Technical Failures

I call the members of the class together via Skype. But not even fifteen minutes into the conversation, my voice starts to break up into robot-like static. I hear the laughter and gasps from the other team members as I struggle to get my reception back. Unplugging the microphone, then plugging it back in, brings me to little avail. Even messaging doesn’t do the trick: I see a swirling circle on the screen, which indicates that the internet is somehow stalled. It ends in a mini-disaster, as I struggle to summarize my notes from the first few minutes of our sessions together. I tell myself that maybe I need  a new computer with more memory and fewer programs on it.

I can never blame anything on technical failures, because machines are just parts of one’s mind. They are extensions of mind, in the sense that they perform specific functions in response to commands and contingencies. The fact that those conditions were not present in my machine today does not make me less accountable for the situation. It means that I need to have a back-up plan when things don’t go right, or conditions are not met. The same  is true when one’s car breaks down, or one’s cell-phone runs out of power. But the interesting thing about technologies such as these is that they often create an illusory sense that nothing could go wrong, especially if they are working well. In a sense, there is a feeling that machines should be more a more proficient and ‘perfected’ over time. We even promise ourselves this perfection when we refer to different versions of a technology as ‘upgrades’. There is hardly ever such a thing as a technology ‘downgrade’, is there? Yet I am sure that examples abound where technology does the opposite. I have a feeling that it happens precisely when the machine becomes a sought-after dependency.

A concern that I had recently is that technology can make human ability seem obsolete, in the sense that what I could do without internet twenty years ago seems to pale in comparison to what I can do now (or certainly what I can access). It might seem that way, but is it really that way? This can lead to a depressing feeling that one is not fully human in a social sense unless they have the apps that allow them to interface with others. And even worse, if technology fails, it looks as though the human being has not sufficiently prepared for that failure. Anyone who cannot connect online in a collaborative project of that nature is bound to feel obsolete if they personalize that experience. But on the other hand, technical failures sometimes remind people that they do not need to always be in the mainstream of efficiency and connectivity, to feel a basic aliveness. That  aliveness shines through no matter what situation, though at times being connected via machines even seems to obscure the aliveness. Too much efficiency could rob people of the ability to reflect, while too little efficiency might alienate me from others who are operating in that high speed realm.

Competition and Cooperation

Lately, I have been thinking about the value of competition and cooperation. This is a theme that comes up a lot in my online class on cooperative learning. It’s become fashionable these days to think that cooperative learning supplants competition, but is this necessarily true? I begin to suspect that these two dynamics reflect deeper elements of being that are both somehow parts of each other.

During the group meditation tonight, a participant had talked about how she is used to being driven to achieve in school, as school almost encourages achievement and standing out in some way. Meditative practice cultivates another space, where one does not need to control all variables, but can come into it from an observing space, as well as finding the natural rhythm of the body and mind. As I was listening to these remarks, I did wonder whether this means that competition is no longer deemed as necessary? Or would it be seen in a different way, once a person looks at things through the lens of Samadhi, or wisdom?

Then, when I came home from meditation, I began to read a post regarding the value of teaching students resilience, and the ability to succeed in competition with others as having a psychological value of reducing anxiety. One key thing that came from this discussion was how competition was somehow framed as necessary to human survival and therefore as something to be faced, rather than avoided.  But sooner or later, I start to wonder: who is one meant to compete with anyway? Is it these ‘other people’ out there, or is it one’s own mind that one competes with? Again, I am haunted by the Buddhist way of looking at these issues.

If one really looks at experience, are there distinct selves and others? How does one set that boundary, and at what point? Does anyone really compete with other beings, or is it more like an artificial boundary between ‘me’ and ‘you’? Of course, in daily life, it seems that I need to produce statistics to show that I am working as much as others with whom I work. In that sense, even the most cooperative exchange sets up a standard of what is expected from me if I am to continue to be in the relationship. But from an ultimate point of view, can one say I am competing with a person, if what I see are just images and thoughts?

Perhaps a more fruitful way of looking at this might be to explore what is really entailed by these concepts. Competition entails a kind of measuring up against others. Cooperation, on the other hand, is about working with others to achieve a shared goal. But both approaches assume that success and failure depend on who I am in relation to others. They are both social psychologies. But what if my true being does not depend on these relations or the image of the self? How does one still continue to play/work and interact in those frameworks when one begins to see that they are socially constructed arrangements, rather than ‘authentic’ natural measures?

I think that as long as one recognizes that there is only mind (not beings interacting), then the terms ‘cooperation’ and ‘competition’ become a little redundant. They are useful because they create a tone for groups, but they don’t limit who one is or how the mind works. To know this is to work within the most accepted social frameworks without thinking those frameworks determine one’s true nature as mind. In that way, we compete for resources, but the mind doesn’t compete, because it encompasses everything. How, as the Venerable expressed it, could the left hand compete with the right, when they are both of the same body?

 

 

Eating a Sandwich

Learning in groups and collaborating with others is a real experience in letting go. Why do I say that? It is because the process of learning and collaborating introduces all kinds of dangers, one of which is the fear that all one’s best laid plans will not ripen. The more spontaneous I am with others, the more I see impermanence in everything that happens. At any given moment, a person can say or do something that takes the conversation in a different direction. So in this sense, one has to learn to let go in collaboration with all experiences. This is one way of looking at things, but in another way, I ask myself: why is there this separation of myself and other people in the first place? Isn’t that sense of separation the more basic mistake I make, rather than trying to figure out how to hold my own in a group?

From the perspective of what I learned in the last couple of weeks, this letting go does not require some effort to get rid of thoughts. It rather means not thinking that I am one thing or another. Anything I experience is all going to be mine. So why is it that when I hear a voice, I think that voice belongs to someone else? This is a habitual reaction that arises, the tendency to separate my understanding from someone else’s.

As I was eating lunch today, the thought came to mind of , ‘does the mind really eat a sandwich?’ And I can’t honestly say that mind does anything or interfaces with anything. It is like an operating system in the sense that whatever programs I place into it or run, mind remains basically the same. But most of the time, I am not even thinking of mind. I am getting lost in the objects of experience, such as the body, the self, the thought of who I am, etc. These phenomena seem so pervasive that they are like clouds covering an always clear sky. Meditative practice is one way to get back to the fundamental nature of the awareness, knowing that awareness does not interact with anything at all. To claim as such would be like saying that the water ‘interacts’ with waves, when in reality they are expressions of the same, where one is only the form of the other.

But who eats, anyway? Is it this mind? This body? Which one is me?

It is hard for me to sink into this teaching, which arises from Buddhism. None of this is my own idea, but it is something I feel compelled to revisit again and again.

 

Everything is in Process

The subway seems slow as I head home from downtown. I find the wheels lurching along the tracks between Davisville and Eglinton Station, and I start to wonder if I can get home before 10. Time presses onward. But is there such a thing? It is just a thought.

