The Path of the Human Being - Part 1

I’m going to try to convey the teaching that Roshi gave last weekend. It’s a brilliant bit of dharma teaching that I think some folks might enjoy. But because it’s somewhat long, this will be a multiple posting. I’m going to try to condense it without losing the flavor of it. So I ask for your patience.

What must be understood is that first and foremost, Roshi is a Zen Master, and as such, his major interest is in transmitting the dharma and finding ways to make it accessible. That is why he is so invested in the Big Mind process. Big Mind looks and sounds like a voice dialogue tool. But that’s where the similarities end. Big Mind is a process to both teach the dharma AND to give people direct experience of the dharma. In the hands of a skilled facilitator, the Big Mind process has the power to awaken us.

Another important point to keep in mind is that the range of voices generally fall into 2 categories: dualistic and transcendent. Traditional voice dialogue primarily works with the dualistic voices, the psychological identities that we are more familiar with and work with during a mat trip, e.g., the victim, the controller, the protector, the damaged self, the innocent child, etc.

When working with the dualistic voices we discover that we are actually engaged in is a process of shadow work, integrating our disowned voices. We also discover that we are using our own life force to suppress and disown these voices because they’re too painful, too uncomfortable. So freeing and owning these voices releases vital life force energy that becomes available to us. This, in an of itself, is extremely healing, allowing us to live more freely in our lives and the world. All of us have had a taste of this freedom on the mat.

But when we switch to the transcendent voices, here’s a whole different ball game. We are then engaged in a process of awakening these voices within us. They are not disowned, they simply have never been opened up before and have lain dormant. That’s where it gets really exciting. Quite literally, the Big Mind process is a practice of enlightenment, helping to fast track us through these stages.

That last sentence probably sounds very big.

I’m learning all kinds of things as to what enlightenment is. It’s been refreshing to be part of a group that speak of it so openly and candidly, as something completely achievable rather than something magical.

Simply put, enlightenment is an experience of awakening that can happen quite out of the blue. One day you’re walking down the street just minding your own business, and then WHAM! you suddenly discover that you’re not who you thought you were. Such an experience can feel ecstatic or scary. But your sense of self has irrevocably expanded beyond what you now know to be a very contracted perspective of self. But we don’t have to rely on the unpredictable to wake up. We can also intentionally court it through spiritual practices such as sex, shamanism, meditation, extreme sports, asceticism, sensory deprivation, nature and certain drugs. Or Big Mind.

Our first experience of enlightenment is as a state of being. By definition, a state is an experience of something that is at first very immediate but fades away in time and becomes a memory. We find ourselves consistently referring back to to the memory of the experience. As the experience turns into a memory, many of us will set off on a spiritual path in an attempt to regain it, hopefully permanently. For most of us, this is the stage in which we find ourselves, and it can take many years to move through it, as long as 10-40 years!

Although these are called stages, they are not linear, although they are fairly sequential. Each person reading this will likely discover that s/he knows something about each one of these stages. That is because we have had a state experience of that particular stage, not necessarily have experienced that stage fully and have completed with it. And we can have experiences of one or more of these stages at the same time.

For those who want to have an experience of these teachings, I recommend purchasing and watching Genpo Roshi’s DVD of the same name. But nothing compares to being with Roshi as he takes the entire group through the experience of the teaching through the Big Mind process.

Tomorrow: the 5 stages of the Path of the Human Being