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HOUSEHOLDER SERIES
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It is wisdom which is seeking for
wisdom
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1. The Eightfold Path: Right Understanding |
| This meditation practice, as many of you
have done with this day of sitting and walking, was actually quite a lot.
Some people will start with a 20-minute sitting and do that for a number
of months, or go to a class and have some instruction and sit for a little
bit. There are people who also will come to a ten-day retreat. We've even
had a few kind of unusual people sign up for a three-month retreat who
had never meditated before, and say, "Well, I guess I'll just do it." But
as you can discover, even in just one day of sitting, though some things
are interesting and you learn some from it, it's also not so easy. There
aren't a lot of distractions and diversions here. It's pretty simple. All
that's really left for you in this place is your own body and mind, and
there's not a lot to take one away from that. What is the essence of meditation
practice? Here is a story. After the Buddha was enlightened he was walking
down the road in a very happy state. He was supposed to have been quite
a handsome prince before going off to be a monk. So here's this handsome
prince now recently enlightened, wearing golden robes and obviously quite
happy, and very special from all accounts. And he met some people and they
said, "You seem very special. What are you, are some kind of an angel or
a deva?" He seemed inhuman in some way. "No." "Well, are you some kind
of a god then?" "No." "Well, then are you some kind of a wizard or magician?"
"No," he replied. "Well, are you a man?" "No," he said. "Then what are
you?" And he answered, "I am awake." And in those three words --"I am awake"--he
gave the whole teaching which Buddhism contains. To be a Buddha is to be
one who has awakened, awakened to the nature of life and death and the
world in which we live, awakened to the body and mind. So the purpose of
practicing meditation, the Buddhist and other traditions, is not to become
a meditator, or a spiritual person, or a Buddhist, or to join something.
Rather, it is to understand this capacity we have as humans to awaken.
What is that which we can awaken to, what is the Dharma which we can awaken
to? //Dharma// is the Sanskrit word and //Dhamma// is the Pali word which
refers to that which is universal, to the laws of the universe, teachings
which describe it. The Dharma as a law is that the way things work are
always here to be discovered; they're quite immediate. There's a story
of a pious man who very much believed in God. One day, at the place where
he dwelled, it started to rain heavily and it rained and rained, and a
big flood came. He went from the first floor to the second floor of his
house and the water rose until he was on the roof. Someone rowed by and
said, "Get in, my friend, I'll save you; the water is rising." He said,
"No, I believe in God; I really have faith; I believe." So he sent the
rowboat away. It rained more and the water got all the way up to his neck.
Another rowboat came by, picking up people. "Get in, my friend, I'll save
you." "No, thank you. I have trust. I have lived my whole life. I believe
in God; no need." The rowboat went away. It got up to his nose so he could
just barely breathe. And a helicopter came over and lowered down a rope.
"Come up, my friend, I'll save you." "No, thank you. I believe, I have
faith, I trust." So the helicopter went away. It rained some more and he
drowned. He goes to heaven after that. Soon after that he gets an interview
with God. So he goes in, and he sits down and pays his respects, and then
he says, "You know, I just don't understand. Here I was your faithful servant.
I was so trusting, and prayed, and so believing, and I just don't understand
what happened to me." And he recounts all of his circumstances. "Where
were you when I needed you?" God looks up and kind of scratches his head
and says, "I don't understand it either. I sent you two rowboats and a
helicopter." We wait for God to come in some big flash or our spiritual
awakening to be some wonderful other worldly experience. What the Dharma
is, and what we can awaken to, is the truth that is here when we leave
our fantasies and memories and things behind and come into the present.
What are these laws, what is it? First, there is the Dharma which is described
as the law of cause and effect, or Karma, which means by one teacher's
definition, "To keep it simple, 'karma' means you don't get away with nothin'."
