Post Retreat Reflection

  The one day intermediate retreats often teach me one thing, and that is the importance of acknowledging facticity of experience. I think 'facticity' is more a word coming from Heidegger, but it might map onto the idea of cause and condition in Buddhist philosophy. And during the one day retreat today, I had this experience where the leg pain seemed to great that I simply found it impossible to exert any effort to 'soothe' it or transform it in any way into something else. And the interesting thing is that during the sharing afterward, the facilitator talked about how meditation often appears to be a physical 'embodied' experience at the beginning, but then later it starts to appear that al the bodily conditions can be rooted in specific states of mind. That is, the key to being able to deal with states of pain is to contextualize pain in terms of wider states of mind.
   However, I found that toward the end of the day, the only thing I could really do was to completely and utterly accept what was happening to me in that moment, without trying to adjust anything. How did I accomplish that? Well, I found that simply asking 'who experiences this pain?' lead me to experience the absence of a single fixed person who feels pain. This was very powerful for me, not in the sense that it eliminated the pain but more in the sense that there was no self that was pushing it away anymore. The pain was at times experienced as a kind of pure sensation, and there was simply no self to say "I" feel this pain. But at times this experience was quite difficult to sustain, and there were times when I had to accept that I was not 'okay' with the pain at all. Now again, is there an "I" in this particular experience?  Not a permanent one, but in those moments, I had to realize how hard it is to let go of the belief and attachment to self-experience.

The Body and the "I"

    What does it mean to have no self? Surely, when I am called by my name "Keith", this is a self. So why does Buddhism talk so much about no self when there are definite labels? I think this is a serious question that I am pondering currently.
    For instance, if a person feels hungry, they feel their own distinct bodily sense. I don't feel someone else's hunger, and when someone else is eating in the room, it's not 'this body' that feels full. So in that case, is it not proper to refer to this body as me and someone else's as them? The problem is that I attribute the body to a distinct and separate self. But when I reflect on it, there isn't a separate body at all. For instance, if the body were relaly separate from the environment, there would be no need to eat or to move from one place to the other. The body would just be where this 'me' is situated, so there would not even be a need to look outward. But in fact there is an outside and an inside. So why do I limit the sense of "I" to this one single thing I call a body?
    When there is some unpleasant sensation or feeling, there is a tendency to protect the body as though it were the only thing that I can safely call the self. Even when that feeling is coming from a verbal statement, the sense of self kind of recoils into the body. I try to figure out ways for 'this body' to be protected from harm, whether real or imagined. But pain is unavoidable. In order to be social beings, there are many emotional risks. Can one make one's body immune to the emotional pains of being social?
    The paradox is that the more I try to protect 'this body'  from the perceived threats of the environment, the more suffering will be felt. This suffering takes the form of trying to anticipate or plan around every perceived danger. Such a life would be very difficult to inhabit. It would be like trying to anticipate every possible 'terrible' thing that could happen to this body. But what would happen if I did not at all identify with the body or with what others are labeling as 'me' or 'my body'? Then the way of seeing would be quite different.
     People tend to think of others as bodies. When I think of a person I know, I am imagining the familiar body that they inhabit. Recently, in the news, I see the image of the actor Hugh Jackman, and there is a big fuss over the fact that he looks much older than in his other pictures. People start to speculate whether it's a makeup job for an upcoming movie or if it is his 'real body' or if it is due to illness. It's interesting that the media really scouts for the person's 'real' body, as opposed to the body that is ravaged by illness or disease. I remember once reading about how the soul in heaven is supposed to take on the form of the body that is in its 'prime', which is often assumed to be in one's 30s. The search for the self is often the search for the body that one cherishes the most: the body that is considered the most complete, the most attractive, the most matured, and so on. It's as though this image of the body sets the standard for a person's true being.
      When someone points out that "I" made a mistake, are they pointing to me, or to their thought of my body? Normally, people talk but they are imagining the image of the person rather than seeing the person. But the true 'body' is actually a shifting form that is continually being generated. It is not even really one 'body' that holds it all together. Instead, the body is a kind of concept that is supposedly bringing together different moments in time. If there is no distinct unchanging substance called a body, does it make sense to point the finger at this "I", to say it is the source of suffering or happiness? These questions seem trivial but they are part of investigating what it means to protect the sense of self by way of the body.
        One way of dealing with criticism is to try to deflect criticism from the body that I believe is me. I might say, "I wasn't myself that day" or "I was tired", "my body hadn't been fed when I made that remark." In other words, I try to  salvage the sense of an unchanging me which is separate from all the actions. But what if there is no separate unchanging substance that I could refer to as myself? There may still be consequences to actions taken, but the body itself is part of a changing flux. Would it then make sense to limit who we think we are to this image  of the body?
       Sometimes, when I make an embarrassing mistake in front of others, I am afraid to look at myself in the mirror afterwards. But I wonder, what does the image have to do with the previous action? Why blame the image for the action? Yet the habitual way is to attach to this image of the body and say 'it' is responsible for all the behavior. Or we make reasons why "it" is not responsible. Both views are somehow very limiting, because they treat the body as the ideal locus  of action and thought. It overlooks the many conditions that go into the present moment, opting instead to separate body from environment.

