It Would Be a Pity to Waste a Good Crisis

by John Tarrant, from Shambhala Sun, January 2010

Zen Student: “When times of great difficulty visit us, how should we greet them?”
Teacher: “Welcome.”

In a Dark Place, You Still Have What Really Counts

The beauty and nobility of your life might be more visible to you if a dark contrast is available. A woman who was meditating with the koan at the start of this piece-the little conversation about hard times and “welcome”-was in an unusual situation. Her father was prosecuted for the murder of her mother, a death that happened decades ago and for which no resolution has been found. No one close to the situation believes her father did this. But someone with a grudge, and hearsay evidence, and a relative with dementia, and an eager prosecutor…If it’s a cliché that a prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich, it becomes personal when you are related to the ham sandwich.

The woman with the meditation practice noticed something unexpected, though-she is happy, she’s not outraged, and although people expect and even want her to be angry with the prosecutor, that is not what she feels. She gave counsel to her father, and sympathy, and money for defense lawyers, but she didn’t have to give her own emotional well-being. The intensity of the difficulty actually drove her to deeper practice and the world suddenly became very beautiful, not at an unspecified future date, when the situation would be resolved, but now, when nothing is resolved, or fair, or sensible-now, when it’s now. Even the prosecutor’s face glowed with light. “No one told me it would be like this,” she said. Awakening might happen at any time, perhaps especially when we are convinced that something else is going on. That’s a positive surprise, a benign-catastrophe.

If You Are in a Predicament, There Will Be a Gate

In the main, koans are predicaments the you can use in case you don’t have one lying around in your life. Usually, of course, you do have a predicament, since being human is a predicament. I might think that it’s a bad thing to have lost something, but if I start from the current situation there will always be a doorway. When I meditate it’s like calling out a spell in a forgotten language. The spell slowly traces the outlines of a door, making the way out visible, even in twilight, even in the darkest, most forgotten prison. When we lose money or get a diagnosis, we might decide that this is a bad thing, but we might be wrong. Uncertainty and the unknown are not things to endure; they are things to rely on. If you don’t even consider winning or losing, there will always be a doorway.

When I had cancer, I thought it might be inconvenient or frightening, but it was interesting. It made me a lot less lazy about being present. There was a time when diagnosis, course of treatment, and outcome were all uncertain, and in that condition my mind reached for certainty over and over again. That quest, being hopeless, brought pain. But when my mind stopped reaching out and fell back into the warm dark of uncertainty, time stretched out infinitely on either side and there was a pool of joy that seemed bottomless-joy in breathing, joy in hearing the birds in the cold before dawn. Having cancer was much more exciting than sitting in an armchair watching the game on Sunday. And everything I looked at had the aspect of tenderness and delicacy. I looked into the checkout clerk’s eyes and saw the universe looking back.

Dogen’s Genjokoan (excerpt)

When you first seek dharma, you imagine you are far away from its environs. At the moment when dharma is correctly transmitted, you are immediately your original self. When you ride in a boat and watch the shore, you might assume that the shore is moving. But when you keep your eyes closely on the boat, you can see that the boat moves. Similarly, if you examine myriad things with a confused body and mind you might suppose that your mind and nature are permanent. When you practice intimately and return to where you are, it will be clear that nothing at all has unchanging self.

Money and Meditation
by Ken McLeod

A question that has long drawn my attention appears at first glance to be quite simple: what is money? I’ve come to the feel that it is a collective thought.

Let’s turn to meditation for a moment. When we sit in meditation, resting the attention with the breath, thoughts come up. Sometimes when they arise, they just disappear without disturbing the attention. Sometimes when they arise, we are distracted and begin to think. Thoughts bounce off each other and we stay in this distracted state for a period of time until it dissipates: “Oh, I’m meant to be meditating!” and we return attention to the breath.

There is a crucial difference between resting with the breath and engaging a thinking process. In the former, we know, without thinking, that we are resting with the breath. In other words, we are mindful. In the latter case, we are not aware that we are thinking until after the distraction has dissipated. In other words, the mind is less clear when we are thinking.

Let’s return to money. As a collective thought, it has a great deal of power. Consider the involving allure of advertising and store displays. When we are caught up by thought, we lose awareness, we become confused. We could say quite reasonably that we lose touch with ourselves. In this confused state, our habitual patterns have a great deal of power, for there is no strength in our attention or mindfulness and we tend to be reactive and go with whatever impulse arises. This is exactly the kind of confused, reactive state that advertising and store displays are intended to cultivate. As an exercise, try watching a television commercial mindfully or go into a favorite store and experience how it is set up with full mindfulness: the music, the background colors, the items for sale. It’s an interesting experience and makes us much more aware of how much effort is being expended to encourage us to slip into a distracted, reactive state where our conditioned patterns determine our behavior.

Increasingly, money has become the only medium for exchange between people in our culture. The human part of us resists this as we feel that there is more than simply financial value in our interactions. But money is now used to determine the value of time, the value of any material article, the value of culture, the value of social programs, etc. It is this seeming willingness to measure every aspect of life in money that indicates the true extent to which we have engaged this collective thought.

