GETTING YOUR BEARINGS
There have been moments in your life when you were pure awareness. No concepts, no thoughts like “I am aware” or “That is a tree” or “Now I am meditating.” Just pure awareness. Openness. A spacious quality in your existence. Perhaps it happened as you sat on a river bank and the sound of the river flowed through you. Or as you walked on the beach when the sound of the ocean washed away your thinking mind until all that remained was the walking, the feeling of your feet on the sand, the sound of the surf, the warmth of the sun on your head and shoulders, the breeze on your cheek, the sound of the seagull in the distance.
For that moment your image of yourself was lost in the gestalt, in the totality of the moment. You were not clinging to anything. You were not holding on to the experience. It was flowing—through you, around you, by you, in you. At that moment you were the experience. You were the flow. There was no demarcation between you-sun-ocean-sand. You had transcended the separation that thought creates. You were the moment in all its fullness.
Everyone has had such experiences. These moments are ones in which we have “lost ourselves,” or been “taken out of ourselves,” or “forgotten ourselves.” They are moments in flow.
It is in these moments of your life that there is no longer separation. There is peace, harmony, tranquillity, the joy of being part of the process. In these moments the universe appears fresh; it is seen through innocent eyes. It all begins anew.
The past has flown away.
The coming month and year do not exist;
Ours only is the present’s tiny point.
—Shabistari
The Secret Rose Garden of
Sa’d Ud Din
Mahmud Shabistari
We try so hard to overcome the separateness. More intimacy. More rubbing of bodies. More exchanging of ideas. But always it’s as if you are yelling out of your room and I am yelling out of mine. Even trying to get out of the room invests the room with a reality. Who am I? The room that the mind built.
We spend so much effort to get out of something that didn’t exist until we created it. Something that is gone in a moment. We’ve all had moments when there was no room. But we freaked. Or explained it away, ignored it, or let it pass by.
A moment. The moment of orgasm. The moment by the ocean when there is just the wave. The moment of being in love. The moment of crisis when we forget ourselves and do just what is needed.
We each come out again and again. We turn and look and realize we’re out—and panic. We run back in the room, close the door, panting heavily. Now I know where I am. I’m back home. Safe. No matter how squalid the room is, no matter how unmade the bed, no matter how many bugs are crawling around the kitchen. Safe.
These moments appear again and again in our lives. For many people it first comes as a glimpse into other states of consciousness brought about by emotional trauma, drugs, sex, nature, or a love affair. This glimpse reveals to the person that there is something more. That he or she isn’t exactly who he or she thought.
You may link these moments with the conditions out of which they arose. Perhaps it’s the moment of sexual orgasm when you transcend self-consciousness. Perhaps it’s a moment of trauma, of extreme danger when you “forget yourself.” Perhaps it’s when you are out in the woods away from people and you let down your defenses, loosen the boundaries of your self-consciousness. Perhaps when you are lazing by a stream. Perhaps when you are sitting quietly with friends you trust and love.
For surfers it is the moment when they come into equilibrium with the incredible force of the wave. For skiers it is when the balance is perfect. When our skills fit the demand perfectly, then there is no anxiety. Then we have proved ourselves. There is nothing left to do. In that moment our awareness expands.
These moments bring a sense of rightness, of total perfection, of being at-one-ment, of clarity, of feeling intimately involved with everything around you, of being free of the tension self-conscious thought brings. But you mistakenly identify the moment with the vehicle. You cling to these situations; you keep going back to them to recreate those moments. But you needn’t cling to the situations that have triggered them in the past. These moments of flow can happen anywhere, anytime. Throughout life, each of us has had many of these moments. They are ephemeral. But such moments are the essence of meditation.
What concerns us in this book are the practices, that increase these meditative moments in your life, until ultimately your entire life is meditation-in-action. Then all of your acts are part of the flow of the universe. Why meditate? To live in the moment. To dwell in the harmony of things. To awaken.
