Where Limitations Stop

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We begin with the Tao, the eternal, the Way, which cannot be told. And then we begin to try to tell it, right? Or at least to tell something. Why? Because “the name that can be named is not the eternal name,” but we really, really need to name things.

Remember in the last post how I talked about how naming = capturing and tying down? Well, you can’t do that with the Tao itself, but you have to do it to plant a tree or build a house or develop an identity. The writer of the Tao Te Ching, traditionally known as Lao Tzu, understood this:

The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth.

The named is the mother of ten thousand things.

http://tiltonfenwick.com/2012/09/paint-is-boring/

So the nameless, the Tao itself, gives rise to the basis of creation – and then the stuff comes creeping in. “Ten thousand things” means “all the stuff in the world” – rocks, trees, squeegees, wall clocks, incredible bouncing balls, etc. Now, there are lots of “things” we don’t need, surely, but there are some things of which I’m awfully fond – cooking implements and substances used to create shelter jump right to the top of that list. No “things”, it seems, no life. We need the named, and the ten thousand things to which it gives rise (at least some of the them).

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Where we get tripped up is when we start thinking that either

1)   the ten thousand things is the totality of the Tao and there is nothing more than this materiality that we can see,

OR

2)   the ten thousand things has nothing to do with the Tao and being in harmony with the Way means being out of harmony with all the stuff that’s around you (especially the stuff you don’t like, be that water pollution, urban sprawl, the gun lobby, the anti-gun lobby, your neighbor mowing his lawn at 6 am on Saturday morning, whatever).

So if the Tao isn’t comprised of the ten thousand things, and getting in harmony isn’t about getting all rarified and separated from the ten thousand things, then just exactly how are we supposed to understand the relationship between this great Way and all the cluttery little stuff that we find around us? Turns out, it just depends on how we ask the question:

Ever desireless, one can see the mystery.

Ever desiring, one can see the manifestations.

So when we are able to be at play with the moving colors of the iridescence rather than trying to pin them down, in harmony with what is, flowing without desire from one moment to the next, then we are aware of something more like the Way in and of itself. At other times, when we want to find the paci so the baby will stop crying, or buy a new car to replace the heap in the driveway, or get that promotion that we really deserve, then we are looking at the ten thousand things. But – and here’s the fun part – they aren’t really different:

These two spring from the same source but differ in name;

                                               this appears as darkness.

Darkness within darkness.

The gate to all mystery.

The Tao and the ten thousand things, the harmony and the craziness – it’s all the same. It just depends on which way you are looking.

We want to trace a logic line through all of this, but Lao Tzu tells us that when we try to do that we are missing the point. The “darkness” he talks about is that place where the logical mind can’t draw lines, where words fail to capture the essence anymore. It’s the place where limitations – like the limitations between harmony and craziness, things and not things – stop. It is darkness, it is mystery, it is Tao. And it’s all good.

Quotation from Tao Te Ching, trans. Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English. 

Going Someplace Else With The Tao

“You can’t get there from here;
you’ve got to go someplace else first.” 

That’s what my father-in-law used to say about places you could see from a road but couldn’t find any roads leading TO. The locals always know the right path, but the sojourner has to hunt around a bit or stop and ask directions before he or she can figure out how in the heck you get from here to there. (And if you’ve ever been caught in the labyrinthine streets of the small medieval city of Toledo, Spain, where the streets twist and curve back in upon themselves, then you’ll know what I’m talking about.)

So what happens when you get to the next street, and the next and the next, and you’re still not there? Well, then you might just be in search of the Tao.

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
Tao Te Ching, Chapter 1

What we hear right off the bat is that if you can talk about it, then it’s not the real thing. Why? Because the real thing is beyond words; words are just too puny, too limiting, to hold it. It’s like that place you can’t get to: if you get there, then you are in one spot, and that spot may be great, fantastic, terrific, like no where else – but it’s just one spot in a big, wide universe. So if you’re in that one spot, you know it can’t be the All. And the Tao, it’s the All, the Way. So if you want to know it, you have to keep going someplace else first, metaphorically speaking, because you can never capture it, you can only move with it.

We humans, we like to capture things, to tie them down in nice neat packages, but “capture” and “tie down” are exactly what you cannot do with the Tao. It is the way of harmony in the universe, and harmony both includes everything (no need to capture) and is constantly in motion (cannot be tied down). Think of something that is iridescent: can you capture its color? As soon as you define one of the colors, you have defined yourself right out of all of the others – and the whole changing interplay – that makes it iridescent in the first place. The best thing you can do is let your eyes play along with the movement of colors, understanding all the while that this movement itself is the source of beauty and harmony. Just like the Tao.

More on this next time.

Quotation from Tao Te Ching, trans. Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English.

