Wake Up Now Blog

Question from Colleen Loehr: My understanding is that desire is generally a future-oriented obsession based on delusions of deficiency. . . . [and that] the Second Noble Truth is that desire is the root of suffering. . . . I get confused. On the one hand, there seems to be something that could be called devotion or motivation that seems to be essential to any true spiritual blossoming.On the other hand there is the “stickiness” of desire that glues one to the delusion of separate self-hood. I’d be grateful for any clarification you might offer.

Response:

Desire is a natural expression of our human nature. Without desire, quite simply, we would not be. Desire brought our parents together, the desire for food keeps us fed, the desire of the cells for nourishment and life keeps us vital, the desire for contact keeps us connected to others. As the great American mystic Walt Whitman put it, “Urge and urge and urge, always the procreant urge of the world.” Desire is another name for the powerful energy that animates life in the world of form.

The difference between freedom and suffering lies not in eliminating desire, but in being unattached to the objects of our desire. Desire takes its natural place in the order of things, but we no longer attach to the outcome. By contrast, when we believe the view that we’re separate selves in a challenging or hostile world, we tend to feel that our survival is constantly at risk. As a result we cling to whatever we believe will help ensure our survival– material possessions, status, power, people, and our beliefs about how life should be. Desire, which is fluid and dynamic, like a river, hardens into the “sticky glue” of attachment.

Paradoxically, it’s the desire for truth that frees us from the prison of attachment. When we discover who we are, we realize that we were never born and can never die, and that the person we took ourselves to be is just an elaborate and seductive construct. In the light of this realization, attachment naturally falls away, and suffering comes to an end. (More on the desire for truth next time.)

Tibetan Buddhists have a popular saying: “Everything rides on the tip of your motivation.” On a walk recently, an old friend and I talked about the importance of motivation in spiritual awakening. She said that many of her students were curious about meditation and wanted to try it, but didn’t have a strong motivation to realize the truth. “Yes,” I replied, “one of our jobs as teachers is to set our students on fire.”

When I began practicing Zen in 1969, I was on fire with a longing to relieve my suffering and discover for myself the realization I’d read about in ancient Buddhist texts and Jack Kerouac books. I didn’t have access to hundreds of volumes on Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta. There were just a few antiquated translations and virtually nothing of contemporary relevance. I couldn’t try out different teachers, compare and contrast various points of view, and develop my own sophisticated philosophical position.

Rather, in the words of a parable told by the Buddha himself, I was like a person who had been shot with a poisoned arrow and needed to remove the arrow and antidote the poison as quickly as possible. I didn’t have time to speculate about who made the arrow or where the poison came from. My first Zen teacher told me that meditation was the way to relieve my suffering, I trusted his judgment, and I threw myself wholeheartedly into the practice. Over the years, with several teachers, I continued to trust and follow their guidance. One Zen saying always stirred my devotion: “We must practice constantly as if to save our heads from fire.”

Of course, I no longer teach traditional Zen practice, but I do emphasize to my students that motivation is key. If you really want to discover the truth with all your heart (and quench the fire raging in your head), just orient yourself toward the truth and trust in the guidance of your teacher, and the truth will reveal itself to you. After all, you are the truth, and the passion and the longing that fuel the search arise from the truth itself. The truth is in search of itself through you.

When we seek to discover our true self or awakened nature, we may think of it as some special mental or emotional state that we can acquire or achieve and use to replace all the challenging thoughts, feelings, and moods that have plagued us all our lives. But the truth is that our true nature is all pervasive, like air or space, and has no flavor or characteristics in itself, like pure water. If you drink pure water, it feeds your cells and keeps you healthy, because your body is composed primarily of water. Yet pure water by itself has no taste.

Any experience that lingers and leaves a taste in your mouth is not true awakening. Genuine awakening strips everything away and leaves you with nothing but the clear, crisp taste of reality—what is, just the way it is. Your true nature is what is experiencing, and it is also the very essence of experience, subject and object both. Like space, it’s everywhere but can’t be seen or touched or located in any way. When you recognize it, you feel washed clean of yourself, empty yet invigorated, empty-handed yet filled with being. The truth is at once nothing special, yet infinitely precious.

