Never think that I believe I should set out a “system of teaching” to help people understand the way. Never cherish such a thought. What I proclaim is the truth as I have discovered it and “a system of teaching” has no meaning because the truth can’t be cut up into pieces and arranged in a system.
— BUDDHA
Spirituality has been integral to my life for as long as I can remember, although I didn’t always call it that. I was raised in a conflicted Baptist family: my father had been recently born again, and my mother had no use for organized religion. She was, though, unwilling to argue about it, so we kids went to church or Sunday school every week. Nature was my mother’s church, and by inclination, mine, too.
The first time I swore was at a fish. I was twelve years old and working a stream in California’s Sierra Nevada. A trout kept stealing my bait, and in frustration I finally muttered, “Damn you!” That was the beginning of the end for me and fundamentalist Christianity. I became a backslider: troubled by fears of hell, but eager to live a free and adventurous life here on earth.
By the time I was fifteen, Baptist dogma no longer made sense. My deepest question (then and now) was: “How can both predestination (determinism) and free will be true?” The church had no satisfactory answer, and this gap in logic nudged me further from the fold. At seventeen I announced that I didn’t want to attend Sunday school any longer. My mother cheerfully agreed and said that I could, instead, stay home and help clean the house. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, her response was a fine example of the Sunday school teacher’s explanation of predestination and free will: I could, of course, do what I wanted, but my mother knew beforehand what I would choose. There was, however, a difference between my mother and God. My mother didn’t really know, not for certain.
When I left home a year later, my faith was gone, and I’d begun to deny the existence of God. For a time, while experimenting with LSD, I again considered the spiritual aspects of the world, but it wasn’t until my first long solitary retreat in the wilderness that I directly experienced a Presence I could not explain away. This was both joyful and troubling.
During the next year, I struggled to make sense of what had happened to me in solitude. Along with consulting the I Ching, I read the Bible and Carl Jung, searching for a way to acknowledge the mysterious Presence I still sensed at times — without sliding back into fundamentalism’s rejection of all spiritual experience that doesn’t conform to a literal interpretation of the Bible. For a while I visited various churches, seeking a community where I could feel at home. I often recognized the presence of Spirit, especially in evangelical meetings, but they wouldn’t accept the validity of any path but their own.
BUDDHISM
One day my sister told me she had recently attended a Buddhist meditation retreat and had hated it, but thought I might like it. She was partially correct: I didn’t actually like it, but I did find it enormously valuable and reassuring. Soon after, I attended a three-month silent retreat, and then lived for a time in a small hybrid Buddhist/Christian/Tai Chi community in New Hampshire.
Over the years, Buddhist meditation and thought have been very useful as I attempt to explore, accept, and, perhaps, understand myself. Although I’ve devoted considerable effort to inner work, I still consider myself a beginner on the way as I work to develop moment-by-moment, nonjudgmental awareness and acceptance of living in all its ambiguous wonder.
My thinking about Buddhism tends to be pragmatic and straightforward. For instance, most Buddhists believe in the birth/death cycles of reincarnation. I spend little time wondering about what might or might not happen after death, focusing instead on life in the here and now. I do recognize, however, that I must die to each moment in order to be fully alive and present in the next. This seems to be how the Buddha taught as well. Instead of answering questions about abstract metaphysics, he dedicated his words to the practical alleviation of suffering.
The Buddha taught Four Noble Truths:
1. | Suffering exists in our lives. | |
2. | Attachment, aversion, and delusion are the cause of suffering. | |
3. | There exists a way to alleviate suffering. | |
4. | Freedom from suffering is found through the Middle Way practice of the Eightfold Path. |
Life involves physical, emotional, and psychological pain. This is self-evident once we stop pretending otherwise. One of our most ubiquitous forms of denial is to hope for a future in which pain will no longer exist in our lives — to imagine that our current pain is a temporary anomaly. Our cultural drive for progress is based, to some extent, on the utopian social ideal of an end to pain. Belief in a pain-free eternal life after death is another manifestation of this longing. There is also suffering in our lives, but pain and suffering are not the same. Pain is inherent to living, suffering is optional.
Buddhism teaches that the root causes of suffering are attachment, aversion, and delusion. We are attached to sense pleasure; to our opinions and theories about how the world is and how it should be; to various social, political, religious, and scientific rites and rituals; to the belief in a permanent separate self — I, me, mine. This teaching can be loosely summarized as: the desire for and attachment to pleasure and security cause suffering because nothing in the world is permanent; everything changes.