But in a more explicit way, it means that we become what we do, or we create
how our future will be. For example, if we practice being angry all the
time, in a while, when a situation arises, that will be our response to
it, and it will create that in other people; that will be the kind of society
we end up in. If we practice being loving, that becomes the way of what
will happen to us in the future. When the Buddha spoke to people who were
interested in happiness -- which some people are -- they said, "How can
we be happy?" He said, "Well, one way is to understand the law of karma.
If you cultivate generosity, kindness, awareness and giving. you will be
happy because you'll learn that it's pleasant, and also the way that karma
works is that your world will become more of a cycling rather than fear
and holding. You will discover happiness in this generosity." He said,
"If you're kind to people, if you maintain a basic level of non-harming
-- what's called Virtue -- if your words are honest and helpful, if your
actions are truthful and helpful and based on kindness, your world will
start to become kind. Inside you'll feel kinder and happier; outside people
will treat you that way. The law of Karma is one of the first things you
observe if you practice mindfulness and awareness. This is one thing you
can discover through practice. A second thing you can discover is that
there are two places that we can live. There are many places, but one is
to live in our fantasy, in our thoughts about things; and the other is
to be more here in our bodies, in our eyes, our nose, in our senses, and
the direct experience of things. For me -- says Don Juan -- the world is
incredible because it is stupendous, mysterious, awesome, unfathomable.
My interest has been to convince you that you must learn to make every
act count. You must learn to assume responsibility for being here in this
marvelous world, in this marvelous time, for in fact you will learn that
you are only here for too short a time, a very short while, too short for
witnessing all the marvels of it. So one way is to be kind of lost in thoughts
and fantasies, and the other is that while we have this life, to come into
it; to live in our physical bodies, to be aware of the senses; to open,
to see what they have to teach us. When we do that and we pay attention,
we start to see some of the characteristics of the Dharma or the life in
which we live. One characteristic is impermanence. Thus shall you think
of this fleeting world -- it says in one Buddhist sutra -- a star at dawn,
a bubble in a stream, a flash of lightning in a summer cloud, an echo,
a rainbow, a phantom and a dream. That as you look, the more closely you
observe, the more you realize that everything you look at is in change.
Seeing changes, hearing changes, smelling, tasting and physical sensations
are changing; all the experiences in the body and mind, all the experiences
of the senses change. It seems solid -- That's the illusion of //santati//.
-- It's like a movie. And when you watch the screen and get caught in the
story, it seems like it's very real. But when you turn your attention to
the projector, or slow it down, or focus your awareness very carefully,
you start to see that it's one frame after another, one appearing and dissolving
and the next arising. It's so for our life; it's really a process of change.
That's so because things don't last. If you have something that lasts in
your life, please raise your hand. Has anyone gotten any mental states
of any kind to last very long? Someone once raised a hand and said, "Yes,
ignorance. It's lasted my whole life." But basically it's change. You sit
here for one day -- you don't even have to be a very adept meditator to
get the point that it moves all the time, that it changes. And because
things don't last, if we're attached to them being a certain way, what
happens? This is one of the laws. What happens? We suffer, or we get disappointed
-- not because we should. You can be attached as much as you like, but
even though you're attached, does it stop it from changing? You have a
nice mental state and you try and hold on to it, does it last anyway? You
start to see the laws of things, that things are impermanent, that attachment
doesn't work, and that there must be some other way. There is actually
what Alan Watts called, "the wisdom of insecurity," the ability to flow
with things, to see them as a changing process. You also see not only are
they impermanent and ungraspable, but that there's suffering if we're attached
to them, and that there's pain as well as pleasure in this world; it's
part of what we were born into. If you decide to get off on this planet
and get one of these things with ten little things on the end here and
ten little things on the end there, that grows for awhile, and that you
put old dead plants and animals in, and mush them up in order to get it
to kind of move around -- if you choose one of these things which you have,
it's too late already. What is the nature of it? It grows up, it grows
old, it dies. Sometimes it gets sick, sometimes it feels good, sometimes
it hurts; there's pleasure and pain in it. Anybody have one that doesn't
hurt sometimes? If you don't want that, you've got to go to another planet
because it's not the way things are here. You sit, and you say, "I'm just
going to be with my body and mind," and what do you find? Sometimes you
find it's pleasant and sometimes it's painful; sometimes it's quiet, sometimes
it's restless, and you begin to relate to what Zorba called, "It's the
whole catastrophe," all of it, instead of fearing the painful things and
running away all the time, and grasping after pleasant things, hoping that
somehow by holding them they'll last and seeing that they don't. My teacher,
Achaan Chah used to wander around the monastery at times and talk to people
and just say, "Are you suffering much today?" And if you said, "Yes," he
said, "Oh, you must be quite attached," and kind of giggle and go along.
