Paying it Forward.

Let’s push the matter of surrendering to pay-offs a bit further. Surrendering is ordinarily seen as releasing from attachment. When we hold onto something and try to preserve it, we are inviting disappointment and suffering. 

Previously I shared my realization regarding pie. The key that unlocked that door for me was all about pay-offs—expecting a reward without realizing that the reward was “paid-forward.” I really like that idea—paying it forward—since it connotes a pure gift, given in advance without strings attached.

I didn’t say where this pay-off idea first corrupted my thinking but it actually began at home when I was a boy. My mother would say “If you don’t eat your dinner you’re not going to get any pie (dessert).” The message was clear: eating dessert had strings attached. Either I ate my dinner or else no pie. I never considered that early message would linger. But it came to dominate my life and without realizing it I began to arrange everything in the same fashion: investing for the future pay-off, like a carrot on a stick tied to the back of a dumb donkey. Every step I took toward that goal, the pay-off carrot moved away. I didn’t notice in the early years of my Zen life that I was doing the same thing with my practice. The harder I pushed to get the prize of enlightenment the faster it moved away.

I often think I must have been really dense to have not seen this pattern sooner. But I’ve come to appreciate that the pay-off-behavior is endemic in human behavior. We all do the same thing but in different ways. We do it when we imagine what gifts to give at holiday time and think to our self, “should I spend that much money on them? Maybe they will spend less on my gift and then I’ll feel like an idiot.”An artist often does it when they plan their work. All artists wonder about acknowledgment (getting stroked or being rewarded with something more liquid, like hard cash), and often times the conclusion to their wondering shapes their work. 

I have known artists who are so concerned about this issue that they try to figure out what the public will like and what they won’t, and then attempt to create a salable product. And it is a foundational strategy in the advertising business, that I employed as an adman. We do it when we pay someone a compliment and they don’t acknowledge our kindness, and we end up feeling short-changed. It happens widely in business when we invest in the hopes of a future return. And a really bad form of this is when we modify our selves to please everyone and then get really angry and bitter when we discover that everyone else is happy but us. The result is we start to feel taken advantage of. “Suffering is the emotional distress that arises when you become frustrated that things don’t go your way, or upset about life’s injustices, or worried about money or meeting others’ expectations.” 

In short, we all think “Pie in the sky, bye, and bye.” It is sadly one significant way that we create suffering. We set ourselves up for misery by expecting future pay-offs. So what is a better way? We all need to learn to give gifts, with no strings attached. Give yourself just because it feels good. Beyond the sheer acts of no-expectation kindness, our bodies are designed to release the “feel-good” hormone oxytocin by doing warmhearted acts. Additionally, the release of oxytocin stimulates two more hormones— dopamine and serotonin, that reduce anxiety. So the act itself is the reward.

Create works of unencumbered art because of the joy of genuine self-expression. Give that outrageous gift and stop wondering whether or not it will be acknowledged. Share the pure Dharma gladly, freely, and broadly and stop worrying about whether anyone will get it or even acknowledge the contribution. 

It is not our job to be concerned about results and pay-offs. Our job is to share no-strings-attached gifts. To conduct our lives in that fashion is to pay-it-forward and accept the joy of simply feeling good. A single act of kindness infuses the world with gladness. Living this way is about surrendering from pay-offs.

Surrendering from vengeance.

Tit-for-Tat

Quite a while back I wrote of post called, “Surrendering from inflexible positions” and a reader responded with a suggestion that I write about surrendering from vengeance. I didn’t take the advice at the time but given the current state of affairs, with so much at stake, maybe it’s time to track this human tendency through to its logical conclusion. 

I don’t have much wisdom to offer on the topic since the downside seems rather obvious. However, since the dominant forces today seem locked into this pattern of back and forth violence, perhaps the downside isn’t so obvious after all. Antifa and White Supremacy have locked horns with clear political spin. Curiously, Antifa is getting labeled as “radical socialists.” Nothing could be further from the truth, but nowadays political spin outranks truth. 

