When we realize that each moment is perfectly orchestrated by the Mystery, without any extra effort required, fear and struggle evaporate, and gratitude and wonder take their place.
“I’m in love with the mystery, and I don’t know what it is,” said the Advaita sage HWL Poonja. We could just as easily substitute “reality” or “truth” or “my very own true self” for mystery, whatever word has the most resonance. It’s the not-knowing that gives rise to the love—what we can’t possibly know is endlessly rich and open and intriguing, an inexhaustible source of wonder. When we don’t pretend to know, life is ever unfolding in this extraordinary and ungraspable way, beyond the mind’s ability to understand or control.
Of course, Poonjaji knew that he was (you are, I am) the very mystery that he was in love with—yet he also knew that we are always at once the admirer and the admired, the worshiper and the worshiped, ready to prostrate ourselves at the feet of what we really are. Indeed, this paradoxical dance between personal and universal is one of the most fascinating faces of the mystery.
Like many gestures that arise spontaneously in the awakened heart, bowing was turned into a practice, by Buddhists and followers of various other traditions. If you bow enough, the reasoning goes, you may wear away the ego sufficiently for essential nature to shine through. (Besides, bowing feels good, because it satisfies our need for a deep and immediate connection to something beyond ourselves.) As a Zen monk I bowed often, full bows with my forehead on the ground. Tibetan Buddhist novices are required to do 100,000 full prostrations, with the whole body flat to the floor, as a preparation for more advanced practices.
As long as you understand that you’re really bowing to your own true nature, in the form of the Buddha or the guru or your favorite saint or sage, the practice of bowing can be a powerful reminder of who’s living this life, who’s really in charge, and a powerful humbling for the illusory someone who thinks it’s in control.
Of course, the problem with practices is that they can become addictive, just another toy for the ego to play with—see, I’m becoming humbler with every bow. Or you may forget that you’re bowing to your own true Self and fall under the spell of some spiritual authority outside yourself. When you recognize that who you really are—this luminous, all-pervasive, ungraspable essence—has been living life through you all along, deep bows of gratitude and wonder arise spontaneously, as the only adequate expression of the truth that has been realized here.
My first Zen teacher, Kobun Chino Otogawa, used to say, “Buddhism is a religion of bowing.” When I first heard this teaching, I was taken aback, since the Buddhism I had read about seemed to emphasize the practice of meditation and the attainment of that lofty goal, enlightenment. But as my realization has ripened, I’ve developed a deepening appreciation of what Kobun meant.
When your earnest desire to awaken to your essential nature is strong enough, awakening happens—and for many people it happens in the absence of any interest in awakening whatsoever. Great, now you know who you are. What next?
Rarely, the awakening is so strong and clear that it obliterates all trace of a separate self, and you live the rest of your life in complete oneness with the flow of life, with Being itself. More often, you dwell in and as the undivided for a few hours, a few days, perhaps a few weeks or even months, and then separation and old patterns of identification and reactivity begin to re-emerge.
At this point, there seem to be two options available (though of course there’s really no one to choose)—the ego can co-opt awakening and turn it into an experience that happened at a certain point in time and is now another colorful story in the narrative of you; or you can devote yourself to living the truth of who you are from moment to moment. Whatever is left of you becomes a servant of the undivided. And this is where bowing comes in . . . (more next time)
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.