mindfulness is this simple knowing. What the mind doesn't understand is that all the explanations in the world are unlikely to be helpful in finding peace and deep awareness. On the contrary, when we are busy 'splainin' (as Ricky Ricardo would say), awareness has no chance to enter in. Much of modern psychology reinforces this misconception by promoting the idea that we must dig down deep and find the sources of our neuroses before they can be "cured". This is dubious advice, if only because the sources may well be buried so deep in our psyches that all the mining in the world would never bring that ore to the surface. It is also doubtful that this is a useful exercise in any case. To assign blame or responsibility, you have no doubt noticed, is no path to healing.

The Buddha's answer was bare attention, the cultivation of thoroughly knowing what is happening in this moment. "Bare Attention," writes Nyanaponika Thera in The Heart of Buddhist Meditation, "...allows things to speak for themselves, without interruption by final verdicts pronounced too hastily. Bare Attention gives them a chance to finish their speaking, and one will thus get to learn that, in fact, they have much to say about themselves, which formerly was mostly ignored by rashness or was drowned in the inner and outer noise in which ordinary man normally lives."

Eightfold Path: Wise Concentration

Thinking is essential to wisdom, but you cannot think your way to wisdom. This may seem a conundrum, but is actually the explication of a truth we know in our deepest selves but cannot always bring to the surface of our understanding.

When we are born, we do not have wisdom. Though some infants seem more wise than others, the judgment and awareness essential to wisdom can only arise through experience. Infants are information-gathering machines and it would be grand to have the capacity for taking in the world around us we did at that age. But eventually we accumulate enough awareness of the world to form opinions and strategies for navigating that world as we move into it as thinking beings. We encounter loss, pain, disappointment and limitations and must find our way through these. Thought and the formation of lasting impressions are essential to this process; otherwise we would simply repeat the same mistakes over and over without learning how to avoid them.

Eventually, though (for most of us, at least), this thought formation begins to feel unsatisfying. We sense that there is something more to the world, that its patterns and synchronicity cohere into more than the sum of its parts. We seek for this deeper meaning in a variety of ways, many of them futile and some of them destructive. Many get stuck in this stage. Some of us find a spiritual discipline which answers many of the nagging questions of wisdom's path. But inevitably we come up against the frontier beyond which thinking cannot take us further. This can be very frustrating. From our earliest thoughts until this moment, thinking has carried us through, kept us safe, given us the information we needed to negotiate the world. But it cannot take us further.

One metaphor which speaks to me is that of light. As we mature, we turn on more and more lights in our mind. We begin in darkness, lacking wisdom. Slowly we turn on lights as we learn. But the brightest of lights will never cut through the wall of our final darkness unless it is focused into a laser-like beam of unforced, unmitigated, unfiltered concentration.

This is an uncomfortable point in our development. We have always been able to think our way through any problem and find a solution. The powerful tool that is the mind has been our constant companion and surest safeguard against the depredations of the world. But now we have reached a point where the mind is no longer useful, where yet more thought will not lead us any closer to the naked truth we seek.

For this we turn to the power of concentration. Anyone who has practiced meditation for any time at all has had the experience of insight spontaneously arising when the mind is stilled. No matter what the specifics of our practice may be, if we focus our minds on a neutral object rather than on an object of inquiry, insight has the opportunity to arise. Without concentration, such an arising cannot take place—there is no room in our heads or our hearts for this to occur. The vacuum created in the absence of thought allows insight to arise.

This is illogical. (It just occurred to me when I wrote those words that Spock of Star Trek fame was very logical and because of this was sometimes not very wise). Logic is the purview of the mind. At some point in our lives we believe that logic holds the answers to all questions (most of us have encountered ten-year-olds who know everything because they have made this discovery). Coming up against the illogical barrier of the end of the usefulness of thought is very disconcerting. Nonetheless, in order to move beyond the land of limited wisdom, we must drop thought altogether.

Concentration is almost absurdly easy to develop in the short term, which is one of the reasons it may not seem very important to the thinking mind. All we need do is find an object upon which we can entirely focus our attention. The formula is simple: the more thoroughly we focus that attention, the more insight and its fruit, wisdom, can arise. We choose a neutral object about which we do not hold a strong opinion, such as the breath. (We can only imagine what would come of choosing something like our mothers or our jobs as the object of our attention; we hold many, many opinions about these and would spin off into thought and be entirely lost to concentration before we even began). There is nothing special about choosing the breath; it is constantly available and entirely neutral and therefore extremely useful for this. Other than our opinion that it is a good idea to keep doing it, we tend to accept breathing as it is.

The difficulty, if it can be called such, is that concentration on our object of attention cannot be sustained without vigorous, constant effort to train the mind to do so. As our practice progresses, we can sustain concentration more often and for longer periods. As we do this, we find that insight arises of its own accord. We are then on the road to wisdom. Every time a thought intrudes into our meditation, we gently turn our attention back toward the object of concentration. We do this over and over and over. This is compared quite often and (I think) appropriately to the training of a puppy. We ask the mind to sit. To stay. To heel. Over and over we gently, gently condition the mind to focus attention until (in theory, at least) this becomes second nature and our preferred state of being. Thinking can then become a tool we use when it is helpful but put on the shelf when it ceases to be so. Even when not in formal meditation we can return to untrammeled concentration except in those moments and situations in which thought is useful. This is the goal of this part of our practice, to come to the realization that there is a greater consciousness beyond the thinking mind. We have access to this at any time and under any conditions. But when the mind takes up so much of the foreground of our awareness, it can seem as if these thoughts are all there is. Concentration is the key that opens the door to the larger awareness, to freedom from compulsive thinking and to wisdom.