The Four Noble Truths: beginnings

 

This marks the beginning of a new series of posts on the Buddha, Caffè e Trieste blog. This initial offering is on the Four Noble Truths. I realised that I needed to get to grips once again with this essential Buddhist teaching and do my best to rework it into contemporary language. Initially I had intended to post a single text, but the endeavour has turned out to be greater than expected, so I will start by presenting the Four Noble Truths, and then follow up with the steps of the Eightfold path, as and when I manage to complete them.

The Four Noble Truths

The Four Noble Truths was the first teaching given by Siddhartha after he awakened/achieved enlightenment. It is the first major teaching on the Buddhist path and is found in pretty much every Buddhist school. The Four Noble Truths is a summary of the path of awakening defined in four logical, interdependent steps. They have been defined quite differently throughout time and by different schools with ramifications for how they are understood and received. The number of people for example put off by one of the original translations into English of the First Noble Truth is impressive. ‘Life is suffering’ is certainly a turn off and fails to match the life experience of the average westerner. Life is clearly not a cesspit of misery. The pleasures of life attest to this and certainly defining it in such pessimistic terms is a non-starter, unless you happen to be a full-time masochist! A more approachable yet traditional phrasing is;

1.      The truth of suffering

2.      The truth of the cause(s) of suffering

3.      The truth of the end of suffering

4.      The truth of the path leading to the cessation of suffering

As advertising for the Buddhist path, it still kind of sucks, but at least we don’t need to all start drinking heavily to dull the pain and depression that the initial phrase might have inspired. I still find this wording though to be almost clinical, academic and a little unworkable. Here’s a contemporary rewording that, in my opinion, makes the teaching more accessible ;

1.      Suffering, unsatisfactoriness, dissatisfaction, disappointment, illusion and confusion are an inescapable part of life.

2.      There is a root cause for these.

3.      There is a way to work with and eventually remove this cause.

4.      There is a practical method for doing so accessible to anyone willing to apply themselves.

Words are so important. For those who haven’t yet realised it, they are extremely powerful and suggestive symbols. We can communicate in a way that helps understanding and that stimulates opening and curiosity, or we can communicate in a way that leaves people feeling cold and uninspired. What is important in presenting such traditional and timeless teachings is stimulating understanding, and being flexible in the way we express them so that they can be opened up to the genuinely curious. A core tenet of NLP for example is that ‘the meaning of your communication is what is understood or received’ and not necessarily what you intended to say. This puts the onus on the communicator to strive to make clear what they wanted to communicate and the form should ideally match the symbolic reality in which the interlocutor exists. I shall take this tack for these blog posts and attempt to offer updated interpretations of the Four Noble Truths to make them more accessible for a westerner. Here goes.

The First Truth (Note: have removed noble. I mean who says that these days)

Life features both ups and downs that cannot be avoided. The first truth points to this. It tells us that suffering, rather than being avoided, should be acknowledged as a fundamental aspect of a human life. The word suffering usually requires further explanation. Suffering is the typical translation of Dukkha, the Pali word found in the oldest Buddhist texts for the First Truth. Often the key terms that we find in Buddhist teachings, whether they emerged from Sri Lanka, Thailand or Tibet, express a concept rather than a straight word-for-word translation. Often misunderstanding arises due to word-for-word translations from inexperienced historians and academics. John Dunne, John Peacock and Rita Gross are among those working diligently to re-examine the culture of translation and the intended meaning of central terms and themes within Buddhist teachings. This has at times led to radically different interpretations of traditional teachings and central themes. Dukkha is one such example. Dukkha was often translated as misery, pain, and suffering in the first western texts on Buddhism, although it turns out it translates much more faithfully to its Pali origins  as unsatisfactoriness. Suffering makes me think of pain and agony, and misery and despair, whereas unsatisfactoriness hints at an underlying quality in much of our less dramatic and more mundane existence.

If we are prepared to go further with these teachings, it is useful to consider the First Truth as a category of symptoms that most of us would admit to experiencing fairly often. This category includes unsatisfactoriness, dissatisfaction, frustration, disappointment, separation from what we want, separation from what makes us happy, loss, confusion, disconnection, the whole array of negative emotions and feelings, as well as a lingering sense of incompleteness. Suffering also means the inability to live life as fully as we would like.  Pain is suffering too of course, but many teachers point out that pain in the physical is simply pain, whereas the added elements of reaction to that pain and interpretation of its significance are suffering. Some of us have fairly pleasant and stable lives of course, but even the richest, healthiest individuals on the planet experience a good deal of the above. And if their wealth and health should fall apart, they too will taste some of the more gross forms of suffering that the less privileged know all too well.

Although the Four Truths emerged at a time when much of the ease of modern living was not available, when suffering was much more in your face, visceral and raw, it still remains the starting point for the Buddhist path. Why is that? This first truth points to how much of our day-to-day existence is wrapped up in trying to keep ourselves separated from unpleasant experience. The central life goal for most people after basic survival is to be happy. Happiness though turns out to be an extremely subjective experience and an extremely difficult one to hold onto. It is, like all experience, temporary by design. Because it is so we tend to feel bad and a sense of loss when separated from it. Secondly, many of us spend our lives jumping through hoops to avoid looking at the presence of suffering around us and in the wider world. We close our eyes to it all. We separate and this turns out to be a central theme in how 'Dukkha' is sustained. By starting from an honest examination of the presence of unsatisfactoriness in our lives, we slow down and begin to get in touch with a more authentic experience of being human in the world that is less based on attraction and aversion. These two beasts are the primary reactive impulses that drive our search for happiness and our urge to get away from what we dislike.

The Second Truth

There is a cause to this suffering that runs very deep within us. It is sustained by the advertising industry, by the ‘me’ culture we are still living in, by TV, films, and so on. It is wrapped up in our name, our preferences, our sense of self-importance, and self-pity, by our place in society, our relationship with meaningful others. It is also embedded in our beliefs and the way we constantly frame and conceptualise experience. The primal cause for suffering and our distorted living is the belief that we exist as separate, external individuals that we have a self, an ‘I’ that truly exists on its own terms.

