Finding the Center Within: The Healing Way of Mindfulness Meditation. (20 page)

would inevitably come to you for guidance. They would ask: How should we live? So how would you, as an enlightened person, answer them? It would pose a dilemma, because you would know of course that reality is so much more rich and complex than any rules or guidelines could ever take into account. You would know that rules and precepts tend to elicit argument and rebellion from human beings. So you might be tempted not to answer at all, knowing that anything you could say would be inadequate, would be too simplistic, and could not possibly begin to cover all the kinds of situations and difficulties people could encounter. And indeed, some very spiritual people decided to do just that; they taught nothing at all. Even the Buddha did not feel he could teach anything at first, for how could he possibly explain enlightenment to those who had not experienced it for themselves?

But in the end, for the sake of compassion, the Buddha spoke. He tried to show the way. He gave teachings. He gave precepts to guide our behavior, knowing full well that these ultimately and inevitably would be inadequate. Despite the danger that people would misunderstand and misapply the teachings, being loose when they should be strict and being rigid when they should look more deeply, he spoke. And to most teachers—or at least to those who have left a record for us—this was the best conclusion. Risk the inevitable misunderstandings. For in the end, some guidance is better than none at all. Many people lose their attraction for the spiritual life when they encounter a lot of rules. Some of these rules—especially since many come down to us from other times and places—do not seem to fit their insight about what is appropriate here and now. They do not want to give up things that bring them joy. They want to be free. When you encounter this kind of tension, you must proceed very carefully. You do well to consider the teachings and traditions that have been laid down, not dispensing with them too casually. But if the rules feel like a heavy burden that removes the joy of the spiritual life, you may be better off not to follow them until or unless you come to see their necessity for yourself.

When you lose your way and start to question, return to simple precepts. Remember that you are walking in the direction of being able to live happily and peacefully in the present moment. Or remember to see the universe as full of life and intelligence.

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The missionary Albert Schweitzer’s phrase for this central insight was
reverence for life
. We would add that you should not be too restrictive about what you consider living and what you consider not living. In fact, you should see everything as alive.

In biology, scientists are hard put to describe the difference between living and nonliving things. When you consider simple organisms, such as a virus for example, it is hard to say whether it is alive or not. Ultimately, it is one of those dualities into which we split reality that does not really hold up, revealing what Buddhism calls the emptiness of concepts.

In the study of comparative religion, the attitude of viewing things as alive is denigrated as animism—the belief that rocks and trees are alive or contain a spirit. This is supposed to be a primitive attitude. But consider the alternative. To us, everything is dead. We live on a dead planet, treating it as dead rather than living, destroying it ruthlessly, and with it, destroying ourselves. If that is animism, then we could use a good dose of it.

Choose a Living World

For at least one day, practice seeing everything as alive. If you see a tree, greet it silently: “Hello, tree, I see you. I am here.” Do this several times. Each time will be deeper than the first. Each time will increase your joy. Do this also with people, with animals, as much as possible with whatever becomes an object of your awareness. Do this also with objects you do not normally consider alive, such as a rock, a desk, your car, your meditation seat.

Notice how this practice affects your consciousness. Your world becomes more alive, and as your world becomes more alive, you do as well.

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Practice for Week Six

1. Increase your meditation time to twenty minutes twice a day. 2. Continue daily reading.

3. Practice walking meditation when you can.

4. Continue with two moments of mindfulness (p. 42). 5. Practice the exercises in this chapter:

• “Practice the Five Remembrances” (p. 105)

• “Change
Must
to
Prefer”
(p. 107)

• “Practice Mindful Consumption” (p. 113)

• “Challenge Your Busyness” (p. 116)

• “Choose a Living World” (p. 121)

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I I I

o

The Path

In this section, we turn to areas where psychology is uniquely helpful. Psychology has special strengths in working with emotions and dreams and in the skills for working effectively with our relationships. Journaling is also a very psychological kind of technique. Still, as always, spiritual understanding and practices are intertwined with psychology in this section, helping us nourish the proper attitude and understanding that empowers us to carry out what psychology has to teach.

To find mindfulness at every step on the path requires assistance in dealing with two special areas: negative emotional states and relationships. If we are unable to deal with negative moods, with our anger and our sadness, we will run from the present moment rather than build a home there. Similarly, we must be able to learn the skills to take good care of our relationships. If our relationships need healing, we will also need healing, and we will not be able to live mindfully. Mindful living requires a good relationship with ourselves. If we do not like ourselves, we cannot come home to ourselves. To be able to come home, we must face the truth of who we are and work with it in a loving, accepting way. Dreams can help us to do this. Through dreams, the practice of mindfulness can be extended even into Somnus’s nocturnal realm. Journaling can help us bring awareness and attention to our daily life.

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6

Week Seven

—The Talmud

When we set out to live spiritually, we can make a number of wrong turns. One of these is attempting to repress our nature rather than mindfully transforming it. We can avoid this by working with dreams. By their nature, dreams remind us of those aspects of ourselves most in need of attention and mindfulness. If we repress our anger, for example, we may dream it nonetheless, witnessing horrible things happening to the people we are angry at in our dreams. If we are willing to listen to such dreams, we allow this anger to be more conscious. We can work with it mindfully instead of repressing it, so that the energy of that anger remains part of us and provides us with needed vitality and enthusiasm for life. The true nature of the spiritual path is not avoidance or repression but transformation. Transformation requires contact with the raw material—all of it. No evasion will do. This is why suffering lies at the heart of the Buddha’s teaching. Suffering is a sure teacher, calling our attention to what needs healing. The world does not make us suffer, but our grasping and avoidance do. Whether we cling to impermanent 125

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things as though they were permanent, or try to avoid painful truths, we hurt ourselves. We suffer.

