Wake Up Now (4 page)

Breathe and Reflect

Close your eyes, and imagine yourself abiding in your true home, wherever that may be. Take a few moments to experience this home in all your senses—the sights, the sounds, the smells. How do you feel? Where do you feel it? Are you surprised in any way by the feelings and images that the word
home
evokes?

In our heart of hearts, don’t we all yearn to return home, not to the family of our childhood, but to the place where we feel completely free to be ourselves—a place of total contentment, relaxation, and ease? You may never have experienced such a home on this earthly plane, yet you may have glimpsed the possibility from time to time. Perhaps you’ve had such intimations walking on the beach, listening to music, or lying entwined in the arms of a beloved—a fleeting few moments of indescribable peace and love, when time seemed to stop, space opened up, and you encountered something indescribably sacred and profound. But such experiences inevitably come and go, and you may have been left believing that you could never experience such peace consistently from moment to moment. Or you may have been so enthralled by the encounter that you spent years trying to re-create it through spiritual teachings and practices.

This paradox of the home we’ve never left but must somehow rediscover is expressed throughout the world’s
spiritual traditions by the universal parable of the prodigal son. Wandering off from his father’s home in search of some distant treasure, the prodigal forgets who he is and inadvertently stumbles home years later, where he is found by his father, welcomed back, and offered his original inheritance and birthright. In one version of the story, he finds a treasure map that leads him back home to the jewel buried beneath his own hearth. In another, the prodigal, who has been reduced to poverty, discovers a precious diamond that was hidden in his pocket all along.

These versions of the parable acknowledge the mystery of the spiritual journey: there’s no place to go but here, yet the going is often inevitable because it wears us out, humbles us, and prepares us to receive the treasure with a gratitude and appreciation we might not otherwise have experienced. By looking to externals for answers and coming up empty again and again, we discover everything we’re not—pleasurable experiences, material possessions, spiritual accomplishments, blissful mind-states, anything that comes and goes—and become more open to recognizing what we really are, the indestructible jewel of true nature, which as Jesus said is beyond rust and decay.

This paradoxical dance of seeking and finding wears different costumes in different traditions. In Zen, it’s usually known as the “gateless gate.” Until you crack the combination and pass through, you can’t fully understand the meaning of the great Zen teachings, but all your mental effort inevitably
proves fruitless before this enigmatic and impenetrable barrier. You need to bring your whole being to the process, not just your mind, and allow the paradox to transform you from inside. Many Zen koans pose some version of this paradox, disorienting the mind and evoking an answer from another dimension of knowing.

Consider the famous saying attributed to Shakyamuni Buddha: “All beings are inherently enlightened, but because of their attachments and distorted views, they can’t realize this fact.” I can still remember how these words short-circuited my mind the first time I heard them. “If we can’t realize it, then how can we possibly say we’re enlightened?” I mused. “But if we’re really enlightened, why can’t we realize it?”

As a neophyte practitioner, I understood these words to mean that deep down inside me there was this enlightened nature that I somehow needed to discover, and meditation was a kind of excavation project designed to unearth it. For years I kept digging, sitting intensive retreats, contemplating koans, emptying my mind to make room for the influx of awakening. I was spurred on in this archeological exploration by my teachers, who offered encouragement in private interviews and lavished authority and cachet on those who passed koans quickly. Eventually I just wore myself out with the digging, so I set aside my shovel (and my monk’s robes) and went back to living a more ordinary life. Yet the paradox continued to gnaw at me silently, from the inside.

The fact is, once you’re gripped by the core paradox and recognize that consensus, everyday reality is merely a reflection
of some deeper truth that’s close at hand but hidden from view, you’ve embarked on a search that you can never really abandon, no matter how far you seem to stray. The Zen masters say that encountering the paradox is like swallowing a red-hot iron ball you can neither disgorge nor pass through. Until you digest it, you can never be completely at peace.