What emerges out of this phantom self is the need to sustain, defend, maintain and protect this construct from the world out there. Because of this we identify with experience and take life personally. My experiences are ‘my’ experiences. We get attached in all manner of ways to our possessions, our beliefs, our ideas, our goals, our sense of values, our categories of right and wrong, to those we have around us, to our feelings, our favourite emotions, and our identity. We incessantly attach to experience a subjective meaning with a self-referenced bias. We refer everything back to ourselves and because we hold this idea that we are a fixed identity, we believe somehow, against all logic, that the world should be fixed too. In order to meet our expectations we become very attached to very specific thoughts, feelings and emotions, which have the core function of running us in circles whilst feeding the same ideas, beliefs and personal mantras to confirm our position in the world. These are all fed by desire and our lack of awareness about the nature of change.

Desire really is not the problem. It being co-opted to run the treadmill of a fixed identity is what creates the problem. Desire is just energy at the end of the day. It allows us to survive, procreate and spread our genes. The problem is we are fairly sophisticated animals and we manage to be subverted by a society built around the notion of satisfying trivial and immature wants. This is amplified by the consumerist dream of instant satisfaction being the right of each and every individual with a few quid in their pocket. So many of our values, priorities and dreams are artificial constructs inherited blindly from the society we are born into. The rest come from our families, educational experience, peers and our experiments with life. Desire feeds emotional and psychological games in the form of impulsiveness and when it becomes insatiable, desire turns into craving. That feeling of, "I’ve got to have it!" and, "I can’t live without it!"

Life is change and change is constant. How few us are really in touch with this and the fact we are ageing constantly? How few of us are extremely clear and sober of the fact we will die and that we could potentially pass away in any moment? These are the two unavoidable facts of life and yet we tend to ignore them both and avoid discussing them in any down-to-earth manner. Constant change in Buddhism is defined as impermanence. Simply put, nothing lasts. So why do we act as if it will? It's important to add that intellectually we may believe we are clear on these topics. Rationally we may convince ourselves that death is inevitable, but it's Ok we tell ourselves. We might feed ourselves the line that we should live for today and forget about tomorrow. Sure, it's a strategy you can employ. What happens though when you find you've aged and death doesn't seem so far away any more? How do you convince yourself then that your attempts at pushing reality away haven't failed? 

Death is the second socially taboo topic that Buddhism is grounded in. Because collectively we fear and avoid it, we kid ourselves with the belief that we are happier by doing so. Developing  a deep appreciation for the finite nature of life though actually makes our lives vastly richer. By working with impermanence we begin to see directly the place of change in all aspects of our lives and how thoroughly natural it is. By loosening our grip on how we want things to be, we begin to experience more fluidity and a greater capacity to let go. This is the way of non-attachment. Not detached or distant somehow, but more present, awake and embracing of experience as it is while it lasts.

The Third Truth

Dukkha may end. That’s right. The Third Truth lets us know that we can actually learn to live differently, and radically so. We can end the complex network of interdependent patterns of psychological and emotional confusion that keep us living unconsciously. It lets us know that we can recognise the first two truths in our lives and the wider world and work with them. We can gain an adequate understanding of the importance of being conscious of the presence of Dukkha in our lives and start to change the way we live both internally and externally in order to find a door to open to a new possibility. The Third Truth lets us know that we can shake off this addictive identification with experience and learn to release the attachments we have to fixed forms and ideas in order to slowly start to see things as they are. The Third Truth lets us know that loosening up our self-obsession allows us to gain a little bit of freedom from impulsive, reactive living, and the comfort of our more self-indulgent patterns. By continuing to release our dependency on habitual patterns, we gain further and further freedom and a much richer experience of pleasure and happiness. The third truth tells us that by letting go fully of the illusion of a separate, independent self, of the striving to keep change at bay, we gain enormous freedom and begin to embark on the path of awakening.

The Fourth Truth

This is traditionally written as the path that ends Dukkha. The early schools of Buddhism emphasised the Eightfold Path as the fourth truth. Later schools invented all manner of technique and some very radical approaches to freeing oneself from addictive living. On a basic level though, anything that relieves suffering is the path. Any habit that gives us freedom from bad habits and attachments is the path. Since the Buddhist path though is one of radical transformation and the completion of the Third Truth, rather than a simple taste, or occasional holiday, it offers a complete system for working with our own personal collection of suffering, and also importantly, that contribute to the suffering of others. Yes, it turns out that shitting on other people and raping the planet does affect us directly too.

To change takes time. It requires work and discipline. Most of all it requires consistency. To break a pattern means establishing a new one to take its place, at least in the earlier phases of practice. The Fourth Truth holds at its centre the practice of meditation. This is supported, fed and sustained by the way we act, speak, use intention, and work. 
It cannot be expressed enough that direct experience is what counts above all else. This is true for our own experience, relating these teachings to that experience, and for discovering the validity of much of what is written here. You must experience it for yourself. Theory, philosophy, intellectual understanding, beliefs and ideas all fall away in terms of value when compared to actually knowing the truth of your life directly.  
The next post introduces the Noble Eightfold Path and the actual practices of working with the Four Truths.

Next page: The Noble Eightfold Path: Part.1

Buddhism Meet Shamanism (pt.4) (italiano da seguire)

The Spiritual Aspect

What is spirit? Unseen force? Impulse, desire? Expansive passion? Moving beyond the limits of what is known we may discover a personal dimension of its expression present in a desire to know, and an ability to be deeply human and of service. To dissolve the boundaries that separate us from all that surrounds us in ever widening, expanding circles. Spirit is vision, illuminations through opening and questioning, perhaps found most often though by simply embracing each moment fully.

