where the rubber meets the road

Over the last two years, I’ve been meeting three times a year with a group of twelve people, focusing on some of the deeper aspects of practice and teaching. This group, like most of the groups I’ve worked with, has presented me with a consistent challenge: passivity. (For more on passivity, click here.)

Role-playing is a good tool to develop people’s capacity and to put them in touch with their internal material. It’s challenging. It’s revealing. And, yes, it can be frightening, but to be present in fear is a good way to build capacity.

With this group, when I asked for volunteers for a role-play, there was always an awkward silence. Sometimes one or two people would reluctantly step forward, but usually, I ended up picking a couple of people. The air was thick with resistance and discomfort. Once into the exercise, people usually appreciated how helpful it was, but the passivity continued.

At our meeting in June this year, however, something happened that made all the difference.

After lunch one day, when we met for our afternoon session, I again asked for a couple of volunteers. Instead of the awkward silence, every hand shot up! It took me a moment to adjust. This was a completely different situation — or was it?

In one sense, nothing had changed: I still had to pick a couple of people for the exercise. In another sense, everything had changed: I could now focus on picking people who would benefit most from the exercise or who could demonstrate the points I was trying to convey. I no longer had to be concerned about pushing people against their will.

What had happened? Apparently, over lunch, the group had decided that they were fed up with my constant pushing and organized a conspiracy. Everyone had agreed to step forward whenever I asked for volunteers.

The shift in energy was dramatic. The air almost sparkled with the energy of engagement. Most important, we were all able to work at a much deeper level.

The same dynamic applies in other settings. Two or three times a month, I lead Sutra Sessions, at Against the Stream and Insight LA here in Los Angeles. More than the meditation period, the Q&A that follows is where the real learning takes place. The few people who pose questions are not being passive. They are presenting their questions, challenges, or insights, and inviting a response. We go back and forth until they are clear in their experience. The interaction is two-way, not one-way, and this two-way interaction is crucial if one is to deepen practice and make it a way of life.

Most teaching situations are one-way interactions. A person listens to a talk, reads a book, or plays a podcast or other recording. However beneficial a person may feel the talk or the book is, the flow is one-way and it is difficult to say what, if anything, has actually been learnt.

In the two-way interaction, both teacher and student find out very quickly what they know. Does the student stand in his or her own experience and give expression to their understanding? Does the teacher respond to the student without concern for position, identity, status, role or other forms of protection? Is there a meeting of minds? And what happens then?

This two-way interaction is challenging for both parties. Neither one knows where things are going to go. It can be uncomfortable, even frightening, but when minds meet, understanding arises, and with it, a subtle joy. This is where the rubber meets the road — where our practice comes alive and active in our lives.

rules for the road

I know I can be deceived by patterns. I can feel that what I'm seeing is true and what I'm doing is fair and just, and still be completely wrong. Perception is always limited, by conditioning, by patterns, by circumstances. I cannot know what is beyond and yet, often, I have to act.

Consequently, I've evolved a few principles to help me in such situations. I won't claim that they are exhaustive or comprehensive, but they seem to work pretty well most of the time.

It's never about fairness or justice.
As I said in a previous post, I've consistently found that any clinging to notions of fairness or justice is a way of avoiding some aspect of the situation I don't want to acknowledge. I now take such clinging as an indication that I haven't penetrated my own confusion and projection. Eventually, I come across a pain or a hurt that tells me why a person acted as he or she did, or why a person can't go to a place that I think he or she should.

Equanimity does not mean fairness.

To practice equanimity is to understand that everything everybody ever does — I repeat, everything everybody ever does — is because at that moment, he or she feels that their action will improve their world. In other words he or she is just trying to be happy. The actions may be, and often are, tragically, catastrophically self-defeating, but that is the motivation at the moment of action. Equanimity, then, is a profound acceptance of each person's humanity. Fairness may be the result of equanimity, but it's not the practice of equanimity.

Whatever is there is there, calmly licking its chops.
When I encounter a powerful, overwhelming, painful or massively unpleasant (or pleasant) feeling, it's there and there is nothing I can do about it except experience it. I sit in it using bare attention, do taking and sending with it to form a relation with it, or mix the feeling with awareness — whatever I'm capable of. In all these, the aim is not sitting with the feeling, but sitting in the feeling. There's a difference.

Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless, calmly licking its chops.
— H. L. Mencken

Go to the body.
When there are feelings of injustice or lack of fairness, stories abound. When there are feelings of being misunderstood or unappreciated, stories abound. The stories are almost always projections, and are, by and large, unreliable. Engagement is fruitless: one inevitably gets lost in them. I go to the body, and sit in whatever physical sensations are there, including the sensation of no sensation.