And then I recently wrote about the findings of Peter Cathcart Wason, the English cognitive psychologist, who discovered that we humans are much more interested in our egoistic desires to protect our preconceived opinions than to seek truth. So maybe vengeance has more to do with covering our vested flanks than anything else. If so, then this post probably won’t succeed in chipping away at that crusty vest. We seem to be slow learners and our collective ignorance leads us all to more suffering.

In one of my books, More Over, I wrote about this idea called kleshas (or afflictions; causes of suffering). The five following kleshas were described by Patanjali at the beginning of Book 2 of the Yoga Sutra (1, 2, 4). So I don’t claim any special knowledge. I just took the time to read because learning about the causes of suffering seemed like a good thing to do. When these kleshas are laid out end-to-end the logic of vengeance can be fathomed.

The first of the kleshas was called ignorance of the true nature of reality (avidya in Sanskrit). However, Patanjali’s perspective here is contrary to Mark Twain’s advice who said: “To succeed in life, you need two things: ignorance and confidence.” Perhaps so, but thus far evidence is lacking.  Then comes misidentification (asmita), attachment (raga), anger following a loss (dvesha), and finally misunderstanding life and death (abhinivesha). Having identified these five, Patanjali makes it simpler yet by saying that all of these five are contained in the first: ignorance of the true nature of reality. 

As a human species, this simplicity seems to be lost since we proceed to go forward with this tit-for-tat practice of violence (otherwise called vengeance). The downside is rather simple when viewed in terms of one person in a relationship with another. If someone strikes you, the immediate response is to strike back. This response leads to their response to a strike back at you, and this unending pattern leads to where we are today: nowhere. The lure to right all wrongs is magnetic and we gnash our teeth struggling to find wisdom for solutions to raging conflicts around the world. The carnage is unquestionably awful but the essential question is this: How does meeting violence with more violence lead to anything other than more responsive violence? 

According to Patanjali, the entire flawed tendency can be reduced down to the first klesha: a misunderstanding of the true nature of reality. The untrue nature of reality is what we have today (and apparently have had all the way back to a beginningless beginning) and that understanding is that every person on earth, and beyond, views him or her self as purely an individual with no meaningful connection. We have a term that fits the bill for this view. It’s called mutual discretion and is the basis of the entirety of human failings.

Just for the sake of consideration, let’s think about the consequences of this view. If I am mutually discrete from you, then I will do as Patanjali suggests and misidentify myself (and you, and all others) as an image, which we call a self-image (otherwise known as ego). The nature of an image is unreal and the nature of the ego is individual self-preservation. And we have an infinite number of ways of preserving a separate self. The number one way is to attach our sense of identity to stuff we like (power, material possessions, other people, ad infinitum) and bulwark ourselves from stuff we dislike. The problem is that stuff doesn’t stand still. It moves and changes, one moment here, gone the next. And with the demise of what we have clung to (or resisted, which has the nasty tendency to find its way to us anyway) comes a sense of loss or precarious identity, self-worth and power. Then we get royally ticked off, blame others for our pain, and strike back at the perceived source of our suffering, thus vengeance.

So if that is the pattern (and who can deny that it is) then what’s the alternative? Simple: That we are not, at the core,  mutually discrete. Feedback loops define our existence  Instead we are essentially united with everything. That, of course, is easy to say and very difficult to experience. Just saying it is not enough. Unity must be experienced to be of any worth, otherwise, it remains a figment of our imagination. The experience of unity is what goes by the handle of transformation or enlightenment: where the sense of being an individual, separate identity melts into an irrevocable unity with everything. And when that happens the image we previously held of ourselves (self-image) evaporates into thin air.

From that point forward vengeance becomes an impossible matter because we realize that striking another, or destroying our world, is the same as destroying ourselves and we come to understand, in a new way, a commandment offered by Jesus when asked which commandment was the greatest. He answered by saying, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this: Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these.”

There is just one tiny, yet all-important issue here. All of these: God, soul, mind, neighbor, and self are single, never born, never die, united entity. If this is not so, then the commandment falls apart and we are left with mutual discretion, all of us claiming, with self-righteous indignation, that individually each of us is justified in preserving our egocentric identity and never-ending vengeance continues forever. The arms race never ends, nor does the associated cost in blood and money.

Surrendering from surrendering.