IF I HAD MY LIFE TO LIVE OVER
I’d like to make more mistakes next time. I’d relax. I would limber up. I would be sillier than I have been this trip. I would take fewer things seriously. I would take more chances. I would climb more mountains and swim more rivers. I would eat more ice cream and less beans. I would perhaps have more actual troubles, but I’d have fewer imaginary ones.
You see, I’m one of those people who live sensibly and sanely hour after hour, day after day. Oh, I’ve had my moments, and if I had it to do over again, I’d have more of them. In fact, I’d try to have nothing else. Just moments, one after another, instead of living so many years ahead of each day. I’ve been one of those persons who never goes anywhere without a thermometer, a hot water bottle, a raincoat, and a parachute. If I had to do it again, I would travel lighter than I have.
If I had my life to live over, I would start barefoot earlier in the spring and stay that way later in the fall. I would go to more dances. I would ride more merry-go-rounds. I would pick more daisies.
—Nadine Stair,
85 years old,
Louisville, Kentucky
Relax
Your ego is a set of thoughts that define your universe. It’s like a familiar room built of thoughts; you see the universe through its windows. You are secure in it, but to the extent that you are afraid to venture outside, it has become a prison. Your ego has you conned. You believe you need its specific thoughts to survive. The ego controls you through your fear of loss of identity. To give up these thoughts, it seems, would annihilate you, and so you cling to them.
There is an alternative. You needn’t destroy the ego to escape its tyranny. You can keep this familiar room to use as you wish, and you can be free to come and go. First you need to know that you are infinitely more than the ego room by which you define yourself. Once you know this, you have the power to change the ego from prison to home base.
All that we are is a result of what we have thought.
—The Dhammapada
The epitome of the human realm is to be stuck in a huge traffic jam of discursive thought.
—Chogyam Trungpa
The Myth of Freedom
Consider awakening on a usual morning. The alarm clock rings, you come out of sleep, focus enough to think “Alarm clock,” and reach over to turn it off. Your thoughts might go something like this:
“It’s time to get up. I have to go to the toilet. It’s warm in here. Do I smell coffee perking? I could still sleep for ten more minutes. Oh, I forgot to do the dishes last night. I need to go to the toilet. Gee, my mouth tastes awful. I could still sleep for ten more minutes. What was I dreaming about? Who was that person in my dream? Wonder if it’s warm outside. Boy, I’m hungry. What’s that sound in the other room? I really need to go to the toilet. God, I wish I could stay in bed all day.”
Thought after thought with the rapidity of a triphammer. Thoughts about what you hear, what you taste, what you smell, what you see, what you feel, what you remember, what you plan. On and on they go. A raging roaring river of thoughts pouring through you: “Think of me, think of me, think of me, me, me, me, me first, think of me.” And so it goes all day, until you go to sleep.
You are totally in the control of your senses and thoughts. The alarm sounds and captures your attention, draws your awareness to it. But “you” are not your ears hearing the clock. You are awareness attending to your ears hearing. It’s like when you’re reading something so absorbing that you fail to hear someone enter the room. The sound of their steps triggers the processes of hearing, yet you do not “hear.” For you are busy reading and thinking. Just as you are not your ears hearing, you are not your other senses either. You are not the eyes seeing, nose smelling, tongue tasting, or skin feeling. Only your thoughts are left. Here is where most people cannot escape. For they identify totally with their thoughts. They are unable to separate pure awareness from the thoughts that are its objects. Meditation allows you to break this identification between awareness and the objects of awareness. Your awareness is different from both your thoughts and your senses. You can be free to put your awareness where you will, instead of it being grabbed, pushed, and pulled by each sense impression and thought. Meditation frees your awareness.
A being whose awareness is totally free, who does not cling to anything, is liberated.
Wherever there is attachment
Association with it
Brings endless misery.
—Gampopa
The Jewel Ornament of Liberation
We need the matrix of thoughts, feelings, and sensations we call the ego for our physical and psychological survival. The ego tells us what leads to what, what to avoid, how to satisfy our desires, and what to do in each situation. It does this by labeling everything we sense or think. These labels put order in our world and give us a sense of security and well-being. With these labels, we know our world and our place in it.
