N-lightenment

Something in you already knows.

A Mountain Monk

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A Mountain Monk
When I say I am a monk, people often ask me what kind of monk. Am I a Buddhist monk? A Zen monk? Am I affiliated with a certain monastery or lineage?
 
I suppose I should say I am a mountain monk. I learn from the mountains. The mountains are my teachers and my lineage. I have a Zen lineage also that goes back thousands of years all the way to Shakyamuni Buddha. But my main lineage is these mountains and it is far older.
 
I don’t only learn from these mountains. I learn from everything. The sun, the stars, the wind, the birds, the coyotes, the mountain lion, snakes, spiders and ants are all my noble teachers. I learn from people too. People like Buddha, Dogen, Ramana Maharshi, Thich Nhat Hanh and Mooji understand mountain wisdom too and so I learn from them.
 
And I learn from other people as well. From the media and conversations, I learn to trust my mind and opinions. I learn that some things are good and some bad. I learn pride, arrogance, disappointment, anger, judgment and fear. I learn suffering. And I learn confusion because most people do not understand mountain wisdom. And if I spend too much time listening to their thoughts and opinions or my own, I don’t either.
 
So mostly I just listen to the mountains. The mountains teach me silence and stillness. They teach a timeless wisdom affected by neither birth nor death. Do not imagine that mountains cannot speak. They are always speaking. Do not imagine that mountains are limited to this planet or that they were not here before this planet. Do not imagine that these mountains have any limitations at all. Do not imagine that there is a hair’s breadth of separation between you and these mountains, because that is not what mountains teach.
 
When you understand the wisdom of mountains, you may learn to speak the language of mountains. People being people, not many will understand you. They are still listening to their thoughts. But some will.

Eating Zen – The Meal Gatha 2

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Eating Zen – The Meal Gatha (9 minutes)
This is part of the Awakening Tool Kit – Awakening Practices for Daily Life. Zen is not just about sitting on a cushion. It is about every moment of our daily life. This beautiful meal gatha from Thich Nhat Hanh helps us be aware of the wonderful reality of life. Every time we sit down to eat is an opportunity to awaken.

You can download a pdf file of this Meal Gatha here: Meal Gatha Download

The 5 Myths of Ego-Based Spiritual Teaching

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5-mythsExploding the 5 Myths of Ego-Based Spiritual Teaching

David Hoffmeister, a popular teacher of A Course In Miracles, was speaking at an event. A member of the audience asked, “You’ve been speaking for two hours and you haven’t said a single positive thing about the ego. What can you say positive about the ego?” David turned to him and said simply, “The ego wants you dead.”

I’m pretty sure that’s not the answer he was looking for. But that’s the question most of us have. We want something to support and reinforce our ego, our sense of self-identity. Our entire life is based on this. So when we enter a spiritual practice, we’re actually looking for the same thing. Only now we want an enlightened self-identity. And, unlike David Hoffmeister, there are many spiritual teachers who will promise us exactly what we want.

The problem is there is no enlightened self-identity. Enlightenment is the end of the ego, the end of the illusion of self-identification. That’s why promising enlightenment AND the ego is a myth, an illusion. It’s not both / and as these teachers promise. It’s one or the other. It’s Truth or illusion.

Zen

I’ve been feeling very grateful lately for my many years in Zen practice. Zen is a very simple and incredibly focused spiritual practice. Its ONLY focus is enlightenment. And this focus evidently pays off. Over the centuries there have been many enlightened Zen masters.

Zen is a very challenging practice for most of us in the beginning. There is no support for the ego at all. We may have an incredible realization during meditation and take it to the teacher. The teacher will simply say, “Let it go. Go back and sit some more.” No support for our brilliant realization. No support for our brilliant realized ego. Just “Let it go. Go back and sit some more.”

Kensho or Satori are names for powerful spiritual experiences that break through our normal conditioned consciousness. When we experience these amazing breakthroughs we feel that we’re finally enlightened. The first thing we want to do is tell our teacher and have him realize how enlightened we are now. We rush into his room. And what does he say? “Let it go. Go back and sit some more.” There is absolutely no support for the ego anywhere in Zen at any time. Zen is a practice of enlightenment. And enlightenment means freedom from attachment to the ego.

