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
Tuesday, June 3, 2014
Sunday, May 18, 2014
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.
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.
Thursday, May 1, 2014
When Does Spiritual Dialog Hit the Mark?
A few of us on Facebook have been discussing Oprah's interview with Adyashanti on Easter Sunday. The main issue resolves around a certain place fairly early in the interview when Oprah has an "ah-ha" moment -- when she realizes the nature of the connection between her and Adya. Some people think that this realization wasn't as deep as it could have been; others that it was in fact a glimpse of the nondual dimension of consciousness.
I'm not so interested here in which view is right as in the fact of the disparity of views. We all watched the same interview and yet every person that commented saw it differently! On the one hand, maybe this shouldn't be surprising. It's common to emerge from a satsang thinking it was a wonderful talk only to overhear someone else say it wasn't that good. Or vice versa. To speak about the wordless dimension is in itself a kind of contradiction, so it's not surprising that when words are used, people interpret them differently.
The question that's been teasing me, though, is this: if you watch the interview, it's clear that Adya himself knew exactly what was going on with Oprah, where she was and how she took what he said, even if the audience obviously wasn't so sure. So how did he know?
I've watched Adya talk with students over the years, and also spoken with him myself numerous times. It seems that he particularly has a knack for being "with" the student -- being able to comprehend what is meant by the words someone utters about the inexpressible. He misses the mark only rarely. I've always wondered how he was able to do that.
Of course, a satsang is different from a TV show. Without the commercials on Oprah, the show ran only 36 minutes. With interruptions every four or five minutes, I doubt if anyone watching had the opportunity to sink into a deeper state of consciousness . So we were watching from the outside. The participants, though, did not experience these commercials: they had the advantage of spending the time together uninterrupted, the time to move into a place where they really could meet. And this is where Adya was when he was dialoging with Oprah, and where he is when he dialogs with someone during satsang. And it is only when we ourselves are in that place that we even have a chance of knowing what the two participants are experiencing together.
I'm not so interested here in which view is right as in the fact of the disparity of views. We all watched the same interview and yet every person that commented saw it differently! On the one hand, maybe this shouldn't be surprising. It's common to emerge from a satsang thinking it was a wonderful talk only to overhear someone else say it wasn't that good. Or vice versa. To speak about the wordless dimension is in itself a kind of contradiction, so it's not surprising that when words are used, people interpret them differently.
The question that's been teasing me, though, is this: if you watch the interview, it's clear that Adya himself knew exactly what was going on with Oprah, where she was and how she took what he said, even if the audience obviously wasn't so sure. So how did he know?
I've watched Adya talk with students over the years, and also spoken with him myself numerous times. It seems that he particularly has a knack for being "with" the student -- being able to comprehend what is meant by the words someone utters about the inexpressible. He misses the mark only rarely. I've always wondered how he was able to do that.
Of course, a satsang is different from a TV show. Without the commercials on Oprah, the show ran only 36 minutes. With interruptions every four or five minutes, I doubt if anyone watching had the opportunity to sink into a deeper state of consciousness . So we were watching from the outside. The participants, though, did not experience these commercials: they had the advantage of spending the time together uninterrupted, the time to move into a place where they really could meet. And this is where Adya was when he was dialoging with Oprah, and where he is when he dialogs with someone during satsang. And it is only when we ourselves are in that place that we even have a chance of knowing what the two participants are experiencing together.
Friday, April 11, 2014
Barbara Ehrenreich a Mystic?
This is from Ehrenreich's interview with Terry Gross on April 8, 2014:
"I was just staring at the woods ... [when] something happened. It's like a layer peeled off the world, the layer that contains all the meanings, the words, the language, the associations we have. Yeah, I was looking at trees, but I no longer could say I knew exactly what a tree was, with all the knowledge and experience that goes into our notion of a tree. . . .