Archie Bunker was for many years a TV archetype of a bigot. He had definite labels for who everybody else was. As long as they stayed within the labels, he seemed content. When the world refused to fit his labels—when the black turned out to be a corporation vice-president or his doctor a woman—Archie’s world collapsed.
Our ego renders safe an unruly world. Uncountable sense impressions and thoughts crowd in on us, so that without the ego to filter out irrelevant information, we would be inundated, overwhelmed, and ultimately destroyed by the overload. Or so it seems.
The ego has convinced us that we need it—not only that we need it, but that we are it. I am my body. I am my personality. I am my neuroses. I am angry. I am depressed. I’m a good person. I’m sincere. I seek truth. I’m a lazy slob. Definition after definition. Room after room. Some are in high-rise apartments—I’m very important. Some are on the fringe of the city—just hanging out.
Meditation raises the question: Who are we really? If we are the same as our ego, then if we open up the ego’s filters and overwhelm it, we shall be drowned. If, on the other hand, we are not exclusively what the ego defines us to be, then the removal of the ego’s filters may not be such a great threat. It may actually mean our liberation. But as long as the ego calls the shots, we can never become other than what it says. Like a dictator, it offers us paternalistic security at the expense of our freedom.
We may ask how we could survive without our ego. Don’t worry—it doesn’t disappear. We can learn to venture beyond it, though. The ego is there, as our servant. Our room is there. We can always go in and use it like an office when we need to be efficient. But the door can be left open so that we can always walk out.
Outside there is flow, no definition. We don’t have to be thinking all the time about who we are. The tree is not saying, “I’m a tree, I’m a tree; I’m an elm, I’m not an oak, I’m an elm.” It’s just being an elm. Why couldn’t we have the same harmonious relationship to the universe that the elm does? The elm is harmonious whether it’s a seed, or a little sapling, or a huge elm, or a rotting dead tree. Not us. We fight the flow. We think. “I gotta stay young.” Or, “It’s horrible.” Or, “I don’t dare.” That stops the flow.
The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like the condemned man who is proud of his large cell.
—Simone Weil
Simone Weil: A Life
If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few.
—Shunryu Suzuki
Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind
Initially most people choose to meditate out of curiosity or to relieve psychological pain, increase pleasure, or enhance power. The goal of all these motives is to strengthen the ego. For as the ego gets more comfortable, happy, and powerful, its prison walls thicken. The ego’s motives do not allow examination of the ego itself, nor allow insight that the ego is your prison. These motives paradoxically contain the seeds of freedom, because they lead you to meditate more. Meditation makes you more calm and quiet, and in this new stillness other motives, deeper motives, arise for going further into meditation. As your meditation develops beyond the level of ego payoffs, the prison walls begin to crack.
You might think of these deeper motives in many ways:
to answer the question, “Who am I?”
to awaken cosmic consciousness
to see things just as they are
to rend the veils of illusion
to know God
to tune to the harmony of the universe
to gain more compassion
to reach a higher consciousness
to become liberated
to be born again
to know the truth which lies beyond dualism
to transcend the wheel of birth and death
to abandon desire
to be free
These motives all describe the same peak from different points at its base. They all express a single desire: to escape the prison of ego.
From the moment you came into the world of being,
A ladder was placed before you that you might escape.
—Divani Shamsi Tabriz
Selected Poems from the
Divani Shamsi Tabriz
In the process of pursuing my own deeper motives, the ego neuroses that once preoccupied me, my obsessions with sexuality, achievement, love, and dependency, haven’t all gone away. What has gone is my preoccupation and my identification with them. Now they are merely quaint and fascinating, an interesting room or passing show rather than the huge mountains and crevasses and devastating potential disasters which once seemed to surround me on every side. Though I may get angry, I let go of the anger more quickly. And more important, I let go of the guilt connected with the anger. These feelings now simply arise and pass away, without my resisting or clinging to them. More and more I am just awareness.