keep on going

  There are times when I encounter such strong obstacles in meditation practice, that I tend to think that they are insurmountable. I fail to realize that what I think are obstacles are my way of rejecting the situation and trying very hard to avoid certain things I dislike. In those moments, one can only just face what is happening and try to see it with compassionate eyes. And I find that this kind of compassion is very natural when we reach low points in our lives, and are able to face what is causing the problem.
    My biggest fear and worry in life is personal inadequacy: the feeling that I am simply not good enough to meet challenges, and the thought that something terrible will happen to me if I fail to meet those challenges. At times, I have to just let go of the worry and do my best, but there are other times when the fear of inadequacy gets too overwhelming. In those moments, the only thing I can do is somehow believe that I can find a way through it, as well as to be open to the present moment. And if my mind is open, I have found that there is always some way that I can keep going on.
     The huatou practice is really special in the sense that it does not depend on external environment. One can simply use this meditative practice to investigate the source of all experience, rather than wrestling with the contradictions of experience, which can give rise to all sorts of challenges. But it is also helpful to know that one is not dependent on others to try to solve existential questions, and that these kinds of questions can be sorted out through some spiritual practice. I can only hope that intensive huatou practice will help me improve my skills in facilitation of meditation practice, as well as to be more confident in the practice and what it means.
    When there really isn't a concrete, unhanging self, all one can do is exert efforts, without knowing what the real self is.
     

Allowing Meditation to Work on You

   During the group meditation, I had this idea of completely trusting and allowing the method to be fully experienced, as though it were working on me, rather than me working on "it". What I mean by this is that I normally approach familiar things with this preconceived notion of myself as the actor who is actively 'working' on something to somehow mould or shape it into something that is favorable. Quite opposite to the attitude of meditation, this attitude tends to assume that there is a desired end result to practice, and my goal is to somehow make my experience into the mould of this stylized, idealistic experience.
    How or what does 'allowing something to work on you' mean? I think it means taking something to be for the first time. When I was doing the yoga exercises at the opening, I just treated the exercise as though I had heard it for the first time. I savored the words from the instructor and allowed the words to guide my movements, whereas before I would simply interpret the words through the filter of my previous experience or habit. This way, I was really connecting to the sounds from the facilitator, rather than only connecting to memory or expectation.
      At times when I was trying to do the same with meditation practice, it felt a bit like trying to open a very tightly shut door. The door would give way at times, only to slam back in my face. And in those moments when I allowed myself to experience huatou as a raw question, it felt so releasing. What or who was being 'released'? All the self-reference points I cherish were being shifted and eased in that moment. The experience is like any tectonic shift: extremely painful and vulnerable, with a distinct fear of what is unfamiliar or new. And there is also this added sense that all my familiar reference points are falling away. What is this mind anyway? Can I really approach mind as it is unfolding now, without filtering it through these blinders?
     It's not so easy to allow something to work on me because deep down inside, I am desiring to hold onto something that I know is mine, or 'me'. Yet, when I catch those glimpses of 'something working on me', I feel such a relief, like I am taking off this heavy armor which I thought was supposed to protect me, but is really just unnecessary burden. What is really being lifted is expecting something to be a certain way and not tolerating any other way. In this sense, meditation becomes devotion to something that is such an integral way of being but has somehow become foreign to us. We have to somehow rediscover what is always there, but do so by throwing out our preconceptions of what must follow from a certain activity.

Temporarily...

