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!