Luke Soiseth

The Buddha said, “My Dharma is the practice of non-practice.” And when I’m in the deepest meditative state, I can almost achieve that. I’m like the proverbial pebble at the bottom of the river. All things rush by and I am still, quiet, empty of all the distractions, frustrations and obsessions of the so-called real world. I practice and when I succeed I am, as he said, not practicing anything. I’m just being, being a part of everything else, deeply present and aware, but unaffected in any way. It is here that I can truly rest and I can heal the wounds of 46 years of mostly unmindful living.

And then I go back into the world and start all over. So be it. I’m no Buddha, but I’m trying, and if I slingshot back and forth from booze to Buddha and back, so be that, too. The effort is to make it effortless to stay here, now, mindful and kind.

In a discussion at the end of his book A Practical Guide to Buddhist Meditation, Paramananda writes about maintaining your practice that  “…meditation is a challenge to the way we see ourselves. In particular, it challenges us to take fuller responsibility for our lives. It challenges us to acknowledge that we are responsible for how we feel, and for the way in which we lead our life.”

It is a point that strikes me very profoundly right now. I notice that along with the joys I feel from my practice, I also have some real anxiety around it. I sense that I am letting go of something safe, albeit dull, and having to reach forward to something entirely new and clear, but “out there” and unknown. I rationally want this new mindfulness and clarity but know that there’s comfort in the old. He goes on:

“We are very attached to our version of the world, and it might well be difficult for us to give up the views and prejudices we have. Our sense of who we are is closely bound up in the way we see things, and it would be unrealistic to think that we can effortlessly give up views that have been conditioning us – essentially creating us – over many years. While we might like the idea of breaking out of the limiting ways we look at our lives, in reality it is frightening to give them up.”

I came across all of this smack dab in the middle of those anxieties and it was quite heartening. I was concerned that I didn’t get it or was doing something wrong. We have this misconception that meditation is all bliss and happiness when in fact it is often very much the opposite.

We are encouraged to meditate upon our own suffering and the suffering of others to better understand the world and ourselves. But looking deeply into ourselves is far from easy and especially in the culture in which we live. What you see is never perfect and often ugly – and if that is not what you see, you are not looking closely enough, or you’re already a Buddha or a Saint. We are flawed creatures, yes, but with great ability to correct those flaws.

And once you look and really see, and if you continue the practice, you’ll never return to your former self. As Thich Nhat Hanh writes in the first few pages of The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching, “Once the door of awareness has been opened, you cannot close it.”

That, to me, is profound, beautiful, and not a little freaky.

“A popular misconception is that depth of experience is something to do with intensity of experience. …It is only on the foundation of a clear, relatively integrated mind that experience will penetrate deeply.”

This from A Practical Guide to Buddhist Meditation by Paramananda.

I find that arc of thought particularly resonant for me now. It is such a part of American culture, youth culture, as well as the culture, and also personal intense engagement, of drugs and alcohol. We tend toward the intense, exciting, and anything that will provide the short adrenaline rush, then confuse that experience with that which is profound.

I think back to my childhood and Evil Knievel, a man who spent months between jumps doing who knows what, and then with great fanfare and long-drawn-out hype, jumped a motorcycle over a line of buses. That – then – was considered something to be praised, looked up to, and even emulated with a bike, a wooden jump and a couple of the neighbor kids.

Entertainment is like that as well. The thrills we get at a horror or suspense flick, the tears from the jerker, the laughs from comedies, rocking out to Foghat live! tantalize us certainly, sometimes blow our minds, but ultimately it dissipate and leave us depth-wise exactly where we were. We toss words like brilliant around – “Mad Men is brilliant!” It’s really good television and it’s entertaining, but brilliant, brilliant might be reserved for the reflection of a mountain on a still lake, the profundity of which is lost on only the most jaded or empty of souls – while there’s no clear agreement on what’s brilliant on HBO right now.

That is not to say that we should look down on those experiences. On the contrary, they’re fantastic, we enjoy them, we come out the other side feeling rejuvenated and thrilled and, in the very short run, altered ever so slightly.

But the truth of the matter all of those experiences while providing a brief intense, adrenaline rush are truly shallow to the person, to the soul. Void of depth.

The more I drink, the shorter the intensity lasts, until another drink is added upon that one in a desperate and failed attempt to repeat the intensity, and so on. The moments of bleary-eyed brilliance become fewer and farther between. The trip is over sooner and I don’t travel nearly as far as I once did – or think I did.

Clarity of mind goes deep and lasts. It opens us up to transcendent understanding that will never come from a bottle, a smoke or snort, all of which ultimately act against it.