WHY THE BUDDHA SMILES

                                                                        by Carol Rawlins  

            For the first 50 years of my life I lived with what the Buddhists call a suffering mind. Using the values to which it had attached itself, my mind charged ahead doing its own habitual thing: searching, searching, seeking but never finding, well, finding, but only temporarily. As soon as I had whatever I was sure would fix my discontent, my discomfort, a new desire would bubble up and I’d attach my attention to that, and off my thought stream would go again.

            My unchecked ego mind not only had endless cravings, it was reactive, like the fire dept, always first responder whenever it felt threatened. For example, one day, in my apt house laundry room, I had two washers of wet clothing ready to be dried. I opened two dryer doors, and, being a very responsible person, cleaned the lint filters, and turned around to put the lint in the trash basket. A good person wouldn’t drop lint on the floor! In that split second, while my back was turned, a young woman turned from her washers and popped HER clothes into MY dryers. Her back had been to me and I doubt that she even knew I was preparing the dryers she took. I didn’t outwardly attack her but only because “those are my driers” sounds like a childish whine, and my self-image wouldn’t permit that, but I was in a snit for an entire day. I can still get up a good head of steam thinking about that. That steam resides in what Eckhart Tolle calls our pain-body . My pain-body looks like Gollum in Lord of the Rings. I am grateful whenever the Universe conspires to help me re-think such embarrassing moments, such as with a bumper sticker I saw on the freeway: "Calm down. All I did was change lanes."

            Dragged along by the mind stream, my mind developed a sense of self. It was pretty much an idealized self image created, conditioned, and limited, by my judgments, my conclusions, my experiences, the story I tell about who I am, and by my family of origin, my politics, my nation and by the collective unconscious mind. It seems to pick up things from the air - like the post traumatic stress of 911 that resides in the collective American pain-body. It picks up Beware of MiddleEasterners or whomever The Others are at any particular time. It worries that that TB guy was getting married on Santorini when Wendell and I were there. Fear, fear, fear.

             The favorite action verbs of my egoic mind - although it would deny that unless the I of my better nature is being watchdog - are to justify, to project, to place blame, to assign cause. My egoic mind doesn’t much like guilt so it minimizes the feel of that by making The Other, singular or plural, responsible. The felt sense of myself increases in size when it is in conflict. Indignation is great for puffing up and feeling powerfully alive. A low consciousness requires the drama of day-to-day activities, which the human race has believed to be life.

            The suffering mind believes that its continual internal dialogue is a self. The stream of thought goes a mile a minute, “Who is she? I hope she won’t talk long. Oh, yes, Tom’s at General Assembly. I forgot to take the roast out of the freezer, maybe we can go out for lunch, I wonder where the Lunch Bunch is going. There’s even a 12-step program for run on minds. It’s called On Anon..

            The suffering mind lives toward the future, or the next moment. Fulfillment is always in some time other than NOW.  It doesn’t like what is. “When my ship comes in, then I will be happy, loving, loved, content, at peace. If only.... Desire and attachment are other attributes. The self of the suffering mind competes to be better than...or worse than. Poor me. Did I tell you what happened?  It thinks its story is itself. The more drama the better. Suffering mind identifies with physical form - I am a body.  Its personal pain-body feeds on its own mind story and others’ emotional reactions.

             The key descriptor of the suffering mind is non acceptance, resistance to what is. It always say, NO! not that, not yet, not right, not enough. I want that .....over there. Never here, this, or now. A Course in Miracles asks,  “Why would you ask this transient stranger wandering about in your mind to tell you who or what you are?

            I’m giving you a worse case scenario. Most spiritual resources - Buddhism; Jesus, the teachings of the yogis and the rishis, and many popular contemporary books - A Course in Miracles; The Four Agreements, The Power of Now - offer ways to calm the mental noise and emotional turmoil, to help the egoic mind choose peace, not further add fear and anger and lack of awareness to the individual and collective unconscious minds.. Left unexamined, the habitual mind will be a suffering mind.

            But what to do to get started when one has had enough? Eckhart Tolle in The Power of Now says that if we’re lucky the weight of the whole thing will get so heavy and intolerable it will collapse - but I know that’s a scary place to be - with that old self identity gone- and a new one not yet in place -  but there are more gentle ways to change the outcome when one finally makes a commitment to change the status quo..

            The first method I tried when I finally heard I could choose otherwise was from a cognitive therapy workbook. I began to observe - to objectively peer at - the thoughts that preceded the anxiety that kept my nervous system in a state of exhausting watchfulness. Years later I learned that there’s a meditation technique called Vipassana which is similar in which one just watches one’s thoughts go by and chooses not to attach to any particular one, rather like each thought is a bus. That’s not my bus. And let the bus go on by.