   This morning, I decided to do meditation before going out to work-something I am not accustomed to. I found that my spine was much more supportive to my practice in the mornings, leading me to believe that my posture likely suffers during the day from a lot of sitting. In addition, morning meditation seems to have the added advantage of being easier to sustain, as there are much fewer wandering thoughts in the morning. Although I wasn't able to sustain the stillness of mind for very long, the morning meditation very much did help me.
    Although many books have been written about Buddhist concepts such as impermanence and emptiness, I would have to say that it's only through dedicated practice of a specific method in mediation that these concepts have meaning. Why is that? I think it's because none of these are real concepts at all, but are more similar to ways of being. For instance, Francis Cook remarks, "Primarily, the doctrine of emptiness is an attack on the conceptual mode of grasping the world. It says that although words and concepts are normally valid for purposes of accomplishing our business, they are totally invalid from the standpoint of the highest truth." (p.42) If emptiness is more of a way of seeing than a fixed concept, it is nearly impossible to know emptiness simply through a concept. To do so is to try to fix something that was never meant to even be a 'thing' to begin with. Of course, one has to use language to be able to get emptiness or understand its direction, but after that, the concept can just become another impediment.
    For example, if a person simply uses the word 'impermanence' to remind themselves that things are going to pass, they only add another concept which they believe is permanent. But even the concept itself is not permanent. It is conditioned, in fact. If a tiger were to suddenly run into the workplace and start chasing me, would the word 'impermanent' come to mind? It may or it may not, but it probably won't do me much good because it's a kind of distracting thought. If on the other hand, I had an insight into impermanence, it is no longer just a word or a thought. It is a mode of being where thoughts are able to come and go freely, because none are regarded as having a fixed duration or even continuing from one moment to the next. Each thought is gone as soon as it has arisen. So if I speak of the thought as 'changing', I am still assuming that it starts as one thing and simply changes to another. But again, the thought has already passed, so nothing is said to have changed.
     I say this because I sometimes think that having a calm mindset is much more important to  practice than calling up ideas or words from a book. While the latter are pointers that are quite important to practice, they are unable to capture the true experience of thoughts' instantaneously arising and perishing.
    I have also often heard people use impermanence as a way of consoling themselves: well, our lives are impermanent anyway, so why bother putting hopes in anything? But is this the true meaning of impermanence? The problem is that one secretly holds onto what she hopes to be permanent, while trying to defeat it with the thought that "all things are impermanent". But these thoughts have no connection to each other, so there is no way to 'defeat' the first thought with the second. Perhaps a more accurate way to describe impermanence is that both these thoughts simultaneously exist and disappear as soon as they arise. So the past and present don't actually interact, contrary to other notions of impermanence which emphasize 'continuity in the midst of change'.

Cook. Francis (1977) ..The Jewel Net of Indra. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State Press.

A "Compassionate" Thought Experiment

 
    Whenever you are in a  crowded commute, try to imagine the following: every being  on the bus or subway is  someone that you will  eventually encounter or have  encountered before. If you have not encountered that person recently, it is simply because the causes and conditions haven't yet  ripened  for it to happen.  And there is an infinite stretch of time available to encounter all the beings, so there is no need to worry about meeting everyone in a single lifetime.
    Now the second part of this exercise is to contemplate: what would it be like if we had something that these beings don't have, and they have something we don't have? It would be as though each of one us were puzzle pieces in a totality, and we were entrusted to somehow  figure out how the pieces interlock with each other. But the interesting thing is that the more I reach out to other beings to find out what is missing and how my piece complements theirs', the more I  question: who is this "I" anyway? If what I have to give  is always a part in the whole, where does my piece begin and where does it end? Is it not the case that we are always influenced by  the way others interact with us?
     To put in in a slightly different way  that is more understandable: at any given moment, what "I" have experienced is never completely whole, because there is always some potential new experience to encounter. I have certain distinct functions based on my previous experiences: skills, habits, and ways of thinking that have been influenced by my education, interests, work life, and so on. But at the same time, none of this collection of experiences and education is ever 'completed'.  It is always being applied to the present moment where there are endless possibilities, combinations and new experiences with others. Furthermore, one can never say that they are ever completely independent, since they are always intermingling with new experiences. The 'self' we conceive to be our identity is never closed off, but it is influenced by what happens around it.
     Now, in a concrete situation, how might this viewpoint influence the way I interact with people or view them? One thing is that it curbs the tendency to view other people with a self-reference. Typically, I see people in terms of likes, dislikes and indifference. I crave to be with those I like (to the point of wanting to think about them a lot), while I try to avoid those who I dislike (to satisfy my desire to be happy) and I disregard those who are neither harmful nor particularly beneficial. This view is selfish, because it only sees people in terms of the self and its comforts. The previous experiment suggests that we can curb this view when we start to see a bigger picture of our encounters with other beings. While we do have gifts to develop, these gifts are always unfolding in the context  of a totality. No being is excluded from that totality, since each part interacts with every other part (directly or indirectly).
    The second point is that it converts desires and dislikes into something quite different. I am not sure how to describe it. I was at the subway this morning and I asked myself: how does my experience of people around me  change when I realize that all of this is a totality, and there are no completely separate identities? It doesn't necessarily cause me to feel loving toward everyone, but it converts my experience to one of endless becoming and possibility. What I am seeing 'now' is not the full picture and nor can it ever be complete. It is endlessly moving toward something else that is unknowable but is all-encompassing. In a sense, when I like or dislike, I am already limiting those possibilities, as though I have attached a fixed meaning to something that can never truly be fixed.
     What I have described is just a kind of thought experiment, and it is likely to change over time. But perhaps it is a starting point to viewing people in different ways.

