On Being

Our minds constantly seek to be something in the future:  to be rich, to be doing something, to be with someone. Yet ironically the mind shies away from just being. To sit in the present and observe life is a challenge.  Thus I'm coming to view the mind as an organ of future thought and memory reorganizing. I'm not sure what to call the faculty that peacefully observes the present without needing to judge and categorize it. Meditation brings out this Observer. 

Being Anchored

One form of meditation is called "tonglin" and focuses on visualizing yourself smiling, happy, healthy and surrounded by light. Then you visualize someone you love being happy, smiling, healthy and surrounded by light.  Then you proceed to visualizing the same for a person for whom you have neutral feelings. Finally you visualize this happy light around someone with whom you are having a troubled relationship.  In each visualization you picture yourself smiling and laughing with the other person. 

This meditation has produced some amazing results in my life. It has helped me deal with strong feelings of anger with other people.  It has helped me find peace and even joy working with previously difficult people. 

Today when I meditated and turned to a tonglin sitting, I realized that the anchor of this chain of joyful visualizations is the self. If one cannot first anchor yourself in love for yourself ("maitri" in Buddhist terms), then it is impossible to share this light with others.  Loving compassion for our own humanity and selves is the gateway and anchor for compassion for others. 

The Challenges of Happy Times

I think everyone enjoys it when things are going well, and we are happy.  Yet happiness also has some challenges when it comes to meditation practice. At least in my experience when I am unhappy meditation is a release. It is a way to sit down and contemplate balance and a mindfulness of being in the now. When I'm happy I'm often lost in little mental movies of all the future delights I'm expecting. Thus when I'm happy it is more of a challenge to make myself sit down and meditate. It is more of a challenge to find the balance in my life. It is harder to put down a happy expectation that it is to let go of an unhappy present. Good times also often mean that one is with friends and loved ones.  When one is in a new love or deeply in love with one's longterm partner, it can be very challenging to find the balance of not being attached to people.  

Yet meditation gives me balance. It also helps me to balance my relationships. Being mindful does not mean that you cannot love people. It also doesn't mean that you are necessarily going to become detached from them. In my experience, however, it does help me to keep a proper balance. This means for me that I do not look to make myself happy through another person.  It also means that it I keep my balance and realize that I am not here to make other people happy. That's their job. Likewise it is not their job to make me happy.  

Meditation helps me step back and evaluate all these feelings and emotions and actions on my part. It also helps me to shut off my thoughts for a bit so that I can regain it counterbalancing focus. Yet I do find that happy times are more challenging in terms of keeping my focus and meditating regularly. I've learned, however, that consistent practice brings me better quality of life, better balance with relationships, greater compassion, and an inner peace. 

On Being Awake

Sometimes I contemplate just what Gautama Siddhartha meant when he talked of being awake.  The very title Buddha means the one who is awake.  A number of people I've known have thought being awake was a poetic way of describing the far more profound experience of enlightenment.  The term nirvana describes being in a state of enlightenment.

In movies and books, enlightenment seems very ethereal.  Sometimes it even comes with superpowers.  And when you die you just evaporate and ascend into a higher state like Star Wars' Obi Wan Kenobi. Enlightenment seems really different than my life of work, family, blogging, meditation, and going grocery shopping.

The thread I see in Gautama Siddhartha's teachings, however, emphasizes a very pragmatic focus on living in the Now and obtaining skills which anyone can learn.  So, the other day when meditating I think I may have awakened for a bit.  It seems somewhat grandiose to claim I have reached enlightenment, but perhaps I just have in a way.

For most of my day and even in my dreams, my mind plays out an endless series of movies in my mind. Some involve the past where I rehash old memories and often in the process reconstruct them based on my current understanding of the situation then.  More often than not, however, these mental films focus on what I should be doing in the future or little scenarios of what may happen.  I endlessly ponder what all is on my To Do list, what needs to be done next, and how to do it.  Sometimes I imagine scenarios that turn out badly with people shouting, rejecting or disapproving of me.  Perhaps I'm late with a project or I'm not attractive to them when I ask them out or I somehow am just not good enough.  These negative projections in my head create a huge amount of fear and anxiety.

On the flip side, I sometimes daydream of things going just as I hoped.  I win the lottery.  My current favorite restaurant is going to have the yummy broccoli casserole on the menu today when I go there for lunch.  My blog becomes immensely popular.  Aliens land and hail me as their God-Emperor. ha

For the years I have been meditating, the work comes in trying to still these movies.  It is hard work trying not to think.  Then the other day I just paid attention to the Now.  I made a breakthrough in mindfulness to get all technical.  I heard the garbage truck outside picking up the weekly trash.  I could hear my cat lightly snoring.  I could smell the comforting aroma of last night's dinner and my partner's scent.  I felt the parts of my skin that felt warm and my ice cold feet.  I could taste the tea I drank with breakfast.

When I looked inward at my body I could feel the tension and anxiety drawing my shoulders together.  I was balled up in a slight way as if expecting someone was about to hit me.  And I could mentally trace these fears to the mental movies that had been playing in my head earlier.

