In Post-meditation, be a Child of Illusion

For quite a while now, certainly in the 40 years or so I've been reading about such things,  conventional descriptions of mind/brain biology and evolution have suggested that the human mind/brain is really a multi-leveled organ. The organ in our skulls is actually a multi-part brain,  with primitive, instinctual elements overlaid with functions that are increasingly evolved and refined.

At the base level of the brain stem is what is sometimes called the "reptilian" brain, a non-thinking brain that responds on a wholly instinctive, preverbal level to basic urges of pain avoidance, pleasure seeking, self-preservation. This faculty is so primitive, we're told, that it doesn't yet even really process sight and sound, but offers nothing but base instinct and emotion. It's the organ that is the source of murderous rage, animal lust, insatiable hunger, terror and fear, blissful pleasure.

Evolved from this is said to be a large, multi-leveled cortex devoted to trafficking sensory input, organizing it, and making rational sense out of all of it. This is what we normally think of as the human brain, and is the source of all thinking and most everything we normally call "mind." The thing we call "thinking" is, by some descriptions, nothing more than a highly complicated system of organizing sensory data.

While we think of this big-lobed, cauliflower-like mass of soft tissue as a lordly object worthy of reverence, many neuroscientists will point out that the thinking brain really does no more than articulate and manage the same base impulses that drive the reptilian brain. Most thinking, most cultural advances, most  lofty scientific exploration and thought, after all, is really still about seeking peace and pleasure, avoiding pain and discomfort. This rational brain is, in the final measure, only very slightly more evolved and refined than the reptilian brain that makes us jumps when a loud noise startles us, or recoil in disgust when we see decay.

Much more mysterious, and only now starting to draw some notice, is a mind-brain function that serves a more transcendental role. It is a mind capacity that has been known by mystics over the centuries, but one that has recently been observed and commented on by science, as well. It is a faculty of pure awareness itself, which exists on a level entirely divorced from the push/pull faculty by which we avoid pain, seek pleasure, and scheme to survive as an individual organism. People sometimes imagine that this state is a kind of "observing self", an inner reporter or journalist. But that's not it, either, because with genuine awareness there is no sense of self vs other, no distinction between an observer and objects being observed. There is only utter, non-judgmental immersion in the experience of phenomena. It's as though phenomena is experiencing itself.

I think that even moderately serious meditators have had small tastes of this level of mind. It's a place of serene acceptance of all things as they are, free of all wanting or rejecting. It is entirely devoid of all the fear that fuels virtually all activity attributed to the mind. Time falls away utterly during these revelations, as do all dual concerns of all kinds. Good and evil, life and death, merge into a single taste. There is no longer any need to want or avoid anything at all; you take comfortable refuge is whatever is.  Of course,  this lovely sensation vanishes almost instantly, in the time it takes us to recognize that it's something unusual. It disappears just as soon as we remember to pick up the familiar blanket of unhappiness, as soon as we remember to separate ourselves from our experience.

Our glimpses of this unique state are maddeningly rare, terribly brief. So fleeting, so unusual, that we convince ourselves that this transcendence, this liberation, is something we must desperately court, something to be achieved through great effort. It is, we believe, a pinnacle to be climbed.

Only gradually do we come to the suspicion that this condition we rarely glimpse is actually the natural, true state of things. It's a treasure lying at our feet, not found at the top of a forbidding pinnacle.  We may soon recognize that realizing this transcendence does not require us to do much of anything, only that we give up all the self-induced effort that has prevented us from seeing things as they are.

Like a man who hoards pennies, unaware that he owns a gold mine, we suddenly see that the "mind" we've defined for ourselves is actually the hindrance that has prevented us from seeing the genuine nature of mind all this time. The pain and suffering that dominate human life and govern nearly all of our actions turns out to be the result of delusion; and escaping the cycle of suffering requires nothing more than the courage and despair to see plainly.

Even the first glimpse of this reality changes things for all time. Pain and suffering will return, but now and forever more when they visit,  you'll have the quiet, secret understanding that they are clouds formed from illusion and will vanish like smoke when the winds freshen. One must only be patient.

Made for Walking

The knee injury I'm recovering from has turned out to have relevance to my spiritual practice. I suppose that shouldn't surprise me.

I'm now at a point where I'm beginning to take tentative forays out walking without the full-leg brace, and I've found that the six weeks of relative inactivity has caused my right leg to lose most of its memory of how to walk. I can, indeed walk, and can even do so without much of a limp, but it takes very deliberate focus and concentration. I don't walk with habit right now, but with very conscious intent. Rather that walking on auto-pilot, I have to focus and very deliberately raise the knee, extend the calf while raising the toes, plant the heel, rock forward on the ball, and gently push off with the thigh to deliver my weight to the other leg. Again and again and again. It occurs to me the act of walking is really nothing more than a series of controlled forward falls. Odd that I didn't realize that until now.

Forgetting the deliberate actions that go into walking causes the leg to go spastic and wobble like overcooked spaghetti. A feeling of utter vertigo arises whenever I stop thinking about how to walk. Very peculiar indeed.

Every time I walk, then, becomes an exercise in meditative focus. A few minutes of this causes me to break a sweat, not through exertion so much as through mental concentration. There will come a time pretty soon when I'll walk again completely on autopilot, but the fact is that I enjoy the wonder of walking much more when paying attention to it.

Matters of Mind

Over the ages, a lot of energy has gone into discussing and arguing and articulating the presence of a split between mind and matter, a divide between mind and body, in the human experience. It's at the heart of all psychoanalytic theory, and seems to underlie most religious systems. It's widely accepted, for example, that all the various parables about a fall from grace, an alienation from God, are metaphors for this schism between the physical, corporeal world of the material body; and the ethereal realm of the mind and spirit. They are thought to be two separate states, which we would desperately like to reunite. It's the base state that creates various legends of falling from grace, being cast from the Garden of Eden.

Yet the older I get and the more hours I log in pure observation, the more convinced I become that the schism doesn't exist, never did exist, and that much human sorrow occurs simply because we subscribe to an idea that was erroneous from the get start.

I say this largely because I'm increasingly aware that there is just no real separation between mind and body. A disturbed mind is soothed by relaxing the body, and relaxing the mind is the surest way to relaxing the body. Recently, I've learned that healing my broken knee has been in no small measure a matter of relaxing my mind about the whole matter. It's a package deal, and always was so.

The world as we know it is really a construct of mind. One cloudy day might be dreary experience indeed that interferes with all our happiness; another rainy day might be delightful excuse to lounge with a book and listen to rain tap on the leaves of giant hostas outside an open window. The same worlds, but entirely different worlds, thanks to the various spices which the mind brings to experience. There is no world to experience, in fact, except the one flavored by mind.

We have no experience of the world at all that is independent of mind, and you are therefore left with no conclusion except that mind and the material world are utterly indivisible. You can't be aware without being aware of some thing, so does it not then follow that they are indivisible aspects of the same phenomenon?

