(What enlightenment actually is)
you can think of enlightenment as a kind of permanent shift in perspective that comes about through direct realization that there is no thing called “self” inside you.
When the sensory experience of the mind-body becomes sufficiently clear and uninhibited, it ceases to be a rigid thing that imprisons your identity. The sensory self becomes a comfortable home, not a jail cell. That’s why enlightenment is sometimes referred to as liberation.
People wish they were at some other place on the path, and they struggle to get there. When we think about spirituality as a path, we create the idea of enlightenment as an object out there in the future, separate from ourselves.
equanimity. Equanimity is the ability to allow sensory experience to well up without suppression and to pass away without identifying with it.
Enlightenment is not a peak from which you descend over time. It is a plateau from which you ascend, further and further as the months, years, and decades pass.
For me, this cold-water purification was a horrific ordeal. Maybe being a thin-skinned Californian had something to do with it. I did notice, however, that if I stayed in a state of high concentration while I did it, my distress was noticeably lessened. On the other hand, as soon as my attention wandered, the suffering became unbearable. I could see that this whole training situation was a giant biofeedback device designed to keep a person in some degree of samadhi at all times.
(Meditation as life amplifier)
Meditation is the key to this kind of nonmythical life extension. The central feature of any meditation system from anywhere around the world is that, by developing an extraordinary degree of focus and presence, it allows you to live your life two or three hundred percent “bigger.”
Rigorous research by people in the positive psychology movement has shown that a concentrated state is intrinsically rewarding, and that reward is independent of the content of one’s experience.
life. Common Misconceptions about Concentration
Experience Very broadly, there are three aspects to religious or spiritual
So the simplicity of daily life would tend to make it easy for people to enter samadhi.
They don’t just get completely focused when they dance, they tangibly taste a formless state of no self/big self as they dance. The dance, the dancer, and the audience
all vanish into a pure doing of space. The dance continuously manifests from seedless samadhi—the Still Point of the turning world. The poet T. S. Eliot describes this beautifully: “Except for the point, the still point, / There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.”
The Flower is what happens when rigorous training, intrinsic talent, and deep no self come together. The art is no longer a creation, it’s a manifestation.
Because it was a Zen retreat, there was a zero-tolerance policy toward movement—you were not allowed to shift your posture at all during formal meditation periods.
Through concentration, you magnify those tiny, subtle, pleasant experiences into something that is hugely enjoyable and available to you any time you want. It’s not exactly getting something from nothing, but it’s getting quite a lot from a very little.
fuller than the basket of receivables, you may have to look into your business model! You have gotten insight into your business’s income stream. The reason this metaphor seems so obvious is that we constantly do this kind of sorting or analysis in our external world. Categorizing and labeling are a mundane and extremely useful part of our everyday lives. Nothing could run without our doing so. However, practically no one makes use of this powerful technique for cleaning up their inner world.
If you really understand the complementary relationship between samatha practice and vipassana practice, you realize that, no matter what your situation, there is always something productive you can do.
(Complete experience as the method)
If you want to be happy independent of conditions, you’ll need to learn how to have a complete experience of each basic type of body sensation. On the spiritual path, we have to learn how to have a complete experience of anger, so that anger does not cause suffering which then distorts our behavior.
When I say, “Have a complete experience of x,” it’s just a quick way of saying, “Experience x with so much concentration, clarity, and equanimity that there’s no time to coagulate x—or yourself—into a thing.” You and x become an integrated flow of energy and spaciousness.
Learning how to have a complete experience of discomfort sets us free. Learning how to have a complete experience of pleasure deeply fulfills.
In India, Tibet, and China, there’s a whole tradition of transmuting sexual experience into spiritual energy. In the West, this endeavor is sometimes referred to as Tantric practice, but scholars are quick to point out that using the Sanskrit word tantra as a synonym for “sexual” is historically misleading and inaccurate.
This makes a nice parallel with science. Buddhist meditators learn to “take the derivative” of what they see, hear, and feel.
Greeting experiences this way—both in formal practice and as we are doing things in day-to-day life—catalyzes a process of insight and purification. In a chemical reaction, the role of the catalyst is to speed up a process that would occur naturally but perhaps very slowly. The catalyst interacts with the reactants in a way that can dramatically speed things up. Similarly, concentration, sensory clarity, and equanimity interact with the experiences of life to speed up a natural process of psychospiritual evolution.
(The formula for insight and purification)
Whether they know it or not, all human beings are involved in the path to enlightenment by virtue of living daily life. Nature (or grace, or spirit, if you’re comfortable with such words) is constantly pulling us toward the enlightened state. The main difference between a practitioner and any other person is the speed at which they are intentionally moving along this path.
Concentration + Sensory clarity + Equanimity + Time = Insight + Purification
The samskaras are located in the deep subconscious. We are not aware of them on the surface. But we notice that despite our best intentions to be different, year after year we seem to be pulled into the same coagulated patterns of perception and action.
From a Buddhist perspective, that old material gets worked through by pouring clarity and equanimity into the experience of the moment. That clarity and equanimity percolate down into the subconscious and give the subconscious what it needs to resolve/dissolve its issues.
But all the while, clarity and equanimity are slowly but surely trickling down into the subconscious. They rewire us at the most fundamental levels without us necessarily knowing it at the time.
Meditation can clean out stored materials without necessarily requiring that you recall specific memories, traumas, and such.
Ordinary experience, when greeted with concentration, clarity, and equanimity catalyzes a process of insight and purification which culminates in the ability to have complete experiences whenever you want.