The explanation is involvement without clinging. Not grabbing at anything. You may be attached to your lover: you say “my woman” or “my man.” There’s the clinging. It can be part of the flow of the moment to be with a man or woman, but if he or she disappears tomorrow, that’s a new moment. No clinging. Your life just lives itself.
You’re not sitting around saying, “How am I doing? Am I a failure in life? Am I a success?” You’re not judging. Your life is just a process unfolding.
I’m a Ram Dass. I do whatever it is I do. I see people, teach, and write my books. I eat, sleep, and travel, get tired and irritable, go to the bathroom, touch, and taste, and think. A continuous stream of events. A flow. I am involved with it all, yet I cling to none of it. It is what it is. No big deal.
The man in whom Tao
Acts without impediment
Does not bother with his own interests
And does not despise
Others who do.
He does not struggle to make money
And does not make a virtue of poverty.
Without relying on others
And does not pride himself
On walking alone.
While he does not follow the crowd
He won’t complain of those who do.
Rank and reward
Make no appeal to him;
Disgrace and shame
Do not deter him.
He is not always looking
For right and wrong
Always deciding “Yes” or “No.”
—Thomas Merton
The Way of Chuang Tzu
The mind of a yogi is under his control; he is not under the control of his mind.
—Sri Ramakrishna
The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna
Your duty is to be; and not to be this or that.
—Sri Ramana Maharshi
Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi
We have built up a set of ego habits for gaining satisfaction. For some it involves pleasure; for others, more neurotic, it involves pain. As you look at many people’s lives you see that their suffering is in a way gratifying, for they are comfortable in it. They make their lives a living hell, but a familiar one.
This network of thoughts has been your home since you can remember. Your home is safe and familiar. It may be sad and painful sometimes, but it’s home. And besides, you’ve never known any other. Because this structure has always been your home, you assume that it is what reality is—that your thoughts are Reality with a capital R.
If you start to use a method that makes gaps in this web of thoughts of who you are and what reality is, and if it lets the sunlight in and you peek out for a moment, might you not get frightened as the comforting walls of ego start to crumble? Might you not prefer the security of this familiar prison, grim though it sometimes may be, to the uncertainty of the unknown? You might at that point pull back toward the familiarity of your pain.
That is the criticial point. For here is your choice: whether you truly wish to escape from the prison or are just fooling yourself. For your ego includes both the suffering and the desire to be free of the suffering. Sometimes we use cures halfheartedly, with the secret hope that the cures will not work. Then we can hold on to our suffering while protesting we want to get free. But meditation does work. It gives you moments of sunlight—of clarity and detachment. Sooner or later you must either stop meditation, do it in a dishonest way, or confront your resistance to change.
When you begin meditation you may approach it as you would a new course in school, a new method to learn, a new goal to achieve. In the past when you took a new course you studied the rules of the game so you’d do well. You wanted to receive a high grade from the teacher, to get approval, or to be more powerful. As you advance in meditation, these external motives fall away. You begin to feel a spiritual pull from within. It is profound and it is scary.
Most people start to meditate for psychological reasons. It’s not that they feel a great yearning for God. They’re just kind of miserable. Or they feel they’d be a lot more efficient if they had a quieter mind. Or that life would be more beautiful if their hearts were more open. Or that they would be more powerful if their minds were focused. Because this is all true, the mass movements in the spiritual community market their product to play on these ego motives. If there were nobody buying, they wouldn’t be selling.
For example, I recently got a magazine on meditation. On the back page it shows a couple, both very gentle-looking people. He is putting his hand on her breast, and she’s looking down sort of pleased-shy. The blurb says, “Very often the meditator is attracting more potential partners than ever before.” And it’s true. It’s not a hustle, it’s true. When everybody’s light is veiled, as though they had dark clouds over them, even a little flicker of light makes the meditator seem special or attractive.
