Chapter 1: The Mystery of Being
Wake Up to Your Life - Kickoff Essay
by Joshua Zader (e-mail)
Introduction & Chapter 1: The Mystery of Being
Author Ken McLeod states in the introduction that his goal in this book is to provide "practical tools with which to change the way you experience life." He notes that "quick fixes" (such as peak experiences) are ultimately a distraction along this path, since they do not address the habituated patterns that lead to unhappiness. Instead, true change requires developing long-term practices and insights that stabilize one's understanding of oneself and of reality.
McLeod writes that "Buddhism is fundamentally a set of methods through which we wake up to what we are and stop the cycle that generates and reinforces suffering," and he describes the road ahead as one of dismantling the wall that separates us from what we experience and prevents us from knowing what we are. Only by dismantling this wall and entering into the mystery of being, McLeod teaches, can we come to know life in all its fullness and immediacy.
He concludes with the weighty assertion that "All the philosophies, world-views, ethical systems, practices, and rituals have only one intention: to wake us up from the sleep in which we dream that we are separate from what we experience."
Chapter 1
The chapter opens with two stories, "Nasrudin's Sermon" and "The Prince and the Horse." The central figure in the first story, Nasrudin, seems rather impertinent. Described as a holy man "of some indefinable sort," he steadfastly refuses to teach his audience. One gets the sense that the audience's initial skepticism about him is either well founded, or entirely unnecessary. Is the old man a crackpot, or reluctant to teach for some other reason? And so we begin with something of a riddle: Why won't Nasrudin teach?
In the second story, "The Prince and the Horse," we learn of a young prince who had little interest in the responsibilities he would assume once his ailing father dies. Rather, he was passionately interested in only one subject -- horses. A sorcerer is brought in to solve the problem and does so, not by magically endowing the prince with responsibility, but by drawing the prince into an extended dream, where he gives up his life in the kingdom and builds instead a new and common sort of life: working, falling in love, and having children.
Ultimately, this new life becomes so vibrantly meaningful to the prince that, one day when his wife and children run headlong into a pool-like mirage and disappear, he follows them in, with no certainty of what lies on the other side. Tragically, his wife and children are nowhere to be found. And only when he gives in entirely to this loss, does he awaken from the extended dream and see his (real) family. The awakened prince, in contrast to the prince in the beginning of our story, is quite transformed. "His heart opened to every moment of his life."
With these two stories as a prelude, McLeod begins Chapter 1 with discussions of "The Mystery of Life" and "Separateness." He notes that life is what we experience in each moment: "We don't know where experience comes from or where it goes. We don't know how we come to be here or what is going to happen after we die. We live and are aware: we experience thoughts, emotions, and sensations. That's all we really know. Life is a mystery, as the prince learned from his experience" (4).
Most of the time, however, we live our life in a state of being cut off from mystery. Occasionally an intense experience may pierce through, allowing the subtle grandeur of life to shine before our eyes; but then the moment passes and "a wall goes back up." We're back in our habituated states of mind, where we retreat from being deeply engaged.
McLeod states that they key error here lies in the assumption that we are separate from what we experience, which drives a wedge between our life (our experience) and our sense of self. The goal of spiritual development, then, is to dismantle this wedge, or wall, and abide in a state of consciousness where one's life, one's experience, and one's self are felt intimately as one.
Next, McLeod addresses whether this goal can be achieved on one's own, or whether it requires the assistance of a teacher. His answer is no; for the vast majority of people, a teacher is required, because it is very difficulty to step outside one's own "illusion" far enough to fully engage in the process of dismantling the maladaptive thought patterns.
McLeod devotes considerable space to discussing how to succeed with the help of a teacher. (This is obviously a subject with which he is very familiar.) To be effective in this process, the teacher himself must be intimately familiar with the path, for the special quality of working with a teacher "lies not just in the understanding that is passed from generation to generation but also in the individual experience of those who have made the understanding their own" (7).
In the story of "The Lamp Shop," McLeod illustrates a number of the pitfalls that may prevent a student from finding, or connecting with, a teacher. In this story, a person who seeks light is unsuccessful in obtaining directions (to the lamp shop) from a local resident. Being unfamiliar with the territory, and quite hung up on the literalism of what he hears, he is clearly lost. Worse, he cannot tell whom to trust, and the story ends sadly. ...Perhaps this story helps solve the riddle of Nasrudin. (If you had difficulty understanding the story's metaphor, re-read the five paragraphs following the story, where McLeod provides a very straightforward analysis.)
McLeod summarizes the three key responsibilities of a teacher thusly: to demonstrate presence, provide training in the requisite techniques, and direct your attention to the internal patterns that prevent you from being present in your life. "Everything else is extra and is usually based on the projections of the student, the teacher, or both" (9). The student, in turn, has two responsibilities: to practice what is taught as it is given, and to apply the practice in your life.
We are then taught how to evaluate a prospective teacher's trustworthiness, to help avoid the problem of "The Lamp Shop." Particularly useful is McLeod's list of warning signs to be found in a teacher's other students: Are they restricted in the use of their own intelligence and judgment? Are questions and discussions inhibited or restricted to certain topics? Does the group exploit students for its own functioning? Etc.
After the story of The Ferryman, which illustrates the proper relationship between teacher and student, McLeod makes an important observation: "The only way to repay a teacher for freeing you from the confusion of habituated patterns is to pass on what you have come to understand to another person."
