the Path of the Human Being - Part 2 - the 5 Stages

1. -- AWAKENING

Here we experience an opening, kensho (Japanese word for awakening). This might happen only once or repeatedly. Here we catch perhaps a glimpse, or an even more clear experience of our true self, that life as we know it is not exactly as it appears. But instead, we have a profound realization, a knowing of the inarguable truth that we are The Way. But as time goes on, we discover that we are no longer in the state of awakening, that it is no longer an immediate felt sense state of being. Instead the experience of awakening fades into a memory that we find ourselves constantly referring back to. After this, we are possessed by a strong desire to make this a 24/7 experience and we set out on a spiritual path to make this spiritual state a permanent way of being. But yet we’re firmly removed from the experience. This presents dangers for those of us who teach spirituality because we’re teaching about awakening in the 3rd person rather than having a 1st person experience of it while teaching. We begin to fake it until we hopefully make it.

2. -- SURRENDER AND SUBMISSION

This is a lengthy process of letting go of old concepts, beliefs and opinions; the ways in which we think it ought to be, should be, might be, rather than relating directly to a felt lived sense and relating to that. In the course of this path, we may submit and surrender to a teaching or a spiritual path. We receive many new teachings and gather new ideas and concepts. But as we aspire to be truly spiritual people, good people, we begin to disown all the qualities that we consider to be unspiritual. For instance, really spiritual people don’t get angry, aren’t egotistical, aren’t depressed, etc., and so we disown these qualities and relegate them to the shadow. We’ve become even more distorted and one-sided as we try to return to the awakened experience and to be “spiritual”. Shadow work becomes more important than ever during this stage. Roshi says that the majority of us are in stuck in this stage, and that it can take many years to move through and beyond it.


Stage 3 – GREAT DEATH & GREAT LIBERATION

Any doubt about who you are is completely gone. This stage is also called Supreme Enlightenment. All concepts are entirely gone and we are living in direct contact with reality. This is also called Buddha Mind or the absolute. We feel that we have entirely been successful in eliminating the self or the ego. It feels incredibly free and a tremendous relief; but it is just another trap. We might find ourselves saying things like “I don’t feel anger or pain anymore”. But this is because now we’ve completely and thoroughly disowned the egoic self. To others, we come across as impersonal and condescending but we don’t see this. Very few people make it beyond this stage because the pseudo peacefulness is highly addictive. If we can see the trap of it, we must consciously choose to give it up.

Stage 4 – FALL FROM GRACE

This is an experience of great disillusionment. The ego comes back in full force with all its disowned emotions. But because we thought ego was gone long ago, all our filters are also gone and we have nothing to protect us from feeling the full experience of all of our emotions. What’s even more painful is that we not only do we feel our own emotions, but we also feel every one else’s. It is a time of deep despair where everything seems pointless. At this stage, the task is to completely own all our feelings, positive and negative, and to consciously choose to feel them and not disown them yet again. This is where we can work with the emotions in a tantric manner.

5. -- THE HUMAN BEING

This is the stage where we consciously choose to be a human being and to embrace the ego as an important aspect and embrace it consciously and completely. This is where we fully integrate as being human. Here we have the ultimate flexibility, to feel, to own and to experience the entire spectrum of human emotions. Very few people make it to here. It could take years or even lifetimes to accomplish.


All of this reminds me of one of my favorite stories about Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. Notorious for showing up late at his own lectures, he strode into one gathering, already speaking as he entered the room. He said that the spiritual path is a very arduous one. If you haven’t begun as yet, you might want to reconsider. But if you have already begun, it’s best to finish.

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

Gratitude

I look forward to reading Pat’s posts. They are so fresh and free-flowing- so immediate. A couple of times now I’ve sat down with the intention of producing something deep and insightful, but no luck. The harder I try the less that comes out. I know this place well from my time at school and even when writing retreat blurbs for the Shalom brochure - hours and hours of fiddling with words, willing myself to be creative. It’s torture.