The game of awakening is very subtle. At first you may buy the package of meditation because you’re nervous, anxious, uptight. You want to get rid of all your pain and and have a little pleasure out of life. But you really don’t know what you’re buying. They say, meditate and you can have a Cadillac, but they don’t tell you that when you get the Cadillac it’s liable to feel a little empty. By the time you get to the Cadillac, who it was that wanted it isn’t around any more. See the predicament? Meditation changes your desires in the course of fulfilling them.
You may meditate in order to get rid of your pain and increase your pleasure. When you have moments where you see your suffering as just a set of thoughts that come and go, you begin to develop a new perspective. But as you see that pain and suffering come and go, you also see that pleasure passes. If you use meditation to avoid pain and to have more pleasure, in the bargain you also come to see the transitory nature of pleasure.
While at first you were motivated only to maximize your pleasure, you are now faced with what lies beyond pleasure and pain. Enlightened beings have always said that clinging to any experience or possession that is in time causes suffering, for everything changes. Both pleasure and pain are in time. To fully escape suffering, you must seek what lies beyond the polarities of pleasure and pain, beyond time.
Time is the grim reaper of it all, of all forms. Form is always changing. Time, change, flow. Going to hold on? Where? Remember Shelley’s poem about Ozymandias? He had been king of a long-forgotten desert empire. All that remained to tell his story was a broken statue half-buried in sand. And on its pedestal it bore the inscription:
My name is Ozymandias, King of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
The great sages have warned again and again about things in time. Buddha said, “Cling not to that which changes,” and Christ said, “Lay not up your treasures where moth and rust doth corrupt.” Both are saying the same thing, though they use different images to talk to different people. The truth is one and the same.
There are many ways the message is transmitted. If you’re ready, one Zen story can change your whole life. I’ve met people whose lives were transformed by some simple little story. The Way of the Pilgrim. The Little Flowers of St. Francis.
Everyone needn’t go through the big public routes at all. The spiritual journey is individual, highly personal. It can’t be organized or regulated. It isn’t true that everybody should follow any one path.
Listen to your own truth.
It’s characteristic of the ego that it takes all that is unimportant as important and all that is important as unimportant.
—Meher Baba
Discourses
All worldly pursuits have but the one unavoidable and inevitable end, which is sorrow: acquisitions end in dispersion; buildings, in destruction; meetings, in separation; births, in death.
—Milarepa
Tibet’s Great Yogi Milarepa
There once was a king who was going to put to death many people, but before doing so he offered a challenge. If any of them could come up with something which would make him happy when he was sad, and sad when he was happy, he would spare their lives.
All night the wise men meditated on the matter.
In the morning they brought the king a ring. The king said that he did not see how the ring would serve to make him happy when he was sad and sad when he was happy.
The wise men pointed to the inscription. When the king read it, he was so delighted that he spared them all.
And the inscription? “This too shall pass.”
The world is so constructed, that if you wish to enjoy its pleasures, you must also endure its pains. Whether you like it or not, you cannot have one without the other.
—Swami Brahmananda
Discipline Monastique
You have at this moment many constellations of thought, each composing an identity: sexual, social, cultural, educational, economic, intellectual, historical, philosophical, spiritual, among others. One or another of these identities takes over as the situation demands. Usually you are lost into that identity when it dominates your thoughts. At the moment of being a mother, a father, a student, or a lover, the rest are lost.
If you go to a good movie, you are drawn into the story line. When the house lights go up at the end of the film, you are slightly disoriented. It takes a while to find your way back to being the person sitting in the theater. But if the film is not very good and it does not capture you, then you notice the popcorn, the technical quality of the movie, and the people in the theater. Your mind pulls back from involvement with the movie.
The quietness meditation brings your life is like pulling back from the movie. Your own life is the movie, its plot melodramatic: Will I learn to meditate? Will I become enlightened? Will I marry, will I have children, will I get a better job? Will I get a new car? These are the story lines.
The autobiographical part of the book Be Here Now was initially called His-Story. Each of us has his story. History. To see your life as His-Story or Her-Story is to break the attachment to the melodrama of your story line. But be careful. This doesn’t mean to push it away, to reject or deny it or consider it trivial. It merely means to surround the events of your life with quiet spacious awareness.