Not feeling anything is a sensation.
This may seem like a paradox, but not being able to feel your body is a sensation, and often quite a vivid one at that. It usually indicates that one is in some kind of shock. I sit in that experience, too.

Let the sun shine.
A simile I've found helpful is that the feeling at the core of a pattern is like a flower bud and one's attention is like the sun. Let the sun warm the bud, and the flower will open in time. You can't hurry the process. To force the bud to open damages things beyond repair. When an issue is up, I work with it regularly and consistently, but I don't try to work through it in one session or in a limited period of time. In fact, I don't even try to work through it at all. If it's there, that's where I sit. If it's not, then I don't go looking for it.

(If decisions have to be made, I make them, cognizant that they may not be the right ones, and cognizant, too, that I will have to receive the results, whatever they are.)

When you feel resolved, look to the stars.
In astronomy, any observation or theory that places the earth in a privileged position indicates a mistake in the data, the method of observation, or the interpretation of the data. Any resolution of the issue that leaves you in a privileged position (the usual ones are hero or victim) is suspect. These are identities, and are pretty reliable indications that the "resolution" is serving some unacknowledged agenda.

It ain't over 'til the fat lady sings.
The origin of this phrase isn't clear. I remember it from one Salinger's novels, but Wikipedia suggests it came from a sports writer in the '70s. The singer here is an internal admission or allowing of a weakness, a hurt, a prejudice, or an ignoring, that you haven't acknowledged before. It comes with its own set of body sensations, emotions, and stories. In other words, you are back in the mess, or another mess, and all the previous principles apply. How many arias or choruses will she sing? No one knows. That's part of the mystery.

Fairness and Justice

In societies in which there is one overarching world view, fairness and justice are complex issues. Interpretations of the law, in Judaism, always include the minority opinion, a way of saying that fairness and justice are contingent, not absolute, principles.

In a society in which there is multiplicity of perspectives and world views, different views compete and fairness and justice can become functions of power.

Spiritual practice goes nowhere if it follows this path. Everything gets lost in interpretation, conceptual thinking, unacknowledged prejudice and bias, etc.

In spiritual practice, we have to dispense completely with appeals to justice and fairness, precisely because they are open to interpretation and dependent on position. And if we claim access to a higher truth, we are, in effect, claiming the power and the right to decide for others.

Aside: I dislike and avoid the notion that spiritual truth is a higher truth, in terms of society and the world, etc. Spiritual practice is based on a principles that run counter to many principles of society. To claim that spiritual practice is a "higher truth" is another form of prejudice. Instead, I have to acknowledge that the principles on which I base my decisions are different from the principles that a person in a social context may base his or her decisions.

I now rarely try to persuade people to adopt a specific perspective, Buddhist or otherwise. Rather, I seek to help them find what is true for them in the world they experience. As we explore this together, appeals to justice or fairness are almost always stories that hide or protect unacknowledged hurts or pains. As they open to those pains, people frequently find clarity on their own and know what to do, not because it is "fair" or "just" or "right" (these are, in the end, somewhat childish motivations), but because, when everything, inside and out, is included in awareness, often only one course of action is indicated — the direction of the present, to use Uchiyama's phrase.

In other words, the illusion of choice is an indication of a lack of freedom.

clarifying oranges and deities

Three words that, clearly, should not be in the same sentence together.

An email exchange prompted by an earlier post.

The question:  

Dear Mr. McLeod, I greatly value your teaching but found the latest email about concentration not being meditation a bit odd. My experience with both shamatha and (even more so) deity practice is that they are unequivocally concentration practices. Yes it's important to drop any sense of undue struggle or will but the whole point at least for a long while is to drop (but not supress) thoughts that distract one from focus on the object and return to it. There is a clear preference for one object over all others and an ever clearer preference for concentration over distraction. What am I missing?  

And the reply:  

I'm not sure you are missing anything. My aim was to move people away from trying to bind the mind to the object by force of will and toward bringing about stable attention by resting with the object (or more accurately, in the experience of the object). This particularly applies to deity practice. Here, one is not actually focusing on an object, but resting in the sense of being the deity. All kinds of internal voices rise up against this (we experience these as distractions). Concentration tends to lead people in the direction of suppressing those voices, creating tension in the system, which undermines stability in attention. Resting in the whole experience allows the emotional material driving those voices to be experienced, releasing the emotional tension, and thus the distractions, and now one can rest more completely as the deity. This way of practicing is not what most people usually understand from the word "concentration".