One thing that is definitely not torture for me these days is meditation. We sit for an hour in the morning and sometimes for a couple more in the evening. Zen is all about letting go of the thinking mind and focusing on direct experience. The Japanese Zen term for this is shikantaza – “just sitting”. Not as easy as it sounds because the thinking mind never stops. “OK, I’m going to do nothing but just be here. No wait, wasn’t that a thought? I’m supposed to just sit, not think. OK, just try harder. That’s it. Now I’ve got it! Hold on, I just did it again. How about now?” And on and on.

In Big Mind, we work with some of the “10,000 faces" (voices) of the self by giving them a name and getting to know them. Not by thinking about them, but by being them. So now I sit in meditation and play at embodying whatever voices show up. It has transformed my practice.

Tonight I start with the voice of gratitude and think about the way that Terry, Shawn and Victoria have stepped forward, doing their part to make sure that Shalom Mountain continues. And suddenly, I’m there. My chest swells up and tears of gratitude pour down my face. For a moment, I find myself thinking, “What if I completely lose it here?” And then the thought drops away and I return to just being gratitude.

How fortunate I am to be here and doing this with Pat; to be discovering my own true nature; to witness others from around the world doing the same, all of us feeling the imperative of bringing our newfound discoveries to a world that so desperately needs it. To have the opportunity to experience this thing we call “precious human birth”.

The final bell rings. We bow to each other as the timekeeper recites the closing chant:

Let me respectfully remind you
Life and Death are of supreme importance.
Time swiftly passes by and opportunity is lost
Let us Awaken, Awaken
Take heed
Do not squander your life.

And we get to do it again tomorrow morning. It doesn’t get any better than this.

Hitting the Wall

It’s been a little over a week since we’ve been here and I’m starting to feel the usual retreat fatigue. I’ve got a cold and I had a fever last night (can I fish for some sympathy out there???? ). Alistair slept on the sofa in the living room in the early morning hours because of my congested snoring. This morning I decided to rest a bit longer and skip the Sunday morning talk, only to discover that the sangha house plays host to a Buddhist version of Sunday school. There were kids everywhere, running, yelling, crying, etc. Not much rest for this girl.

The Big Mind process has been running a lot of energy through this body of mine. It seems that I’m both clearing and breaking down. The best illustration of this was during the afternoon’s session when I kept slipping back and forth from the elation of I’m getting it to the despair of I ain’t fucking getting it. I kept falling in and out of the slip stream of the experience as it was unfolding. Honestly, sometimes I’d be listening to the conversation between Roshi and someone else and I’d swear that I was stoned -- but I wasn’t. It was just that kind of expansive, we’re-in-the-experience-here-but-there-really-isn’t-a-word-or-name-for-it-and-we-can’t-know-it-but-just-be-in-it kind of experience. As my dear friend Sharon Brain wrote to me recently, she wondered if pretty soon I wouldn’t be able to write any words other than IS-NESS. She could be right.

So it seems that having a cold is both breaking down my resistance as well as messing with my head. If I can only let go and hang out with it I might really “get” it. (The Voice of My Teacher says: there’s nothing to KNOW - it's unknowable.) I do know that when I let go, I feel soft.

In a few days I’ll write more about Roshi’s teaching on The Path of the Human Being that he did on Saturday afternoon. It was out of this world. His brilliance seems to come from the way he beautifully uses the Big Mind process to illustrate AND give an experience of Zen teachings. It’s absolutely incredible.

10,000 Voices

I've finally found the camera cable and I've discovered how to create and embed a slideshow for you here. After I did so, I realized that I've been so immersed in life between the sangha house and the zendo, that I don't have many pictures! But it's a start. I'll take more and post them later. In the meantime, I'm rather pleased with myself to have discovered how to do this. This can have all kinds of great possibilities for the Shalom Mountain website that I maintain.

Today was a great day with Roshi and crew. Today Diane taught us how to use Big Mind during our individual meditations. Alistair has already been doing this, so I decided to give it a try tonight during our meditation which was 1.5 hours long. Both Roshi and Diane keep emphasizing that if we want to learn how to facilitate Big Mind (and I do) that we/I need to learn these voices within myself very, very well. So the trick -- if that's what you call it -- is to do Big Mind dialogue with yourself, playing both the facilitator and the voices. Well, it was an incredible experience. I talked to a whole slew of voices, some of whom were very vocal, and others timid, more emergent. I discovered those who were allies to one another, those who were saboteurs. I also knew when I had a transformative conversation with some particular voice, because my body responded with released energy in the form of heat and sweating. And no, they're not hot flashes! -- remember, the zendo's cold.

