Continued from November 04

We still have bodies that break down in all sorts of amazing ways. We still face injustice and conflict. Awakening isnt a waiver from the shared circumstances of human life. But it does radically transform how we experience them. We are no longer beleaguered exiles but now people at home even in the most difficult times, searching for ways to respond that encourage the bursting forth of the enlightenment that is present always and everywhere.

Theres a story about Tolstoy that speaks to this fundamental shift from self-centeredness to all-centeredness, when we see the self as infinitely large, taking in all others. Tolstoy and Chekhov were on a walk in the spring woods when they encountered a horse. Tolstoy began to describe how the horse would experience the clouds, trees, smell of wet earth, flowers, sun. Chekhov exclaimed that Tolstoy must have been a horse in a previous life to know in such detail what the horse would feel. Tolstoy laughed and said, No, but the day I came across my own inside, I came across everybodys inside.

A great deal has been said about walking the path of awakening, including practices that show us our habits of exile and how our allegiance can turn away from them toward more spacious and generous lives. So Ill just mention one thing that relates to taking on a day-to-day practice of enlightenment. Especially early on, most of us still have a lot of self-centeredness, by which I mean belief in the absolute reality of the self and the primacy of its concerns and reactions. One of the bemusing results is that here we are, hoping for an event which by its nature is unprecedented, and we think we know best about how to make it happen. We try to exert control over the process, and we believe we can find our way to enlightenment through acts of will.

There is mad discipline and insane persistence on this path, but theyre in the service of something more fruitful than certainty, control, and will. Theyre in the service of availability. Whatever happens, you have to just keep showing up. Sit the meditation, attend the retreat, absorb the teachings, face the fear, feel the sorrow, endure the boredom, stay open to the disturbing and also the knee-bucklingly beautiful.

When revelation begins to walk toward you, have the courtesy to walk out to meet it. You know the tricks of distraction you play on yourself, so stay alert to them, but dont allow hyper-vigilance to blind you to the moments when the world comes to call you home. Theres an old story about a man who vowed to meditate until Krishna appeared to him. Moved by his commitment, Krishna walked up behind the man and put his hand on his shoulder. Without turning around, the man cried, Go away! Im waiting for Krishna!

Just keep showing up, no matter what, with an open mind and a whole heart. Allow your allegiance to be turned from the habits of exile to the promise of home, naturally. Make yourself unconditionally available, and trust that enlightenment will find you.

The metaphors we use can powerfully shape what we imagine awakening to be. My own Zen tradition has lots of descriptions, like wielding the sword and penetrating the mystery, that wed be forgiven for confusing with exercises of will. Enlightenment is likened to a lightning bolt or a sudden flash of sparks, something instantaneous and bright. But what happens when we listen to other voices with very different ways of describing the same thing? Here is Qiyuan Xinggang, a seventeenth-century Chinese nun, being questioned by her teacher:

In some Mahayana traditions, the luminous totality of the universe, called the dharmakaya, fulfills a vow that all things should come into existence and grow toward awakening. The bodhisattva vow harmonizes in microcosm with the dharmakayas macrocosmic vow: we will continue to exist, and we will dedicate ourselves to awakening so that we might help everything that exists awaken, too. To take this vow is to allow ourselves to be pulled to that place where our enlightenment is continuous with the universesour vow continuous with the dharmakayas vowso that there is no rub between our intention and its.

And so we enter a phase of awakening that we might, perhaps surprisingly, call endarkenment. Awakening is a marriage of wisdom and compassion, and each has an aspect that is enlightening and one that is endarkening. The enlightening aspect of wisdom is a growing clarity of insight that puts doubts to rest and creates confidence. Its about what we come to understand. The endarkening aspect of wisdom is our profound acceptance of the great mystery at the heart of things, which we can never understand in our ordinary ways but can rest in and be nourished by. This is sometimes called not-knowing mind.

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What is Enlightenment?