But is there an alternative? Yes. Go ahead and pin some, even most, of your happiness on things that won’t last. But be sure to allocate at least some time and energy for exploring the dimension of happiness that does last. Ironically, the dimension of happiness that does last is itself a facet of impermanence. It’s the positive face of impermanence—the flow of Creator Spiritus that is always present, surrounding each moment of conditional happiness, embracing it from within and from without.
This indicates to me that they are thinking that impermanence is something special. It’s not. It’s something ordinary that will become extraordinary if you consistently pay enough attention to it for a long enough time.
Impermanence is simply the changing-ness of experience, and everybody has contact with the changing-ness of experience. However, most people have not developed an intimacy with the changing-ness of experience. They may not have the sensitive radar to detect its various guises. They may not have cultivated a palate that appreciates all its subtle flavors.
When Buddhists talk about having insight into impermanence, they just mean appreciating the normal changing-ness of experience at deeper levels of poignancy.
A deeper appreciation of impermanence comes about through continuous concentration.
Some people are drawn to actively seeking intensely challenging situations, not just little things like itches and aches. Why would someone do that? In order to put themselves in a situation where they will literally be driven into a state of equanimity and Flow by the sheer intensity of the ordeal. Those
The other side of training involves detecting the momentary primordial perfection that’s always there for everyone. Success with that second side of training brings you to the realization that you never needed to do any training! I’ll talk more about this in chapter 10.
Understanding the nonduality of spirit energy and ordinary experience is very important. We must watch how ordinary experience becomes waves of impermanence over and over—a hundred times, a thousand times, a hundred thousand times—before we really believe that all ordinary experience is impermanent. Eventually it sinks in: every statue dances.
As concentration, clarity, and equanimity deepen, the experience presents itself more as wave, less as particle.
This realization integrates your personality at a profound level. Your personality becomes a single flow, a pure doing, an integrated activity. This is what is behind the apparent paradox that those who vehemently claim that there is “no such thing as a self” usually have powerful, impactful personalities.
From the Buddhist perspective, this point of view also has truth to it because the subconscious can be looked upon as the sambhogakaya—“
the realm of archetypal bodies.”
This story is told to Zen monks as a caveat: do not develop a craving for even the most celestial content that may come your way during meditation.
These phenomena themselves are not a problem. The problem comes when you start putting all of your spiritual energy into them.
Saint John wrote that if you want to climb Mount Carmel, you cannot let yourself be frightened by the beasts you may encounter along the way, neither can you stop to pick any flowers. This description beautifully captures the essence of spiritual maturity. You are not freaked out by the weirdness, and you’re not decorating yourself with cool stuff either.
Liberation is dimensionally independent from these powers. The Buddha confirmed that the arhat was liberated, but his path had not involved any unusual experiences.
The most important thing in working with unusual phenomena or altered states is to see them as a convenient venue for reaching and liberating the depths of your consciousness.
Some people have experiences of intense pleasure or ecstatic bliss during practice. Some even say that the goal of meditation is to experience such pleasure. However, the goal of meditation is subtly but significantly different: it is to transform your relationship to pleasure, so that any kind of pleasure brings profound fulfillment. Bringing concentration, clarity, and equanimity to pleasure vastly elevates the fulfillment that pleasure delivers.
Bliss during meditation is a great thing. Experience it tangibly as a body sensation and track your level of equanimity with it. Notice how every once in a while, you will greet a wavelet of bliss without any tightening around its arising, or any grasping around its passing. When that happens, notice how much more deeply fulfilling that detached pleasure is. In this way, the bliss of meditation becomes more a source of insight and purification and less a source of entertainment and craving.
It’s fine to sometimes use these archetypes as a conduit to get information from the depths, but I recommend that you mostly use them as a conduit to bring clarity and equanimity to the depths. Become fascinated with how they move, and less tripped out with what they mean. Then you will be able to see the hands of the formless puppeteer, literally animating the images from within—the doingness that is the Great Spirit that lies behind the somethingness of any specific spirit.
(Contacting the source through Gone)
Enlightenment is the ability to form a clear see-hear-feel representation of that which precedes each arising of see-hear-feel.
As you pay attention to these everyday Gones, you are gradually, gradually developing a sensitivity—the ability to detect the unborn Source of consciousness. Each one of those Gones represents a teeny tiny learning that in and of itself would seem rather trivial. But once you begin to sum that learning over many instances—over weeks, months, perhaps years of practice—you start to notice that those moments of Gone momentarily direct your attention toward something that’s actually not a thing, and therefore can’t really be experienced in the senses but can be contacted. That not-thing that you are contacting is the Source.
The word is nirvana. It means “to blow out,” like a candle flame. It also means to quench your thirst in the sense of being completely and totally fulfilled.
Where things go to is where things come from. Each time you note Gone, for a brief instant your attention is pointed directly toward the richness of the Source. That is what’s behind the seeming paradox of “satisfying nothingness.”
Such a Zen dialogue is basically a contest, but it’s really an anti-contest. It’s a kind of reverse or paradoxical contest. It works like this: two people talk, and the first one who speaks from the ego loses.
Metaphorically, we feel small, helpless, vulnerable. But it’s not just that we feel small, we are literally shrinking, being contracted out of existence. Look carefully, really carefully. We’re not helpless. Very much the opposite. That decentering, that shrinking of selfhood, can become something pleasant—like being gently squeezed.
“In my beginning is my end,”
The nihilist has been wounded by the world, over and over again and, as a result, has come to an emptiness that’s bleak and paralyzing.
(The mark of the liberated)
There is a kind of graceful, “it just happens” quality to their movements, their gaze, and their speech.