This coming weekend Roshi's offering a workshop called The Path of the Human Being. To Roshi, the truly transcendent being is the human being, not the Christian transcendent perfection dream that I used to know as a former born again Christian. So I'm more than a little intrigued.

I've put the slideshow on the left hand side bar. I'm adding pictures to it regularly now.

The Roshi Rides a Harley

Very cool. Every afternoon Genpo Roshi roars in on his Harley motorcycle to teach. Then he walks into the zendo in black t-shirt, black sweater, jeans ripped at the knees and black motorcycle boots. How cool – and sexy -- is that. I just realized that he, and Diane Hamilton, are the only ones who wear shoes in the zendo. (I guess enlightenment has its privileges.)

Yesterday afternoon began with a bang. Even after 2 days of listening to the Voice of the Boaster, the group wasn’t finished as there were at least 20 or so people yet to speak. And I was steeling myself to face yet another afternoon of listening to 10-20 minute long soliloquies by the Boaster. Mercifully, Roshi cut the Boaster short and moved on by asking us to speak as another voice.

The voice he asked for sent freaking out waves through the group. He asked to speak to the Sexual Pervert. I laughed out loud. As a long time leader of erotic retreats, this is one of my favorite subjects, the topic of many a meal conversation. It used to be my karma that no matter who I was with, within 10 minutes we’d be talking about sex, sexual histories, sexual preferences, sexual scary places. So I was really interested to see how this would all evolve. I was also curious to see what points of further resistance I might have to speaking in this voice.

First Roshi explained that he wasn’t asking us to speak about our sexual perversions per se, it’s just that through using this name repeatedly he’s found that the word “perversion” carries a very big energetic and emotional charge. And that this charge acts as a suppressor of the life force energy behind it. At Shalom we frequently speak about how our culture has a deep and painful split between sexuality and spirituality. Roshi added to this subject by saying that when we came into incarnation, integral to the process of incarnation was the creation of this split. Part of the little game of forgetting that we play with ourselves in our search to rejoin with our true nature, oneness, unity, or whatever similar term you care to use. This is a very Zen-like reflection, which is always turning us from a subject-object relationship to a subject without an object relationship. Far from theoretical, it is the repeated experience of union.

Before people could speak with the voice of the Sexual Pervert, the Voice of Fear made a big showing. In fact, Fear almost became the voice of the afternoon, that’s how much it needed to speak on the subject. What I heard was that if the Sexual Pervert were allowed to speak, then its small-s self, the personality, might act out without any limitations. That made the whole prospect very dangerous. Others, myself included, were afraid of being judged for their sexual acts or even for expressing that they liked sex – that was me. The Voice of Fear made for a very high and intense energetic in the room.

When Fear had said enough, the Voice of the Sexual Pervert began to speak. Very hesitant at first, still wary, there were several painful experiences that were revealed and held in honor. Eventually, when the experiences were expressed and opened up, the voice gained in strength until there was much laughter and kundalini experiences happening throughout the room. All the trapped energy was being released and people were enjoying themselves, the movement of the sexual energy through their bodies, and the relief of being able to speak aloud and be witnessed.

Sound familiar? Very Shalom-like.

Then in one very dramatic moment, I witnessed Roshi in his most masculine aspect as he worked with a man to release him from the bind of a parental figure. Shouting at him in one powerful burst, “NOW!”, the man freed himself from the parental figure with an incredibly powerful samurai-like act. It was like witnessing a seated mat trip.

I am quickly coming to admire Roshi. At Shalom I live with two of the most incredible and loving active listeners that I know – Joy & Lawrence. In Roshi I have met someone equally skilled and compassionate. When I watch him and feel into him, he feels as open as the air all around us – no resistance at all. He receives and affirms through his very being. Yet, when needed, he has that powerful and decisive masculine presence that cuts like a knife. Throughout, I sense an incredible depth of compassion in him. It is not personal, though; he’s not our friend. He is a beacon and teacher for those of us who wish to awaken. Quite literally, he wants our liberation.

