Spinning Wheels

 I have sometimes heard the expression "to spin in one's wheels" to refer to a habit of ruminating: coming back to the same thought again and again, and feeling stuck in it. This is such a powerful metaphor, if mainly because it evokes times in my early childhood when something would get stuck in a wheel of one of my toys, and even the slightest piece of dust would cause the car to spin in circles. It's funny how this very same metaphor continues to survive in my memory to this day, as sometimes the image comes up from time to time.

   Wheels evoke direction. When we aren't moving like we should, we might get impatient, until we realize that we are making the same mistake of not letting go, and taking the things around us to be solid and substantial. One example of this comes from the Christian concept of "pride", which I actually haven't heard about in a long time. Pride is often equated with the ego, but I see it as the mental trap of thinking there is something substantial within us that we have to defend. When I get caught in the quagmire of hurt, what I do is to put on the protective armor of consoling thoughts, which sooner or later becomes an overprotective armor consisting of all kinds of consolations. These consolations, as comforting as they are, imply a barricading of self against a perceived threatening "sense of the other" which could take the form of any number of hurts. There is nothing wrong with all of this, but soon, we may become so invested in a strong sense of self that we refuse to let go of it even when the "threat'' has disappeared. Then the hardest thing is to let go, and I think this is a form of pride.

  Pride can even take the form of thinking that our suffering has ennobled us. We might even hold onto the idea that we overcame something terrible in the past to make us who we are now. I think this is valuable to a certain degree, but it also means that I identify myself as fighting against some adversity, and this creates an opposition of I vs. them.

How we let go of pride is to realize that there is nothing much to defend. I think this takes many years of realizing that all the scrapes we get into are temporary experiences. What seems real today gradually recedes into the distant past later. 

Having vs Wanting to Do Things

Life goes at a frantic pace, so how do we slow down? One way of slowing down is to realize that nothing really needs doing most of the time. Most of the things that we want to do, are really only wants. I sometimes have the anxiety that unless I keep on the move, I will simply slide into lethargy and won't bother to pick up at a later time. The truth is, however, that one should always ask themselves sincerely whether something is a "want" or is in fact a need. It is in investigating the difference between wants and needs that we may be able to let go of what we don't need to do right away.

Going back to my previous entry, if we believe in the idea of cause and conditions, we can recognize that a house never gets built in a single day. Many factors are required, and it takes sustained effort that happens over a long time. During the three day retreat, Ven. GuoYen reminded the participants that it is better not to become so impatient or consumed in wanting to progress in practice that we lose energy. A tense mind hardly gets us farther down the road, so we should find other ways to be content with what has been done and let the rest be completed at a later time or phase. Another way of looking at this is to allow a plan to fold naturally rather than trying too hard to achieve in one go. Trying to do everything at once can not only pressure yourself but also those around you too.

Having to do things always comes with a hidden question: what do I stand to gain or lose in doing this? Can it wait or does it need to happen right away? Reflecting on these questions can also dovetail with the theme of having few needs.

Conditioned Arising and Life

   During our Three Day Retreat at Bliss Haven Retreat Center in Dunville, Chang Yuan Fashi was remarking on how elusive the peaceful mind can seem to us. We are often caught up in so many desires, which results in a busy mind, that we are unable to enjoy the simplicity and wonder of "just being". In fact, we even need to somehow put this simplicity into words, to "reason" it into existence. For a few moments, I was able to see the peace and freedom that comes from just dropping thoughts altogether and beholding the present moment as it is: "coming home" to it, in fact, as Fashi had suggested. But why is it so elusive? 

    Most of our desires are probably social in nature. We are taught to fear solitude and abandonment. For instance, the most harsh punishment we can possibly imagine is solitary confinement, or the common practice of arranging people to sit facing the wall, just as we normally would do in our retreat centers. We are also taught to fear rejection and scorn. I think that all of these thoughts grip around us and create the mental fog of guilt that we feel when we don't serve other people's desires or expectations. I am sure that we also contribute to a similar vicious cycle when we add our own desires (and fear of not having them fulfilled) into the mixture.

    During the retreat, Fashi asked us to try to hold the feeling of being at peace and at home into the spaces beyond the retreat itself. I sometimes wonder what this would be like. We truly can't be blissful and happy all the time, could we?  Actually, however, it's possible, but we have to honor whatever emotions arise in the moment and know that these emotions are all just parts of our empty nature. They are conditioned arising, meaning they arise based on causes and conditions. Once the conditions disappear, there is no trace of it, just as our leg pain disappears as soon as we unfold our legs and come out of the meditation. I believe freedom from suffering--especially from the ego--comes from reflecting at all times on conditioned arising. Nothing stays the same, not even the sense of an enduring self that is experiencing the conditions. So when we let go of trying to grasp this permanent sense of self, that is when we are left with the question of what is left? I believe this is an important contemplation. It is the contemplation of an open hand as opposed to a closed fist.