            One day, while attempting to observe the process of the anxiety - what thoughts set it off and what kept it going- I realized there were two "me's". There was a me, an "I", who was doing the observing, and there was an "I" who was being watched. I, neutral witness, was observing the me with the anxiety, and the I who was doing the witnessing seemed to be the authentic one. That was my first clue that there really might be another self besides that suffering egoic mind self.

            I also had learned a little about calming my agitated mind with biofeedback, which I had learned at the Menninger Foundation in Topeka, KS, a major psychiatric facility, where my then-husband was on staff. We wives were placated by being allowed to play with whatever the latest exciting research at the Foundation happened to be. We didn’t get buried alive like one particular yogi, but we did have the opportunity to try out ESP and learn innovative mental and physical health techniques such as biofeedback.

             Standard to biofeedback are relaxation, visualization and the resulting stilling of the anxious mind. From there it was an easy step to meditation. In meditation, one does what Deepak Chopra describes as tiptoeing through the herd of sleeping elephants which are our thoughts - without waking them up. Deep within the layers of the mind I found a place of great silence. Once I discovered the Silence, which seemed a place in my mind as much as a condition, I spent many hours there. The experience was so extraordinary, especially in contrast to my ceaselessly churning mind, that I turned again and again to the great still pool I found within myself.

            Whatever the Silence was it seemed like Nothing, No Thing. It had no form. It was just kind of a lit up emptiness. And I would lose my form, the boundaries of my self, when I would merge into it. There was no form to it or me. The I of suffering Carol disappeared. And yet that witnessing I was aware of what was going on.

           Interesting that though the No Thing of meditation had no identity, was formless, I nevertheless experienced it as Love. Jesus seemed to be pointing to the same when he spoke of The Kingdom of Heaven Within, or The Father Within. Not I but the Father Within Doeth the Work. Jesus sometimes referred to it as Abba, Daddy. Abba is a diminutive form of the Aramaic word, abwoon, meaning Birther, Father-Mother of the Cosmos. I would come out of the Silence at peace and functioning in a more creative way. It, whatever the It was, kind of reorganized my ordinary mind. I was provided with direction,  information, organization, ideas, at the very least, a quiet mind. My perennial racing thoughts would subside.

            If you are a meditator, and about half of Summitarians say they are, your version of meditation may lead you, too, into a seemingly empty space which you think of the Emptiness, the Stillness, the Silence. It is being in touch with that Still Point that calls the meditator back again and again because life on the far side of the meditative moment is never the same as life before the meditative moment.

            In the spiritual books of the East, there seems to be an assumption that a person will spend the years of his or her maturity seeking to contact this inner Whatever.

           Recently when I was dropping my old friend, the runaway mind, into the silent mind of meditation, my attention was suddenly pulled into my full body instead of to the place in my head where I had always experienced the Silence. It was as if a door in the front of me kind of opened. All of a sudden I was filled with the Silence from my toes to above the top of my head. Oh, my gosh, something new. What was this! Inquiring minds wanted to know.

            And about that time I found the picture on the cover of the Order of Service (thanks to our office treasure Linda for working with it). Here the artist shows the Buddha hosting an inner presence. The Buddha is filled with it, not just in his mind, but in his body, as well.

            My answer to the question in the sermon title is that the Buddha smiles because he found the Holy Grail, the Pearl of Great Price, and he actually abides in it .  Abide means to dwell, to sojourn, to rest, to conform to. That’s the Abide in Me, I suspect, of the old hymn. The Buddha knows he need take no thought- like Jesus said the lilies of the field take no thought. Get out of your head, that small controlling mind part of us, they both are saying.

            And that’s when I finally got it. From my experience of the Silence as Nothing, No Thing, and the transfer of that Nothing, No Thing from the mind into the body, I realized  - and here’s the difficult part, conceptually - the Within in which the Buddha abides is Source Itself, but Source while it is still Nothing, before it becomes something. At that point nothing has happened. There’s no doing, no thinking. There’s only being. Ah, ha, thought I, that’s The Word of Scriptures: In the beginning was the Word. The Buddha abides in the Word.

            Then other words  came at me from all directions, words that pointed to the Nothing before Something in the Budda. In the circle discussion after Bob Moore’s sermon on Nothing, Ed Henry mentioned a term he learned in India: the Divine without Attributes. No way to describe it and yet people sought it.  How very odd.  And then there’s the Buddha himself. When Gautama was asked what are you, are you a God or a master, he replied.  I Am Awake. What was he awake to? The reality of himself. That within him was a great void, a space, a vibrantly alive nothing, a silence, out of which everything originates. Buddha was fully conscious. He abided in It, the Divine Without Attributes.  For the physicist, The Nothing, the No Thing, is perhaps wave, and not particle. It is the state before it becomes Something.