There are times when I don’t think I have enough time to do everything I wanted to do. And then I think: what are my priorities? What do I most want to learn and do? Is it so easy to know? If my mind is focused on one thing, of course it is pretty easy: just focus on achieving that one goal, to the detriment of all else. But impermanence abounds. If I stay with one thing, it soon starts to become a question mark. What is the importance of this one thing I want? What does it mean to focus on only that thing, and not the other factors that make up a life? If I pursue a degree and let go of all my social connections, I will be left with a degree on the wall and no friends. Does that work? The goal starts to lose its value when I see everything that supports the goal itself, including all the people one needs to stay alive and thriving.

If I measure my life according to one standard, then even eating and sleeping become like agony. Why? It’s because eating and sleeping are serving nothing but the body. They don’t have any intrinsic nature or special ideal. What happens when those necessities arise and one is caught up chasing after his or her one thing? Maybe I stop eating, or just stop taking care of myself. I remember reading a story about a man who starved himself because he was stuck playing a highly addictive sort of video game. Even though perhaps his reasoning might have convinced him that it is just a game, his emotion still stuck to the thought of the game itself. And I have heard similar things happen to mice when they were exposed to a button that excited pleasure signals in their brain. The animals would stop eating and would prefer stimulating their brains in this way rather than sustaining their bodies. This is the power of desire.

The “one thing” is slippery because it is not one thing at all. It is a series of thoughts, all of which don’t relate to or interact with the previous thought. Why chase after one thing? It is a delusion, but it reflects the desire to take all these thoughts and make coherent shapes out of them. We do it with the constellations. Depending on which country one comes from, they might see different shapes from looking at the stars. Again, I am reminded of this analogy: the incense stick creates a circle when it is twirled around. We see the circle, but is the circle real? It is just previous thought and present thought joined in a new thought. But the thoughts have already passed. They were never joined to begin with.

I try to remind myself, whatever I have now is resulting from shifting conditions. Everything is part of a process that never ends. But I should not take anything I do as having an antecedent cause that I can influence. Thoughts are emerging like bubbles. I think I had this thought before, but it’s a completely new thought.

 

 

Cat and Cicada

The heat wave spread through the streets of Toronto today, sending out a wave of cicadas (sometimes known as ‘heat bugs’). I saw a cat sitting in the middle of the driveway on my way to the subway. When I looked closely, I could see that the cat had caught a cicada and had turned it upside down. When I got closer to the cat, she edged away to the other side. I talked to the cat, and she meowed back to me. Meanwhile the cicada still struggled to right itself. The cat didn’t seem too interested in it after a while, and started to head back to the house to which she presumably belonged. And she continued her prate of meowing.

 I wondered what the cat was really thinking of the cicada. Did she perhaps think, “I wish that were  a bird?” Does the cat feel disappointed when she realizes what she caught? Why did she lose interest so quickly?

I think that disappointment is probably just as relative as my example suggests. When the cat spots something flying, she might identify it as one of many potential things. In the same way, disappointment is based on some image or idea of what I think it supposed to happen in any given situation. But I already see how powerful my thoughts are in the present situation, when I see how I project thoughts onto the cat that are not hers! So this disappointment is really the feeling that arises when the current thought doesn’t match the content of the previous expectation. But in this example, the feelings of triumph or disappointment have nothing to do with what the cat has actually caught. Some cats might still think that the insects are some kind of food for them. And some might still think that what they caught is a kind of bird. Appearances are like that.

The sense of failure is also like that.  It is a kind of juxtaposition of conflicting ideas, and it sometimes can create terrible feelings. I think it is because from my earliest years in school, teachers had to impose strict standards on what would count as a pass or a fail. And I decided to internalize that script of pass/fail, not realizing that it is only a convention that the teachers use to get people through the schooling system and assign standards to work. It is probably not really learning and the real learning might just happen when I recognize it is just a convenient standard. It is like: here are the rules for Monopoly, for chess etc. and people follow the rules because that is what keeps  the game coherent. It doesn’t mean that I don’t follow those rules. But if I can see that they are just guidelines to keep people flowing together, I don’t need to attach failure as something that cripples me or hurts me to the point of inaction. It doesn’t mean that I won’t feel disappointment, but it means that I don’t need to associate failure with an inability to use the mind.

 

 

Interactions with Mind, Sad Farewells

Today was the Venerable’s last major event in Toronto, before he takes a new posting in Taiwan. And I felt a little sad. It was an occasion of bittersweet recollections. On the one hand, my sadness comes from not quite being at a point where I am confident to continue the principles and practice that he promotes. I always feel that I am not quite ready to fully understand his very profound teachings. On the other hand, I have understood from his teachings that there is no person who isn’t one’s teacher. This is because a) we don’t interact with ‘persons’ to begin with, and b) we always interact with our own thoughts. Therefore, it is very easy for anything arising in mind to become one’s teacher.  What stops that from happening? Only mind itself.

One thing I continue to make use of is the Venerable’s concept that there  is no interaction between this thought and the previous thought. And this evening, in my last discussion with him, he pointed out that one should not even try to interact with calmness, since this is still a dualistic attachment. I start to realize that there are so many, many mistakes I make in my thinking. But on the other hand, it is really only the mind that I interact with, so there is no need for me to upbraid this previous thought for its mistake.  That previous thought has already gone.

If I were to boil it all down to one statement that I need to practice, it would be learning to see the stranger as my own mind. Strangers can reveal to me all the ways in which I shut down or cut off from others. I make the mistake of thinking I (or this body) is separate from another beings’. And I need to trust that the mind is everything and everywhere. I don’t need to limit my views to protecting this body or my previous memories. This seems to be the only antidote to self-centeredness or guardedness. If I can learn to trust the phenomena as part of mind, do I need to attach to my comfort, my body, or my thoughts? It’s critical for me to grasp this point, or else I am only practicing to find calm in the chaotic world.

It is not easy to practice this point, but I think I can start by asking the question : when I am in a social situation, am I looking only for personal gain/support/protection, or do I genuinely see that all this in front of me is the true mind? If I am able to see that all the phenomena I experience if fundamentally mine (my mind), then what need is there for me to cling to this body and its feelings? Is there a need for me to cling to old habits, when I have a whole universe of choice in front of me? These are not easy questions to consider, but it is enough for me to reflect deeply on them, and how they might revise the way I see myself in relation to the world. In fact, ‘self’, ‘world’ and ‘others’ are just constructions of mind. Knowing that such is the case, could I loosen my grip on these concepts?

Collaboration, Cooperation and Spirit

It is hard to say what makes people collaborate well, and what makes collaboration difficult or problematic. I think this is the one area I most want to explore as I am taking a Cooperative Learning class. But there is still a lot left unsaid in the literature. I almost would like to explore it from the perspective of the recent Chan workshop.