Before

After

Years ago when I first began to practice yoga, I heard a story of a revered yogi who arose one morning, before dawn, and went to meditate on the banks of the Ganges. The heat of the day was beginning to rise. To be more comfortable, he removed his robe. Not wanting it to blow away while he meditated, he folded it carefully, laid in on the river bank, covered it over with a mound of sand, and then proceeded with his practice. Time passed and when he opened his eyes he saw he’d been joined by many young aspirants all with mounds of sand shaped neatly in front of them.

“Immature beings with but a twig of awareness

Are incited by the demon of death.

Where they’ll be in the future depends on the karma they gathered in the past.

Doing evil deeds is meaningless.”

Young seekers all aspire to achievement and many times adopt meaningless rituals believing they contain some magical properties that will transport them to Nirvana. The following is excerpted from Mokchokpa’s Song of Advice in Nicole Riggs’ book on the Shangpa Lineage, Like An Illusion: Lives of the Shangpa Kagyu Masters.

Look at the two images above. The comparison is shocking! Both images are of The Buddha at different stages of enlightenment. On the left is the figure of a person determined to the point of death. At that stage, he had surrendered a life of luxury and everything else except the one thing that mattered most. He was austere and relying purely on the unreal part of himself. In contemporary vernacular, he was pulling himself up by his bootstraps. That road nearly killed him and he was “… incited by the demon of death.”

In his dying breath, he broke the chain of death, dropped body and mind, and gave up the final vestige of which he was holding. In a flash he suddenly became Self-aware. At that precise instant, he realized that to which every seeker aspires and had nothing more to surrender. He then shed the baggage of fear and turned into a person of serenity and love (the image on the right).

The process of Self-realization is like this. We move from reliance on illusions to surrendering to all illusions, even the illusion of God. It was Meister Eckhart who said this was the final frontier: giving up the idea of god to fuse with God. Whatever we can imagine is a barrier. When all images and ideas are gone, we dwell in the silence of the mind, and the only thing left is Pure awareness/The true Self: the source of all ideas and none.

Many times, in our desire for spiritual achievement, we replace the work of Self-realization with the surrogate of enhancing our self-image, thinking that if we look the part and reach down deeper into our limited reservoir to try-try-again, it will be enough to impress those upon whom we rely for the transparency of self-worth. The truth is that while the treasure of our True Self always lies buried beneath our feet, it takes much digging to rid ourselves of the impediments that block access to who we are truly. And once we complete the mining, there is nothing more to surrender. Then we are in the home we have never left and realize, like the ancient “stupid men,” there was never anything to surrender.

“When we renounce learning we have no troubles. 

The (ready) ‘yes,’ and (flattering) ‘yea;’⎯

Small is the difference they display

But mark their issues, good and ill;⎯

What space the gulf between shall fill?

What all men fear is indeed to be feared;

but how wide and without end

is the range of questions (asking to be discussed)!

The multitude of men look satisfied and pleased;

as if enjoying a full banquet,

as if mounted on a tower in spring.

I alone seem listless and still,

my desires having as yet given no indication of their presence.

I am like an infant which has not yet smiled. I look 

dejected and forlorn, as if I had no home to go.

The multitude of men all have enough and to spare.

I alone seem to have lost everything.

My mind is that of a stupid man; I am in a state of chaos.

Ordinary men look bright and intelligent,

while I alone seem to be benighted.

They look full of discrimination,

while I alone am dull and confused.

I seem to be carried about as on the sea,

drifting as if I had nowhere to rest.

All men have their spheres of action,

while I alone seem dull and incapable, 

like a rude borderer. (Thus) I alone am different from other men, but I value the nursing-mother (the Tao).”⎯Chapter 20: Tao Te Ching

It was the great Rabindranath Tagore who wrote in his poem: Journey Home:

“The traveler has to knock at every alien door to come to his own, and one has to wander through all the outer worlds to reach the innermost shrine at the end.”

What none of us realize until we awaken, is that we are always at home in that innermost shrine. We have always been there and so long as that innermost shrine exists it is there we always will remain. It is impossible to make a journey to where you already exist.

