“Ordinary people look outwards whilst followers of the Way look into their own minds, but the real Dharma is to forget both the external and the internal. The former is easy enough, the latter very difficult. Humans are afraid to forget their own minds, fearing to fall through the void with nothing to which they can cling. They do not know that the void is not really void but the real realm of the Dharma.” -Jiyu Kennet, Zen is Eternal Life
I feel a strong resonance with passages such as this. They inspire me. But I must not ignore all the passages in the book that came before, that led the groundwork for that statement. I cannot forget all that precedes this truth. Whereas my aspiration may be nothing less than the highest spiritual realization, my day-to-day reality is far below, in the mud. Laying on my hotel room bed without an internet connection, I feel the familiar tug towards some sort of stimulation. Bereft of easy distractions and obligations, what will I do with my time? Clearly, I am still in the grasp of the external, I’m looking outward. And that was supposed to be the “easy enough” part. How much less ready am I then to give up the internal?
It is helpful at moments like these to remind myself – different things are helpful depending on where on the path you are. Some activities and tools may be useful now that won’t be useful in the future. There are levels to this. I am also reminded of what is taught in Vipassana retreats – Sila, Samadhi, Paña. First comes Sila – moral action. Then comes Samadhi – concentration. Then through the practice of the first two arises Paña – wisdom, which feeds back into moral action, and so forth. It is a cyclical, self-reinforcing sequence.
One’s pleasures and sources of happiness become more and more refined as one evolves. Always, I have to be honest with myself and my current state of evolution. In the early stages, knowledge work (reading, writing, and discursive reflection) can be a useful tool to help me work past frivolous media addictions and attachment. In the relative scale of merits, I feel that developing the mind through reading and writing is a much more worthy use of my limited time on this Earth than watching Youtube, for example. That’s not even to mention other even more destructive pursuits – vacuous, short-sighted reaches for dopamine, against which, I admit, I am not entirely immune. So, for me, I feel literature and writing is a productive activity. Eventually, if I’ve cleansed my impurities and delusions enough, I may reach a point where reading and writing are no longer quite as useful to me. At that point, I may find that my attachment to those activities falls away naturally…or not. I’ll have to wait and observe and continue to develop my practice. But for now, I fear that letting go of reading and writing could precipitate a fall back down onto a lower rung of the ladder, back into more vacuous dopamine chasing.
I guess what I’m trying to say can be encapsulated nicely by the old aphorism: “Don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good.”
Forcing myself to give up knowledge work as a form of dutiful adherence to an idealized end state of spiritual attainment only does harm to my current self. It allows more room for the more pernicious, lazier parts of my character to express themselves. In the end, it does no good to “should” on myself.
Always, I have to be honest with myself and my current state of evolution. The quote in the first paragraph, therefore, may not serve me if I’m not yet at a level where it is actionable. Believe me, in my initial idealistic fervor I have tried jumping to the end. I have tried giving up everything and just sitting in a room and looking at my own mind all day, for several days in a row. It was excruciating. It was too much. I aborted. I didn’t have the tools and the maturity to see it through alone. I realized I needed support. I needed to be embedded in a spiritual community and to work diligently along with others. Then, in the community, I chose to leave. There were a few things I felt very strongly I still wanted to do in the world. Does that mean I have experienced a backslide into worldliness? Was my initial fervor just a “spiritual phase” that I went through? I don’t yet have an answer to those questions. But I have chosen to trust my heart, and I know that I must take absolute responsibility for my life with honesty and compassion. Patience. The lotus opens to the sun, but first its roots in the mud must be nourished.
Always at the Beginning 