Gratitude is Always a Step Away

   When we are using conscious thinking to reflect on our lives, we are always in a conditional frame of mind. In a subtle kind of way, my orientation becomes "this is who I should be" and "this is what I need to obtain". Yet, as Andrew Bernstein notes in his book The Myth of Stress, the notion of stress arises when we inject a "should" in between our current moment and the moment we think should be happening. In a sense, we are continually interacting with the previous thought by adding a second one which evaluates the previous. This is an extremely subtle point which needs meditation to reflect.

   ChangYuan Fashi is always emphasizing "ordinary mind": a mind that is simply intent on doing what is needed in the moment. When we add a thought of "the self" to that ordinary state, ignorance arises. I start envisioning a sense of self that I need to advance or protect, through the acquisition or rejection of certain kinds of experiences. If I cling too tightly to this process of liking and disliking, I literally stop seeing the mind that is still and unmoving. I am not able to tune into the mind that is a source of infinite peace and abundance. Sometimes this can take the form of  subtle striving to replace one thought with another but more often it is from over-conceptualizing experience: trying to fence it in using concepts, which makes a person dead to the present moment. The present moment is the most important, but this requires a real study of what is the present? How can we even grasp something like "present moment"? We might see it as a drop of dew or a falling star: something ephemeral. So then we need to ask, what is this process of minding that is beyond time, beyond space, beyond clinging and grasping, and beyond definition? 

Contemplating this would give rise to a tremendous feeling that there is something that cannot be bought or sold; it freely exists beyond the mundane world and yet enfolds the mundane world simultaneously.

Free Flowing Thought

 Most of the time, when the process of thought arises, there is a kind of attempt to catch the thoughts. We are often encouraged to do so due to the exhortation of "focus", thus picturing the mind to be a kind of light-beam that selectively focuses on one item or the other, without seeing the totality of our experience. Surely, however, we must realize that the mind has more miraculous powers than simply focusing. For instance, if we needed to do a double take to catch every thought that came to mind, we would never process anything a person was saying. The mind itself, we must trust, is an enormous field of understanding that is able to smoothly process and absorb a great deal of information, without the self having to be overly conscious about it and intervene all the time to catch those thoughts all the time.

   When I find myself confused about a conversation whose subject I know little about, I try this experiment: imagine that your mind is a giant radar that extends across the horizon. This radar dish is capable of receiving a whole lot of information, so much so that it is practically saturated with rich information bouncing off its surface, from sensory to feeling, to cognitive and reflective. All this knowledge is immediately available in this present moment, as long as we have the confidence to affirm our own ability to receive and illuminate that information. If we are able to just slightly expand our field of awareness to beyond a narrow focus on the self or the immediate thought, we suddenly realize how rich our experiences are, and how thoughts are constantly flowing freely within us. There is no "blockage", here, only the way the mind contracts around some specific or particular thought. This certainly can create an optimistic view because we are no longer identifying with these thoughts that we "miss" or "don't completely fathom". This would be like missing crumbs in the middle of a spectacular feast.

The mind is not "our thoughts"; it is only host to thoughts, and therefore is not limited to any specific thoughts. When we stop focusing or taking these arising thoughts to be ourselves, then our approach is more like a kind of river of thoughts that keeps flowing and flowing without cease--and we needn't worry by trying to grasp one of those thought configurations to be the true self, because the true mind is always beyond all thoughts.

The Beautiful Gaze

  We sometimes imagine that people see "right through us". I wonder if you have ever experienced that idea where a person was able to pierce deeply into the darkest part of you and reveal something you never realized before. In fact, such kind of ideas are often projections that we imagine on others. When someone scowls at us, such as when they are cut off in traffic or rush past us, we might bring our minds back to the memory of when, as small children, a look was more than just a look. Those were the days when our survival often seemed to depend on being able to discern whether a face is loving or threatening; life sustaining or life-terminating!

   What I tried to say is: there is a reason why the human gaze is often studied and becomes a token of power. An authority figure can overpower us simply through a look (which can provoke anxiety), because looking so deeply comes to represent knowledge. A parental figure can punish a child simply through an unloving look, which can in turn remain with that child even well into adulthood. It's sometimes our task in adulthood to understand that the gaze is often only a display, and has nothing to do with who we are fundamentally. If we aren't able to understand the gaze in this way, it will paralyze and overpower us, and we can be gripped with a sense of claustrophobia and paranoia.