What do we do? The answer, for me, seems to lie in the direction of becoming more mindful (have we heard that word before?) of the role money plays in our lives, to take money much more seriously than we do now. This is the theme of Jacob Needleman’s book Money and the Meaning of Life. He argues strongly that we need to cultivate a deeper awareness to free ourselves from the dull state that this collective thought projects us into. David Bohm echoes similar ideas and urges the use of awareness to cultivate a sense of what is valuable and significant to us that is not measured in monetary terms. Finally, David Loy in a wonderful little essay entitled “Buddhism and Money” notes, “…money has become modern man’s most popular way of accumulating Being, of coping with our gnawing intuition that we don’t really exist.”

The phrase “we don’t really exist” probably needs some explanation. When we ask ourselves, “What am I?” the first moment brings us a total unknowing that we usually quickly retreat from or repress. Our apparent willingness to define every aspect of human experience in terms of money can be regarded as the inevitable result of that repression. But that seeming unknowing is exactly where the awareness that is the core of our being lies. The perspectives and tools of Buddhism instead attempt to bring us to embrace that intuition with full awareness and thus awaken to an experience of the world that is not defined in terms of thought of any kind.

Main Practice Night, each Monday in December, 7 – 8:30 p.m.

Wednesday “just sit” Night, December 9 only, 6:30 – 7:30 p.m.

Saturday Study Group, December 12 only, 10 – 11:30 a.m. Ongoing study of the Dhammapada.

Being Intimate with What Is

From “Being Intimate with What Is: Healing the Pain of Separation” by Dorothy Hunt in The Sacred Mirror: Nondual Wisdom and Psychotherapy, edited by John J. Prendergast, Peter Fenner, and Sheila Krystal

When what is awake directly touches on its own experience of anything, there is a deep intimacy with what is. By directly, I mean when the thinking mind is not engaged in it’s usual efforts to separate, label, understand, categorize, judge, dampen, exaggerate, deny, change, manipulate, or create stories about the experience of the moment. To experience something directly is not to discharge it, deny it, act it out, redirect it, repress it, represent it, judge it, analyze it make commentary about it, or “understand” it with the mind. It is to be one with it, to experience it fully. This direct experiencing is always transformative.

In this intimacy, we find ourselves undivided. When we experience being our wholeness, we are not afraid to experience the truth of the moment, regardless of how things look to the judging mind. This realization of our undivided being feels very holy, because it is whole. The words heal, whole, and holiness all share the same root, but our awakeness is actually neither sacred nor profane. It is simply awake. It is experienced by some as Presence, but there is no one to “become” present. It is unfailing healing because it experiences itself as whole. It is who or what we are when we are not busy creating our identities out of ideas. It is spacious, without boundaries of any kind, and yet expresses itself in the human experience of our lives. What is awake is never a concept and never separate from the moment as it is.

When we do not separate ourselves from the mystery of our own essential awake being, or separate ourselves from experiencing the truth of the moment as it is-the felt sense of the body of being-we do not suffer. Physical bodies may experience pain; thinking minds may be confused; emotions may present themselves as intensely positive or negative; but we are not suffering. We are living from the truth of our wholeness, being who/what we truly are, and this is never divided, never in conflict, even when conflict is being played out.

We are not trying to transcend the moment, or change our thoughts about the moment; we are simply being intimate with the moment exactly as it is. Nothing needs to change. What was rejected is welcomed; what was divided is whole; what was “out there” comes close. Such living experiencing of the truth of our being and the authentic truth of the moment is always healing. Conversely, it is our separation from the moment and our separation form the truth of our being that creates suffering.

Our Wednesday night “just sit” meditation will not be held this week due to the Thanksgiving holiday. Our Saturday study group will be meeting as usual, Nov. 28 at 10 a.m. at the 12 South Dharma Center. Everyone is welcome to join us for informal dharma discussion and meditation.

The Nothing That Heals Us
by Sharon Salzberg

It’s the end of daylight savings time on the east coast, and it just about always seems to be dim. Each day is largely dark, and cold, hinting at the uselessness of endeavor and the insubstantiality of what we ordinarily run around seeking. It’s a good time to be depressed. This is the way we conventionally view what Buddhists call emptiness, and mystics of many traditions call nothingness or the Void. A really murky day, pointing to the uselessness of it all. But at the heart of personal, transformative wisdom, this emptiness isn’t a cold, depressing problem, leading us down to nihilism – seeing emptiness is liberation. It brings us right through the seeming solidity and oppressiveness of our ordinary concerns, into a world where reality is shimmering, translucent, vital, while also being insubstantial, fleeting, and evanescent.

In speaking of the unalloyed, direct knowing of profound emptiness, the Buddha said, “Oh, Bhikkus, (mendicants) there is the unborn and the unconditioned. Here the four elements of earth, air, water, and fire have no place. The notions of length and breadth, the subtle and the gross, good and evil, name and form are altogether destroyed. Neither this world nor the other, no coming, going or standing, neither death nor birth, nor sense objects are to be found here.”