There wasn't much more to say. You come to see that you don't own this
body because it changes by itself, that you rent this house; you get it
for a little while, and you can honor it and feed it and walk it, and jog
it if you want, but it's not yours to possess. You can begin to see, in
fact, that none of these things are possessible because the nature of life
is nonpossession. You're an accountant in the firm -- you get to count
it for awhile and that's all. We sit to awaken, and we awaken by coming
into our bodies and our senses, and we start to see the laws which govern
life so we can come into a wiser relationship with it. What does this mean
for our lives? Well, this really teaches a way of wholeness and awareness,
of bringing our body and mind together, our heart and actions, being conscious
with our speech, conscious with our eating, conscious with walking, making
them each a part of what allows us to grow and live. To do this means accepting
the fact of impermanence, and of some pain and suffering, and the fact
that we don't control it very much. I mean, you control some of it, but
not very much, and in a really limited way. If you can't accept those things,
then you will probably want to stay in your fantasy, because they're what
you encounter when you come here. Some people might ask, "Doesn't meditation
fragment us away from the world? You say that it makes us more present."
It can if we become attached to solitude, if we sit and try to get quiet
and block everything out, close our eyes and ears and nose or go into a
cave. There's another story of an elderly woman in New York who goes to
a travel agent and says, "Please get me a ticket to Tibet. I want to go
see the guru." The travel agent says, "You know, it's a long trip to Tibet.
You'd be much happier going to Miami." She says "I insist. I want to go."
So this old lady gets a ticket, brings her things with her, gets on the
plane and goes to India, gets the visa and the pass, takes the train up
to Sikkim, gets a border pass, takes the bus up to the Tibetan plateau,
and gets out. And they're all saying, "Where are you going?" "I must go
see the guru." They say, "It's such a long way. You're an old lady. It's
up in the mountains." She says, "I'm going. I have to see the guru." They
say,"You know, you only get three words with him." "It doesn't matter,
I am going." So she goes, and she gets on the horse in Tibet, because there
are no roads in this part, gets to the foot of this large mountain, and
all these pilgrims are saying, "Where are you going?" She says, "I want
to see the guru." They say, "Remember, you get just three words." She says,
"I know, I know." She gets in line, gets up there, finally past the guards
at the door who say, 'Three words.only." She goes in and there's the guru
sitting in his robes with a kind of scraggly beard. He looks up at her
and she looks at him, and she says, "Sheldon, come home." I tell it mostly
for a laugh but the fact is that for us who live in the Bay Area, the spirituality
that's going to work for us is not a spirituality of finding peace by leaving
the world. It's not to say you shouldn't go and take a vacation in Yosemite
or have periodic retreats. But fundamentally, for spiritual practice to
be vital in our lives, it has to be what we can use in the supermarket,
while we drive, when we're walking, when we're dealing with our families;
to make everything a part of it, and not to escape. Someone might ask in
the same vein, "Doesn't meditation fragment us from the world?" It can
if one tries to escape, but what we're training here is an awareness that
can be used throughout our day. What about social responsibility? We're
on the brink of nuclear war. There is exploitation and injustice in every
country. There are 40 wars going on right now, in Iraq, Iran, El Salvador,
Nicaragua, Guatemala, Jordan, Israel, Lebanon, Cambodia, Laos, Libya, Angola,
Afghanistan, all these places, and God knows where else. And it's not just
a story. It's painful for millions of people, as is starvation, as are
50,000 nuclear warheads which could literally destroy most of the human
beings and many or most of the major animals that live on the planet in
a painful way, easily, quickly. One must listen to one's heart in this.
