The bodhisattva's tears

I've been thinking about emotion and awakening.  During the period when I was waking up, I'd go to satsang dry eyed, but I'd always be crying by the end.  Sometimes I cried all the way through, from the time I sat down.  Some people probably thought this was weird, but what was happening inside was too important for me to worry about what others thought.  I never could really pin down what the tears were about except that they seemed to correspond to some kind of opening in me.

The other night I was watching a program of Tony Bennett singing duets with other well-known singers and I found tears in my eyes.  The songs were mostly love songs and the singing was beautiful.  Were these tears coming from the same place?

I ask this because my inclination has always been to demean the latter kind of tears as just "emotional."  The tears sitting in front of my teacher at satsang came, I imagined, from a truer place.  Now I'm wondering.

I think there are bodhisattvas who are portrayed as having a tear on their cheek.  Such a tear represents compassion for humanity.  But what is compassion?  Is it, as we often assume, akin to pity?  Is it hope that suffering humanity will get with the program and wake up?  I DON'T THINK SO.

Now, suddenly, I see anew the idea that a bodhisattva is one who has reached the door to enlightenment but turns back and vows not to enter nirvana until all are enlightened.  This is not a choice made out of self-sacrifice but one made out of the realization that to live this life as an awake being is the very best choice that can be made -- because when life is looked at from the awake perspective, the kind of suffering that comes from needing things to be different disappears. One doesn't shed a tear because people are suffering and need to change but in appreciation of the bounty that life is -- and the bounty now also includes sorrow and longing and desire and everything that one experiences, each moment.

Metaphorical language and spiritual beliefs

Over the holidays I went to a sing-along Messiah.  For those who haven't ever done this, it is a performance of Handel's Messiah, with the audience singing the choruses.  If you love to sing, it's both challenging and a lot of fun. I hadn't done it in years.

This performance was put on at the local Mormon church, and it was my first time there -- maybe the first time in a Mormon church at all.  The solo singers were wonderful, and they enunciated clearly as well, so I had ample opportunity to take in the words.  And I thought, "My, what a weird religion Christianity is! What is all this supposed to mean?  No wonder I never could believe my childhood religion!" 

But I was also moved.  And it is that ability to move that Handel, and the Bible verses he used, were aiming to elicit.  The doctrine itself is meant to be non-rational, because ultimate truth is beyond rationality, beyond the mind.  And the deeper the spirituality, the more that is true. 

I think about the assumptions behind non-dual spirituality, of which there are plenty, and realize that these too, to those who haven't experienced what they point to, don't make sense. Religious ideas arise as a way to describe the ineffable.  They just point to a truth that can't be spoken. 

So, then, are all religions equally true?  I wouldn't go that far.  And I do think different religions stress different aspects of truth.  But it's important to keep in mind that I was called to the path I have been on in this life not because it is in any way "truer" but because the language that is used to describe ultimate truth is language that made intuitive sense to me as well as moved me.  When we are looking for a path, it's important for both of these elements to be there. 

Trying gets in the way

After Toni Packer died a few months ago, I checked several of her books out of the library.  I was intending to write something about her legacy but never did (except the brief post on this blog).  Now, I'm just getting around to the books.  It's a re-visit for me because I also read a couple of them before I went to visit the meditation center she founded, Springwater, in 2007.

I like best the book The Light of Discovery (Charles E Tuttle, 1995).  Here is a dialogue between Toni and Joan Tollifson.  Joan was a student of Toni's and is an author and teacher in her own right.

"Joan: Suppose I see the same patterns coming up year after year, habits I feel stuck in. . . . I see it over and over, but it keeps happening, and I can't get out of it.

"Toni:  When you say, 'I see it, but I can't get out of it,' what is the quality of that seeing?  Here is where you really need to look and examine carefully.  Is it thinking about your habit-patterns -- how long they have persisted, how this is never going to end, wanting to know how to fix it?  This is not seeing.  This is thinking.  It's not an on-the-spot discovery of thought arising.  To see the thought of wanting freedom as it arises is different from thinking,, 'I've had this thought pattern all my life, and nothing has happened about it, and what can I do about it?'" (pp. 11-12)

Reading this, I'm reminded of an incident in my own life.  I was in turmoil over a relationship with someone that wasn't happening -- at least not the way I thought it should.  It had been literally years, and one day I was in a particularly bad place, crying on my bed, when one of my teachers returned my call to her.  And I told her what I was going through, adding, "I've tried everything but I can't find a solution!"  She said, "It's not about solving problems."