So, although we generally think that coming to wholeness and happiness is about healing some kind archetypal division or achieving at-one-ment between matter and mind, perhaps the truth is that this perceived wound was imaginary all along.

The sense of separation we long to heal turns out to be the separation we've chosen for ourselves.

Creatures Know

I've always quietly believed that our identities aren't at all fixed in time and space, but that who we are this moment is entirely different than who we are the next.

Animals seem to know this quite clearly, as they treat me much differently when I'm in the role of gardener. It's not always fondness I'm feeling from animals, but I do know that I'm a different being altogether when I'm gardening.

It's as though gardeners are somehow kindred spirits to creatures in the garden. Normally, animals sense the innate animosity of the human species to their kind, and react defensively, or with fear, toward us. Gardeners, though, get treated differently. For example, I've never, ever been stung by a wasp or bee when puttering around the garden, even though that's normally where I come across stinging insects. Put me in a car, though, at a picnic, and I'm just as likely to get stung as the next fellow.

Squirrels, chipmunks, raccoons, birds of all types might be startled and flee from me if I come upon them on my walk to the bus stop in the morning, but when I'm tending the garden, it is largely as though I'm invisible. I've had squirrels run over my feet on the way to the birdbath to drink. Chipmunks have run up my legs to sit on the end table next to the armchair on my patio when I'm sitting there quietly reading. Voles come up from the ground to look at me. Birds actually flock to me when I'm watering the garden, as they know the moisture will raise worms and other invertebrates out of the soil for them to eat. One robin, when it spots me, will come and scold me severely until I spray the water for her.

Rabbits have no fear of gardeners. Though we hate them passionately for the mayhem they inflict on the lilies, they know full well that no gardener is capable of violence against them. Once, a mother raccoon came down out of the ash tree in the yard with her baby gripped in her mouth, paused in front of me to allow me to compliment her family, then scurried back up the tree to the hollow spot where she nested.

Alas, though, the mosquitos haven't yet learned that I am their friend.

Citizens of 4F, March 10, 2010

My walk-sprint to the bus stop is successful, and I arrive there several minutes before the bus arrives.

As I relax against the back wall of the enclosed shelter, and my mind becomes slow and receptive, a street appears in my experience of mind——as with all experiences, it is a mixture of sensory data coming in from eyes and ears and skin, plus memory, plus subjective feeling.

It is Marquette Avenue in downtown Minneapolis, between Third St. and Fourth St., at 5:33 pm on March 10, as experienced by myself.

This street that appears in my experience is utterly unique, and will never appear again. At no other time will the light and overcast weather be exactly the same; never again will the melting ice and snow create exactly the same sculptural shapes on the sidewalks; never again will my own mood and memory and outlook be exactly the same.

This street, utterly unique and temporary, appears nowhere else but in my mind. For no one else is this street exactly the same as the one I experience. The fellow standing next to me——although he might see a few details that resemble the details in my own experience of the street——is experiencing a different street than I am. Perhaps his emotional day has been such that the street seems terribly dreary and foreboding, not the mysterious and symbolic street that I am experiencing right now. Perhaps his hearing is much more acute than mine; perhaps he has more perceptive sense of color, and sees a more vibrant display in the reflected lights of the wet pavement.

Not only is my street unique to me, but in the very next moment, I will myself experience an entirely different street, as when the bus pulls up to the curb, there will be a glad urgency to get home to a warm supper followed by relaxed time spent reading or planning the spring garden. Slight differences in sight and sound and smell and memory and mood will create an entirely new experience. In fact, merely noticing what I am currently experiencing causes it to vanish and be replaced by a new experience.

This is the nature of all phenomena, all experiences. They occur only in our minds, they are utterly unique and belong to us alone, and they are instantly vanishing in the very same moment they first appear.

Depending on your outlook, this realization can be quite terrifying, or it can be jubilantly freeing.

That too, may change moment to moment.

Some Buddhist Basics

In the Buddhist philosophy that I follow, it is thought that human suffering is the result of the cyclical reliving of behavior patterns. The human condition is said to be one of both quiet and overt suffering, because we are trapped into repeating the same behaviors again and again. For very fundamental Buddhists, this is believed quite literally——that the human soul/personality is actually reborn again and again in subsequent lifetimes. For Buddhists of a more symbolic bent, it's taken as a comment on our human habit of reliving the same behaviors and problems again and again within this life.

Either way, though, the driving mechanism of this literal or figurative rebirth is the energy of hunger, hatred and ignorance. The cyclical, recurring problems of our existence arise because because we don't see things as they are (ignorance), which leads to either some form of subtle or obvious longing or attachment (hunger), or some form of resistance and aversion (hatred). These three problems are very intimately connected, and making progress on one leads to progress on all three. In other words, seeing things as they are quite naturally causes a reduction in grasping or aversion, and reducing grasping will naturally lessen hatred and cause us to see things more nakedly.

The principle tool of spiritual development, for Buddhists, is meditation, and the goal of meditation is quite simple: to practice the surrender of our pulling and pushing, our hatred and hunger, and thereby see things as they are. Should we ever accomplish this permanently, the legendary result is nirvana——the escape from the dreariness of cycle repetiion. Fundamentalists believe that such a soul no longer requires rebirth; more modern believers suggest that such accomplishment will cause this life to be one of peace and happiness.

To the westerner approaching Buddhism from a different culture, all this will feel pretty alien and unnatural, but very gradually almost everyone who steadily practices will see some literal truth to it. Most of us see it only in small glimpses, especially at first, but it is surely there: surrendering aversion and grasping causes you to see things much, much differently, and the result is a peace of mind that is most definitely transcendent and can be life changing.

Buddhist practice can seem to be a bewilderingly complex system of practices and lessons, but it's important to understand that it is all really about this very simple goal of surrendering hatred and longing, and seeing phenomena as they are rather than through the filters of wanting and disliking. Although there are many different schools of Buddhist practice, they all share this goal. The practices that focus on seeing the impermanence of phenomena, for example, focus on this because it automatically shows you that there is no logic to clinging to things that will vanish in a moment. Practices that focus on non-selfish compassion for others are designed to lessens our attachment to ego. The "middle way" that is so much a part of Buddhist practice is largely about applying antidotes to the extremes of greed and hatred in an effort to find the silence that occurs when they are neutralized.

On a very practical level, I have found that there is a tangible physical sensation to this surrender of longing and aversion. At meditative moments when I momentarily know myself to be in the zone, there is an almost cellular sensation that an energy which normally grips us, like magnetic charges either attracting or repelling, suddenly falls silent. The feeling can be a bit unnerving and ungrounding, and can even frighten you at first. But if you can come to trust it, you find a delicious sensation of peace and calm within it. A frantically spinning hamster wheel suddenly falls silent. I think that my own practice, whether it involves one lifetime or many, will be to gradually trust this sensation and rest comfortably in it more and more often.

