Wake Up Now (22 page)

In Zen, koan study is often touted as a method for practicing the actualization and embodied expression of your innate Buddha nature. In reality, however, koan study tends to be a ritualized give-and-take that occurs in private, in a sequestered environment, and doesn’t necessarily generalize to the world of money, power, and personal relationships. Besides, most koans describe cryptic exchanges that took place between monks and their teachers in an unfamiliar culture hundreds of years ago, and their relevance to the
blood and guts of everyday life may seem tentative at best. The roshi I spoke of earlier had completed koan study in two separate traditions, and I’ve watched over the years as a succession of his students have acted in the most outrageous and insensitive ways, despite years of koan work.

Clearly there are cultural reasons for this traditional lack of attention to spiritual embodiment. In the East, most serious seekers spent their lives in monasteries or ashrams, where their behavior was carefully circumscribed by institutional precepts and guidelines that described exactly how to behave. Traditional societies also had well-defined ethical rules and role expectations that left no doubt, for example, how men and women should relate to one another or how members of different classes or hierarchical levels should interact. In the case of the roshi, it wasn’t considered culturally appropriate for the other Zen masters in his lineage to monitor the inconsistencies between his behavior and his purported realization, and his students were too intimidated by his spiritual stature and pedigree (and his rather fierce demeanor) to confront him on his spiritual bypassing. Even his wife, who was originally one of his students, seemed as cowed in his presence as everyone else.

In the contemporary West, by contrast, we live in a much more fluid and nonhierarchical social environment in which authenticity, spontaneity, and direct communication are valued over socially correct or conformist behavior. As a result, we’re called on to respond to situations intuitively as they unfold, and our responses and the frank responses of others provide ongoing feedback about whether we’re living
the awakened reality of no-self and no-separation or living from attachment to our fixed point of view. In addition, our personal relationships are far more complex and psychologically sophisticated, and our friends, partners, and family members require that we bring a fullness of being and an authenticity of emotional expression to our interactions that weren’t expected in the traditional East.

Let me be clear, however: Embodiment is not about becoming a better person or living up to the expectations of yourself or others; the mind is just thrilled at the prospect of turning embodiment into another self-improvement project. Rather, it’s about freedom and authenticity, about letting the radiant emptiness that you are live your life, not the conditioned mind with its preconceived ideas and agendas. When you’re embodying the truth, you’re living without conflict or resistance, in harmony with the flow of what is.

Despite our cultural emphasis on authenticity, there are still plenty of opportunities for avoiding the embodiment process, even in the West. For example, ashrams, meditation centers, and other spiritual communities and groups often mimic the culture on which they’re based by encouraging the use of spiritual jargon and conformity to traditional guidelines, rather than authentic action and self-expression. Ultimately, East or West, only a deep and wholehearted commitment to the truth at every level can undermine the natural tendency toward spiritual bypassing and keep dismantling the various fixations the ego tends to construct.
The fire of truth must burn bright enough that you desire complete freedom more than the power, comfort, or recognition that the “awakened position” can confer. As a result, you’re willing to face the reactive patterns, the contracted knots of suffering and control; acknowledge that the truth has not yet fully embodied itself in your life; and be open to allowing the love and awareness of your essential nature to enter.

This unflinching investigation requires a discriminating wisdom that sees reality as complete and perfect just the way it is, yet at the same time acknowledges the relative imperfections, the stuck places that awakening has yet to illuminate and redeem. Through the eyes of such wisdom, you recognize the seamless, undivided nature of reality yet can discriminate between absolute and relative truths (see
Chapter 1
): “Yes, I realize that I’m nothing but pure consciousness, but somehow I still suffer, still get embroiled in the drama of life and contract in fear or explode in anger, still act unskillfully and cause harm to others.” “I know that I’m Buddha nature incarnate, but I don’t live every moment with the peace, love, and freedom of the fully enlightened one.” As Zen Master Shunryu Suzuki said, “We’re constantly losing our balance in a world of perfect balance.” There’s no judgment or blame in this recognition, just the steadfast, unwavering gaze of truth, because you realize that the imperfections and imbalances are inevitable and have nothing to do with who you really are. Here again, we encounter the core paradox: everything is perfect just as it is—but when the roof leaks, have it repaired.

