The Lotus Still Blooms (24 page)

Finally I remembered “Just like me.” How I was like her was very difficult to fathom initially. So I made a list of her hostile and annoying characteristics, and after each I would say, “Just like me.” After a number of repetitions the light began to dawn. She was the outer voice of my inner critic. “Aha, just like me.” She would criticize loudly for anyone within earshot to hear, just as I criticized myself at times silently within my own mind.

Through the years I have made enormous strides in that area and have silenced and released the inner judge, resulting in increased freedom and much greater peace and happiness.

“Just like me” is a wonderful and profoundly aware insight to make. We are not separate from our nemesis, no matter how distasteful they are or how much we dislike them.

She finally did go away, but not until my inner work was done and my own inner critic went into retirement.

Years later I was co-officiating with an Orthodox rabbi at the funeral of a member of my congregation who had been raised in Orthodox Judaism. It was very uncomfortable, because several of the family members were literally yelling at one another. At one point, when I was at the podium speaking, the elderly rabbi began raging at me because I was a woman, and no woman had a right to speak at a funeral. The entire situation was ugly and certainly not what the deceased deserved.

Afterward, when the funeral directors and sane family members were apologizing to me profusely, out of my past came this same woman who had been in my congregation. I almost laughed out loud.
Okay, God,
I thought,
is there anything else that could happen today? Bring on the locusts!
Amazingly this formerly angry woman said kind and thoughtful things to me and said not to take on the ragings of the old rabbi. For me that encounter was a miracle.

The raging Orthodox relatives and the rabbi are me, and I am them.

Some races and cultures and religions are completely into separation and the sense of a separate self, never to find any connection with others. Other races and cultures and religions look for the similarities and seek to recognize the inter-being, the non-self.

“Just like me.” What we perceive, we are.

What I saw in the rabbi was fear, fear that his tightly controlled world was coming unraveled by my presence as the leader at that time. I knew the deceased well. The rabbi had never even met him. The rabbi is an Orthodox Jew. He saw me as a Christian (not how I define myself) and female. From his viewpoint it was absolutely blasphemous that I would be present, let alone leading the service. It was inconceivable to him that the deceased, one of my favorite congregants, a precious elderly man, would be attending Unity with his son. So he was in fear. “Just like me.” When in fear, attack is a common response. My presence became like a lightning rod. By my very presence I was saying,
We are one
.

With non-self we are all waves in the great ocean of life. Non-self helps us begin to see all as our brothers and sisters—from the Dalai Lama to Uncle Ed, to your mother-in-law to the grocery store clerk—as one. This in turn gives us not only great insight but also great compassion for others.

When we have developed the ability to look deeply, we can begin to see that there is no separate, independent self. We see how we are interconnected with all beings. Many people live just to satisfy themselves, not realizing that in living to bring happiness and joy to others, they will attain happiness and joy themselves.

I visited my mother’s cousin Margie, who lives about twenty miles from where I was writing and whom I had not seen for a number of years. She is a tiny, sweet, dear woman, now a widow living alone and in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. When she first saw me, she thought I was my mother. Throughout our visit at various times she thought I was all of the women in my mother’s family, including my grandmother, who left this life forty years ago.

She was very chatty remembering with joy all kinds of tales from the past, saying, “You remember Theresa. We all went to school together.” Gently I’d remind her, “No, that was my mother.” Then we decided to call my mother, who she soon thought was my mother’s mother.

As we continued to visit, I began to see the energy of non-self dancing about the room and within our conversation. Cousin Margie’s brain had the female lineage of her family intact, but the individuality was no longer discernible to her. She didn’t introduce females from the old neighborhood or relatives from her father’s or husband’s side. There was simply a fading and a blending, and in her mind my grandmother, aunt, mother, her sister and I became one person.

If we all could see life that way and then multiply it by a billion, then we would be getting close to non-self, oneness, emptiness.

His Holiness the Dalai Lama speaks of our “grasping at self existence,” that this is “an erroneous belief that keeps us imprisoned in the cycle of existence,” which is to say, samsara—birth, life, death, rebirth, again and again. All of life is impermanent and without self. We can eventually develop profound insight to deeply touch all of life without self and become free from birth and death. We can become free from impermanence and permanence, as well as free from non-self and self. Only then do we arrive at the Third Dharma Seal, Nirvana.

A wanderer spoke to the venerable Sariputta: “Reverend Sariputta, it is said, ‘Nirvana, Nirvana.’ Now what, your reverence, is Nirvana?”

Reverend Sariputta replied, “Nirvana, it is said, is formless. It has always been. It was not created in man. It cannot die. The way to Nirvana can be pointed out, but it would be impossible to show a cause for the production of Nirvana.”

Nirvana is our true, ultimate expression of being. I heard Thich Nhat Hanh teach that Nirvana means “extinction.” Now this is where the Eastern mind and that way of teaching is very different from the Western mind.

How can it be defined as “extinction”? All normal beliefs, concepts, ideas, perceptions become extinct with Nirvana. Our perceptions fill our minds and keep us in ignorance. On our way to awakening, we have to rise above our notions, concepts and perceptions.

In Nirvana we touch our real self, our non-self, our profoundly spiritual nature. This true self is what we can learn to touch—the ultimate nature of reality. Nirvana is the ground of being of all that is. In metaphysics this profound state of being is called Christ consciousness, illumined consciousness, when we are truly at our essence. We are in our Buddhahood.

