Having No Idea — a Cambridge Insight Meditation Center dharma talk by Doug Phillips
Choosing topics for these talks is always an interesting experience for me as the folks who do the planning want talk titles months in advance. I personally find this next to impossible to do because if I pick a topic for that far into the future I’m either done with it, bored with it or it wasn’t a good topic to begin with by the time to do it comes around. So the way this title came about was that as the organizer and I danced around his need for a title and my need to resist same, I said with a hopeful feeling of finality, “Tom, I have no idea! Why don’t you just call it that.” He said, “Really? That’s a cool topic!” I then muttered something and left it at that. He later did a little bit of editing to make it sound like a real topic and thus we have, “Having No Idea.”
Now, this was really true: I really had no idea. But as I played around with this and let it play with me a bit it did seem like there might be a good dharma talk in here. What does it mean to have no idea? What does it mean to be without thought or image? Is such a state possible, desirable? Is it something that arises or emerges spontaneously, or something that results from a certain practice? Why would we even want such a state of mind and towards what end if any? Does it mean that the brain stops producing thoughts or does it have something to do with how relate to those thoughts? And who would be experiencing all of this anyway? Maybe this is somehow related to that famous line in the ancient Chinese poem, “The great Way is not difficult for those who do not cling to their preferences.” For many years this was mistranslated as, “…not difficult for those who have no preferences.” I don’t know how it is for you, but I’m not sure that I would want to live a life in which I had no preferences. I imagine this might be somewhat akin to being colorblind. I rather like my preferences and some I experience as quite wonderful, like freshly baked chocolate chip cookies or listening to Allison Krauss or hanging out with certain people I care about. However, it is also pretty clear that often I can’t have what I prefer and it is also true that the more I want those preferences when I can’t have them the greater is my suffering. But it’s not the preferences themselves that are the problem; it is how I relate to them that creates either suffering or allows natural freedom to be present and experienced. The same applies to thinking. What is useful, skillful or necessary thinking? How much thinking is really necessary to move safely and skillfully through my day? How much thinking is necessary to have right view and to enter into this practice in a thoughtful way? So, there seemed to me to be some real energy in this for a talk and I began to put it together.
However, at the same time there seemed to be another stream of interest running that competed for my attention. I do a three week self-retreat each year in England and while I was there in March my wife sent me a poem by Mary Oliver, called “Wild Geese.” During this retreat I was sitting with a tremendous amount of sadness around some particular life events and when I began to read this poem I found that initially I could only get through the first couple of lines before the sadness and grief came welling up. So I would stay with that until it receded and then go back to it later in the day or the next day working my way down through the sadness literally line by line; watching it, honoring it and seeing when and how I was making something out of it that it did not want to be. And even after many days when I could actually read the whole poem aloud, I would still return to it periodically to stay in touch with that energy and to see if it still needed my attention; my love, really. So Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese” and I kept company with each other for about half of my retreat until, for the most part, the sadness and loss pretty much revealed itself fully, openly and intimately.
When I returned in late March a student gave me another Mary Oliver poem about letting go. Let me see if I can find it… You know, I thought about making this an evening of just reading Mary Oliver to you, us sitting quietly together and then going home, but I was not sure how that would go over with the administration, so…let me read you the last few paragraphs of this:
Every year everything I have ever
Learned in my lifetime comes back to this;
The fire and the black river of loss
Whose other side is salvation.
Whose meaning none of us will ever know.
To live in this world you must
Be able to do three things:
To love what is mortal,
To hold it against your own bones knowing
Your whole life depends on it.
And when the time comes to let it go
To let it go.”
I’ll have more to say about this particular poem later, but I was book ended by these two poems and they continued to work on me over the intervening weeks. And then a few weeks ago I came across a short article in the journal “Buddhadharma” by Joan Sutherland, a wonderful zen teacher in California. So, I’m reading this article and get to the last two lines which are a quote from Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day.” These lines are key to the rest of this talk and if you go away with nothing else, I hope you will at least go away with this: “So tell me, what do you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” Joan talks about this being much in the spirit of Rinzai Zen.