Cooperative Learning is essentially the idea that learning is done with the aim of helping all learners to achieve a shard goal. I could see the parallel with compassionate action. If I truly take it that you are not separate from me, then your achievement of a desired goal would affect me positively as well. Conversely, your inability to achieve a goal would also negatively or adversely affect me. So, from that perspective, “I” help “you” in much the same way that my right hand helps my left hand to perform a task. Because there is no separation between the notion of “I” and “you”, this process is quite natural. It isn’t really encumbered by an artificial sense of self. Cooperative Learning doesn’t quite work that way, because there is still a sense that there is a goal or a time frame to which individuals are held accountable. In other words, Cooperative Learning still takes the “I” and “You” to be separate, with the aim of ensuring that each self takes personal initiative and responsibility for ‘doing their part’ of the work that requires doing.

Cooperative Learning seems make a whole lot of sense, for many reasons. It intuitively gels with people’s culturally entrenched notions about “enlightened” self-interest (“I scratch your back and you scratch mine”), as well as with the notion of being held accountable for oneself in the context of a group.  But in meditative practices in Chan, there is no sense that there is a separate self to be held accountable. For one thing, I go back to the analogy of the incense twirling around in a circle. The light appears to make a complete circle. In reality, there is no complete circle at all, but only separate instances of the same light twirling in motion. In the same way, from an ultimate perspective, I can’t really say there is a concrete ‘me’ who is accountable, because the self is not permanent. In fact, no experience ever dwells in a permanent condition. When I take it in this way, I am never at any time ‘taking on’ or ‘owning’ anything, because neither myself nor the phenomena around me are ever permanent. Drops of water don’t ‘own’ other drops of water, even though basically they belong to the same ocean.  A challenge with the paradigm of Cooperative Learning is that it emphasizes ‘separate’ selves, yet claims these selves have accountability to a greater whole. Why, though?  I think this is also a burdensome dilemma to the Cooperative Learning movement, because there will always be students who will ask, “Why should I contribute?” They haven’t recognized their inter-being with others, so they wonder what this ‘personal accountability’ is really all about.  No matter who sincere or enthusiastic  you may happen to be about Cooperative Learning, you (as a teacher) are always going to have that one student who refuses to cooperate. And there is no amount of ‘social engineering’ or guilt mongering you can do to ‘get that student’ to do your bidding or the bidding of the greater group. Is this good or bad? It is stating that the Cooperative Learning is going to bump up against the same realities that Rationalism (its predecessor) had encountered a century ago in the writings of Dostoevsky (see Notes from Underground) and other writers like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. People are simply not just rationalists, and rationality is only one part of a greater whole that is within my being. If my ‘reason’ is interacting with others’ ‘reasons’, this is fine for small issues (like getting the washing machine to work), but for the greater scheme of how people live together, I am afraid it won’t quite work all the time or even most of the time.

If I start with the argument that I cooperate with you because we should both be equal or work equally, I might still ask, but why should I do that? There is always a lingering question: why work in groups when one can just as effectively work alone? The Cooperative Learning approach focuses on utilitarian reasons, such as studies which show that cooperation has beneficial effects on overall functioning and cognitive learning. This is fine, but there is always going to be that one incredibly honest student who will still ask, but why? And perhaps they would be right to ask, because deep inside, human beings have an ontological issue that they need to sort out (or existential) before they can be somewhat placated by these utilitarian arguments. It is the question of : what does it mean for me to work with you, to achieve a shared goal? Does this mean we are the same, or we are different, or neither, or both? What does that experience of working together signify? If the purpose of this cooperative effort is only to ensure individual survival or greater resources, then there will always be someone who gets away with cheating that arrangement. It is because deep down inside, people hunger for an ontological experience of who they really are, which is not linked to identifying ‘me’ with ‘my name’, ‘my role’ or ‘my body’. Some people just don’t care whether they are doing 50%, 20% or 100%. And that is not because they are necessarily bad people. It is because their hearts are elsewhere. In my opinion, I believe that Cooperative Learning will be somewhat doomed to stagnate or fail unless those spiritual questions are addressed (somehow) in the way people interact.

When I talk about ‘spiritual’ questions, I am really suggesting that collaborative learning inquire into the roots of how and why we interact, and who is interacting in the first place. If I am unable to understand this deep existential question, I am evading something and creating more pain for everyone. How would you feel if you were an elephant and someone tried to stuff you into a jar? You would feel miserable. And that is what happens to those students who don’t want to cooperate. Their refusal is a heartfelt search for the something else that drives pretty much the whole of human existence. If education does not in some way address that ‘something else’, it ends up substituting over-controlling ‘coercive exercises’ such as complicated rubrics and checklists, in its anxiety to ‘make people cooperate’. So, I think that we need to ask ourselves over and over, why do students refuse this? They do so not because of ignorance or lack of rationality. They do this because the true meaning of collaboration (inter-being) is not in the formulaic checklist of ‘whether I listened to everyone’, ‘whether I contributed equally’, ‘whether I did the same as others’, etc. And that checklist will only create more eye rolling and resistance, because the students know they are more than just a to-do list of items.

Work and Comfort Zones

I am struck by an idea that the Venerable had mentioned this week during our group meditation, and that is the purpose and nature of work. Venerable talked about how many people prioritize profit or the final result over the actual learning process that could take place if we have a more present-moment attitude toward work. It is something like: rather than working for profit, work for the betterment of one’s personality. If work betters my being as a human, then work is good for everyone. If, on the other hand, my attitude toward work involves grasping at something, this only creates negative energies for me and others. I am testing out the idea in my own practice at work. Rather than thinking in terms of an end result to everything I do, I am thinking of work in terms of the value it adds to my character as well as to other beings. This is a tricky concept that I am still trying to work out in life.

I think it is tricky because, in reality, all people at work have different conditions and different affinities. It is also tricky, because I surmise that it can create a huge resistance if it is not introduced skillfully according to people’s conditions and personalities. Many years ago, when I  had tried telemarketing (this would have been in my early 20s), I felt myself forcing myself into a role I was not comfortable with. And I had a similar process in trying to adjust to what I thought others expected of me, particularly in socializing with others. As soon as I talk about ‘serving others, not myself’, a dominant idea seems to pop into my head which emphasizes over-accommodating others. And this gets to be to the point of being anxious. So I think that in some sense, serving others requires a good knowledge of one’s own strengths and how one best learns and operates in life.

Around the same time as those telemarketing stints, I recall seeing a lot of books that related to the term ‘comfort zone’. It might have been inspired by Wayne Dyer’s idea of ‘zones’ of being, but I am not sure. The point is, I wonder how much this idea of ‘stepping outside my comfort zone’ has really taken with people. If a person is truly not ready to accept a certain teaching or way of being, it often backfires to the point where they react to change with a sense of fear. It is like recoiling back into a shell after being violently pulled out.I don’t think I have experienced any moment where I was able to make changes in life without a good structure of meaningful support. Even in the case of meditative practice, it is not like completely going off the deep end. It is more that the method of practice creates a field of faith and trust that one already has a true wisdom and compassionate nature. So there is a sense that one is never left with some bare or naked experience of discomfort. Rather, the meditative practice itself gives me a greater tolerance for the particular discomforts I might face in life.