Moving In

The process of moving into a house is similar to the operation of transformed spiritual evolution. The first step is to find your house, then comes a long process of getting rid of stuff leftover from the previous tenant. Slowly you begin to arrange the new furniture and settle in. But this is just the beginning. 

Through living, we track in dirt and create clutter. Then we have a choice—we can either allow the dirt to accumulate or adopt a practice of continuous cleaning, which never ends.

It is the same with the path of Zen. Before we can move in, we have to realize that there is a new house. Before that point, the thought of moving can’t even occur. Once we come to this realization, we have to make a slow transition of moving out the old tenant (our ego) along with all of his/her accumulated baggage, which can be massive. The idea of moving into an immaculate house with our new belongings is not going to happen. We move in and, over time, discover stuff left behind, which we thought was gone. So then we begin once more. As we clean, we find not only the accumulation of new dirt but also remnants of our old tenant.

The analogy is not perfect but close. The goal is to stay as clear as crystal water—To one day eliminate all remnants of prior occupation and become a whole person, living in a house with no divisions or barriers separating our noumenal and phenomenal aspects. One part of us is complete and perfect; the other part is a work in process. 

The job of bringing these two together never ends. Clouds come and they go. Tides swell and subside. There is war and there is peace. There are people we like and those we don’t; events which we find disturbing and ones we cherish. “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity...” Enlightenment is complete and it isn’t—Letting go is hard work but that is the way of Zen.

Pie In the Sky.

Of the many posts I’ve made over the years, this one may be among the most important.

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Shakespeare’s words for Juliet fit the messages of wisdom. His words could easily be re-framed: genuine wisdom from any other source would remain genuine wisdom.

Some time ago, I wrote about a message of wisdom from within a Christian context. That message was about different forms of life and the call by Jesus to surrender from one way to gain a different kind: Death of the old, life of the new. That exact same message comes from the second chapter of the Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra in the form of the allegorical story reflecting a dialogue between a common man by the name of Cunda and The Buddha. 

The wisdom expressed from these two sources is the same message of surrender: Releasing from one form of life and receiving a different kind of life. Does it matter from which source this wisdom comes? Genuine wisdom from any other source would remain genuine wisdom.

Various forms of surrender are like Lao Tzu’s ten thousand things that arise from the seed of wisdom. The seed is essential life, and that seed manifests in many ways, one of which I’ll share today. But before I deal with specific forms, I want to examine what it means to surrender, in any kind. Surrender is release. We let go of one thing, and when we do, we receive something else; a sort of trade. Nature abhors the vacuum. The fundamental idea is that we can’t focus on two things at the same time, at least not this side of complete release. 

Here’s my first example of surrender: The one that completely transformed my life—Pie, as in “Pie in the sky.” Suppose you had a gift that you didn’t know you had. Without knowing, the gift would be of no value to you. The only way the gift would be of value would be if you knew that you had it. If you didn’t know (but were intent upon getting it), it would be like not eating pie but instead trying to grasp Pie in the sky. For too many years, that is precisely what I did. 

When I first began Zen practice, my teacher, in his great wisdom, encouraged me to go for broke to gain enlightenment. Authentic Zen masters are like doctors of spiritual diseases who exercise refined judgment when working with ill students. They craft appropriate remedies for each student, known in Sanskrit as upāya: expedient means. No one solution fits all students since each person is spiritually ill with a different sickness. Every illness requires just one tailor-made remedy from an infinite list of ten thousand treatments.

Dayi Daoxin (the fourth Chan patriarch) had this to say regarding crafting specific teachings: 

“Therefore the Sūtra (Nirvana Sūtra) says: Since there are numberless (types of) capacities among sentient beings, the buddhas, preach the Dharma in numberless ways. Since the Dharma is preached in numberless ways, the meanings are also numberless. Numberless meanings are born from the One Reality. The One reality is formless, but there is no form that it does not give form to, it is called the true form. This is total purity.”

My teacher knew what I needed better than I did and prescribed a unique dose of medicine for my illness, which is most common. I was very sick with the disease known as accomplishment—never being good enough and always pressing for greater and greater degrees of worth. The medicine was, therefore, “more pressing.” 

