Beliefs about Shifting into Nonduality

There's been a shift lately in the way I move into nonduality.

In the beginning, it seemed that I needed someone else to, as it were, thrust me there. (This is commonly called "transmission.") And once I found a someone who did that, I became attached and assumed that I needed that person to "go there."

Later, I became able to do it myself, and could initiate others in the same way others had played that role for me. But, unlike most people -- who first find nondual space inside themselves while meditating -- for me I always needed to be looking outward to gauge when the shift happened. When I could I see the emptiness, I knew I was there. 

It's only more recently -- and I mean in the past weeks at most -- that I've been able to find that same emptiness inside. There's a shift and I notice that the bodily space is "empty" -- just as I have been used to noticing that the outer world is pervaded with emptiness. The way I move into that space is simply to notice that thoughts have been filling the space! Without thought, it's empty.

But what I want to talk about here is not this process but about how hard it seems for most of us to move from our beginning point to the point where we notice that the emptiness is omnipresent. For me, and for some others I've spoken with, there was a belief that the way I was first initiated was the way it had to work. In my case, because it came through people who were in the teacher role, I believed that that person -- whoever it was at the time -- had to be in that role for me or I couldn't find what I was looking for. In a friend's case, he has had the belief that he has to go through some kind of suffering and then move into the body to find the emptiness and therefore relief from the suffering. It's a very different process from mine but it's similar in that there is a belief that there is a "way to do it," and, more important, an implicit belief that it is the ONLY way to do it. 

Of course, the way we learn in the practical world is to find some practice that works and keep repeating it. The more urgent it is to get whatever it is right, the more likely we are to follow the path that has worked before. We might be willing to try a different way of making a pie, for example, but we are less likely to experiment with another way of crossing the street.  And moving into the awake energy is certainly as important as getting across the street safely, so it makes sense that we believe that whatever way we first discovered to do that seems, maybe for a long time, to be the ONLY way.

TWO ACCOUNTS OF NONDUAL AWAKENING: WHICH IS MORE AUTHENTIC -- AND WHY?

 First Account:

    "I have no descriptive talent, I don't know the words to paint a picture; I can't tell you, so as to make you see it, how grand the sight was that was displayed before me as the day broke in its splendor. Those mountains with their deep jungle, the mist still entangled in the treetops, and the bottomless lake far below me. The sun caught the lake through a cleft in the heights and it shone like burnished steel. I was ravished with the beauty of the world. I'd never known such exaltation and such a transcendent joy. I had a strange sensation, a tingling that arose in my feet and traveled up to my head, and I felt as though I were suddenly released from my body and as pure spirit partook of a loveliness I had never conceived. I had a sense that a knowledge more than human possessed me, so that everything that had been confused was clear and everything that had perplexed me was explained. I was so happy that it was pain and I struggled to release myself from it, for I felt that if it lasted a moment longer I should die; and yet it was such rapture that I was ready to die rather than forgo it. How can I tell you what I felt? No words can tell the ecstacy of my bliss. When I cam to myself I was exhausted and trembling."

Second Account:

    [The teacher concludes his statement, during satsang, "Just for a moment, allow yourself to directly experience, who are you?"]

    "When he said these last words, the whole world stopped. It was just complete stillness. Then suddenly, the first sound I heard was the ocean crashing against the beach, and I knew immediately, 'I am this ocean out there! I am the ocean.' I looked at the room which was me as well. 'I am the people. I am the chairs. I am the microphone. I am this body.' I wanted to say, 'I'm everything.' As soon as I wanted to utter this, it sort of popped and gave way to limitless transparency, a transparent nothingness that could not be located specifically. Yet everything was made out of that. I couldn't speak anymore."

See the following post for the answer!

Sometimes an obscure explanation is best

I am reading about a woman with a Zen background who goes to a temple of the Shingon sect in Japan to study the teachings.  (Shingon is an esoteric form of Japanese Buddhism.)  The priest at this temple tries to explain the distinction between the teachings of Shingon and Zen. He starts by saying that, as he understands it, the point of Zen is to be nothing, to be in the void. By contrast, he says, the point of Shingon is not to be nothing but to understand that everything is and is not actually concrete. He goes on to explain how, while a cup will not continue to exist, its atoms will. It's not clear whether this is meant as an analogy or an explanation, but the listener seems to take it as the latter.

This, the listener says, is the simplest, clearest explanation she has ever heard.*

But I wonder.

It is true, in my experience, that things do and don't exist. The way I like to talk about this is that forms have no substance. That is, everything is empty. I like to say it this way because, there is a danger, when you start talking about atoms, that the mind will think it understands, when it really only gets it abstractly, scientifically. This is not the kind of seeing that matters when we're talking about awake consciousness.

Again, I like Zen's mu  because "emptiness" cannot easily be grasped by the mind. The point isn't to know the Truth, but to see it. And one can only see it when one has become it, if only for a moment -- when one realizes that one is oneself empty, nothing, only then is it possible to realize everything as oneself.

*This exchange comes from the memoir, When the Dead Pause and the Japanese Say Goodbye, by Marie Mutsuki Mockett.  This book will be reviewed on my literary blog, Literary Journeys to Truth, when I've finished it.

And One More Time: There is NO Separate Self

Recently, I heard an interview with an engaging, modest man named Robert Wright, who has written a book called, Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment. 