And progress doesn't require any kind of massive accomplishment, but rather just an ongoing surrender of the habits that interfere.

Simple Energy

Waking up in the morning, there is a simple decision to be made. Most days, we make this decision without even really recognizing that we're making it. If you court a habit of careful self-observation, though, you will perhaps come to recognize this decision you make each morning, each moment.

You can choose to live the day by applying the brakes. Or you can live your day in free-fall, going with the flow.

I suspect that this common decision process is a matter of energy, with a physics very much like magnetic energy. Either we react against things as they are——like magnets of the same polarity repulsing each other; or we're drawn into life, like magnets of opposite polarity pulling one toward one another. 

It's easy to get in the habit of reluctance, of applying the brakes. Living this way, you feel a quiet protest against things as they are. You resist the mortality of the physical body as seen in everyday ache and pain.  You're a little reluctant to get out of bed, to do things. In this mode, your knee-jerk response to the world is one of quiet negation, reluctance, ennui. My hunch is that this impulse arises as a rejection of that most formidable of truths—that we're mortal. In an attempt to deny that truth, we quietly deny life itself.

Normally, I think, this mode of reluctance is present from time to time in all of us, but within a context of give and take. Resistance one moment is replaced by attraction the next, and life is an orchestra of interplay between two energy strains. Fortunately, not many of us are mired in negation all the time. Most of us experience both.

Still, it seems to me that one mode or the other generally has the upper hand in most people. Many people live recessively overall, with reluctance toward the world as it is. This is, I think, the actual prevalent attitude of our culture, this quiet fear and reluctance toward life. Others, rarer individuals, have a happier, more risky approach, in which they meet most of life's idiosyncracies with interest and enthusiasm, moving forward rather than resisting life. 

And I further believe that this isn't a matter of fate or innate personality, but rather that we can choose which club to belong to. The default is the recessive style, I think, as culturally it seems to be the status quo. Fear, after all, pretty much rules us these days, and because it's so common we don't realize it's a choice.  

But although there is some leap of faith required, it is entirely possible to release the brakes and make the leap into the unknown land. I know a few people who h ave managed it, and others who experiment with it from time to time.

A teacher once described this moment to me in the following way:  "It's like jumping from an airplane, only to realize that there is no ground to crush you when you fall. Not only that, but there never was any ground to start with."

Morning, awake

At any moment, there is present within us a clear, thin quality of bare awareness. No matter how deeply possessed by physical pain, there is still a quality that simply knows the pain. No matter how consumed by ecstatic pleasure, there is still a quality that simply knows the pleasure.

This quality has both the thinness of single microscopic thread, and the vastness of a whole cloth. It is both detached, and at the same time fully interested and present for all things. It has a pleasant coolness, but is at the same time comforting and warm.

Aware of pain and pleasure, it neither hurts nor thrills. Aware of both hatred and hunger, it neither yearns nor despises. Aware of basic physics, it neither pushes nor pulls. Aware of body, aware of thought, it belongs neither to the body nor to the psyche. Aware of the coming and going of all things, it isn't born, nor does it die.

A glimpse of this quality is very much like awakening well rested on cold Sunday morning long before dawn, when the senses are keen and you find yourself with a crystalline perception of the creaking of cold timbers, the throb of the furnace, the sounds of early morning birds and the newspaper delivery man crunching through the snow in the front yard. Nothing has changed, all the challenges and pains and pleasures of the world remain, but at this moment there is nothing whatsoever to be accomplished, nothing to be done but to lie still, rest there, and be aware of it all.

The spiritual life in the final measure isn't about some kind of muscular, mystical transformation. It is not an alchemical process but a geographic one. We don't transmute lead into gold, we just open our eyes to stoop and pick up the nugget. Hunger and hatred, passion and pain, birth and death remain: those are simple realities of physics. But they manifest within the landscape of awareness. We don't become aware or achieve it; we travel to it, we awaken to it, because it was there all along.

Space Exploration

This morning on the bus ride into downtown, a young man took the seat next to me. He was munching on a large, chocolate covered sweet-roll with one hand; in the other hand he was thumbing through a novel. Not just any novel, but a graphic comic-book novel with bright, violent colors. In his ears were audio earbuds, through which MP3 music was audible, even to my failing hearing. At one point, the young man even took a phone call, removing only one of the earbuds to talk, while continuing to eat and to read his comic book at the same time.

It was a voracious orgy of sense fulfillment, and I both admired the young man's ability to juggle so much data, and was worried for his mental well-being.

His was an extreme example, but in this young man I recognized a pretty common human urge. As a modern culture, if not as a species, we seem to be intent on filling up all available emptiness and space with sensory stuff. I cannot even use a public restroom these days without also reading advertising placed at eye level on the wall above the urinal.

Because we are so intent on filling up every empty moment, every blank space, with excitement and sensory input, we might logically conclude that humans have some inherent nervousness and fear regarding openness and space. We're told that a large percentage of Americans are now so uncomfortable with silence that they use television and radio as sleep aids. If modern humans don't hear the voice of God, it may well be because they've chosen to distract themselves with Muzak instead.

This speaks, I think, to a certain existential uneasiness we have about our own identity. It's the information flowing through our senses that gives us an illusion of concrete solidness, and we force-feed ourselves all this experience, all these sights, all these sounds, all these tastes, to reassure ourselves that we do actually exist. Our deepest fear, I think—the one underlying all the other forms of nervousness—is that we don't truly exist. If we keep the forms flowing fast enough, we can fool ourselves into thinking otherwise.

And so one of the very biggest moments in a spiritual practice comes when we finally run up against the inherent spaciousness of existence. This seems to be a necessary stage no matter what spiritual tradition you practice. Some Christian practices place a supreme value on "surrendering to God," which is a metaphor for recognizing the relative insubstantiality of our "selves". In the various eastern traditions I have studied, there comes a point when the practice inevitably discovers a certain kind of emptiness or hollowness that is quite jarring and disconcerting.

For example, ever one I know who has had a serious meditation practice speaks of coming to a time when the quiet, relaxed seeing-of-things-as-they-are reveals that things we once viewed as solid and concrete are in fact extremely fluid and ever-changing. It's certainly not all that hard to recognize that emotions, thoughts, beliefs, feelings don't have any material substance, and it's not all that long that you begin to recognize that even the things you regarded as physically solid, such as mountains and boulders, exist solidly only within a split second of time. Nothing is genuinely real in terms of permanent solidness; everything is in motion, at all times.

Lots of meditators will acknowledge that this is a point where they're forced to work through a time of despair or even depression. After all, we turned to spiritual pursuits in the first place in order to transcend the temporal, to discover something eternal. What we discover, instead, is that nothing eternal exists, whatsover. Form is the most fleeting of all things, and we begin to feel that we are being devoured, evaporated by this spaciousness we didn't really want to see. The very first intimations of this can be extraordinarily shocking. The rug gets pulled out from under you entirely, in a way that can feel quite devastating. Lots of people even talk about a physical feeling of vertigo, a sense that they are falling, when they glimpse the true spaciousness of things.