I have tried to avoid mention of spirituality in this series of blog posts. In the East this becomes  impossible as it is the actual direction of spirit and our spiritual aspect. This step of the ‘Buddhism Meet Shamanism’ series will be in part an invitation for those who are sceptical with regards to any mention of spirituality to explore the theme of non-religious spirituality. It might be an opportunity to expand the idea of what being spiritual means to those who are not sceptical. This direction requires a degree of imagination and creativity because spirit, as defined below, is very much about meeting the edge of our knowledge and experience, going beyond, and expanding our field of self-interest.

Why avoid the term spirituality? Part of the reason is because of the tendency for spirituality to be lumped together with religion and the new age, along with practices such as tarot cards and astrology. It’s not that these topics are not related to spirituality; rather they don’t need to be perceived as inseparable from one another and spirituality doesn't have to be a single all encompassing category to be avoided at all costs by the sceptic.

On this wheel the spiritual aspect exists not as a personal choice but as a fundamental aspect of every human being. Spirit is part of who we are and spirituality is a fundamental expression of our humanity. For spiritual types this is usually extremely obvious and naturally so, but what are the characteristics of this fundamental human aspect outside of any explicit religious connotations? Many prefer to be labelled as non-spiritual and if you are an atheist, what form does this spirit aspect take in your world?

According to the shamanic outlook, our spirit is an integral part of our totality. Expansion sits in the east and perhaps spirituality is simply the combination of two forces; the impulse to grow and expand, to become more than what we currently are, and the desire to know and experience what is not known. These forces are inherent in everyone and not partial to religious folk, philosophical pursuits of self-knowledge, or psychological self-enquiry. At times we subvert or deny these drives, yet perhaps any feeling of impulsive desire to do, whether it’s pursuing a career, a large family, or excellence in a hobby or sport, has within a trace of this desire. At times it gets projected onto others; we live vicariously through their attainments, whether it’s a footballer or celebrity. This happens in the world of Buddhism too when disciples bathe in the attainments of their teachers or lineage holders and never quite make the effort to achieve the same magnificent results themselves.

The enemy of the east and the desire to expand is repression. Expansion, growth and personal knowledge are traded in for security, comfort and predictability. The beliefs we establish and inherit in the north of the wheel are carried round to the east where they become the justification for stifling our imagination, creativity and ability to vision ourselves as greater than the mould our parents, society, class, etc, have granted us.

Fire is the east element. It illuminates the darkness of the unknown. Our fire, our spirit, leads us to expand and move into unknown territories not just of knowledge, but feeling and experience. It is the innate urge to discover and meet our world in all its complex majesty. To self-actualize, is to expand beyond what is currently known, and illuminate the darkness of our own ignorance and sense of disconnection and incompleteness. This necessitates the meeting of our edges, which are often designated by those fears, the need for security and reliability, and that desire for comfort.

Our need for comfort and how it’s expressed illustrates the way we personally tend to soften the edges of experience and make them less raw by coating them in projected feelings (more on this in the south and west posts) or interpreting them as having a preordained meaning that goes beyond the simplicity of immediacy. By prioritising comfort and the familiar, we reduce risk and invest in predictability that is ultimately dissatisfying. Our fears are an illustration of the areas in life in which we refuse to partake.

The east element, within humans, is very much about passion, which is human fire. Passion means desire and implies a fundamental urge that is part of our rich humanity and that can be harnessed as an intensely, creative force. The key is to enter passion with emotional balance, physical presence and stability, intelligence, a clear intent and receptivity, i.e. the balanced expressions of the previous directions on this wheel.

Creating room to move

If repression is closing down our creative instincts and our ability to imagine ourselves as more than we appear to be, then the first step in the east is creating space to allow our curiosity to emerge and our ability to, in shamanic parlance, dream of ourselves outside of the boundaries we currently live within. This can begin with setting your intent to make room in your life to explore and experiment with alternative ways of being. Through breathing space in-between the confines of the structures of your day-to-day world you begin to find an antidote to the suffocating habits that limit your potential. Letting go of gripping onto a fixed sense of your identity is central. This involves in part expanding your personal sense of space. How big can you allow yourself to be? This first step is daring to vision yourself alternatively. You’re actively giving rise to a creative sense of yourself in your world rather than holding onto a fixed self-image. For many this is the spark that re-establishes a relationship with the expansive impulse that is spirit.

The greats in life are those that harnessed this creative impulse, who dared to dream. They are greats though because they put it into a manifested form. The working direction for the east is the west, so we must never forget that what counts is action. The dream must produce results, or change. You don’t want to remain in fantasy. Imagination in a healthy form leads to expansiveness, opening to new possibilities, the ability to connect and make something happen.

The new age movement often leaves people in fantasy, floating around in dreams and imagined self-realisation. Many of the new age books available doggedly claim that a single thought will manifest your greatest desire if only you’ll believe it possible. Sounds like poppycock, is poppycock. It’s a self-absorbed escapist fantasy at best.

Daring to dream must be followed by daring to do. This relates pragmatically as much to experimenting with alternative beliefs and habits, as it does to attempting to fulfil our childhood dream of being an actor, doctor, or whatever. The world turns out to be limited after all in spite of new age idealism and fantasy. Just remember how you do what you do is as important as what you do and an ongoing challenge in life is to find the right balance between the two.

As an aside, spaciousness, or space, is also an alternative translation of the Buddhist term emptiness. The ultimate nature of reality is most often described in Buddhism as such. The problem is that this term fails to capture the experiential dimension of working with this aspect of reality and it tends to confuse people into thinking that ultimate reality ends up being all about nothingness, which is the nihilistic fallacy. In pragmatic terms space implies establishing a habit of openness, of opening to experience as it is, being limitlessness in curiosity, expanding beyond what is known, in order to perceive and experience life as it is outside of our ignorance. Spaciousness also means creating distance between our incessant internal thoughts processes (see last post).

Developing compassion

Compassion involves expanding beyond the boundaries of our self-interest and our tendency towards self-absorption and the prioritising of our needs and wants over others. Compassion means being and feeling with another and the ability to place as much importance on another as we do on ourselves. It is an antidote to self-importance and the survival instinct.

