Wake Up Now (8 page)

Don’t try to figure out what this means or meditate in your accustomed way. Just trust that you merely need to let go and be. Rest in the peace and joy of your essential nature. Gaze out at the world through the eyes of unconditional, nonjudgmental presence. This silent presence is what’s looking through these eyes right now, and nothing the mind says can make it otherwise. Even concepts like “peace” and “joy,” “unconditional” and “nonjudgmental,” are superfluous and misleading. Just be who you are!

Continue to remain as you are as you get up and go about your day.

The fact remains, all knowledge is a form of ignorance.
The most accurate map is still only paper.

—Nisargadatta Maharaj

As a young child, I had an insatiable curiosity about the world around me. I collected insects and flowers and spent long hours wandering through the forest near my home, merged with my surroundings in a timeless dimension of beauty and light. In school, this curiosity found expression in a fascination with books and ideas, and my teachers were soon praising my ability to solve complex problems and remember significant facts. Gradually, I began to take pride in my accomplishments and to identify myself as a brainy kid, an intellectual. In sixth grade, I emblazoned on my notebook the motto “Knowledge is power.”

By the time I reached college, I began to realize that all my conceptual knowledge didn’t have the power to deliver the one thing I wanted most: happiness, peace of mind, ease of being. Some of the brightest people I knew were miserable. One, a brilliant mathematician, jumped to his death
from his dorm room, and another, one of my closest friends, overdosed on psychedelics and ended up in a mental hospital. My professors, considered among the best in their field, were visibly dissatisfied with their lives and, from all I could tell, had no connection with a deeper source of meaning and knowing. They could talk for hours about
King Lear
or the Bhagavad Gita, but they appeared to know nothing about their own hearts and souls.

Fortunately, I had already begun exploring the wisdom of the East, particularly Zen, where the sharp sword of discernment cuts through conditioned beliefs to reveal the living truth beneath. Longing to transcend the burden of my busy mind and the pain of a difficult childhood, I finally put aside my Zen books and began practicing meditation. Instead of studying other people’s ideas about life, I became intimate with life itself—cleaning houses, preparing food, working in the garden, following my breath, teaching others how to meditate.

Ten years later, as the head monk in a monastery in California, I was asked to select a koan for the Dharma dialogue that marked the end of my tenure, and my choice reflected a profound transformation in my attitude toward knowing:

Zen Master Dizang saw his student Fayan dressed in traveling clothes and asked him, “Where are you going?”

“Around on pilgrimage,” Fayan answered.

“What is the purpose of your pilgrimage?” asked Dizang.

Fayan said, “I don’t know.”

“Ah,” replied Dizang, “Not knowing is the most intimate.”

Not knowing is the most intimate. Concepts of any kind only serve to separate you from the rich, intimate, juicy experience of this moment right now. Once you label the flower or the insect, psychoanalyze your partner or friend, break your body down into its component muscles and bones, you no longer really see them as they are, but only as the mind understands them to be, trapped in an intellectual framework that freezes the river of constant change into a single frame and leaves out the flow that makes the river what it is. This conceptual overlay separates you from life and leaves you feeling estranged and disconnected. To paraphrase John Lennon, life is what’s happening while you’re busy imposing your interpretation on it.

But if you set aside your ideas, you have the potential in each moment to experience life directly, intimately, without any division between knower and known. Sensing your body from the inside, without the interference of the mind, gives you an opportunity to step through a doorway into a direct apperception of being itself—pure, radiant, undivided—where subject and object are one. As the mystic and poet William Blake put it, “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.” Even Saint Paul understood this truth when he wrote, “For now we see through a glass, darkly [that is, a mind clouded by concepts], but then face-to-face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” In other words, in spiritual
illumination, the apparent separation between knower and known dissolves into pure, undivided knowing, which is simply existence itself.

Breathe and Reflect

As you did at the end of
Chapter 1
, take a few moments to gaze around the room as if you were an infant encountering the world for the first time. You don’t know what anything is or what it’s called, you’re just aware of shapes, colors, movement, the play of light and dark. Set aside any concepts or beliefs that may arise, and continue your innocent looking, free from conceptual overlay. How does this looking affect you?

Pretending that you know deprives you of the intimacy of your true nature, which is as near to you as your own skin. In fact, the truth of your being can never be known by the mind—it’s elusive and ungraspable—but as soon as you completely let go of your struggle to know, the truth reveals itself to you. “You must unlearn everything,” says Nisargadatta Maharaj. “God is the end of all desire and knowledge.”

The world’s scriptures are filled with sayings that warn against the limitations of conceptual knowledge and point to the ineffability and unknowability of the Divine. Yet these teachings have not stopped the great religions from amassing countless volumes of conceptual elaboration on the most fundamental spiritual truths. Even Buddhism, which emphasizes the importance of direct spiritual experience, often comes replete with centuries of encrusted beliefs that burden the seeker with a clouded lens through which to interpret
the path. One of my students, for example, got involved with a Tibetan Buddhist sect that taught that enlightenment was possible if she devoted herself to her teacher and engaged in rigorous practices. The promise of awakening lured her on, but the more committed she became, the more she was exposed to other, more disturbing teachings that warned of the fires of painful hell realms if she in any way violated her vows to her guru. By the time she came to me, she was having nightmares about going to hell and was terrified she would end up there—simply because she had wanted to wake up to her essential nature.

The Jewish tradition tells a wonderful story about the dangers of taking even the most exalted religious doctrines too seriously. One day, it seems, the founder of the Chassidim, Israel the Baal Shem Tov (Master of the Good Name), was experiencing an elevation of his soul in the heavenly realms, as he was accustomed to do. There he met Satan, the angel responsible for bringing challenging situations to Earth, gesticulating and reading aloud from a book. From Satan’s words and gestures, the Baal Shem could tell that the book contained a version of his own Torah teachings.

