Written during a solo retreat.
In the practice of the Dharma it becomes essential to understand that within the everyday lies the Great Joy. It is not that Joy is elsewhere nor that it has to be laboriously worked for. It is not that one is worthless, undeserving, wicked and hence unable to discover it Dharma Joy itself lies within the everyday.
Why then are we so normally cast down, anxious, restless or depressed, entertaining the notion that the practice of Buddhism is either out of reach, requires more than one has to offer or downright incomprehensible?
The answer lies in the fact that we have to wake up to that which underlies our negative preoccupations, doubts and failures. We see the state of the world and want to help, to bring about some positive change. Yet, in these days when there is no prevailing idealism except material advancement on offer, when Marxism and Socialism, the great creeds, have failed, when all external paths are seen as fraudulent, we often do not know in what direction to turn. The multiple alternatives of this age of post-modern relativism all seem relatively cheap, sentimental or superstitious, lacking anchorage in a firm sea-bed.
Abandoning all we might rush off to Somalia, Angola, Sarajevo Calcutta or even Belfast, filled with a zeal for do-gooding. And indeed those who rescue the afflicted in Bosnia or prevent the slaughter of a whale do achieve something. Activism is truly important. Yet afterwards nothing pivotal has changed. It all goes on again. Where next? Are politicians really as powerless and as characterless as they seem? And the junkmail of endless appeals from charities lacking the aid of any official compassion continue to pour through our letter boxes as if we personally were responsible. And indeed, collectively, perhaps we are - because who else can be?
No wonder we are cast down. The problem lies in the fact that all of us are sleepwalking within the materialist ethos and individual isolationism of our time. There are precious few alert enough to awaken us. We have to do it for ourselves.
For the moment then leave the world as it is; its cares as they are. When you are awake you will find out what to do. Only wake up. First things first. The actions of a sleepwalker rarely achieve anything.
What then is this awakening? Words will not do it for you. Direct investigation can.
Dharma Joy lies within our own mind's heart in the extent to which we can set aside wanting something else, something other. We want something else out of a feeling that we are incomplete; like a shadow seeking its substance or a lonely ghost in quest of a companion on an uninhabited planet In our ghost towns there is nobody there. There is the endless ache for a love that will fill the hole in the centre of being. Yet those who themselves lack the surety of inner love cannot fill the holes in others. illusory romance only discloses the unsatisfactoriness of a companion which equals ones own for him or her. There is no inner completion, there is the ache after it.
Are you a ghost or a vibrant embodied being, a sentience? Do you feel your presence inthe world now, here from moment to moment, a validated reality, a presence - or an absence? Presence in the world is not knowing about the world, having one's mind in the office already as one drives to work, absenting oneself from the Now. Presence in the world begins with presence in the body.
The Buddha himself had to make this discovery and he put it forward as a prime method. Mindfulness of the body as the body, in the direct apprehension of embodiedness as being the body is the start. Mindfulness means investigation not passivity: asking what is my experience of this body now and taking time to go into it, to bring it into a moment by moment continuing presence.
The method of watching the breath takes one into the body and in this practice you go on to investigate the arising of sensations, perceptions, cognitions and the prejudiced attitudes of the mind in just the same way. In the end you investigate consciousness itself and find it tainted by all that has gone before, the sensations, cognitions, prejudices. Consciousness is coloured by what goes on in these processes for we identify it as the basis that sustains them in awareness.
The practise of mindfulness acts by focusing attention on these realms, shifting it away from the anxious split between what you are and what you might be, where you are in life and where you might be, whether you are good or bad, beautiful or ugly, the endless dualities, and brings you to where you quite undeniably are. In the body there is no duality but rather the immediacy of actual unsplit being.
And strangely where you find yourself to be lies within an experiential continuum that has no boundaries because there are no horizons to the space within which the body, the sensations, the cognitions become objects of awareness. The bare consciousness within which you are aware, indeed which is itself awareness, contains all that which is present yet is in itself boundless and untrapped. As you relax your hold on the body, the sensation, or a thought, and slip into this experiential space you find a felt vastness which like a mirror contains all and yet stands itself in a different dimension. Indeed this awareness remains an inference for the mirror cannot know itself except within the conscious act of reflection - for this is indeed all that it is. Yet the basis of mind, this Rigpa of the Tibetans is more than a mirror. This awareness is a dynamic vastness, a depth and not a mere surface. As Hui-neng said, "There is no mirror bright, Upon what can the dust alight?"
Indeed the dust of our thoughts and preoccupations simply float in this inner vastness like clouds in the sky. The essential thing is to place one's sentience in the sky itself and experience the clouds from there -and not the other way about. Being sky-borne the view is vast and clouds evaporate and reform as situations change. The vastness goes on for ever. If you look at a thought from within this vastness the thought evaporates - its apparent thing-ness just disappears, it self liberates into inner space. As they say in Dzogchen; a thought is like writing on water - as soon as the sign is made it spreads out into nothing. This is self liberation like evaporating clouds or melting snowmen.
If you let the meditative attention widen to include the presence of the room, the town, the countryside, the sounds of everyday, these too are at first reflected and then self-liberate into vastness. Here then is freedom. The prison cell becomes the liberating cell of the hermit And because there is freedom from any wanting, all being complete, a joy arises, an untrammelled joyousness which shines like a lamp in ones being.
After meditation you return to the tasks of everyday life, willingly operating dualistically as you and yours in the world of them and theirs. This is the natural mode of samsara, of becoming, the mode whereby needs are met, needs for warmth, food, adequacies of comfort and relationship. It is the mode of activism.
The Chan practitioner who trains with persistence can find within this everyday dualism the inner freedom that meditation discloses. It remains then as a basis, a unity, that divides only functionally not essentially. To get things done there is land mine and you and yours. Outside and inside of that there is the experiential continuum, the vastness, the matrix of self liberation.
Our pain stems mightily from the illusion that the split mind is natural, that it has no other depth, that it is an inevitable condition of being bound by time and impermanence. This is not so. A mind lost in duality is drugged, ignorant, asleep, unaware of its basic continuum. The task is to awaken again and again to the joyous spaciousness that lies within.
In the habitual dualism of the illusory everyday you may well feel scepticism and doubt. The Buddha understood that and did not make an assertion precluding your consent. Try it for yourself was always his message. And this must be ours too whenever we are quizzed about these goings on. The uncovering of vastness is in itself enlightening for this is the light of the -mind. Do not waste time for the world is waiting.