Compassion = being with passion. Expansion means going beyond selfishness in its widest sense to encompassing the wider world in our own self-interest. A shamanic world-view almost always sees the world as an integrated, inter-dependent whole in which we must honour our part. The view of animals, trees and plants as our brothers is not just romanticism, it’s an appreciation of how the forms of nature are intimately linked with our being alive. It is within our self-interest to care for the world around us.

For compassion to be of use it must be human, and not overtly abstract, and it must, at some point, take us out of self-absorption and navel gazing to embracing being of service in a consistent natural manner in order to harness our creative self-actualization as a force for the greater good. This usually starts with our immediate environment; our family, parents, friends and neighbours, then moving to the man in the street, both near and far. We are steadily increasing our capacity to include humanity in our field of self-interest. By considering others and the impact our actions have on the world around us we begin to weaken our attachment to our self-identification. Life becomes less about ‘me’ and more about ‘us’. Compassion is also very much enthusiasm for the world we live in and our participation in it. Rather than hang out in fantasies of how the world should/could/must be we start to let the world be as it is and relate to it more honestly seeking opportunities to end suffering where possible. Compassion is caring enough about this wonderfully complex world to participate fully in it. How does it play out on a human, day-to-day level? That’s up to you to find out.

Opening the heart to universal suffering, freedom

Compassion leads nicely to a central theme in Mahayana Buddhism, and notable among many shamanic cultures, and in particular amongst the plains Indians in North America, where it is called the great give-away. This theme is generosity.

Generosity means recognising that nobility is found in embracing our place in a greater family of man and sharing of ourselves fully with that family. There is a shared intent hidden, infused in all our desire to grow and evolve that is the antithesis of selfishness and narcissism. To align with that intent is to develop a generosity that is open to life, as it is, and to ourselves, as we are, as an ongoing process which we are striving to open and remain open to.  

The give-away was literal in the plains Indians culture. Your greatness as an individual and member of the tribe was measured in how you gave-away the fruits of your accomplishments to others at the end of the year. Your personal wealth was not measured by the possessions and riches you kept, but in how you gave them freely for the benefit of other and the tribe. How starkly this contrasts with the materialism of the last century.

Tonglen is a central practice in Mahayana Buddhism that dissolves those boundaries between the individual and the collective too, opening us at a deep level to the suffering in the world. Although practiced at a visual level and in a meditation context, it leads to a similar breaking down of the boundaries between us and them as we take on the imagined suffering of others and give back healing, equanimity and happiness. Pema Chodron is a modern advocate of this practice if you want to know more.

To touch the impersonal, rich interconnection found through allowing ourselves to open our feeling centre to universal suffering dissolves self-obsession, as genuine giving without expectations or need of return does too.

Strangely enough to embrace others more fully is to gain a form of freedom that’s really from self-obsession. Firstly, because giving generously means loosening up and letting go of holding onto possessions and ideas, which is painful. Secondly, because in order to grasp the enormity of the collective human condition in a way that does not generate overwhelming emotional suffering (or result in us ending up in poverty), we have to let go, in a profound way, of our attachments to wanting outcomes to be a certain way, and this is highly liberating, as well as challenging.

If the basic premise of Buddhism is to end suffering then the initial opening to the suffering of others and its uncomfortable and challenging nature, must be moved through and beyond in order to open, feel and not get stuck in the pain of it all. Inexperienced practitioners can fall into this trap, or end up elevating themselves above the human condition, in order to detach from the great swath of pain and injustice with lofty ideals and abstraction. This is to miss the point however. We are an essential element of the suffering within each and every individual; they are part of us on a certain level. To feel is to meet and we must be at the level of what is rather than an idealized world that simply doesn’t exist.

Touching life deeply & being touched deeply by life

Working with compassion  and opening involves embracing our humanity much more deeply. Instead of being some form of super-holy force that has us rise above it all, we descend into the deepest layers of the heart where the richness of feeling allows us to connect beyond our usual boundaries and limited imagination. It requires us to have enough presence, self-acceptance and confidence to carry this out as a naturally emerging mode of being. Chogyam Trungpa called this embracing our basic goodness. In establishing these qualities we become more able to face depth more willingly and open to whatever arises whilst meeting the experience fully and willingly, even when uncomfortable. At the same time you present the fullness of yourself to that same moment, so that you become an integral part of the unfolding and we begin to perceive that life is workable.  

In a sense, as you wake up and open to experience more fully, as you have the courage to meet experience without striving to control or manipulate it, as you stand naked in experiencing the fullness of your own unique and collective experience, you find yourself more integrally being part of the awakened presence in more frequent moments of your life. This is part of what means being of service.

A simple and essential key here, as the Dalai Lama often says, is ‘Do no harm’. This means avoiding certain behaviours such as violence, lying, theft and so forth. There are plenty of good books available on the noble eight-fold path, which cover this topic in great detail, although Ken McLeod has something very important to say on this topic below which is often missed in the transmission of ethically based practices.

Actively doing no harm includes being dedicated to bringing awareness and generosity to those areas where unintentionally harm is caused. This means ceasing to be clumsy with the unrefined edges of our character and habits. It means being present, aware and conscious.

Ken McLeod points out how much Buddhist teachings are often descriptive rather than prescriptive, how the noble eightfold path describes the results of practice as opposed to some mould that we are supposed to squeeze ourselves into. Therefore right speech does not mean avoiding gossip, lying, hurtful speech and so forth based on rigid criteria. They act as guidelines and a description of what will likely emerge with time.

Language as we know is highly symbolic. Context is important to understanding the symbolic value of what is transmitted through speech. Different contexts have different rules about what is appropriate, or offensive, or right. If we inhabit a very restricted environment in which the rules of right speech are explicit, then managing right speech based on those rules becomes a prescriptive act which is more likely to work. For the rest of us though, living in a multi-faceted world, speech becomes a field of play that must be navigated consciously and with awareness in order for our speech to become less harmful as a natural expression of our progress in practice.