You are what you are seeking, and when you find what you imagine you have lost, you will merely be returning home to where you’ve always been.

After awakening, one of the key changes to occur is that the sense of wanting and needing life to be different from the way it is drops away. The endless self-improvement project comes to an end. You’re no longer watching yourself for signs of imperfection and plotting the next workshop or technique to make you better. Suddenly, everything is extraordinarily ordinary, and there is simply no problem. Life is happening exactly as it should.

Not that you become complacent and inert—far from it. Your natural creativity continues to express itself–now even more forcefully because there isn’t the old resistance to hold it back–and you act to solve “problems” when they arise. But now you’re moved by love and joy and curiosity, by life itself, by a sense of what’s appropriate to each situation, rather than by fear, dissatisfaction, self-judgment, or some prearranged agenda or plan.

You’re no longer struggling with a difficult world; instead, you’re flowing with the current of life as it moves through you—indeed, you are the both the current and the one moved by the current. You have no idea where life is taking this body and mind, but the resistance to the flow has been replaced by ease and surrender. It’s quite a ride!

Recently a student asked me to reconcile the statements “This is it” and “Everything is empty,” because for her they seemed contradictory. If this is all there is, she explained, and it’s empty, then what’s left? Precisely! I replied. There’s nothing left!

This luminous, incomparable moment is the only reality. Just this is! At the phenomenal level, this is the perfect expression or manifestation of spirit, or consciousness, or source, or big mind, or whatever we choose to call the sacred, absolute, unmanifest dimension of being.

But this moment has absolutely no substance in itself; though we can touch it and taste it, it’s just a fleeting appearance or apparition with no lasting meaning or significance, as is this body and mind that we like to call our own. That which is touched and that which is touching are equally empty. Emptiness is their essential nature, and this emptiness is inseparable from its manifestation. As the Heart Sutra says, “Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.” (For a translation of the Heart Sutra, visit www.dzogchen.org/chant/heartsutra.htm)

But what do these words mean? Take them to heart and find out for yourself!

My teacher Jean Klein used to say that the words of the guru are redolent with the perfume of their source; that is, the sayings of the teacher arise directly from Consciousness and have the power to evoke a direct seeing in the student. One expression that struck me quite powerfully when I first heard it was the following: “None of the thoughts and feelings that pass through your awareness has anything to do with you.” This complete and utter denial of any kind of ownership cut deep, and I could suddenly penetrate through the identities I had accumulated over the years and see their essentially empty nature.

The truth is, this life doesn’t belong to you, because there is simply no you to which it could possibly belong. Everything is unfolding just as it is, in a completely impersonal and inscrutable way, arising moment by moment fresh from the Mystery, which is its source. “You” are not in charge of “your” life, and you’re not to blame for the apparent mistakes you’ve apparently made. How much suffering we inflict on ourselves with the elaborate stories we tell ourselves about what might have been if only we had acted differently. In the perfection of the eternal Now, nothing could have occurred otherwise. Instead of trying to figure things out, assign blame, or wallow in endless  guilt or regret, the only response fully in alignment with Truth is awe, gratitude, and forgiveness (for nothing!) in the face of the sacred Mystery of life.

One venerable metaphor for describing the relationship between the illusory separate self and true self, consciousness, Being itself, is the wave and the ocean. The construct you take yourself to be—a loose conglomeration of thoughts, feelings, sensations, memories, images, stories, beliefs, held together by the elusive perfume of “me-ness”—is merely the foam playing on the surface of the vast ocean of what you really are. The wave is never separate from the ocean, indeed it’s made of the very same substance, yet the wave is not commensurate with the ocean itself.

The great Zen master Tung-shan (Tozan), one of the founders of the Soto School of Zen, said, upon awakening, “Do not seek him anywhere else, or he will run away from you!
 Now that I go on all alone, 
I meet him everywhere. 
He is even now what I am.
 I am even now not what he is.
 Only by understanding this way can there be a true union with Suchness.”

By this, Tung-shan means that Being itself is my essential nature, yet I can never claim it as my own, just as the wave can never claim the ocean as its own. The wave and the ocean are inseparable, and at the same time the wave is merely an expression of the ocean. The one you take yourself to be is an expression of your true self, just like everything else in the phenomenal world, but it can never own or possess your true self, for that is what you are prior to all separation.