McLeod then takes off the gloves and delivers his first punch of the book:
We are what we experience. Presence is knowing, directly in the moment, that we are what we experience. The path described here does not promise quick results. It does not rest on fictions,beliefs, or peak experiences. It consists of taking apart, brick by brick, the wall that prevents us from knowing what we are. To dismantle that wall is the work of a lifetime. It requires an *outlook* to show us a way, a *practice* to develop the abilities we need, and a *way of living* that brings the practice into life.
The outlook is no separation: we are what we experience, nothing more and nothing less. The practice is attention: cultivating attention and using it to dismantle the sense of separation. The way of living is presence: we live in attention, aware and awake in the mystery of being.
With that outline in place, McLeod turns to the central role of attention: "not the weak, unstable, reactive attention that is part of our automatic functioning, but the strong, stable, and volitional attention cultivated in such disciplines as meditation." He fleshes out our understanding of attention with a metaphor:
In Florence, Michelangelo's statue of David stands at the end of a long hall. Twelve roughly hewn blocks of marble line the hall, six on each side. The twelve blocks are unfinished sculptures of the twelve titans from Greek mythology. Each block contains a rough human form, crouched, back bent, powerfully flexing its muscles. When I looked at the unfinished sculptures, I felt the power in the forms. Extra marble separates the figures from who and what they are. I had the impression that their flexing their muscles had broken off chips of marble and would continue to break off more marble until the beings inside were free. The life and vitality in the rough forms were remarkable.
Like these titans, what we are lies buried under the marble of our conditioning. By cultivating attention, we break apart the marble, dismantle the wall, and enter into the vitality of being. Attention acts on the wall of habituated patterns in the same way that the energy of sunlight acts on a block of ice. Heat from the sun raises the level of energy in the water molecules until they can no longer remain in the compact crystalline structure of ice. The crystal breaks up, and ice melts into water. In the same way, attention penetrates habituated patterns and raises the level of energy so that the patterns have to break up. The energy locked up in the patterns is released and is used to power attention to higher levels. Step by step, attention increases the energy until even the sense of separation dissolves and we open to the mystery of being.
In this powerful metaphor, KcLeod provides a vivid image of the task ahead -- to break out of the self-limiting blocks of our habituated mental patterns. This is the task of all spiritual seekers, not just those who call themselves Buddhists: "With attention as the central element of practice, the spiritual principles involved in different methods of practice can clearly be discerned. The process of spiritual awakening becomes clear so that you, the reader, can recognize your own process and practice. The methods presented here are relevant regardless of your background or tradition. You can use them to deepen your own work."
COMMENTARY
Although the themes in this section come together by the end of the chapter (see the "punch" I refer to above), they start with some fairly diverse observations. A lot of material is covered. To simplify my task, I'll only comment on two things: the "mystery of being," the "illusion of separateness." (Overall, I think that McLeod's comments about teachers and the cultivation of attention stand well on their own.)
The concept of the "mystery of being" was confusing to me when I first read it, and I'd expect other Rand-influenced readers to have a similar difficulty. It has been a year now since I first read the chapter, however, and I believe I've had more relevant experiences to help me understand what McLeod is talking about.
I would think that if you have ever had an experience of looking closely at a cherry blossom in bloom, and thought to yourself, "No amount of science could EVER fully explain the splendor of what I am looking at," then you have glimpsed the mystery of being. Such experiences are usually fleeting, however, and poignantly so if we try to hang onto them through conventional means (i.e., conjuring them up in our mind over and over).
In my meditation practice, though, I have come to increasingly focus on the act of simply being, of resting in the experience of being alive and present. And this act can bring me very near to a state of sustained contact with McLeod's "mystery of being." I become more aware of the act of being conscious itself (rather than the contents of my thinking, for example), and it reawakens a kind of childhood awe at being awake, even in fairly mundane surroundings.
So, although the mystery of being can be confusing when you encounter the words at first, I don't think there is anything about the concept which should be troublesome from an Objectivist standpoint.
The "illusion of separateness," however, is a different beast. Here, we bump into the issue of self/no-self, and whether that conundrum can ever be resolved adequately for a typically unreceptive Western audience. If anything, Objectivism encourages an even more rigid concept of self than found in the general population, and hence an even greater divide (from the Buddhist perspective) between one's felt sense-of-self and one's direct experience of life. The danger is that we come to experience life increasingly through concepts, and a veil of abstractions, rather than directly, through being deeply with our most intimate experience of life ("the mystery of being") in any given moment.
To my mind, McLeod resolves the self/no-self conundrum better than any Buddhist author I've seen. Rather than making his students stew in the contradiction of no-self, he comes right out and says: You are what you experience. (*Whew*, at least we've got a self....) The interesting thing about this perspective, however, is that the more deeply you sink into it -- the more fully you practice intense present-moment awareness, of the sort cultivated in meditation -- and the more "narrow" a slice of experience you are seeing, the more your felt sense of self shrinks. And shrinks.
Having experienced this process repeatedly in meditation -- and enjoyed it, by the way -- I am comfortable with McLeod's description of the illusion of separateness. But the question of how to reconcile such an experience, and the implications it has for the concept of self, with the Objectivist epistemology and ethics, strikes me as a potentially huge task. I invite anyone who is interested to start taking shots at this beast, and I'll chime in as often as I can.
DISCUSSION
Here are some questions for the group to consider:
* Is the view that "you are what you experience -- nothing more and nothing less" reconcilable with rational egoism?
* Do you think the "path of attention" McLeod describes would be useful to Rand admirers in general?
Lastly, I'm very interested in hearing the following from everyone in the discussion:
* What was most troublesome to you in Chapter 1?
* And what was most valuable to you?
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