What I tried to practice at work this week was not attaching to the sense that work has to have some specific quantitative outcome that can be statistically measured.  Even though my work does place value on stats, there is a need to see past the obsession with numbers and start to see other processes I am learning in the process of working. Even the values of patience, waiting for answers, tolerating mysteries, and negotiating tensions, are all skills that can be developed through the process of working. But while I acknowledge that space, I also recognize that there are in fact places where I am not comfortable to go, and there are situations where I am of more benefit than in others. To truly benefit others or uplift myself, I have to have an intimate and accepting appraisal of the kinds of tendencies and experiences I have built up to the present point, in addition to expanding to include the present moment. So there is a balance there between not rigidly holding to one view of who I should be, and accepting/embracing one’s unique gifts to the workplace, which cannot be replicated by someone else.

Chaos in the Workplace

This day’s work had its share of chaos. We had a very tight deadline to meet today, and there was a kind of mad dash to ensure that the report would be completed on time before 4 pm. Things were happening so fast, mainly because everyone had different ideas about what should be done to handle the problem most effectively. I normally feel quite determined in these situations to do the very best and achieve a good result from the problem, but a part of me also felt carried along by the situation. I almost started to feel that no matter what the outcome would be, all of us are bound to fall below whatever expectations we were harboring inside. 2 per cent became 1 per cent.

When I described this situation during the group practice tonight, the Venerable mentioned that a good attitude is to allow the mind to fully relax so that the best solution can naturally arise. When all people in the workplace have agitated minds, they tend to shoot off the first solution that comes to mind, without realizing all the impacts or what would be most helpful. Of course, it is hard to achieve the relaxed and clear mind all the time, but the Venerable’s example reminds me that it is possible.

I think that one useful way of looking at it is almost the opposite: namely, to say that from a relative point of view, there are never any perfect or ‘ultimate’ solutions, even though problems often get posed in such a way that one would expect a perfect solution. I think what the Venerable suggests is somewhat of a paradox. As soon as a person lets go of the need to find a perfect solution or answer to a complex problem, their mind becomes clear enough to find ‘good enough’ answers to problems. But the interesting thing to me is that ‘good enough’ never comes from the things themselves and the way they present themselves to us. Rather, the ‘good enough’ always comes from one’s own state of mind. If my mind is agitated in trying to pursue a particular solution to a problem, I am not likely to see any outcome as satisfying, no matter what kinds of thought I put into it. But if I am aware that the mind is always perfect equanimity, then there is no strong desire to attach to one solution or ultimate truth. In that sense, the mind is more flexible to take on multiple possibilities, depending on the conditions of the sentient beings. What I am suggesting as well is that the ‘good enough’ comes from adjusting the tendency to attach to perfect answers, and to see the wisdom and perfection found in the present moment.

Sometimes, one needs to go through a situation where solutions kind of ‘exhaust themselves’ before one can really let go and see that both perfections and imperfections have the same source in mind.  At that point, I suppose that all the solutions possible can yield both perfections and imperfections, and there is no need to cling to one over others.

Water and Waves

During the meditation tonight, I tried a different approach to relating to pain. But I don’t think that this has anything to do with meditation itself. It has more to do with how I see things, my attitude in general, and how I adjust. The closest analogy I can think of is the ‘water’ and ‘waves’ analogy. This analogy was used by the Venerable to describe how one relates to phenomena in the world. Though I don’t have too much spiritual attainment, I will relate what I find useful about this analogy in my daily practice.

It seems to me that the view of ‘seeing things equally’ is not enough. It is not enough to see waves as having an equal value or intensity. I think that the deeper meaning is to understand what is the substance and core of the waves themselves. To appreciate this core principle (the mind principle) is to value things in ways different from those traditionally known. I remember years ago, when I was facilitating a Meetup Group for a Huayen Buddhist class, there was a person who briefly joined online. He later felt put off by the group, because there was a line in Francis Cook’s Jewel Net of Indra where it talks about a grain of sand being equal to a tiger. He simply couldn’t believe this, and ended up leaving the group, almost in disgust. How could a grain of sand be like a tiger? I couldn’t explain to him what the expression meant, though it seems to defy human reasoning.  I might take a different crack at it here.

On a relative level, waves do vary in intensity and duration. In the same way, I encounter different sizes, shapes and characteristics of forms. To try to ‘equalize’ forms in terms of their appearances would seem counter-intuitive, and most people would understandably reject that. But Huayen and other schools of Buddhism seem to be taking it a step deeper, in saying all being is equally the same material as the ocean itself. The investigation is to understand precisely why these things are equal, rather than to use reasoning to simply declare ‘all phenomena are equal’. From what angle am I able to see that waves are ‘equal’?

To go back to meditation practice, I can easily try to use relative arguments to say that my pain is equal to any other sensation. But if I don’t understand the principle of why it is equal to other sensations, then it just becomes a way of trying to convince myself that one thing is somehow the same as another. This might sometimes be like trying to convince a child that mashed potatoes are another form of vanilla ice cream. I think that where the practice goes deeper is to inquire into the nature of the ocean itself, to understand what is substantially ‘equal’ about all phenomena, to the point where mind does not move between them. I think the answer to this question is that when I am really looking into the nature of the ‘unmoved’ mind, phenomena naturally lose their ability to hook themselves into me or make a deep impression on me.  This happened to me a little bit today, for example. During the process of experiencing body pain, I had begun an inquiry into what the pain is. But rather than trying to use logic to convince myself that the pain if bearable or even enjoyable, I took a different approach. I started to ask, what part of all this sensation does not move and is not affected by the pain itself? Can the mind be said to be ‘hurt’ by anything? I say, I hurt my hand, or I have a hurt feeling, but is mind ever ‘hurt’? Maybe it is analogous to a tv screen being hurt by an actor punching another actor in a movie. The mind doesn’t feel ‘hurt’ because mind is only reflecting experience. It is like the nature of water in the ocean is not ‘moved’ by the waves, because it is in fact the waves themselves. So, when I say “I am hurt”, I am confusing my reality as a being with the forms I witness, including the image of ‘me’ or ‘something else hurting me’.

I think that when I keep my mind on this unmoving aspect of mind, I am moreflexible to feel grateful for whatever comes up, because I am not just seeing the appearance anymore. I am seeing that it is all coming from this deeper wellspring that is infinite and can be replenished at any time. Reflecting this way allows me to better handle painful sensations.

That Full Catastrophe at Wendy’s

The line- up is short and not too many people are in the Wendy’s. I stand in line and wait for my time to come. I order and stand aside. I notice the movement of hands as the food transfers from raw ingredient to cooked product, to something wrapped and ready to take home. I marvel at the efficiency. And for a moment, I wonder if there is a single being in the room. When I take away thoughts of ‘me’ standing here and ‘others’ preparing the food, what am I left with? The sounds,  the smells, the process, food flowing by, a sneeze, a nose blowing, dust flying, brooms sweeping, and shuffling to get to a vacant seat. Life is a verb, life is a breeze. Life is buzzing, is blowing. But is there anything ‘living’ that I can point to? Can I point to one single piece in this process and say “that is life, and that is not life”? Subject and objects dissolve at the Wendy’s.