Powerful Spiritual Experiences

An awakened master understands that there are many powerful experiences and breakthroughs on the spiritual path. But these are not enlightenment. These are just very powerful experiences. There are many spiritual teachers today who believe they are awake because they have had one or more powerful experiences. But this is not awakening. This is not enlightenment. These are just powerful experiences. They did not have a wise enlightened teacher who could see this and tell them to “Let it go. Go back and sit some more.” They didn’t have someone to tell them, “You’re not done. You’ve just peaked through the door. Keep going.” And that’s unfortunate. The result of not having a wise and enlightened teacher or friend available is that there are many “awakened” teachers teaching who are not awake. They’ve just had a few powerful experiences. The ego self-identity has not yet been uprooted. While there is still any attachment to an ego self-identity, there is not awakening. And when a teacher teaches from this place of ego self-identity, the teaching cannot be from Truth. It cannot be from awakened consciousness. It will just be the ego teaching its ego version of spiritual truth, which will always just be more illusion, even if now it comes with spiritual names.

The 5 Myths of Ego-Based Spiritual Teaching

And that, my friends, brings us to the 5 popular myths of ego-based spiritual teaching. They are myths because they do not come from awakened consciousness but from ego consciousness. They do not come from Truth, but from illusion. To the ego, they seem very logical, obvious and true. The ego does not understand awakened consciousness. Coming from illusion, the ego cannot understand Truth. And this makes it quite challenging to be an awakened spiritual teacher, but quite easy to be an un-awakened spiritual teacher. An un-awakened spiritual teacher, someone still living in ego consciousness, speaks exactly the same language as the majority of people also living in ego consciousness. A similar way of seeing the world, the awakened teacher no longer shares.

I will do my best to share these 5 popular myths encountered in much of today’s spiritual teaching hopefully in a way you can understand.

Myth 1 – You can do it.

You hear this a lot in spiritual marketing. “You can experience bliss.” “You can attain abundance.” “You can attain love.” “You can attain enlightenment.” This is a primary myth because the truth is you cannot attain anything. There is not even a you to attain anything. Your entire self-identity is a myth. In fact your self-identity is the primary myth that keeps you from awakening and keeps you living in illusion. Bliss, peace, love, complete contentment are all realized as soon as the separate self-identity is gone and not before.

Awakening is freedom from this myth of a separate self, not catering to it.

Doing Without A Doer

You may have heard the phrase, “doing without a doer.” Things are done but there is no separate doer doing them. In this way life and doings flow effortlessly and perfectly. This is the awakened way. You may have experienced a book, poem or painting flowing through you effortlessly with no experience of a separate you doing it. In fact it’s very clear the separate you could not possibly create anything this beautiful. You might have experienced this in sports where suddenly everything flows perfectly and you observe the body doing things it’s never done before. It may sound strange, but anything done by the personal self is done far better without it. That is living awake. It’s not logical. The ego consciousness doesn’t get it. But it’s very real and can be directly experience in our life.

Myth 2 – You need balance and integration.

When you hear spiritual teachers talk about “balance” and “integration” these are code words for “I’m still attached to my separate self-identity and I’m afraid to let it go.” As the teachers themselves are not awake, they’re not aware of this either. These teachings are very attractive to those who are also still attached to their separate self-identity. As this includes most of humanity, these teachers and teachings can attract a large audience. It sounds logical and makes perfect sense to ego consciousness. That your separate self-identity, “you”, don’t even exist makes no logical sense at all. Such is the challenge of true spiritual teaching.

Generally such teachers had some powerful spiritual experience and were frightened by it. Once briefly seeing it was possible to live without the separate self-identity, they became frightened of losing it, so they attached to it even more strongly than before. And this fear became part of their teaching. It doesn’t come from awakened consciousness. It comes from fear and attachment. They also teach the importance of being “more fully human”, which again is code for “I’m afraid of losing my separate self-identity.” And of course the ego consciousness loves this because it protects it from the danger of waking up, even though this is, on the surface, what it appears to be asking for.

Myth 3 – If you remain in a state free of separate self-identity, you’re not fully human.