But then, if you begin to experiment at resting in the spaciousness, the fluidity, you begin to sense that it is within this spaciousness that genuine awareness, genuine freedom exists. You are falling, yes, but there really is no ground that is going to shatter you when you hit. You begin to have moments when you begin to appreciate the ocean, because you are no longer fighting waves. When spaciousness and fluidity are the matrix, all things become possible.

Ever so gradually, you learn that the antidote to pain isn't to grasp for the shore of a particular island, but to swim freely among all the islands.

Suffering is largely the process of trying to make things solid, when their inherent nature is spaciousness.

For Now, Anyway

A recent change in my work life is greatly cutting into my available time for blogging, and also for checking up on your blogs, which is a far more serious crime. My job now involves direct supervision of 20 people, many of them remarkably immature personalities, and it is very rare that I'm able to put together more than 20 minutes to focus on a single task in between interruptions. Sometimes, days go by before I can get back to cyberworld and check up on what my friends are doing.

So life has become a bit more dense lately, but strangely, it hasn't particularly affected my level of happiness. What I'm aware of is a kind of controlled frenzy, but within it there never seems to be a lack of space or perspective. I feel a bit like a conductor orchestrating a large group of rowdy musicians. It's noisy, but all the notes are still defined by the space and silence surrounding them.

I'd like to think this hints at a certain spiritual maturity has been reached, but this could well be wishful thinking on my part, ego puffing itself up. I am aware, though, that in recent days I feel a good deal of comfort and trust in my instincts to respond appropriately to circumstances, even very difficult ones.

A phrase from a favorite teacher keeps popping up for me. "...(true practice) is realizing that space contains matter, that matter makes no demands on space and that space makes no demands on matter. Spirituality is a panoramic situation in which you can come and go freely and your relationship with the world is open. It is the ultimate non-violence."

For this moment, anyway, I get it.

This Is.....

If my early morning mediation session is especially relaxed, my awareness of mind sometimes takes a shift, so that there is a more leisurely awareness of each phenomenon of mind as it arises. This is in sharp contract to the waterfall cacophany of thoughts and feelings that normally tumble one upon another at breakneck speed in my awareness.

An air vibration behind me enters awareness, and I can physically feel the oscillation of tiny membranes in my head.

This is hearing.

My feeling regarding this sensation is utterly neutral. It is neither pleasant nor unpleasant, but it does interest me, and my mind begins to form a rudimentary constellation around the sense object.

This is feeling. This is interest.

Instantly, and inextricably linked to the hearing and feeling, myriad associations move toward the new constellation. Memories join the bare object of hearing, and this leads to the recognition and name of this sound as "plane taking off from airport."

This is perception.

Perception continues, the constellation builds. From the sound I know the direction the plane is heading, and memory of maps tells me the likely destination is Detroit, or New York, or Boston. Mental images of these cities arise, and now there is a new sense object for the mind to constellate around. New feelings: Detroit--unpleasant. Boston--pleasant.

The perception doesn't fade until well after the initial sound object, the noise of the plane, has faded.

A skin sensation arises, along the back side of my body.

This is touching.

This time, an immediate feeling of pleasantness joins the constellation.

This is feeling: pleasant.

Perception arrives in the form of memory and language and naming.

This is perception; this is warmth.

In response to pleasant feeing, an energy of attraction arises. I want more warmth.

This is desire.

A new skin sensation arises, this one along the front of my body. This, too, is touch, but this time the constellation is a little different.

This is feeling. This is unpleasantness.

Perception tells me that this is "cold." An almost magnetic energy of repulsion, aversion now joins in.

This is aversion.

A subtle energetic shift takes place. I am aware of an intention to capture warmth, to escape cold.

This is intention.

Another energy is present, though, one that intends to study rather than react.

This is restraint.

I am now aware of two constellations around touch sensations: one dominated by pleasantness and warmth, the other by cold and aversion. Close examination, though, indicates that they do not occupy the same space; they aren't experienced at the same time, but oscillate back and forth so rapidly that there is the illusion of simutaneousness.

In truth, there is only one "this is" at a time.

The present constellations seem to grow tired of their existence all by themselves, and quietly die and fade away. Others various constellations replace them: Itching. Story-telling. Planning. Muscle aching. A fantasy. Smelling bacon.

None of them need to be avoided; none need to be captured.

Gradually during the course of the meditation, I become absorbed in the sheer knowing, the "this is" of every phenomenon that arises. For this time, anyway, I have no investment in things being different, and am nothing more than a student of what's arising.

This is delight. This is peace.

Occasionally, this fascination with the bare "this is" of experience follows me off the meditation cushion and informs the entire day. This is more common on leisurely weekend days, especially when bad weather enforces an indoor indolence, but even a work day may sometimes be treated with a steady fascination with things just as they are, whatever they are.

More and more these days, the fabric of a spiritual life seems to be just this simple.

"This is."

A Few Words Regarding "Suchness"

For the vast majority of practicing Buddhists, the lifestyle is about practice--following common sense living patterns that are intended to remove the elements that hinder our ability to be happy, and to cultivate those that nurture happiness. We try to avoid hurting others, avoid bad habits, in order to be happier, and to help other people be happier.

The idea is that living in such a way will very gradually cause us to evolve out of the habit of suffering. For traditional Buddhists, it's believed that many lifetimes of such gradual evolution will eventually bring us to the brink of full awakening, or enlightenment.

In a relatively small corner of the Buddhist world, a somewhat mystical and esoteric corner, the focus is on View. The belief here is that one can come to enlightenment all at once, in this very lifetime, by opening one's mind suddenly to see the truth of how things are. Some forms of Zen practice fall into this corner, as do the Tantric Tibetan schools, such as Dzogchen. To become awakened here is said to be a matter of achieving permanent non-dual awareness, an awareness in which it is seen finally that observer (witness) and the observed phenomenon are not two, but are the same thing. It's here that you run into strange sayings, such as "Emptiness is Form; Form is Emptiness."

It is in this corner of Buddhism where you run into a term that is sometimes translated as "suchness," or "is-ness," or "thusness." I first ran across the term while reading Ken Wilber nearly 10 years ago now, but I didn't really begin to understand it at all until I began to study the Tibetan teachers from whom Wilber was borrowing his ideas. In particular, I would recommend Chogyam Trungpa, who elucidates these powerful ideas like no one else.

A vastly oversimplified explanation of "suchness" is that it is our state of mind when we flash to a genuine experience of non-dual awareness. At these moments, past and future cease to exist, and we are entirely within the absolute perfection of a moment. All striving is seen as pointless, since each moment is a perfect one. There is no goal to achieve; it was a delusion to have been pursuing a goal at all, since Buddha-nature is already ours. We are said to experience "one taste," in which observer not only merges with the observed, but understands that there was never any separation at all.

