Attending to the True Nature

 

I often want myself to be different, and to have been different. I think that somehow if only I could be more like someone else, I would somehow be happier and more content with myself. But let’s think about this here and now moment. Is it really being “someone else” that will make me happier? Aren’t all identities somewhat tenuous? And what about this desire to be someone else? Is it the correct way to be?

We know from Buddhist scriptures that desires lie at the heart of suffering. Even more fundamental to this is the sense of ignorance that gives rise to desire. When I admire a famous person and how they talk, think, act, etc. I start to think that I would be happier by being that person. Actually, it doesn’t necessarily even have to be a famous person. We can want to emulate anyone who is different from ourselves. Where does that desire come from? It comes from imagining that this person is somehow better off, more comfortable, more “facile” than we are. We even interpret the seeming smoothness of another person’s actions as indicative of a higher state of being that we are not privy to. As a result of this admiration, we get lost in the ignorance of thinking that the peace we are looking for the most lies outside of ourselves.

In Surangama Sutra, the Buddha asks Ananda what he admires the most about the Buddha. Ananda remarks that he admires the Buddha’s “golden” appearance, features and demeanor. He thus attributes the Buddha’s powers (and his own Buddha nature) to an external appearance or form. This causes him to desire to be something that isn’t inside of him. Now, this isn’t so bad, since this appearance is what leads Ananda away from a prostitute and toward Buddha. But at the same time, the admiration he feels is only superficial. It’s like admiring the manners of a person without really knowing the substance underneath or the underlying heart of that person.

To get to any true peace or true stillness, we have to turn inward and let go of this endless striving to become someone else or even keep up with someone else. This is because both desires come from the mental habits of seeking some forms and avoiding others. As long as we are stuck in that cycle, we can’t realize true peace and happiness because we continue to feed our minds with a chase after external appearances. I want to emulate or become something that is really only symbolic of a fundamental awareness that is always still and not sticking to anything.

The unrest we feel is because we are attached not only to our own bodies, but to the images that we have, of ourselves and others. When we are around others, we continue to check ourselves to wonder if we are good enough compared to them. This creates all kinds of anxieties and even suspicions or paranoia, not to mention gossip. To know our true self, we must continue to look into the real source of these images, and stay with that question of who has the images: who sees, feels, thinks, perceives, senses etc. Even if we have no answer to this question, engaging it can help us detach from the desire to become an image, and see the image for what it is, a kind of empty and ephemeral phenomena. True peace thus comes from letting go of these images and seeing their moment to moment flux and impermanence.

Even when we feel states such as “depression”, “regret”, “anger” etc. we must ask ourselves, am I creating the illusion of the angry, depressed, regretful “person”? Am I reifying what is otherwise only a temporary emotional state based on an incomplete interpretation of things? This is the point where investigation starts to happen and we are no longer enslaved by labels and stories related to emotions.

The Naked Now

   What would life be like if we were simply to have a window into the unfiltered experience? While watching a  Master Sheng Yen video tonight about mindfulness of the breath, he compared the method of breath watching to a kind of window into the present moment. We very rarely are able to see the present moment without the usual filters of the past and future. In fact, the lack of stillness can lead us to easily compare our current predicament to something we want more of. Or, as Marcus Aurelius relates, we wish to take "vacations" of the mind by going off to exotic countries, when in fact, the real vacation is resting in the present moment. One need not venture into some faraway planet or locale to get to this moment.

  What gets in the way of this? Thinking does, as well as comparing what we have in the moment with what is past, or what we think could be in the future. When we have the mentality of "this could be the last and only moment there is", then there is no continuation, because the mind has simply stopped moving to the hypothetical next step. It resides in the here and now, where there is no judgment, because there is no dreadful prophecy of what's to come. 

What's most interesting about this is that everything is always eternally now, but we are so often unable to see or feel that way, because of our mental projections. We fear retribution, stress, pressure, downfalls, bad things, all because our minds are in this constant state of comparing one moment to the next: weighing in on whether something will be good for us, bad for us or neutral, all the while not tuning into the effervescence of everything. This is what leads to a reified, stuck or depressed mindset: always thinking that things stay the same, projecting our fears into the future, and staying with what's already past. But the good news is that we can always renew ourselves by just looking at what's in front of us and continually unfolding.

Fear in Daily Life

Have you not seen the idle man of Tao who has nothing to learn and nothing to do,
Who neither discards wandering thoughts nor seeks the truth?
The real nature of ignorance is Buddha-nature;
The illusory empty body is the Dharma body.

When I read these words, I reflect on the nature of fear. If, as the poem suggests, "the illusory empty body is the Dharma body", then why would we be filled with fears? I have started to reflect on how we can approach fear from two perspectives. One of them might be described as "Spinozistic" while the other may be described as "Buddhist".