I don't know how she knew that was exactly what I needed to hear, but something magical happened.  I suppose, looking back on it now, I could say that her words gave me permission to STOP, just stop trying for a moment.  We think we won't find a solution if we don't try, and practical problems are like that, but psychological/spiritual problems are just the opposite:  the trying only gets in the way.  So, then, at that moment when trying ceased, something opened in me, a space to view it all from I suppose, and all of that emotion I'd been trying so hard to get rid of was suddenly just fine!  Not only fine but even blissful.  How could it be that what I'd condemned and tried so hard to rid myself of could turn blissful?  Because the feelings weren't the problem -- it was the identification with them that caused the suffering. The feelings, I'd always assumed, said something about me, about what kind of person I was.  Not so.

And so, reading Toni's words in the above passage, I recognized what she was pointing to.

Awakeness vs Awareness

This blog's name indicates something about what my own path has been.  The sudden awakenings that are part of a number of traditions, such as Rinzai Zen, have been a big part of it.  But there are those who say this whole idea of "awakening" is fraught with illusion because, for one thing, it obscures the fact that consciousness is already awake, and for another, because it implies a goal, or a number of goals -- the time when one will awaken, or awaken more deeply, in the future -- whereas enlightenment is the eternal present.

And yes, both of those criticisms are valid.  And some people, for that reason, are more comfortable starting with the basic truth that there isn't anywhere to get in the first place, that it was all already here.  In Soto Zen (from what I know -- I've never done it) sitting itself is enlightenment.  Of course, it could as easily be said, then, that anything we do is equally enlightenment.

So why not start with the basic truth and skip over the seeking and finding and losing it and finding it again until the truth that it is what we are is finally realized?  I say, if skipping all that works, sure, by all means do it.  And by "if it works" I mean, if it solve the problem of what it is to be human.  If one feels at rest and really doesn't need to seek anymore.

Because it's tricky, isn't it?  "I won't seek because I know that's not where it's at.  I'll just be present all the time," one might say.  Well, good luck.  Just more seeking, right?  Because for most human beings, "being present all the time" isn't something that comes naturally.  Especially since, before awakening, we don't really know what being present truly is.

So, when we're meditating -- and that doesn't just mean formal meditation but any time the mind isn't busy with its stories -- sometimes a space comes between thoughts and we just are awareness.  We just are, just exist -- and there are no boundaries of self at that moment.  But that passes and its significance often goes unrecognized.  Why?  Because what awakening does is more than that.  Awareness is a door, but awakening is seeing that the door we have passed through is the door between illusion and reality.  Now we know, for the first time, that thoughts aren't real.  Before, we thought we knew that; we thought everyone knew that -- but now we really know what that means.  And once we know that, then we understand also that, even when thoughts come back in and busy themselves making stories about our lives, they aren't real stories.

So, truly, I'm thinking this out as I write, but where I've come to is that awareness is that vantage point where we don't filter our experience through thoughts (and "we" and "our" are just grammatical necessities because the reality is that there is no self at that moment).  But if there is not complete awakening, then when thoughts come back in, they are believed again.  Each time we rest in awareness, though, the thoughts may become less solid-seeming, more transparent.  We may become awake even though we have never awakened!

Surrender as a Spiritual Path

I've written a lot here about the realization that there is no separate self and all that entails, but since I've gotten the last two comments, I've been thinking about the various paths and how we choose our path.

Truthfully, the idea that I need to be a good person to get enlightened, or even to begin treading the path, never appealed to me.  Why wouldn't I want to be a good person?  Well, it's not that I wouldn't; it's that I never thought it was possible to be THAT good. 

I think this might have to do with having a perfectionist mother.  No matter how good, I was never good enough.  And so I internalized that.  Even if I did a supposedly "good" deed, it seemed that it didn't count if my ego was congratulating me for it -- that a deed, to be truly good, had to be done without any benefit accruing, even in the mind of the doer.  Since I didn't know how to eliminate thoughts of being a "good" person when I did a "good" deed, I assumed that path was foreclosed to me. 

So what has my path been, then?  I think more than anything it has been about surrender.  But there are two kinds of spiritual surrender:  to someone or something one experiences as external, and to one's own deepest feelings, longings, needs.  For a long time, the conflict between those two kinds of surrender propelled me forward.  I knew there had to be a solution, but the solution could not, and did not in the end, come from the rational mind.  In the end, the conflict became too much to bear and the surrender became a surrender to a deeper truth.  (This actually happened several times, especially when I was in relationship with my first teacher, pushing me to a deeper place each time.)

