The Zen of Commuting

A very well-intentioned and sincere guy wrote to me recently asking me to contribute to his new venture, a website called www.meditationsfromthetube.com. Here's what I said in my reply:

 "Thanks very much for the message and for the information about your website. In terms of meditation during a commute, I’m not sure I have anything valuable to contribute, certainly not without writing an essay.

 What I can offer you is these three bullet points.

•  Take off the headphones 


•  Pay attention to what’s going on around you, and in you 


•  And as the Japanese poet Ikkyu put it: ‘believe in the (wo)man facing you now just narrow your eyes feel the deep love’"

What else is there to say? 

Emptiness

Imagine the sea, stretching in all directions to the horizon. Can you see how vast and calm and all-embracing it is? Now imagine a ripple starting in the centre of the ocean, spreading out and picking up power as it races towards the shore, reaching its zenith before…

Before what?

Imagine the wave crashing onto the beach, fragmenting in a jumble of foam and gravel, its energy spent and dissipated. Imagine the water being slowly drawn back into the ocean.

***

The sea and the wave form a metaphor for the Buddhist idea of dependent origination. In this teaching, the Buddha set out an understanding of ‘cause’ and effect in the phenomenal universe. Dependent origination later became, in a modified form, a cornerstone of Zen philosophy, and it’s in this form that it’s perhaps most useful to us today.

The teaching sets out the 12 ‘steps’ through which the mind becomes trapped in Samsara (the cycle of rebirth; the unenlightened state). These are (in plain English and with some latitude in translation):

• Delusion
• Kamma
• Consciousness
• Reification
• The senses
• Contact
• Feeling/sensation
• Craving
• Clinging
• Becoming
• Birth
• Suffering and death

Traditionally, these steps are viewed as a chain of cause and effect, which goes something like this:

Because we are deluded, we don’t understand our kamma, which condemns us to act in fixed and repetitive, sometimes harmful ways. These habits inform and influence our conscious mind, without our knowing it, and because of our habit of making things out of experience (reification), we come to develop a fixed idea of our self, based on these habits.

When contact between our senses and stimuli is made and a sensation arises, we posit a thing out there that has caused us, the self ‘inside’, to feel that sensation.

This imaginary relationship between a subject (us) with an object (the thing ‘out there’) results in a craving or desire for the object and the sensation it produces. This desire results in subjective attachment (clinging) to the object we have created.

But just as we have created an object we’ve also modified a subject. In other words, we become a wanting thing, a self that wants something. This self is born in both a literal and figurative sense. But because it has been born it must eventually, like all conditioned (dependently originated) things, die. The intuitive knowledge that this will happen causes us to suffer.

***

The good news is that understanding the process and seeing our kamma in action results in what’s known as ‘cessation.

So as we become less deluded, we begin to free ourselves from our kamma, and this gives us more clarity about our consciousness and our habit of reification. Once we see this, we can begin to see how the interaction of an imaginary self with stimuli through the senses creates the desire, clinging and becoming that lead to birth, death and suffering.

As we develop this understanding, we increase our ability to let go of unhelpful mental states. Because we are clinging and becoming less and less, we begin to free ourselves more and more from the cycle of birth and death.

In other words, if we can let go of our subjective desire for what we see as the object of our desire, then our clinging begins to weaken and we begin to operate more naturally, more spontaneously. We begin to free ourselves.

***

How does this relate to our analogy of the sea? We can think of the ocean as our natural state and the wave as the operation of dependent origination.

A ‘wave’ arises because of an interaction between our deluded, karmic-ridden consciousness, our tendency to make a thing of the self and a sensation. The ‘wave’ picks up speed as we become subject to desire, clinging and becoming. However, this wave, having been ‘born’, is now condemned to die. And so, painfully, the wave crashes onto the gravel shore and then is dragged back slowly into the ocean.

If we understand that the wave is only a part of the wide ocean and that its apparent independent existence is an illusion, fuelled by the momentum of desire and clinging and interaction with our kamma, then we can begin to reduce our attachment to it. If we begin to see the wave as only a temporary phenomenon, a ripple wrinkling the surface of the mind, we begin to sense that there is wider reality outside our normal, contracted existence.


***

In this way, contemplation of the workings of dependent origination within our own minds helps us to see how the arising and passing of dharmas (mental objects) is given life only by the extent to which we cling to these phenomena.

***

Dependent origination is described above as a sequential or time-bound process. But if you examine its workings carefully you might see that the way ‘cause’ and effect interact is actually much more like a net than a series of steps. Within this ‘net’ each element influences and is influenced by all the other elements.

Actually, there is never a single cause, a place where the process begins. Instead there’s an endless series of ripples and waves criss-crossing and interacting with each other and everything else that is and has ever arisen. Nothing exists purely on its own.

Some people call the idea that nothing exists on its own emptiness (Sunyata). This may be a difficult concept to grasp, especially for people in the West who are taught tend to believe that the adjective ‘empty’ means having nothing in it.

But in this context emptiness means that everything is in it – and that there’s no ‘it’ anyway.
Here’s an example. Take an empty cup. Is it really empty? Isn’t what’s inside it exactly the same as what’s outside it?

Let’s fill the cup up. We pour in something we like, and we ask the walls of the cup to keep out everything else. But of course the ‘something we like’ is also made out of everything; coffee beans depend on soil, sunshine, water… As Carl Sagan said, ‘To make an apple pie, first take the universe’.

So the outside, the inside and even the walls of the cup are simply the result of myriad elements briefly coming together. To put it another way, the cup is not a single, impermeable membrane at all but a temporary manifestation that’s come into being through a combination of factors (dependent origination).

