Wake Up Now (11 page)

As an alternative to paying mindful attention to your breathing and other particulars of your sensate experience, I recommend a different approach, both in sitting meditation and in everyday life: the practice of presence. Instead of focusing the light of your awareness like a laser on a particular object or activity, you open it like the sky, welcoming the experiences that arise just as the sky welcomes the clouds, neither ignoring nor indulging them. Instead of concentrating, you relax and let go, allowing everything to be just as it is, without any attempt to control on your part. You’re alert but at ease, totally present but not fixated in any way. As Ramana suggests, you can’t fabricate presence because it is what you are; you can only step aside and let it happen. Any effort is an indication that your mind has intervened. You may find this practice confusing and uncomfortable at first, because your mind is more accustomed to concentrating and holding on, which anchors it securely in the realm of the known, than to relaxing and letting go, which opens it to the unfamiliar and possibly frightening prospect of the unknown.

My Advaita teacher Jean Klein, who was a classically trained violinist, likened presence to the function of listening. When you listen, your awareness is naturally global, expansive, and receptive; the mind doesn’t tend to focus or fixate on sounds the way it does on visual objects, but rather opens to what is without picking and choosing. “Just open to the openness,” Jean was fond of saying. This quality of complete openness and receptivity is of the same nature as consciousness itself, which welcomes what is without resistance
or preferences. Eventually, presence ceases being a practice, something you do, and naturally dissolves in consciousness, unconditional presence, without a separate someone being present. “It is like being alone in the desert,” said Jean. “At first, you listen to the absence of sounds and call it silence. Then suddenly you may be taken by the presence of stillness where you are one with listening itself.” The realization that the separate someone doesn’t exist marks the ultimate fruition of the practice of presence. “In your absence is your presence,” Jean often observed.

Of course, the Buddhist practice of mindfulness is intended to lead to the same realization, but it can instead reinforce the subtle control of the mind. One friend, a long-time Zen student and a teacher of the Alexander technique (a refined approach to posture and breathing), recently suggested that the original purpose of the core Buddhist practice, mindfulness of the breath, was to bring you to the point where you let go and realize that you don’t breathe, you’re actually breathed—that is, there’s only breathing, with no separate someone breathing. In the words of Suzuki Roshi, the “I” is “just a swinging door that moves when we inhale and when we exhale.” In reality, however, the practice of mindfulness often turns into a kind of contest to see how “mindful” the separate someone can be.

Throughout the history of the direct approach, including the traditions of Zen, Dzogchen, and Advaita Vedanta, people have argued about the relative merits of meditation. At one
end of the spectrum are those who insist that you’re already a perfect expression of your radiant, essential nature just as you are, and any deliberate attempt to meditate separates you from what you’ve always been, reinforcing the illusion of a goal to be achieved and a someone who meditates. At the other end are those who contend that, even though you’re perfect and complete just as you are, you need to meditate to realize this fact. (For more on this paradox, see
Chapter 1
.) Nowadays, many hardcore Advaitists believe that practices of any kind are antithetical to realization because they constellate a doer that doesn’t really exist. By contrast, many devoted Zen practitioners consider regular meditation practice to be a prerequisite for enlightenment.

Perhaps the most famous expression of this age-old debate can be found in the story of the Sixth Patriarch of Chinese Zen, Hui-neng. Originally an illiterate woodcutter from the southern frontier, Hui-neng was enlightened as a young man even before entering the monastery when he heard these words from the Diamond Sutra: “Cultivate a mind that dwells nowhere.” Recognized immediately for his extraordinary clarity by the Fifth Patriarch, the young novice nevertheless toiled away in the monastery kitchen, gathering firewood and washing pots, because his teacher didn’t want to upset the monastery hierarchy by acknowledging him. Eventually, the Fifth Patriarch invited his disciples to submit their understanding in the form of a poem, hoping that this contest would help reveal his true successor. The head monk wrote the following verse and posted it on the monastery wall:

Our body is the bodhi tree,

Our mind is a mirror bright.