Concentrate is what we do to oranges

Several times now, I've had occasion to meet with groups of practitioners whose practice is based on focusing attention on an object or observing thoughts and sensations or watching the breath. They frequently report difficulty, a kind of catch 22: either the effort they make in concentration works against stability or they lose clarity when they try to relax. They are usually trying to control their experience, to make it conform to certain expectations of how meditation should be.

All forms of practice that involve such effort, i.e., "I am doing something", inevitably reinforce that sense of separation from experience that arises as "I".

A monk sat meditating in the courtyard of a monastery.

"What are you doing?" asked the abbot.

"Meditating to attain enlightenment," replied the monk.

The abbot sat down beside him, picked up stone, and started to polish it with his robe. After a while, the monk's patience ran out.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

"Making a glass tile," replied the abbot.

"You can't make a glass tile by polishing a stone."

"Nor can you reach enlightenment by meditating."

Part of the problem is the word concentration. It has, unfortunately, become an accepted translation for the Sanskrit samadhi, a choice that was made about 100 years ago before many Westerners had much experiential understanding of Buddhism. And it sets up expectations, always a problem in meditation practice.

Samadhi denotes a deep level of attention, usually accessed through some form of meditation. In samadhi, it is said that the mind joins with the object of attention. But this union is not brought about by concentration on the object. That just squeezes the mind. It comes about by resting in the experience of the object.

When I suggest in these groups that, instead of concentrating or observing or watching, they just rest and open to what arises, they have a very different experience. The sense of "I" subsides naturally and they come to rest in experience, not separate from it.

We truly rest only when there is no enemy: we include everything that arises in experience, excluding nothing. We have to build the capacity to do this, of course, but we can build that capacity through resting and opening, not concentrating or focusing.

Catch 22

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.

"That's some catch, that Catch-22," Yossarian observed.

"It's the best there is," Doc Daneeka agreed.

The Stones Stand Cold

Sisyphus is tired.

Too clever by half, inevitably

He draws the gods' revenge.

Things are the way they are

For a reason.

But he never learns.

Teachers teach.

And they all agree

A quiet colloquy may be desired, maybe needed.

But the fire calls them

To their calling

And they go.

The stones stand cold

As he waits,

Angry and alone.

And the gods have their revenge.

Evolution and Buddhahood

Let no one suppose that evolution will ever exempt us from struggles. 'You forget,' said the Devil, with a chuckle, 'that I have been evolving too.'
— William Ralph Inge

When I read about the stages of practice and buddhahood in Tibetan texts, I come away with the sense that there is some ideal state to which all paths of practice converge. One finds elaborate descriptions of various stages, culminating in the final attainment of buddhahood. At the same time, I haven't seen any evidence for such a convergence, whether in the various teachers with whom I've studied, my own practice, or the countless hours I've spent with students.

Instead, I've come to appreciate that things just evolve. What went before shapes what follows. One can often and easily trace how a person's way of experiencing life has evolved out of family and childhood experiences. At the same time, something new and unsuspected can arise at any time. Education, social interactions, finding a life partner and other events introduce different strands that mix with what is already there and influence the way we develop. It's rich, it's complex, it can be utterly amazing, and it can be utterly dismaying. Sometimes what happens is all too predictable and sometimes it's completely unexpected.

The Middle Way, not falling into extremes, captures, very simply and very wonderfully, this complexity. We are not just body or just mind; things are neither ordered nor chaotic; the universe is neither one nor many, and so on.

The implications for practice are profound. Systems of practice such as the Path of Purity in the Theravadan tradition or the Graded Path texts in the Tibetan traditition lay out stages of development, types of practitioners, what practices are suitable for whom and when. These are extraordinary collections of the wisdom and experience of masters over the ages, but we can easily feel that something is wrong with us if we don't recognize our experience or can't fit ourselves into those descriptions.

We need to remember one thing: there is no such thing as normal. Normality is an average and no one is actually the average. All classification schemata are after the fact, seeking to ascribe an order to the chaos and complexity of evolution. Such schemata necessarily average things, but there are always aspects of experience that don't fit or lie at one or other extreme of the bell curve.

There are general principles in spiritual practice, just as there are general principles in evolution theory. But each plant, each organism grows its own way, and we need to respect that we, too, will grow our own way.

The Buddhist concept of causality reflects this sense of evolution. It's based on the notions of genesis and conditions. Just as an acorn is the genesis of an oak tree, the genesis of awakening in us is the very awareness that is present in experience. Just as an acorn requires water, warmth, nourishment, and shelter to begin its evolution into an oak tree, we need to provide the conditions for attention, awareness, and presence to grow and evolve in our own lives.

And how we evolve is how we evolve.