Nirvana is the extinction of suffering. It is our notions, concepts, attachments and perceptions that cause us to suffer. When we give these up and silence our monkey mind, our suffering begins to diminish, our joy increases, our state of awareness is clearing, and we are waking up and reaching Nirvana.

In Nirvana we know we have already had all along what we were searching for. We are what we have always been. We touch our true nature.

The greater truth is that we need do nothing. What in the world can that mean? It is absolutely a Buddhist principle. We do not need to run here to there, rushing about in our quest for enlightenment. We do not need to search anywhere. All we need “do” is turn within. Here lies the vast reservoir of our true self. Just being our authentic self is enough. And yet there are many paths and methods and schools and practices to get us in touch with our authentic selves.

I perceive all of the above as a means of discarding our unknowing to reach our knowing. We can carry around a shipload of unknowing, false knowings, mistaken concepts, beliefs and perceptions.

A Buddhist term that is used here is “aimlessness,” again difficult for the Western, educated mind to understand. Often the meaning is lost in translation and convoluted in its character.

From the
Dhammapada
: “There is no fire like lust, no sickness like hatred, no sorrow like separateness, no joy like peace. No disease is worse than greed, no suffering worse than selfish passion. Know this and seek Nirvana as the highest joy.”

Says American Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman, “. . . realization of Nirvana transforms the ordinary, relative world into an extraordinary, perfect environment or ‘Buddhaverse’” (Thurman’s term for what is generally called Buddha-land). Imagine living in a Buddhaverse. How would life be different for you? For all of us?

In Nirvana we are free from all concepts and notions. In Nirvana we have had and continue to have our own direct experiences of blissful reality. Theory does not result in Nirvana. Actual experience and deep practice is what can bring one to this remarkable state of being. No one person or teaching can take your experience from you. It is now your very own. You own it.

We know what we know, and we do not know what we do not know. An example I often use to illustrate not knowing what I do not know is that I’ve never had a baby. I have not given birth. It does not matter how many times I have seen actual births on video or in person. I DO NOT KNOW what giving birth is like psychologically, physically or spiritually. There is not a man on the planet, including all male ob-gyns, who knows what giving birth is really like. One has to have the experience to know. So therefore we can only truly know what we have experienced and do not know what we have not experienced.

Nirvana is the state of awareness of all that is. One of my remarkable, blissful experiences came in the mid-1990s while studying with His Holiness the Dalai Lama in Los Angeles. It was several days into the teaching when my dear friend Linda and I arrived at the UCLA auditorium early in the morning to be present when His Holiness would be doing his morning chanting aloud.

She and I stood in place for twenty or more minutes, drinking in this remarkable energy. After the chanting, the morning session was to begin and we returned to our seats next to my husband, David, and our friend Roger. As the session began, something very out of the ordinary began to occur in my mind and body. Every cell and atom began to vibrate with light, and I began spontaneously to go into a profoundly altered state. With each passing moment the experience accelerated.

Linda was acutely aware something was going on within me and asked if I needed to go to a quiet place. We left and returned to the hotel. In my room she proceeded to work with the burning energy that was radiating from my entire body, concentrated between the second and fifth chakras as a great turning wheel spiraling out from me and emanating from above me.

I was not afraid. I had had some experience with what can happen in extremely deep and profound meditations, but the earlier experiences paled in comparison to what was then occurring. It felt as if my entire electromagnetic field was undergoing a cosmic tune-up. It was like I was moving out of a human experience into something other, something beyond.

Thank God, I have a husband and friends who have seen beyond the veil and could hold the space, so to speak, for this transformation to run its course. I stayed in this state for approximately twenty-two hours. It slowly began to subside after dawn on the second day. I told our Tibetan friend Lama Chonam and American Tibetan Buddhist translator Sangye Khandro what I had experienced. Lama Chonam responded that he had heard about such occurrences but had no direct knowledge of them. I now do. I experienced it.

For me that experience of opening and awakening so distinctly to bliss for almost a full day was, I dare say, entering the threshold of Nirvana.

At a later teaching of the Dalai Lama, he stated, “Nirvana comes after mind has been thoroughly cleansed of all mental pollutants. The mind is then totally free. This is true Nirvana.”

THE THREE DHARMA SEALS, the teachings of impermanence, non-self and Nirvana have been likened to a raft to travel upon to get to the other shore.

—THICH NHAT HANH

THE SIX PERFECTIONS

THE CHINESE CHARACTER for perfection translates as “crossing over to the other shore.” This shore is the shore of liberation, freedom and peace.

Visualize how it is now that we spend so much of our lives on the shore of separation, obfuscation, stress, disease. We all spend time there. Here is a formula that affords us the opportunity to cross over from the shore of separation to the shore of liberation. When we are focused and committed, we can actually do this with amazing ease.

This technique is a daily, moment-by-moment practice. For all Six Perfections we begin by centering ourselves through our breath. Stop and take three deep breaths, slowly, in and out. By doing so we become centered and begin to cross over. Said the Buddha, “Just don’t hope that the other shore will come to you if you want to cross over to the other shore—the shore of safety, well-being, freedom from fear and anger. You have to swim or row across. You have to make an effort.” This is the Buddha’s way of saying you have to do it for yourself.