The Middle Way and the Vertical

 We cannot solve problems with the same thinking we use to create them.

—Albert Einstein

I have lost track of how many conversations I’ve had over the last few months about polarization in today’s world, despair about the future of this country, of Western society, or the environment, or the interregnum we seem to have entered with the crumbling of institutions and the order on which they were based. 

Here are a few thoughts.

In Aspirations for Mahamudra, Rangjung Dorje writes:

It doesn’t exist: even buddhas do not see it.

It doesn’t not exist: it is the basis of samsara and nirvana.

No contradiction: the middle way is union.

May I know the pure being of mind, free of extremes.

Implicit in this verse is some very important meditation instruction. 

The first two lines are two opposing views, each supported by an incontrovertible argument.

Mind does not exist. Why? Even buddhas do not see it. 

We are not talking about belief here. If you tell me something exists, it has to be sensible, able to be perceived, in some way. I cannot sense mind, and if even the most capable people in the world, i.e., buddhas, cannot sense mind, then what does it mean to say it exists?

On the other hand, to say mind does not exist is also wrong. Why? Mind is the basis of all experience—samsara and nirvana being an elegant way of saying all experience.

These are not abstract philosophical propositions. On the one hand, when I look at mind, I do not see anything. There isn’t anything there. On the other, because I experience sights, sounds, thoughts, and emotions, something is going on. I must have a mind.

The next line says that this is not a contradiction. How does that work? This is where the vertical comes in. They come together, not in the sense of merging with each other, but in the sense of no longer being contradictory. 

A basic principle of Buddhist practice is that when you have two apparently contradictory positions, hold them both at the same time. Do not go in the direction of one or the other. Hold them both. 

That is, essentially, the definition of the Middle Way. The Middle Way is not about balance. It is about avoiding falling into an extreme position—order or chaos, eternalism or nihilism, monism or pluralism, etc. To avoid falling into an extreme position, hold both poles in mind at the same time. Don’t try to reconcile them. Don’t try to balance them. Just hold them, both of them. This is not an intellectual exploration. It has to go deeper than that. 

It may take a while. It may take days, months, or even years. Eventually, you see that both views come from a common source, a source you may not be able to put into words, but a source that you can sense, intuit, or feel deep in your being. 

It is as if these two conflicting views are two sides of the same coin. You could not see the coin before. You could only see one side or the other, so heads and tails were in conflict. But when you see the coin itself, everything shifts. The seeming contradiction disappears, not because heads and tails merge, but because heads and tails are seen to be two facets of something that you can now see.

In the case of mind, you come to a knowing that is totally different from the knowing that you are used to. I’ve translated the word for that knowing as the pure being of mind. Others have translated it as mind nature. It is empty, clear, and unrestricted.

This is a movement into the vertical because this knowing is a higher knowing. It is not a rational knowing. It is not a conceptual knowing. But it is a knowing, and when you are able to touch it, apparent contradictions disappear—form and emptiness, for instance, or movement and stillness, or sound and silence.

What is important here is the move to the vertical, a move that comes about through holding apparently contradictory positions at the same time for a long enough period of time for a higher knowing to form.

When you move to the vertical, you are able to experience divergent views, but the move comes at a cost: you cannot hold onto either of the earlier positions as absolute. Long cherished beliefs may have to be let go. Some people find that too difficult. They prefer to hold on to those cherished beliefs, even it it means they stay in turmoil and conflict.

As for applying this principle in your life, make it part of your practice. Hold opposing views in your meditation until the move to the vertical takes place, until there is a shift in how you see and understand. It is impossible to say how long this may take, anywhere from a few minutes to a few years. You cannot manufacture higher orders of knowing with a wave of the hand. 

When you discover how powerful and how wonderful this method can be, you may want to share it with others. That is much trickier. In doing so, you are essentially moving into a teacher role. You must be capable of holding a field of attention in which the movement to the vertical can take place. I did so, both with students and in my business consulting. In both situations, I was in a position to hold the field of attention and address the emotional material that inevitably arises when people see they have to let go of cherished beliefs. 

Better, I think, is to plant seeds, and let the seeds sprout and grow at their own rate. To plant a seed, introduce a different perspective, but don’t argue for it or defend it. Just introduce it and trust that if the ground is fertile, it will sprout when the time is right.

Cultivating Faith

Why do people today have so much trouble developing faith? 