            The Nothing seems to be Consciousness Itself, consciousness without form,  a reservoir of all potential, all possibility. The No thing, the Nothing Within, precedes form. It is timeless. Later, in time, the No Thing will become ideas, words, thoughts, personality, everything we experience externally. It’s like a great bubbling pot of surging unmanifested energy out of which everything we call reality arises. It is the I AM. It is Being before Being becomes beings.

             As my dear husband reminds me, “Everything has a machinism out of which it works.” I’m perfectly willing for science to tell me what this No Thing is. I am particularly excited about a concept called Zero Point Field with which everything seems to interact at the subatomic level, something to do with resonance and picking up a few loose subatomic bubbles. This Zero Point Field may turn out to be a scientific name for what religious people call God. 

            And does it matter if we know that this No Thing is within us, except to the excited spiritual seeker like me who wants it all?. Indeed, yes, and for this important thought I am again grateful to Eckhart Tolle.  Tolle sees a collective insanity in the suffering human mind. That collective insanity, he says, has had its grip on the world and has dominated all of human history. It has resulted in the suffering inflicted by humans on themselves and on others.  When we operate out of our small egoic minds, fueled by that collective insane mind, the result is history as we have known it - war, atrocities, hunger, cruelty.  In the current mind frame of small egoic mind we cannot live without enemies because the egoic mind gets its sense of self from resistance. The old reactive collective egoic self feeds on the desire to be the strongest, the most powerful, the biggest and best, to be other than. It feels safest when it attacks. It is a collective warrior - my words.

            Tolle believes that that insane collective mind can be dissolved but only at the individual level. We must see the roots of it within our own self or we get trapped in the inherited mind patterns.  The solution that he offers is to come to know ourselves as who we are beyond form, beyond content, beyond future, or as I visualize it, before form, before content, before the suffering identity we have given ourselves. Tolle calls the No Thing within the Buddha, presence or spaciousness.

            So how to get there, should one wish to abide where the Buddha abides? Again, Tolle offers a way, and it is so simple it knocks my socks off, and it works. He says to just say YES to whatever is at this moment, to align yourself with whatever appears within you this very moment, whether it’s guilt, fear, anger, pain, grief, irritation, depression, boredom, a craving, a sense of separation or specialness or the need to be carefully kept. And here’s why saying YES is essential. The suffering egoic mind is resistance itself; we create it by resisting what is.  

             For a minute, close your eyes and in your mind shout NO and feel that life energy rise up. Here’s that head of steam I talked about earlier. And we’ll want to get rid of in some way so we’ll pass it around. It doesn’t feel good though we feel very alive and big. But there’s no flow to it. It’s just going to sit there for a while. That’s why the suffering.

            It isn’t what happens to us that matters so much as our reaction to it, which is usually no, unless we’ve learned otherwise. All that life energy that goes into desiring, thirsting, wanting, needing, craving, looking for an identity , saying NO,  strengthens the small self, keeping us trapped in an illusory sense of self .

            Tolle advises that when loss appears, don’t resist it; when something is removed from you, accept it; be in the ISNESS of this moment. Become friends with what IS. When resistance collapses, the larger unconditioned capitol S Self comes into being.

            Saying YES to whatever IS releases that very same life energy  from its old bonds, the old patterns we’ve trapped it in. That very same energy freed by the YES then goes whoosh and drops into the body and become the not yet formed energy that abides within the Buddha and within us, when we free it up.  Tolle say it’s the only hope for humankind. It’s happening now to many people. 

            So here we are, selves with form, surrounded by things, with minds filled with things, and imagining more, and where were we and this stuff, before we came into being our small selves? We were in the state that preceded our creation of ourselves, before taking form, before capital B Being flowed into the cookie cutters that became our individual beings. But our vision of our potential was too small, too pinchy tight, and we wound up with suffering mind, not knowing that there was a way out. There was no flow in us.

              Should we choose to accept the possibility, we, too, can abide a while, like the Buddha, like Jesus, in the Source, in the Kingdom of Heaven Within, for a while be melted down, unstructured, but then filled up with new possibilities, to  return to this world as new creatures, with new vision and new understandings,  ready to try new ways of being and doing, poised to be the Saviors of the World. I think that’s our destiny, but it does require that we say Yes to what is. No resistance allowed. No suffering preferred. 

            In the Beginning was not a one time creative moment, nor is it a future creative moment, but it is a right now, right here, creative moment, ours for the taking, just by backing out of our heads for a while and going into our internal closets to be made new. 

            I conclude with words from the German poet Rilke: "A billion stars go spinning through the night, blazing high above your head. But in you is the presence that will be, when all the stars are dead.”     

June 24, 2007