Suppose our usual human fantasy came true, and we had a totally secure and guaranteed life, with no thorns. What would happen? The worst outcome imaginable. Because we would never develop any spiritual life at all, no compassion. We would be drowning in triumphalism, self-satisfaction. In that case our listening humility, which is the true source of spiritual deepening, would be gone.
It's a strange thing to contemplate, but it's the thorns of life that actually give it its sweetness. It's the thorns, defeats, failures, losses and so on that cause us to dig deeper. And what do we find when we do?
It's very easy for us sentient beings to spend our lives in an orgy of self-absorbed grasping. Acquiring this and that—objects, answers, beliefs, parts of the self-image, etc.—seems to fit society's idea of how to be happy. This endless grasping (after happiness!) is the source of endless, though subtle, suffering. And indeed, there's nothing wrong with reaching out into the world; it's where our actions derive from that makes the difference.
When life presents us with loss, it is only then that we begin to truly realize that others have pain too; this is the birth of compassion. When life presents us with loss, it is only then that we begin to look deeper inside ourselves to find a deeper source.
Without the thorns of life, we would forever be caught in infantilism, caught in sterile self-satisfaction. When we feel loss and pain, however, we naturally turn to ways of dealing with it, and this in turn—sooner or later—leads us to humility, that is, to a spiritual journey.
And it is on this spiritual journey that we begin to encounter the true spirit, the animating presence that underlies and embodies and is everything. And one touch from that underlying humility, where the heart breaks open, and a thousand million outward empires and successes crumble into dust in comparison.
It is no accident that roses have thorns. This exquisite flower, celebrated throughout the ages, is precisely the one that has the thorns. So too with life. It is life's thorns that are its greatest blessings, because they lead us back—in halting steps, perhaps, but still back—to our source.
And as we turn inward, even a little bit, what we encounter is our own mind. Sooner or later, if we're truly to turn toward the source, we must pay attention to our mind—what in Zen they call the "small mind."
Paying attention to our own mind means becoming aware of our thoughts and thinking, which act like mud on a lantern (in the famous metaphor), obscuring that which is beyond thoughts and thinking.
This attention to our habitual ways of thinking and perceiving can come in a number of forms. It can come, for instance, in The Work of Byron Katie (thework.org), where we meet our thinking with some very profound questions and find out that our thinking isn't the truth.
It can come in the form of shikan-taza in Zen, vipassana in Buddhism, the prayer of silence in Christian mysticism and under many other names and forms, in which we sit in silence and, in that great silence, cannot help but notice the mind as it goes through its various dances and contortions—and thereby begin to dis-identify with it.
It can come in the form of therapy or counselling, which can help us see destructive patterns in our ways of thinking and perceiving ourselves, others and the world. It can come in the humility of surrendering to that which is incomparably vaster than the personal self, a process which begins to open our internal eye of pure observation.
There are many depths and forms of this process, but they all share the same principle: That of encountering the "small mind," with its endless grasping and wanting, and beginning to see it for what it is—that our beliefs and thoughts and self-told fairy tales are not actually reality.
However it comes, however it happens and at whatever rate it happens, our looking at our own mind gradually diminishes our fascination and identification with it. As that happens, gaps open up in the "small mind" and we begin to encounter hints and whispers of what in Zen they call Big Mind.
In introspective moments, it is commonplace for even very successful people—those who have "succeeded" in various areas of life—to notice that they still feel like something is missing.
That something just might be Big Mind, the Mind beyond the small mind, the Mind that only begins to be encountered as thoughts become more flimsy. It cannot be transmitted, because how do you transmit nothing? But a teacher, even one long gone, can inspire us to look into the deep silence for ourselves.
To begin to encounter Big Mind, which is no other than our true self, is, we could say, the fulfillment of the meaning of our human life. And then our actions, whatever they might be, come from a less encumbered place, a place of greater spirit and compassion. We could say that Mind wakes up to Itself again, in the unfolding of our exquisite human flower.
(This is the end of Part 1. Go to Part 2.)
—jim sloman, 4.18.03 for 8.10.03
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