Trungpa describes these glimpses as "flashes," and points out that once experienced, the ongoing practice is to cultivate and stablize our ability to dwell within the flash of the awakened mind.

I had studied these ideas and contemplated them for quite a long time before I had the first such small flash of really understanding what these very smart people were talking about.

It occurred during a lecture I was attending at a local meditation center. That night, the teacher was elaborating on the nature of awareness, in particular talking about how to shift one's attention during a meditation sitting from the beginning object (in our case, the breath), gently onto the faculty of awareness. We talked for quite some time about this very important element of meditation practice: resting comfortably in bare awareness.

Then the teacher said "And it will be interesting to note that at no time is it possible to be aware of nothing. To be aware, is always to be aware of some thing, some phenomenon. Phenomenon, experience itself, is always connected to awareness. You cannot have awareness without an object. And vice versa, I suppose."

Flash.

There was a common sense truth here that I saw, so simple that I was stunned to have missed it for so long. Of course awareness occurs only with an object, and this implied a reflexive truth: that all objects, all phenomenon, include awareness within their fabric. In all things, awareness is included. It is inherent in all phenomenon. It could be no other way. It's only our mistaken view that prevents us from joining into this cosmic awareness. In one writer's words, "you no longer look up and admire the sky. You become the sky."

In the years since, I have had other flashes, and I suppose its fair to say that the experiences both awe me and terrify me a little. Unlike the Dzogchen masters of Tibet, I'll almost certainly fail to fully awaken in this lifetime.

In my own rare and fleeting glimpses of non-dual suchness , my experience is of a complete dissolution of boundaries between self and object. But unlike what occurs in madness, this dissolution carries with it not annhilation of self, as we commonly fear, but a vast and natural expansion of self into a kind of grand awareness that is implicit in all things.

The paradox of progress in this kind of practice is that it's really not about achieving anything at all, but about systematically surrendering all the things that obstruct our genuine awareness. First and foremost among these obstructions is the terrible defense of the small self, sometimes called ego. It is this defense that fills our normal everyday life, which is exactly why we imagine that awakening is a difficult feat rather than wonderfully simple. Pretty much everything we thought we knew turns out to be a delusion.

Even with pitifully small experience, I would warn you that this is very serious practice that requires much discipline and fearlessness. It most definitely should not be viewed as some kind of shortcut for people too impatient to practice moral living. Expert teachers will tell you that you have to pretty much surrender everything you've believed about yourself to practice in this kind of way. After 10 years of rather serious study, I know just enough to be careful.

No Expert, Me.

Sometimes in these pages I am asked to speak as an authority on Buddhism. While I'm flattered at this, I also feel compelled to say quite honestly that I should not be regarded as any kind of expert. I am not a formal teacher of Buddhism, nor am I a veteran of lengthy meditation retreats that have given me the keys to the Absolute.

My practice is that of an amateur in every sense, and while it's true that I've avidly studied these subjects for a long time, it would be a mistake for anyone to see me as anything but a serious beginner.

While there are many various spiritual traditions that interest me, Buddhism has always held a special appeal for me. Partly this is because there is an intellectualism to Buddhist study that appeals to my need for cerebral exercise, and partly it's because Buddhism has a clean coolness and clarity that I find to be an enormous relief and antidote to the fiery emotional winds that once dominated my life.

But if pushed to really define why I see myself as a Buddhist, the reason can be summed up by one single experience.

About 15 years ago, one Saturday morning saw me shopping at a local indoor retail center in Minneapolis, a relatively avant guarde section of town known as Uptown. In one of the upstairs galleries at the shopping center, I came upon a pair of Tibetan Buddhist monks working on an elaborate geometric mural painted with colorful sands, known as a mandala. The exhibit was sponsored by some American-Tibet exchange program, and the room was sparsely decorated with a simple Tibetan alter with some small shrine objects, but it was extremely simple by most standards.

Mandala artwork is a well-known craft in Tibet. These large sand "paintings" are created on the floor, by artisans who sit cross-legged on the floor, applying the dyed sands to outlined patterns with tools that most closely resemble those pastry bags that bakers use to apply fancy frostings to wedding cakes. Sometimes the designs are purely geomentric; sometimes they resemble landscapes or other natural scenes. The artist sits cross legged, hold the nozzle of the bag where he or she wants the sand to fall, then gently taps on the metal tip so a fine layer of sand drifts down and covers the wood base. A variety of nozzles are used, depending on the relative coarseness or fineness of the design.

In can take days, weeks, or even months for a mandala to be completed, depending on its complexity. Ultimately, this is an exercise in understanding the temporary nature of existence, since the artwork is never preserved, but is soon cast to the winds or allowed to wash away in a river.

On this particular morning, the two young monks were nearing completion on the mandala; a small flyer announced that in a week, the mandala would carefully be carried down to the shores of Lake Calhoun and allowed to wash away. A number of observers came and went during the hour or so that I sat and watched the monks. Once, a man paused to ask me a question, a fact that puzzled me until I realized that the khaki trousers and Minnesota maroon sweatshirt I was wearing was very close to the saffron and gold robes the monks were wearing. I had by mistaken for some kind of tour guide or sponsor for the exhibit.

The work was painstaking, with the monks hunched over in a position that would have been agonizing for you or me. They were about three hours into a four-hour work session. Eventually, they'd be relieved by helpers.

Then a young family with two small children came into the gallery to watch, and something in me know that problems were brewing. The mandala could not have been any more delicate, and the boys were about 4 and 6 years of age. No genius was required to see what was coming.

The moment of disaster was both entirely innocent and quite dramatic. One of the young boys, as they sat off to the side to watch the monk, kicked off his boot---which sailed across the floor and smeared colored sands to all four corners of the compass, effectively ruining the portrait. Days worth of work were instantly ruined.

Now, I know that Buddhist monks were supposed to be patient and kind, but nothing prepared me for the response of these two young monks, perhaps 20, 25 years old. I would have supposed that even these fellows would have to wrestle with anguish and possibly impatience at seeing their work ruined. In my mind's eyes, I imagined that they'd struggle with a bit of anger, probably successfully fighting it back, then grinning and bearing it.

That's about the best I'd have hoped for for myself, on my very best day. But even though I was watching with utmost intensity, I saw not the least flicker of dismay in either of these young monks at seeing their hard work demolished in a moment. Instead, one of the monks simply asked for the boy's name, then lettered his name in finely scripted colored sands on the floor of the gallery using his bag of slendidly colored sands. The boy was at first startled at not being scolded in any way, then lit up like a Christmas tree when he saw his name emerge on the floor.

I watched the monks for another hour, long after the family left. When I finally stood up to leave, one of the monks stood, and bowed to me with a smile as I left. I wasn't asked for any contribution, wasn't handed flowers, didn't receive any literature asking me to join the club.

