Enlightenment Handbook, Part Five
This is the final part of a five-part series. I’d encourage you to read through each part in order, since each builds upon its predecessor.
I promised you’d find ‘practical methods’ in this handbook. Usually, offering practical methods to attain a goal is pretty straight-forward. But when it comes to Awakening, things are a little bit different. Why? Because in our usual lives, we’re trying to arrive at a certain result, and all we have to do to get there is to arrange the different elements of the world so that they help us arrive. But with Awakening, we can get into a special trap. Instead of trying to ‘get somewhere’, we’re trying to see something that is right in front of our eyes – so obvious, in fact, that we’re blinded to its presence. Can Zen and Advaita and all the mystique of koans and meditation be pointing toward something so blatantly obvious that we literally have to do nothing in order to perceive it?
We simply can’t believe that. Life is more difficult than that, and we’ll continue to create model after model to make it a struggle for us to Awaken. In short, we’ll insist on some sort of effort in order to Awaken – and that very effort will prevent the Awakening!
Skillful Means
Since we simply can’t comprehend doing nothing to Awaken, it makes sense for us to begin with some practical exercises. Now, entire religions have been built around such exercises. These exercises are sometimes called Upayas, or ‘skillful means’ of pointing us toward Enlightenment. The problem with these methods is that it is very easy for us to become attached to them, to think that if we just do such-and-such enough hours per day, we’ll Awaken. Soon we are chanting sutras, meditating for hours on end, and contemplating the words of great teachers. Some Zen teachers have called this sort of thing ‘stinking of Zen’ – in other words, we become so immersed in the methods that we forget we’re not trying to achieve a typical ‘goal’. Indeed, Enlightenment is something that we can’t achieve by any amount of effort! So why all the work?
Just Try
If you really cease trying (which is totally different than ‘giving up’ in despair), if you cease craving happiness and peace, you’ll Awaken. It’s that simple. So all of our efforts to Awaken are just attempts to get us to cease our efforts. In effect, the ‘goal’ of these efforts is to show us, without a doubt, that we can’t Awaken. We can’t achieve the perfect happiness we long for. We can’t ever overcome our most subtle fears and insecurities.
When we discover what is meant by ‘cease trying’, Awakening will happen. But in the meantime, addicted to effort, we might as well just try. We’re going to do it anyway (until we stop), so let’s make some use of our efforts!
The suggestions I’ll make here are very basic and simple. The reason? If our methods have fancy-sounding names and a lot of ritual involved, it’s much easier for us to become trapped by them and create a ‘practice’ for ourselves. And ‘practices’ easily become traps of never-ending effort.
The Half Hour Challenge
Usually we’re applying our efforts toward self-defeating ends. We think we’re doing the right thing by trying to make lots of money and get good insurance policies (after all, that’s what everyone else is doing, right?), but all the while we’re simply reinforcing a life model which is guaranteed to make us miserable.
In general, we spend probably fourteen to sixteen hours each day in this constant effort. Even our best-intentioned efforts, such as doing an hour of yoga, exercise, or meditation, can easily be self-defeating. So let’s try something new. Let’s devote a half hour (that’s all) each day to doing absolutely nothing. That’s right. Sit down in a room where you can close the door, and just do nothing. No music, no TV, no answering the phone. Don’t stare out the window. Just look at a wall. Don’t try to meditate. Just sit there and see what happens.
I call this the ‘Half Hour Challenge’ because the first thing most people will notice is that it’s very difficult to do. That’s right! Sitting down for a half hour and doing nothing at all is difficult. Why? That’s a good question to ask yourself. If you can devote sixteen hours a day to your usual life efforts, why is it so difficult to do a half hour of nothing?
You see, we like to think of ourselves as the ‘drivers’ of our lives, but most people, when they begin the half hour challenge, will start to notice that they are actually being driven. The force of habit and the force of fear create a powerful combination, and we’ll tend to think that the half hour is actually ‘wasted time’.
Even if you can physically spend the half hour in the quiet room, what is your mind doing all that time? Are you the driver, or are your thoughts moving off in every direction so that you can barely follow along? We soon discover that there is a lot of mental effort going on without us even knowing it! Is it really right to think that I’m directing my own life, or is it more apt to say that I’m just being pushed along like a stick in a swift-moving stream?
We can feel very resistant to these thoughts. We’ll insist that we’re in control, when in reality we know that we’re basically powerless to affect any change in our lives. Our careers, our relationships, our finances, and our wildly careening thought-processes dictate our every move in life. In fact, we really have no evidence that we’re in control at all!