Spinoza saw strong emotions as being rooted in a lack of proper perspective on life. Fear is literally a "passion", meaning it takes us by surprise and leads us to a feeling of diminished control.  In contrast, reason provides a proper understanding of the place of an emotion in the development of a human life. To understand the way an emotion unfolds and its proper function is to not overstep the role of that emotion. Let's say we are watching an action movie, and we see the protagonist surrounded by many explosions or gunfire. We "fear" for the protagonist's life, because we simply don't know how the movie will end for this character. When we are particularly empathetic toward this protagonist and know precisely why they need to go through their trials and tribulations--what lessons to be learned or skills to be gained--we start to see fear in the context of a greater whole. Fear has a necessary place in life, but it needn't consume us. On the other hand, overattachment to fear can lead to a life lived simply for the sake of avoiding fear. Fear is reified as a kind of demonic power or enemy.

A Buddhist view of fear is to understand it as a mind-created phenomena. To go back to the opening vignette, all feelings, thoughts, emotional states, are creations of the mind. As such, they are not alien to Buddha nature. The subtle mistake we make here is that as soon as any unpleasant emotion arises in our mind, we create a sense of self that wants to detach from it, and which is even based on a belief in our ability to successfully distance. Attachment comes from this belief that we have a self that is worth salvaging from any dire emotional state such as anger or fear. Contrariwise, if we were to see that eve anger and fear have Buddha nature, we wouldn't try to barricade ourselves from these states of awareness. Furthermore, we would be able to observe their arrival and going without attaching to them.

Fear is part of a greater context of lived experience governed by purpose (conatus) and reason, per Spinoza. But in Buddhism, fear need not have an ulterior purpose that it moves toward or acts against. In fact, by trying to interpret fear in terms of a larger sense of meaning, we may miss the fact that fear is just a part of deeper Buddha nature. All we need to do is to peer deeply into the impermanent nature of every moment to see what's underneath fear.

Grace and Life

   Grace involves being able to accept one's flaws as indicative of the need for help. Coming from a Christian perspective, this could mean the chief sin is one's belief that they are self-sufficient: the sin of "pride", in other words. From a Buddhist perspective, it's the belief in a reified sense of self. According to both views, our need to control things and to 'play God' with ourselves is not only the root of suffering but also our biggest burden.

   Grace can come from the breath. When I breathe, I remind myself that there is more to "me" than just my thoughts and worries. Also, simply looking--using my senses and being mindful of the surroundings--can be one helpful reminder that my being in this world is not sustained through thoughts. On the other hand, when I try to subsume everything under a single overarching thought, that is like trying to swallow the ocean. It's simply impossible.

    Random coincidence is one way we remember that our life story is not within our control. Things come together just as they fall apart, not with any overarching plan per se, but just like mathematical combinations and permutations. There is a certain refreshment in the view of evolution, because it stresses that things are shifting, and there is no set, determined fate to things. An organism survives not because of its own inner strength, but because of the way it adapts to the things around it, and vice versa.

   There is no need to coerce or influence anyone using ideologies. This only chains us to one idea that ends up exhausting itself, like very cheesy fashion that we look back on from decades past and wonder how people could wear it. Sometimes we don't need to live linearly but we can draw various parallels from one thing to another, and this is enough to make an interesting pattern and connection. We can then wipe it away the next day like sand castles on the tides.

The Mystery of Flow

 Flow moments have sometimes been described as experiences of being at one with an activity that we love, such as a sport or even writing itself. When someone experiences "flow" moments, they are said to lose the sense of time, become absorbed in what they are doing, and just challenged enough to feel that they are engaged with something. People have sometimes found themselves "unified" with the experience of flow, as though they were one with whatever they were doing. Does this mean that flow can only be experienced with certain kinds of activities--especially ones that are challenging or passion filled?

  I would like to suggest that flow moments can be induced in any experience. There are two conditions required to get oneself into a sense of flow. The first is focus: focus on a particular event, experience or doing, as though this were the only experience, event or doing that is of any importance in the moment. When walking, only walk; when typing, only type, etc. The second condition required for a flow experience is a completely supple, relaxed mind. We let thoughts flow evenly from our minds like water from a river, and we don't suppress some thoughts over others. In that way, our mind is less tense and not so focused on successfully completing the task at hand.

   Even something that is challenging can be changed to a flow experience, if we adjust our focus to be in that moment, while allowing for as many permutations of the action as possible. As I am typing these sentences, I am performing the balancing act of allowing certain meanings to be freely put together through the words and controlling the meaning to make cogent sentences. By balancing between focus and relaxation, I am able to maintain a certain presence toward the writing itself without going back to correct the sentences.

