Insight--Living Awake

"Insight is not transferable" wrote H. Clayton Moyer. In my 21 years of teaching on the college level I have learned that insight cannot be taught. It actually must be caught. It's like a line drive that smacks into our ball glove simply because we extended our arm and opened the glove in the trajectory we perceived the ball to be going. Insight flies into our very being in serendipitous moments. It comes when we are not necessarily looking for it, or straining to make it happen. Yet, ironically, we must be open to receive it when it comes. If we are living awake, living mindfully, we have a greater chance of catching the insight. Living awake means living in a posture of readiness for whenever insight might surprise us. When insight comes, we must be willing to wrestle with the changes of perspective that it potentially demands from us and desires to bring to our lives. We must be willing to set aside our presuppositions of how things 'should be' and open our deepest selves to the possibilities of life. When insight comes we have the potential for a life transformation that increases our compassion and makes us more loving, open, and vulnerable to the hurting, broken masses around the world. Live awake. Practice mindfulness. Catch the insight. To paraphrase Ghandi, be the change that the world needs!

What is Mindfulness?

In my last blog I mentioned something about mindfulness. You may wonder what, exactly, is mindfulness. The word mindfulness is a translation of the Pali word sati. Samma Sati is the seventh step of the Buddhist Eighfold Path to Liberation from suffering (dukkha). Sati is most often translated as mindfulness or mindful attention, though it can be understood or translated as awareness or attentiveness. While mindfulness is rooted in Buddhism, the concept does not belong exclusively to this religion. It is a practice that can be found in various forms in all of the world’s major religions as well as in the areas of psychology, medicine, education and business.

The root purpose of mindfulness is to help us learn to live “awake,” or fully conscious to the present moment. It is awakening and releasing the subconscious mind to the gift of who we truly are, the gift of our True Self. As we slowly discover the gift of our True Self, our lives become transformed. We become gentler and more nonjudgmental of ourselves and others—all others, not just those who are look like us or think like us. We express tangible acts of compassion. We speak compassionately to and with others. In the words of the Christian scriptures, we become more Christ-like, because we are practicing “putting on the mind of Christ.” The fruit of this practice is unconditional love for ourselves, others, creation, and the Divine.

Living in a state of mindfulness calls us to intentionally live fully in the present moment (or as fully as possible). It is not easy to do; it takes time and practice. However, it is well worth the effort on multiple levels. I will talk about the benefits of mindful living in a future blog post.

I hope you are trying to spend at least a few moments each day with a contemplative practice. I mentioned three in the last blog. In future posts, I will suggest others. But for now, let me leave you with the words of three great teachers:

·         “Let go of your mind and then be mindful./ Close your ears and listen!” Rumi

·         “Each morning we are born again. What we do today is what matters most.” Buddha

·         “In mindfulness meditation or Contemplative Prayer “We open our awareness to God whom we know by faith is within us, closer than breathing, closer than thinking, closer than choosing – closer than consciousness itself.” Thomas Keating

Monkey Mind and Froglessness

How many times have you sat down with the intention of meditating, inviting the sound of silence to surround you and penetrate your being when suddenly you found your mind racing with uninvited thoughts? You remember the events of the day, or what happened yesterday, or even years ago. You think about that project you have been working on. You recall a pleasant conversation you had a day or so ago. You see the face of a person you recently met. Your "to-do" list keeps poking you. Countless thoughts swirl around, tugging at your mind like little preschoolers demanding attention from you. The Buddha aptly called this experience "monkey mind," and reminded us that while it is perfectly normal and there is no need to become frustrated over it, we can work to gently slow our thoughts, eventually gaining control over them, at least for the most part. There are three ways that I have found helpful in the process of slowing down my monkey mind. 

• The first way comes from the Centering Prayer tradition of Christianity. Each time you recognize a thought demanding your attention, first acknowledge the thought and then imagine placing the thought on a barge. In your mind's eye, watch the barge carry your thought downriver. As the barge floats out of sight, call up your "word of intention" or focus word and silently repeat it to yourself to refocus your meditation or Centering.   
• A second way to address your monkey mind is to gently acknowledge the thought that wiggled into your silence and then turn your attention to your breath. Attend to your in-breath and out-breath as a way to return to your meditation. 
• A third way is playfully, yet effectively named, "Froglessness". Thich Nhat Hanh teaches that we are to strive for the attainment of "froglessness." He says that froglessness is the first attainment in the practice of mindfulness meditation. Thich Nhat Hanh teaches that our thoughts are like a frog on a plate. When you put a frog on a plate, it will not remain there. Rather, it will jump to another location. As we practice mindfulness, we give our intention to the practice of silence but like a frog, in a few seconds, it jumps off. When this happens, we gently pick up our intention and place it back on the plate. Given much time and patience with ourselves, we will attain froglessness, if only for a few seconds longer. (Thich Nhat Hanh's poem on this teaching can be found at the end of this post.)