Throughout the centuries, zealous Zen students have meditated long hours struggling to resolve this paradox, to return home, to discover their “original face.” In the Rinzai Zen tradition, practitioners bellow, “
Mu
” (the key word from one of the most important koans) for hours in their fervor to break through the gate. The tradition’s stories are filled with notable examples of those who took their practice to even greater extremes, standing in the snow for hours, sitting at the edge of a precipice, walking on foot from master to master. “Monasteries are places for desperate people,” my first Zen teacher used to say, by which he meant people whose suffering, urgency, or intensity drives them forward on their long and often lonely search.

Many centuries ago, the Persian mystic poet Rumi described his own divine desperation in these words:

I have lived on the lip

of insanity, wanting to know reasons,

knocking on a door. It opens.

I’ve been knocking from the inside!

Judging from this poem, Rumi struggles for a long time to penetrate the paradox with his mind, but the door eventually
opens by itself, almost in spite of his efforts, and reveals that he’s been living in the secret chamber all along. Rumi’s epiphany when he discovers that he’s been looking from the inside out mirrors the surprise, relief, and delight of those seekers who wear themselves out attempting to unravel the paradox and drop to the ground exhausted, only to discover that they’ve never strayed from home, even in their most desperate moments. “No creature ever falls short of its own completeness,” says Zen master Dogen. “Wherever it stands, it does not fail to cover the ground.”

Needless to say, this intense longing to crack the code and reveal the truth at the heart of reality is as ancient and universal as humankind itself. You could say that it’s in our DNA. According to the Sufis, God said to the Prophet Muhammad, “I am a hidden treasure, and I want to be known.” In his yearning to be loved and experienced, God set in motion an evolutionary pattern that reached its pinnacle in the human capacity for spiritual awakening. God, or Truth, in other words, is seeking to awaken to itself through you, to see itself everywhere through your eyes and taste itself everywhere through your lips. “That which you are seeking,” wrote an anonymous sage, “is always seeking you.”

Ultimately, your every desire—the desire for material things, relationships, career success, sexual gratification—is really the desire for the peace you experience for brief moments when you attain the object of your desire. Of course, such conditional peace is fleeting, and you move restlessly on to new objects and new desires in the hope of
recapturing it. Until you know who you really are, know the freedom from desire that’s the true aim of every desire, you can never recognize the peace that can never be disturbed or lost.

Though many people seem to “effort” and struggle for years to rediscover their innate awakened nature, others just seem to stumble on it inadvertently, without intensive meditation or deep inquiry. One friend of mine realized the emptiness of self quite unexpectedly while boarding a bus. Another asked the question “Who am I?” just once and penetrated through the illusion of a separate self. Still another woke up one morning without her accustomed identity; instead, pure awareness seemed to move through her body and experience life through her senses. But if you’re like Rumi, you need to exhaust yourself with the knocking.

There’s a traditional story about a man imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit who attempts to dig his way to freedom with a spoon—rather like the character played by Tim Robbins in
The Shawshank Redemption
. After years of bone-wearying struggle, his hands calloused and bloody, he finally realizes the futility of his efforts and gives up. Tears of frustration and desperation streaming down his cheeks, he leans back against the door of his cell, only to discover that it’s been unlocked all along. No doubt his surprise and relief are similar to Rumi’s. As implausible as this story may seem, the point is clear—the prison that you imagine constrains you doesn’t really exist.

Indeed, the one who tries by every available means to escape from the prison is the prison itself, as my teacher Jean Klein used to say. This formulation points directly to the source of our imprisonment—the mind that believes we’re imprisoned! Whether you can look directly at the source of the prison and release yourself from its grasp in the looking, or need to wear yourself out pounding on the bars, depends more on your karma than on your intentions. Even those who attempt to go directly to the source may suddenly find themselves confused and disoriented, standing once again outside the gate. “The only obstacle to complete realization is the thought ‘I have not realized,’” said the great Indian sage Ramana Maharshi, but dispensing with that pesky thought can be the work of a lifetime.