Faith, unfortunately, is often not well regarded in our culture. In the minds of many, it is equated with belief. It is also equated with hope. It is also regarded as something that is irrational, a position adopted without supporting evidence. This last view of faith is particularly pernicious in my opinion because it implies that there is no valid form of knowing outside of the logical or rational mind—and that is just not true. These views are pervasive, and many people have difficulty in letting them go and giving themselves to a path in which faith looms large.

Rather than say more about those difficulties, I am going to describe a way of practice through which different aspects of faith have developed in me. Here, I’m using the word faith to refer to the willingness to open to whatever arises in experience. In this respect, it is the antithesis of belief, even though many people use these words interchangeably. In this vein, James Carse in The Religious Case Against Belief presents a clear distinction faith from belief. 

In the Tibetan tradition, to develop faith in one’s teacher or the Three Jewels (Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha), the usual instruction is to contemplate the qualities of one’s teacher, or The Three Jewels. This approach did not work for me—too much thinking, too much scope for idealization, and too much propensity to degenerate into belief.

A first step for me was to acknowledge that there was something I wanted to know—the nature of mind, for instance, or emptiness, or whatever term you want to use. I had to acknowledge that to know that was more important to me than anything the conventional world had to offer. 

That is a reasonable starting point because I think it is very difficult to practice effectively unless you feel that way. To acknowledge that to myself was not easy because to do so meant that I was no longer in control of my life. Control is an illusion, of course, but it is an illusion that many of us in the West are loathe to give up. 

Once I acknowledged that I wanted to know mind nature, it was clear that I was going to follow that calling and submit to its demands, whatever they were, wherever they led me. And that, right there, is one aspect of faith.

A second step was to acknowledge that to know what I wanted to know required a completely different kind of knowing or understanding. It was not hard to arrive at an intellectual, a conceptual, understanding of mind nature, say. But a conceptual understanding did not take me very far. It was like trying to taste an apple by thinking about an apple. It just doesn’t do the job.

One can, of course, go into all the subtleties of emptiness, all the philosophical ins and outs, as masters and scholars have over the ages, but that path never appealed to me, and my teacher never encouraged it.

When I came to understand that a completely different kind of understanding was required, I was stuck. I did not know how to proceed. Sitting meditation has always been difficult for me and I just could not develop the kind of stable clear attention that was described in the texts and that other people talked about and which, supposedly, led to the knowledge I sought. What to do?

Largely through grinding away at the ngöndro or groundwork practices, I first came to understand prayer as a way to form an emotional connection with what I sought to know. In teacher-union practice (guru yoga), for instance, you pray to your teacher as the embodiment of awakened mind, or, to put it another way, as the actual knowing of mind nature. In a series of blogposts in 2016, I discussed in some detail a prayer that is the central to that practice. You can find the blogposts starting at https://musingsbyken.blogspot.com/2016/05/line-1-treasured-teacher-i-pray-to-you.html

Over time, however, I came to see prayer and faith differently. I came to see faith as a kind of knowing, an opening to whatever I was experiencing, and prayer as a way of building that ability. In other words, prayer became the primary way through which I developed or deepened faith.

For me, as least, it was important to rely on actual prayers and to give voice to them. If I just said them in my mind, they did not engage my body. Giving voice to them, saying them out loud, became a physical declaration that I was reaching into the unknown and was prepared to receive whatever came of that. For a long time, actually giving voice to my deepest longings was quite difficult. It required a ruthless honesty that acknowledged that I really was reaching out to the unknown.

That has become the essence of prayer for me, whether it’s the prayer of refuge, a prayer to my teacher, or a prayer to buddhas and bodhisattvas along the lines that I wrote in The Magic of Faith. 

What I want to know is not in what I know. It is in the unknown, and prayer is the first step in forging a relationship with it.

There are many different kinds of prayer, and the kind I’m talking about here might be called supplicatory prayer, reaching out, asking, to connect with what I don’t know. I have to do this with complete humility. Any sense that I know what I am doing, any sense that I am in control, any sense of “I” at all, means that prayer stays in the conceptual domain, and goes nowhere. Thus, prayer is also a way of letting go of “I”. This is not easy, for any number of reasons including not only my psychological and cultural conditioning, but also my academic training and the way we are conditioned to think in this culture. 

