Chuang-tzu's P'eng: Developing Perspective

Chuang-tzu tells the story of a giant bird, P'eng, which when it flies travels hundreds of miles a minute. The dove and cicada scoff at it. What need does one have for size? They can see as far as the elm and the sapanwood tree. What else is there?

The Taoist sage says, Little understanding does not come up to great understanding; the short-lived cannot come up to the long-lived. (Burton Watson's translation)

Taoists searched for wisdom by looking for the elixir of immortality. If someone 70 years knows so much more than someone 20 years old, supreme knowledge must come only if one was immortal, having eternity to accumulate knowledge that became wisdom.

But there is another way of understanding the metaphor. We don't have to become immortal to rise above the tiny, limited and limiting worlds we inhabit. With perspective we can see beyond the stage of our personal dramas. When we can see beyond the tips of our noses we discover a world so much bigger—it even feels infinite—and the stresses we feel diminish seeing how tiny they are in the larger scheme.

This perspective, I think, is one of the benefits accruing from regular meditation practice. Sitting quietly until the incessant flow of me-thoughts begin to slow down, even occasionally stop, I loosen the grip of the self on selecting what I experience and the world opens up to amazement. The world is far bigger than what I normally concern myself about.

With me being not only center but the whole of what I see the world is small indeed. When I can see beyond myself I might understand that I am not alone. The world is not my sole responsibility. I am in this together with everyone else. I don't have to act all the time, the next minute, hour, day or year not dependent solely on the act. Countless other acts come together each minute, each hour, each lifetime. I'll do my own thing but what transpires transcends what I do, what I know.

To be so small is strangely empowering. I no longer have to rely on just my meager resources. The world's resources are mine as well.

A Child's Clarity of Vision

Krishna Bedtime Stories: Before the Beginning reminded one reviewer of Christian children's Bible books. The teachings are couched in simple words, the concepts accessible. This is why I fell in love with cartoons as a child. In the world of cartoons (not in the anime books that teenagers and young adults now enjoy as imports from Japan), life is simple to read. The colors are primary, the lines unequivocal. No ambiguity or complexity here. Life should be this unambiguous.

Snow turns the landscape black-and-white. Details that give complexity and meaning vanish. Only the main points remain, the skeleton framework, not the flesh-and-blood that obscures the fundamentals of a body.

Never was there a time when I did not exist, declares Krishna to an Arjuna reluctant to begin battle with revered teachers and relatives. There was never a time when God did not exist, nor you, nor these warriors and kings many of whom shall be dead by day's end. Nor is there a time in the future, Krishna continues, when any of us ceases to be.

Krishna is not saying as Christians, Jews or Muslims believe that we have the opportunity to go after death to a more pleasant life where the pleasantness never ends. His teaching is more profound than this, goes beyond even the idea of what in the West we call reincarnation. From investigations made from the depths of meditative stillness, mystics see beyond time, and therefore beyond being. (Being is gerund for the verb to be, as abstract as anything we know.) Without time there is neither then or now or later. What is seen is seen now and now is all there is. Now is tied to a particular seeing. When the mystic breaks free of that tie now becomes the boundlessness that is ein sof in Kabbalah. There is no death if there is no individual or separate being.

That is little comfort if we are caught up in our personal daily dramas. We'd like the snow to stop, the drier fixed, the stir-fry cabbage aromatic and hot, the cage fighting video dream-like and evocative of human aspirations. Now is not where we are, where we are there are birth and death, and beginnings and endings, clarity sometimes and mostly ambiguity.

What Is Real in Indian Spirituality

Frank's mother is "probably terminally ill" with cancer. He and Audrey are flying to NY to join his siblings. He told us after the hour-long sitting this morning that spirituality is fine "then there is reality." We sit in the fashion of vipassana.

Spirituality that which ennobles our lives, that springs us out of our usual self-centered habits into transcendent action, that kills our addiction to meaning and purpose inimical with what is real. Spirituality belongs to spirit, that part of our lives beyond the concerns of the physical body or the psychological self. When it comes in conflict with reality, generally it vanishes without a trace as we deal with reality.

In Yoga the teaching aphorism states: Asatho maa Sadgamaya[1]. Lead me from the unreal to the Real. Westerners often point to how Indian-inspired spirituality leads practitioners into la-la land. By contemplating their navel they miss financial and technological opportunities and preserve the poverty of their societies.

