I’d like you to contemplate one of the most important words in Zen practice.
Aspiration.
This word evokes a possibility for something beyond what is now. This is often expressed as desire or longing.
What is it that we are seeking?
Some people I have worked with seek the truth. Some seek peace; others, enlightenment, love, union, realization. Sometimes, we don’t know what we are seeking, but we are drawn to something greater than ourselves. It is hard to express this desire with a word because words are inadequate. But the feeling of yearning or longing is unmistakable.
When did you become a seeker? What were the circumstances? Have things changed since you began your search? What have you found? How is your seeking different now than some years ago?
A friend of mine, who was working in the film industry in Los Angeles, was driving down the freeway when she suddenly realized she had no idea who she was. That prompted a spiritual question: "Who am I?"
This is the fundamental question posed by the great Indian saint, Ramana Maharshi This question is basic to Zen; for instance, when Bodhidharma visits Emperor Wu. The emperor asks, "Who are you?" And Bodhidharma answers, "Don’t know."
His "Don’t know" is different than the one my friend encountered. Hers occurred at the beginning of her quest, and Bodhidharma’s was a result of a lifetime of practice.
Some people start their spiritual search because they are suffering intensely; they want to find a way to end or to answer for suffering. This the Buddha’s initial motivation. He was the son of privilege, growing up in a palace surrounded by material wealth, and every form of pleasure. But when he ventured out beyond the walls of the palace, he encountered a very sick person, a very old, decrepit person, and a corpse., and lastly, a wandering bikku. As soon as he witnessed the more disturbing side of human existence, he felt compelled to leave the comfort of the palace for good and to follow the path of the seeker.. He ventured beyond his known reality into the wilderness of the spiritual search.
Some people, like Michael Murphy, the co-founder of the Esalen Institute, began their quest after experiencing what he describes as a "hinge moment" in meditation. He dropped out of the pre-med program at Stanford with a new vision for the purpose of his life. Another friend of mine began to seriously practice meditation after one too many nights of hard drinking. It was also a hinge moment, but of a different kind.
Our desire to awaken or to discover truth is very particular to our life, and it has unique qualities and detail. The personal is one dimension of our experience. Another dimension of our experience is that this profound desire, this longing, is an attribute of enlightenment itself. In other words, enlightenment seeks itself.
Intrinsic to who we are as living beings is a deep yearning to know our original nature, who and what we are beyond form and condition. And at the same time, there is a deep yearning, an almost paradoxical yearning, to manifest in form and within our unique situation. This paired yearning, this desire to know the unformed and manifest it in form seems intrinsic to the unfolding of the universe. For we are not other than the universe, we are only a manifestation of it, both in our yearning and our form. Scientists say that the universe has been evolving for 13.7 billion years. Ken Wilber reminds us that it has evolved from quarks to atoms to molecules to cells and livng organisms. Emerging from nothing, each advance of the nervous system, comes greater and greater complexity, and that complexity in form carries more consciousness. So human beings are participating in the awakening of the universe to itself.
A beautiful way to think about aspiration is to remember, each time you sit on your cushion, that your desire to awaken, and your desire to express that awakening, to discover more of who you really are, is an expression of the universe at work, identifying itself through you. It’s not just you coming to the cushion; it is the universe coming to reflect on itself through you—the impulse of evolution. All of life, in fact, is moving because of desire; all creatures co-create through the experience of desire. It is a non-personal force with which you can join as an expression of the universe unfolding and getting to know itself.When we honor our intention, or desire, rather than personalizing it, we can experience it as an attribute of life itself. So in practice, we sit both as complete fulfillment and complete desire.
Yesterday, I sat next to the geraniums on the windowsill in my kitchen.They were an expression of what we are talking about because they are awake, they are present, they are naturally fulfilled. They are drawn toward the sun, not because of a personal impulse to be happy, but because the life in them is drawn naturally toward that which is light; they are reaching out, they are being pulled toward the sun. That is their nature because they are part of the life force itself. So when we surrender our personal ideas about desire, we can join with that universal life force.
The Buddha said have few desires, but have great ones. Have the same desire as the universe.
 Voice Dialogue Practice: Exploring Desire
Diane Musho Hamilton: Let’s engage in the Big Mind process for a moment. Identify with desire and free it of any object—the desire for money or sex or enlightenment. This is desire in its purest, most powerful form.
Student: I am unbridled energy. I am free to go in any direction that I choose, and I don’t have to agonize over that direction because I know I can turn on a dime, and I am not denying myself in doing that and wronging myself. I am free to explore wherever I want to go.