This depends on your definition of what it is to be fully human. If it means experiencing anger, fear, jealousy, greed, despair and other negative emotions, then it’s true. Sometimes these teachers will hold up these negative emotions as something to maintain and encourage as being fully human. A being living in awakened consciousness no longer experiences these negative emotions. Only a separate self-identity is capable of experiencing suffering. Awakening is freedom from suffering, as all spiritual teachings through the years have shown us.

Yet an awakened being free of separate self-identity is far more fully alive, far more open to all of life without resistance or attachment. Such a being lives in a continuous state of profound peace, unconditional love and complete contentment independent of circumstances. To me, that is fully human. Living in an illusion of separation and suffering is not human, even though it’s so common in humans. It’s illusion.

Myth 4 – You can’t live or function without a separate self-identity.

If you’ve ever met or seen anyone who is awake, like Mooji for instance, you’ve seen someone living and functioning perfectly well completely free of a separate self-identity. These un-awakened teachers claim that without a separate self-identity you would be “living in a trance”, “unable to function”, “be a robot”, etc. There are plenty of YouTube videos of Mooji. Take a look. See for yourself.

I live in this freedom. I don’t think any of my students or friends would say I’m living in a trance, unable to function or a robot. It’s another myth created by the ego to scare you away from waking up.

Myth 5 – You can embody the divine.

An awakened spiritual teacher once told me, “To say I am God is the most humble thing any human can say because when you say this there can be no you.” Embodying the divine means there is no you. As soon as your separate self-identity is gone, everything is fully here. And that is the divine. You embody the divine by getting out of the way.

The divine has always been here. Truth, love, peace, contentment, everything has always been here. Enlightenment has always been here. It is only your belief in the primary illusion of a separate self that is standing in the way. Once that’s gone, everything is realized. You are awake. And, yes, you can live like this. In the traditions of the awakened masters it’s called “dying before you die”. The separate self-identity is gone. The body lives and carries on as an expression of this infinite awakened consciousness.

What you are is infinite and eternal. It is far too much to create an identity out of. It is free of identity, free of attachment and resistance, free of concepts and suffering. That’s what being awake is.

Living Awake

When we live awake our purpose and function in life becomes very simple, focused and obvious.

  1. Stay awake and don’t fall back asleep into the limited dream of a separate self. Continue expanding ever deeper into awakened consciousness, which happens naturally without any effort or anyone to make an effort.
  2. Awaken all sentient beings. That means to help sentient beings recognize their own pure awakened nature. Pure awakened nature is in every being, sentient or otherwise. There is nowhere it is not. This is done through skillful means. Sometimes it is teaching through writing or speaking or simply sharing a transmission through deep silence, what Buddha called the “lion’s roar”. Sometimes it is simply a smile and eye contact as you pass someone on the street or a kindness given to a stranger. Spontaneously and without any effort, in awakened consciousness you are a blessing wherever you go.

Not everyone or even most humans are ready to realize their true pure awakened nature. Attachment to illusion is still too strong. In those cases a simple smile and silence may be teaching enough. That is skillful means, the appropriate action arising spontaneously in the moment to offer the highest possible benefit. Freedom from a separate self-identity makes this possible. It allows the infinite to move through the body / mind without the obstruction of concepts and separate self-identity.

To live awake, we no longer live our previous self-centered life. Everything becomes very simple. We live a life of complete service because there is no longer the illusion of a separate self and other. We are no longer a part of the community of life, we ARE the community of life. 🙂

 

The Embodied Divine

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meeting-pointThere is a junction where the un-manifest meets the manifest, where the formless meets form. It is like the meeting point of ocean and wave. In this meeting point the un-manifest becomes manifest, the formless becomes form, the ocean takes the form of a wave and the Divine is embodied.

And you are that meeting point, that channel for the embodied Divine. Not only you, but everything you see, hear, taste and touch. It is all an expression of the formless in form, an expression of the Divine in matter.

Suchness

In Zen, we use the word Suchness to describe this meeting point. When we see a person or object, we see both the form and the formless it is an expression of and cannot exist without. We see both the manifest and the un-manifest, both the material and the Divine. In this way everything is seen as essentially One. There is no separation anywhere. No manifest form can exist without the un-manifest it is an expression of. When we truly realize this deep in our own experience as both manifest and un-manifest, we are free from the conditioned concepts of this and that or this versus that. Nothing appears as separate and independent any longer. Our own identity is no longer separate and independent. It includes all that exists, both form and formless, both manifest and un-manifest, both material and Divine.