When he returned to his body, he called together his close disciples and asked who among them had written a book of the Baal Shem Tov’s Torah. Sure enough, one of the disciples sheepishly came forward, holding a small journal in which he had carefully recorded the teachings he had personally heard from the master’s lips. The Baal Shem Tov
read the book, then handed it back to the student and said, “Not a single statement in this book is true.” By this, the Baal Shem did not mean that the concepts were inaccurate, but that the words no longer carried the wisdom of their source—they were dead, lifeless replicas, without the power to evoke the Divine.

Too bad the Buddha can’t return like the Baal Shem to read the volumes of admonitions and theories that have been propounded in his name and declare them distorted, inaccurate, outdated, and inert. Every Buddhist sect and school makes different claims about what the Buddha really taught, but the truth is that the so-called words of the Buddha recorded in the Pali canon were written down more than five hundred years after the master’s death. Can you remember what you said last month, last week, or even yesterday? How, then, can the “words of the Buddha” be reliably transmitted for five centuries from one generation of monks to another without alteration? Who knows what the Buddha really taught? Yet millions of men and women revere these words as the gospel according to Buddhism and live their lives in alignment with them.

In his wisdom, the Baal Shem realized that Satan, the tempter, could take words that were meant merely as pointers to divine revelation and fashion them into a golden calf, a false idol to be worshipped in place of the living truth that must arise anew in each individual heart. In the same way, the mind takes possession of even the highest spiritual teachings and pretends to know the truth of which they
speak, whereas the mind is merely seeing reality through the cloudy lens of spiritual concepts.

No doubt you know people who have read all the right spiritual books and imbibed the most refined spiritual concepts and can repeat them verbatim, but have no direct experience of the truth behind the words. These people identify with—and believe themselves to be sanctified by—the spiritual knowledge they’ve accumulated but still suffer and cause suffering as if nothing has changed. Perhaps you’ve used spiritual concepts in the same way.

The spiritual marketplace is filled with well-intentioned folks who collect teachings the way some people collect antiques and take comfort and pride in admiring them. The first time I met my teacher Jean Klein, I described the teachings I had studied and the books I’d read, and he smiled lovingly and said softly, “Put down your baggage.” Jean called such concepts “sweets for the ego” because they give the mind a false sense of power and control over what simply cannot be controlled or known, a feeling of solid ground where no ground exists. Such concepts interfere with your ability to awaken because they give you the mistaken impression that you already know.

Of course, religions develop in the same way, beginning with a genuine, vital spiritual revelation that gets passed from generation to generation and gradually loses its juice as fewer and fewer disciples experience the simple, radiant truth behind the words. Over time, the religion degenerates from living communion to rigid dogma, from the sayings
of the masters infused with the power of their source to a collection of dead words that are enshrined in holy books and scriptures, defended against apostates and nonbelievers, and worshipped from afar as the sacred and irrefutable pronouncements of the enlightened or divinely inspired ones of old.

Radical spirituality takes an entirely different approach. Instead of offering more beliefs for your collection, it slashes away at your most cherished assumptions to reveal the root, the living source, from which all concepts spring. “Throw it away!” says Nisargadatta Maharaj. “Whatever you understand is not the truth and is to be thrown overboard.” Indeed, radical spirituality teaches that your ideas and stories are the only things that separate you from the truth of your essential nature. Once you stop taking them as reality and see them for what they are, mere thoughts, you have an opportunity to fall back into the vast, spacious, luminous, thought-free presence that is always already who you really are—the living reality that no thought can possibly touch. “Realization is not the acquisition of anything new or a new faculty,” says Ramana Maharshi. “It is only the removal of all camouflage.”

Buddhist masters and Indian sages aren’t the only ones to emphasize letting go of conceptual baggage, as the story of the Baal Shem Tov makes clear. Christian mystics like Meister Eckhart and Saint John of the Cross expounded what later came to be known as the
via negativa
(the way
of negation), which teaches that nothing you can say about God is true, because God is a vast emptiness beyond all conceptual knowing. “God the ineffable one has no name,” wrote Eckhart, adding that “the highest and loftiest thing that you can let go of is to let go of God for the sake of God”—that is, the concept God for the living God. Yet according to the masters of the via negativa, you can know God directly and indisputably, beyond the mind.

Jesus himself said, “It’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.” Although he was primarily talking about an attachment to material wealth, he was also referring metaphorically to the wealth of beliefs by which many people in his day (and ours) identified themselves: Pharisee, Sadducee, liberal, conservative, Muslim, Jew. “You must become as little children to enter the kingdom of heaven,” Jesus preached in the Sermon on the Mount—meaning you must be innocent, open, receptive, with childlike faith unencumbered by dogma. The path that Jesus taught emphasized spiritual poverty and humility, stripping yourself bare of the old in order to be baptized and reborn in the newness of the Now.

Spiritual dogma can be extremely seductive, despite the admonitions from the various spiritual traditions to avoid succumbing to its temptations. Through your spiritual beliefs, you can gain a sense of security and comfort in a world that may otherwise seem threatening or chaotic,
create community with other like-minded people, organize your life according to certain fundamental principles, and connect with a current of spiritual energy that has been transmitted from one generation to the next. In the process, however, you trade the possibility of experiencing reality directly for a familiar, reassuring, unquestioned (and unquestionable) filter that you project onto the real. Such filters in turn make up the spiritual ideologies and dogmas that wreak so much havoc in the world. (By the way, I’m not suggesting that there’s anything wrong with spiritual beliefs per se. In fact, some of them are masterful creations of the human imagination, like poems or symphonies. The suffering begins only when you become attached to them and mistake them for truth.)