There was no way for me to understand his wisdom at that time. That knowing took more than a quarter of a century for me to fathom, which came about only by completely exhausting myself in the quest for being good enough.

Twenty-five years later, when the time was right—when I was fully ripened—I fell like a perfect plum. By this time, I had moved to a different city and had a new teacher who prescribed a different dose of medicine, which came in the form of the message, there is no enlightenment to attain. To be perfectly honest, I was extraordinarily upset when hearing this message, felt as if I had been manipulated for 25 years, and encouraged to chase a non-existent windmill. 

I had trusted my first teacher entirely and thought he had deceived me. It took me a full year more before I got it, and when I did, I fell kerplunk right down into myself like a ripe plum. And as soon as I did get it, I threw back my head and laughed myself silly until tears rolled down my cheeks. I still laugh every time I think about it.

Without realizing, what I had been doing was trying to grasp air which was already in my hand: the pie in the sky—the payoff for my persistence and diligence— was already in my stomach where it had always been, already digested. There was no way for me to get what I already had, and there was no way to be good enough since I, like everyone, came into this world complete, yet I was persuaded I was incomplete. 

No one will never get more complete since that is an oxymoron. There is no attainment, just like it says in the Heart Sutra, which I had repeated a million times but never understood. That is what surrender is all about. Letting go and getting what we already have. That is enlightenment, not some “pie in the sky.” Trading away illusions (the ideas) and getting real, is an excellent trade!

By the way, this expression “Pie in the sky” came from the book “The Preacher and the Slave,” a composition by legendary labor hero Joe Hill. The song became part of the widely distributed ‘little red songbooks’ around 1910. The complete verse goes like this:

“You will eat, bye and bye,
In that glorious land above the sky;
Work and pray, live on hay.
You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.”

Well, there are still slaves today: The ones we make of ourselves all by ourselves. This illness of accomplishment is vast. From birth, we are encouraged to get better. The message comes from every dimension of our world to become somebody. But there is no becoming somebody. We already are somebody, just not the somebody we think we are. The real truth is the pie is already in our gut, not in the sky, bye, and bye.

We are like Eskimos with plenty of snowballs but are being duped into believing that we need more. If you want to put that into a spiritual context reflect upon Zen Master Hakuin’s Song of Zazen: 

“How near the truth, yet how far we seek. Like one in water crying, ‘I thirst!’ Like the son of a rich man wandering poor on this earth we endlessly circle the six worlds. The cause of our sorrow is ego delusion.” 

And if you prefer the same message from a Christian context, try the parable of the Prodigal Son, who wandered away from his birthright of splendor and ate from the trough of pigs. Only then did he know what he no longer had. Wisdom from any source remains genuine wisdom. It’s the message. Not the messenger that matters.

Surrendering from ourselves.

I’ve never met a person who said, “Today I will conduct myself in a negative and self-centered way.” On the contrary, the odds are extremely high that each of us conducts our lives according to certain ideological criteria, whether implicit or explicit. Everyone thinks they are right and others who don’t share their perspectives are thus wrong. The polarity of ideologies has never been more extreme than now and is ensuring our mutual undoing.

To plumb the depths of this, we need to consider the words of Krishnamurti. Do you align yourself with a particular political party? Nowadays it is hard not to. Or in a different vein, do you think of yourself as a man or a woman? Or how about belonging to one religion or another? Lots of variations on the theme of differences but Krishnamurti has a point worth our consideration: 

When we identify ourselves in contrast to others we unknowingly adopt an attitude of unintended opposition and violence. And nobody takes favorably to opposition and will then meet opposition with opposition.

Some time ago I had a friend who had grown up in the Soviet Union and was thus subjected to unspeakable oppression. He detested every idea that might align with socialism and defended his positions with conviction and passion. Many times we engaged in friendly discussions and we both came to the same conclusion: If each of us had grown up with the experiences and influences of the other, we both would have very different points of view. 

In that case he would understand my perspective and I would understand his. Neither of us came into this world with any point of view and when we die our points of view will die with us, but in between birth and death we remain adamant in our convictions. Our views were entirely the result of what we had experienced, not who we were.