Many years ago, I read Jon Kabat Zinns’ book on mindfulness called Full Catastrophic Living. Since then, it has become something of an Indigo/Chapters classic. Every time I go to the bookstores, I am seeing several copies of that book. And it’s a good book if only for the metaphorical title, which says many things about life itself. For me, there is a humor in that title. It acknowledges, as Kabat Zinn does, that hardly anything really goes according to plan, and we don’t have it all together in our lives. Not only this, but there is no expectation that one ever will fully have it altogether. As the Venerable shared with us in the Dharma Talk this evening, people have to use skilful means to interact with mind. All the great religions provide an access point for people to dialogue with the mind and find peace with the mind, yet the religious figures themselves are projections of mind.

But how we “dialogue” with mind or when there is fundamentally only one mind, this mind, is tricky to understand.  I can’t say that I have integrated the teaching into my life, because I still behave as though there are things and people separate from mind. The analogy used in the Dharma Talk tonight was about a man who played chess with himself in the park, beat himself, and gave himself a heart attack over a rude gesture he gave to himself! This sounds crazy, but we are always interacting with our previous thoughts, so in that regard, we are all very much like that chess player. The violence of this inner dialogue comes when we don’t recognize the suffering we create when one thought reacts to the previous thought. We think that this previous thought is something outside of us, or someone who bothers us, or a separate object from our own subject. 

Dreaming, Together

The message in my inbox this morning gave me some cause for alarm. I realized that my group for the online course on collaborative learning hasn’t communicated very much since we had begun the course two weeks ago. Now the course instructor is giving our group a bit of a nudge. Are we really working together, or just working as separate individuals to complete a group project? Are we truly collaborating? And I started to reflect, a little guiltily, that I have not developed a good plan for how the team members will interact with each other. In this regard, I would have to say that I have failed so far to implement the collaborative style of working with others.

This situation leads me to wonder: what leads to communication breakdown? Is it just misunderstanding? Is it just the fact that everyone is busy? I am sure that there are as many answers to this question as there are people. But I want to apply what I learned from some Chan teachings to this question.

I have heard it often said in the Chan Buddhist school that people are dreaming awake. This is a metaphor that is difficult to really appreciate. I think that it means that consciousness is caught up in the causes and conditions generated by the past thoughts. It is like: this consciousness is always continuing or ‘picking up’ where it left off from the previous thought. Now I wonder about this: does it mean that ‘my’ dream and ‘your’ dream don’t connect? What does it entail when people come together to collaborate? This again is a bit murky, and I don’t want to create any mistake by going into this. I will use only my own observations to try to understand it.

There really isn’t this separate “I” and “you” that are interacting, according to what I learned this past little while with the Venerable. So, already, it  is a mistake to say that “I” and “you” are dreaming. So I think the dream metaphor means something different. It means getting caught up in impermanent illusions of what “I” am, or who “you” are. For example, when I see a puff of smoke,  my mind will find ways to see shapes in the smoke and make them appear to be real. But does the smoke really work with itself to create the special shapes? It seems unlikely. The point is that the shapes have no real nature of their own or cause of their own. They are so impermanent that one cannot say the shape has a separate essence with its own unique qualities. But also, it is fundamentally the same substance as all the smoke. So trying to make out a shape from it and taking the shape as something with its own nature, is a kind of mistake. But it is easy to fall into that, I think.

When I was very young, I used to wake up in the morning and spot a strange shadow somewhere on the floor, where the sun would start to rise through the curtains. At first, I would think that the shadow is some strange alien creature, or a mouse. And I would marvel at the shape for a while: what is it? Is it a toy I had received long ago which I had now forgotten? Is it something new? I would not want to get out of bed or change my position, because doing so would guarantee that the mystery would be gone. Soon enough, I would emerge from the bed and realize that the thing on the floor is not a real “thing” after all. It is only a kind of shadow cast upon by that particular configuration of light and shade, in that particular moment. But I wanted it to be something else. I wanted that shape to have its own substance that I could feel or marvel at indefinitely. Such is the desiring mind.

To return to the theme of collaboration: I think that from this perspective, I cannot say that there is a separate ‘me’ and ‘you’ for the same reasons elaborated above. The experience itself is always coming from the same experiential source.  Where I draw a line between what is ‘me’ and what is ‘you’ is not part of that experience. It is a kind of discrimination. If I don’t treat myself as separate from the whole experience of being, would I need to worry about ‘self’ and ‘others’? I could then take the voice of the other to be a voice coming from the same source as all things, the mind itself. So the principle is that I don’t need to add this layer of ‘me’ and ‘you’ to the interactions of mind.  To do so is to make the mistake of thinking someone should be here, who isn’t here. And this thinking is a subtle attachment. With ‘me’ and ‘you’ comes craving, rejection and ignoring. To conceive a separate ‘you’, I then have the thought of what ‘to do’ with ‘you’: crave (want more), reject (want less) or ignore (want neither more nor less). The other way around this is to treat the present experience as always and already perfect in itself. The bird has not really flown to anywhere. Nor has a ‘person’. It is a total experience in itself, whether there is a joining of others or a breakdown of communication with others.  This is to say, as long as I am not fixated on what “I” should do with “you” (specifically the “I” or “you”), then I can view collaboration with others as a changing and empty experience. It doesn’t have this frightening substance or absence to it. It is just this present moment unfolding the way it is exactly unfolding, without expectation or need for the ‘other’ as a separate construct of mind.

I think this principle might help me to stop seeing others as ‘present’ or ‘absent’ and thus to work with whatever conditions are in front of me, without trying to crave more or less of someone. This does not mean collaboration will work, but it means that collaboration is always of the mind itself (between mind and mind), and therefore there is no need to hold onto a ‘missed’ collaboration that didn’t happen. The bird flies without a trace, and so do people!

Group Learning and Letting Go

The chanting ceremony started out with a bit of turbulence. I had a lot of wandering thoughts in the beginning, but I ended up resorting to asking ‘what is wu?’ many times. Yes, it diverted me from the words of the chanting itself, but on the other hand, it seemed effective to me. I started to realize that the entire sounds and environment aren’t separate. They are part of an inter-being that does not have a separate distinct ‘me’. And at that point, I started to experience what it is like for there to be no real person in the experience.