In this way, we are free to see life as it is without limiting it to concepts or beliefs. How can you describe this? How can you contain this in any thought or concept? It is unlimited, infinite, beyond all thoughts of space or time.

A Concept To Free You From Other Concepts

This meeting point is also a concept used here to free you from the other concepts that are limiting you. The manifest and un-manifest, form and formless, material and Divine have never been separate so there is really no meeting point between two separate things. There is just what is. And what is is beyond description or any concept.

In this moment, you are both manifest and un-manifest, both form and formless, both material and Divine. You are both the wave and the ocean.

Shifting Attention

Through most of our lives our attention was directed exclusively to form alone. And I include thoughts and feelings as form. Our attention rarely, if ever, strayed to the formless which is always here and which no form could exist without, just as no wave could exist without the ocean. As we begin to awaken, our attention begins to include the formless. At first this may happen with sudden flashes of realization. In Zen, we call these moments Satori, or clear seeing. As this happens more frequently and for longer periods of time, our attention begins to rest as much on the formless as it does on form. Eventually we realize that there has never been any separation between form and formless. They have always been One, just as the wave has never been separate from the ocean.

All form arises from the formless. All that is manifest arises from the un-manifest. All that is material arises from the Divine and can never be separate from it. All that is manifest has the nature to be constantly changing, a dynamic expression of the un-manifest. Only the un-manifest in its un-manifest state can be said to be unchanging as it has not yet manifest to change. Manifest and un-manifest inter-are. They are One. When we talk about Oneness or nonduality, this is what we mean. Nowhere in all existence can anything stand by itself alone.

If you are able in meditation to surrender your attention to form and relax back into the formless, to surrender all concepts and thoughts, to enjoy this vast infinite spaciousness, you cannot help but experience the oneness of form and formless. All separation dissolves. If you are fully present, you cannot help but notice this dynamic play of form ceaselessly arising from and returning to the formless.

Here you truly experience the absolute and undeniable perfection of all life.

The Enlightened Rainbow

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the Enlightened Rainbow
the Enlightened Rainbow

Most of us love rainbows. They are beautiful. And they also have much to teach us about life and truth. One of the reasons we love rainbows so much is because they are clearly so temporary. As soon as the sun sets, where is the rainbow? When there is less moisture in the air, where is the rainbow? Rainbows usually don’t even last for a full hour or even close to it. They appear like magic and disappear just as quickly. And this is why we love them. It’s a wonderful treat to see a rainbow because they are rare and very temporary. You better look while it’s there because it won’t be here for long.

And this temporariness is part of a rainbow’s great beauty. If a rainbow lasted for days or years, it would not have the same impact. We’d begin to take it for granted. “Oh, yes that old thing. It’s always there.” The short life of each rainbow is a big part of its appeal.

Everything Changes

The temporariness of a rainbow points to a very important fundamental truth about all of life. It’s temporary. If you have grown children, you can remember and even have photographs of them when they were just born. They were so cute and tiny, usually weighing less than ten pounds. You could hold them in one hand. Imagine if their body remained that same size throughout their life. It would seem pretty strange when they were twenty and still weighed less than ten pounds. So the body of your child has been changing all the time. At one point they could neither walk nor talk. Now they may never seem to shut up. 🙂

Everything in life is changing. Your body will also not remain the way it is today. The lifespan of a rainbow may only be a few minutes. The lifespan of your body, including all its changes, may be eighty or ninety years. There is a difference between the lifespan of a rainbow and the lifespan of a human body. But both are impermanent. Both begin and end. It is only a matter of how long this takes.

No Separate, Independent Self

There is something else very important about rainbows. They cannot exist without certain elements existing. If there is no sunlight, there is no rainbow. Rainbows don’t occur at night. If there is no moisture in the air, rainbows also can’t occur. Rainbows depend entirely on other things for their very existence, like sunlight and moisture in the atmosphere, among many other things. I think this is pretty clear.