Is there any way of circumventing this dilemma, of bypassing such fleeting bias? In our ordinary way of thinking it doesn’t seem possible, but one of the greatest thinkers in human history had a solution, which is not routinely understood, due to translation problems. According to Jesus, two things are required to solve this problem: dying to ourselves and then practicing unconditional love (the kind without discrimination).

The first supporting scriptural reference comes from the book of Matthew: “He who finds his life shall lose it: and he who loses his life for my sake shall find it.”[1] That passage (as many other translations) doesn’t express well in English. The English word here for life, in the original Greek, was psuchē, which has various meanings, the most prominent of which is soul, later to be translated as a psychic image of self, in other words, the ego—our idea of who we are separate and apart from others.

The second reference comes from the book of John: “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”[2] Again, there is that word life/psuchē. This is perhaps the most butchered and misconstrued expression in the entire New Testament. The literal meaning, contrary to popular belief, is surrendering your psyche (ideas) for your friends constitutes the greatest love.

The question is simply this: what is the prerequisite to surrendering our ideas in order to express the greatest love? The answer is obvious: Letting go of our ideas about who we think we are. It’s a two-step process: once we become clear that we are not an idea (ego) that is hostile to others we can then release ourselves from the death-knoll of polarized thinking. Only then is it possible to have an open mind and be released from the prison of inflexible dogmas. 

In such a case we can conduct ourselves as the Buddha said at the conclusion of the Kalama Sutra: “… after thorough investigation and reflection, you find to agree with reason and experience, as conducive to the good and benefit of one and all and of the world at large, accept only that as true and shape your life in accordance with it. Do not accept any doctrine from reverence, but first try it as gold is tried by fire.” 

In the end, spiritual insight has a most positive, practical and profound impact on personal and world affairs.

---

[1] Matthew 10:39
[2] John 15:13

Becoming Self Aware.

All of us eventually become creatures of habit and after the passage of time are lulled asleep into a state of blindness based on an assumption that what we think we know is true. 

Mark Twain said it best: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” Someone who never knows the truth believes they do nevertheless.

Faith, by design, is a precarious state of being that asks us to accept particular aspects of the inaccessible, the imperceptible, the ineffable, and the immeasurable without challenge. And being given over to easy persuasion by those we trust, as being more astute and capable than ourselves, we come to a state of confidence in their esteemed judgments, and at long last embrace and take to be our very own, the ideas expressed by “the experts.”

What breaks this chain of presumption? Ought it not be success or failure? The measure of life as what works or doesn’t for one and all? Unfortunately this is rarely the case. What we believe, is held in higher regard than such concrete measures and we shape our lives, not so much by the good of all than we do by what supports our fanciful wishes: The hope for things being different than they truly are. 

Try, try again is the mantra. If at first we don’t succeed then try harder to shape what is not so into illusions of what we prefer. Be more perseverant, more tenacious, and resilient. And after such relentless assaults, even with the experience of not reaching the goal of the common good, we are remiss to let go and try a different path. Instead we hold fast to dogmas and reject the obvious, clinging forever to standards set by those in whom we have placed our trust. In psychological terms, this strange behavior is known as “confirmation bias,” a state of ignorance wherein we reject the truth and favor what confirms our preconceived beliefs. To do otherwise, we reason, will cause a loss of face and force us to admit error, neither of which our egos desire.

It is an exceedingly sad aspect of being human that leads us all into those habitual states of continuing ignorance, and it is not an aspect adopted only by the common man. Surrendering from our cherished ideas, valued though they are, seems risky work. Yet to reach the depths of our souls where the light of truth prevails, requires letting go of little to get all. Meister Eckhart, one of the greatest mystics of all time put the highest release like this:

“I will put into plain words what St. Paul means by wishing to depart from God. Man’s last and highest leave-taking is leaving god for God. St. Paul left god for God: he left everything he could give or take of God, every concept of God. In leaving these, he left god for God since God remained to him in his essential self, not as a concept of himself, or as an acquired thing, but God in his essential actuality.”

Even those who adopt open minds and are moving toward enlightenment fall prey to the trap, sometimes to the edge of death. The Buddha came to the final point of surrender before letting go of the greatest natural fear of all: The fear of death. When he reached the edge of the abyss, his choice was clear: Let go or die. Only then did he awaken to the essence of his True Self. Only then did he become genuinely Self Aware. 