It's interesting. You can make a compelling case for different sides. From
that point of view you see that what's necessary is not to sit but to act.
There is starvation. Nuclear war is imminent if we don't do something.
There is compelling need, even in this very rich and affluent society,
of people who are suffering in many ways. And what are we doing sitting
around? It's quite convincing. There is another side which is equally convincing,
and that is: What is the cause of that starvation and all those wars, and
that suffering? What do you think is the source of it? There's enough oil,
there's enough food, there's enough resources on this planet. The cause
of it is greed, and the cause of it is prejudice and hatred. We hate people
of different religions, different skin color, different customs; we like
our country, our family, our religion, our type. So there's hoarding, and
there's grasping, and greed and hatred and ignorance. We've tried revolutions
for many centuries. It's helped in some ways but in others it just keeps
going around because we haven't touched the root of the problem. The way
out of the root of the problem is for someone to discover what it means
to not be caught up by anger, what it means to be free from that fear or
that prejudice which arises in human hearts and minds, what it means to
be unafraid of that which is painful as well as that which is pleasant
-- to have the heart open to all of what the world presents. We don't need
more oil and food as much as we need somebody who understands how to avoid
getting caught in anger and fear and prejudice. And that somebody is you.
So instead of it being a luxury to meditate, from another point of view,
it's a responsibility for anyone who can, to figure out in their own being,
in their own life, what it means not to be caught by these forces, to learn
some new way -- and then bring that to bear on the economic and social
and political kinds of suffering as well in the world. There's a favorite
letter of mine from a Nobel Prize winner named George Wald, who is a biologist
at Harvard. He wrote it in response to an argument about the starting of
a Nobel laureate sperm bank. Some irate feminist wrote into the paper saying,
"Sperm banks, they should have an egg bank. Why just sperm?" He says: You're
right, Pauline. It takes an egg as well as a sperm to start a Nobel laureate.
Everyone of them has had a mother as well as a father. Say all you want
of fathers, their contribution to conception Is really rather small. Nobel
laureates aside, there isn't much technically in the way of starting an
egg bank. There are some problems but nothing so hard as involved in the
other kinds of breeder reactors. But think of a man so vain as to insist
on getting a superior egg from an egg bank. Then he has to fertilize it.
And when it's fertilized, where does he go with it, To his wife? "Here,
dear," you can hear him saying, "I just got this superior egg from an egg
bank and just fertilized it myself. Will you take care of it?" "I've got
eggs of my own to worry about," she replies. "You know what you can do
with your superior egg. Go rent a womb, and while you're at it, you better
rent a room too." You see, it just won't work. For the truth is that what
one really needs is not Nobel laureates but love. How do you think one
gets to be a Nobel laureate? Wanting love, that's how. Wanting it so bad
one works all the time and ends up a Nobel laureate. It's a consolation
prize. What matters is love. Forget sperm banks and egg banks. Banks and
love are incompatible. If you don't know that, you don't know bankers.
So just practice loving. Love a Russian. You'd be surprised how easy it
is, and how it will brighten up your morning. Love whales, Iranians, Vietnamese,
not just here but everywhere. When you've gotten really good you can even
try loving some of our politicians. This is the other voice. He said this
amazing thing, that even the Nobel Prize is a consolation prize because
what human beings most want is to be honored, to be loved, to be recognized.