Camping Meditation

 This past weekend, I had the opportunity to help with a pilot project of camping meditation, which took place at Lafontaine Camp grounds in Georgian Bay. The purpose of the meeting was to scope out the area and to work out a tentative program for a possible outdoor meditation program in 2017 at Dharma Drum Mountain. I am not going to go too much into the project itself, since this would take quite a long time to explore. Rather, I want to explore some of my own observations on the relationship between my experience of Chan Buddhism and this specific camping experience I had. I am well aware while writing this that Chan can be experienced differently according to people's various capacities, practices and affinities.
   I think that there is some mysterious connection between Chan and nature. I have yet to see a study which really explores the interconnections between nature and Chan, but Master Sheng Yen remarks:

Within the confines of your own home you may feel you are the master, but if may others live there, the sense of being in your own space begins to diminish. When you go into the country, the expanse of sky and earth  form one big universal house and you can feel very small. At the same time, in that great open space you would feel that all nature is yours, and even with other people there, you still feel a sense of spaciousness. (p.33)

I felt a similar sense when I was on the camping trip and doing meditation this weekend. City life does in fact make people feel that they are often masters of their lives. I am thinking about how convenient it is to find food in the city and even to turn on a faucet or a light switch in the expectation of clean water and light. While spending time in the non-service area (read: no hydro), I began to see how everything that I take for granted in the city is based on complex supporting conditions. But when a lot of conveniences are reduced, we are all left to take in the sounds, sights and smells around us, as well as to see that there is only a very thin tissue between ourselves and the universe of other sentient creatures.

The tent seems to symbolize this interconnection the most. While meditating in the tent, the four of us had experienced all the sounds of the natural world, separated only by a very thin mosquito netting. As I closed my eyes to start the meditation practice, I began to feel a certain power in the way the sounds were all separate yet coalescing and co-existing together. And I also began to appreciate the vastness of life. What I experience in my relations with those I know is only a tiny part of all the relationships that living beings share with each other. Even though I may not feel connected to the spider which crawled into the inside of the tent, we are both in some ways contributing to the same world, and there is some collective karmic affinity that we are able to experience the other in some way.

There seems to be some intrinsic joy in meditating close to nature and being able to sense certain things or connections there. Part of it is what I alluded to before. Even to close your eyes or behold a landscape such as a forest or a lake can give you and idea that the world is much bigger and less controllable than the habitual worlds one occupies. And this vastness is nothing to fear. Rather than excluding, it envelops the listener. There is a sense that the world participates in a shared unity, even when it may seem that sentient beings are divided from each other by different perspectives and concerns.

Somehow, I feel a linkage between nature and the kinds of relationships that can only develop with a healthy solitude. What do I mean by 'healthy' solitude? I am referring to a kind of solitude that increases the sense that one is already connected to the world and universe in ways that go beyond words and verbal communication. To be with plants and animals in a silent way is a kind of step in realizing the depth of connections that aren't really said at all. Sheng Yen remarks, "When I was in solitary retreat, I knew that I was together with all sentient beings in innumerable worlds. Even though I seemed to b alone in a small, enclosed room, actually I was living in the company of many ants who found their way inside, and insects outside of the hut created all kinds of sounds in the evening." (p.24) With this perspective and attitude, could anyone ever feel alone in the universe?

Sheng Yen (2012), Tea Words Volume One. New York: Dharma Drum Publications