Only when any of us faces the grim reaper and accepts what seems like our ultimate demise will we be ready to cast off the chains of illusion and meet, at long last, our true nature and know that, as Eckhart said: “God expects but one thing of you, and that is that you should come out of yourself in so far as you are a created being made and let God be God in you.” 

And on the way to this exalted place of pure awareness, where do we place our faith? In the orthodoxy? Holy Scriptures? The experts? What shall we consider the anchor that binds us firmly to eternal life?

• “Do not believe anything on mere hearsay.

• Do not believe in traditions merely because they are old and have been handed down for many generations and in many places.

• Do not believe anything on account of rumors or because people talk a great deal about it.

• Do not believe anything because you are shown the written testimony of some ancient sage.

• Do not believe in what you have fancied, thinking that, because it is extraordinary, it must have been inspired by a god or other wonderful being.

• Do not believe anything merely because the presumption is in its favor, or because the custom of many years inclines you to take it as true.

• Do not believe anything merely on the authority of your teachers and priests.

• But, whatever, after thorough investigation and reflection, you find to agree with reason and experience, as conducive to the good and benefit of one and all and of the world at large, accept only that as true, and shape your life in accordance with it.

The same text, said the Buddha, must be applied to his own teachings.

• Do not accept any doctrine from reverence, but first, try it as gold is tried by fire.”⎯The Buddha: The Kalama Sutra

It is the fires by trial in life that burn away ignorance, but only when we are open to letting go of the unreal and ready for the real. And when once we meet our Self for the first time we are still left with a residue of the old, that lingers like unwanted dust and was previously considered to be gold, when all the while it was fools gold. Then we must learn a new way, no longer clinging to chains of the past but rather accepting wings of The Spirit, just as any baby learns to crawl before walking. And until our spiritual legs grow strong, we will wobble and fall again and again, until at last, we rest in the assurance that the core of our being is firm and immovable. Along the way to maturity we will be unaccustomed to the new way and think for a time as Lao Tzu:

“I alone seem listless and still, my desires having as yet given no indication of their presence. I am like an infant which has not yet smiled.”

Surrendering from absolute truth.

Wise as a serpent.

“Man speaks with forked tongue,” ordinarily means someone is deliberately saying one thing and meaning another. In the longstanding tradition of many Native American tribes, speaking with a forked tongue has meant lying. 

This, however, may not have applied in ancient India, where the serpent was often considered one of the wisest animals, being close to the divine. In Sanskrit, Naga meant snake and was perhaps an allusive reference to the entheogenic nature of Nāgārjuna, one of the most revered figures in Zen and other sects of Buddhism. He is widely considered one of the most important Buddhist philosophers after the historical Buddha.

The relevant question in this post is whether or not there is such a thing as Independent Absolute Truth, and perspectives established by Nāgārjuna can help us thoroughly consider this matter. If there is such a thing, then just maybe no human can have access to or speak the absolute truth. Lao Tzu was persuaded that the truth cannot be told (absolute or otherwise).

To start the ball rolling, let’s begin with the notion of the truth of salvation. On the surface, it seems to be true that either we need salvation or we aren’t. A key piece of Christian scripture says yes, we need saving. You find this referenced scripture in Philippians 2:12, and it says, “…continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose.”

From the Prajnaparamita Sutra (Diamond Sutra), The Buddha allegedly said, “O Subhuti, no one is to be called a Bodhisattva, for whom there should exist the idea of a being or non-being, the idea of any form of living entity, or the idea of a person, thus there are no sentient beings to be liberated and even no being-ness who attains Anuttara Samyak Sambodhi,”—the latter meaning in Sanskrit: supreme, unexcelled, perfect and equal enlightenment. The unexcelled wisdom which comprehends truth that is attained only by a Buddha. 

