Searching for Spiritual Roots, Trying to Balance Different Practices, and Asking for Help

[Ben Ross]

I'm wondering lately if in order for me to move forward spiritually I need to find one path to root myself in, or if it's better to actually give up on trying to find one path or set of ideas and practices that I can believe in completely. The truth is, I've found truth and beauty in a variety of traditions, from Tibetan Buddhist to Congregationalist Christian to Pure Land Buddhism to Theravadan Buddhist to Thich Nhat Hanh's Zen Buddhism to Toni Packer's non-sectarian Zen-influenced practice. I can honestly say that in each of these systems I've tasted something true and so deeply helpful that I can't imagine giving it up. And I can say that in all of them I have found areas of experience that seemed to be either overlooked or less focused upon, areas that I didn't feel I could imagine giving up on in my daily life. I feel able neither to give up on praying to God, on nembutsu, on choiceless awareness, on Thich Nhat Hanh's gathas, on tonglen meditation practice, on the beautiful depictions of the bardo presented in the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, in the beautiful presentation of human limits and the compassion that naturally holds us as depicted by Shinran, Saichi and Dharmavidya, on the value of not-knowing and discovering for oneself as presented in Toni Packer's writings, or on the beautiful stories of Jesus Christ experiencing the suffering of humanity in order to unite beings in compassion and express a vision of love and justice without boundaries. And no more could I give up on the Buddhist sutras, especially the Four Noble Truths, which has been as valuable a guidepost as any in living my daily life.

Most spiritual teachers recommend that at a certain point you just decide to stick with one thing and that this is necessary in order to actually get anywhere on a path. I wonder if there's another way. I wonder if it's possible to practice simply based on what works. I know that tonglen works for me. I know that body scans work. I know that the Four Noble Truths help me understand my experience. I know that nembutsu works, that prayer works, and I know that approaching the world with an attitude of not-knowing works as well. Can I hold all of these things in this spirit of not-knowing? Can I simply practice based on what brings greater compassion to my life and helps me be more available to others? Does searching for truth really help? Don't all of these practices point to aspects of the truth? What is the perspective I could engage them from that could hold all of them without engaging in a kind of contradiction?

I'm thinking of something that Dharmavidya wrote in "Who Loves Dies Well". It was to the effect that from the Pure Land perspective, one may wish to engage in meditation practices as ways of opening up or developing parts of the self, but that there's an underlying understanding that it isn't a practice of perfecting the self. There is already perfect realization as embodied by Amida (or what Amida represents, depending on your interpretation). Its not something we could gain by striving - in fact, it can only be experienced by giving up this striving. All of this matches my experience.

I think what's most confusing to me these days is how this relates to Toni Packer's approach as well as to Christian prayer (Toni Packer founded a non-sectarian meditation center called Springwater in New York state and guides people in the practice of choiceless awareness, for those who don't know of her). How can it be that when I pray for help answering a question or pray to be held in love, these prayers are almost always answered in some way? If I can pray in this way, how could I restrict myself solely to the nembutsu? And if I find that bringing non-judgmental awareness to my experience in an attitude of not knowing gives rise to spontaneous feelings of being loved and of insights into my mind, how could it be that be that I could rely solely on prayer or nembutsu to seek experience and understanding on the deepest levels, or that I could imagine this love and understanding as emerging from a certain source that I must try to connect with? How can all these paths lead to that place of feeling loved and to the arising of spontaneous insight? Do I really know what's going on when this state arises? I can't say I know whether it emerges from inside myself, from outside of myself, or from both. I tend to lean toward the outside, and yet intellectually I imagine that distinctions between inside and outside really dissolve at the deepest levels of insight.

All of this is kind of an intellectual exercise right now, isn't it? And yet I have to give voice to these struggles. Somehow this has been paralyzing me lately. To what exactly am I praying when I decide to do so? Why does it seem not to matter if I know, in terms of whether my prayers are responded to in some way? To what or whom am I saying the nembutsu when I say it? Does it matter whether I say it or just feel it? Why does it sometimes lead to an opening to light and love and sometimes doesn't? How can I both pray and say nembutsu and at the same time engage it all form the perspective of not-knowing - all aspects of my spiritual life I feel I can't give up on?