As I suggested earlier, those who suffer from Zen sickness tend to get caught in the absolute perspective and turn it into a fixed position. As a result, they can act insensitively and unskillfully because they refuse to recognize that ego still controls their behavior in unrecognized ways—that is, they haven’t fully embodied. My friend and teacher Adyashanti had a series of deepening awakenings over a period of years, and after each one (except the last), he heard a voice that told him, “This isn’t it, just keep going.” That’s the kind of relentless commitment to truth that fuels the process of spiritual embodiment.

Genuine spiritual awakening shatters the comfortable little world of personal beliefs and identities you’ve constructed over a lifetime and reveals your true nature as the vastness of being. Though the old stories tend to come back and reassert their control, they generally dissolve rather quickly in the light of investigation and inquiry. Once your mind has been swept clean of concepts, at least temporarily, it’s easier to identify and release the concepts as they arise. Once you have a direct insight into the emptiness of self, it’s hard to pretend to be someone for long.

But emotional identification tends to be more deeply rooted and “endarkened,” and it doesn’t respond as readily to the light of awakened awareness. You may know who you are and be relatively free of fixed beliefs and stories—or at least recognize them as they arise without getting attached—yet keep reacting to circumstances in a powerful,
visceral way that belies your spiritual understanding. Awakening has illuminated your upper chakras but has not yet reached down into your emotional centers, where ego has established a more inaccessible stronghold. Most of the people I know who have had powerful awakening experiences still get ambushed by their emotions at least occasionally, if not regularly, and many are aware of an ongoing contraction in one or more of the emotional centers that signals an unawakened fixation of emotional energy, a stuck place that has the potential at any moment to flare up into reactivity and suffering.

Many Eastern spiritual traditions ignore the emotional dimension entirely and prefer to encourage transcendence and bypassing. The renowned Japanese Zen master Eihei Dogen once characterized zazen (Zen meditation) as “dancing on the heads of demons,” by which he meant that the power of concentration generated in meditation creates a kind of force field of purity and wakefulness that keeps the so-called negative emotions and defilements at bay. When I studied Zen in the 1970s, we were encouraged to develop the power of samadhi and intensify our focus when our emotions proved difficult or problematic. (More recently, Zen has been influenced by Western psychotherapy and become somewhat more sensitive to emotional issues.) The Indian tradition of Advaita Vedanta invites the seeker to release the hold of the negative emotions by seeing their inherently insubstantial, illusory nature and realizing that the separate self to which they apparently belong simply doesn’t exist.

These strategies may be effective at maintaining wakefulness in the midst of challenging circumstances, but they often fail to transform the more difficult, persistent emotional patterns and instead merely drive them deeper beneath the surface, where they’re no longer visible but still exert a powerful influence. For example, one well-known American Zen teacher who was renowned for his clarity had a series of covert affairs with his students but refused to apologize or acknowledge the inappropriateness of his behavior when he was finally confronted. Another, whose samadhi could light up a room, created quite a stir in the neighborhood when he chased a stranger down the street with a gun. In traditional cultures, such behavior by teachers might have been excused or ignored. But in the contemporary West, where honesty and accountability are prized, emotional embodiment is necessary, lest we wreak havoc in our communities and personal relationships and heap suffering on ourselves.