The other side of desire and attachment is aversion to and avoidance of pain. The strong sensations we generally label as pain are inherent to living, but we can work with the quality of our experience in relation to these sensations. If we resist them, our resistance actually intensifies the sensations and thus creates additional pain. Another common way we intensify pain is by taking it personally and having a “why me?” attitude. If we can relax into pain as a natural part of living that everyone experiences, and let go of the self-judgment that something is wrong with me because I’m experiencing pain, we can alleviate our suffering to a large degree. Much of our suffering is caused by attachment to our sense of a separate autonomous “I” that can somehow achieve a permanent state of affairs with only pleasure and no pain. Attachment to pleasurable spiritual experiences and aversion to other darker experiences also causes suffering.
The Buddha taught that the journey from suffering to freedom is along the Noble Eightfold Path: right understanding; right thought, right speech, right action; right livelihood; right effort (in meditation); right mindfulness; right concentration. Still rebelling somewhat against my fundamentalist Christian upbringing, I tend to resist prescribed ethical rules. But Buddhism doesn’t use language of condemnation; instead it speaks in terms of unskillful and skillful means — actions that do or do not lead to more suffering.
One Buddhist teaching, based on insight that may arise during meditation, is that to a great extent our normal experience consists of conceptual categories, and that beyond/beneath/within these categories the world flows without fixed boundaries. When we clearly see that nothing is solid or permanent, see into the process of how we construct and name objects by distinguishing them from the surrounding matrix, see that without the background matrix an object cannot exist, and see that each object is part of the background for each other object, our lives are transformed and we can relax — until we forget again and slip back into conditioned habits of perception.
The terms Emptiness, Groundlessness, and Suchness slip and slide and cannot be pinned down. They remind us that the world of discrete objects — including the self — is conditional and empty of permanence or self-sufficiency. And they direct our attention to the flowing physical reality beneath the level of conceptualization. But they also point to something more. Wilber writes:
This is why, in nondual Suchness [Emptiness], it is absolutely not that each being is a part of the One, or participates in the One, or is an aspect of the One. In other words, it is not, as in pantheism, that each is merely a piece of the “One,” a slice of the pie, or a strand in the Big Web....As Zen would have it, Emptiness is not the sum total of Form, it is the essence of Form.
And:
Pure Emptiness and pure Consciousness are synonymous. Consciousness is not a thing or a process.... It is ultimately Emptiness, the opening or clearing in which the form of beings manifest themselves, and not any particular manifestation itself.
[All italics and quotation marks are Wilber’s.]1
And then the Heart Sutra from the Buddha further boggles the mind: “Form is emptiness, emptiness itself is form; emptiness is no other than form, form is no other than emptiness.” Here it might be useful to give up trying to “understand” with the rational mind and simply return to following the breath.
From a Buddhist perspective, spiritual practice is not primarily intended to structure the content of experience and prevent unpleasant thoughts and feelings from entering, but rather to stabilize consciousness itself — the context within which all thoughts and feelings arise — to honor and care for all aspects of ourselves and our experience. We do not fear the dark and chaotic, but allow everything to arise and dissolve — as all experiences arise and dissolve — without rejecting or clinging to anything. It is this equanimity, the confidence to be with life in all its manifestations, that brings peace and joy.
CONTROL OR SURRENDER
The extremist dichotomy — control or surrender — between West and East is an artificial generalization I don’t want to defend as literally true, but I would like to look at it as a possible metaphor with broader implications for how we live our lives. Posit a spectrum. At one end is the efficient modernist technician: fully focused on getting the job done, improving his personal life by seeking more status and a higher salary that will fulfill his desire for more material goods. He is intent on developing ever-more-powerful technology to control and improve the world and his own body. At the other end is the caricature of the Eastern mystic: scrawny, long matted hair and beard, dirty, covered with flies, making no effort to better his lot or improve the world in any way.
The technician accepts his inner self as given (indeed, it is often invisible to him), sees pleasure as good and pain as bad, and works to change the external world — including his own body — to improve his quality of life. The goal of the mystic is to embrace pain as well as pleasure and to experience all as sacred. He works with his own mind to accept and value the world — including himself — just as it is and so improve his quality of life. Both seek to be happy, but go about it in different ways. Which approach is correct and which mistaken?
Both are right. If we attempt to avoid all pain by controlling the world, our emotions, and our bodies, we run in an ever-more-frantic circle, trying to deny who/what we actually are, as though we can somehow escape from the universe. On the other hand, we (or someone who cares for us) do need to act to survive, and we do have the capacity to alleviate some of the pain of life through adjustment of external circumstance. It is not activity or acceptance, but rather acceptance and activity — based on wisdom rather than avoidance and greed. This is the middle way of Buddhism.