And what the world most compellingly needs is someone who understands how
not to get caught in these ancient human patterns of prejudice, fear and
anger. Doesn't meditation make people withdraw from the world anyway? One
has seen that for sure. There's a fine teaching in the Buddhist tradition
called, The Near Enemies. The near enemy of love is attachment. It masquerades
like love, it feels like it, but it's separate. It says, "I love you but
really I'm attached to you. I need you out there to make me whole." Rather,
the sense of love is honoring and seeing our connection. The near enemy
to compassion is pity. "Oh, that poor person, they're suffering. I don't
suffer, not me certainly,." but they all do, and it separates them again.
The near enemy to equanimity or balance of mind is indifference. It feels
like, "Ah, everything is fine basically because I don't give a shit. I
don't care about anybody," believing that in not caring we can find some
peace. Real equanimity is when the heart begins to open and we find a capacity
to experience all that the world presents -- with balance, with love, with
openness. Our training in meditation is not a running away from the world
at all. It's really a sitting down right in the middle of it, paying attention
to that which is pleasant and that which is painful, that which makes a
lot of noise, that which is silent, and begin to listen to our relationship
to it, to observe it, to learn from it, and learn a wise way of relating.
Then what is the heart of this inner way of practice? The heart of it is
mindfulness, listening, paying attention to our bodies, to all the various
energies, to the voices, paying attention when we eat. Which voice do you
listen to when you stop a meal? Is it the belly which maybe speaks first
and says, "Oh, I had enough. Comfortable, nice and full." And then the
tongue chimes in, "Gee, but that fruit was so good, let's have a little
more." And the eyes say, 'Yeah, there's more of that other stuff too that
we haven't finished yet." And you hear all these different voices. In our
culture we don't listen to our bodies so much. Like James Joyce somewhere
in //Ulysses// said something like, "Mr. Duffy lived a shortdistance from
his body." We do in some fashion, you know. The first foundation of mindfulness
-- to become wise -- is to live in the physical reality of our body, to
live in the feelings, to be aware of emotions, to be aware of the pleasant
and neutral and unpleasant aspect of our experience, and to learn that
we don't have to resist that which is painful and grasp that which is pleasant
all the time. That's perhaps our conditioning, but in fact it doesn't lead
to peace, it doesn't lead to happiness, because things change anyway. Even
if you're attached to them they change. It's an open-hearted and non-judging
awareness which comes into the body and into the feelings and then observes
the mind as well as its laws, the law of karma, the laws of impermanence,
and begins to see how to relate to it all out of compassion, kindness and
wisdom, which means seeing how it's really operating. Sometimes it gets
very painful when you sit. Sometimes it's pleasant; you have bliss and
light. Then you get attached. Sometimes it gets painful and then you want
to avoid it. Thomas Merton said at one point: True prayer and love are
learned in the hour when prayer becomes impossible and the heart is turned
to stone. Sometimes it's in the very greatest difficulties in our sitting
or in our life that our heart opens the most, or we finally get the fact
that we can't get attached to things and hold on to them; that they don't
go the way we think but the way that they go. So wisdom begins to arise.
How then to work with the basic difficulties which arise in meditation?
What to do when there's physical pain? As best you can, sit and quietly
mentally note "pain, pain," paying attention. See if you can notice how
it changes. Sit comfortably. Don't make pain for yourself. There's plenty
in this life without it. But if you'll notice, sometimes it comes anyway.
Then see if you can learn some balance with it. When you observe pain,
one of three things will happen. Do you know what will happen if you observe
it? Sometimes it will go away; sometimes it will stay the same; and sometimes
it will get worse. That's not your business. Your job in meditation is
to start to see things as they are; light and dark, and up and down, pleasant
things and painful things; to open to them, to start to pay attention to
all of what makes up our reality. That develops what is called in spiritual
discipline, a heart of greatness. If you open the door to the outside,
what do you get when you open it? You get whatever is out there. You get
the weather for that day. And if you keep the door open, you get the changes
in the weather. If you open your mind and your body and your heart, what
do you get? You get everything. You get what's painful and what's pleasant.
And there is a way to come to a new relationship with it. In working with
difficulties -- desire, anger, restlessness, doubt, fear which are the
traditional hindrances which arise in meditation -- how can one work with
them, how can one make one's spiritual practice so that these become workable?