Perhaps the primary problem with these strategies for dealing with the emotions is that they are, indeed, “strategies,” effortful tactics designed to avoid or eliminate the emotions rather than welcome them as a natural expression of the human condition—and as another perfect manifestation of your essential nature. This strategic approach reflects an aversive, adversarial attitude toward the emotions that permeates not only Eastern religions but traditional religions throughout the world. If you aspire to be a spiritual person, these traditions teach, you need to cultivate the so-called positive qualities and mind-states and eliminate the negative—an
approach that’s inherently dualistic and encourages an inner division or conflict that’s impossible to assuage. As long as you deem some experiences desirable and others undesirable, you’re destined to be at war with yourself—and war is ego’s favorite activity. As long as you’re attempting to get rid of some aspect of yourself, even in the subtlest way, you merely afford the ego more power.

From the nondual perspective, the key to working with disturbing emotions and core reactive patterns is to meet them with genuine love and acceptance—what Nisargadatta Maharaj called “affectionate awareness”—without indulging in the drama they convey and without subtly, or not so subtly, pushing them away. Consciousness or awareness, your essential nature, spontaneously meets and delights in each arising, without preference or resistance. In the vastness and completeness of who you are, nothing is experienced as unacceptable or left out.

If there’s any technique here, it’s to abide as awareness and welcome your emotions as you would your most intimate friends. Give them plenty of space to express themselves, but don’t energize or solidify them by resisting them or taking them to mean something about a fictitious me. Not
my
sadness, but
the
sadness; not
my
anger, but
the
anger. Eventually, even these minimal labels drop away, and you’re left with the raw, sensate experience of the moment, free of any story. The emotions may dissipate and release (they generally do), or they may stick around—you’re not attached to the outcome. When you rest as the silent, empty mystery of your essential nature, which is the undisturbed yet welcoming
background of every experience, this kind of intimacy occurs quite naturally, without any direction or effort, as the spontaneous movement of love and compassion.

In his poem “The Guest House,” the Persian mystic Rumi accurately likens this intimacy to being a gracious and open-hearted host to the full range of human experience. “Welcome and entertain them all,” he says of uninvited guests like depression or meanness. “The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.” Rather than considering them unwelcome intruders, he encourages us to feel grateful for these difficult emotions, as they provide an opportunity to open more fully. The more we try to exclude these guests and fortify our realization as if it were some unassailable citadel, as certain traditions teach, the more rigid and narrow we become and the more genuine realization slips through our fingers. By contrast, the more wholeheartedly we accept and embrace whatever arises, the more we abide as the spaciousness and expansiveness of consciousness itself, our essential nature, which includes everything without exception.

Here’s an example of how the process of emotional embodiment may unfold. Let’s say you’ve been feeling grief and sadness for weeks about the loss of a significant relationship, and the emotions haven’t spontaneously released but have become fixated and repetitive. Talking or writing about them doesn’t seem to help, and even allowing them to be, without consciously indulging or avoiding them, hasn’t shifted your suffering. Clearly, you’re caught in identification and attachment.

If you can genuinely recognize—not as an intellectual concept but as a whole-body realization—that there’s no separate little me to which these feelings apply and that your life is actually unfolding in some perfect, impersonal, and mysterious way, the feelings will gradually (or suddenly) dissipate and release. As Byron Katie likes to say, they’ve come to pass and not to stay.

If they continue to haunt you, you can inquire into the beliefs that perpetuate them; for example, “I’ll never meet someone like that again,” “It was my fault,” or “I’m all alone in the world.” For each story, you can ask, “Is it really true?” “How do I react when I believe this story?” and “Who would I be without it?” In response to such concerted inquiry, persistent beliefs and the feelings they cause tend to loosen their hold. Again, you’re not trying to get rid of them, you’re just freeing yourself from the suffering that results when you attach to them.

Some emotional patterns and recurring identities and stories seem to be more deeply entrenched than others and don’t readily shift or loosen their grip in the embrace of affectionate awareness or the investigation of self-inquiry. You could say that they constitute the underlying root, hidden beneath the surface, from which passing emotions such as anger and fear keep springing up, like shoots and branches.