TRADITIONAL TEACHINGS AND PERSONAL EXPERIENCE
I sometimes question the relationship of my own direct experience to traditional spiritual teachings. Buddhism is an empirical practice: students are encouraged to accept only what they directly experience for themselves. Yet great value is placed on the ancient teachings of the Buddha, who was, it is claimed, a fully enlightened being and saw the truth of existence. When my own experience does not accord with traditional teachings, there could be several possible reasons: my understanding of the teachings is partial or confused; the original teachings have been idealized or corrupted over time; my perceptions are distorted; the cultural context of my experience is different from that of the Buddha; our current collective understanding has evolved beyond that of the Buddha.
Ken Wilber criticizes philosophers who see current culture as degenerate and want to return to some supposed Golden Age. He argues that the knowledge and sophistication of spiritual explorers as well as that of natural and social scientists continue to evolve.
I value both my own explorations and traditional teachings. I also continue to question whether our understanding of ourselves and the world is progressing in a fundamental way, or if we are simply developing explanations that reflect our current language and cultural context.
POTENTIAL TRAPS
Tension often arises between adherents of different organized religions. There may also be edginess between those committed to a traditional spiritual practice and those who follow a more personal idiosyncratic path. Both approaches carry risks. In adopting an established tradition it can be tempting to literalize the teachings and idealize the teacher. This creates the illusion that there is someone or something outside ourselves that can “save” us. How often I’ve imagined that someone somewhere must have the Answer and a system he can teach me that will end my suffering. Buddhism is frequently presented as a system of practice and thought that will lead to enlightenment, but as the epigram above suggests, the Buddha himself, at least in some contexts, denied he could provide such a system. Finally, we must each find our own way home.
In recognizing this, it is easy to become a spiritual dabbler. Instead of deepening our own contemplative practice, we take the easy way out and spend our time reading and thinking about what others have written. This can be extremely useful, but such teachings are only conceptual descriptions of someone else ’s insights and understandings; they are not a direct examination of the light and shadow of our own inner world. There is also an opposite risk. In following a personal meandering path, it’s easy to become lost in thickets of doubt and confusion. At such times, a trusted teacher can be invaluable.
Always skulking in the shadows is the ego’s need to perceive itself as special. This need is often present but unrecognized in spiritual communities. A sort of “us and them” superiority can develop among groups of spiritual seekers. It’s easy, when surrounded by a group of like-minded people, to believe that you have found the Truth others are still seeking. Teachers, too, when held aloft by ardent followers, can be seduced into seeing themselves as special beings. This limits everyone involved. The teacher is no longer a fellow being in the flow of life, but set apart and above.
In following your own path, on the other hand, there is the risk of spiritual arrogance and excessive independence: an “I don’t need any help; I can do it all on my own” attitude. Surrendering the ego to Something Greater is at the heart of spiritual practice, and the process is endlessly subtle and challenging. The temptations of self-deception and hypocrisy are always present.
Some years ago, feeling myself to have veered too far into independence, I began to participate in a Native American sweat circle. It’s an interesting and powerful practice. Some of my brothers and sisters take the traditional teaching quite literally; others less so. I work to relax my habit of doing things my own way and to join respectfully in the ceremonies, without attempting to be other than I am.
LEARNING AND CREATING A SPIRITUAL PRACTICE
I approach spirituality as integral to ordinary life, not something special and apart from it, and I see the spiritual journey as simply becoming a mature human being. Some spiritual systems categorize stages of development in great detail. I’m too pragmatic to be attracted to abstract discussions of theology. What fascinates and beckons me is direct experience and understanding of the mind/body process as lived here and now. One of my own — and my culture’s — immediate tasks is to acknowledge and integrate our inner shadow and heal the rifts between mind and body, self and other.
It can be seductive to project an abstract idea of spirit out into the ether and seek salvation in our own imagination, but this is as misguided and deadening as is denying the existence of spirit altogether. In Religion in an Age of Science, Ian Barbour points out that spiritual traditions tend to either understand spirit as transcending the physical, which leads to disembodied dualism, or they equate spirit to the physical world as in nature worship. Western religions lean strongly toward the transcendent, and there is now hunger to redress this imbalance. We are beginning to rediscover spirit in the immediate, in our flesh
— even perhaps as our flesh. Of particular and intense interest for me is the experiential shift from feeling alienated from an essentially static and lifeless existence to a sense of belonging in a world that is vibrantly Alive.
My basic spiritual practice is daily meditation and retreat into solitude. Alone in the wilderness, my awareness deepens. I slow down and frequently pause to come back to myself in the here and now. In loving-kindness meditation each morning I ask for peace, happiness, and freedom from suffering for all people, plants, and animals in the world. Before each meal I pause to give thanks and offer a small portion of my food to the earth. In solitude, daily rituals spontaneously develop that enrich my life and express my sense of gratitude. These regular practices create a sense of stability that helps maintain equilibrium.