MENTAL PRACTICE
The basic difference between an ordinary man and a Warrior is that the Warrior sees everything as a challenge whereas the ordinary man sees everything as either a blessing or a curse.
CARLOS CASTANEDA, The Teachings of Don Juan
Getting the physical body healthy through lifestyle and activating the proper flow of energy through qi gong are essential steps to waking up and snapping out of our trancelike slumber. However, we have to maintain the correct mindset in our training or we’ll be running around in circles for a long time. It is futile to bring up the amount of energy running through our system while continuing to play the same games of our past. If we don’t wake up and clearly recognize our habits and tendencies of old, then we may as well not even start. Simply put, there are a number of places and circumstances where we tend to “leak” our energy, and these holes need to be plugged up. Recall from part I when I spoke of polarity and the tendency of the human mind to channel energy into the opposite polarity of what we are feeling. Essentially, we are channeling our energy into situations that we are uncomfortable with and reinforcing them through our ignorance of how our energy systems work. The point is that we really don’t have anything to “do” here, per se, other than accepting reality as it is in every moment. Our judgment (or our aversions and cravings) of any given item or situation is where we literally breathe life into our lack of acceptance of these things, and this is what births our monsters.
In this book, we have come to understand the nature of how we create such harmful mental karma; thus, we are now poised to practice just the opposite. We are going to learn something that is at first very difficult to do for the human mind, but it is an important step in our journey. This is to do nothing at all. As mentioned in part I, the concept of karma is simply the action that we take. This applies to the mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical. Anytime we “move” to do or create something, we are generating karma. Every time we react to a given thought or statement, our mental waves reflect this reaction to the edge of the universe and back. Instead of being listening stations for the symphony of the cosmic Tao, we are broadcasting stations for the reflections of our shadows, spewing chaos and noise into the universe.
The ancient Taoists spoke of the concept of the yi, or the intellect, creating a disturbance in the heart. The disruptions of the mind manifest as an invading space that slowly grows and eventually nudges out the shen of the heart. When the shen doesn’t have a house to settle in, it cannot reside in the body, and we perish. Therefore, a big part of the Taoist immortality practice is the clearing of this disrupted yi from the heart.
Taoist Mental Practice
This exercise will start to create an understanding of the overactive role your mind plays in every instant of your life. Practice it daily in silence and then take it into your day-to-day life. The goal is to be constantly practicing this at all times, day and night. You may think to yourself, How am I going to get anything done then? The answer is simple: you’ll get more done efficiently when you are not blowing away all your energy into chaos. Trust. Practice.
PREPARATORY STEPS
• Sit in a quiet place with your spine straight and body relaxed. A cushion on the floor is ideal, but a firm chair will also work — just don’t lean back in it.
• Rest your hands on your knees with the thumb and index fingers touching, palms up.
• Take ten breaths into your lower dantien (three finger-widths below your navel), in nose and out nose.
• Settle into your breath and relax your mind.
BEGIN THE PRACTICE
• Your only action item in this practice is to ask yourself, What am I doing right now?
• Whatever it is that you are mentally engaged in, simply stop doing that and relax.
• Stay in this state of inaction but constantly pose the same question to yourself: What am I doing right now?
• You’ll find that you tend to get pretty busy doing something all of the time. Don’t get upset with yourself and think of yourself as a failure — welcome to the nature of the mind! We all have this noise, and we are all constantly jumping into the mental ring with it and fighting it to exhaustion.
• Again: What am I doing right now? Do this for ten to fifteen minutes at a time at first and extend sitting time as you progress.
If we are going to practice and cultivate inaction, which is the opposite of doing, then what do we do? There is only one action allowed in this exercise, and that is the last action that bridges us into the realm of inaction.
With continued practice, you will learn to become more and more aware of this tendency to always be doing something, and you will understand how much effort you are putting into this nonsense all the time! The only reason any of us feel any “lack” of energy is that we are spending 99 percent of our time leaking our energy on this freight train of nonsense that’s constantly running through our head.
Once you get a sense of how this practice works, simply program your subconscious mind to continue to ask it of yourself throughout your day.
True meditation is a state of being; it is not what you do for twenty minutes on your cushion! Let this practice function as a self-diagnostic or correctional program that keeps pulling your awareness back to what it is you are actually doing in the present moment. You will find that, with time, it is tremendously liberating, and you will learn to relax more and more into your intact energy field.
Western students often ask me about the principle of inaction. The general theme of their questions is, “If I were to relax and do nothing all day, then how could I perform my job and feed my family? How do I reconcile this paradox?” To them I often share the following story:
There is a famous tale of a Zen monastery in the mountains where an enormous boulder rolled down into the grounds after a storm. A number of monks were outside fretting over it when the master came out to inquire about all of the noise and fuss they were making. Without giving it another thought, the master simply picked up the huge boulder and carried it off to the side of the plaza. Unable to believe their eyes, the monks asked their master how he was able to perform such an extraordinary feat, and his reply was simple: “I simply relaxed as deeply as I exerted and lifted.”
Don’t worry about what you insist on getting done! If it needs to be done, it’ll happen naturally at the right time. We spend 99 percent of our time and energy playing out scenarios or anticipating an action instead of relaxing and doing it naturally. We’re so tired by then that most of us can’t even perform the action right when it is time. Practice these exercises and don’t fall for your mental trance arguments. You’ll be better than fine.