I'm not suggesting that this should necessarily be anyone's path.  I didn't really choose it; it just seemed the only one possible for me. 

Who is a bodhisattva?

Someone left a comment to my last post that is worth responding to.  She asked if I was positing that there is no such thing as genuine concern for the welfare of others, or, in Buddhist terms, whether I thought there is no such thing as a bodhisattva.  Certainly, I did not mean to imply that.  By positing of two kinds of self-absorption, I did not mean to imply that those are the only types of people that exist.  Nor did I even mean to imply that a person would always be self-absorbed in one way or the other.  In fact, most human beings are naturally outwardly focused and only become oriented inward either because their upbringing was difficult or because of some other suffering through which they have come to understand that something is lacking in the kinds of satisfaction that outward focus provides. And they may only be self-absorbed for a period of time and then turn outward again.

But rather than dismantling my analysis for lack of completeness or clarity, let me add a bit to it.  There could be said to be a third type of self-absorption.  This is the one in which the "self" is absorbed into the All or the One.  This would be when a genuine concern for the welfare of  "others" begins to arise because the thought-wall between self and others has been seen through.  One is, then, not concerned for others because "but for the grace of God go I" (which is more akin to pity), but because one has seen that others are not separate from oneself.

I, like the reader, have also been transformed by those I saw as bodhisattvas.  For those who aren't familiar with the term, let me define bodhisattva before I continue.  Technically, as I understand it, a bodhisattva is a being who has reached nirvana but vows to come back and help other beings reach it also, and not to enter nirvana until every other being does so.  In general terms, though, the word is often used just to mean someone who acts with selfless compassion.  Either definitions will work for purposes of this discussion.

In fact, though, I think there may be a problem with the bodhisattva concept.  We see a person acting with selfless compassion and call him or her a "bodhisattva."  But does that person see himself or herself as a bodhisattva?  I would guess that, to the extent that someone thinks, "Ah, now I'm finally a bodhisattva," it indicates that they really have quite a bit of self-concern, and that maybe even that person is getting some ego-gratification out of being such a good person.  This is not what we usually think of as a bodhisattva.

So, then, a genuine bodhisattva will be someone who does NOT see himself or herself that way.  Thus, the ambition to become a bodhisattva is problematic because, once the separate self is seen through, it is no longer the separate person who acts with selfless compassion.  The reason, that is, that SELFLESS compassion is such a powerful force in the world is that the act does not come from individual self but from a deeper source.  (Of course, it may be said that all of our actions come from a deeper source, but usually the ego wants to take credit and that dilutes the effect.)

So perhaps "bodhisattva" as a noun is misleading since, as a goal, it is never reached for the self or ego who has that goal; that is, "selfless" acts are not in fact done by the separate self.  Maybe it would be more accurate if we just used the term as an adjective -- bodhisattvistic -- meaning that a certain generous act was pure and did not come from any concern for how the actor would be seen.  Or maybe it could be a verb:  "He bodhisatted yesterday."

Describing the act rather than the actor is more accurate anyway since the actor is, in a sense, channeling spirit at such times.  And it may prevent us from idealizing someone whom we experience from the outside as the epitome of compassion.  This idealization can be a motivating force in the beginning of one's spiritual journey, but it can also be a hindrance later on.  Almost everyone who seems to be completely without self has gone through the same struggles all human beings go through, and to see this is also to see that we all are, at times, bodhisattvas for each other, often without that intention.

Self-Absorption and Awakening

I've some inchoate thoughts around this topic, so let's just see where this goes.

Based on my own experience at different stages in my life as well as on observation of others, I would describe two types of self-absorption.  The first is the unaware kind.  This is where the person's orientation is basically outward, toward finding satisfaction outside him/herself.  But s/he is unable to find it because the reason for the outward orientation in the first place is the deep belief that there is nothing of value inside.  Thus, the only hope is that what is needed will come from somewhere else.  That need for the sense of emptiness to be filled is self-absorbed because the person isn't really interested in others except to the extent that s/he sees hope that others might fill the emptiness.  Usually this orientation is pretty unconscious although someone who is doing this and is scrupulously honest might eventually get a sense that it really isn't about any genuine interest in others.  Such a realization might be the start of a genuine search for truth.

The other type of self-absorption is the one that arises as one starts on the path to awakening, or re-starts after a period of outward orientation.  Suddenly, everything and everyone in the environment comes to take a back seat.  One does the daily tasks and maybe has a few recreational pursuits but the meaning of life only comes from absorption in one's advancement on the path.  This kind of self-absorption, unlike that above, arises from an inner orientation.  It is the one that leads to freedom.