As we put these insights into practice, we develop a more refined notion of what is worth grasping at and what is worth turning away from. Before, we grasped at fleeting pleasures. Now, we grasp at enlightenment. Before, we sought immediate gratification; now, we try to hold onto a vision of ourselves as spiritual. This is almost as bad and nearly as pointless.

In the preface, we pointed out that this problem has been called

“spiritual bypassing.” People try to avoid real-life issues on the emotional/psychological level by trying to be so spiritual that they transcend them. This does not work. It does not work because avoidance does not work. No matter how many hours a day you meditate, if you use meditation to avoid your life rather than to live it, you will continue to be plagued by the same issues.

Spiritual Bypassing: Tim’s Story

Tim was a respected meditation teacher. He meditated four hours a day, every day, and went on many retreats involving days on end of continuous meditation. While he was an accomplished meditator, and while I had respect for his abilities in this area, it was clear that he used meditation as a form of spiritual bypassing. Tim came to my office because of an intense fear of flying. He had been able to avoid this problem until now, but at this point, he was confronted with a chance to expand his teaching to a national level. He very much wanted to do this, but it would be impossible if he could not board an airplane. Tim’s life was presenting him with a teaching, with a possibility of facing an old fear. I knew that there were other areas that Tim was also avoiding, but I never got the chance to explore these with him. When the behavioral treatment we began forced Tim to confront his fear, he quickly dropped out of therapy, opting instead for another intensive meditation retreat.

“People will do anything, no matter how absurd,” wrote Jung, “in order to avoid facing their own souls. They will practice Indian yoga and all its exercises, observe a strict regimen of diet, learn theosophy by heart, or mechanically repeat mystic texts from the literature of the whole world—all because they cannot get on with themselves and have 06 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 9:53 AM Page 127

Look to Your Dreams

Using dreams as a tool to better understand our unconscious wishes and desires, our disappointments and yearnings, is a major contribution of Western psychology. This is an area where the West has excelled in helping people uncover and unravel those hidden signposts, life struggles, repeating patterns, and fears that often get in our way. Working with dreams can help you to get to your inner core, your life purpose; it can lead you to glimpse your true soul.

Many Buddhist traditions do not emphasize working with dreams. There seems to be a feeling that working with dreams is to involve oneself increasingly in
maya
—in illusion. But there are exceptions. Some Tibetan traditions practice a form of dream yoga, with the rationale that if we can learn to see through the illusion of our dreams clearly and mindfully, then we will be able also to see through the illusion of the waking dream as well, and ultimately, be able to deal with the difficulties of the
bardo
realm—the transition realm after death. But this is the exception among Buddhist traditions.

Many spiritual traditions value dreams. In the Bible, Joseph helps the pharaoh by interpreting his dream of fat and lean cattle to mean seven fat years followed by seven lean ones, and thereby prevents catastrophic starvation. Another Joseph, the father of Jesus, is warned of Herod’s plot to murder Jewish children, and he saves the day by fleeing with mother and child to Egypt.

Whatever these spiritual traditions say, in modern culture, we are in great need of the counterbalancing dreams provide. We are disconnected from our deep, unconscious, and supraconscious selves. Our culture is desperately one-sided. We have become far too rationalistic, scientific, and technological. It is precisely in such a culture that dreams take on great importance. For while our rationalism is clearly valuable, it has come at a greater cost than we imagine. In his usual complex and discursive prose, Jung put it this way: “Modern man does not 06 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 9:53 AM Page 128

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understand how much his ‘rationalism’ (which has destroyed his capacity to respond to numinous symbols and ideas) has put him at the mercy of the psychic ‘underworld.’ He has freed himself from ‘superstition’

(or so he believes), but in the process he has lost his spiritual values to a positively dangerous degree. His moral and spiritual tradition has disintegrated, and he is now paying the price for this break-up in worldwide disorientation and dissociation.”

Working with dreams heals the split, returning us to our own soul and its wisdom. As the Jungian analyst Robert Johnson put it, “if we don’t go to the spirit, the spirit comes to us as neurosis.” In less fragmented cultures than ours, this may not be so necessary. In our world, it is vital.

Respect Your Dreams

Many volumes have been written about dreams. It is beyond the scope of this book to discuss the various theories and complexities of working with dreams. Fortunately, however, you do not need to become an expert on dreams to benefit from dream work. The main practice we suggest is simply to bring mindfulness to your dreams. The act of respecting your dreams by writing them down in some detail, telling them to someone, or in any way giving them your attention and respect is already valuable. Do not worry too much about trying to interpret your dreams fully. A dream is never fully interpreted. But just by paying attention, you are already building a bridge between your conscious and unconscious selves. If you are overly rational and logical, as are so many in our world, dreams will put you in touch with the source of myth and feeling. Or if you happen to be very emotional, through dreams you touch aspects of yourself that view things from a much cooler, levelheaded perspective.

THE EXPERIENCE (TOM)

Dream fragment:
A workman comes to my home. He has received or-
ders to install a telephone line.

The symbolism is not hard to understand. A new kind of intrapsychic communication capacity is being established. This is 06 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 9:53 AM Page 129