One could actually consider this to be a truly contemporary American koan, a study point, an opportunity for the mind to stop and inquire into itself with the possibility of discovering spontaneously a new perspective on life and living. In vipassana we have the natural koan of “Who is breathing?” or “Who is the breather?” which is a variation on the theme of the most fundamental of all spiritual inquiry: Who or What am I? These questions create a structure and an opportunity for thinking to stop and turn in on itself; to see the mind, the self, our life in all its naked and startling freshness exactly as it is. Of course one of the ways the mind frees itself from the way it makes separation through thinking, and thus lots and lots of suffering, is that thought sees its own radical limitation when it confronts the vast unknowableness (if that’s a word) of life and it just kind of throws up its hands, so to speak, and simply stops. At this point there is no time, no struggle, no effort of any kind to change or do anything. Thinking just stops, sometimes for a little while and sometimes a bit longer. So when we see this enough, and no one can ever say how much is enough, when the mind confronts a piece of reality that is either pleasant or unpleasant in whatever degree, thinking does not so readily create a story about that reality. Maybe the mind becomes more willing to rest in that space between the breaths, to trust in moving more slowly and with out making conclusions so quickly. It becomes a bit less fearful and more able to tolerate life sequences as punctuated with commas and semi-colons, rather than periods. Awareness just meets what’s there and clear seeing knows exactly what to do. Seeing and acting are one thing when the flow is not interrupted by all of that out-of-date mind chatter. That quality of wanting things to be other than they are, which is the seemingly endless source of suffering, when this is not fed by thinking it tends to get more and more quiet, less and less energetic and problematic.
I think here of the Bahiya Sutta which is a fairly well known and I think quite wonderfully concise and direct teaching of the Buddha, where the Buddha offers as a summation of practice/realization the following: “When in the hearing there is only what is heard; when in the seeing, touching, tasting, thinking there is only what is directly experienced by these senses, that is the end of suffering.” Why is that the end of suffering? Because in that complete intimacy of hearing, seeing, etc. there is no one there to suffer. There is no separation created by thinking and so what is happening? Life is hearing itself; seeing itself; touching, tasting, feeling itself. This is what we call “intimacy.” And this is the heart of our practice, whether we call it anapanasatti, choiceless awareness, koan or shikantaza. Our practice is the practice and realization of an intimacy that does not come from seeking, but rather is the true state of what is .. what we are.. when all seeking, all thinking, everything that supports the illusion of separation falls spontaneously into abeyance. We may have to practice very hard for many years before the thinking mind realizes that truly there is nothing that it can do to be free except stop and it seems that it usually does that when it has exhausted every other possibility and at last simply surrenders; gives up any idea or thought that it needs something or can do something to complete itself.
So back to Mary Oliver. “So tell me what you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” I carried this around with me for a few weeks and then several nights ago I’m reading in my newly arrived copy of Shambala Sun an article by the zen teacher Blanche Hartman and turning the page find in its entirety “The Summer Day” from which these lines I just read to you come from. And I thought “Well I guess I’d better talk about this, since it seems to be following me around rather closely.” So, that is the talk you’re getting tonight. So, I’m going to read you the poem and just talk about it for a little bit. As you listen to this, see if you can do it from a place of practice; of just listening. Maybe staying with your breath and not trying to understand what is being read but rather just letting the words come to you. Don’t go out to the words. Let them come to you.
The Summer Day
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean---
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down---
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
So that is something you can carry around with you as a practice, all the time. We could stop right now, spend the rest of the time sitting and you could go home. What is it that you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? How do you come forth as wild and precious life? Right now, how do you manifest your one wild and precious life? Do you think that you have to do something? I look across the room and I see wild and precious life just glowing, beaming back at me. Can you feel its movement in you right now? Completely one, completely fulfilled, completely precious and unique and dynamically alive, functioning freely as you, right now with this breath, this sound? Right now is there anything at all that you need? Anything that needs to be added or taken away?
Much of our practice in working with the breath, working with the kileasas (greed, hatred and delusion), the very activity of sitting, is about creating space and quiet for this wild and precious life to reveal itself. Or more accurately, for us to see what has always been ours, is us, from the very beginning. Over the past few days there have been articles in the news about how the weather has been so awful and how people are becoming depressed and irritable by this period of overcast, windy, rainy, Seattle-like weather. This is wild and precious life! Right now the wind is blowing and rain is hitting the roof and windows calling out to us; life calling out to itself. This, and how our hearts respond is the very best dharma talk! When we sit right in the middle of this with welcoming emptiness, it blows right through us and there is absolutely no difference between the wind that blows out there and the wind-sound-sensation that blows around and through us in here. No inside or outside. It is the same wind and mysteriously we are that! Only thinking leads us to believe otherwise. As my buddy Ikkyu said: Never mind the sutras; first learn the love letters sent by the wind and the rain!
So we really have nothing to do, and yet it’s not really doing nothing. This doing is dynamic, but it doesn’t mean with have to do something extra, something that thinking tells us to do. In most situations, the being is the doing and will manifest itself as right action when the mind is not clouded by the dust storm of thinking. Sitting upright, fully engaged with the breath moment by moment, is dynamic doing. It is doing in the form of sitting, in the form of attention to the breathing. And we take this practice of full, direct and intimate engagement out into the world and practice with it all the time.