I'm not sure there's really a big contradiction here. It seems quite possible to pray sometimes and say the nembutsu others when it feels right, and to just hold the perspective that I don't know where these practices are directed toward and if there really is a God or Amida or an energy of infinite love and light or what the mind really is and yet all of these practices can work in the sense that the experience they lead me toward is one that isn't really intellectual at all. And yet the lack of intellectual consistency seems to be causing a contorting pressure in my chest, throat and head these days that I'd really like to find a way to loosen.

Am I afraid to approach these practices from the perspective of not knowing? Am I afraid that I'm missing the true path, that if I don't devote myself to one path fully and deeply that I'll miss experiencing the depth of any of them? What's so hard about giving up on any one of these practices and modes of understanding, and choosing to follow one approach alone?

As I sit here in the confusion, it occurs to me that Toni Packer's approach also constitutes a kind of prayer, as do all meditation practices, when seen in their essence. They are all ways of trying to give up on figuring things out, ways of letting go of the intellectual grasping that grips and tightens body and mind, ways of opening to something greater. Toni Packer doesn't name what this greater thing is, and yet in her approach there's still definitely this aspect of being aware and questioning until you realize you really aren't in control of your body-mind, and that there's really no need to be in control. She often writes that being present is the change, that there isn't any other kind of change one really needs grasp after.

Isn't this what prayer and nembutsu are also about? Granted, when I pray, I want a certain outcome. And yet I am giving up on trying to create this outcome in some way (and I also only pray either for love or understanding, not for particular outcomes regarding a job or something like that). When I say the nembutsu, I am also giving up on trying (although of course the times that I truly give up are rare, which probably accounts for why it often seems not "to work", because it is coming from this place of trying to effect a certain outcome). The truth is, my mind always turns everything into something it would like to control. It would like to have a certain practice it could repeat with a definitive result. It would like to know that that practice was the most reliable of all, that there's no way there could be another practice more effective. It would like to find a way to figure this problem out, of how to find that fleeting sense of being held and loved and of understanding what this life is, of how to hold onto that sense and reproduce it. In this way, it often tries to find some way of being good, of doing the right things, in the hopes of being held this way always.

But maybe there are no right things. Maybe there is only giving up. And giving up comes in many flavors. Or it can be accessed through many doors. It's all the same giving up, though. Where else is there to go but into that emptiness? The emptiness of division, of anything that I really am doing, in the sense that it's not really ever me doing these things, it's just a set of conditioned behaviors and thoughts endlessly churning, endlessly bouncing off the world.

Who cares how you get there, right? Having a path and practicing diligently doesn't necessarily do it, as far as I can tell. It's seems possible that for some this can lead to developing more ego and more fixed ideas in this process. And yet bouncing from practice to practice may not help in the long run either, because it becomes a kind of distraction. Really giving up is a terrifying thing, I'd say. Like a view of the ocean from on top of a sand dune lit by the moon at night, its vastness stretching to a dark horizon and its waves seeming to crash all around, something is both beautiful and terrifying about giving up. Like the sunset exploding into colors one instant and darkness surrounding the next, there's a sense of death permeating this giving up. How can I give up to dying? To not being able to hold onto one moment, one person, one thought, one sense of who I am, one molecule of my body? It's beautiful one instant and terrifying the next. Or it's terrifying up front, and there's some attempt to control this terror, to finally find that one thing that does last, to encapsulate the love and be able to carry it around and take it out at any moment. I think the love is lasting, but it's not lasting in the sense that I could take it out of a jar I was carrying around like the fireflies I caught as a kid (that were always dead the next morning). I think it's lasting in some other sense, though I can't pretend to say I know what that is, but I think it goes beyond how I can perceive the world, which is through the lens of time and the sense of a separate me relating to other separate things and growing and changing in some methodical way.

I just went back to read over what I've written tonight with a sense of pride, a sense that I've figured something out. It seems I can't overcome that demon. Of course the second I create a new thought system it will dissolve again as I try to make it work to effect a certain outcome. There's no thought or system to really hold onto, it seems to me, even a system espousing emptiness. And yet in the spirit of devotion there's at least the recognition of this helplesness, of bombu nature, and an asking for help.

[Susthama]

And so why do you want to move forward in spirituality? Or rather - do you really want to?

[Dr Di]

hi Ben. you write beautifully. the disadvantage of being so attached to words is that they tie you to the left side of your brain. anxiety comes from thinking too much. try silence for a while (in thought and speech) and let me know how you feel. Diane