In our human lives, experiencing this kind of profound emptiness means that like a candle flame gets blown out, our separateness and suffering are blown out. Not our capacity for love, or kindness, or clear seeing, or relationships, or work, or choosing soy ice cream in the grocery store over the dairy kind.

And the experience of this profound, liberating emptiness isn’t meant only for those who lived long ago in far away places, sitting in caves and at the roots of trees. It is beckoning right here and now.

In our society we are taught to badly want this and want that. But no matter what we get, it is never enough because it doesn’t last. So the search for new experiences goes on and on. We look for new intellectual experiences and sexual experiences and cosmic experiences. Over and over. We even see people willing to destroy their bodies, their minds and their loving relationships–destroy their lives–for a new experience.

Even if a pleasant experience could endure, we could not bear for it to go on and on. Who could watch the same movie over and over without wanting a break? Who could listen to a sweet sound that never stops? Yet commonly when we seek rest from one experience we do so, ironically, by seeking another. It is possible to find rest even from the constant tedium and pressure of changing experience through knowing the difference between bleakness and what is meant in Buddhism by emptiness.

May the consideration of nothing free you from anxiety, dread, and all unhappy things. It’s right here.

One Dharma Nashville Presents
AN AFTERNOON WITH MIKE SNIDER
SATURDAY, NOV. 14
1 – 3 P.M.
12 South Dharma Center
Cost: No set fee, but donations of any amount are appreciated

Satsang with Mike followed by Q&A session

Mike Snider, a talented Grand Ole Opry member, describes himself as “an ol’ country boy who was starving to know God and found that God was not a him or her or it…and loves to share with people how simple, available and immediate God (or your true nature) really is.”

Mike has been asked to teach by Adyashanti, and is highly recommended by author Joan Tollifson (Awake In The Heartland). This will be a refreshingly different perspective on nondualism and awareness.

Impermanence is a Practice, Not an Abstract Principle
by Caitríona Reed

In Buddhist teaching impermanence (anicca) is one of the three universal characteristics, sometimes referred to as the Three Marks of Existence, along with no-self (anata) and suffering (dukkha).

It is important to remember that the Buddha emphasized practical tools for change, and steered away from metaphysics and theoretical speculation. “I teach one thing.” he said, “suffering and freedom from suffering.” In addition, he recommended that we question and test received beliefs and teachings-including the ones that came from him.

In the West, however, we are not used to challenging beliefs, especially in a religious context. Despite many signs to the contrary, we have a deeply conformist tendency. Challenging authority is still associated with heresy. So teachings that are intended as practical instructions become inadvertently turned into fixed principles.

This distinction may seem subtle, but it is an important one. It is not hard to understand that everything does indeed change, and that everything is impermanent. But when you turn Impermanence into a fixed principle you limit your ability to actually assess your experience of impermanence, and you miss some important distinctions.

Impermanence might be more usefully understood as a process. Turning impermanence into a principle makes it into a thing, an unquestioned abstraction removed from scrutiny or actual experience.

For example, within the cycles of history, or within the cycles of your own life-journey, some events are fleeting phenomena, while others may be relatively consistent components of repeating patterns.

Another example is in the pervasive notions that we hold, collectively or individually, about such things as race, gender, sex, class, and money. We may have certain inherited points of view, and we may have perspectives that we have become so identified with over time that we can’t imagine challenging them.

Notions are continually changing, to be sure, and in many ways. Yet it may be useful to look at how we hold onto certain attitudes, prejudices, and points of view. It is also useful to know the difference between the fleeting sort of change, and the kind that is cyclic.

There’s a relativity to this too. Everything changes, yes. But what changes for a mountain or a forest may seem very fixed from the perspective of an ant or a human-being. What seems endless to a three year old may be a momentary instant to their parents.

It is true that at the core, beyond objective and subjective, there are no distinctions to be made-no gender,no race, no class, no otherness. And yet, we live in a world of complex distinctions. If we are to navigate with skill, it serves us to differentiate between what changes all too fast, what lingers, what might change but does not, and what we can rely on to be consistent.

Caitríona Reed is a Dharma Teacher and Group Facilitator who has led retreats and workshops in Buddhism, Deep Ecology, and Social Responsibility in the U.S. and Europe since 1981.

Monday Meditation, 7 – 8:30 p.m,.every Monday night in November. Meditation, chanting, and dharma talk/discussion. Newcomers should arrive at 6:45 for orientation.

Saturday Study Group, November 14 and 28, 10 – 11:30 a.m. Ongoing study of the Dhammapada. This is an open group and newcomers are always welcome. Contact Rana for more information: rana_mukherji@yahoo.com

Wednesday “Just sit” Nights, 6:30 – 7:30 p.m. November 11. (No meeting on November 25, the day before Thanksgiving.) Meditation practice, followed by a short chant and q&a period. All are welcome. Please arrive 15 minutes early for your first practice with us.

There is no cost to attend any of our meetings, but donations are appreciated to help us cover the cost of rent and associated expenses. Visit our website for more informaton and our practice location.