Listening and Seeing

In the first  Dirty Harry movie we are entertained with the sight of Harry educating a citizen on a fundamental problem in human relations.  With a wave of the 44 magnum to emphasize the seriousness of the issue, Harry poses a  rhetorical question- "You don't listen good, do you (expletive?)"  Lesson accepted, the suddenly wiser young man exits the scene.

This basic problem is on display with the release of American Sniper, with people fighting about whether Chris Kyle was a hero or a villain.  With insults flying back and forth the one thing that is clear is that we don't listen to one another.  And we don't see.  Whether the people Chis Kyle needed killing or not, hurting other people hurt him.  However he may have presented himself, he suffered from what he did and he died because of it.

The wounds from 9/11 are still raw.  The Iraq War didn't turn out as well as hoped and the  Arab Spring was pretty much a bust. The bitterness and horror of Middle Eastern politics is, distressingly, the new normal.

Thich Nhat Hahn was a young Buddhist monk during the Vietnam War.  Horrified over the violence wracking his country, he issued a statement calling for peace and reconciliation.   For the sin of placing the value of human life above ideological purity he was exiled by both sides of the conflict. He has only visited his home country twice since, in 2005 and 2007.  

Thich Nhat Hanh  experienced the great depth of human suffering.  His country  was torn apart by warfare.  He lost friends and he lost his home. But he devoted himself to helping those damaged by  conflict.  He has worked with refugees and and veterans without distinguishing between perpetrator and victim because, to him, there is no distinction.  Everyone suffers.   The tool that he used to maintain his humanity, that he teaches to others is mindful awareness.  

We are inclined to examine the hearts and minds of other people in the most excruciating detail.  It is a powerful natural reaction rooted in fear and grief.   But we can only examine other people by projecting our own worst fears on them.  We we do this we see the worst in others and it brings out the worst in us.  

 We are much less inclined to examine our own hearts and minds.    Mindfulness is the simple act of transferring attention from the thinking mind to the feeling body.  When we find the courage to do this we watch our own stories spin themselves out.  Then we experience the reality the underlies our thoughts   We find anxiety, grief, and pain- almost without end.  If we stay with it and allow ourselves to feel the truth of it, we see the suffering in those we consider our enemies and we simply can't hate any longer.  

Thich Nhat Hanh teaches his students to "look with eyes of compassion on all beings."  It is the task before us and, in our troubled world, it is the work of a lifetime.

Penetrating the Present Moment

When practicing meditation, it is best to keep it simple.  The Buddha taught that suffering, change, and emptiness are natural elements of life.   People practicing meditation have a perfectly reasonable desire to escape the pain of suffering and change.  They see the Buddha's serene smile, understanding it as a symbol that he has dropped the burden of self.   Those of us attracted to meditation are often drawn to the more esoteric teachings of Mahayana Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta that seem to promise the realization of emptiness.   

Angarika Munindra is not well known but he was an influential figure in the transmission of Vipassana to the west.  Grounded in the Theravada, he taught  meditation stripped of cultural baggage and, he stuck to the basics of suffering, impermanence, and emptiness. 

He taught his students that they had a choice between two worlds, a world of concepts and  a world of experience.  Concept and experience blend so seamlessly for most of us that the idea that they are separable might well come as a revelation.  Usually, we simply assume that what we feel is an accurate reflection of real world conditions.  

Experience is immediate- seeing, hearing, tasting, feeling.  What you feel is what is.  It is very simple, very stable.  Whatever you add to that, and if you are anything like me, you tend to add quite a lot, is conceptual.  You experience a feeling.  You interpret it as uncomfortable.   You decide that it feels really, really bad.  Then you start coming  up with explanations  as to why you feel that way.  From there, you brainstorm escape plans, all the while imagining the even more dreadful  pain of it all..  

One of the imaginable, less harmful and actually elegant solutions that you might come up with  is the perfect escape, an escape into the realization of bare awareness.  The problem with that concept is that the immediate experience, the raw feeling of discontent that you wish to escape, is bare awareness.  Meditation is the art of patiently directing attention toward that raw pain until it dissolves.