And here is the real challenge: To see those moments when thinking creates separation, really see it, because in that seeing something mysteriously shifts. That shift may be quickly covered over again, but as we learn to remain with those moments of open clarity the mind naturally tends to tilt in the direction of freedom and liberation and away from its self-manufactured delusions. This doesn’t happen because we are doing something to change something else. That is practice gone askew and that is always sewing the seeds of present and future conflict as the mind is simply trying to change or cure itself. Thinking cannot cure itself because it is itself the disease! Whatever doing is happening, is right in the moment of intimate meeting; seeing clearly and staying with how and why we hold back from deep intimacy with life as wild and precious. Vimala Thakar, who I know some of you are familiar with, talks about how frightened we are of living. So our practice is really meeting that fear, keeping company with that fear because when that non-judgemental completely accepting energy we call attention and which is really love, contacts the energy we call fear, there is transformation and release. Our relationship to the energy of fear and of life changes. Again, while we usually have to “practice” this, fundamentally it is not something “I” do. Something happens, but there really is no one doing it.
So our koan unfolds. What do you plan to do….. This may suggest that we need to plot a course, develop a “game plan.” And while planning does have a place in skillful daily living, I think that for our purposes at least, this is not the important point. We plan, execute our plans, live our life in the moment; not a moment tomorrow or yesterday, but in this moment. So we might change this question a bit to ask, “What do you plan to do right now with your one wild and precious life?” “How am I living my one wild and precious life right now and how am I holding back from living that life right now. This is a question that we can carry with us continuously, touching and being touched by it off and on throughout the day and night until we may notice that we become the question itself and there is just life living itself as whatever form it is assuming in this eternal now.
There is so very much in this directly challenging and yet starkly simple question: How am I living right now? Am I really willing to examine this continuously when getting up in the morning, showering, going to the cushion, fixing breakfast, helping get the kids ready for school, relating to my partner and to whatever reactivity arises from how she or he relates to me, when life presents me with what I want and when it offers up what I most definitely do not want, and so on. What do I plan to do with this? How am I meeting, living this?
And then we move to this word “your,” as in “your wild and precious life.” Is this a life that we own, possess, control? If we think so, then in what way is this true? Life expresses itself in this unique form that very early on in its’ manifestation was called Doug, or Sue or Bob or Liz. Clearly there is a sense of ownership, of identification with the body which leads to certain further questions that, I think, are relevant and important: How do “I” relate to and care for this body? What does it mean to be responsible and responsive to its needs and wants and to the needs and wants of other body/minds that I encounter? And yet as dharma practitioners we must also question exactly what we mean when we say “my life.” Is not such an idea just more of the kind of thinking that creates separation and eventually sets human beings not only against one another, but against other non-human beings as well? We live with this interesting tension of simultaneously acknowledging a “me” and yet intuiting something vast and empty of which we are the wonderful and wavelike expression.
“Wild and precious.” Have you noticed that those aspects of life which seem to be the most precious, the most valuable, are also the most wild; the most uncontrollable. The word “wild” is a wonderful synonym for “impermanence.” What do we encounter that upon penetrating examination does not reveal itself as changing, unpredictable, uncertain…wild and uncontrollable? This can put us right on the edge of our practice and can be an occasion for meeting some fear, especially when we begin to work with our bodies in this way or realize the true nature of the breath. Because sooner or later, and sometimes this can happen through illness or some other dramatic physical change, when we observe long enough we see that that which we depend upon for the sustaining of “my” life is in fact completely unreliable. It grows older, it gets sick and eventually it dies and it does not seem to care one whit about what “I” think or feel about it. It is an interesting study point: This body, or any relationship really, requires my care and attention and yet it will remain true to its most basic nature no matter what I want and no matter how well I care for it. The challenge of course is to care for it anyway and not to make it an enemy out of fear or clinging. It is both completely wild and completely precious and, you know, I think somewhere in all of this is a lesson about what it really means to love; both oneself and others.
And, of course, what is most wild and most precious in what the poet Issa referred to as our dew-drop world, is love. Some of you may know the lines from the song, “Lookin’ for love in all the wrong places. Lookin’ for love in too many faces.” One might say that looking for love at all is looking for it in the wrong places, because behind that there is the idea that we can do something to make love happen or create it or somehow through a serious search, discover it or lure it out of hiding. This very activity of looking with a result in mind is somehow off the mark. In this there is something a bit too controlled or contrived; too much of “me”; that “me” that is the source of separation. And of course we all know that real love is not about separation; not about a “me” as apart from a “you.” The wildness and unpredictability of love; how it finds us, never on our schedule and often not in the form we could have possibly imagined; or how it finds us when we really don’t want to be found; or how it does not find us when we most want it to. And then suddenly we turn and bump right into it as though it had been there, unseen, all the time, which of course it was. No one at all in their right mind would consider themselves an expert in this area, but experience does seem to suggest some truth to this. Quite mysterious.
