"Not dead yet" Posted by Douglas on July 12, 1999 at 13:05:47:
Hello Coach, Hello Everyone:
> I wonder how your doin’ with it these days, Douglas.
On the one hand, I am just trying to survive the various complications of the ill-assorted, chronic conditions that I suffer from. They
are like opportunistic delinquents — they don’t harass you one at a time; they travel in gangs. I wouldn’t describe my state as diligent,
although one of the delinquents, terminal insomnia, lends itself to roaming the Internet as will be obvious.
On the other hand, the dogs that have been vexing other members of the class are not part of my experience. I am single, have no
children, legitimate or otherwise, the climate is temperate, the pigeons haven’t taken to wearing four inch spiked heals, and much to that
effect. My pack of mad dogs are internal or “Its all in my head” as the cliché goes which is unfortunately where I am located.
Speaking of “There is always the dog.” does the following ring a bell? It is set in the context of a retreat, in the midst of the
meditation hall, and a meditator with companions on either side complete with notebooks.
My concentration deteriorated and instead of observing my breath, the sessions began by neurotically waiting for the agitating sounds
to begin. As their vibration was detected, uncontrollable fantasies would arise. In my mind's eye I would see me violently stomping on the
culprit's journal and pen and strangling him while simultaneously I could feel a power growing in my arms, getting ready to stuff any
available cushion up my noisy neighbour's nostrils. The thoughts would arise, and with great aversion and clinging, I would suffer. Feeling
the conflict in my heart, my mind began to bargain. One thought I had was to write each of them a polite yet frank note: "Please stop
writing, it is disturbing my peace." or "Do you mind not breathing, it is distracting my attention". For hours I would sit obsessively
planning the how, when, where, and what of my potential notes. While my colleagues were either getting enlightened or completing the
first draft of a best seller, I was entangled and enmeshed with thought and conflict. Naturally, I didn't strangle my neighbours, nor did I
write them any diplomatic messages. I did, however, remember a talk given by a Thai meditation master. He compared the suffering of
worldly beings to a dog with an itch on its back. If the dog sits in the sun it blames the sun. If it finds a shady tree it blames the tree.
If it jumps in the river it blames the river. The itch he said was greed, ignorance and hatred. He, like the Buddha, claimed that only when
these taints of mind are uprooted will worldly beings find resolutions to their conflicts, peace and freedom from suffering (Chah, 1980,
1982).
I found this and the next piece on an Australian Buddhist site named BuddhaNet whose URL is as follows:
http://www.buddhanet.net/
In your piece “About Natural Awareness”, you wrote:
> is there an evolution to mindfulness too?
I think so. What do you sense? I have a hunch that mindfulness can make a come-back in the human race. People can like it. People can
catch on that it is useful, practical, and beautiful. The word might get around. It might catch-on. It might get popular. Some day, in the
21st Century, even, people might catch on that mindfulness contributes to peace and harmony. It might become — if people understand
that it really can be done — a cause as important to human society and as widespread as making monetary profit has become today, or
having power over other people.
I don’t share even your guarded optimism here. Buddhism has been around for over two and a half centuries and I think it is fair to say
that, across the various schools and sects, present centred awareness is central to the teachings. After, approximately, two thousand,
five hundred years, I see no appreciable impact from those teachings even in countries that are or were allegedly Buddhist.
Here, I should like to cite one of my other finds. It bears upon your quotation to some extent as a cautionary tale. Moreover, it also
mirrors my thinking on the current conversations on the blackboard, a section I have come to label “Hell is other people” (Sartre). I have
admired the writings of Jack Kornfield for at least a decade now and oftentimes find his advice sage although I do have reservations
about his “Great Way”. At any rate here it is, stated with more authority and eloquence than I possess.
Note: The essay is about four pages long so peruse at your leisure if you so choose.
Even the Best Meditators Have Old Wounds to Heal
Jack Kornfield
For most people meditation practice doesn’t "do it all." At best, it’s one important piece of a complex path of opening and awakening.
In spiritual life I see great importance in bringing attention to our shadow side, those aspects of ourselves and our practice where we
have remained unconscious. As a teacher of the Buddhist mindfulness practice known as vipassana, I naturally have a firm belief in the
value of meditation. Intensive retreats can help us dissolve our illusion of separateness and can bring about compelling insights and
certain kinds of deep healing.