"What if there is a world underneath what we perceive? We're usually in a world of shared "reality." You and I agree on what we see if we're together, we have similar explanations for it, and so on. To leave that behind and just see things without any of those human attributions, well, that's very, very strange, but I wanted to know more. ... I couldn't tell anybody. I had enough sense to think that this would be seen as crazy."
I suspect a lot of people reading this have had awakenings -- and if you have, you know that this was one. This is the world with language stripped away -- the world of "That Which Is."
Most people know Ehrenreich as a lifelong socialist and social activist. Her new book, Living with a Wild God, is a real departure for her. She kept the mystical experiences of her teenage years secret for more than half a century!
Ehrenreich is just a bit older than I am -- culturally we are contemporaries. I didn't have any teenage mystical experiences, but I know that if I had, I would have kept them a secret. The 1950s and early 1960s were not a time to tell people things like this. You would be thought crazy, or you would simply be dismissed. I'm not sure which would be worse. When the most important thing in your life happens to you and you can't find anyone who can validate it, you must keep it secret. You must keep it secret or it will be destroyed by those who cannot understand what it is to know what is actually real.
I feel sad that Ehrenreich didn't have the support that people can find now when they have these types of encounters. If you listen to the whole interview, you'll see that she hasn't gotten to the bottom of it at all. She doesn't know yet that this is just the tip of the iceberg -- that without language as a barrier, we do not actually exist separately. If things had been different when she was young, she could be fully enlightened now. Think of that, and think of how important it is for us to nurture these spontaneous realizations in those we know.
"I was just staring at the woods ... [when] something happened. It's like a layer peeled off the world, the layer that contains all the meanings, the words, the language, the associations we have. Yeah, I was looking at trees, but I no longer could say I knew exactly what a tree was, with all the knowledge and experience that goes into our notion of a tree. . . .
"What if there is a world underneath what we perceive? We're usually in a world of shared "reality." You and I agree on what we see if we're together, we have similar explanations for it, and so on. To leave that behind and just see things without any of those human attributions, well, that's very, very strange, but I wanted to know more. ... I couldn't tell anybody. I had enough sense to think that this would be seen as crazy."
I suspect a lot of people reading this have had awakenings -- and if you have, you know that this was one. This is the world with language stripped away -- the world of "That Which Is."
Most people know Ehrenreich as a lifelong socialist and social activist. Her new book, Living with a Wild God, is a real departure for her. She kept the mystical experiences of her teenage years secret for more than half a century!
Ehrenreich is just a bit older than I am -- culturally we are contemporaries. I didn't have any teenage mystical experiences, but I know that if I had, I would have kept them a secret. The 1950s and early 1960s were not a time to tell people things like this. You would be thought crazy, or you would simply be dismissed. I'm not sure which would be worse. When the most important thing in your life happens to you and you can't find anyone who can validate it, you must keep it secret. You must keep it secret or it will be destroyed by those who cannot understand what it is to know what is actually real.
I feel sad that Ehrenreich didn't have the support that people can find now when they have these types of encounters. If you listen to the whole interview, you'll see that she hasn't gotten to the bottom of it at all. She doesn't know yet that this is just the tip of the iceberg -- that without language as a barrier, we do not actually exist separately. If things had been different when she was young, she could be fully enlightened now. Think of that, and think of how important it is for us to nurture these spontaneous realizations in those we know.
Saturday, March 29, 2014
Eternal versus Everlasting
A magazine I subscribe to has a children's page and a couple of sentences read like this: "Imagine you found a river that flowed with waters of eternal life. Anything you put by the river would last forever."
Like many who were raised Protestant, I learned the following Biblical passage as a child: "For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life." (John 3:16) That's the King James version. In more modern translations, "everlasting" is replaced by "eternal."
Conflating "everlasting" and "eternal" can cause confusion. "Everlasting" is within time -- it's just time stretched out as far as it will go. But "eternal" is beyond time -- outside the boundaries of time.