Ken points out that it’s probably more useful to think of right speech as being something that is conscious and backed up by a clear and honest intent to do no harm. By taking care with our speech as opposed to fitting it into a narrow band of right and wrong, we naturally use speech that begins to develop along the lines of what is laid out in classic Buddhist teaching. As always it is a developmental process that emerges through our practice as a facet of our own naturalness rather than a forced religious dynamic of rules and laws.

In my experience this points to yet another myth held by many followers of Buddhism, in particular Tibetan Buddhism. Practitioners often fall into the trap of trying to maintain an idealised behaviour based on core Buddhist teachings; it’s a sort of acting. Followers of traditional Buddhism may be surprised by this, but awakening is not an act of conformity and must be personally realised.

Once again we see that we must begin with where we are, and not some idealised image of practice. To be of service means to work with the circumstances in which we find ourselves in our day-today lives. To be of service is a process rather than maintaining a fixed identity. In part it’s about being responsive to our situation and getting our hands dirty. Part of this is using body, speech and mind in a way that does not intentionally harm others. This does not mean we will never cause harm though. In fact our lives by their nature harm others, whether it’s exploitation of Chinese workers putting together I Pods, or our discounted jeans, or the death of millions of insects in the production of crops. This is a huge topic that I will avoid continuing here, but it’s worth investigating further.

As a teacher of mine once said, the best approach to long-term service is to choose one of the four worlds to dedicate our particular skills and talents to, whether it is the animal, plant, human or mineral world. This can help us to be more concrete about how we go about giving back to the world. 

What makes being of service problematic, especially when prescriptive, is that it often ends up being as much about ourselves as it is about the other. It can be about our need to be important, needed, wanted, or to have a role that affirms our identity as someone good. Without a self-referenced dynamic, service as a spontaneous facet of being, becomes a natural part of how we are in the world and the results can be very surprising.

Awakening over enlightenment

To awake is a more tangible, accessible term, concept and experience than enlightenment. Enlightenment is big, abstract and near impossible to define outside of a particular tradition or school of thought, and if you go for one of the many concepts or beliefs of what enlightenment is, you will quickly find yourself having arguments with others about who has the best definition!

To awake implies moving from sleep, or ignorance, to an awakened state. To awaken then can be measured to some degree and understood and related to contexts, that is to say, it is workable.  This is really important if we are to make progress in meditation practice. The same is true for the term freedom. Absolute freedom is meaningless as a concept. Freedom from something, is another kettle of fish entirely.

Awakening is both temporary and permanent. Without a context in which to place it, it can be confusing and lead to mistaken view. Many claim enlightenment, to be awakened, when it is probable that they have simply gone through a process of awakening and gained a certain degree of freedom from something. It can also mean they have accessed an ability to maintain certain advanced levels of Jhana, or concentration/absorption states.

The east of the wheel reminds us that if awakening is not deeply human, it is not whole and may lead to harm. Read any story of supposedly enlightened Gurus on the web for past and current examples which feature abuse, manipulation and the seduction of power. If you are not rich in your basic humanity, your awakening is poor and it will tend to separate you from the world and from others. It has many masks and is not to be trusted.

The central theme and starting point in Buddhism is suffering (dissatisfaction/incompleteness) and this is always to be kept in mind when approaching the topic of awakening. It is sobering and brings humility to remember that suffering is a central theme of life and doesn’t go away for the vast majority of humans, and animals that die day in, day out. It is an antidote to feeding the increased energy that emerges through consistent practice into our need to be important and to elevate ourselves in some way. To awaken is not to gain super-powers, to become a god, a super happy dude, and so on. To awaken is to break the patterns of habit that generate suffering: Plain and simple. Awakening means breaking up, for good, mind fetters that sustain suffering (dissatisfaction/incompleteness) and the ignorance of constructs that keep us in pattern.

I personally find the Buddhist Four Path model of awakening very useful.  With its starting point of Stream Entry, it is a model that gives us a context in which to place profound experiences of awakening.  Some of the language used to expand on the essential themes is archaic, but the description, in my experience, of the fetters is accurate.

Finally, awakening is something that emerges through practice. It cannot be forced in most contexts. It is in great part a ripening in our dedication to practicing diligently and sincerely over time.

Morality and ethics

A word of warning? Passion is powerful and when expressed in a selfish way leads to all manner of destructive behaviour. Passion for religion when unbalanced leads to dogma, religious intolerance of other faiths, views and beliefs. Passion for work can lead to workaholics’ prioritising their work over other responsibilities and investing all of their life energies in mundane pursuits that are ultimately dissatisfying. Passion for beliefs can mean sustaining all manner of action because our beliefs tell us we are right and we are forced to defend them as they are the core of who we believe ourselves to be. This is the pollution of the north seeping into the east, rather than the fluid inter-relationship between the two. Passion can mean addiction, a lack of self-control, and being burnt out.

I will repeat again that passion harnessed from a place of balance is an essential part of our being, and our practice. By seeking balance in our emotions, body, mind and bringing that to how we express our desire to grow and to know, we are protected from the excesses of the creative, expansive urge. Each of the four cardinal directions is a sphere of development to which we must apply conscious, presence and a dedication to balanced expression.

Finally, ethics and morality must mean including others in our sense of what is important and relating our developmental and spiritual growth to the context in which we live. It means embracing our humanity and having humility.

Click here for the complete Buddhism Meet Shamanism series

Buddhism Meet Shamanism (pt.3/2) (italiano da seguire)

Faith and DIY

In a recent post on the Speculative Non-Buddhism website an argument was made that within Western Buddhism there is a tendency towards anti-intellectualism. They argue that world-famous authors such as Thich Nhat Han encourage a form of mindless practice in which feelings must have an overriding importance as the rational mind cannot be trusted. The authors on the site are heavyweight intellectuals and at times I confess to being baffled by their level of knowledge, but their criticism of certain tendencies and trends within Western Buddhism is certainly stimulating, and eye-opening. The site is dedicated to opening up the conversation on developing Western Buddhism with such articles as Ghost Buddha and X-Buddhistic Hallucination. So, if you like a bit of controversy and enjoy having your intellect exercised, go an take a look at their site.