During the Surangama Study Group session today, we were continuing to explore the chapter on Yajnadata and the dream. I found one of many interesting insights from the group members. Let me set the background. Buddha explains to Purna that he does not need to keep working himself to the bone to become enlightened. Rather than looking at the phenomena inside the dream for an answer to why beings are deluded, a person only needs to let go of distinctions created by karma, as well as killing and stealing, to realize the true mind. This is tough to unpack, because my thought was: isn’t ‘do not kill’ just another way of reacting to other beings? What does this have to do with realizing the true mind? But then the group members started to share how ‘ending’ these negative karmas is not about engaging the dream at all. The opposite: vexations arise only when I begin to see people in the experience. That is, when I make out a face and say, ‘that is you’, I have already created vexations for myself. Not only that, but it is the beginning of breaking the precepts. Why, you might wonder? It is because the violence always begins when I create a ‘me’ and  a ‘you’. And this “me” and “you” become the ways in which the dream itself is perpetuated. So, there is a mystery there. The actual maintenance of precepts means that I never generate ‘separate’ beings in mind.

A lot of this way of looking at things is strange to me initially. Part of the reason is that I am used to the notion that behaving ethically implies respect for ‘separate persons’.  The problem begins when I start to conceptualize my interests as opposed to others’ interests. This is a tricky point. I agree that there are times when people need to assert their own interests and create boundaries in relation to ‘others’. It is not a question of being enmeshed with others. I think that the Sutra is describing a state of realizing that there just aren’t these ‘self’ and ‘others’ in the experience, because experience is a totality. Does this mean that “I” need to submit to “you”? Not really, because “I “and “you” are just conventions that are used in daily life. If I take ‘I’ or ‘you’ too literally, I end up hyper-relating to them as concepts. “I” and “You” become separate objects to be loved or hated, rather than as conventions used to demarcate certain kinds of experiences. This can create a lot of conflict, as “I” struggle to find a place in a world of ‘other’ beings.

I don’t think this means that I can ever get away from the conventions of self and other. On the contrary, the conventions are preserved in order to use language and communicate. But, beyond that, I need to ask myself whether there is any real use for a deeply entrenched notion of self, as distinct from other beings. Besides the social roles I play and cultural identities, is there any enduring, fixed and embodied sense of self that stays the same? From what I learned this past weekend from the Venerable, the notion of self is always a kind of thought. I get these thoughts from images which continually arise in interactions. But, if I take those images to be my ‘real self’, who watches the images? And does the watcher behold that image forever?

Now, in my practice of huatou, I am trying very hard to see past the convention of differentiating a self from others.  I observe that most of my thoughts about myself are fleeting and not tangible. They are based on momentary feelings of inner threat that don’t necessarily come to fruition. When I can go back to the situation and surroundings as I truly experience it (without the mental filters of “this is mine”, “this is yours”), I find less of a need to feel a separate self. In fact, the feeling of separation  is based on thoughts of separation. Is that thought truly embodied?

Academic Reading

              I am taking a course with large amounts of academic reading involved. I find that there are times when the mind becomes agitated and distracted when I read. I am trying to understand the dynamics behind that. Is it due to the strain of reading complex clauses? Or is it simply that the interest in the reading is not always evident or apparent? Maybe all of these questions and alternatives apply, though I am trying to find a more spiritual understanding of what it means to be distracted by what one reads. Is it possible, for instance, that distraction is an unconscious form of resistance to what the text is implying or suggesting? At times, how I respond to a text is not so smooth as a linear model might suggest. Reading does not simply mean taking the letters of words, stringing sentences together, and then coming up with neat interpretations. Other processes are involved, many of which seem taken for granted. And resistance to the text often comes, for me, in the form of a kind of turning away from the words. It is a subconscious way for me to make personal space for what the text is telling me, without fully submerging myself in the meaning of the words. I have a feeling that there is never a full ‘immersion’ in words. A subject always lingers in the spaces between the words.

                To give an example of what I am talking about: I was recently reading a required article for a course about educational reforms, specifically related to cooperative learning. This article describes a program which is designed to empower schoolteachers to design their own lesson plans and develop confidence in their abilities to lead students toward cooperative learning strategies. I felt resistant about this article for perhaps a few reasons. One such reason was that the data took the form of teachers expressing their opinions on how confident they were to implement cooperative learning strategies on their own in a classroom setting.  I wondered: how confident should I feel in the teacher’s expressed confidence? And what does it really mean for a teacher to express confidence? Is confidence a step forward, or is it a concealment of what is not known or not report-able? So I think my resistance to the article was its silent demand for my own confidence in the study and its methodologies, which I either lacked or could not pretend I actually had. It also comes from my feeling that high confidence is not always an accurate perception of what is really happening in one’s inner or outer worlds.

                The point I want to make is that reading is similar to a meditative experience. The Venerable was remarking in the Buddhist class today that most people approach science from the angle of wanting to replicate a particular experiment using a kind of proven hypothesis or recipe based on past experiences or cultural preconceptions. But meditation is not like this at all. I may have all the ‘right’ postures, right views and right conditions to practice, only to find myself falling asleep or having any number of wandering thoughts. The same is true of reading. Both my cultural expectation and working hypothesis about the reading process is that it is a linear process, if not one of the most linear. In theory, yes:  one reads from left to right or from top to bottom, depending on one’s culture/language, and simply turns the words into meanings based on the surrounding sentence structures and contexts.  But the real practice of reading is tricky and problematic.  It stops, it restarts, it disconnects, it pans out to reflect, it grows weary, and it is subject to all sorts of external conditions of the reading environment. And it implicates the process of why we become distracted from our reading.

Distraction is not just about boredom. It can be an indication that something does not connect me to that particular reading. But because my reader self dislikes so much the notion of disconnection, I will tend to have wandering thoughts or be tempted to go to the internet to find more distractions. A deeper ‘reading’ would be to stop before I distract myself and wonder about the disconnection itself. It might be about observing what resistance is preventing me from getting the vital point of the article or understanding its main gist. But that non-reading or refusal to read may be the way to engage the reading itself, if only the meaning of the disconnection is fully absorbed and understood. Because I train my mind to choose distraction over disconnection, I may never find the rich insights that lie behind the disconnection itself.

The Sound of Ringing in the Ears

              This morning, I feel quite alarmed to hear my right ear plugged up, and having a faint ringing sound. I hope that it isn’t the early onset of tinnitus. And I can feel the strain of my ear pressing against my pillow, leading me to wonder whether my sleep posture has anything to do with my fragile eardrum. My body wants to swallow in a desperate effort to unplug the offending ear. But I am not so lucky today, and I end up simply getting used to the congested ear and the faint ringing.

                Whether the ringing of my ear is a terrible obstruction to hearing or not is a bit debatable. In The Surangama Sutra, there is a dialogue between Buddha and Ananda where the Buddha compares delusion to those flowers that emerge in one’s line of vision after a person rubs her eyes tightly. Anything that is created by the body can easily fool the senses, such as an overstimulated nervous system, the ringing of the ears, or the ‘floating flowers’ in the eyes. As I compare that story to my present situation, I realize that it is a bit of a blessing to have the chance to have somewhat impaired ear functioning. Hearing a ringing that has no real source puts me in touch with the constructed nature of all the things I hear. For example, does the sound of ringing really come from another object? Or does it come from the mind? Even if I link the ringing sound to the mind, I have to admit that the sound is not the real nature of mind. Otherwise, if it were inherent to mind, I would be stuck hearing that sound all the time, which (luckily?) doesn’t happen in reality.