In Buddhism, the practice is geared towards realizing one of three fundamental characteristics of experience that singly or together bring about dukkha or suffering. One of these characteristics is annata, without self (atta in Pali, atman in Sanskrit). Meditation reveals how dominant and controlling is our sense of self. Self is the story we want to tell. It is not necessarily the story we want to live much less the story we are living. Self is opposed to reality. Self is how we want to see ourselves and how we want others to see us. Self is living our life for the effect we want our presence and actions to have with others. We live for the effects and stay impervious to what is essential, to what is real.

The universe is meaningless, that is, beyond the story we are living out. Meaning is what we try to impose on reality. It is how we think we, others, the "external" world, what we experience should be. Self is our preferences, what we would like to experience, not the experience itself. We spend our energy combating how things are and trying to impose our will on everything. Being unaware of the operation of self is, I believe, the idolatry monotheisms inveigh against. Thou shalt have no other gods but me. Modern-day followers of the great monotheistic faiths have lost the gist of the teachings of the founding teachers of their tradition. They have created God out of their preferences and beliefs and anybody who sees differently are wrong. Their God is what they believe reality is, not what reality is but what their belief construes as being ultimately real. Instead of leading them to see what is real religions lead them to superstition, that is, something added unto what is real.

The real is simple, utterly and murderously simple. It is beyond the drama we complain about but keep on creating by responding to the world of circumstances as though it was real instead of this world being the illusion created by self. Self is our history of experiences of success and failure. What brought us pleasurable consequences becomes enshrined as absolute, unchanging, the eternal rather than product of a particular moment. We see the infinite in a ridiculous detail of deluded living.

Human beings believe themselves very powerful indeed. They even affect global weather, forgetting that they don't drive the weather. The weather is governed by forces inherent in itself. Describing the phenomenon is not the same as identifying how that phenomenon arises and goes away again. We are responsible for only this much: what we think, what we say, what we do. To think we are responsible might mean we control the energy we put out into the world but thinking upon this we might realize we don't really choose. We think, speak and do what Self directs us to do. Our doing is just the doing of Self. Where is the choice? To be enlightened is to be free to choose how we respond to what is real. First we have to see through the machinations of the self. Once we see how self makes us see things, what we call the subjective or experience, we can then be free to be like the clouds or rain or sunshine or the flowing stream. The marvel is not that a man can walk on water but that water yields when something heavier than itself is set upon it, gravity being operational.

Back to Frank and Audrey. We can continue to act in the way we think or feel others would like us to act and we are simply living out our stories. The story we want others to recognize as who we are is powerless in the face of nature and its laws. It is something "extra," as Zen teachers teach. Practice is to see past the extras we build into life, the drama to which we are addicted, that we become one again with the totality beyond our projections and imaginations. Art is something else. When genuinely art, it appears to add strokes to the illusion but its effect is the opposite. We transcend self and perhaps momentarily live in the real, in the essential, in the infinite truth of what is real. What is real is beyond what we have experienced, beyond what we can experience if experience is what the self lives. Buddhists talk about samsara, spinning wheels that give us a sense of being active and busy with living. When we see what is real we see the inconsequence of spinning wheels. We talk less, act less when we see how mindlessly yielding to self just adds to the drama we want to escape from. It is not life we want to escape but the delusions that again and again we seek to impose on an impersonal universe that is deaf and blind to what we want.

Freedom from the extra imposed on reality by our measly self we might gain the awe that life seen clearly brings about, the same wonder that stirred a Buddha or Jesus, maybe even Mohammed, into changing the Mecca of their existence and pointing their effort instead to what is real.

As we go into each situation let us remember to act knowingly. Let us remember to bring into each situation what we want to bring into each situation. Do we want to sow enmity and differences? Do we want to sow harmony and impeccability? Do we want to bring kindness or generosity or gratitude or wonder or joy? Someday we may want to examine the very values we say we live our lives by and see which are true, bound not by our tiny lives but transcending our laughable wisdom that we live harmoniously with ourselves. Until then let our values guide our conduct, shape our contribution to every human circumstance, remembering to eschw idolatry, worshipping the Self.

---

[1] For an example of how a Hindu teacher teaches this aphorism, see http://www.saibaba.ws/articles/fromtheunreal.htm

All This and Heaven, Too!

I was walking to the car intent only on getting out of the heat again when I saw my neighbor, Kelley, leisurely watering and deadheading his border. We exchanged pleasantries and the topic quickly devolved into the hot, humid weather.

"I love it!" Kelley said.

"This heat, this humidity? Even walking is a struggle!"

"When it's summer I want to feel summer," Kelley explained.