Photo by Ute Esser, found at http://www.astronet.ru/db/xware/msg/1194022

“You Were Never Born; You Will Never Die”

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So there is Arjuna, falling down on the field of battle, overcome with such weariness and despair from even the thought of the fight before him that he can’t imagine going on. Why live at all if this is the battle he must fight? He places himself at Krishna’s feet, literally and figuratively, looking for something to help him move from the place of complete and utter STUCK that he is in. And he gets it – boy, does he get it – but not at all in the way he is looking for.

Arjuna is waiting for a pep talk on why he should make a choice for one course of action or the other. Instead he gets the deep dive into metaphysics and the ultimate nature of reality.

“You speak sincerely, but your sorrow has no cause…One man believes he is the slayer, another believes he is the slain. Both are ignorant; there is neither slayer nor slain. You were never born; you will never die. You have never changed; you can never change. Unborn, eternal, immutable, immemorial, you do not die when the body dies. Realizing that which is indestructible, eternal, unborn, and unchanging, how can you slay or cause another to slay?”

                                                      Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 2

Bet Arjuna wasn’t expecting THAT as the answer.

Krishna does tell him to stand up and fight, to do his duty and stop being a sissy (okay, not in so many words, but close), but it’s all as a way of explaining to him that the whole world around him - and he himself within it - are not what he thinks, and his despair comes from all this wrongheaded thinking. What Arjuna does matters because it affects the people around him; but at a much deeper level, the only actions that can ever really matter are those that lead to an understanding of the Self, the truest part of every being, which is “everlasting and infinite, standing on the motionless foundation of eternity.” If he can come to realize this, Krishna is telling him, all despair and doubt, all fear of any kind, will be but a whisper of wind passing by him because he will be living in full knowledge of the truth.

The Self is not the same thing as the Christian understanding of a soul. The Self is immortal, unchanging, tied to a body for a time but never contained within it. The Self is not where human and divine meet: it is where they recognize that they are one and the same. The divine is the Self writ large; the Self is a part of the divine essence attached to a personality, at least for a while. Atman, the Self, is one and the same thing as Brahman, the Ultimate Reality, the ground of all being, the essence which stands behind all deities and creations.

Do you feel this sense of profound connection to everything that is? Do the tiniest blade of grass and the largest galaxy in the universe and the face of every human you see all reveal the divine to you? If so, then the Bhagavad Gita, in all its sheer beauty, may be a scripture that calls to you.

The impermanent has no reality; reality lies in the eternal. Those who have seen the boundary between these two have attained the end of all knowledge.

                                                      Chapter 2

Quotations from The Bhagavad Gita, trans Eknath Easwaran

Image found at http://heartofphilosophy.wordpress.com/events/past-events/edge-of-reason-ngv-2007/

“My Will Is Paralyzed”

This is what Arjuna says near the beginning of the Bhagavad Gita when he realizes that the choices before him are equally untenable; better, he says, to be killed “unarmed and unresisting” than to walk the path that lies before him. But, as the title reminds us, this is not Arjuna’s song to sing: Bhagavad Gita translates as the Song of the Lord, the Lord in question being Krishna, an avatar of Vishnu. This is Krishna’s song, where he explains the inner workings of the world and the beings within it to his friend, Arjuna, who becomes his disciple in the course of the text.

But we don’t know that in the beginning. After a brief setup of scene, we are with Arjuna the warrior standing on the battlefield and surveying the enemy he is to fight that day. Only the enemy doesn’t look very enemy-ish. Across the open field are cousins, uncles, teachers – some of the people Arjuna loves most in the world. Up to this point anger at the injustice that led to this fight has fueled his usual strength and vigor, but seeing all these beloved faces arrayed against him breaks much more than just his resolve.

-->“O Krishna, I see my own relations here anxious to fight, and my limbs grow weak; my mouth is dry, my body shakes and my hair is standing on end.”

                                                                        Chapter 1

Arjuna thinks he is about to enter a fight for his life, and he is; what he doesn’t realize is that this fight will take place within his own heart and mind, and only secondarily on physical ground. The true fight, the more dangerous one, is with a terrifying and soul-destroying despair.
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“I have no desire for victory or for a kingdom or pleasures. Of what use is a kingdom or pleasures or even life, if those for whose sake we desire these things…are engaging in this battle? Even if they were to kill me, I would not want to kill them”…And casting away his bow and his arrows, he sat down in his chariot in the middle of the battlefield.

                                                                        Chapter 1

He sees those beloved faces and realizes that winning is just as futile as losing. It isn’t whether he will win or lose, it isn’t even how he plays the game: what Arjuna is up against is why he would want to live at all if this is the game that has to be played.

Maybe some of you reading this recognize yourself in Arjuna and his grinding despair. You too have thrown your weapons to the ground, refusing to enter the fray because winning seems as painful and pointless as losing. This is what the depths of depression look like; it is the contours of acute grief, and the darkest of dark nights of the soul. Why win through to the other side when all you see there is a life devoid of meaning, a life you wish you weren’t forced to live anyway? Why not just sit down in your chariot and refuse to fight?