I’ll end here by quoting a chant that we do at the end of evening zazen.

Sentient beings are numberless, I vow to save them.
Desires are inexhaustible, I vow to put an end to them.
The Dharmas are boundless, I vow to master them.
The Buddha Way is unsurpassable, I vow to attain it.

Of Big Mind and Cold Butts

I think that Alistair’s Muse is still jet lagged, so I wanted to write a bit more.

The morning is dark and chilly as I make my way from the sangha house to the zendo. The houses are right next door to each other; the path is a series of stones set into the front garden to avoid the extra few steps to the sidewalk and back again. In this short path I already feel a tranquility in the setting. But because it’s cold AND dark, I’m feeling grumpy. The cold doesn’t lessen by entering the zendo. That’s because it’s not heated. Ever. So I start practicing letting go of expectations, repeating to myself “be content with whatever arises”. Great practice but I’m still freezing my ass off.

I go up the stairs into the darkened zendo. There is nothing but a single candle on the altar, giving soft light to the space. There are several people already there, seated on their cushions. Some of them are civilians like me while others are monks dressed in traditional robes. But all of them are sitting still and the pervasive air is one of deep focus. But if they're like me, they're listening to an endless internal chatter like snow on TV.

I bow to the altar, I bow to my meditation bench and bow to my companions before I seat myself. As I sit down, I notice that the window behind me is open. I silently curse and let go once again. There’s a lot of letting go in this business, it seems. And I’m still freezing my ass off.

As we sit, the light outside the windows brightens as night transforms into day. The metaphor isn’t lost on me.

Yesterday afternoon, after much anticipation, we finally met The Big Man – Genpo Roshi. Not one for preliminaries, he launched into one of the voices of the Big Mind process. He asked us each one of us in turn to come up to the front and speak with the voice of The Boaster. All of us newbies have been asked to sit at the front, and so we spoke right away. What came out was almost exactly like telling our stories at a Shalom Retreat. People spoke of all the glorious as well as the painful places in their life. Only this time, they spoke of the painful places with pride and a sense of accomplishment. Some people bragged outrageously. Some people told their story quite simply, giving themselves permission to boast about important parts in their life for the first time. It was great community building.

And there are remarkable people here. Many of whom speak with the same voice as I hear at Shalom very often, about how this process – and, often, Genpo Roshi – has changed their lives. Many feel that the practice and the zendo are home.

There’s the monk who came to Kanzeon at a time when he was ready to kill himself. Now he is still a monk but has left the monastery to marry and have a child, the which has equally completely changed his life. Now he calls himself the greatest bodhisattva ever.

There’s the woman who was named several times over as THE extreme skier in North America. Now she runs a ski instruction school informed by zen. It’s already received rave reviews in the major ski magazines.

There’s the man who had a peak experience in the Himalayas and is here to try to understand what happened to him.

There’s the man whose awakening caused his life to fall apart. He’s excited by having the tool of Big Mind to help others to awaken.

There’s the woman who is a life coach and exhausted from giving to others and struggling to know her own boundaries, and hoping that Big Mind might help.

There’s the MTF who is as brilliant as Ken Wilber and with a new body.

Last night, a woman sitting next to me in zazen passed out and several of us helped her out of the zendo and into the helping hands of paramedics.

People’s lives are front and center in this process of awakening. I am quickly learning that it is, as Roshi says, the path of the human being. He says that our ordinary mind is our awakened mind, we just don’t recognize it. That makes my conceptual mind (not to be confused with the thinking mind) screech like a banshee, yet my body feels a profound sense of relief.

And me? I’m here to keep waking up. I, too, am excited to find a tool that gives people an experience of awakening. I've been crying with gratitude to find something so easy yet profound, that comes seated in a solid foundation of a practice and lineage.

I am considering taking refuge by the end of our time here, and coming back on a regular basis to study with Roshi. I am coming to a knowing that Roshi is my teacher, something that I’ve shyly suspected for a few months now. I am going to have a conversation with him so that I can look directly into his eyes, see the clarity of him, and feel him with my entire being.