The point is that it could be a rare gift to see the strange breakdown of the senses. Through the breakdown, I begin to see that what I feel is real, is actually a particular interpretation that the brain makes in response to a great deal of stimuli. I also begin to observe the patterns of how I habitually respond to situations, by comparing what is happening now to something previous to that experience. Whenever a new situation comes into play, my tendency is to keep comparing that experience to a past situation that might have been more ‘pleasant’ in some respects. I feel catastrophic when the new affairs conflicts with the old. But as the Venerable mentioned in our Dharma Talk tonight, is the mind ever disordered or sick? Though the state of the body and senses might fluctuate, the nature of mind is that it can never become sick or ‘disordered’.  Though the Venerable didn’t explain why this is so, I think it is because sickness is a relative term. Sickness relates to a body that is prone to disintegration, like all the elements. The mind, on the other hand, can never be said to decay or disintegrate. Mind is the background through which all experiences give rise.  It cannot be said to fall apart. So resting in mind is to be confident that I am not the experience of my body.

If I always think I am in my body and conditioned by the body, what results? I have experienced first-hand that too much of an obsession with bodily ailments can lead to a lot of needless suffering.  It contracts consciousness, by insisting that the mind depends on the condition of the body. Underneath that obsession is the desire for the ideal body. What drives the suffering is my tendency to always compare what I feel now with what I supposedly felt in the past. It reminds me of an old story I read many years ago, where the question was asked: in what form of the body will the Christian be, once she or he gets to heaven? The answer given: the body that ascends to heaven is the body in its healthiest ‘prime’ of being (say, 30 years old). Indeed, that would be heaven for most, considering all the fragilities that occur as people get older. But is this really ideal? Who decides that this particular state of the body is the natural or most healthy form there is? Again, it is surprising to learn how much my understanding of pain and embodiment is influenced by cultural constructs as well as past memories. Instead of seeing the body as a natural process of ageing over time, the culture values a particular age of health. This idealization of a limited age of health ends up driving many industries, including cosmetics and facial surgery.

If I know that I am not my body, I can calmly accept the fact that my body isn’t always going to create pleasure for me. And this can help create more relaxed and calm embodiment, in spite of pain that might occur throughout a person’s life span.

 

The “Will Power " of Water

During our Thursday evening sitting tonight, a question had been raised by one of the U of T students regarding how pain is treated in meditation practice. The Venerable mentioned three approaches, all of which resonated well with me. The first is to appreciate the pain, almost as though one were to embrace the pain rather than rejecting it. This is a tricky practice, since it involves letting go of the fear of pain that often overwhelms the meditation practitioner in the beginning of practice. Sometimes people refer to this practice as being ‘open’ or ‘curious’. In other words, it’s not just a neutral practice of holding something at bay or trying to emotionally disconnect from it (which would be a form of rejection in a way). I think it’s more like slowly opening up to the rawness or the tenderness of that pain, wanting to genuinely face it and understand its signals rather than trying to neutralize the experience or detach from  it.

The second approach mentioned by the Venerable is not to treat the pain as ‘my’ pain. For example, I might describe the sensation as something that is part of me: “I have this pain”, “there is a pain in my leg”, etc. This approach can be valuable in the way that I am no longer adding more pain to it by identifying with my own body. But this ‘dissociating’ is not the same as the dissociating I do with my intellect, when I find a pain uncomfortable.

The third approach was described by the Venerable as a kind of will power. By acknowledging that sitting with pain can create a greater sense of tolerance for that pain, the practitioner can learn to sit still in that pain with a sense of purpose and motivation. If I can learn to bear the discomfort of leg pain, I may later be able to have the strength to handle the greater discomforts of a major illness.

In principle, I think all these approaches work, but I find it useful to go back to the water analogy to understand what is happening. When I first started to meditate in longer group situations, my reaction to pain was often quite intense. I noticed how I regarded the pain as something that somehow should not be, and therefore needs to be rejected in order to embrace a truly ‘liberating’ experience. What I didn’t realize was that this desire for a liberating experience was where most of my suffering was.  It reflected a lack of intimate understanding of the pain itself, and a wish to push away from the body in order to achieve a realization of some kind. But what I couldn’t realize is that this pressure to desire something more created a tremendous fear of not realizing it. This took the form of anxiously trying to push away the pain or transform it into something else, much as an alchemist might transform lead into gold. Of course, it doesn’t quite work this way.

What I find most useful with the water analogy is that we don’t even need to reject our ‘rejections’. Everything is beheld as it is equally in mind. When I can understand that no experience is ever away from the mind, it is like realizing that the water pervades everything without obstacles. The true nature of mind is able to accommodate any experience, so it fluidly moves between viewpoints. The more I can understand this, the less I feel a need to change one ‘unfavorable’ experience into a very good experience. Each experience is complete into itself because it depends on something greater than everything.

This sounds abstract, but one way to practice it is to understand that the thoughts are just parts of a fluid and dynamic experience. They are never to be confused with the true mind, which cannot be grasped as an object. It can only be somehow pointed to. The more I can grapple with that question of how true mind is approached, the less I take these solid-looking appearances to be real. So the will power of water is that it simply has no separate individual will controlling its experience.

How To Drink Water

                 I am still reflecting on yesterday’s Buddhist talk, as well as today’s application of Chan/mindfulness at work and in daily life. I admit that I find it very difficult to implement mindfulness and spiritual practices simply by following a set of principles. I think the principles can form a scaffolding through which faith in a practice needs to be the core. In fact, I have a nagging suspicion that faith in mind is far more important to sustaining a spiritual practice, as opposed to simply having intellectual understandings of practice. I want to describe what I mean in terms of my own experiences.

                Ever since I started to practice meditation, I have gradually learned to tell the difference between grasping a thought (which is short lived) and resting upon a kind of bed-rock awareness. This awareness actually is not attained. It is like: if I were to tell you it is difficult to drink water, what would you think? Your first impression might be to say that it isn’t drinking water that is difficult, but it is my thought that makes it difficult! Maybe I am overthinking the process of drinking water, so it seems difficult. But the point of this example is to say that being is natural, and we are always inter-being. We don’t need to make a special effort to connect, when the connection already pre-exists. Then the question  becomes, why do we over-think?

                I believe that the biggest impediment to practicing is the thought that there is an enormous mountain to scale before I can realize the mind that I have. But in Chan traditions, I have heard the story of someone who was enlightened when he realized that his nostrils point downward. Is this possible? But this realization is not as easy as it seems.  It is like realizing what I had all along but forgot through force of habit or a kind of sleep-inducing state. The story inspires me to have more confidence that the mind is not really obstructed by anything. It does whatever cause and conditions require, yet it is not bound by causes and conditions. Here is another analogy: when the water runs down a stream, what does it do when it encounters rocks or a tree trunk? Does the water try to avoid the rocks? Will the water shatter when it hits the rocks? In fact, the water flows into the rocks and finds any possible direction to accommodate the rock. It surrounds the rocks and trees. And as soon as the rock is surmounted, the water goes back to its shape before. But in all this process, is water anything but water? Its nature remains the same, no matter what is thrown into the river. Yet it is so perfectly accommodating of every condition, that one would have to say the water has no conflict with anything.

