Each of us arrives on the doorstep of spiritual practice from different paths. When I first encountered Buddhism in the 1970s, I was particularly drawn to the the idea of finding my self. Both Eastern and Western traditions offered prayer, meditation, mantras, service, devotion to guru or god that shifted the attention to the universal in which I as an individual moved, without ever addressing my original reason for why I began the search in the first place. I wanted to know – who I was, how did I fit in, and what was my purpose in life? I discovered it’s futile to teach self-transcendence to someone who first needs to find solid ground to stand on.
I found Western traditions too narrow and limited in their perception of human nature. I was much more comfortable with the impersonal, timeless reality I discovered through Buddhism than with my personal life which seemed messy. I thought if I could find my self, I could then lose the self I was, and become an entirely new person. Sounds kind of crazy, but I knew I was on to something, I just didn’t know what it was.
My spiritual teachers encouraged me to be loving and compassionate, to give up selfishness and anger, but how could I do this if my habits arose out of a childhood of dysfunction that I never clearly faced, much less understood? My attempts at loving kindness and compassion, selflessness and serenity were short-lived and not genuine because they were based on denying my feelings.
In my naiveté I discovered that the idea of spiritual realization is very seductive and relatively easy compared with actualizing it into my daily life. It took hard work and steady practice to recognize my feelings, accept them and then let them go. My attachment to my feelings is what gave rise to my suffering. I’d built up so many defenses to cope with my suffering that I only created more. Letting go of my feelings was hard because I thought if I let them go I would no longer exist. But you have to start somewhere. That was many, many years ago.
I’ve learned it is impossible to reduce reality to a simple dimension. We’re not permanent, fixed entities.The whole idea of a permanent identity is a fiction we each create to keep ourselves sane. Granted there may be some aspects of our character that don’t change over our lifetimes, but most do. I may still have all that I’ve learned from my life experiences, all the skills and knowledge that I’ve acquired, and all my personal talents, but those are meaningless if I’m not mindful to the present moment and confidently relying on my known strengths, rather than fighting to hold up my weaknesses, my version of a fool’s paradise. Mindfulness doesn’t cure anything, it supports the flowering of insight.
So if there is no self, then who is writing this? If I asked you who you are, what would you say? Most people would tell me what they do for work or tell me something about their family, personality or character, but these descriptions aren’t who you really are. There really isn’t anything anyone can point to within themselves that they can confidently say is their basic nature that will stay the same.
Over the years my way of thinking has fundamentally changed. It’s a real gift to acknowledge, even for a moment, that I am inseparable from my surroundings and intimately flow with the world as it spins, to feel confident enough to let go of my old stories and create new ones. Who am I, where do I fit in and what is my purpose in life? I still don’t know, but it doesn’t matter. Paradoxically, the more I let go of the idea of my self, the more I’m becoming who I really am teetering on the middle path somewhere between heaven and earth.
We can change and we can choose how with optimism and hope. As Carl Jung said, “I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.”
SINGULARITY
by Marie Howe
(after Stephen Hawking)
Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity
we once were?
so compact nobody
needed a bed, or food or money —
nobody hiding in the school bathroom
or home alone
pulling open the drawer
where the pills are kept.
For every atom belonging to me as good
Belongs to you. Remember?
There was no Nature. No
them. No tests
to determine if the elephant
grieves her calf or if
the coral reef feels pain. Trashed
oceans don’t speak English or Farsi or French;
would that we could wake up to what we were
— when we were ocean and before that
to when sky was earth, and animal was energy, and rock was
liquid and stars were space and space was not
at all — nothing
before we came to believe humans were so important
before this awful loneliness.
Can molecules recall it?
what once was? before anything happened?
No I, no We, no one. No was
No verb no noun
only a tiny tiny dot brimming with
is is is is is
All everything home.