When we are talking about life, this has important ramifications. The phrase "everlasting life" indicates that we don't die. And of course, this is a common understanding of what being "saved by Jesus" implies. You go to heaven and keep on living forever. But "eternal" is something else. "Eternal" is a whole other dimension of consciousness, not a "place" where things last forever but where there is no time.
And so my issue with these lines in the magazine I was reading was that it could cause children to misunderstand what spiritual awakening actually is -- to imagine that it means one is going to live forever when really the Biblical text points to something else.
And then, suddenly I remembered something I had realized: This form doesn't die. How can that be? More and more, as I sink into this possibility, which I realized without understanding, I get the sense that the forms that we usually think of as ourselves aren't really us, that the real "me" is what creates the forms and that actually doesn't die. And so, if this is so, any dichotomy between "eternal" and "everlasting" perhaps also doesn't exist at all!
Like many who were raised Protestant, I learned the following Biblical passage as a child: "For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life." (John 3:16) That's the King James version. In more modern translations, "everlasting" is replaced by "eternal."
Conflating "everlasting" and "eternal" can cause confusion. "Everlasting" is within time -- it's just time stretched out as far as it will go. But "eternal" is beyond time -- outside the boundaries of time.
When we are talking about life, this has important ramifications. The phrase "everlasting life" indicates that we don't die. And of course, this is a common understanding of what being "saved by Jesus" implies. You go to heaven and keep on living forever. But "eternal" is something else. "Eternal" is a whole other dimension of consciousness, not a "place" where things last forever but where there is no time.
And so my issue with these lines in the magazine I was reading was that it could cause children to misunderstand what spiritual awakening actually is -- to imagine that it means one is going to live forever when really the Biblical text points to something else.
And then, suddenly I remembered something I had realized: This form doesn't die. How can that be? More and more, as I sink into this possibility, which I realized without understanding, I get the sense that the forms that we usually think of as ourselves aren't really us, that the real "me" is what creates the forms and that actually doesn't die. And so, if this is so, any dichotomy between "eternal" and "everlasting" perhaps also doesn't exist at all!
Thursday, March 20, 2014
Different Kinds of Love?
I've heard it said that there are different kinds of love: romantic love, love of family members, love of friends, and love of all of humanity. But is there, at bottom, a difference between these types of love?
It is true that they feel different. And people who are "spiritual" especially like to differentiate the last kind from the other, seemingly more limiting, types. All-encompassing love, Buddha's love -- that is what we all want to experience, is it not?
But in my experience, the only difference between the more limited kinds of love and all-encompassing love (which includes love of self), is that the object drops away. It's the same energy of life, but we don't need to focus on someone or something anymore: we don't need anything outside ourselves to feel whole but rather we realize that we are ourselves the embodiment of love, that we are created as love, and that everything else is as well. Love isn't so much something that we do as something that we realize we are and always have been. And since everyone and everything else is also experienced that way, we can't help loving all else as we love ourselves.
Elizabeth Gilbert in EAT, PRAY, LOVE describes hugging trees in India when she had her awakening. I had exactly the same experience: anything and everything was embraced by my passion, but for some reason trees were especially lovable! Maybe awakening makes tree-huggers out of us all!
It is true that they feel different. And people who are "spiritual" especially like to differentiate the last kind from the other, seemingly more limiting, types. All-encompassing love, Buddha's love -- that is what we all want to experience, is it not?
But in my experience, the only difference between the more limited kinds of love and all-encompassing love (which includes love of self), is that the object drops away. It's the same energy of life, but we don't need to focus on someone or something anymore: we don't need anything outside ourselves to feel whole but rather we realize that we are ourselves the embodiment of love, that we are created as love, and that everything else is as well. Love isn't so much something that we do as something that we realize we are and always have been. And since everyone and everything else is also experienced that way, we can't help loving all else as we love ourselves.
Elizabeth Gilbert in EAT, PRAY, LOVE describes hugging trees in India when she had her awakening. I had exactly the same experience: anything and everything was embraced by my passion, but for some reason trees were especially lovable! Maybe awakening makes tree-huggers out of us all!