There's a story in the community of George Gurdjieff of this obnoxious
and very difficult man who finally left, for he was having such a hard
time. Gurdjieff paid him to come back. Everyone was upset because they
all had to pay a lot to live there, and here is Gurdjieff paying this old
creepy guy who gets annoyed at everybody and is dirty. They asked him why
he did that, and he said, "This man is like yeast for bread. Without him,
you wouldn't really learn the meaning of patience or compassion or loving
kindness. You wouldn't learn that about yourself." So when these states
of mind arise -- restlessness, desire, fear, wanting, worry, agitation,
or judgment, if only it were somehow different than it is, "I don't like
this" -- what to do with them? Sit in the very middle of them and study
them. Note how they feel in the body. There's desire. Desire runs much
of our world. If you watch TV that's all they sell is desire. Pay attention
to see what it's like, how do you feel it in the body, what is it like
in the mind. Give clear and careful mindful attention to it, without getting
caught -- not suppressing it, or trying to get it go away, and not getting
involved. Just noting, "desire, desire, wanting," until you come to see
its nature and you come to some balance where you're not so caught up in
it or afraid of it. The same for anger. Most of us are either afraid of
it and stuff it down or we act it out. See if when judgment or anger arises
you can just sit and note, "angry, furious, judging," whatever it is, and
feel it. Heat, movement, energy in the body, certain contractions, different
qualities of mind, see if it is possible to experience that energy and
learn from it. See how it changes, what it does to you, what its flavor
is, its effect on you, and then maybe you can learn not to be quite so
caught in it. It doesn't mean it won't still come, heaven knows, but your
relationship to it can be a wiser one. Do it again and again -- with fear,
with all the kinds of mental states that come up, especially the difficult
ones -- until you can sit and allow them to come and go like cows or sheep
in the meadow. What if they're very strong, what if they're too difficult,
they're really, really hard, what should you do? You're so restless you
just can't stand it, what to do? Die! Be the first yogi to ever die of
restlessness. Just say, "Fine, take me." Surrender to it and let it kill
you. And what you discover if you do that is that in a way you die; what
dies is your resistance to it, and that you just carry on. You discover
this powerful capacity we have, if you work with it, to open to all of
our experience and find some balance in it. If you're more advanced, if
you've done practice for awhile, you may also wish to work with the capacity
one has to go into the very middle of something. If there's desire, anger,
or fear, or whatever it is, not just to feel it, but see if you can find
the very center of it and discover what's there, and maybe go through the
center in some way. I'll just leave that as a //koan// for you right now.
Now, what about all the different kinds of meditation? Here one is learning
Vipassana. How about Tibetan meditation, Zen or TM, and so forth? There
are a lot of good ways to practice. There are these two students of a master
who were arguing. One says, "It's really good to sit very still and not
move and just work with whatever pain comes," and the other one says, "No,
no, that's macho. You want to relax and be gentle, and just be aware, but
you don't make a lot of effort in it." And they're arguing and they can't
seem to get any answer. And they go to the master. One says, "You've really
got to make effort to bring your mind back and to stay very present and
not to move, and in that way you get through all this stuff. You learn
how to be still in the middle of anything." And the master says, "You're
right." And the other one says, "But wait a second. Don't you want to learn
to be loving and gentle, to move if you really need to, and just to find
a balance with it all, to be soft and not to struggle against it, but simply
to open." The master says, "You're right." And a third student who was
sitting there says, "But they can't both be right." And the master says,
"And you're right too." There are many good ways of meditation. There are
some that are better than others, in the sense that some have a limited
purpose, but there are many major schools of meditation which are wonderful
if they develop awareness or mindfulness of the body, or the mind and the
heart are sense-experienced, where you observe how the world is working.