Try using these ways, or one of your own, to intentionally practice meditation (the sound of silence). Practice it every day. If you need to, start with 5 minutes-- or even one or two minutes. Do not worry about whether or not you are doing it "right". It's not about "rightness"; it's about practicing it in your in your life. In time, you will yearn for the sound of silence and then the related practice of mindfulness will seep into every aspect of your life, not just the times when you intentionally stop to be silent. 

Froglessness
The first fruition of the practice
is the attainment of froglessness.

When a frog is put
on the center of a plate,
she will jump out of the plate
after just a few seconds.

If you put the frog back again
on the center of the plate,
she will again jump out.

You have so many plans.
There is something you want to become.
Therefore you always want to make a leap,
a leap forward.

It is difficult
to keep the frog still
on the center of the plate.
You and I 
both have Buddha Nature in us.
This is encouraging,
but you and I both have Frog Nature in us.

That is why
the first attainment 
of the practice-- 
froglessness is its name. 

(Source: Thich Nhat Hanh. Call Me by My True Names: The Collected Poems of Thich Nhat Hanh (Berkeley: Parallax Press, 1999), 180.

Sound of Silence

Today I heard for the first time the music group Disturbed’s version of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Sound of Silence.” Growing up in the 60s & 70s, I was quite familiar with the original version of the song—I even learned the words by heart. The rare times these days when I do hear that song, I tend to mindlessly, yet harmonically, sing along. But today’s experience with the song was different. I would venture to say that this new version of the song teased my mind to truly listen to the lyrics. As I listened, and yes, even sang along, two phrases became particularly poignant and attention getting:  

“people talking without speaking” and  “people hearing without listening”  

The song played on, but these words swirled in my mind until they dipped down and touched my heart. I began to ponder the words, to chew on them, to turn them angle by angle so that I might observe any possible meanings seeking a hearing within my True Self. My realizations do not have to do with the overall meaning of the song; rather, they address what I have been learning to see in life.

We live in a world where silence is subservient to words. High quantities of words spoken at louder volumes yield greater power to the individual doing the speaking (or more accurately pontificating).

The skillful art of listening has been subjugated to verbosity. Many of us prefer verbose ramblings because we like the feel of the sounds sliding off our tongues and spilling over our loose lips. However, if we pay attention, we will see the eyes of our audience (even an audience of one) glaze over because our conversations have become monologues with multiple trajectories instead of a heartfelt true dialogue. We want so badly for others to agree with our perspectives and oft self-perceived cleverness that we delude ourselves into believing that if only they “hear” our multi-syllabic bead stringing, they will listen. Then we will win. What we will win is in question. But we feel like we’ll win. In reality, the only thing we have done is tired into silence those who very well may have held within them a nugget of insight that would have transformed our malignant egoic-perspectives of how we believe things to be.

Why are we this way? We are this way because our self-deluded egos are either licking the wounds of past experiences that lie secretly beneath the skin of our existence, waiting for an opportune moment to erupt and disrupt our lives. Or we are so obsessed with what life is going to hold for us at some point in the future, near or far, that the eyes of our false self become myopic.

Is there a remedy? Most certainly. The remedy is to live in the present, the very present moment where life happens. The past has passed. The future is not yet. The remedy seems simple enough, but it actually takes discipline to actualize. It takes discipline because clinging to the past, or obsessively longing for the future is like the tackiness of pine sap sticking to the bottoms of our souls or the tips of our fingers. The clinging distracts us from the task at hand, from the present. The result is failure to live with full awareness to and in the present moment.

The sound of silence is demanded of us if we are to be whole and complete human beings. The sound of silence nurtures us, enabling us to let go of grieving the past even as it frees us to glimpse the future, while not living for it. Mindfully living in the present moment clears the sap from our souls. Then we speak and not just talk; we listen not just hear.