Flow moments can even be created from lax times when we have no particular goal to accomplish. When listening to a long speech, we can pay attention to the flow of sounds and just relax with that flow. In that moment, there is no need to respond to the speaker or try to catch multiple meanings from the words. Instead, it's sufficient to simply behold the words and let them penetrate our eardrums. The sheer delight of the sound itself, without going into the meaning, can help us to relax into the talk or conversation, because we are simply enjoying the presence of the words themselves without suppressing or seeking them.

In today's age of distractions and many entertainments, I believe flow is a muscle that we can flex through the process of writing, particularly what we call "free association" or stream of consciousness writing. By seeing words freely put together on the page, we free our minds of thoughts while also seeing a product come to life before us. We can also get a more concrete sense of what we truly think and feel about something. Flow moments such as this can give us the sometimes surprising revelation that we do have many stories to tell and thoughts to share. We only have to commit them to the pen (or keyboard) to see them emerge.

Coping with Weariness

  Tonight, I had this feeling of being midway on a mountain, and feeling tired from overexertion. I feel like the mountain above me is covered in mist, and I have no idea where my steps will lead me anymore, or if I even have the energy to scale such a precipice. But for a moment, I gave myself permission to feel tired and even to feel sick. And I even started to listen to some chanting in Sanskrit.

   As I was relating in yesterday's group meditation, our society is addicted to the concept of time, keeping time and clocks. Life rarely ever flows according to the clock, at least certainly not the literal clocks that surround us in the form of wristwatches, timers, cellphone clocks, laptop displays etc. In spite of all my efforts to be on time, accomplishing tasks on time, etc. there is still a part of me that has nothing to do with time at all, let alone the chronological sense of it. And I think that it's crucial to touch this eternal present, even if it seems physically inaccessible or impossible. 

   When people feel tired, they might take it as a sign that something is wrong with them. I beg to differ: it may have nothing to do with iron deficiency or Vitamin D loss, etc. Instead, I tend to think of tiredness as arising from the expectation to care. Quite simply, in the age of surplus information, we are expected to care about everything, respond to everything at once, and even have answers to things that are unanswerable. This creates a sense of pressure.

   Actually, pressure is illusory, and the only thing we need to be true to is our own embodiment in this brief world. I can read many books that contain lofty ideas, but if I am unable to feel those ideas in my bones at the end of the day, then they are only indigestible footnotes. Time, responsibility, efficiency, are all words of violence against our bodies and even our souls. These words come from an industrial model of the world --one which assumes that people can be reduced to numbers and even tracked using time-motion studies. People become depressed because it's the body's way of saying "I can't do this anymore", or "this is not who I really can be at the moment". And so in those moments, we need to honor the feeling of weariness and nurture it.

   The soul itself is full of mysteries that will never be fully resolved. From a Buddhist perspective this amounts to emptiness. We are full of infinite possibilities, to the point where there is not a single "I" that controls, let alone oversees, the entire life story. We simply don't know whether we will succeed or fail. This is a scary prospect--one prefers the safety of knowing what they are capable of--but at the same time there is solace in the fact that nobody can take this moment away from me.  

Benefitting Others, Then Self

  During our group meditation practice discussion today, I was reminded that whenever we encounter adversity, we should always embrace it as a sign of care. Criticism or even the day to day hassles of life can be reframed as challenges and ways that those around us help us to grow. Perhaps the best attitude possible is to think that whenever we are being challenged, the result of the challenge will help us to better help others. For instance, if I go through a difficult ordeal, I may not be so successful at overcoming it, but I can take what I have learned from adversity and use it to benefit (or, at the very least, warn) others. In this way, I don't take the situation too personally and I am able to reframe it overall as the opportunity to practice.

  If, after all of this, I still encounter negative emotions and afflictions, I can reframe my attitude toward those emotions. First, are they permanent? No, they are conditioned, and therefore they won't last forever, no matter how dire the circumstances. 

Second, is the emotion "me"? If I take a detached view, I can realize that emotions are usually the result of habitual thinking. By changing my mindset and thoughts to positive ones, the feeling that I am "in danger" or "under threat" will eventually subside, and I can treat the experience in a smooth and easy way. 

Thirdly, does the emotion benefit me? If it only pains me, why should I even nurse the emotion? We often think that anger or irritation benefits us by giving us a form of self-defense, but in fact, these emotions only tend to make situations worse, and never help us solve the issues. In fact, anger can end up estranging us from others. Simply contemplating the destructiveness of the emotion can be one way of counteracting it, by proving to ourselves that no matter how strong the emotion may feel, that feeling does not legitimate or "prove" its value to our survival.