Waking up and Growing up

“Each of you is perfect the way you are ... and you can use a little improvement.”

― Shunryu Suzuki

To me this quote neatly encapsulates the two main features of the spiritual path: getting in touch with our essential spiritual nature, and maturing into a less egocentric, wiser and more compassionate person. While our deepest refuge is eternal, immediate and unchangeable, our human nature is very much a work in progress. I am a great believer in the view that there is no one place where we arrive in the spiritual life, and then we are done; to think otherwise is to be the victim of a sort of spiritual pride or perfectionism.

Waking Up

Waking up - or enlightenment - is a term widely used throughout the spiritual world, and it clearly means different things depending on the context and tradition. To one person, it might mean waking up to the gospel of Jesus Christ, to another, the "truth" of secular and scientific life, that there is no God. In this blog, we support everyone in their understanding of their "Higher Power" as they understand it. In the Tibetan Buddhist tradition that will be particularly guiding us in this blog, this reality is known as "nature of mind", that is to say, our normal and everyday consciousnesses holds depths and connections that we can gradually get in touch with through practice.

Importantly, this is an experiential approach to our deepest nature, though the teachings point in its direction, its existence not being a matter of faith alone. Or to put it another way, we will need a little faith in the path as we commit to devoting time and practice to what it suggests, but the expectation and hope is that at some point what is talked about will be directly revealed to us. The Buddha himself tells us to find out for ourselves, and not to take anything he says purely on trust, which can be a relief to those of us who have grown up with a somewhat more "scientific" viewpoint, which can make it hard to take on faith anything as important as this without evidence.

So what is this higher nature of the Buddhists (or of some schools at any rate)? Our term "nature of mind" is a good place to start. This sounds like what one of my old meditation teachers called a "highfalutin" word, but actually, it simply means awareness, or consciousness. Yes, according to this tradition, who we are, what we are made of, is at bottom consciousness itself. It is not awareness in the form of a personal God, fundamentally separate from us, but amazingly, the very same awareness reading these words right now, the awareness we all share. More specifically, Empty awareness, which means that objects and people are not ultimately separate from each other in the way they generally appear to us.

Getting in touch with this depth of our being is said to promote lasting peace and inner freedom, and the deeper we go, the closer and more intimate we become with ourselves and the world itself. Our previous sense of isolation and being cut off from the universe, as it feels like at times, can itself begin to seem like an illusion.

A more generic term for nature of mind that has become popular in recent years, is the word nonduality: from the Nonduality Institute comes this definition "Nonduality is understood as the realization of a very subtle, non-conceptual, unbounded consciousness that is experienced as the essence of one’s own being and of all life." Another popular view of this approach is that in some way, everything is One.

One of the appealing things about this unity of consciousness, is that it is not just applicable as a philosophical description of the Buddhist view, but also of reported religious experience over many times and places, from various schools of Hinduism, to Christian, Sufi and Jewish mystics. This is not to say this proves it, or that this is the only reality, but that its pervasiveness in human history gives credence to its possibility for you and I; perhaps we don't need to be on a Himalayan mountaintop to have such an experience.

The danger of a discussion such as this and the words nature of mind and nonduality, is that it can reify these concepts, making them into something solid and separate from us that we might be able to grasp and hold on to, that we "have" (or not), when in fact, our true nature is 100% opposite to this. Its realization is much more about letting go of grasping and seeking, and relaxing into what is already here.

If you feel pulled towards what is being described here, the best advice I can give is to find a spiritual path along these lines and then spend time practicing what it requires. The spiritual teacher Jack Kornfield, speaks of finding a "path with heart," and its a good idea to do one's research into a genuine nondual spiritual path, but once you've decided on one, to give it some time.

There are some groups listed under the "Meditation" tab that I know directly, so have a look there, but of course there are many others.

Growing Up

Though by no means guaranteed, with practice many spiritual aspirants report wonderful, liberating experiences of openness, spaciousness and freedom, such as discussed above, where they feel that have finally found what they were looking for; and then the next day, the old patterns reassert themselves again and again, which can be quite discouraging!

One way of looking at the "Growing Up" part of spiritual work, then, is integrating these experiences into everyday life. This usually means coming to grips with our long standing patterns and habits (such as anxiety and addiction), which very often do not take kindly to the possibility of being dislodged. Sadly, we have all heard stories of gurus and teachers of various kinds, including Buddhists of apparent attainment, who behave badly around their students. This tells us that this phase of the work is not automatic, it is a lifetime's work, and maybe beyond.

One of the most effective ways of approaching this issue, is what has been called in Tibetan Buddhism, "making the obstacle the path." In other words, if we get back from a retreat or period of meditation feeling open, peaceful and content, and the next day we wake up irritable and anxious, we don't regard this as a mistake, and berate ourselves. Instead, we try to take an inner step back, and observe what is happening as objectively and without judgement as possible; or what is more likely, observing our judgements as they arise, without judging them. After all, this is the truth of what is happening to you in that moment, and a good deal of suffering arises from resisting what is arising.

Instead of either avoiding the discomfort, such as via an addiction, or acting out the feelings, such as with anger or leaving a place of social anxiety, we stay with the experience, curious and with as much kindness as we can muster.

Bit by bit, we can learn to tolerate, and even befriend inner experiences that previously baffled us, ranging from shame to anger to anxiety, which then allows us to see that they invariably come and go, and that perhaps we don't necessarily need to do anything about them, treating it all like a sort of internal weather, that we may have an opinion about but which we may not have much choice over, and which will come and go on its own if allowed to do so.

This is a sort of internal exposure practice, if you will, because as we learn to stay with everything that arises and falls away without avoiding or acting out, we realize that our true identity, our true nature, is the calm center that observes it all, and we need not become destabilized and pulled and pushed about so much by difficult thoughts and feelings.

But this needs time and patience, which while not immediately attractive to the addict in us, turns out to be a great ally and support to us in life, especially when addressing internal demands for instant relief and gratification.

And along with learning to stay mindful of whatever is arising, and not leaving ourselves, we can inquire into the more deeply held patterns. I will devote a blog post to how to inquire in the future, and this can be a great complement to learning to stay with our experience, as we learn to understand the origin and nature of a particular pattern or belief. In this sense the work is a bit more psycho-therapeutic, though the intention in this context is more spiritual, in that we are principally trying to understand and minimize obstacles to being present in our true nature, who we really are.

Tibetan Buddhist texts read aloud