Diane: Notice that as desire, your job is not to be fulfilled; your job is to keep moving, to keep evolving; your job is to reach forward, and expand and change.
Student: Without an object—that really changes the quality of my desire. At first I was going into intellectual analysis. And then I was just sitting in my room, feeling this insatiable energy. I guess this is the impulse to become better, to expand.
Diane: On the one hand, we are instructued to wish to become enlightened and raise Bodhi-mind; or to invigorate our desire for enlightenment in order to fuel our path. On the other hand, we are told to practice without gaining an idea, without wanting something, to just sit as we are. This is the paradox that we have to navigate in our practice. By relaxing into the present and feeling the energy that is here, we can experience both pure desire and utter fulfillment. Dogen Zenji said raising the Bodhi-mind constitutes half the way; practice, the other half. As we sit with this intense desire, if we can let go of our ideas about it which are limiting, that quality of longing will bring us to the posture itself, invigorating our sitting.
Student: You have to trust the desire.
Diane: Yes, it takes a tremendous amount of trust because our lives, this planet, this universe are such a crazy mystery. This longing to awaken is a mystery. To trust in this desire is to trust in the practice itself, as opposed to pinning it down so you can be a better person. Let yourself become one with that particular energy.
It is not easy, because the moment there is an aspiration, resistance arises because you are committing to something. We don’t have to take the voice of resistance personally since resistance is also a property in the universe, and we should prepare ourselves to experience it.
Student: To experience desire without an object, to just rest in presence feels like mounting a horse that will never stop galloping. There is this fear that it will never give me peace. It will never let me rest. And yet, as I gaze out the window, in the distance I see a 250-million-year-old wall of sandstone. Slowly it is eroding, and the wind is blowing ferociously. If I rest like the sandstone, I won’t have to ride the wind forever. Buddha said the only constant is change; resting in an object of desire makes that change seem less relentless. And yet there is always this leaving behind whatever you are in the moment. It’s emotional.
Diane: In the tradition, we talk about great faith and great doubt and great effort so that we can learn to trust in our life. We can position our life not only in our personal experience, but also in the human experience, the biological experience, and the cosmic experience. There are so many dimensions beyond the personal. And yet everyone I know in this practice, including myself, has gone through long periods of alienation, doubt, estrangement.
Student: Great doubt is, I think, doubting every solution you come up with; every answer you arrive at is a stuckness. As Buddha said, everything is change so as soon as I reach a resolution, I reach a stuckness. My practice is a universal solvent.
Student: As I seek, there is this desire to seek, then the desire to ruminate or reflect. Sometimes I feel like I am in the middle of those two voices.
Diane: Identify for just a moment with non-seeking mind, the mind that is not searching. What do you notice?
Student: I’m just sitting, which is completely receptive. Openness to doubt as it comes up, openness to desire, and just it letting go. Here and now, this...
Diane: Now identify with desire and non-seeking simultaneously. Eckhart Tolle talks about the person who became enlightened while watching a cat watching a mouse hole—the desire and satisfaction of focused attention in the present.
Student: Everything is open. I’m just blossoming into my true nature.
Diane: We have no idea where we are headed. In one dimension of experience we are completely at home with impermanence; in another, we are excited and stirred up. This is a mature response. We can rest with the peace, and the feel joy in the dynamism. Andrew Cohen has said that when consciousness becomes aware of its desire to evolve, the excitement is overwhelming and persistent.
Student: I get this picture of myself almost like one of Alex Grey’s pictures or paintings of light. Energy is just going out to the universe, connecting with the universe, both coming in and going out. Like exhilaration, it is a fuel.
Diane: In Zen practice, we work to liberate the self because the self is the limit that we put on our capacity to connect to the free energy and fulfillment of the Kosmos itself.
Student: I feel like a coiled muscle that is ready to jump or ready to leap, but there is nothing necessarily to bounce at.
Student: I went right to the energy of the Big Bang—not just the outward expansion. I was on the edge of the wave.
Diane: Then contemplate your commitment to realize yourself as the Kosmos. At what scale does your commitment lie? Is it personal? Social? Evolutionary? Kosmic? The word in Japanese for vow is nembutsu. We are committed to our aspiration. We choose to take part in the evolutionary process, and in the desire of the Kosmos to come into form, to evolve, and to know and express itself. We are form and formlessness, we are empty and poised to express ourselves. We die even as we are constantly reborn. Our creativity depends on our intimacy with dissolution; and our ultimate fulfillment is recognition of our emptiness.
+POST A COMMENT
Images: Expression and First Memories by Pamela Sukhum [+view gallery] |