It is not that you erase all of your individuality, for even an enlightened being has a personality marked by all sorts of idiosyncrasies. An enlightened being doesn’t necessarily have beautiful hair, sparkling teeth, a young body, or a nice disposition. His or her body has its blemishes; it ages and dies. The difference is that such a being no longer identifies with that body and personality.
Another way to understand the space you approach through meditation is to consider dreams. Perhaps you have never experienced awakening from a dream within a dream. But when you awaken every morning, you awaken from a dream into what? Reality? Or perhaps another dream? The word “dream” suggests unreality. A more sophisticated way of saying it is that you awaken from one relative reality into another.
We grow up with one plane of existence we call real. We identify totally with that reality as absolute, and we discount experiences that are inconsistent with it as being dreams, hallucinations, insanity, or fantasy. What Einstein demonstrated in physics is equally true of all other aspects of the cosmos: all reality is relative. Each reality is true only within given limits. It is only one possible version of the way things are. There are always multiple versions of reality. To awaken from any single reality is to recognize its relative nature. Meditation is a device to do just that.
Normal waking consciousness, dream states, emotional states, and other states of consciousness are different realities, somewhat like channels of the TV receiver. As you walk down the street you can tune your “receiver” into the world on any number of channels. Each way of tuning creates a very different street. But the street doesn’t change. You do.
You see what you look for. If you are primarily preoccupied or tuned to the physical body, as you look at people you see them as man or woman, fat or thin, tall or short, attractive or unattractive. If, on the other hand, you are busy looking at personalities you might see them as introverted or extroverted, hysterical or paranoid, happy or sad. If you were tuned to astral identities you’d see a Leo or a Taurus, an angel or a demon. It’s all in the eyes of the beholder.
Christ could walk up to you and you might see him as a pleasant carpenter, dressed plainly. You might think: interesting teacher, he has a nice vibe. If you were looking beyond that, you might see Him as Living Spirit.
Meditative awareness is a vantage point from which you can focus on any event from various levels of reality. Take, for example, your relationship with your parents, spouse, or children. Most relationships are very reactive. Your parent comes along and says something to which you immediately react and the parent in turn reacts to you. These are habitual reactions, in which nobody really listens; there is merely a mechanical run-off between people.
If you are rooted quietly in your awareness, there is space. In the moment, after your mother or father speaks to you, you see the reaction you would usually make. But you also see the situation in a variety of other ways. You might see that your parent is in fact your parent only in this incarnation; from another level, like you, your parent is just another soul running off karma, living out the results of his or her past actions. You are part of each other’s karma. To appreciate this allows you to understand your dialogue in terms of cause and effect. Or you might understand it from other vantage points: in Freudian terms or as a power struggle, or as a symptom of the generation gap, or perhaps your parent simply has a stomach ache. Or you might see this dialogue as God talking to God.
Every event in your life is incredibly significant on level upon level upon level. Were you to attempt to think of each of these levels at the moment someone says something, you would be swamped by an overwhelming number of thoughts. The meditative awareness is not one of intellectual analysis nor one of labeling different “takes” of reality. It allows all ways of seeing to exist in the space surrounding an event. Meditative awareness has a clarity that lays bare both the workings of your mind and the other forces at work in a situation. This clarity allows you to see the factors that determine your choices from moment to moment. Yet you don’t have to think about it to grasp all this. You find that you know, you understand. In this inner stillness and clarity you are fully aware of the entire gestalt, the whole picture. With no effort your response is optimal on all levels, not just mechanically reactive on one. The response is in tune, harmonious, in the flow.
The manifestations of mind outnumber the myriads of dust-motes
In the infinite rays of sunlight.
—Milarepa
The Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa
You carry heaven and hell with you.
—Sri Ramana Maharshi
Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi
What am I doing at a level of consciousness where this is real?
—Thaddeus Golas
The Lazy Man’s Guide to Enlightenment