We all understand this about rainbows, but we don’t really consider how much this is also true for ourselves. Just like a rainbow, there are many things that are absolutely necessary for our existence. Our body could not exist if our parents had never met for instance. And then of course there is air, water and food. It is obvious that this body could not last long without these essentials. Most of us don’t consider all the things that the very existence of this body depends on when we think of our body and ourselves as separate and independent. Just as a rainbow cannot be separate and independent from sunlight and moisture, we cannot be separate and independent from the many things that are necessary for our existence.

The Three Seals

In Buddhism we call this the realization of non-self. Not only rainbows and bodies cannot exist separately and independently, but nothing can. The realization of non-self and the realization of impermanence are two of the universal truths that lead to awakening. These are known as two of the Three Seals. They are called Seals because they represent universal truths.  The third of the Three Seals is Nirvana or the extinction of all concepts. Concepts, thoughts and language all divide the world up into separate and independent things. Since no separate and independent thing can actually exist, all concepts are fundamentally false. When all concepts are let go, we encounter the truth of life directly.

Nirvana

When we realize fully that a rainbow is impermanent, that it is changing all the time, even while we can still see it, and that it cannot exist independently and separately from all the other elements that are necessary for it to exist, then our concept of a rainbow dissolves. Only then can we truly see a rainbow for what it is, not separate from anything else in the universe. This is true seeing. This is the seeing of Nirvana. Each of these Three Seals (universal truths) we can realize from deeply observing a rainbow. We can actually learn this from deeply observing anything because everything contains the same universal truth. But observing a rainbow might be more fun, if you like that sort of thing. 🙂

The Body

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the body

What is the body made of? If we look carefully, we can see it is made of only four elements: earth, air, fire and water.

Earth is the body’s bones, skin, teeth. Fire is the heat generated in all living bodies. Water is in our flowing blood and in every cell. The body is mostly water. And air is not only the exchange of oxygen necessary for the life of our cells, but also the vast space between molecules that is true of all physical matter. Earth, air, fire and water.

When you sit silently in nature, these four elements of the body become very clear. This body is not separate from the earth it sits on. Without this earth element, it could not exist. This body is not separate from the sun that shines on it. Without the sun, this body could not exist. This body cannot be separate from water or air. Without these the body also could not exist. If you removed even one of these elements, the body could not be here.

What Is This Thing Called A Body?

If you too can see this clearly, then answer me this. What is this thing you call “my body”? Is it a separate, independent thing, separate from the rest of life? How can it be? Without the earth, the sun, water and air, it cannot exist for even a single moment. So it is not separate and independent from these things. How about parents? Could this body exist if your parents had never met? And, you know, this chain of ancestors goes back a very long ways, even before the human species existed. Could this body exist without even a single one of those ancient ancestors meeting? So this body cannot really be separate and independent from any of them.

If you look carefully you cannot find any evidence at all that this body is separate and independent from anything else. Don’t take my word for it. Try it and see for yourself. Let me know if you find any evidence of this body’s separate and independent self-nature. I’m very interested in hearing what you discover.

This is all very clear, is it not? It’s quite obvious. Perhaps you have not looked at your body in this way before. You may perceive the body as separate, independent and unique. You may call it “my body” as if it really were separate from all the other bodies, from all your ancestors, from earth, air, heat and water. This experience of a separate, independent body is part of our conditioning. It is also why we feel that we are a separate, independent self separated from the rest of life. But, if we look carefully, we can see that there is no evidence for this. The evidence is, in fact, just the opposite. There is no separate, independent body, just as there is no separate, independent self.

The Fifth Element

There is a fifth element we haven’t mentioned yet. This element may not yet be so obvious. It is what animates the body, giving it what we call life. And it is also the substance of all life, including earth, air, fire and water. We have many names for this fifth element, which is not really an element at all. Some call it Spirit, Consciousness, God, the Formless, the Un-manifest, Emptiness, etc. But no name can really describe what this is. It cannot be seen and yet it is very much here. In deep silence, when you are really paying attention, when you are really listening, perhaps you can feel it. Nothing that exists is ever separate from this.

Oneness

Oneness or non-duality are not really concepts at all. They are, instead, the end of concepts. They are simply freedom from the conditioned concepts of separation and independence. If you look carefully and pay attention, it is clear that separation and independence cannot exist – not in a body and not in a self. That we experience life as separate and independent is only the result of our conditioned thoughts. It is much like a sleeping dream. When we wake up, we realize this has never been true.