I don't necessarily agree with the conclusion reached by their anti-intellectualism article however. In my personal experience the majority of Western Buddhists, who generally come from a middle-class background, are well educated, and reasonably well-informed. The issue as far as I can discern is not anti-intellectualism, but the abandonment of independent thought, an unwillingness to question the status-quo, and a naive acceptance of the superiority and authority of a spiritual figure, or traditional teaching. I have written about the guru-daddy complex already (Character hats article), but haven't touched on how people will voluntarily refuse to think for themselves as soon as they come across a Buddhist dictate, or classical teaching, however old they may be.

The majority of my experience is with Tibetan Buddhism where Guru Yoga and faith in your teacher are central practices. Within that context there tends to occur a sort of voluntary naivete. This is a process whereby students take on a series of beliefs as if they were certainties, without examining them to a sufficient degree. This is not always the case of course, but more often than not westerners when confronted with a Tibetan with exotic robes and a wonderful smile, can’t help but be enamoured.

I have to confess to despising hero worship and I tend to perceive much of Guru Yoga as such. The benefits and reasoning behind Guru Yoga are quite clear if you care to investigate the topic, but I don't know how realistic or practical its application is here in the West. Certainly, it does not sit alongside the understanding we have of power dynamics in relationships and unfortunately without empowering the student to question the teacher openly, the whole system is open to abuse. What's more, such a student teacher dynamic often gives rise to an unhealthy parent-child dynamic with all its confusing, psychological stickiness.

Faith is earned, not given, and it should never involve giving your power away to anyone, even a supposedly enlightened teacher. It should also not be based on group consensus, which is a prevalent feature in almost all religious circles. A feel good factor will usually emerge through group consensus. Rationality, independence of thought, and open questioning are replaced by a feeling of belonging, emotional nurturing and acceptance: we basically get an emotional fix. These feelings are not bad in themselves, but are really only healthy when made explicit and agreed upon, and removed from a parent-child dynamic. These feelings sum up, in my experience, one of the major motives people have for engaging with spirituality of any kind. Well, guess what folks, at some point you have to grow up and stand on your own two feet, and this means leaving the family home, or in this case, the safety of a group consensus.

The alternative to myopic acceptance would be to take a more autonomous hands-on approach to working with teachings and teachers. A simple starting option is to adopt the position of sceptical doubt towards all teachings and removing some of the facile obsession with the sacredness of every supposed word the Buddha, or some other saintly type, said. The Buddha himself stated as much throughout his adventures. The second would be to avoid falling into the philosophical trap where we use religious arguments to gain a position of superiority, or debate as if we knew, without any real lived experience. Such trite statements as ‘My teacher says..’ ‘It’s written in so and so text’ ‘The Buddha said…’ are rife in Buddhism and indicate lazy thinking. My response is always to ask, ‘Never mind the Buddha, what do you think?’

It has to be remembered that Buddhism is primarily a path. This means it must be walked. It involves consistent, physical action. Buddhist ideas taken out of context and without a practice background have very little value and are simply speculation. Until we actually put the idea into practice, we have nothing really to say about it that is reached through our own thorough examination. We are simply reciting what has already been said. How do you have something of your own to say? Start by thinking for yourself and place Buddhism fully and completely into the context and time in which you live.

As of writing it is 2012 and most western Buddhist are lay practitioners living in cities. Add on a career, intimate relationship, family, bills to pay, pleasure to be shared, and you have a very different reality to the fantasy world revered in many Buddhist books of monasteries, mountains and caves. We have a wealth of knowledge post-enlightenment, post-modernity, and perhaps even 'post' post-modernity about the world, the human condition and the influence of psychological factors, social conditioning and context on how we create meaning. We have made major leaps forward in the historical analysis of texts and the understanding of the contextualisation of thought, belief and its resulting prescriptive nature of the major Buddhist movements. Much of what is held to be sacred is dismantled when held up to the light of modern western academic research, or stripped to its more essential significance. My advice; don’t ignore it! What does it lead us to? An enormous opportunity to gain freedom from archaic dogma and a whole array of beliefs.

Beliefs

Beliefs are a central issue in Buddhism and sit on the north of the wheel too. They can be understood as constructs, or frames, for understanding and relating to life and the vastness of human experience. Beliefs are also the filters through which we give meaning and sense to our experience. Because of this they do not mirror an absolute or ultimate truth, even if such a thing exists. To believe they do is to go down the path of sectarianism, dogmatic adherence to tradition, and perhaps even religious extremism. Beliefs are to be examined and not held as sacred and this applies to all beliefs, with no exceptions! In fact it is in the examining that we begin to find our what lies behind so many Buddhist beliefs and make progress in our understanding of the context within which we are working.

As Buddhists we need to understand that beliefs must be challenged. This is because they are the supports for our identification with our constructed self, and the idea that we exist separate from the world, unchanging.

Beliefs can turn into experiential knowledge when they are worked with and examined through actual, direct experience. In the context of Buddhism this means ongoing meditation practice. You can respect beliefs, but be flexible in how you hold them, and be open to being wrong, as the power they hold over us individually and collectively is immense and blinding. 

 Doubt

Working with beliefs also means working with doubt. It is acknowledging that we actually do not know everything, and neither should we ever have to. Too much certainty is often a sign of self defence and the shoring up of our position. It is an attempt at self-affirmation. Entertaining doubt means allowing space to come between ourselves and our treasured ideas and concepts. By allowing this space to develop, we gain a little bit more objectivity to view openly what it is we have invested our energies into, and how we sustain our self-image through constant positioning.