They can bring you to liberation, they can bring you to freedom. So it
doesn't really matter which kind you've chosen. If you're doing Vipassana
practice, wonderful! If what's accessible or interesting to you is Zen,
fine! What's important is that you pick one and you stay with it and do
it. Its takes discipline. If you want to learn to play the piano, it takes
more than just a day once in awhile, a few minutes here and there. If you're
lucky, after a year you'll be able to play "Happy Birthday To You." If
you really want to learn something in a full way -- tennis, piano, not
to speak of training the mind and opening the heart -- it takes perseverance,
patience and a systematic training. Pick a practice, use it, work with
it every day, work with a teacher if you can, or in circumstances where
you sit with other people. And in doing it over and over again, it starts
to develop your capacity to open; it starts to train you to be more in
the present moment; it starts to develop this sense of patience. When you
sit and really feel what's in there, it brings a kind of compassion. Now,
what's the particular value of intensive retreats? What's the value of
leaving the world to go off on a weekend or a ten-day retreat, or even
a day here?. Why not just do it at home? There are two things to say. First
again is a story of Mullah Nasrudin. He's out in his garden one day sprinkling
bread crumbs around, and a friend comes by and says, "Mullah, why are you
sprinkling those bread crumbs?" He says, " Oh, I do it to keep the tigers
away." And the friend says, "But there aren't any tigers within thousands
of miles of here." And Nasrudin says, "Effective, isn't it?" One tends
to get rote or go on automatic pilot in whatever one does. Have you noticed
that? You learn how to do it, you master it a little bit, and then you
check out. Part of the process of meditation is to wake up from being on
automatic pilot or Zombieland. It's kind of ironic because you come here
and you walk around very slowly, you don't look at anybody, and you look
more like a zombie. But inside it's a different story. What we're doing
is breaking our habit. If you walk at your normal pace, la, la, la, and
whistle while you walk down the street, what would happen most likely is
that your mind would immediately go off some place else. We use the form
of intensive retreats, of a day or a weekend, to use the silence, to use
a bit of stillness, to slow down, all as ways to break the habit of automatic
pilot, to begin to awaken in a new situation. Then you can take that back
to your daily life. We use it also because there is a great strength that
comes in meditating in groups. Especially in the beginning it's hard to
do, and you're sitting here and squirming, and everybody looks like they've
been meditating for hundreds of years except you, and you'd be embarrassed
to get up, so you stay with it, which is not a bad thing. There's another
reason for taking more than twenty minutes or half an hour or an hour a
day for meditation, and that is, when you do it in a number of hours of
succession, there's a greater possibility that you will really get concentrated,
and that you'll get quiet and silent inside. And in doing so, it becomes
possible to see more deeply, to kind of dissolve the thought and go to
the nature of the experience more directly and immediately, and see, in
fact, how rapidly it changes, and how we grasp things outside ourselves
or our self-image, or even that the basic sense of oneself is made out
of thought and attachment, and that fundamentally we don't exist as some
separate entity, that that's all created out of our rapid thought and attachment.
We come to some radical new way of seeing -- that we are not, in fact,
separate. Einstein put it his way: A human being is a part of the whole,
called by us "universe," a part limited in time and space. We experience
ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest,
a kind of optical delusion of our consciousness. This delusion is really
a prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires, and to affection
for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from
this prison by widening our circle of understanding and compassion, to
embrace all living creatures in the whole of nature and its beauty. As
we get silent and our awareness gets refined and deeper, when we pay careful
attention to it, the sense of separation and solidity breaks down. So this
is one of the strengths of doing deep or silent or retreat practice in
meditation. What to do if you actually attain something in meditation?
People ask that sometimes. "You should be so lucky," is the first answer.
But there is a second one, and the most important one. I remember when
I went to my teacher Achaan Chaa after many ventures in meditating in other
monasteries and different kinds of practice and experiences and recounted
them all to him, feeling kind of pleased with what I learned and how I'd
opened, and he just looked at me and said, "Well, do you still have any
greed?" I said, "Yeah." He said, "Still got fear and anger?" I said, "Yeah."