As I looked back through the storefront glass, the monks were already back at work, in intent and joyful concentration on a task they well knew was entirely ephemeral.

That day, I knew that I'd very much like to be like those monks. If not in this lifetime, then perhaps in another.

Concentration, Spiritually Speaking

The subject of "concentration" gets a lot of attention in spiritual circles, particularly among Buddhists. Concentration is courted in a meditation practice is thought to be a trait of substantial benefit to progressing on a spiritual path. However, confusion often arises because the traditional western definition of concentration isn't quite the same thing as the Buddhist meaning of the term.

Modern westerners approach meditation with a gung-ho goal of achieving a fierce, single-pointed that involves a highly focussed, intellectual obsession with some object that has been selected for attention. While this kind of concentration, similar to what we used to cram for an exam in our school days, can be useful for beginning to quiet a mind that wanders wildly, it isn't exactly what genuine concentration is about.

Spiritual concentration is a more refined thing. It's is not about intellectual ferocity, but comes about when a mind exists in unity and connectedness to circumstances as they actually are at the moment. Concentration is absent whenever the mind finds itself alienated from real conditions, obsessed instead with goals and outcome.

Browbeating oneself into banishing all thoughts, sweatily focussing on the breath, or a mantra syllable, or a flame, or an mental image of a lotus flower, isn't the end goal at all. This rudimentary form of intellectual concentration is useful only as a bare starting point for beginning the process of quieting the mind. It should be dropped the moment we begin to glimpse the quiet awareness beneath, which is what we're actually seeking.

What we're seeking to join ourselves to during meditation is not an object at all, but the restful, wide awake quality of bare awareness itself. A concentrated mind isn't one that lacks thoughts, feelings and concepts. It's one that is awake, present to whatever phenomena are occurring.

In practical terms for the meditator, this kind of concentration will have a more subtle feel to it. When I reach it in my own sittings, it's sometimes accompanied by a physical sensation of first becoming microscopically small, then paradoxically large. This kind of concentration feels like a fine jeweler's hammer—much smaller and humbler than a sledge hammer, but capable of far more intricate and powerful work, in the end. It's this tool, after all, that can carve diamond.

To Meditate

A colleague who learned that I meditate regularly asked me about it the other day. It turns out that some years ago she had struggled mightily to "get" meditation, and was rather wistful about the fact that she hadn't made it work for her. It was, she felt, a rather serious failure in her life. In listening to her words, it was obvious that she had been anticipating dramatic changes, had wanted them badly, and was disappointed with herself at failing with something she wanted so much.

I'm always somewhat matter-of-fact when describing what meditation can and will do for you. In truth, expecting dramatic, mystical results is one of the surest ways to hinder yourself in a mediation practice (or in any spiritual endeavor, for that matter), so I surely don't really play up this aspect of the practice.

One of the best definitions of meditation I ever heard came from a Tibetan Rinpoche, Chogam Trungpa, who said that mediation practice was really nothing more than "making friends with your own mind."

A similarly useful and reassuring definition came from a teacher of basic insight practice, who said that meditation was really nothing more than "experimenting with letting things be exactly as they are, with no pushing or pulling."

(The movement from "concentration" to "insight" meditation comes about naturally. At the point where you are truly letting go and letting things be as they are, insight arises automatically.)

Such definitions might quietly disappoint you, if you're looking for something more earth-shattering. It's not until you're well into practice, perhaps for many years, when you finally realize that these simple definitions have a quiet, earth-shattering quality after all.

When you start a meditation practice, it's essentially not much more than setting aside 30 or 40 minutes a few times a week, or perhaps each day, to just let the mind fall quiet, to see what might happen, to see what it feels like. It's not uncommon at first for this to feel like a slightly guilty pleasure, since the luxury of letting the mind go quiet is so very alien to us.

This is because our normal status for being in the world is one of incessant, never-ending willfulness. Virtually all our energy is spent in pulling or pushing against things as they are, in an effort to transform them into something that suits our liking. So to take a break, even for a few minutes, may seem like an utter waste of time, a luxury that delays our accomplishment of goals. I, for one, fiercely defended my willfulness, seeing it as the engine that allowed me to accomplish things in life.

Very gradually, though, as the mind begins to settle just a little, a quiet insight starts to take shape. There is another way of being in the world, and that is simply to act logically and naturally based on circumstances as they happen to be at any given moment. You begin to see that you can "be" in the world by just responding to things as they are. All the mental pushing and pulling --the desire and aversion–-have absolutely no impact on changing things. The experience of wanting or rejecting, in fact, are entirely unpleasant, when examined directly.

No amount of wanting will cause a dirty sink to miraculously become clean and neat.

Washing the dishes, however, does the trick.

"Hold on a second," you might say. "If you don't hate a dirty sink, or want a clean kitchen, then the place will never get cleaned." The common belief is that desire and aversion are the fuel that makes the engine of accomplishment turn.

But I'd suggest to you that this isn't so. A decision to wash the dishes can well arise simply because the kitchen is chaotic, and the natural thing to do with chaos is to create order. Wanting and hating are symptoms of having failed to act intelligently, not a fuel that causes us to act.

Willfulness-- pushing and pulling, desire and aversion--need not enter into the equation. Without willfulness, the world begins to act through you, and you begin to have a sense of experiencing things as they are, not as an affront to the way you'd like them to be.

In the early days (perhaps the early months, or years) of a meditation practice, the meditation session itself is a novelty, is something far different than the way you lead your life off the mat. Gradually, though, you find that the outlook you have while meditating begins to carry over into the rest of your life. Eventually, you start to live a meditative life, and everything that happens becomes a part of your on-going practice. "Hmm," you think when your tire blows out on the freeway. "How interesting the way my heart pounds during fear," even while you matter-of-factly slow the car with precision and pull safely over to the shoulder, rather than panicking.

So what I told my colleague was this, as she expressed her disappointment in herself over her expectations for meditation. "The feeling of disappointment....Are you experiencing it? Right now?"

She paused for a moment, then nodded.

"That's mediation," I said.

Thoughts on Emptiness

The Buddhist practice as it has evolved for me more closely resembles a practical science than it does a religious practice. Meditation is nothing more than a technique for becoming familiar with the activities of our mind and studying it. Everything else——all the highly touted spiritual goodies— simply flow from that common-sense observation.

What I invariably notice is that very precise, close observation of almost any subject always has the effect of eliminating the subject's solidity. Study a piece of marble and you begin to see the veins of ocean sediments, even the individual grains of sand—not a big solid chunk stone. Meditation, like any form of observation, introduces space into any object. And in the case of mind-study, it introduces space into thoughts, emotions, concepts——all the stuff that we sometimes treat as though they have material concreteness.

