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.

My Will and Thy Will

Recently, I went to a discussion group about Buddhism. I thought I'd like it, but I was bored to tears. For me at least, having found out that words are empty, I can't handle abstractions anymore. I wanted to shout out, “But you don't exist so none of this means anything!” But I knew how that would be greeted. Everyone at the meeting was very nice, and no one would have responded rudely, but they would have just ignored my outburst, perhaps looked at me a bit askance, and then continued on with more abstractions.

I remember how being told that I didn't exist did absolutely nothing for me when I was trying to wake up. What did it even mean?

Similarly, I remember my teacher once giving a talk about how when we are truly awake we have surrendered our will completely to the larger consciousness. I remember thinking, “Then I'll never be awake because my will isn't going to lay down, I'm sure of that.”

This are both aspects of the same issue. Our mind has an idea that we have an identity separate from the whole. That identity is based on a history of experiences which the mind has put together to form an image of “me.” But there is a beingness of ourselves that is deeper than that and this is what those teachings described above point to. Before realization, though, they didn't make much sense to me.

Recently, I came across something in a Christian context: “Thy Will be done.” Same message but it sounds so much better somehow – maybe because it doesn't explicitly oppose one's own will to the larger consciousness. After all, it's all the same will. It's finally just a matter of knowing that – not as a fact, but experientially – and then the struggle ceases. I think for me this happened without my even being aware of it. It hasn't felt that anything was laid down – more like an awareness gradually dawned: my will is also That.

What IS universal love?

 Having been disillusioned with the Buddhist paths I tried in Japan when I was young, I joined the Quaker meeting in the town I lived in in the late 1980s. Although I still believed, theoretically, that those paths led to enlightenment – and had in fact had a couple of spiritual awakenings on one of those paths – in the end, they just seemed too hard – and too foreign. I wanted a way to the Infinite that relied on my own Western spiritual tradition, but at the same time didn't discount the realizations of deeper truth I had had through the Eastern way. I was also looking for something less hierarchical and sexist – and the fact that there are no paid clergy in Quakerism – that everyone is, in fact, a teacher to everyone else – appealed to me. All around, Quakerism seemed a good “Middle Way.”

I was active in the Meeting until I moved away in 2000. Shortly after I re-located, I found Adyashanti – and he undid my world. Undid and remade and everything else that there are no words for. So Adyashanti's teachings became my new “Middle Way.” I call it this because Adya never studied Zen in Japan – and neither did his teacher – but he did come from a Zen lineage. As a third generation teacher, though, he felt free to innovate – and he did. In the beginning, he called the talks he gave “Zen-Satsang” because the content was often Zen-like, but the format was in the Nondual tradition of India – and specifically of Advaita Vedanta: a talk and then questions from students. This worked for me: no arduous practices – no need to do anything but just sit and let the energy wash over me.

Through all of those years, I wondered if I could still call myself a Quaker – or whether I should resign from the Meeting which I was, in any case, no longer close enough to geographically to attend except very occasionally. When I did get there, it had been so long that many people didn't recognize me anymore. Still, I have kept my membership, and so I get the monthly newsletter.

In the November 2014 newsletter I just received, there is a quotation from John Woolman, a well-known 19^th century Quaker: “To turn all the treasures we possess into the channel of Universal Love becomes the business of our lives.” When I read this, I thought, “This is why I'm still a Quaker – this is a tradition that really does still speak to me.”

After years of Adyashanti, I no longer feel the need of him in the way I once did – which is fortunate because he rarely comes around to my town anymore. But there's one area where I've still felt like something was missing. It is said that there is a Universal Love that one comes to manifest when spiritually awake. I kept waiting: where was it? Last year, I was at a five-day retreat of another teacher, Pamela Wilson, and when I emerged, the love was so palpable – I went to the grocery store and loved everyone I saw there! (I probably wrote about that here if anyone wants to go back and look at the summer 2013 posts.) But it quickly faded.