Yet intensive mediation practice has its limitations. In talking about these limitations, I want to speak not theoretically, but directly
from my own experience, and from my heart.
Some people have come to meditation after working with traditional psychotherapy. Although they found therapy to be of value, its
limitations led them to seek a spiritual practice. For me it was the opposite. While I benefited enormously from the training offered in
the Thai and Burmese monasteries where I practised, I noticed two striking things. First, there were major areas of difficulty in my
life, such as loneliness, intimate relationships, work, childhood wounds, and patterns of fear, that even very deep meditation didn’t touch.
Second, among the several dozen Western monks (and lots of Asian meditators) I met during my time in Asia, with a few notable
exceptions, most were not helped by meditation in big areas of their lives. Many were deeply wounded, neurotic, frightened, grieving, and
often used spiritual practice to hide and avoid problematic parts of themselves.
When I returned to the West to study clinical psychology and then began to teach meditation, I observed a similar phenomenon. At least
half the students who came to three-month retreats couldn’t do the simple "bare attention" practices because they were holding a great
deal of unresolved grief, fear, woundedness, and unfinished business from the past. I also had an opportunity to observe the most
successful group of meditators — including experienced students of Zen and Tibetan Buddhism — who had developed strong samadhi and
deep insight into impermanence and selflessness. Even after many intensive retreats, most of the meditators continued to experience
great difficulties and significant areas of attachment and unconsciousness in their lives, including fear, difficulty with work,
relationships wounds, and closed hearts. They kept asking how to live the Dharma and kept returning to meditation retreats looking for
help and healing. But the sitting practice itself, with its emphasis on concentration and detachment, often provided a way to hide, a way
to actually separate the mind from difficult areas of heart and body.
These problems exist for most vipassana teachers as well. Many of us have led very un-integrated lies, and even after deep practice and
initial "enlightenment experiences," our sitting practice has left major areas of our beings unconscious, fearful, or disconnected. Many
American vipassana teachers are now, or have recently been, in psychotherapy in order to deal with these issues.
It should also be noted that a majority of the 20 or more largest centres of Zen, Tibetan, Hindu, and vipassana practice in America have
witnessed major upheavals, centring on the teachers themselves (both Asian and Western), related to issues of power, sex, honesty, and
intoxication. Something is asking to be noticed here. If we want to find true liberation and compassion what can we learn?
Some Helpful Conclusions for Our Practice
1. For most people, meditation practice doesn’t "do it all". At best, it’s one important piece of a complex path of opening and awakening.
I used to believe that meditation led to the higher, more universal truths, and that psychology, personality, and our own "little dramas"
were a separate, lower realm. I wish it worked that way, but experience and the nondual nature of reality don’t bear it out. If we are to
end suffering and final freedom, we can’t keep these two levels of our lives separate.
2. The various compartments of our minds and bodies are only semi-permeable to awareness. Awareness of certain aspects does not
automatically carry over to the other aspect, especially when our fear and woundedness are deep. This is true for all of us, teachers as
well as students. Thus, we frequently find meditators who are deeply aware of breath or body but are almost totally unaware of feelings
and others who understand the mind but have no wise relation to the body.
Mindfulness works only when we are willing to direct attention to every area of our suffering. This doesn’t mean getting caught in our
personal histories, as many people fear, but learning how to address them so that we can actually free ourselves from the big and painful
"blocks" of our past. Such healing work is often best done in a therapeutic relationship with another person.
3. Meditation and spiritual practice can easily be used to suppress and avoid feeling or to escape from difficult areas of our lives. Our
sorrows are hard to touch. Many people resist the personal and psychological roots of their suffering; there is so much pain in truly
experiencing our bodies, our personal histories, our limitations. It can even be harder than facing the universal suffering that surfaces
in sitting. We fear the personal and its sorrow because we have not learned how it can serve as our practice and open our hearts.
We need to look at our whole life and ask ourselves. "Where am I awake, and what am I avoiding ? Do I use my practice to hide ? In
what areas am I conscious, and where am I fearful, caught, or unfree ?"
4. There are many areas of growth (grief and other unfinished business, communication and maturing of relationships, sexuality and
intimacy, career and work issues, certain fears and phobias, early wounds, and more) where good Western therapy is on the whole much
quicker and more successful than meditation. These crucial aspects of our being can’t just be written off as "personality stuff." Freud
said he wanted to help people to love and work. If we can’t love well and give meaningful work to the Earth, then what is our spiritual
practice for ? Meditation can help in these areas. But if, after sitting for a while, you discover that you still have work to do, find a
good therapist or some other way to effectively address these issues.
