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.

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