But these are just philosophical distinctions if you don’t realize this truth for yourself. Let them be pointers to the living experience! Who is this me you take yourself to be? And who or what is really living life through this body? Experience the powerful, limitless, luminous ocean as your true body and breath, and all questions will naturally come to rest.

In my work as a psychotherapist, I find that personal transformation is intimately linked with self-realization. When we wake up to who we really are, much of the conditioning we’ve accumulated over a lifetime falls away because it no longer has a center to hold it together. Like spokes on a wheel, the repetitive, distorted patterns of thinking and behaving that cause us suffering require a hub, a me, to which they can refer and attach, and with the dropping away of the me, the old patterns drop away as well.

But some of these patterns are deeply entrenched and tenacioos, and they persist as long as there’s any vestige of a separate self. The key to ongoing deepening and embodiment is to see the patterns that continue to arise in the light of awareness and in the context of truth. As we rest in the knowledge that we are pure, primordial consciousness, unblemished and unconditioned, the old negative beliefs lose their traction. After all, in the radiant effulgence of self-recognition, what can common self-ciritcal thoughts like “I’m not good enough” or “I’m unlovable” possibly refer to?

Just rest as you are, and gaze at what arises through the eyes of truth, without resisting or believing any of it. In this way, thoughts and beliefs arise and pass away without holding you hostage.

But you don’t have to be “awakened” to begin freeing yourself in this way. Even the slightest glimmer of self-recognition, the fundamental knowing that I’m essentially pure and whole, gives us a basic orientation from which to see the inherent untruth of negative beliefs and stories. The Greek philosopher and mathematician Archimedes purportedly said, “If I had a fulcrum, I could move the Earth.” The fulcrum for dislodging the grip of the old, sad story of me is what Tibetans call the view—the unshakable realization that the me, the separate self, is just an empty construct and who we really are is luminous emptiness, the essence of what is. 

When we’re open to what is, without manipulation or resistance, our whole being comes into alignment and we realize our innate, essential wholeness and completeness. Nothing is missing, nothing left out, everything is perfect just the way it is. With this recognition, there arises a profound sense of peace, joy, and contentment.

Most of the time, however, the mind is working very hard to manufacture wholeness (an oxymoron if there ever was one) by trying to sew all the fragments of our life together into some coherent whole. If only, it believes, we can somehow get the right car, the right house, the right partner, the right job, the right retirement plan, we’ll finally experience the satisfaction the mind has been struggling so hard to achieve.

Little does it know that happiness and fulfillment are available right here and now, in this moment and place, when we let go of trying to “hold it all together” and let it all be just the way it is, in natural perfection and completeness. The mind’s struggle to achieve or accomplish wholeness, based on its idea of what wholeness should look like, just obscures the inherent wholeness that’s always revealing itself right now.

But the mind is tenacious, as we know so well . . .

People often ask me if a teacher is necessary on the pathless path of awakening. Certainly there are numerous examples of people who have awakened and whose awakening has unfolded and deepened without the guidance of a teacher. Ramana Maharshi is perhaps the greatest example. On the other hand, there are those who have awakened merely by being in the presence of an enlightened master, without any practice or discipline on their part.

Both the Indian Vedanta tradition and the Buddhist tradition emphasize the importance of a teacher, as well as a community of like-minded seekers and direct access to clear teachings. Teachers transmit the living essence of truth through their presence as much as through their words—indeed, as I suggested, sitting in silence with an awakened teacher can be a life-changing experience. Such teachers point directly and relentlessly toward our essential spiritual nature, which the Tibetans call our natural state, or the nature of mind, and encourage us to realize it for ourselves. 

Once you’ve recognized your “original face,” a teacher can help you authenticate your realization and clear away any doubts or lingering confusion you might have. In my own case, I had a profound, life-changing awakening that was followed not long after by waves of fear, and I spent years doubting the validity of what I had realized because I believed that a true awakening irrevocably brought all fear and other negative emotions to an end. Only with the guidance and encouragement of a teacher did I fully recognize that absolutely nothing is left out in the completeness of who we are and that fear and its companions continue to arise, but it’s our identification with them that ultimately drops away.