Some spiritual traditions, including Advaita Vedanta, refer to the core paradox as the “open secret”: The truth of your being has never been hidden from view—indeed, it’s as plain as the nose on your face—yet it remains a secret because you don’t know how and where to look, and the teacher’s job is to point you in the right direction. Instead of being advised to storm the barrier or crack the code through intensive practices, you’re counseled to listen to the teachings and allow them to point you gently in the right direction. Then, in a moment out of time, the secret reveals itself to you.

In fact, the nose on your face is actually invisible when you’re looking straight ahead; you have to maneuver your eyes in a particular way if you want to see it. You’re accustomed
to focusing on external objects but rarely turn around to look at the one who looks, the source of all seeing. “The eye can’t see the eye,” the sages say, because it’s the medium through which you see. Yet you can come to know the eye in a subtler and more indirect way, can apperceive the source of seeing, through a direct and timeless recognition that bypasses the mind.

The process is rather like solving a figure-ground puzzle where it’s difficult to distinguish the image from the background. You pore over the picture with curiosity and perhaps a little perplexity, until you suddenly realize that the vase you’ve been staring at is also two faces touching; once you see the faces, you wonder how you could ever have missed them. Or like rummaging around the house before an important appointment, frantically searching for your keys, only to discover that they were buried in your pocket all along. Or even more embarrassing, like hunting for your sunglasses until someone points out that they’re already perched on top of your head. “Ah, here they are,” you say. “I knew they were there somewhere.” The recognition is immediate and quite ordinary—like opening the door to your home and stepping through.

Beneath the paradoxical metaphors of the open secret and the gateless gate lies a crucial philosophical distinction common to both Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta: the two truths. At the level of absolute, or ultimate, truth, you’re already enlightened, already Buddha, already perfect and complete
just the way you are, and everything in every direction shines with the same inherent perfection. Nothing needs to be added or taken away, figured out or improved, because nothing is ever problematic. Past and future, cause and effect, do not exist, only this timeless moment, the eternal Now, in which manifest reality is constantly springing forth in some mysterious and ungraspable way. At the level of relative, or conventional, truth, you may not enjoy the peace and contentment of Buddhahood because you haven’t yet recognized your inherent perfection, and you read teachings and engage in practices in order to experience the ultimate for yourself. Problems are constantly arising and requiring your attention, situations demand improvement, and reality (at least at the superatomic level) closely follows the law of cause and effect.

Both truths apply simultaneously; rather than being mutually exclusive, they’re inseparable, and the goal of the spiritual enterprise is to acknowledge and embrace them both. In fact, they’re merely flip sides of the same nondual reality that includes both the personal realm of thoughts and feelings and the transpersonal realm of pure awareness; the apparent world of work, family, and relationships and the essential world where everything is merely an expression of the One. Even using words like
realms, worlds
, and
levels
gives the mistaken impression that they’re separate in some way, which they’re not. The Heart Sutra says that form is emptiness, and emptiness is form, in a formulation we’ll be exploring again and again. Form is no other than emptiness, and emptiness no other than form. The mind can’t wrap
itself around this paradoxical truth—you can only experience it directly, beyond the mind.

Breathe and Reflect

Take a few moments to consider this paradox, but don’t try to figure it out with the mind. Instead, let your body resonate to the phrase “form is emptiness, emptiness is form.” Notice how your body responds.

As an example, take your closest relationship. If you see yourself and your partner or friend only as two separate personalities attempting to learn your life lessons and maximize your potential for growth and development, you will definitely achieve a certain level of intimacy. But you may miss the deeper experience of knowing that the two of you are already essentially one and that love is who you both are fundamentally, beneath the personal issues. When you embrace both truths, you can have the freedom and equanimity that comes with seeing the empty, luminous, dreamlike nature of these two apparently separate selves and at the same time enjoy the tenderness and openness that comes with recognizing the humanness and vulnerability that this sacred emptiness has chosen to express through these forms. Only in the presence of both the absolute and relative truths, the spiritual and mundane dimensions, can the deepest intimacy flourish.