Of course, there are many mediocre therapists and many limited kinds of therapy. Just as in meditation, you should look for the best.
Beyond the traditional psychotherapies of the ‘40s and ‘50s, many new therapists have been developed with a strong spiritual basis such
as psychosynthesis. Reichian breath work, sand play, and whole array of transpersonal psychology. The best therapy, like the best
meditation practice, uses awareness to heal the heart and is concerned not so much with our stories, as with fear and attachment and
their release, and with bringing mindfulness to areas of delusion, grasping and unnecessary suffering. One can, at times, find the
deepest realizations of selflessness and non-attachment through some of the methods of transpersonal psychology.
5. Does this mean we should trade meditation for psychotherapy ? Not at all. Therapy isn’t the solution neither. Consciousness is! And
consciousness grows in spirals. If you seek freedom, the most important thing I can tell you is that spiritual practice always develops in
cycles. There are inner times when silence is necessary, followed by outer times for living and integrating the silent realizations, as well
as times to get help from a deep and therapeutic relationship with another person. These are equally important phases of practice. It is
not a question of first developing a self and then letting go of it. Both go on all the time. Any period of practice may include samadhi
and stillness, followed by new levels of experiencing wounds and family history, followed by great letting go, followed by more personal
problems. It is possible to work with all of these levels in the context of a spiritual practice. What is required is the courage to face the
totality of what arises. Only then can we find the deep healing we seek — for ourselves and for our planet.
In short, we have to expand our notion of practice to include all of life. Like the Zen ox-herding pictures, the spiritual journey takes us
deep into the forest and leads us back to the market place again and again, until we are able to find compassion and the sure heart’s
release in every realm.
Now to the personal and perhaps of interest.
Setting aside the issue of whether I am getting it or not (particularly given the fact that I would prefer to be asleep right now), one of
the benefits of the exercises is that one becomes more perceptive or more open to one’s surroundings in a general way.
About a ten minute walk from where I live, there is an extensive sand bar which used to demarcate the western extent of Lake Iroquois,
the post glacial predecessor to Lake Ontario. It is now the western terminus of Hamilton Harbour. Located there is both a park and a
cemetery and its attraction for me is that it contains a magnificent collection of Carolinian hardwoods to be found in Southern
Ontario. I gave up years ago attempting to identify them; they are too exotic. Usually I choose the cemetery side, the plantings are
more extensive, its quiet, private save for the odd happy dog taking its human for a walk, nice breeze, and there is a view over Cootes
paradise, a 12 sq. kilometre nature preserve. It is a place for walking meditation or a meditation on death.
‘There is nothing to be afraid of.’
The ultimate reassurance, and the ultimate terror.
R. D. Laing
On this particular Summer’s day, as I was ambling along the paths with no particular agenda, my peripheral vision noticed a red, white,
and blue splotch about a hundred metres off in the distance, decidedly not flowers although it did move in the breeze. People leave all
sort of remembrances at graves — food, notes, mementoes, and the unlike. In short, I was curious so I proceeded to wander in that
general direction. When I arrived what I found was a miniature Stars and Stripes much as a child might wave at a Fourth of July
parade. It was planted before an unassuming tombstone — a replica of a nineteenth century memorial save for the elaborate, five-
pointed, star at the top. In the centre of the star were the initials:
G.A.R.
and underneath the dates:
1861
1865.
On the stone were centred the following words:
WILLIAM WINER
COOKE
COLONEL
7TH U.S. CAVALRY
KILLED IN ACTION
LITTLE BIG HORN
JUNE 25, 1876
I’m really not sure how many seconds I stood there before the questions began to be voiced. It always seems to happen that, no matter
how silent my mind in observation, there is an underlying sense of a word, a sentence, a paragraph, undulating towards the shores of
speech which inevitably crashes on the shore. Then, the spell broken, I looked at the neighbouring stones and they contained the name
Winer which somewhat tempered my scepticism, after which I went on my way.
Curious, wouldn’t you say.
At any rate, I probably have overextended my welcome for today so I will say goodbye for now.
P.S.: Colonel William Winer Cooke was second-in-command to General George Custer.
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