A human being is a part of the whole called by us “the universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and affection of a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of understanding and compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
— ALBERT EINSTEIN
It is important to see that the main point of any spiritual practice is to step out of the bureaucracy of ego. This means stepping out of ego’s constant desire for a higher, more spiritual, more transcendental version of knowledge, religion, virtue, judgment, comfort or whatever it is that the particular ego is seeking.
— CHÖGYAM TRUNGPA RINPOCHE
In the journal, I use, but don’t define, the terms “small mind” and “Big Mind.” Like Emptiness, Suchness, Spirit, God — all of which, for me, are different terms for Numinous Mystery — Big Mind is not a thing I can pin down. Small mind is a bit easier, but any definition is still suspect. I use the term to refer to: my habitual egocentric way of perceiving and defending myself as a separate entity isolated from an external world out there; the painful experience of holding tightly to my opinions and to my insistence that the world be as I want (construct) it to be; repetitive thinking about things, rather than being in the present moment.
PURSUING BIG MIND AND ENLIGHTENMENT
Experientially, the shift from small mind to Big Mind is not a shift from one state to another, but from a static and tightly structured awareness into an open flowing awareness whose essence is mystery and freedom. This experience of openness is sometimes called “Beginner’s Mind” or “Don’t Know Mind,” because it’s not bound by the conceptual distinctions of small mind. The following quote from Mel Weitsman evokes the relative tightness of small mind and the spacious freedom of Big Mind:
Big Mind is the mind which goes beyond discrimination and includes everything. Suzuki Roshi would admonish us to always live in Big Mind, but that small mind is an expression of Big Mind. It’s not bad. Small mind is necessary; otherwise we would not have it. But small mind should be guided by Big Mind, and as a channel for expressing Big Mind. So our everyday life should be based on Big Mind so that Big Mind is expressing itself through our speech, actions, and thoughts.
[Small mind] is the world of comparative values: this one is good, this one is not so good, the realm of like and dislike, value judgments based on personal preference. But Big Mind is the realm beyond comparative values, where we can accept everything the way it is without being judgmental and partial. It opens our mind to seeing things as they really are.1
I call different experiences Big Mind. Sometimes consciousness opens wide and I sense the whole world as within me, instead of “out there,” and I’m one with Spirit. At other times I feel small and tender; one of innumerable beings living together on the Earth. In the words of Trungpa, I become tiny like a grain of sand — an infinitesimal part of the infinite universe. It’s not all happening within me, but I am part of everything and deeply identified with the rest of existence. Both experiences are filled with mystery and sacred wonder, but the latter carries the rich sense of deep aliveness and gentle humility.
One reason I spend time in solitude is to explore the process of shifting from small to Big Mind — which, at the moment, I equate with enlightenment
— and to learn to control and teach that shift. When I write in the journal about not finding the Answer, I’m referring to my failure to learn how to catalyze the shift at will and how to explain it in words.
The difficulty is that once I find the answer, or rather slip into it, it disappears. Only from the perspective of small mind is enlightenment a specific state to be achieved. From the perspective of Big Mind, the concept of enlightenment — as something to be gained — is no longer meaningful. In other words: Only when caught in a web of conceptual definitions do I think it’s possible to attain enlightenment. In Big Mind, when I’m free from the this and that of conceptual structuring, enlightenment no longer exists as something distinct from nonenlightenment.
Experientially, small mind seems to be a subset of Big Mind. It’s the domain of natural laws (or descriptions of regularities, depending on point of view). In the flowing present of Big Mind, all is spontaneously arising in the moment. It is the domain of direct unmediated experience in which no conceptual explanation is possible or desired.
In stating that small mind is a subset of Big Mind, I imply that Big Mind is primary and small mind derivative. But perhaps we ’re simply more familiar with seeing ourselves as separate individuals and have largely lost the experience of being one with the flowing universe, so the shift in perception carries a sense of profound portent.
If small mind is a subset of Big Mind, then we must always be in Big Mind even when we experience ourselves to be in small mind. This logical conclusion coincides with the Weitsman quote above and my own experience that enlightenment is not something we can attain. We are always already enlightened but usually fail to notice. Thus enlightenment — the shift to Big Mind — is simply waking up to what always already is.
Using the metaphor of spiritual journey may be misleading because it can point away from immediate experience — as though there is somewhere else to go. But while the journey from small mind to Big Mind may be long and arduous, the journey from Big Mind to small mind does not exist. From the broader perspective, there is no separation. There is, however, definitely an experiential difference between small and Big Mind, and while the difference can be conceptually deconstructed, it is nevertheless something I live.
It’s easy to become confused when moving from Big Mind to small mind. One confusion is to conceptualize the Big Mind realization that there is nothing to seek or to gain, and then understand this idea to mean that there is nothing to experience beyond small mind. This is misleading and seduces the ego into defending its own rational status quo as all there is. A second confusion is to carry the memory of the experience of Big Mind into small mind, and then assume that the experiential difference between the two means that there is something called enlightenment that can be sought and grasped.