Some years ago, after I'd already studied meditation for a few years, there came a quiet little breakthrough. On the cushion one day, I was looking at some very old, very ingrained hostility toward a family member that had arisen in me. It was a very common thing for me in those days. I was looking at this hostility very closely, studying all its nuances—when the thought suddenly came to me:

"This is only a feeling. It has no weight, no physical body, no substance of any kind. This feeling is present only in this moment, and only in my mind. It can't be photographed or recorded in any way. It is not real, but only an odd mental activity."

The "solid thing" was a story I had been telling myself. Over and over.

And instantly, the decades-old resentment I'd been nursing was seen as a rather bad plot in a soap opera. It wasn't real in any truly identifiable way, other than as a weird little constellation of enzymes and hormones and brain chemicals that had strangely come together for a moment. And I felt, for perhaps the first time, that my emotions didn't own me, nor I them, but that they were just phenomena with their own cycle of life.

That day didn't mark an absolute turning point. I still have times when I'm gripped by worries and irritations and fears—times when I treat them as though they're my possessions. But with increasing regularity, as I get more astute at studying these mind activities, I see them as little more than stories that my mind habitually tells itself. Deep seeing reveals this to be true about virtually everything —everything—that troubles me: it always turns out to be nothing more than a temporary construction of mind. Not real in any kind of demonstrable way, less concrete than water vapour.

This, I've come to realize, is one way of looking at the Buddhist concept of emptiness. When you look at anything closely, you realize that it has no permanent, concrete substance at all, but is merely a snapshot of energy in time. All things arise, all things pass away, and the illusion of stability and permanent realness is just a story we tell ourselves.

Even a chunk of marble is really just a collection of recently bonded sand particles on its way to becoming sand again sometime in the future.

Initially, I found myself a little saddened by this recognition, because something in me really wanted some things to be permanent. Gradually, though, I'm recognizing that it's the clinging to permanence that causes much of the sadness and pain. Turn loose, go with the emptiness, and illusion begins to fall away and a pretty delicious freedom begins to cook.

Tuesday Buddhism

Buddhist philosophy begins with position that is terrifically different than the tenants of most western spiritual beliefs. This perhaps explains why it feels so alien, especially to those of us raised in Judaic/Christian traditions.

The degree of difference can be clearly seen when you look at the Buddhist version of genesis:

In the beginning, Buddhism would argue, human beings mistakenly made a incorrect distinction between matter and space. To matter, and the various physical forms assumed by matter, they gave the name "real." Spaceousness, however, was demoted to a position of non-reality, so much so, in fact, that to this day we believe that space is nothingness, a void.

This belief in the primacy of form makes up what Buddhists term the first of five skandas, sometimes translated as "aggregates" or "heaps". The skandas represent five different mistaken assumptions human beings make, which form the foundation of a cyclical, unhappy existence. Each of the skandas is a karmic result of the preceding skanda, and depends upon the others.

So the first skanda, form, arises due the human decision to reduce spaciousness to non-existence, and to give primacy, and false permanence, to the various shapes that matter takes. The first human error is in separating matter from space, in separating various forms from one another, and in believing in the truth of "this vs that."

Note how radically different this position is from Judaic/Christian mythology, where the separation between matter and space, rather than being the cause of misery, represents the birth of reality. In this mythology, it is God, not man, that separates heaven from earth.

In the Buddhist cosmology, the second skanda arises when we strangely choose to take up a relationship to the various forms that we have noticed. We create the illusion of ego by creating a feeling that we exist in relation to the various forms that have arise. Feeling is the second skanda, and it is created because we hold to a belief in self and other. "This is me, and that is not me, and that's how I know I exist," is the logic.

The third skanda is usually called perception, and with this skanda there arises an impulse to take some kind of action in relationship to the various forms perceived by ego. We respond with longing to the form, with hostility to the form, or with indifference to the form. This is the skanda that is responsible for desire and hostility in all their forms, and it exists to prop up the illusion of ego/self. We grab for the things that support our sense of self, we reject those that threaten it.

The fourth skanda is usually translated as intellect. This aggregate includes a complicated system of mental concepts and beliefs, a framework that attempts to make sense of various forms and their relationship to one another. In modern western society, this is the skanda that is most highly celebrated. We may, in fact, view intellect as the supreme accomplishment of the human species. Buddhists, however, regard intellect as a construct built on faulty foundations (the previous skandas) and do not find it of particularly important value.

And because intellect cannot exist without a context, the final skanda is consciousness, which is a somewhat artificial ocean upon which the intellect bobs and sails. In this context, it does not mean awareness, which is a non-judging quality that does not discriminate. Awareness is much different from the skanda of consciousness, which exists to give relationship and context to ego and form. Awareness leads us to awakening; consciousness (as defined here) is something of an obstruction.

For theoretical Buddhists, the skandas represent the basic fallacies of human existence, and are the root of all unhappiness. On the face of things, this fact could depress us mightily, since the skandas seem to represent pretty much everything we consider part of the human experience. What could a world without form, with intellect, without passion, without consciousness possibly look like? we wonder.

The key to the Buddhist path is pretty simple, though. We simply look at the initial premise of the first skanda—that form is separate from spaciousness. Is this really true? we ask ourselves. And we then ask what existence would feel like if we ignored the illusion of separateness, and behaved as though form and space are not separate, but are the same phenomenon.

It is no oversimplification to say that this is precisely what represents awakened enlightenment—the discovery that form and spaciousness are not separate at all. For Buddhists, meditation is not a religious practice, but a laboratory in which we experiment with our assumptions regarding matter and space.

Prophet in the Brothel of Iniquity

I lately find myself fascinated by the surging anti-religious mood in this country. It is both heartening and worrisome to me at the same time. I applaud the modern atheist assault on religious hypocrisy, especially in fundamentalist sects of all stripes. Religion has caused a great deal more problems than it has solved, it seems to me, so it's high time to set it in its place. But at the same time, I also worry about the atheists' denial of any kind of symbolic, spiritual life.

A number of the folks I've linked to in my list to the right are atheists, but the site I'd most recommend is Sacred Slut in the Temple of Reason. I recommend it not only because her site features one of the best layouts and great writing, but because its a blog that serves as a clearing house for lots of extremely reasonable voices in this community. It's also a site where I can occasionally play devil's advocate and actually get reasonable arguments rather than shouts.

Deep in Sacred's archives there is a post (read it here) in which she describes her "deconversion"--her move from a religious perspective to a secular, atheistic one. The story is that she came to a point where she began to shine the light of practical sense and reason on her beliefs, and found them wanting. Her investigation was a courageous one, and I admire her for it.

Except for one thing, Sacred's story is a lot like my own. Though my religious upbringing was different (I was raised a Lutheran), I too came to a point where I realized that the tenets of my religion were nonsense, and that I'd need to find truth elsewhere.

Sacred and I came to different conclusions, however. As she describes in her early post, Sacred came to the conclusion that there is no spirit, no reality separate from the body. Her conclusion was that everything commonly called mind or spirit or soul is in fact a manifestation of body, and that there is no supernatural reality separate from the physical.