Using the Half Hour Wisely
Now is when I let you in on the truth, and tell you that I’m not really trying to convince you that you’re being ‘driven’. My intent is simply to help us get perspective on our usual world-view, because as long as we’re stuck in the same old assumptions about life, we’ll merely follow in the same cycle of creating frustration, stress, and fear. If we live in the illusion that we’re in control of our lives, understanding that we’re usually on ‘auto-pilot’ can be a good incentive for us to start paying attention to what’s really going on.
If we are faithful to our half hour, we’ll discover some amazing things. For instance, we might find that a half hour is a very long time (or that our perception of how long a half hour ‘is’ can change dramatically). And if we stick to it long enough, we’ll find that doing nothing is incredibly fruitful. In fact, it’s the only time we’re actually Living during our entire day! Our half hour can be the one place where we feel truly conscious and truly aware of what is happening in each moment. Often, people will characterize their half hour as the one time they feel ‘awake’, and come to see the rest of their day as time spent ‘asleep’ or ‘in a dream’. They are simply noting the contrast between our usual state of ‘running on autopilot’, and the half hour of time spent in relative awareness of thoughts and perceptions.
We could make a little riddle here and say that the meaning of life is to do Nothing. As in all Zen-speak, this doesn’t refer to our usual idea of ‘nothing’, but a new sort of nothing which we can only come to understand once we’ve slowed down during our half hour.
Of course, most people just can’t keep up with the half hour. They’ll try it for a few days or maybe a week, but then they’ll begin to neglect it in order to do more ‘important’ things, like balance the checkbook. This is the reason enlightenment is so elusive and mysterious – we’re completely addicted to filling each moment with busy-ness or distraction.
On the other hand, it’s also easy to make the half hour into a daily ritual which becomes nothing more than a momentary escape from our usual, hectic day. If this happens, our half hour only becomes another ego-trap!
Whether it is meditation, reciting mantras, or reading this website, the important thing to remember is that if these tools are to be properly used, we must use them and then discard them. They are pointers toward Awakening, and aren’t actually a ‘means to an end’. The oddest part is that even though I say ‘discard’ them, you might end up meditating for your entire life. At some point, however, the meditation will transform from a ‘means to an end’ into ‘just another thing’, like washing dishes or drinking a glass of water.
Following Our Assumptions
Another good tool is to make a practice of following our assumptions. I’m not really referring to our everyday assumptions, such as assuming that the mail will arrive or that the sun will set at the end of the day. I’m referring to our most basic assumptions about life. One common assumption is that there is a ‘me’ in here, interacting with the world out there. Another is that I make my own decisions. Another is that time moves from past to future.
If you take the time to really look at these assumptions, you begin to discover some very unusual things. However, you must become artful at seeing when you run into an ‘assumption roadblock’. This is when you stop thinking because you hit something that seems so obvious that it must be true.
Descartes famously made this mistake when he said “I think, therefore I am.” It seems like an obvious statement, but it leaves unexamined the basic assumption that thinking must imply a thinker. This seems like an obvious assumption, since we’re all so used to thinking that way. It’s written into the very workings of our language. But if you really think about it for a little while, (see how our language implies it?), you’ll come to see that it’s just an assumption, based on no evidence whatsoever.
Understanding Belief
This leads us to a place where we can begin to understand the difference between belief and reality. Many people think of beliefs as things like ‘a belief in a deity’ or ‘a belief in reincarnation’. These same folks might think that the world is also composed of hard facts, such as the facts of science, or the objective reality of gravity.
But if we follow our every assumption, we’ll soon discover that everything we think about the world is based on beliefs. The only ‘reality’ we’re left with in the end is our direct experience of Now. When we can directly experience this without any overlay of beliefs – this is the experience called enlightenment.
A New Sort of ‘Practice’
The real ‘practice’ of enlightenment is Just Living. It is literally the presence of pure experience – being with each moment as it unfolds. This would be easy if we weren’t making it so difficult on ourselves. We’ll do almost anything to make enlightenment into a new ‘thing’ to attain, and continue to apply effort toward Awakening.
We can meditate and ‘practice’ for years on end, and often, all we do is create more and more subtle versions of ego-effort for ourselves. In some ways, it’s much easier to Awaken if you’ve never heard of Zen or enlightenment, and haven’t had years to create layers of new assumptions regarding the whole affair.
All that’s necessary for Awakening is this — the ultimate in relaxation. Not a collapsing sort of exhausted relaxation, but a relaxation in which perception is allowed to do what it does all on its own. When this happens, each moment expands into its full blossoming, and we suddenly see what we’ve been missing all along, which is Just This – the unfolding moment which has always been buried under a heap of assumptions, beliefs, and stray thoughts.
This is all it is. It’s that simple. Just this, right now, without having to apply our usual efforts at labeling, dividing, and make-believe.
This moment is the most miraculous thing any of us can ever experience. Let’s stop trying so hard and just let it happen.
Explore posts in the same categories: Enlightenment Handbook