Monday, March 10, 2014
Elizabeth Gilbert's awakening: why did no one notice?
I'd heard a lot about EAT, PRAY, LOVE when I started to read it, but, since it was a best seller, I figured it couldn't be very deep and stayed away. Am I a literary snob, or what? Anyway, I was wrong.
On pages 98-100 (paperback edition) Gilbert has an awakening. I couldn't help wondering why, in all I'd heard about this book, I never heard this. I mean, I haven't yet gone with her to Bali, where she finds true love, so I don't know what happens in the end, but an awakening seems pretty important -- certainly more important than romantic love.
So I've been wondering why this seems to be the most under-reported awakening ever, despite the fact that the book itself is one of the most read books ever. And what I've concluded is that if you haven't known what she describes, you don't know that it changes everything -- and I do mean everything.
A few years after my 1980 awakening, I wrote a paper about it and what led up to it. Fortunately, I had my journal entry of that day for help. When I now read over what I wrote in 1986, I still think I captured it as well as a wordless non-event can be captured in language. But I noticed again and again that when I shared this paper with people who hadn't been awakened, they would read right over the critical part and think the story was about something else! The first time this happened, I was dumbfounded, but now I'm used to it and even use the paper as a kind of test to see where people are spiritually. (I gave it to my second teacher, Adyashanti, when I first met him, and he passed the test with flying colors!)
So what I'm saying here is that we all rely on our own experience to interpret what we read, and especially to find meaning. Gilbert, basing her discussion on yogic philosophy, calls the awakened state (not really a state, but she refers to it that way) a "fourth level" of consciousness," beyond waking, dreaming, and dreamless sleep. My first teacher called it a fifth dimension. Either way, it's not only beyond the realm of our ordinary experience, but more, beyond the way we ordinarily experience life because, in that moment, subject and object are annihilated. And so, when we come back to talk about it, we are talking in metaphors, because language assumes subject-object relationships. Still, Gilbert does a good job of describing it -- better than I did -- and it's too bad more people didn't notice.
It's said that they took most of the enlightenment section out of the film so that they could show more of Julia Roberts at the beach. Imagine my surprise.
On pages 98-100 (paperback edition) Gilbert has an awakening. I couldn't help wondering why, in all I'd heard about this book, I never heard this. I mean, I haven't yet gone with her to Bali, where she finds true love, so I don't know what happens in the end, but an awakening seems pretty important -- certainly more important than romantic love.
So I've been wondering why this seems to be the most under-reported awakening ever, despite the fact that the book itself is one of the most read books ever. And what I've concluded is that if you haven't known what she describes, you don't know that it changes everything -- and I do mean everything.
A few years after my 1980 awakening, I wrote a paper about it and what led up to it. Fortunately, I had my journal entry of that day for help. When I now read over what I wrote in 1986, I still think I captured it as well as a wordless non-event can be captured in language. But I noticed again and again that when I shared this paper with people who hadn't been awakened, they would read right over the critical part and think the story was about something else! The first time this happened, I was dumbfounded, but now I'm used to it and even use the paper as a kind of test to see where people are spiritually. (I gave it to my second teacher, Adyashanti, when I first met him, and he passed the test with flying colors!)
So what I'm saying here is that we all rely on our own experience to interpret what we read, and especially to find meaning. Gilbert, basing her discussion on yogic philosophy, calls the awakened state (not really a state, but she refers to it that way) a "fourth level" of consciousness," beyond waking, dreaming, and dreamless sleep. My first teacher called it a fifth dimension. Either way, it's not only beyond the realm of our ordinary experience, but more, beyond the way we ordinarily experience life because, in that moment, subject and object are annihilated. And so, when we come back to talk about it, we are talking in metaphors, because language assumes subject-object relationships. Still, Gilbert does a good job of describing it -- better than I did -- and it's too bad more people didn't notice.
It's said that they took most of the enlightenment section out of the film so that they could show more of Julia Roberts at the beach. Imagine my surprise.
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