Wheels as a teaching tool have a fundamentally simple truth inherent in their structure that can help break up this habit: they express multiple viewing points on any situation, and the interrelationship of knowledge.They show us that one position is not always superior to another, rather that truth has multiple faces and multiple meanings. They also help us to understand that by integrating different perspectives we become wiser. This does not lead to the post-modern idea that meaning is never objective or real, rather that within context and perspective their is an objective truth, or reality, but it just happens to sit alongside several other objective truths and perspectives that may seem to be in opposition. The truth of our existence is intimately bound up with paradox.

Recognise that beliefs act as fences, which we move within. They also designate a limit to our imagination. By imagination I mean the ability to be open in thinking and feeling, and think outside the box. This does not mean that beliefs are bad or inherently flawed, rather that we must recognise their utility, or redundancy, and be willing to grow out of them when necessary. Beliefs are surprisingly inter-changeable.

Curiosity

This leads us naturally to curiosity, which means being open to the world being different to how we have been imagining it to be :) It means exploring our world anew each day, even when we think we have already figured things out. It means looking at the world with fresh eyes again, and again, wilfully. It also means spontaneity, and therefore abandoning the security of the position of fixing the identities of the forms in our lives. This implies letting go of our self-importance and our grasping. 

Curiosity is an attitude as much as anything and it includes respecting your intellectual and cultural wealth as a westerner, but not letting it spoil the magnificence and beauty of the unknown that is the immense potential within every moment. 
The enemy of curiosity is cynicism. Scepticism and cynicism are quite different. To be sceptical really means being curious, whereas cynicism says no and degrades experience. It removes the value of what we assume will be the outcome, denying us the ability to be surprised. 
Curiosity is allowing creative questions to emerge and allowing them to act as invitations to expanding our concepts of self, life and others. Instead of fixing experience within known boundaries, we might let the reigns off a little, or even a lot, and risk losing our grip on certainty. It's also about not assigning meaning to events automatically based on the past we have already lived through.

Disciplining internal dialogue

Two aspects came to mind when I started thinking about this topic. One is certainly Buddhist, the other is from psychology. Disciplining internal dialogue firstly means utilising a technique (meditation) to what is traditionally referred to as quietening the mind, although perhaps it is more useful to think of technique as building and stretching space between thoughts. To quieten the mind might be misleading as a term because the objective is not to stifle thought, silence thought, or cut thought off. This more hardcore approach may be appropriate in a monastic, or retreat context, but in day-to-day life, at least in my experience, it is actually unhealthy and can produce negative side-effects and be harmful. Plus, I have to say that thought is wonderful. Don’t you agree?

Creating space between thoughts then really signifies gaining more command over our internal mental world. That command takes the form of choice. The reduction of reactive tendencies is a key component of development on the path and is fundamental if we are to make progress towards greater choice and therefore greater freedom. 
Most mental content turns out to be highly repetitive, it runs in cycles, and because of this it is addictive and is fed through mindless impulsiveness. We run similar patterns of thought and opinion in relation to similar internal and external stimulus time after time and they provide a sense of stability in how we frame ourselves, our experiences, and the external world.

Disciplining internal dialogue means interrupting these habits of repetitive thought and breathing space in-between them in order to see more clearly who we are without these self-affirming and wholly reactive habits. This is a major piece of Buddhist practice as a path and warrants a book or three. If you’re unfamiliar with this topic and want to know more, I highly recommend Ken McLeod’s 'Wake up to your Life' for its immensely practical approach written in contemporary English. 
Unfortunately, meditation often gets misunderstood as a process of becoming mindless, empty, unable to think and act. Meditative spaciousness should not make us stupid though as the opposite is true. Through consistent meditation the mind gradually becoming sharper and clearer over time. We become more lucid and able to hold our balance when confronted with the ups and downs and dramas of life. We gain a more consistent ability to choose how we respond to experience instead of reacting.

Disciplining internal-dialogue has a second aspect that comes from western psychology. This involves using internal-dialogue to bring benefit to ourselves, to question our assumptions, and speak to our wounding and the alien voices that make up much of our internal content. This could be considered a more male, active approach to engaging with inner-content.

As habituated thought patterns are like an insatiable hunger that call out for attention, one of the ways we can more effectively deal with them is to tackle them head on by using clear dialogue, addressing the quality of this impulsive, repetitive material. Most patterned thought holds within it an unexpressed or misunderstood intent, need, or desire. Calling out our inner-voices to discover what the hidden intent is behind them opens internal doors. By revealing this inner-content we are able to make adult, conscious choices about how to address these underlying issues. As we gain greater clarity and lucidity through meditation, the possibility of our engaging with these patterns and uncovering their hidden messages increases. This in turn leads to greater self-awareness as well as the liberation of energy, or in shamanic terms, personal power.

Asking straight questions to our internal dialogue after we have created more internal emotional and mental space can give rise to great insight and open up our meditation practice. Making such hidden needs and wants more explicit gives us material to work within our day-to-day lives and this frees us up from the dynamic of obsessively running towards or running away from experience that gets co-opted into meditation practice. Without understanding the real issue at play in our impulsive behaviour, it is much more difficult to develop spiritually. What happens is that our spiritual practice becomes an integral component of our self-delusion and the avoidance of our deepest cravings, which ultimately require your respect.
For some this will be a huge challenge and may require support from a professional. For others it is a case of facing up to our lives and the excuses we have been making for the state we live in. Many of the voices in our head turn out not to be our own. They are the continuation of the voices of our parents, our exs, brothers and sisters, teachers and important others. If we are interested in gaining freedom and growing up, these voices must be identified and their stories dismantled.

