Geese at 8°C
Frank's mother is "probably terminally ill" with cancer. He and Audrey are flying to NY to join his siblings. He told us after the hour-long sitting this morning that spirituality is fine "then there is reality." We sit in the fashion of vipassana.
Spirituality that which ennobles our lives, that springs us out of our usual self-centered habits into transcendent action, that kills our addiction to meaning and purpose inimical with what is real. Spirituality belongs to spirit, that part of our lives beyond the concerns of the physical body or the psychological self. When it comes in conflict with reality, generally it vanishes without a trace as we deal with reality.
In Yoga the teaching aphorism states: Asatho maa Sadgamaya[1]. Lead me from the unreal to the Real. Westerners often point to how Indian-inspired spirituality leads practitioners into la-la land. By contemplating their navel they miss financial and technological opportunities and preserve the poverty of their societies.
In Buddhism, the practice is geared towards realizing one of three fundamental characteristics of experience that singly or together bring about dukkha or suffering. One of these characteristics is annata, without self (atta in Pali, atman in Sanskrit). Meditation reveals how dominant and controlling is our sense of self. Self is the story we want to tell. It is not necessarily the story we want to live much less the story we are living. Self is opposed to reality. Self is how we want to see ourselves and how we want others to see us. Self is living our life for the effect we want our presence and actions to have with others. We live for the effects and stay impervious to what is essential, to what is real.
The universe is meaningless, that is, beyond the story we are living out. Meaning is what we try to impose on reality. It is how we think we, others, the "external" world, what we experience should be. Self is our preferences, what we would like to experience, not the experience itself. We spend our energy combating how things are and trying to impose our will on everything. Being unaware of the operation of self is, I believe, the idolatry monotheisms inveigh against. Thou shalt have no other gods but me. Modern-day followers of the great monotheistic faiths have lost the gist of the teachings of the founding teachers of their tradition. They have created God out of their preferences and beliefs and anybody who sees differently are wrong. Their God is what they believe reality is, not what reality is but what their belief construes as being ultimately real. Instead of leading them to see what is real religions lead them to superstition, that is, something added unto what is real.
The real is simple, utterly and murderously simple. It is beyond the drama we complain about but keep on creating by responding to the world of circumstances as though it was real instead of this world being the illusion created by self. Self is our history of experiences of success and failure. What brought us pleasurable consequences becomes enshrined as absolute, unchanging, the eternal rather than product of a particular moment. We see the infinite in a ridiculous detail of deluded living.
Human beings believe themselves very powerful indeed. They even affect global weather, forgetting that they don't drive the weather. The weather is governed by forces inherent in itself. Describing the phenomenon is not the same as identifying how that phenomenon arises and goes away again. We are responsible for only this much: what we think, what we say, what we do. To think we are responsible might mean we control the energy we put out into the world but thinking upon this we might realize we don't really choose. We think, speak and do what Self directs us to do. Our doing is just the doing of Self. Where is the choice? To be enlightened is to be free to choose how we respond to what is real. First we have to see through the machinations of the self. Once we see how self makes us see things, what we call the subjective or experience, we can then be free to be like the clouds or rain or sunshine or the flowing stream. The marvel is not that a man can walk on water but that water yields when something heavier than itself is set upon it, gravity being operational.
Back to Frank and Audrey. We can continue to act in the way we think or feel others would like us to act and we are simply living out our stories. The story we want others to recognize as who we are is powerless in the face of nature and its laws. It is something "extra," as Zen teachers teach. Practice is to see past the extras we build into life, the drama to which we are addicted, that we become one again with the totality beyond our projections and imaginations. Art is something else. When genuinely art, it appears to add strokes to the illusion but its effect is the opposite. We transcend self and perhaps momentarily live in the real, in the essential, in the infinite truth of what is real. What is real is beyond what we have experienced, beyond what we can experience if experience is what the self lives. Buddhists talk about samsara, spinning wheels that give us a sense of being active and busy with living. When we see what is real we see the inconsequence of spinning wheels. We talk less, act less when we see how mindlessly yielding to self just adds to the drama we want to escape from. It is not life we want to escape but the delusions that again and again we seek to impose on an impersonal universe that is deaf and blind to what we want.
Freedom from the extra imposed on reality by our measly self we might gain the awe that life seen clearly brings about, the same wonder that stirred a Buddha or Jesus, maybe even Mohammed, into changing the Mecca of their existence and pointing their effort instead to what is real.
As we go into each situation let us remember to act knowingly. Let us remember to bring into each situation what we want to bring into each situation. Do we want to sow enmity and differences? Do we want to sow harmony and impeccability? Do we want to bring kindness or generosity or gratitude or wonder or joy? Someday we may want to examine the very values we say we live our lives by and see which are true, bound not by our tiny lives but transcending our laughable wisdom that we live harmoniously with ourselves. Until then let our values guide our conduct, shape our contribution to every human circumstance, remembering to eschw idolatry, worshipping the Self.
[1] For an example of how a Hindu teacher teaches this aphorism, see http://www.saibaba.ws/articles/fromtheunreal.htm
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