   Human gaze can serve the evolutionary function of a warning, but many people naturally have a sad or somber gaze, perhaps from many years of suffering. This is where the gaze has outworn its purpose, and what started out as a single expression soon becomes deep and hard grooves in the forehead, cheeks and mouth. This is where even a look from a stranger becomes confusing. We can never tell whether those hard lines are from exhaustion, disapproval, or simply neutrality. There is often a tendency to over-read these things.

   From a Buddhist perspective, everyone has a beautiful gaze. It's only because I dislike certain faces that I label them, judge them or want to reject them. I confuse the surface with the reality which is infinite. But because mind beholds all faces and can create an infinite range of expressions, no single expression ever scars the surface of the mind or creates a single wrinkle in the mind's surface. The mind is so infinitely pliable that it never requires a single moment of cosmetic surgery. It is like the softest rubber imaginable. A person's face, no matter how angry or resentful, cannot scar my Buddha nature. There is no gaze so powerful that it can pierce or break the mind. All gazes are phenomena precisely of mind, lacking in the nature of I and You. But we need to practice this, and not wait for a rainy day to do it. Practice in front of the mirror. Then in front of strangers. What is this gaze? Who is the seer? Who is the seen?

Trust in Mind

  What does it mean to trust in mind? I heard this expression during our Buddhist study group today, and I would like to elaborate on it a bit. I specifically had a follow up question and that is, what is the difference between trusting mind and trusting "self" or "ego"? How do we know that we are trusting the original mind and not the ego or the self that we think we are or sometimes identify with (especially the persona)? As I suggested during the meeting today, it's only when we let go of wanting to know the answer to "what is mind" that we can trust in mind. This is a weird paradox that I will describe in more detail.

    We know that when we practice huatou, we are asking a question for which consciousness cannot come up with a cogent answer. As soon as I answer the question "Who is reciting the Buddha's name?" by saying "me" or "I", I have already reduced the answer to a thought object. Anything we say about "I" or the self is going to take the form of language, thought, an image, or something else that we can reduce to the status of something seen or understood. This I is something that I am actively trying to grasp or control: it's like an acting role that I am continually trying to refine by editing parts here and there, just to make it look good or to somehow curate it as a viable answer to the question.

   Whatever the mind is, it's something that cannot be grasped. The mind is what I use to see, hear, and even to type these words. Were I to try to reduce the mind to a bunch of words on a page, this would be similar to the eye trying to see itself. Now, if I were to mistakenly define the mind, is it the true mind itself that makes the utterance, or is it a "false", deluded mind? In fact, regardless of whether the mind says the correct answer or not, it's always the true mind that answers the question. We are simply confused because we take the words as the answer, similar to how we confuse the finger with the moon.

    Trust in mind comes precisely when we realize that the words don't matter as much as the mind behind the words. When I am confident that the mind I use to type these words is the true mind, then what words I type matters less than the spirit in which I am typing the words: the confidence that the source of these words is, in fact, the true mind. This is a bit like looking down at a frozen pond in the winter, and deducing that the dark moving shapes just below the surface must be living beings. The words are like the puppet, so there must be a puppeteer somewhere, and this is precisely what the words are pointing directly to, whether we use huatou or not.

     This is to say that as long as I don't confuse the finger with the moon, then what I say to people and how I act around them will have a certain dignified confidence. I don't need to know where this confidence is from because I am not fixated on making an appearance. My only motivation is to somehow show the fish shapes swimming underneath the surface of frozen water. That means, I don't need to be so ostentatious, or good with words, or ornate. I have the confidence of knowing where the finger is pointing, without needing to paint my fingernails a pretty glossy color.

   The true mind is a form of living grace. We are never out of the grace of mind, because nothing can never be away from mind itself. It's only when I get stuck on words, thoughts, images from mind that I start to create some pretty strange karma. To put it in a different way: instead of being a transmitter of infinite radio signals, I start to mistakenly think that I wrote and performed all those radio songs myself. I stop admiring my ability to be a transmitter of signals, and instead, put all my hopes on claiming ownership of the songs being transmitted. This is where the self begins. It confusedly thinks that the songs belong to it, and that it creates the sounds, when in fact, sounds are only causes and conditions. We are all receivers of the noise of the universe. The noise is beautiful as long as we stop thinking in terms of "my noise", "your noise", etc.