In the evening, he sits on his deck looking out on the lake. "Maybe I won't enjoy it as much if a pleasant breeze did not blow in from the lake. I've seen owls flying by with their prey in their beaks. One time I saw a hawk fly so low I felt the air stirred by its wings."

After saying goodbye, I hurried on into the refuge of my air-conditioned car. Kelley's words kept echoing in my head. He's right. We should be so lucky. Our senses are intact and we can feel life on our skin, our eyes, and our ears, an ever-changing cornucopia of sensations we take so for granted.

Kelley's words finally hit me today. I stopped at the community beach when I saw this pontoon boat moored in the lake. Oceans and seas are what I dream about when I think of water but this tiny bucket of water, this little backyard lake, is as pleasant to the senses, and imminently here now.

Some people have the natural knack for enjoying the physical world. They glory in their bodies. Some of us, like me, spend our lives in our minds. There is no dichotomy here but shouldn't I enjoy the body, too, as I enjoy the mind? Summer gives precedence to bodily experience. The sun, the heat, the scarce and precious breeze, the laboring breath as we walk briskly through soupy air: instead of fighting off the sensations we can glory in it.

Five times a day Muslim imams invite other Muslims to acknowledge the glory of the one God. God is all this, and heaven, too.

This Morning's Practice

This morning’s practice involved additional readings from Meditations from the Tantras, a collection of essays centered around the teachings of the Dashnami sannyasin, Swami Satyananda Saraswati. Preceding the core of the book, a collection of specific meditation techniques taught by the swami, were essays introducing the teachings at the Bihar School of Yoga that he founded in 1964. Satyananda was a student of Sivananda whose books I have enjoyed through the years. This book on tantric meditations is more recent than Sivananda's books although it was published in 1983. Its teachings are decidedly more ecumenical, including in its broad statements about the efficacy of technique all the major religious traditions of mind-cultivating practices like Christian mysticism and Zen.

My practice is largely founded on the Theravadin scriptural and oral traditions. The bulk of my study has focused on the various Buddhist schools in Asia, and more recently, the translations and commentaries by European and American scholars. My work in yoga has been largely based on Patanjali's synthesis and teachings from Thakor Patel, a disciple of Shri Kripalvanandji. Satyananda's book blurs the distinction between Buddhist and Yogic teachings. The book proposes an end goal of practice not dissimilar from what Buddhism teaches: the elimination of ignorance. Ignorance, as also taught in Buddhism, is ignorance of who or what we are and the profound ramifications this has on how we perceive and live life.

In describing "the experience of dhyana," Satyananda waxes poetical: "Life becomes so joyful so that it needs no ambition, no justification, no reason: it is sufficient just to be."

Manuals of style recommend that the writer avoid hyperbole. To make statements of exaggerated truth makes the whole work suspect. Ordinary life is imminently ordinary. Only in poetry is hyperbolic sweetness condoned. Perhaps only in poetry and in what to me is a similar state, the experience of the sacred, do our minds shift from immersion in the ordinary to be torn free to experience a fuller, more vivid reality unhindered by rationality and intellectuality. Bach's music is intellectually mathematical and perfect but its real impact comes when we forget the architectural construction of the pieces and lose ourselves in the music itself. Living the music is a different function of mind. Dhyana is understood as approaching the limits of mind itself. When consciousness breaks out of the confinement of mind, subject and object become identical. In that union is unlimited space and time, both aspects of experience dissolving into the simplest terms.

I remember a Japanese Zen monk at Barre when I was there to study the elements of Pali. The monk was not in his robes but had not yet given them up. He was seeking a way to return the robes, gifts of a community he was no longer in touch with. He described why he was not sure he wanted to pursue the practice. In his meditation practice, he felt he was losing himself and that was sheer terror.

The majesty of freedom is an amalgamation of all the possible emotions a human being experiences. Like flour, yeast, salt and water, they unite into a common substance, dough, although this metaphor too is flawed. Substance exists when there is someone outside substance that apprehends it. The agent that apprehends is what we refer to in ordinary, unenlightened life as "I". The concept is so ubiquitous that we don't see "I" anymore. We become absorbed in the delusion. This is ordinarily what we call being practical.

Satyananda writes that someone who touches and lives in the nameless still operates in the world of forms. There just is no longer identification with the forms. The forms, whether self or other, are shapes of eternity passing like the shadows of numberless days, numberless years, centuries and aeons beyond count.