Carefully we wipe them, hour by hour,

And let no dust alight.

The meaning here is that we need to meditate regularly in order to clear our minds of the negative emotions and habitual patterns that obscure our true nature.

When the young Hui-neng heard this verse being repeated by one of the monks, he knew the realization it expressed was incomplete and had someone write the following rejoinder:

There is no bodhi tree,

No stand of a mirror bright.

Since everything is empty,

Where can the dust alight?

In other words, your true nature is inherently empty and pure and can’t be obscured even for an instant; therefore, what need could there possibly be for meditation? Needless to say, this verse was approved by the Fifth Patriarch, and he secretly appointed Hui-neng his successor.

Of course, many teachers embrace both points of view, contending paradoxically that the secret of your true nature may be open, but it’s still a secret until you make it your own. “The Tao is basically perfect and all-pervasive. How could it depend on practice and realization?” wrote Zen Master Eihei Dogen more than seven hundred years ago. Yet as long as your mind is confused by attachments and preferences,
he advised, you need to take “the backward step that turns your light inward to illuminate the Self” through the practice of meditation.

According to the twentieth-century Indian sage Ramana Maharshi, the Self alone exists, and separate objects are merely the illusory play of consciousness. From this perspective, there’s nothing to practice and nowhere to go. “Transcend what, and by whom?” he often said. “You alone exist.” Yet Ramana also recognized that most people suffer because they don’t realize who they are, and he taught a variety of practices depending on the needs and maturity of the seekers. Some, he believed, could benefit from sitting in silence and practicing self-inquiry, whereas others might be better suited to prayer or mantra recitation. For those rare few who were already poised on the threshold of awakening, he simply offered the direct pointer of his words and the profound silence of his presence.

Jean Klein counseled his students not to make meditation a habit, but rather to allow the genuine silence that is ever-present behind the noise of everyday life to increasingly draw them to itself: “When you become responsive to the solicitations of silence, you may be called to explore the invitation.” Otherwise, meditation merely evokes a temporary state of mind, a kind of enforced tranquillity that inevitably ends when your meditation comes to a close, rather than the abiding silence that has no beginning or end. Jean likened meditation to a laboratory that you enter when silence solicits you, for the sole purpose of discovering the meditator. Deliberate attempts to meditate regularly just
create expectations of future results and reinforce the fictitious identity of the meditator. When you finally recognize that the meditator is merely a figment of the imagination fabricated from thoughts, feelings, images, and memories, you no longer need to experiment—awakening has become your ongoing reality.

Breathe and Reflect

When you put down this book and go about your day, let yourself be solicited by silence. When your mind pauses for no apparent reason, consciously merge with the silence between the thoughts and allow the silence to expand, rather than efforting to fill your mind again. When you sense the presence of this silence, which is always available beneath all the noise, stop what you’re doing for a moment and enjoy it.

For my part, I would echo the advice of Nisargadatta Maharaj: “Do it if you’re doing it, and don’t do it if you’re not doing it.” If you’re drawn to sit quietly, then honor the impulse, and if you have no interest in meditation, then don’t feel obliged. In any case, don’t meditate because you think you should, and pay attention to the beliefs and stories the mind produces to explain the path you’ve chosen. The fact is, the separate meditator arises as a function of the stories you tell yourself about meditation—for example, “Now I’ve got it, I’m really doing well,” or “I have no idea how to meditate, I’ll never become awakened,” or even “I don’t need to practice anymore, I’m beyond that.” In the end, your attachment to these stories is the only thing separating you from true meditation, the profound silence
beneath all the words. “Realization is already there,” says Ramana Maharshi. “All that is necessary is to get rid of the thought ‘I have not realized.’” Such thoughts and stories rise and fall like waves on the mysterious and unfathomable ocean of the Self. There’s no need to get rid of them. Just see them for what they are and—whether or not you choose to meditate—fall in!

