I have been reading and contemplating some of the Buddhist ideas about how to progress along the path and have begun to wonder if maybe many of them are upside-down in a fundamental way – or maybe I am just thinking about them upside-down.
There are many things that they say you need to do to progress along the path, or at least there are obstacles in the way. For example, pride is considered a problem, as is anger, jealousy, greed, and many other emotions that we all know to be problematic. The teachings say that you can’t become truly happy and certainly not “enlightened” as long as these are how you interact with the world. They also have teachings that tell you to stop doing these things. While I agree that happiness and enlightenment seem to be out of reach. However, I think that it might be impossible to stop doing these things as directed tasks. I think that they are more like the symptoms of another problem, rather than the cause. You can keep working on these symptoms and forever fail and feel defeated because they are not the source of the problems.
Once the underlying causes of these feelings are removed or healed, then the symptoms just go away. You find that you just don’t get angry like you used to, you just don’t feel jealousy, and you don’t experience greed. Not because you stop doing them, but because they no longer make sense and are no longer needed.
If this is true, then the question becomes what is causing these feelings, and how do you go about fixing these problems? The problems all seem to be tied up with the ego, or the idea of “me”. We learn who “we” are when growing, but seem to get the mistaken idea that we are what others think of us – rather than just being content with being true selves. This results in a situation where we take everything personally – we think that everything that happens is happening to us – and we depend upon our guesses of other people’s opinions to determine if we are good, bad, successful or not. Thus we are constantly becoming angry, jealous, greedy, etc., etc., etc. (All of the things that keep us from true, inner happiness).
The Buddhists and others have techniques that can help. One really great technique is meditation. While it seems like nothing is happening, it is a very good way to start to learn let go of your self. We keep ourselves in our position by constantly talking to ourselves, reinforcing our image of who we are. During meditation this internal diologue becomes quieter, and we learn to not pay so much attention to it. We still have the thoughts, but we can slowly begin to stop believing in them. We start following the Toltec advice of “don’t believe me, don’t believe them, and don’t believe yourself.” We have an inner self that knows much more than the speaking mind. In mediation we start to learn to pay attention to that inner self.
Another technique is involved with releasing our personal energy so that we have more energy to use for purposes of growth and enlightenment. We all have an allotment of “energy” (whatever this means) that we can use to get through life. However, it is usually fully allocated – including being used to power anger, jealousy, etc. There is no extra energy to do anything else with, so we feel trapped. However, there are methods whereby we can stop spending some of our wasted energy, releasing some for growth and advancement. It starts with getting a tiny bit so that we have a little room to move. That allows us to free up a little space and do it some more, making more space – until we find that we are not nearly as tied down as we once were.
At that point we can begin to gain personal confidence in our inner being, the one that knows but cannot speak. The wise one inside(s?) of us communicates through subtle techniques that we can learn to be more aware of. They include things like “intuition,” “gut feelings”, “urges”, and vague feelings. Once we practice shutting down our chattering mind, we begin to realize that these communications are not “magic” or unreliable feelings, but rather they are the means that we communicate with ourself. They are real value, real meaning, and are important.
As this shift in attention occurs, and as we get more personal power at our disposal, the actions that stand in the way or our enlightenment just naturally melt away. We find that it what others say really isn’t about us at all, it is all about them – we needn’t take it personally because it isn’t personal. We find that we allow the idea that we may be making the wrong assumptions about things, in fact we start to recognize that most of the assumptions that we make about others is just part of our internal dialogue trying to prove to ourselves that we are right and the other is wrong. Once it doesn’t matter if you are right or not, or the other is wrong or not, then there really isn’t any reason to make damaging assumptions. We can become curious and try to find out the truth – or at least stop acting on our assumptions as if they are the truth.
This whole thing starts to snowball, and pretty soon we find that the energy required to do the things that the Buddhist’s say prevents our movement along the path just dissipates. We don’t have to stop doing these things because we find that we just don’t do them as often, or as vigorously, as we once did. We begin to more carefully watch ourselves and find that we have somehow managed to find some distance between ourselves and ourselves. This distance allows us to move toward personal freedom and happiness.
A key point of all of this is to do it with gentleness to ourselves. We need to remember that all that we can do is what we can do; we can only do the best that we can at the moment – never more. It is a series of tiny progressions, and what sometimes appear to be regressions – which is just as it should be. It can’t be rushed, and it can’t be forced. It is a quiet adventure, learning to trust in a part of ourselves that seems mysterious and hidden. It is neither mysterious nor hidden, but we have learned to think that it isn’t important and therefore we avoid it.
My image of the mind is that it is like an orange (or maybe a tangerine) that has a thin outer layer that speaks, and contains our “consciousness”. Because of the ability to speak, we think it is who we are. The rest of the mind can’t speak in a way that we can hear as words, so we tend to ignore it as much as we can. However, it is clearly where everything is really done. It does the remembering, interpreting, seeing, knowing, analyzing – everything. The speaking and “thinking” part is just a communication interface, but because it knows how to talk it believes it is doing all of the heavy work – when in fact it is doing no work at all. Once we come to know this, we can start to wake up again – and that is the path to happiness, peace and enlightenment.