Basically, to reach out to the unknown means that I have to step into the unknown. That is where the relationship begins to form and that is how faith grows.

Rest in the experiencing of breathing.

When you do your regular meditation practice, sit comfortably, and let your breath settle a bit. Then, as you breath out, let the exhalation be a little bit longer than your natural breathing rhythm for three or four breaths. Then let your breath come and go naturally. 

Now rest in the experience of breathing. Don’t focus on any one thing. Just rest in the experience of breathing. 

As you rest in the experience of breathing, you see that it is both very simple and amazingly rich. There are countless sensations associated with breathing, and your inclination is to focus on one or other of them—the sensation of the breath moving through the nostrils, the movement of the diaphragm, the expansion and contraction of the lungs and torso, the coolness at the back of your mouth during the inhalation, and so on and so and so on. In many methods of meditation you do focus attention on specific aspects of the breath. In this instruction, however, I am pointing you to a different approach.

Rather than focus your attention on any of these, keep the field of attention open. Whenever you notice a sensation—the ones mentioned above or any other, include it in your field of attention while you rest in the whole experience of breathing. You don’t have to name the sensation or identify it. It’s enough to include it.

Your attention may collapse down onto a sensation you notice. If that happens, return to the experience of breathing and rest there. The sensation you noticed will probably come and go in your field, that is, you will sometimes be aware of it and sometimes not. That is also part of the experience of breathing. Keep returning to the experience of breathing, keeping the field of attention open, and include in the field everything you experience. 

Sometimes you may feel that your attention is darting from one sensation to another. Don’t try to control it. Whenever you notice your attention darting around, let it dart around as you rest in the open field of attention and the experience of breathing. Darting attention is sometimes an aspect of your experience of breathing.

Thoughts and feelings may come. Some of them may come and go on their own. Others may grab your attention. When that happens, sooner or later you realize, “Oh, I’ve been distracted,” Again, don’t try to control your mind by focusing on the breath. Return to the experience of breathing and the open field of attention, and, to the extent that you are able, include the thinking and feeling and all the associated sensations. 

Do the same with sleepiness or dullness. This is a little more difficult, but dullness, too, is a sensation. Include it in the field of attention. That dullness, also, is sometimes part of the experience of breathing.

Keep coming back to the experience of breathing and resting there. 

As you do this on a regular basis, you may see that some of the sensations of breathing are more pronounced or more present on some days than others. No matter. Whatever you experience on a given day as you rest in the experience of breathing, keep including it in the open field of attention. 

Some days, you may be overwhelmed with thoughts about this or that—something happening in your life, memories from the past, or thoughts about the future. You fall into distraction over and over again. Some days are like that. To the best of your ability, keep returning to the experience of breathing, even if it’s only for a second or two before the next thought grabs your attention and carries you away. Keep returning and resting, accepting the turmoil the same way you accept a howling wind, or thunder and lightning.

Some days, you may experience and deep stillness or peace, extraordinary well-being, even bliss, or moments or periods of almost blinding clarity. No matter. Include these experiences as you rest in the experience of breathing. You find yourself hoping for those experiences or fearing that you will never experience them again. No matter. Include all that, too, in your field of attention.

Over time, you find that your relationship with all the comings and goings of your mind changes. Whether you are busy or steady as you practice, clear or dull, happy or in pain, the breath is always there to return to, as is that open field of attention. You begin to sense a quietness, a stillness, a peace, that has little to do with how you are feeling or what is going on on any given day. And there is a concomitant clarity, even when you are sleepy or dull. Everything you experience is there in that clarity and peace, but it seems the clarity and peace are not clouded or affected for better or worse by what arises as you breathe. 

Clouds appear and dissolve in the sky. The sky does not obstruct clouds and clouds do not obstruct the sky.

When you notice that clarity and peace, you may be tempted to hold onto it, or try to generate it, or control it. Whatever you try to do with it, you fail. If, instead, you keep returning and resting in the experience of breathing, you may see that you, that is, the sense you have of yourself, is also a sensation in the open field of attention, and that it is not you at all who is sitting there meditating. And that is a kind of freedom, freedom from the tyranny of "I".

People try so hard to understand all this, but they try to understand it with their minds, and it just doesn’t work. The understanding we seek has nothing to do with us. It is not something we can make happen. The best we can do is to create conditions. Resting in the experience of breathing in the way I’ve described here is one way to create those conditions.