Now, recently, I've become part of a leaderless nondual spiritual group which I initiated. It's the fulfillment of my dream of a non-hierarchical spiritual path. After a bumpy start finding our way, the group has turned into a fount of love. But it doesn't feel like I always expected love to look, and I think that's why I've been missing it all along. So, I've been asking myself how it is different and the answer I'm coming up with is that it isn't self-conscious. We usually think, “I love him (or her, or everyone)” But what if that secondary thought is absent? What if thought is absent from the experience entirely? Then love is something else. Certainly not sentimental, certainly not self-absorbed.

Enlightenment and cultural accretions

I'm reading a couple of books that, in very different ways, discuss an issue relevant to those involved in traditions that come from other cultures.  One is a memoir about living among modern Sufis in Afghanistan: Embattled Saints: My year with the Sufis of Afghanistan, by Kenneth P. Lizzio.  The other is a novel about a shy Japanese priest sent to New York to help build a temple for his sect: Buddhaland Brooklyn, by Richard C. Morais.*  The problems these two men face are the mirror opposite of each other.

The American who goes to Afghanistan hoping to gain Sufi mystical wisdom is dismayed when told how important shari'a law is. Over and over again, he is admonished that shari'a is part and parcel of the mystical path, not something only for fundamentalist Muslims but for all Muslims.  He resents having to grow his beard to a certain length and shape, and he believes the sexual segregation is plain wrong, to name only two of his many issues with Muslim law.  But he wants what the Sufis have, so he goes along.

The Japanese priest has the reverse of this problem.  Having lived in a mountain temple since he was a boy, he believes that everything that he was taught to do in reverence to Buddha is a step on the path to enlightenment, and that none of it can be omitted. So, for example, when his New York believers complain that it is hard for them to kneel on the floor, he says, in effect, "Tough shit."  When they want lectures more relevant to their daily lives, he explains that, in order to attain enlightenment, devotees must understand the sacred texts in all of their subtly .  He believes the New Yorkers aren't taking Buddhism seriously because they don't want to do it the received way.

When I was young, I practiced two kinds of Buddhism in Japan.  My unexamined assumption was that I could only get enlightened if I became like a Japanese.  And the problem was, the Japanese believed this as well!  I went home after a year, a total failure.

The trick is to separate the essential teachings from the cultural context.  Not easy.  On the one hand, we have (hopefully) an enlightened teacher who has taken a certain path to his or her wisdom.  On the other hand, we have aspirants who are not enlightened and do not share the teacher's cultural assumptions.  In such a situation, who is going to decide what is necessary to the deepest spiritual realization and what is just a cultural accretion?

Sometimes it takes more than a generation to work this out.  When Philip Kapleau found what he'd been looking for in Japan, he brought it back to America virtually wholesale, and it was not until his senior student, Toni Packer, said, "Wait, much of this doesn't really work for a lot of Westerners," and went off to found her own meditation center, that the deepest realization in Zen could be found, without the cultural accretions.  My own teacher, Adyashanti, was a third generation Zen student -- someone who had never been to Japan and whose own teachers had also never been there.  There was enough distance to have lost the cultural accretions and yet the wisdom of the lineage was intact.  How grateful for this I am! This is what we all hope can happen.  It doesn't always.

*Note: My review of  Buddhaland Brooklyn appears on the Buddhist Fiction Blog. 
My review of  Embattled Saints is at http://www.bookslut.com/nonfiction/2014_07_020733.php

   

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. 

The nature of suffering

I'm reading a memoir by a man who went to Dharamsala seeking truth:  TURTLE FEET by Nikolai Gronzi.  He states what I think are supposed to be the Four Noble Truths in a way I hadn't heard before and that seems more accurate to me:  "that all compounds are impermanent; that all physical and mental states, born out of a misconception about the ultimate way of things, are in the nature of suffering; that all phenomena are devoid of objective reality; and that Nirvana is peace." 

I guess this seems more accurate to me because these days it's becoming clearer that suffering comes from the whole human apparatus of consciousness; not just from some mistaken view, but from the way the human psyche functions.  That is to say, the mind solidifies everything and places it outside of itself, and also tends to make things permanent when nothing lasts more than an instant.  So loss is a permanent feature of life as a human being, not because "things" die but because we imagine they were ever solid in the first place.

All of this perhaps sounds intellectual, but I think it does reflect the realization that happens when all of this gets seen through.