BRINGING
INTO BEING

I sit here looking out at a snowy spring morning and think of all the changes that have taken place…

New Year’s resolutions have been around awhile. According to the History Channel, perhaps as far back as the Babylonians, 4000…

Genuine gratitude isn’t something we can do, practice, or cultivate. Gratitude is not something we can be told to have, or required to feel, by others. It is not “finding the silver lining” as a way to turn away from the pain in our lives and the difficulties we must face. It is not the same as compassionate understanding or forgiveness and serves a different purpose in guiding our lives. Gratitude naturally and spontaneously flows through us when we open and soften to the truth that everything is changing, and that change is the gift of life.

Karma is the principle of cause and effect. Simply put, when a thing happens, another thing happens. In pop culture, karma is typically used to refer to an observable effect in the sense of a universal or cosmic reckoning. In Buddhism, there is no divine agency that punishes or rewards us for our behavior, and no effect randomly happens. It is simply our own lack of clarity regarding causality that makes it seem so.

When we’re speaking or thinking in words and engaging the world with any notion of self, we are not “cultivating The Silence.” There are two kinds of “Silence” in meditation practice, absolute and non-dual. “Absolute Silence” points to cessation events where there is a gap in consciousness without a gap in awareness. Non-dual silence refers to spontaneously intuiting the dependently originating nature of all experiences and integrating that into the worldview of the self-making apparatus. In my view, going through Absolute Silence is one of the key (though not indispensable) ways to realize non-dual silence. Zen is an efficient framework for “cultivating the Silence” when we know what, why, and how Zen supports it. Knowing is an intellectual capacity. Intellect is developed by reading, writing, discussing, and contemplating in words. A skillful and robust intellectual understanding is the first step toward using Zen and zen effectively. This is just like having “the right tool for the job” is predicated on knowing what tools do what, when to use them and why.

The key to believing in a way out and feeling empowered to actualize change in my life lay in committing to a practice method. In some cases, the practice method is specifically suited to address a particular shortcoming. In other cases, it’s more spiritually oriented and aimed at fundamental shifts in perspective. Either way, it’s all about identifying something one can take up to address the issue and get started, no matter how helpless we may feel.

Our practice’s history is rich with instructions, maps, schemes, and methods. It is not at all vague. We can use these to set ourselves on a skillful journey of training that prepares us to just “Sit down. Be quiet. Wake up.” This article is a meander across some of the theories and practices in a way that will hopefully support you in your journey from concentration (dharana) to meditation (dhyana) to samadhi (liberating absorption).

It is the first line that is most essential to our main topic. “Enlightenment is awakening…” begs the question, “what awakens?” The only thing that can, “me!”

When we look deeply enough, we discover that we are the pure potential for experience. Everything is already happening here, within. There’s nothing that we can’t face or handle. Even in our darkest moments, there is space to remember and choose.

Hakuin’s Song of Zazen invites us to explore the Buddhist notion of causality. It is pointing to the two-fold impact of direct causes and contributing conditions… The “six worlds,” could also be translated as the “six realms” or “six inclinations.” Taking it as “six realms,” we can better understand the overall landscape of Buddhist cosmology.

Samadhi is the culmination of one-pointed concentration applied to the investigation of some phenomena, yielding an insight and “unreasonable joy.”

The fourfold wisdom is a way of describing various aspects of awakened sentience (bodhi) as both experience and progressive embodiment of insight. The fourfold wisdom is the:

• Perfect Mirror Wisdom

• Wisdom of Sameness

• Wisdom of Differentiation

• Wisdom of Benefitting Others

The practice of meditation, and thereby seeing one’s own nature (or kensho) prompts awakening to a radically altered worldview: prajna.

Dhyāna refers to stages of meditative practice that have two aspects: stillness (samatha) and insight (vipassana) into the nature of being. It is a co-arising phenomenon when the stilling of the mind reveals its nature.

Patience, endurance, equanimity: when someone thinks of Zen, these words probably come to mind. But what exactly are we referring to when we talk about the “perfection of patient endurance” in our tradition?

As constant learners we radically accept where we are in the process of setting an intention, seeking out what we need to fulfil it, applying our practice to fulfilling it, and then assessing how it all went and resetting our intention. In this process there is an opportunity to remember and choose. In this remembering and choosing, there is freedom and unreasonable joy.

In other words, eventually virtuous behavior isn’t something that we grit our teeth and make ourselves do. It’s simply how we are because it’s the only thing that makes sense in the face of our interconnection and interdependency.