Food in the Early Western Christian Monastic Tradition

When we strip our needs down to the barest minimum, there are only two things necessary for life: oxygenated air and food. Unless you dove below the ocean or flew above the troposphere five to ten miles above the earth's surface, oxygen is abundant and free. Food is ultimately what human beings labor for, according to Jewish scriptures, as price for their disobedience. Everything else is extra.

No wonder then that food is at the heart of most if not all religious traditions. St. Benedict in his famous Rule that most Western Christian monastics follow devoted several chapters to food and how the monks took it. Chapter 39 deals with the apportionment of food, chapter 40 with drink. The saint recommended two cooked dishes at each meal so monks had a choice. There were two meals a day, at the sixth hour (noon) and the ninth hour (three in the afternoon). Each monk was allotted a pound of bread a day regardless of whether the monks have one or two meals. This was long before Dr. Robert Atkins. Recognizing that individuals had differing needs for the amount of food, St. Benedict did not specify amounts for the rest of the meal. In the summer, when vegetables and fruits are available he recommended a third dish of these fresh produce. In earlier times, monks grew their own vegetables and fruits. He also made allowances for the elderly, the sick, and those who worked harder than usual that day. The flesh of "four-footed" animals was reserved only for the sick.

The saint wrote his Rule at a time when it was safer to drink wine than to drink water. He would probably have prohibited wine but decided his monks would not accept this so he suggested wine intake be limited to 1/4 liter or 8 ounces a day, again with allowances at the abbot's discretion for the sick and those who performed unusually demanding physical labor that day. Vespers were scheduled to allow for meals to be finished in daylight. All monks took turns at kitchen duty and waiting on each other.

At Lent, monks were enjoined to observe the 40 days by depriving themselves of usual comforts or adding special activities like more prayers or fasting. The monks submit their intended observance to the abbot who approves or modifies the list based on his knowledge of the monk to avoid "presumption and vainglory." In his concise Rule, St. Benedict shows prescience and common sense, regulating only what needs regulating, and he recognized the importance of food as well as abstinence from food.

What we know about St. Benedict is largely from his biography written by Gregory the Great who before he became pope himself followed the Rule as a monk. Gregory praised the Rule for its "discretion and clarity of language." I think we could all learn from this sixth century saint and teacher of men (and, later, women) that our lives in the 21st century become once more moderate and healthy.

An Uncommon Commodity

"Fasting had made me more alert and more appreciative of the richness around me. I began to comprehend the sense of life anew, more intensely. This sense is an increasingly rare commodity nowadays, because the sense of the Holy, of things that are completely different, of the profoundly secret, has gradually become lost."

Bernhard Müller, Fasting in the Monastery

The early Christians fled to the desert where they confronted themselves. They called demons those features of the mind that even today, maybe more so today, tempt us to immoderation and thoughtlessness. Distinguishing themselves from other Jews, they set aside Tuesdays and Fridays as fast days (Jews fasted on Mondays and Thursdays) to remind them of the passion of their rabbi, Yeshua (Iesous in Greek, pronounced YAY-sus), that began on Good Friday.

When we're fasting, the mind becomes clear as if a giant vacuum cleaner had sucked every detail from the sky—clouds, vestigial moon, flying geese—to leave it an empty blue hemisphere above. When we do see ourselves in this dwarfing landscape, we're as ants, insignificant specks on the vastness of timeless space.

In this vast panorama, we are not the center or point of reference. We see how puny our desires are, how utterly silly our pretensions to power and importance.

No longer the center of being, everything becomes transmogrified, luminous and fresh. We're back in the garden before we took things into our own hands and lost the primal vision. In the garden, every thing is new, pure and essential. There is nothing here extraneous or unnecessary, and every thing is good.

We need to regain this vision of Paradise. All too often we are lost in our own world of thoughts and images, in the project-management attitude we learn early in life. Purpose is great. It pools our resources and directs these towards creation. After a while we forget the true nature of creation. We begin to believe we make things happen, all by ourselves, by our own resources and strength. We forget the deep roots that connect us to worlds of being so vast and empty they boggle the mind. We lose this sense of bogglement. Instead we become comfortable seeing the world from our tiny speck of a reference. Fasting restores us to the whole shebang.

And in the whole shebang, everything we see is replete with light. We can even see death and life, not as tragic events we seek to ignore but as natural punctuation marks in a timeless, endless statement that being is. Each time, our sense of ownership loosens somewhat. We see as gods do, the whole panoply of human sadness and joys laid below us like a model train loop, or the valley below when we reach the summit of high mountains.