"Still got delusion?" I said, "Ah, ha." He said, "Fine, continue." That
was all he said, just "continue." So what you see is that meditation is
not to attain some state of mind -- they don't stay, you can't get them
to stay -- but to come to each moment with awareness, with a greater sense
of openness of heart and with a clear seeing. What can we learn of most
value in all of this? When people die, they commonly tend to ask of themselves
only a few questions, maybe just one or two. One might be, "Did I learn
to live well -- freely, honestly, authentically?" And maybe even more fundamentally
than that, "Did I love well?" All the other things that one does have a
certain measure of importance, but when it really comes down to it, it
is, "Have I loved well?" When somebody says, "Okay, death comes to your
left shoulder and taps you and says, 'This is your last dance and it's
all over," what is your reflection to be? What do you care about? What
meditation can open for us in our sitting, and even in the difficulties,
is this possibility of learning to be freer in the ups and downs and changes
of life and its pleasures and pains, and learning somehow to open and love,
to be unafraid to express that love and to feel it in a full way. One of
the most beautiful images for meditation which I've seen was a poster of
Swami Satchidananda wearing a little orange loin cloth, his long flowing
beard, a very handsome kind of Indian guru figure, who is also a fine teacher.
He teaches yoga and meditation. It showed him in the yoga posture standing
on one leg, very graceful, only he was balanced on a surfboard on a big
wave. It was very impressive. And underneath it said, "You can't stop the
waves but you can learn to surf. Meditate with Swami Satchidananda," or
something like that. It captures the spirit of meditation practice and
the teachings, and how to manifest it or bring it into a world that is
full of senses, of sights and sounds and change. The reason we go through
all this trouble and do this strange looking thing, is to somehow live
more fully, to see the people that we live with, to see the trees, to be
present when we go for a walk in the park and not be thinking about the
bills that need to be paid, and what happened yesterday; to live more fully
here, to be able to love in a greater way by opening in ourselves all the
corners of our minds to that which is difficult and that which is easy.
Perhaps because it's our deepest desire to discover our true nature, to
come to some sense of our oneness with life or to understand who we are
or what all this strange thing that we got born into is about. Basically
it's the only game in town, if you look at it; everything else is kind
of transitory. It is simply to pay attention and discover what the whole
process of life and death are about. In order to do it, one needs to cultivate
or practice mindfulness or awareness, to have it built on or foster some
sense of inner stillness so that we can see and listen to all these things.
It requires courage. It's not such an easy thing. Only as a warrior --
says Don Juan -- a spiritual warrior, can one withstand the path of knowledge.
A spiritual warrior cannot complain or regret anything. His life is an
endless challenge and challenges cannot possibly be good or bad. The basic
difference between an ordinary person and a warrior is that a warrior takes
everything as a challenge while an ordinary person takes everything as
a blessing or a curse. It's a spirit of taking what comes to us and really
working with it. Sometimes you take it as a challenge, and sometimes you
do take it as a blessing or a curse, or you worry about it or complain.
You can complain mindfully then, if that's what you want to do. You can
learn from that as well as anything else. Let it be simple. The spirit
of it is really one of opening, of discovery, of seeing; to sit, to walk,
and to train yourself to bring the attention back, concentration, mindful
balance, to observe the breath, the body, the feelings, the mind, and all
of the movement of what we got ourselves into, and see how one can relate
to it at times in ways that cause pain, how one can learn to relate to
it with wisdom, with loving-kindness, with a greater sense of understanding
and compassion. It's really not all that complicated. Sometimes it's difficult
to do, but it's not all that complicated. Someone once asked Aldous Huxley
as he was dying if he could say what he had learned in all of his experience
with many spiritual teachers and gurus and much of his own spiritual life,
and he said, "It's embarrassing to tell you this, but it seems to come
down mostly to just learning to be kinder." To be kind, though, means that
you have to be here, you have to be present for what's actually in your
experience.
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