As it is for the cup, so it is for the drinker. The cup and the coffee have arisen and will fall away, and it’s the same for us. We’re born and we die – most people can accept that. What we might find harder to accept is that we’re not ‘single impermeable membranes’; we’re not individual entities that exist in some solid way in time.

The self that we use to navigate the world, useful though it is, is no different to the walls of the cup. It, the self, is a temporary manifestation of infinite effects without permanence, ever-changing, an expression of everything, empty.

The same is true of what we would call consciousness, this knowing. It arises and falls and changes ceaselessly, without stopping.

If you can accept this, and you can see that treating the cup or even yourself as a fixed entity is a fundamental error of perception, then you’ve begun to understand emptiness. But it’s vital to see that, just as the cup is not an existential object, neither is emptiness a fixed entity. In other words, emptiness itself is empty.

***

To go back to our original metaphor, not even the ocean exists independently. It is as much a gathering together of factors as is the wave.

So although we can talk about ‘cause’ and effect it’s vital to see that there’s no cause as such, only an infinite number of effects. There’s no prime mover, no God, no Big Bang, no self to set the whole thing in motion.

The universe and everything in it, including even our deluded selves and our wider consciousness, is not a set of distinct and sharp-edged objects. It’s a kaleidoscope of ever-shifting and impermanent fragments coalescing and dispersing continuously.

This is the true beauty of life. Everything is both there and not there at all in any meaningful sense.

It may seem obvious, but can you see it?

What about self-esteem?

Some of us, perhaps brought up in dysfunctional homes or who tend to depressive ways of thinking, find it hard to value ourselves. We tend to chip away at our own self-images.

This, if left to develop, can seep into everything, destroying relationships and sapping confidence. Low self-esteem can lead to destructive behaviours, addictions and unhappiness, perhaps even to economic hardship and shortened lives.

Cartoon from www.jattdisite.com/scraps/cartoon/

Others may throw themselves into work, achieving success at great cost to their personal lives.

But what if you saw that something you’d been struggling with all your life didn’t exist after all? What if you could actually act on the principle that, once we realise something isn't real, it becomes possible to forget about it?

This applies to self-image as much as anything. The ego is the cause of much human suffering. If we could just let it go we would naturally become much happier. Wouldn't we? 

The Buddhist concept of ‘no-self’ or anatta holds that nothing, including our selves, has inherent existence but is, rather, the result of combination of factors. Anatta is one of the ‘three marks of existence’, the others being anicca (impermanence) and dukkha (suffering). 

The idea is that, because nothing lasts or has substance, we suffer as a result of our desire to hold on to things, such as self-image or ego.

If we can stop holding on and live as though we are simply, beautifully, the product of dynamic processes, the problem is solved. We liberate ourselves from dukkha, suffering.

Those with low self-esteem know all about suffering. Their interactions with other people are often wary and anxious and there’s often a background of fear and stress.

There are brief moments of freedom, but these are backlit with a giddiness that sets others on their heels. This just increases the negative feedback to the anxious person, ratcheting up their anxiety.

So the suggestion is that perhaps a person with low self-esteem might more readily accept anatta, precisely because they 'get' dukkha. 

A confident and successful person may well be generous and sensitive. They might even accept the Buddhist idea that life is marked by suffering, but this acceptance is often an intellectual one.

It doesn't mean that worldly 'success' and anatta can't go hand in hand. But it may be harder to see anatta, because perhaps the suffering isn’t felt by the confident person as much as it is by the person who struggles with themselves and who wants to turn away from others.

This urge to retreat, to hide, may be legitimised by many Buddhist and Zen suttas (scriptures), where the dialectic (dialogue) is often highly negative in tone. 

Anatta is a concept that is completely at odds with the direction of travel of Western, individualistic, positivistic society. And some negativity is needed in order to destroy any lingering attachment to the self. 

This negativity can turn many people off, but it may be more attractive to those who feel that they have little value. Perhaps too attractive. 

Without some sense of self-worth, the danger is that you can oversubscribe to the idea of anatta. You let yourself become a walkover. You put yourself in harm’s way because you’re not important. Or so you think.

Anatta does sound negative, does seem ‘contra’. Yet there is a positive purpose behind it, one that is easy to mis-read.

The ultimate message of anatta is not nihilism (negativity, nothingness) but communion. In losing a small sense of self we open to a greater sense of belonging.

To put it another way, the great ‘No’ of Buddhism becomes the great ‘Yes’ of Zen. Renunciation turns in on itself and begins to open to, rather than to turn away from, the world.

Most of us don’t live in monasteries – we still have to make choices. There’s a need to see through the surface of things, but also a need to act at that surface, without getting caught up in it or mistaking it for reality.

Imagine you’re walking along a country road, drinking in the beauty of the fields and hedgerows around you. If you were to hear a car approaching around a blind corner, you’d naturally get out of the way, while still enjoying the sights and smells around you.

Zen does not, as some might fear, so blind us that we let ourselves be hit by the car. It allows you to act naturally, without ego – without focusing so much either on your footsteps or the approaching car that you don’t take in what is around you.

The truth is that you hold two truths in mind. You learn to see both anatta and daily life at the same time.

If you can do so, a sense of self-worth, based now on action and interaction with the people around you, rather than on the shifting sands of self-image, becomes more realistic, more grounded.

The shadows begin to disappear and the light of natural wisdom starts to predominate. You begin to feel more confident; a more authentic, ‘bigger’ self starts to come to the fore.