One thing I notice when Westerners write books about Buddhism, though, is that they rarely mention the most important aspect of enlightenment, maybe even the only aspect that really matters: one realizes that the separate self doesn't exist.

(I really want to emphasize this because some people imagine that the separate self somehow disappears. And so they are looking for evidence in behavior in order to decide if a given teacher is enlightened. But the fact is that the idea of a separate self exists in the mind; and once it is seen through, one knows that it never existed in the first place.)

So, as usual, this fundamental fact was ignored in the interview, which, I think, means that Wright doesn't know it.

I decided to look for a review of the book and found a thoughtful one in yesterday's New York Times, by a Antonio Damasio. But the lack of clarity about the lack of a separate self results in this conclusion to his piece:

 "The self appears fragmented, in daily life and in meditative states, but subjectivity does not break down. It never disappears, or we simply would be unable to observe the fragmentation in the first place.

"I would venture that in most meditative states some subjectivity remains, as representative of the biological interests of the individual. As far as I can imagine, the complete disappearance of a subjective view would result in a “view from nowhere.” But whose view would that be, then? And if not ours, how would we come to know let alone seek such a view, such an emptiness? Mindful meditation is no stranger to the world of paradox. Is there anything stranger than discovering the pleasures of not feeling?"

Whose view would it be then, indeed? The emptiness that we actually are is doing the looking (and at the same time IS the objects it is looking at).

Emptiness is form

Form is emptiness

Emptiness is NOTHING BUT form

Form is NOTHING BUT emptiness.

Nonduality and Concepts

I recently watched this debate: http://batgap.com/whos-driving-the-dreambus-a-conversation-with-tim-freke-and-lisa-cairns/

A nondual debate?  Well, yeah, it was. The central question, if I can dare to paraphrase, was whether, once awakened, we completely operate without a sense of self, or future, or ideas of what we believe will make the world a better place -- or whether, on the other hand, the awakened life includes all of that as well. Lisa Cairns' position was what I would call the "absolutist" one, while Tim Freke's position was that we "come back" from the absolute into the world, where we do operate as separate individuals relating to other separate individuals even while we do not lose the awakenness.

There are a couple of Buddhist concepts that I thought could have clarified things and maybe even resolved the debate. They are "substance" and "emptiness."  These are more or less dichotomous the way I am using them, and there is no way to understand their meaning without experiencing that to which they refer. But I'm going to give it a try.

The reason things look separate has to do with our belief in their substantiality. We believe we are looking at something separate from ourselves when we see a tree. We don't know it, but it is just the label that makes this appear to be the case. This is why Buddhism speaks of the world of "forms." "Forms" are just forms, not individual entities, and when forms are seen as "empty," they are seen without substance. It's as though all things are ghosts -- you know how ghosts walk through things in movies?  Well, it's because they don't have substance, which living "beings" are thought to have.

So -- nothing is really separate but things appear separate. And the question is whether that appearance is believed to be the ultimate truth or not.  Most people implicitly believe forms have substance. But when that belief starts to fall away, we begin to experience ourselves as the other.

What does the ordinary life look like when we know this?  Depends on the person, I'd say. But so long as this truth, having been realized, is remembered, we cannot believe anymore that our concepts of how things should be ultimately matter -- because it is concepts that form the basis of substantiality. Maybe we want to do something that "helps" the world, but if we have an idea of what that might be, we are deluding ourselves, because it is the human mind, not the world, that operates through concepts.  We just live. And if that living is from a genuine place, then that is all we can do. And even if it is not from a genuine place, it is still all we do.

Buddhist "Ideas"

I hope this won't be a rant, but I just saw a program on PBS that got everything possible wrong about enlightenment.  The commentator was personable and obviously interested in Buddhism, but she didn't have a clue.

Should this be a cause for distress?  I don't know. Maybe it's to be expected.  How can you know you don't know the real thing until you experience it?  This is, after all, why there is such a thing as lineage (which I so much appreciate despite my dislike of hierarchy):  people who have been given permission to teach can be trusted to speak from the Truth they have realized. But when people who don't know speak as though they do, then others who listen also get confused.

What did she say wrong?  Pretty much everything. First of all, she kept talking about "Buddha's ideas."  Yes, in a way, anything that is put into words can be called an "idea."  But what Buddha realized is not about thoughts in the head.  In fact, it's about what is not thought.

The commentator at one point says that Buddhism leads us to seek escape from the real world of suffering -- I'm paraphrasing but that was the essence.  This is the whole problem:  when you experience the world you see as the "real" one, then everything you say after that has to be wrong.  

The commentator kept saying that Buddhists believe that you have to do this and that in order to find tranquility or nirvana -- she pretty much equates the two.  And maybe I'll stop here, because really the fundamental problem is that not once did the essential truth come up:  we don't exist.  Until that is known, everything will be seen upside down and backward.

But I remember myself how confused I was when people used to say this to me.  Sometimes I'd even get angry. What do you mean, I don't exist?  Who is this person who is dialoging with you right now if I don't exist??  And it is, actually, very difficult to explain what that means when this psychological self has always seemed so solid, so it's no wonder that the subject wasn't even broached on this show.  But at the same time, this is the raison d'etre for the Teachings.  It's not about following some path in order to get psychological satisfaction of some kind.  It's to realize that we are transparent -- empty -- and it is because we are empty that all of existence finds its home in us.