It’s precisely the act of seeking and grasping that reinforces the sense of a separate self. Such seeking and grasping devalue the actual experience of the here and now, and the mysterious slip from small to Big Mind happens only in the here and now. This circularity can make spiritual practice challenging and frustrating. If we accept the (small mind) here and now and stop seeking, we stagnate in the status quo. But if we reach for liberation, and in the process devalue the here and now, that very act cuts us off from what we seek. The small mind ego cannot unlatch this catch-22 by itself. The peace of Big Mind comes as a gift and brings a deep sense of gratitude.
Liberation, enlightenment, the shift to Big Mind: These are spoken of differently by different Buddhist teachers. Some focus on a single sudden transformative flash of realization that permanently alters consciousness. Others present a more gradualist perspective and see consciousness as a series of extremely short-duration mind-moments that constantly arise and dissolve. Each moment we are free from greed, aversion, and delusion is a moment of enlightenment. As we practice, we come to experience more and more moments of liberation. Here are how three Buddhist teachers and masters have characterized it:2
As far as Buddha Nature is concerned, there is no difference between sinner and sage.... One enlightened thought and one is a Buddha, one foolish thought and one is again an ordinary person.
— HUI NENG, SIXTH ZEN PATRIARCH
Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as an enlightened person. There is only enlightened activity.
— SHUNRYU SUZUKI-ROSHI
The true path to liberation is to let go of everything even the states and fruits of practice themselves, and to open to that which is beyond all identity.
— JACK KORNFIELD
In spite of such counsel, I still sometimes long for the pleasure of an imagined permanent state of enlightenment. One of my favorite Sufi teaching stories succinctly depicts the foolish stubbornness of such an attitude: The Mullah Nasrudin was sitting in his yard eating hot chili peppers from a bowl on the ground beside him. His mouth was on fire and tears were streaming down his face. One of his students asked why he was eating the fiery peppers. “I keep hoping for a sweet one,” said the Mullah.
Equanimity is a difficult lesson to learn, and giving up grasping for pleasure isn’t easy. There seems to be no good reason why the joy, love, peace, and wonder of Big Mind shouldn’t be the permanent conditions of my life — except that they are not. Yet the willingness to be with whatever experiences arise is also deeply satisfying, and at times equanimity, itself, opens into joy, love, peace, and wonder.
ACCEPTING THE DARK AND THE LIGHT
It’s easy enough to say that dark and light condition — even create — each other, that only in contrast to the dark can we know the light. It’s much harder to live such abstract knowledge. Easy enough to philosophically recognize pain as the necessary counterpoint to pleasure — until the pain becomes personal. On an inwardly sunny day, I can nonchalantly embrace the idea that dark clouds and rain are needed for life to flourish, but when depression wraps its wrenching arms around my heart so tightly I cannot see beyond despair, nothing at all is okay.
My experience of light seems less trustworthy than my experience of dark. Light is a rare and transient gift, dark is always waiting. But when I look more closely at this belief, I realize it includes the implicit judgment that light is better than dark. I accept darkness only because I must and with the hope that acceptance will transform it into light. I see darkness as the absence of light, but seldom recognize that light is also the absence of dark. Yet I love the comfort of the night and feel softly at home in her accepting embrace.
When I imagine that the conditions of my life are different from how they are, or that I’m different from the way I am, I dislocate myself from my actual experience, with all its swirls of light and dark. In either case I tie myself into a knot that I tighten with each effort to escape. When I’m able to relax into what actually is, there’s a remarkable transformation as my self-imposed inner and outer boundaries soften and sometimes dissolve. Once I stop holding unwanted aspects of myself and the world at bay, I become the world; or rather, I am free to notice that I have always been the world. I’ve repeated this lesson over and over because it’s so difficult to remember.
Two aspects of darkness are easy to conflate. The first is the actual experience, such as rage, fear, pain, loneliness. The second is the rejection of that experience. This also holds for the two meanings of light: one is a sense of clarity, happiness, excitement, and so on; the other is an openness of heart that accepts the impermanence of all pleasures, including intellectual and spiritual clarity.
The first aspect in both cases refers to the content of experience; the second to context — to the rejection or acceptance of the content; to telling what-and-why stories or simply noticing what actually is; to small mind or Big Mind. There is, of course, no clear difference between the two meanings. The context of this moment’s experience becomes the content of the next. The empty clarity of Big Mind becomes a pleasure to cling to in small mind.
One alluring trap on the spiritual journey is to confuse the pleasure of peak experiences with the quiet joy of equanimity. It’s spiritual pleasure, not pain, that most seductively calls me to abandon equanimity. Wonder and clarity feel so right, as though they should be permanent in my life. Thus, I abandon the quiet depths of equanimity to sail the shining surface of pleasure. But inevitably, another storm rolls through, and I’m caught in waves of emotion once again.
Only when I allow my inner waters to ebb and flow in accordance with their own natural rhythms do I experience peace. Such equanimity modulates both deep pain and deep pleasure. There ’s nothing wrong with experiencing extreme emotional cycles (unless such cycles create needless suffering), but when the storms threaten to overwhelm, it’s useful to remember there’s an alternative in the peace and steadiness of equanimity.
Is it possible to live permanently in Big Mind? I don’t know, and such queries are in any case beside the point. They seek a conceptual answer to a question that can be resolved only experientially. Thinking about it will not get the job done, and experientially there ’s no confusion at all. The practice is to experience each moment as it is: to let be and let go; neither reject nor cling. If there is dark, there is dark; if light, light.