When I tried to survey my emotions just in that second, I felt this kind of splashing ocean of feelings going in every direction.  I could identify an emotion only when I asked about an object or situation.  Otherwise, emotions were like asking What's the color of now?  Well, that plant is green.  The lamp is brown.  Yesterday's underwear in the hamper is red.  Emotions and characteristics attach to objects and situations.

So then I went deeper and asked who I was observing this.  What did I feel.  And I felt nothing.  I didn't have a color or an emotion or even an identity.  I simply was the calm Observer.  It was peaceful.  I didn't have superpowers.  I couldn't move things with my mind (I've tried!).  I simply was awake to the Now.  The mental movies of memories, expectations, and fears were stopped while I observed what was happening in me and around me now.

I've pondered this state a lot.  I've tried and got better at entering it when I'm not meditating by being mindful of this exact moment and what is going on with it.  Strangely, there is this kind of miniature shock like when you are concentrating and someone suddenly turns off the radio that has been playing in the background or knocks on your door.  My attention shifts from a mental place to an awareness place.  I awake.

I am new to this path.  I'm sure there are many more experiences down the Middle Way from which I will learn.  Perhaps I will find enlightenment is something more, but I increasingly think the Buddha was teaching us to awaken to the Now and learn to turn off the mental movies.  To be awake in this way opens a whole new perspective to life which I will examine in another post later.

Meditation on the No Self

This blog is a way for me to understand my growing knowledge and understanding of Buddhism.  So, that's my fine print way of saying "I don't know a lot about Buddhist philosophy."  I'm still learning, and this blog is a way for me to explore and share.

One sometimes challenging concept of Buddhism for me is the idea of no self.  Buddhism argues that our perception of having an individual self is illusionary.  As an illusion, we act in ways sometimes that bring us pain because we cling to this idea of an individual self.  Lord knows I cling to my individual self!

I've come to think of this no self illusion in terms of a single street's relationship with an entire grid pattern.
Streets and roads are part of a larger, interconnected network.  These networks only end at the edge of a continent where oceans separate one network from another.  My house sits on a street that I perceive to be an individual.  It has its own name.  It runs in a particular direction which has a linear cohesiveness to it similar to how my own life has a linear history running through time.  My street is even mine:  it has relationships where certain people live on it.  Certain people commute on it.  Certain repair people maintain the electric lines and sewers above and below it.

But my street is part of a network of all the streets in my city.  My city's network in turn is connected by highways, back roads, and interstates to most of the roads in North America -maybe even South America too.  Change a sign and redirect traffic and my road will become the new twist in the larger, main spoke road to which it connects two blocks up.  There are real things that make my street individual, but in the larger scope of things this individual link in the great network is no more an individual than a single stretch of a line in a painting made with a continuous brush stroke.

I think of myself as like my street:  seemingly individual but part of a larger single spiritual body.  Especially if I do not meditate, my moods are constantly in flux; the reactions to outside stimuli rather than some internal state usually.  Something 'bad' happens and I am in a 'bad' mood.  Something 'good' happens, and I'm in a 'good' mood.  It makes me ask:  just what do I really feel?  Is my emotional state just a series of reactions?

Meditation tells me there is a calm, peaceful state of observation inside.  This place...this me...watches with an interested but detached serenity.  Or, if not always serene, this part of me is able to discern factors behind my emotions such as illness, fear, excitement, etc.

I've read that as one grows deeper in experience with meditation over the years, this place of observation gains depth until the observer notices there is no one to observe:  the people we think we are becomes a series of reactions and relationships we observe.  It is almost as if meditation flies us over our street so that we begin to observe the bigger street grid.  The individual dissolves as a component of the whole.

I think compassion by necessity flows out of this observation.  When the speeding driver irritated by your left turn is as much you as the driver turning left, one feels empathy towards both.

I'll end with two other factoids:

1. There is a Buddhist story or fable about a demon who comes to a Buddhist nun to tempt her with all sorts of worldly delights.  She calmly looks at the demon and tells him there is no one there to tempt.  Neat story! For me the implications are that cultivating this sense of no self is not about nihilism but offers a way to overcome fear, overeating, substance abuse, etc. by moving the locus of control to a higher spiritual sense of unity when our illusionary sense of individual self may feel weak.  Maybe.  I'll have to give this some more thought but it is at least a fable to ponder.

2. One current theory in physics argues that each decision gives birth multiple universes.  In each new universe, we made a different choice.  So, in Universe A I chose chocolate ice cream.  In B I chose vanilla.  In C I chose strawberry.  In D I decided not to have any ice cream at all.  Like the idea of the no self, such a model of the universe is both fascinating and frightening to me because again it unseats the idea of a single, unitary self.  If one could, however, reach a state of being where one was aware of all your selves in the multiverses, each experience would become a rich source of knowledge.  There would be no clinging to hopes for a particular outcome in one universe because both the chosen and feared outcomes would both come to pass in one universe or another.  While physics offers no way currently to perceive between multiverses, it is a concept where Buddhism and physics may overlap in some sense.