What is not mysterious, however, is how to kill or at least seriously disable this thing we call love. This is accomplished with relative ease simply by trying to control it and take away its essentially wild nature; put it in a cage like any wild thing, tame it and cool it down. This is the poisonous exercise of the “me.” As Krishnamurti said, “When “I” am, love is not. When “I” am not, love is.” The same with beauty: When “I” am not, beauty is. It is in this intimacy that the distinction between self and other falls away, and there is love. Actually, we only know real love after the fact because when love is there, there is no observer recording the action. It is only in retrospect that we say, “Oh, I felt love” or “I was in love.” And this can be a problem because we are then living in the past and making love an object to be re-experienced or re-created and again we are back to the problem of control. Love really does not like to be controlled! So, interestingly enough we loop back to wild and uncontrollable, uncertain and impermanent. And one could accuse love of being “unsatisfactory” as well, but only if we misunderstand the nature and terms of its appearance and existence. But please be clear here: Its nature and terms are exactly what makes it, just like the rest of life, so very, very precious and its discovery as rare a seeing a unicorn…and as common as a field daisy. (More on unicorn hunting some other time!)
In Mary Oliver’s powerful poem, “When Death Comes,” she refers to each person as being “as common as a field daisy, and as precious.” How often do we have the experience of being truly precious, unique and unrepeatable, fragile and lovely? How often do we allow ourselves to see those beings around us with the same soft clarity? Can we even entertain that as a possibility, or is there some deep conditioning in us that makes us shy away, turn away from this when it comes. We might be able to see some others around us in this way, but often when it comes to ourselves that crowd of dissonant voices starts to raise a ruckus; “Oh no! Not me. There is this long list of aspects about me that completely disqualify me from the designation of “precious.” Besides, it even feels a little yucky.” I strongly urge you to carry this with you as a practice and examine the ways in which the thinking mind denies itself the experience of knowing its singular and precious being. There is so very much about this ephemeral and fragile expression of the eternal that is so inexpressibly valuable; this wild and uncontrollable phenomenon we call breathing; all the ways life knows itself through seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, sensing and smelling. Life’s completely free and loving gift to itself is to be able to recognize itself in this complete and timeless moment. How could each of us as the expression of that, not be precious. How is it that we are so often blind to this? This in itself is worthy of deep and penetrating inquiry.
We can never control this one wild and precious life no matter how we try. We can, however, bring loving attention to it, see how we create and maintain the illusion of separation through unskillful thinking and allow those moments of intimacy to grow and increasingly inform our life and how we live it. We cultivate this by learning how to meet those places where we hold back out of fear, aversion, clinging and so on and in that attention we redeem those lost and suffering parts of ourselves, the life that we have denied or rejected. Working on this edge of our life we transform what we initially may have thought of as a problem into the gift it is; the gift of opportunity to live our way into a larger more spacious and more loving existence. This very edge of living is the wild and precious nature of life itself. And once we are able to relate to it as such, our life transforms.
One final thing that I want to circle back to and then we’ll stop; Mary Oliver’s lines, “When it’s time to let it go/ let it go.” I’m sure that there is no one in here who has not heard the instruction to let things go. Just let them go; let them be as they are; just allow yourself to be who you are. The Thai forest master Ajahn Chah puts it most clearly when he says; let go a little and have a little happiness; let go a lot and have a lot of happiness; let go completely and have complete happiness.
But, you know, sometimes there are things that we are just unwilling or unable to let go of no matter how much awareness and intention we may bring to it. And these things that we hold onto can really hurt a lot. We may have a preference for something to be in a certain way and we know with utter certainty that it is not going to be the way we want it. And still we will not let it go. Each of us has something and maybe several somethings that fit into this; past angers, insults, hurts, losses, relationships that we want to be a certain way and yet know quite clearly that they will never be that way. And we will not let them go.
It is easy to believe that there is something wrong with us or inadequate with our practice when this happens, and I would like to say as clearly and as strongly as I can that there is absolutely nothing wrong with you when you find yourself in this place. There is a way to work with this, however, because often we don’t really understand why we won’t let something go and I don’t believe that anyone actually chooses suffering over freedom. Human beings do not freely choose to be miserable. For whatever inexplicable reason we find ourselves simply not able or not willing to let go. Why? We just don’t know.
Practice is to hold ourselves, our attention, up against that unwillingness to let go and to let this become the edge of our practice. Maybe some fear is there, or some deep sadness or maybe there is a wisdom about the holding on that we don’t yet comprehend. So don’t worry about not being able to let go, just stay with the holding on and let what’s there gradually reveal itself. Stay with it with loving attention. Always stay with just what’s there, because this is our one wild and precious life. Stay with the wind and the rain and the thunder and lightening of all of this which make up the tapestry of life and our place in it.
Ok. I’m done. Any questions?