For those of us who know this inner torment, this solitary despair, Arjuna is our Everyman, our anti-hero, falling down just at the moment of battle. But the anti-hero turns into a hero; Arjuna the Everyman of despair becomes Arjuna the Everyman of determination, of joy, because blue-skinned Krishna, the Lord of this Song, shows him that there is an error in his – in our – thinking. We may be right about the futility of certain facile ways of life and thought that we have chosen or fallen into that have gotten us into this morass of despair, but we are wrong about what life ultimately is, about what we ultimately are, and Krishna is here to explain it all for us. 

More on this next time. 

Quotations from The Bhagavad Gita, trans Eknath Easwaran

Image found at http://memoirsofarovingmind.blogspot.com/2011/08/despair.html
 

Too Distracted to Meditate, Part II

The Ego, in Buddhist understanding, is nothing more than a few strands of reality mixed with a fistful of wishful thinking and a couple dashes of bravado, but it looks all nice and impervious on the outside. It looks like, well, you, but is no more real than a drawing on paper. (Note, however, that this says nothing about the healthiness of that ego in a psychological sense: your ego could be of the strong-and-confident variety, or the lay-down-like-a-dormat variety; the issue here is not what it looks like, but how firmly entrenched it is in your thinking about yourself.)

But as the Dhammapada reminds us, when you get serious about meditation you start to undo The Ego ’s death grip on your life. Even a little meditation lets you start to see this as you begin to get control over issues such as anger that have done a better job of managing you than you have of managing them.

That is, if The Ego doesn’t jump in, point out what a disaster you are at meditating, and convince you to give up with a simple, “I can’t do it.” Which, of course, is a fallacy: anyone can meditate. All it takes is plopping your butt down on the couch/floor/chair/stoop/piano bench/ottoman and closing your eyes, moving into stillness with the intention of simply being there, and quietly and gently moving yourself back there anytime you discover that your mind has wandered. Boom, pow, done. That’s it. Are there methods and techniques and advanced levels for which you are not ready? Sure, but just because you can’t pitch in majors doesn’t mean you shouldn’t play catch in the back yard. Anyone can meditate. You can meditate.

It’s simple to do, but the Dhammapada tells us that this doesn’t make it easy. Bringing the mind back to stillness over and over again can be mighty frustrating, and when you seriously start focusing and putting all your energy into one point, that’s when The Ego really kicks in and starts sending every distraction known to humans your way to keep you from getting one step closer to free. 

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When the Buddha sat down under the bodhi tree, we are told, Mara the Tempter threw all the fun temptation his way – pleasure, power, fame. Sounds a lot like Jesus in the desert, doesn’t it? And with a very similar result – both men rejected the trinkets laid before them because they knew that a far greater treasure lay in store. The Buddha found his way beyond The Ego ’s cravings – all by training the mind to remove every distraction, including those thrown at him by the Tempter himself – and sending his thoughts like an arrow to exactly where he wanted them to go:

As an archer aims his arrow,

the wise aim their restless thoughts,

hard to aim, hard to restrain.
Dhammapada Ch 3 

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And as we read the Dhammapada 2½ millennia later, we hear his words echoing through time, telling us that we can do exactly the same thing. It won’t be easy, but what good thing ever is? No miracle is required, no salvation from on high: with our own decisions and by our own efforts, we can release ourselves from The Ego ’s talons and discover truth and freedom beyond anything we have ever known before. 

Quotations from The Dhammapada, trans. Eknath Easwaran

 

Too Distracted to Meditate, Part I

Hard it is to train the mind, 
which goes where it likes and does what it wants.
Dhammapada Ch 3

Well, duh. We like to think that it’s the distractions of modern life that make it so difficult to focus, to stay on track, and – worst of all – to meditate. “If only,” we think. “If only I didn’t have to pick up the kids, or work late, or go to the gym, do the dishes, pick up the drycleaning, do that thing at that place where I volunteered. If only I wouldn’t get sucked into stupid online games, or Facebook, or reality shows, or the latest crime thriller. If only I had time/could make time/didn’t waste time. If only…”

And then the Buddha gets right up in our face and says, “Hey, I’m talking to you – yes, YOU – from across the millenia. Guess what? In my day we didn’t have offices or TV or Snookie or Facebook, but the mind was still just as hard to train. You know why? Because it is the The Mind. It’s constantly full of old thoughts and constantly running around looking for new ones. It does its level best to fill up any space of openness so that it doesn’t have to recognize that it is the major source of its own problems. You want to blame the Internet or your boss? Go ahead, but that’s just The Mind offloading its problems once again so that you won’t take a closer look.”

As long as you look outside yourself for the problem, then you’ll continue to look outside yourself for the solution to the problem, too, and you will leave The Mind still doing its gig and getting away with it. See, The Mind is going to point out pretties and shinies in every direction just to get you to keep looking at everything but it. Why? Because The Mind is the gateway to The Ego , that wonderful picture you’ve created of yourself and that you send out into the world on a daily basis. And The Ego has an agenda.

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More on this next time…


Quotations from The Dhammapada, trans Eknath Easwaran