The most important understanding for a lay Buddhist is the immediate availability of awakening. Awakening need not arrive after a long, protracted practice history unless we believe that this is necessary. We deliberately delay our readiness because we are divided about what we really want. We practice until we are tired of preparing for what … Continued
A third way we can inhibit a lay approach to spiritual fulfillment is by investing the sacred within particular practices and conditions.
When we invest the sacred into specific conditions, we only feel spiritual when we are having those experiences. The rest of life goes spiritually unnoticed.
Spiritual forms and rituals can be very helpful in focusing our intention and providing a doorway to the sacredness of all life. They can awaken a sensitivity of heart and allow our mind to quiet. Forms and rituals become a problem when they stop representing a gateway into oneself and become an exclusive presentation of … Continued
As a teaching, the objective of the Eightfold Path is to bring the entire body and mind into a natural relationship with all things. Each step of the path is meant to see through the deceptions of the mind and reveal the inherent unity beneath. Each step is a hologram of all the other steps … Continued
Mindfulness eventually becomes redefined through nondoing and relaxation, and nondoing validates everything. When our ambition toward promoting our mindfulness has ceased, we begin to rest in what is naturally available. Mindfulness effortlessly moves into an abiding awareness, which maintains itself in our absence.
Discerning the difference between thinking about something and directly experiencing it is the function of samadhi. Through the quiet, abiding attention of samadhi, we see clearly how the self comes into being through the commentary we infuse and the narrative we create.
All of this presupposes the basic Buddhist teaching and truth of anatta. This concept is at the heart of the Eightfold Path and will be explored thoroughly in the next chapter. Learning anatta intellectually is not the point; anatta is to be realized, ingested, and completely integrated into every facet of our life. The spiritual … Continued
There is the story of a man who goes to the Buddha and asks him, “If each separate sense-door (smelling, seeing, tasting, etc.) does not connect to the other, what holds all the senses in a single body?” The Buddha replies, “The mind holds all the senses.” All the senses arrive into the mind and … Continued
When pure perception is forced into an exact definition by confining it to a word (in this case, “robin”), the sense-of-self arises in that moment. The sense-of-self and the word are mutually dependent upon one another, but it feels as if “I am experiencing a robin.” More specifically, the self arises with the knowledge that … Continued
The sacred dawns when we realize this wordless sound, sight, smell, taste, or touch is a conduit to the limitless, vast, and mysterious unconditioned. The word conditions one thing to be known and distinguished from another, but when left wordless all things assume their natural order and open beyond themselves into an inexplicable union. The … Continued
A unique balance is maintained by fully allowing both the word and the wordless. If either is given undue weight, the world becomes skewed and dualistic. Once isolated from one another, each operates from a different set of principles. Now the sense-of-self formed by the word must work hard to discover the wordless. These contrasting … Continued
Clinging separates the universe into two distinct dimensions. Playing out our needs and wants keeps us from looking up and acknowledging the ever-present vertical plane that has no agenda. When we become weary of the greed and loss of the horizontal, we begin to search for another universe. The journey begins by owning the pain … Continued
When we try to get over an experience, ponder our salvation, or take the sense-of-self as being anything more than a persistent thought, we are assuming the truth of our separation. But assuming the truth of separation is the cause of separation. If we question that truth rather than assert it, we will rediscover the … Continued
The Eightfold Path is a path of least resistance. It is not about welding or forcing things together but relaxing, observing, and allowing what is already here to be together. All our strategies and tools can be governed by one simple fact: the more resistance we apply to the problem, the more we allow the … Continued
We cannot expect a wrong set of assumptions to lead in a wise direction. The Buddha spent six years as an ascetic monk practicing in an unskillful direction, and corrected his orientation in a single moment of Wise View. The message of the Buddha is not that we have lifetimes of labor to correct our … Continued
If we reverse this figure/ ground, a shift occurs. Now allow awareness to have the experience of being “you.” “You” are being held within awareness. Awareness is not inside you looking out, but rather it is both inside and outside equally. The sense-of-you is one experience among many within awareness. Awareness is not under your … Continued
Having a problem actually defines the self and keeps it occupied within the noble goal of problem solving. The question of “how” is an attempt around a problem; it is not seeing what a problem actually is. It is taking the problem to be real and outside “me,” but all problems are derived from “me.” … Continued
Skillful means are tools that orient us in the direction of the vertical, and are a means to that end.
The advantage of the term “interconnection” as a means of pointing toward Wise View is that it overcomes our need to cultivate or acquire. In the West we gather and collect as a source of strength. Having the word “interconnection” invites a release of that grasping and allows us to pause and renounce that tendency. … Continued