As you may have noticed, I use the term
meditation
to refer both to the deliberate practice of sitting quietly and being present for what is and to the natural state of unconditional awareness or presence that is always already occurring. Ultimately, if your sitting is free of artifice and effort, the one dissolves into the other, the gap between subject and object disappears, and only presence remains. This undivided, nondual presence is your natural state; it’s always available right here and now, and many teachers over the centuries have found that relaxed, effortless, silent sitting seems to be uniquely suited to opening you to the possibility of awakening to it.

Such sitting is actually quite simple, in the sense of being uncomplicated, but it’s definitely not easy, primarily because the mind likes to complicate even the simplest activities. In fact, “just sitting,” as it’s known in Zen, is considered the most advanced and refined practice in the Buddhist tradition precisely because it’s so simple. Even though I describe this practice in some detail in the section on presence and provide guidance in the “Wake-Up Call” at the end of this chapter,
I thought it might be helpful to include some illuminating words of instruction from several teachers and texts that have moved me over the years. As you read these words, along with my commentary, notice which ones resonate most deeply for you. In the end, they’re pointing to exactly the same place.

• “Cultivate the mind that dwells nowhere.” (Diamond Sutra)
One of the clearest descriptions of unconditional presence, these famous words from a Buddhist text highly esteemed in Zen self-destruct as you read them. The phrase could just as easily read “No cultivation, no mind, no dwelling, nowhere.” Just this! When the mind doesn’t dwell or fixate, reality is free to be itself, and suffering and resistance come to an end. The result is true meditation.

• “Settle the self on the self with imperturbability.” (Dainin Katagiri)
These words from one of my preceptors when I was a monk make no sense to the rational mind, but they invite a deep, silent, unshakable sitting. In fact, when the self settles on the self, the self disappears, and reality blossoms just as it is. In his own meditation practice, Katagiri Roshi exemplified the truth of these words.

• “No thought, no analysis, no reflection, no intention, no cultivation. Let it settle itself.” (Tilopa)
Instead of teaching technique, this great Tibetan master instructs through negation, essentially admonishing you not to do any of the usual mind manipulations common in the meditation of his day (and ours), but rather to get out of the way and let meditation happen. The mind naturally settles down
if you let it, just as the sediment in a pond eventually falls to the bottom if you stop disturbing the water.

• “All you have to do is find out your source and take up your headquarters there.” (Nisargadatta Maharaj)
This is easier said than done, of course. Finding out your source is tantamount to awakening to who you really are. But once you catch a glimpse of your source, abide there as much as possible, not only when you meditate, but throughout the day. Live your understanding from moment to moment, advised Jean Klein. Serve the truth that you’ve realized, counsels Adyashanti.

• “In true meditation, the emphasis is on being awareness—not on being aware of objects, but on resting as primordial awareness itself.” (Adyashanti)
As you relax and let everything be just as it is, the tendency for awareness to fixate on objects naturally relaxes as well, and awareness spontaneously becomes aware of itself. True meditation is a kind of homecoming—you recognize the place immediately, and every cell and fiber of your being lets go and relaxes in relief.

Although it may seem abstract, the practice of presence is actually quite sensate and involves wholehearted attention to bodily experience. In fact, the clear perception of what is, unclouded by conceptual overlay, provides a powerful portal to the eternal Now, as Eckhart Tolle observes. To repeat the words of the English mystic and poet William Blake, “If the
doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.”

As awareness clarifies and naturally settles on itself, noticeable energetic and physical experiences may occur. The locus of your awareness (the place your awareness tends to come to rest) may shift from your forehead (home of the neocortex) to the back of your head, and then to the lower part of your body, usually either your heart or tantien (the center of gravity two inches below your navel). You may find that you increasingly act from your heart and move from your gut, rather than from your thinking mind. You may also experience rushes of energy up your spine (kundalini) or more subtle, extremely pleasurable vibrations throughout your body (bliss). As you sit quietly, you may notice thoughts and feelings passing through and releasing without leaving any residue of heaviness or discomfort. Above all, you may gradually discover that your inner experience no longer has the same hold over you, no longer causes the same stress and contraction, and you feel lighter, more spacious, more peaceful, more loving, yet at the same time more disengaged.