But while I agree in the falseness of the religious premise, a similar investigation caused me to reach different conclusions from Sacred's.

The premise of the modern atheist is that all spiritual endeavor is inherently false. The belief is that what passes for mind or spirit in fact emanates from the physical. Our sensation of soul, in other words, is nothing more than a highly refined manifestation of matter.

My own investigations, on the other hand, continually point to another equally likely explanation: that the physical emanates from the energetic. What we know as "spiritual" in the end, simply refers to the realities we can't immediately see or grasp. The energy rather than the matter.

It's likely that neither Sacred nor myself is right or wrong. In the end, as Einstein showed, matter and energy are exactly the same thing.

And taking both meditation and daily vitamins is probably a better prescription for happiness than either one alone.

It is Hopeless

Sometimes, deep looking causes me to wonder about certain cultural assumptions we make. In recent years, one wide-spread assumption in particular seems to have a dubious benefit, at best. I'll apologize in advance, because I know to question this assumption will possibly upset some people.

I no longer think that "hope" is a particularly strong virtue.

In fact, I think a case can be made that "hopelessness" is, in fact, of stronger spiritual merit.

Now, I think that hope plays a perfectly fine role in helping people get through truly dreadful times, since it effectively tells us that nothing remains the same forever, and that this terrible moment will inevitably change into something else in the next moment.

But as I look around, it appears to me that there are many people who turn hope into a way of life. And when you look closely, it becomes evident that hope fits into the same family of human experience as dissatisfaction and regret. Hope, in effect, is the future tense, with dissatisfaction the present tense, and regret the past tense.

All three mind states are the result of disagreement with what is. Regret is disagreement with what was in the past, dissatisfaction is disagreement with the present, and hope represents a strange sort of dissatisfaction with our expectations for the future. We would not hope at all, were it not for our fear that the future will look exactly like the present.

The essense of hope is a desirous wishing for conditions to be other than what they are, and I don't know how, exactly, we have turned this into a culturally sanctioned virtue. Could there be anything less conducive to happiness than to constantly wish for things to be different?

It takes only a very slight shift in perception to see that there is virtue in hopelessness, because to be without hope implies a full, embracing acceptance of the present condition of things. In this moment, if I am without hope, it is because I have fully embraced the present and am responding to it automatically, without desire or aversion.

Desire and aversion, otherwise known as hope and resentment, don't in and of themselves accomplish anything. They are simply unhappy mind states, and in fact they exist because we cling to stasis rather than going with the flow of the universe. The antitode, it seems to me, is to fully and entirely inhabit our experience, our moment. To act, instead of hope.

An example:

Once or twice a week, I bypass the bus and walk home from work, which gives me a rather vigorous two hour hike of almost 6 miles. On this walk, I pass through a somewhat shabby area of town near highway overpasses where trash is often strewn about. Over the course of several walks, this stretch of two or three blocks caused me to feel disheartened and saddened by the selfish behavior of the human race.

Then one day, ahead of me, a girl on a bicycle acted in the most perfect manner. Coming across loose newspapers, she simply reached down, picked up a single piece of trash and threw it away. She clearly wasn't at all unhappy about it. It was simply the thing to do. One piece of trash.

I began to do the same. Coming across a cracked liquor bottle under the underpass, rather than fume about the selfish bastard who threw it from a car, I just picked it up and threw it away. It cost me no more time or effort, and my poor mind state was instantly relieved.

Responding automatically, intuitively, with simple logical action is perhaps all it takes to eliminate fear and resentment and longing and hope.

That's What Friends Are For

Last week I got to hang out with a old friend that I haven't seen in more than a year. This friend, dear to me as a sister, has many of the same spiritual interests as do I, and so naturally this constitutes a lot of what we talk about.

Over coffee one morning, at one point she cocked her head and looked at me with a sort of bemused grin.

"What?" I said.

"Of all the people I know with some sort of serious spiritual practice," she said. "You might be the only one I know for whom the practice actually makes their life better, happier."

This statement both pleased me and saddened me. My friend almost certainly sees me as a little more serene and "together" than I actually am. I struggle mightily with insecurities and self doubts, though I have become kinder to myself in recent years. I catch myself behaving stupidly all the tim. But she is right in some ways: it is undeniably true that spirituality has made my life genuinely better, and this was the piece that pleased me--that the fact was obvious to others.

What saddened me was that the other half of the statement was also true. Lots and lot of people aren't really made better or happier by their spiritual practice at all, and this is truly a shame. And it suggests that something is wrong.

Quite a long time ago, I decided that the only legitimate goal of the spiritual instinct should be the pursuit of a genuine happiness and peace of mind, and it was perhaps this that my friend sensed in me. As we talked, though, we realized how many people we both knew for whom spirituality meant different things.

There are quite a lot of people, many of them participants in traditional church communities, whose traditions seem intent on convincing them of their loathsomeness, their shame. This was largely what the Lutherans wanted for me, all those years ago, and it was why I said no to that club. And in all the years since, I have rarely seen a Christian or Jewish worship service that didn't premise itself on the principle that humans are incorrigibly awful to start with. Nothing very happy in any of those places, at least that that I could see.

And we both knew people, many of them belonging to new age spiritual movements, who seemed to use spirituality to hide from their inherent unhappiness, changing directions frequently whenever the discipline of the month was no longer able to mask the truth. This kind of thing has been no more acceptable to me than the religions of damnation.

All this is largely why I tended toward the Buddhist philosophy a while back. Here, there was no deity, no real liturgy, only something that made common sense. For there is really only one prayer in all of Buddhism, and although the precise words vary, the idea expresses precisely what I believe:

"May all beings know happiness, and the causes of happiness."

I thought this expressed with brilliant simplicity what the spiritual instinct wants from our evolution, and thus that's the way I practice.

Spirituality for me, then, is actually rather scientific. The goal is to analyze the constituents of true happiness, to pursue behaviors that move us in that direction, and avoid behaviors that deter us from that goal. I have had moments that might rightly be called "mystical," but arriving there has always been a matter of following common sense and the logic of experience.

As we talked, I realized several things about the way I live (this is what good friends do for you: show you things about yourself).

First: I have gradually come to see that my times of unhappiness have largely been the result of attaching my identity to phenomenon that are inherently fleeting and impermanent. If I am not attached to one particular identity, I have nothing to defend and hence no loss to fear. And what sense is there in saying "That is me"? "That" changes in the very next moment, anyway, leaving "me" entirely in doubt.

Second: I learned that genuine, durable happiness had nothing to do with the pursuit of ecstatic excitement. It was not an easy lesson to learn, for I was something of an adrenaline junkie as a young man. Happiness for me, though, turned out to be equanimity and peace, not a pounding heart.

Third: Unhappiness always melts if I can introduce spaciousness into my experience. Suffering and unhappiness comes with the illusion that things are concrete. Space always brings happiness.