                When I talk about ‘faith’ in the mind, what I realize is that the mind is going to accord with the conditions, regardless of whether I have faith or not. Water is water, whether I think it is or not. It is the same with belief. The mind doesn’t depend on belief in mind, or any other thought. I don’t need to sustain a certain kind of belief in something for mind to appear. So what would faith mean, in this case? It means, for me, that if I am stuck in the thought, I can be aware that the thought is not the real mind. It is just the thought. The same is true with feelings, and other kinds of phenomena. There is nothing really ‘sticking’ mind anywhere. So if I experience a tightness or tension, the faith is to know that it is like the water and the rocks. Mind accommodates the tension the way water accommodates any rocks in its path, but mind is not stuck in tension. It is just following the function, to be aware of the tension arising in that moment. Then the same goes with relaxation, or happiness, or any other mental and emotional states. These phenomena are just reflections of mind. They are not confining the mind or challenging the mind. In reality, even the rocks are part of the mind. So what, you might ask?

                I feel that it is important to relax and let one’s being go into this experience,  to submerge in this concept, or to be with this concept for a while. Even in the direst state, there is some fundamental knowing that is not contained in that state. It is like in a painting. We see details, but we also need to see the background of the canvas to know the whole painting. I can pretend that I understand everything using thoughts. But this will only submerge me in dualistic thinking. I think “I got it this time”, but what I got was comparing this thought  to a previous thought. What does “I got it” mean without the “I didn’t have it before?” So if I am trying to grasp that ‘I got it moment’, then that is the time to let go. Keep letting go until you can see that your mind is more than the thoughts. It is a kind of elusive ‘more’ that contains everything but is nothing. Again, think of water.

                If I were to worry about changing the current feeling from ‘bad’ to ‘good’, where does that get me? It’s okay because it can help me to be a better person in society, by cultivating pleasant feelings in myself and my surroundings. But I don’t believe that the ultimate goal is to seek these pleasant feelings. I think the main point is to always look toward the true mind, no matter what feelings are there. There is no ultimate value holding onto one kind of feeling or even training myself to like a certain feeling. It is only going to divert energy away from knowing the true mind. This is how to keep going back to the water, instead of focusing on the passing rocks and debris. This debris won’t last forever, and if cling to it indefinitely, I will never understand the nature of mind. I have to remind myself of this every day. And most importantly, that having a practice method in meditation allows me to drink the water rather than just staring at the word ‘water’.

“Empty Tears, Emptied Cups”

            As I left the subway to get home from the Venerable’s talk this evening, I saw a man walking toward the south platform of Sheppard station. He looked like he was staggering and veering dangerously close to the yellow strip that demarcates the safe zone of standing before the subway. He then pulled out a cup of some unrecognizable liquid and threw it into the subway tracks. But since my mind was fairly relaxed and focused from the evening’s talk, it took some time for me to register a reaction. The first was disbelief (why is this happening?), followed by fear (who is doing this?), and then a feeling of disapproval (this shouldn’t happen). But going back to the Venerable’s talk tonight on the Platform Sutra, I began to wonder: what do any of these reactions have to do with the phenomena itself? If I were able to go back and see it for what it is, it would simply be water coming from a cup. And then it would be an empty cup. It was through this retelling of what I saw that I began to understand why the seasons are often used to describe experiences in Chan.

The seasons are a kind of metaphor often used to describe how phenomena arise and then give way to new yet unrelated phenomena. It is unlikely that anyone could ever causally link the seasons together, since they operate separately. They have separate qualities that simply yield to one another in a harmonic whole. It is only my mind that discriminates one season from the next, declaring that one is more natural than the other. Then I start to muddy the seasons. It is like trying to compare two kinds of dogs, one shaggy and one short-haired, and saying that the shaggy dog should be more like the short haired one, then vice versa. Why should they be alike? Engaging the previous thought, we try to compare it with the current thought. When a leaf falls to the ground, I compare it to the previous phenomena of a leaf being on a tree. Then I remark, “How terrible that the leaf should fall”. But the mistake I am making is seeing the current thought in light of a thought that has already passed. Falling leaf and unfallen leaf are not related occurrences. Who makes those distinctions? In reality, the fall is just the fall. Autumn can be fully enjoyed and fully experienced only when we put down the summer.

The Venerable often describes the metaphor of waves in an ocean. Trying to grasp or compare waves in a concurrent sequence, I forget the fact that the waves are all of one essence. Is there a need to compare something that is already essentially whole? Even a thought that appears to be defiled isn’t really defiled after all. I assign a value to the experience based on a comparison to something else, such as comparing the floors in two different rooms. Someone has to give it a value in order to have a value, and that someone is the ‘subject’ separate from the objects of the world. But are thoughts really like that? They are really like bubbles that come and go. When I meditate, I assign all kinds of thoughts to the experience of meditation (painful, blissful, boring, peaceful), but none remains even when I emerge from the sitting. I think this metaphor is useful because it lessens attachment to thoughts, and it loosens the tendency to add more to thoughts, and confuse unrelated thoughts.

                During the talk tonight, the Venerable introduced a beautiful expression that Shifu Master Sheng Yen used: “Tears and Laughter in Emptiness.” What does it mean? Shifu would often use emotions to create situations with his students, such as appearing angry to those who needed further motivation, or appearing gentle to those who were discouraged or stressed.  The point is, Sheng Yen treated the emotions as not himself. He could experience any number of emotions and recognize that none of them relate to a fixed sense of self as a subject. The emotions are just causes and conditions arising in mind. So there is no need to create a self through their arrival. If I attach a self to any emotion, then I start to resist them or crave them, depending on the meaning I assign to the experience. As soon as I remark, “I am bothered”, I have already created a motivation to push away the situation or the feeling. The feeling becomes “my problem”, when actually there is no real self that is linked to it at all. Again, I am reminded of the analogy of the incense stick twirling into a circle. The circle reminds me of the ‘self’. It is the tendency to create a generalization from these isolated causes and conditions happening at different moments in time. But if I go back to the analogy of the seasons: anger is just like the winter. It is an occurrence. It doesn’t have any staying ability in mind. It just is what it is. If I treat it that way (as having some place in mind), then there is no reaction to it. There is neither the need to like nor dislike the anger, because no self has been assigned to say “I am angry”.

                To go back to my experience on the subway, when the cup is empty, there is nothing more to do. Causes have ripened in that moment for water to spill from a staggering man’s cup to the subway floor. I may not be able to see the causes, but they must be all there for it to truly happen. So do I need to go back to when the cup was full and unspilled?