Morality and ethics

Finally, we come to morality and ethics. There are two important aspects I want to mention: Being kind to ourselves, and taking responsibility for our thinking and speech. Creating space gives us more choice. When we become conscious of the source of our impulsiveness and the tendency towards self-defence and self-affirmation, we begin to see more clearly how we so often set ourselves up in opposition to perceived enemies, both internal and external. Such irrationality leads us to be cruel to others or to distance ourselves from experience and both are actually painful. To be separate from the world is a form of suffering that most of us have simply got used to. We have learnt to accept a state of being numb. We hurt ourselves too through violent internal speech, or by denying our own natural capacity to understand and think for ourselves, and we fail to honour our own innate curiosity. We need to learn to be kinder to ourselves. This doesn’t have to be interpreted as all loving, sugary, happy spirituality; rather being nasty to ourselves is unintelligent. Hidden within our curiosity is our creativity, our natural desire to learn and grow and engage directly and nakedly with experience. Creativity, and imagination in particular, are what we find in the next direction of the wheel. 

Click here for the complete Buddhism Meet Shamanism series

Problem….and…Solution? (Il problemo...e..La soluzione?)

'We all fear death & question our place in the universe, the artist's job is not to succumb to despair, but to find an antidote for the emptiness of existence.'

Gertrude stein

'Abbiamo tutti paura della morte e tutti ci mettiamo in dubbi il nostro posto nell'universo; il lavoro dell'artista non è quello di soccombere alla disperazione,ma di trovare un antidoto per il vuoto dell'esistenza.'

'I see the greatest wealth as being the extent to which I can appreciate everything within the sense fields. So, my wealth is dependent on how much I am able to enjoy what I see, hear, smell, taste - but without any need to own whatever it might be.'

Ngakpa Chogyam

 'Vedo che la più grande ricchezza è la misura nel quale riesco ad apprezzare tutto all'interno di me dei campi di senso. Quindi, la mia ricchezza dipende da quanto sono in grado di godere di ciò che vedo, sento, olfatto, gusto -. Ma senza il bisogno di possedere qualunque cosa che potrebbe essere'
Ngakpa Chogyam

Overwhelming simplicity with unindulgent, deep appreciation. This is living each waking moment in spacious presence, with precision and clarity.

 La semplicità travolgente, con un profondo apprezzamento senza essere indulgente. Questo è vivere ogni momento di veglia in una presenza spaziosa, con precisione e chiarezza.

Spaccare i miti e il danno della dualità fra corpo-mente (English version: scroll down)

Pur cercando di completare una traduzione questa mattina, mi sono imbattuto due articoli affascinante che riflette non solo dei miei riflessioni, ma anche degli ultimi scritti che sono quasi finito. Ho quasi completato il terzo post nella serie, 'Buddhismo, ti presento lo Sciamanesimo', che muove la discussione dal ovest, e il luogo del corpo, al nord, e il luogo della mente, in cui parlo della problema della separazione fra mente e corpo nella praticha della meditazione. C'è una tendenza di dividere mente e corpo negli ambienti religiosi, ma anche nei gruppi di meditazione. E 'profondamente malsano e si basa sui miti sbagliati e che necessita un urgente smontaggio. Il nuovo post sarà compiuto fra poco.

Intanto, spaccare i miti continua ad essere una delle mie occupazioni preferite nel dialogo con la spiritualità nel corso dell'ultimo anno e, come spesso accade, questa ricerca fa parte di un'onda collettiva che sembra di essere attraversando il mondo del buddismo occidentale in questo momento. I due articoli sono entrambi abili e precisi nella loro sfida ai miti profondamente radicati nel buddismo che, una volta distrutto, possa portarci ad un’interazione più ricca, e più umana verso il risveglio e il percorso di buddismo. Vi incoraggio a leggerli, soprattutto se sei stato uno dei tanti innamorati del verniciatura mistica del buddismo tibetano.

Il link sotto di Elephant Journal ti porta ad una confutazione di numerosi miti spirituale sostenuta dalla religione organizzata, in questo caso, il buddismo e l'induismo, attraverso una critica da parte di un 'ex-illuminato' Shyam Dodge, che seguendo un video messaggio di un giovane tibetano, che è la presunta reincarnazione di un grande maestro tibetano, Kalu Rinpoche, morto secolo scorso. Nel video, giovane Kalu descrive come è stato abusato sessualmente e e minacciato fisicamente in un monastero tibetano ed è visibile quanto danneggiato è, questo giovane povero. Gli auguro ogni bene e spero che riesca a utilizzare la sua posizione per ottenere l'aiuto di cui ha bisogno e di esercitare una certa influenza, come si matura, nel cambiare lo status quo che gli ha permesso di passare attraverso un simile esperienza.

Shyam prosegue descrivendo le proprie difficoltà nel far parte di un ordine monastico induista e la conseguente negazione della fisica nel nome di un perseguimento astratto della purezza e ideali spirituali. Ha più o meno espresso i miei stessi sentimenti sui risultati profondo e preoccupante di separare lo spirito e il fisico, o il corpo e il mente.

Il secondo link porta ad un sito chiamata ‘Speculative non-Buddhism’ dove hard-core-intellettuali, che sono entrambi buddisti e non buddisti, pone la domanda: ‘Il Buddha esisteva realmente, o era semplicemente un'invenzione?'

Recentemente, ho iniziato a scrivere un articolo intitolato 'Il buddismo ha un problema di marketing?' e in qualche modo il tema è legato. La necessità di diffondere la tradizione è in parte un esercizio di marketing. Avere una figura centrale con tutte le caratteristiche umano ottimizzate, trascendente, e così via, è una strategia di marketing grande, quindi potrebbe essere che lui è stato inventato come un semplice simbolo? Vedendo che mi interessa sopratutto un approccio verso la spiritualità che è profondamente umana, mi va benissimo considerare la domanda, specialmente perché possa risultare nel spaccamento di miti.

Ho recentemente giunto alla conclusione che quando ‘si sveglia’, nessuno se ne accorga, così pensare che un ragazzo si svegliò, disse ai suoi compagni su di esso, poi lotta per la diffusione della sua scoperta, avrebbe in effetti potuto finire per produrre la figura del Buddha come è diventato. Se parli inglese e ti interessa essere stimolato da un discorso stimolante e intelligente, segui il link. Vedi cosa ne pensi.

Elephant Journal

Speculative Non-Buddhism