From an orthodox Christian perspective, we are to believe that we need salvation, and from the Buddhist perspective, there are no beings to be saved (liberated). So what gives? And is there any way to have both of these be true? And here is where Nāgārjuna brings the solution, which, as it turns out, is a matter of relativity and dependent origination. He taught the idea of relativity; in the Ratnāvalī and gives the example that shortness exists only with length. Elsewhere he said, 

“That which is the element of light is seen to exist in relation to darkness; that which is the element of good is seen to exist on account of bad; that which is the element of space is seen to exist on account of form.” He was also instrumental in developing the two-truths doctrine, which claims that there are two levels of truth or reality in Buddhist teaching: the ultimate reality (paramārtha Satya) and the conventionally or superficial reality (saṃvṛtisatya). 

He said that neither the conventional nor the ultimate could exist alone; both came and went together: they dependently originated with each other. It is quite likely that the Apostle Paul was referring to that part of us that is unreal that must cease to exist for “…it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose.” And of course, the imaginary part of us is that which moves, changes, and is the source of all woe: the idea or image of ourselves (ego). The ego has every right to fear and tremble when facing the truth of our real, unchanging Self. It is also equally likely that The Buddha was speaking from the perspective of unexcelled, perfect, and equal enlightenment. In that realm, there are no beings to save since they are already whole and unified (despite what they may think, albeit imperceptible).

Nāgārjuna would point out that both of these statements are true together. Neither is true independently. Yet only when someone awakens to their own genuine Self-nature does such a one realize that from the ultimate, unconditional perspective, salvation is unnecessary. And from the conventional, conditional perspective, there is a necessity for salvation—the ego must be removed (or integrated) before, or concomitant to, awakening to happen. There is a valid American Indian expression that goes beyond the forked tongue idiom. It is “Before walking in another man’s moccasins, you must take off your own.”

Surrendering from contrived actions.

Unmoving movement.

The wisdom of the Four Nobel Truths is present in understanding the causal relationship between attachment and suffering. All suffering arises from clinging and resistance. 

Bodhidharma spoke of this relationship in his Discourse on the Twofold Entrance to the Tao. He understood the Tao to be the animating essence of life and death. The Tao was Bodhidharma’s code for the primordial mind that lacks discrimination and opposition. Here is what he said:

“Everyone who has a body is an heir to suffering and a stranger to peace. Having comprehended this point, the wise are detached from all things of the phenomenal world, with their minds free of desires and craving. As the Scripture has it, ‘All sufferings spring from attachment; true joy arises from detachment.’ To know clearly the bliss of detachment is to walk on the path of the Tao. This is ‘the rule of non-attachment.’”

To be non-attached is to experience release—yielding heaviness and receiving lightness, like removing an obstruction from flowing water. Once removed, the water flows naturally and nourishes all things.

A key principle in realizing our oneness with the Tao is wu-wei, or “non-doing.” Wu-wei refers to behavior that arises from a sense of integration with our source, others, and our environment. Wu-wei is not motivated by a sense of separateness, or egotistical motives. It is the action that is spontaneous, effortless, and naturally reflects our connectedness. It is the experience of going with the grain or swimming with the current. 

The contemporary expression, going with the flow, is an excellent expression of this fundamental principle, which in its most basic form refers to behavior occurring in response to the flow of integrated life. Thus to engage wu-wei means to surrender or give oneself over to the ubiquitous, flow of a mind at peace: the birthplace of The Buddha. 

But importantly, it refers to an experience of getting out of the way and surrendering to the movement of something beyond our comprehension. Our body moves but it seems to function without us moving it. In the Platform Sutra, Dajian Huineng (the sixth and last patriarch of Chan) reported on a conversation between two monks regarding the movement of a flag. One said the wind moved the flag. The other said no, it was the flag moving independently of the wind. Huineng said you’re both wrong. It was the mind/Tao that moved. When the primordial mind moves We remain silent and unmoving.

Lao Tzu expressed this yielding as giving up and getting. He expressed wu-wei this way in stanza nineteen of the Tao Te Ching:

“Give up sainthood, renounce wisdom,
And it will be a hundred times better for everyone.
Give up kindness, renounce morality,
And men will rediscover filial piety and love.
Give up ingenuity, renounce profit,
And bandits and thieves will disappear.
These three are outward forms alone; they are not sufficient in themselves.
It is more important
To see the simplicity,
To realize one’s true nature,
To cast off selfishness
And temper desire.”