The understanding of suffering is the key.  Suffering occupies a really broad spectrum of human experience, ranging from the petty grievances and inconveniences that make up daily life to the sharp daggers of inconsolable grief.  As long as you think you shouldn't have to suffer, you'll spend your energy in the conceptual world.  When you meditate to escape suffering, meditation is not meditation, only imagination.  

Suffering is just physical discomfort.  You need not dramatize it but you need to experience it as directly as possible.   You'll never think so until  it passes but it is really valuable to experience a huge emotional storm that  you can't control or manage with distraction.  The mindful experience of pain is the penetration of the present moment. Mindful witness to out of control thoughts, the desire to sink into depression or to explode with rage, is meditation.  When you meditate you learn what everyone in the world is up against. 

As long as you believe you can escape suffering you will measure yourself and others against an arbitrary but harsh  standard that creates even more suffering.  When you experience the full range of  suffering as the daily bread of existence, you lighten it for yourself and for others.  

In Zen. mindful suffering is known as the "gateless gate."

The Field of Awareness

Because Americans are pragmatic, result oriented people, we naturally see meditation, like everything else, as a way to get something.   It is popular right now. It is also common for people to take it up then become frustrated when they feel like nothing happens. They often think they are doing it wrong.

Meditation isn't about going, doing, or achieving anything.    It is  looking in to the nature of life as it as, how we think about and feel about it, without trying to change any of it.    

This is not so easy for us.  We put a lot of effort into getting what we want and avoiding what we don't want.   We only turn to meditation when we can't do either.  The Buddha taught that nothing is wrong except that we deny three essential facts of life.  Life is unsatisfactory, impermanent, and lacking in a self.

  

  We get dissatisfaction pretty well.  We've had plenty of that.  And we've been through enough disorienting change and had enough loss to understand the pain of impermanence. The idea that there is a not a self is a bit of a mystery.  Each of us has a center we call and cherish "me" and each of us enjoys the gift of a very unique life.

 Douglass Harding developed a series of novel experiments that point to selflessness  with a direct simplicity.  Point your finger at your face and ask yourself, based only upon the information of your senses, just what it is at which you are pointing.  

Of course you are pointing at yourself.   But the question asks you to base your answer upon sensory evidence alone.   Based upon that you are just pointing at a clear, aware space.  It is in that clear space that you and everything you know appears.   His experiment demonstrates how fully we depend on what we think we know.   We instantly and unconsciously classify everything that happens into categories of good, bad, and neutral.

We don't have any kind of a feeling that doesn't come with an interpretation and a plan to fix it.   The plan is always based upon a sense of self that compulsively imagines improved realities. 

 This makes life more difficult than it needs to be.  We'd like just turn our attention to awareness and drop the stories running through our brains but we can't. Our story comes right along, wondering why in the world we are just sitting there not doing something, anything for distraction.   Meditation is the simple but challenging act of turning attention away from the plan to the feeling of the breath moving through the body again and again and again.

  Feeling your body breath is relaxing.  More importantly, the attention to feeling rather than thought invites a shift to a non-verbal awareness. Non verbal awareness is an interesting and overlooked part of who we are.  It is our basic program from which all else flows.  It is completely impersonal.  It is no self.  

 We suffer enormous stress when our field of awareness is narrowed so that we can't see beyond what we think.  When we are aware of awareness we have a large field in which our stories play themselves out without  harming us. 

 We suffer from an artificial sense of self made up of stories that define us and limit us.  Meditation practice is often misunderstood as a disengagement from life.  It is disengagement but it is a disengagement from our personal hard luck stories.   Dissatisfaction and impermanence don't happen because we messed up or because someone else messed us up.  Everyone experiences this.  When we don't understand the universality of the experience we become a danger to ourselves and to others.   Understanding opens our hearts.  Meditation is the path to a compassionate life.