My starting point as a Zen Buddhist is this: I don `t really understandIf I think I know the answers, then I’m in a trap. If I think I “know” what spirituality is, or if I think I can say, If I don’t know what it is, then I’m no longer in touch with spirituality. A map is not a territory. Words are not things, nor are words non-things. If you try to find a single “thing,” you will find instead a web of interrelationships and interdependencies. From electrons to galaxies, nothing has clear, distinct boundaries. The “thingness” of things is merely a product of our perception, reinforced by language and naming, that makes them appear separate.
25 years ago, after my mother died, I started looking for spirituality, that “something more,” but I quickly ran into a problem. I was a child of scientific thinking, rationalism, and skepticism. I believed that everything, including spirituality, could and should be grasped, proven, and defined. I didn’t want to believe in “something more” unless I could prove it for myself. So when I went to Thich Nhat Hanh’s Plum Village Monastery at age 19, I was full of materialistic arrogance and thought I would find conclusive evidence of that “something more,” whatever it may be.
“Anything can become spiritual if we act with our full attention, our full consciousness, and our full sensitivity.”
One afternoon we were invited to practice “total relaxation” and “touching the earth”. I didn’t have high expectations. We lay on our backs and, under the guidance of a monk, slowly scanned our whole body with focused awareness. We gradually released and released the tension in each muscle, sense and emotion, allowing us to lie deeper and deeper into the earth.
We then assumed child’s pose, with our limbs and foreheads on the ground. The monks invited us to think about our connection to our ancestors, parents, teachers, friends, and all living things. The monks asked us to recognize the beautiful qualities we inherited from them — the love they imparted to us, the insight and skills they nurtured in us, and that we are a continuation of millions of years of a gradual evolution of life, consciousness, beauty, and inquiry.
And he invited us to think about the ugly things we have inherited from our different lineages – the clumsy habits, the reactivity, the negative emotions we inherited from our family and friends, the intolerance, the greed, the striving we inherited from our culture and society – and he invited us to let go of all that and to have the desire not to inherit what is not beautiful, but only what is best and truest.
I cannot fully express the power of this practice. Afterwards, I didn’t want to talk to anyone or do anything. I just wanted to be with this feeling. I lay down in my tent under the eaves in the forest. My thoughts completely stopped. A nightingale started singing a few meters away. I released a lot of anxiety, tension, effort, judgment, reaction and was present in a way I had never experienced before.
I Fully present.
The nightingale’s voice came to me, unfiltered. Just a glorious, joyous outpouring of sound. Like a string of pearls, each perfect and flowing from one to the other, without pause to think, compare or grasp. There was no distinction between me and the sound, me and the nightingale, me and the universe. It was like drinking from the purest source of life and beauty. It was within me, all around me, utterly infinite. There was no time or space, and nothing needed to be other than what it was.
Not only was everything I was looking for right in front of me, but I also just…ThereIn the present moment arising from experience, without distinction between perceiver and perceived, I found myself in a world of potential depth, beauty and wonder. everytimeBut I was too distracted, too busy, too wrapped up in the hurt to notice it. My conditioning, my reactivity, and my inability to feel and be with the pain were preventing me from seeing things as they really were.
I was also unable to touch it because of my presumption of understanding the nature of reality. I had been trained to think of the world as made of matter, which is essentially inert, indifferent, and soulless. Matter is just thingbouncing meaninglessly and endlessly off of one another, forever and ever, churning away deterministically according to the so-called “laws of physics.” thingand different configurations thing Until the universe finally heats up and dies.
Only by stopping thinking and the constant inner talk can we truly come face to face with reality. Everything is spiritual and every moment can be a spiritual moment. But to tap into the spiritual dimension requires training. Everything we do at Plum Village can be understood as different aspects of this training. We can look at every action, every thing we do every day and ask ourselves: “How can I make this action, this moment, into a spiritual, profound, beautiful moment?”
Zen asks you to suspend all concepts and theories about spirituality. idea Regarding that, we experience It is important to focus your attention on the here and now, not later. Focusing on the here and now can be called “mindfulness,” and the ability to stay in the here and now can be called “concentration.” If you continue to train your attention as a daily practice, you will gradually increase the strength of your mindfulness and concentration. The ability to be present and grounded in the here and now with uninterrupted awareness is, in a sense, infinite. You can always dig deeper.
If we can increase our mindfulness and concentration, we may be able to tap into insight. As children of scientific thinking and skepticism, we are very interested in insight. We want to see reality as it really is, to make breakthroughs, to know the true nature of things and ourselves. In our desire to understand reality, we jump to conclusions too quickly. UnderstandingWithout actually developing the ability look.
Before we can recognize what is in front of us, we need to make a significant shift in perception and therefore a conceptual shift. Have I found the evidence I was looking for? Or have I found the evidence I was looking for? look The evidence that was always there but that I just couldn’t see until that moment?
Something as simple as listening to the birds sing can be an infinitely profound encounter with reality, a truly spiritual experience, but it requires training to experience it. anything If you do it with full presence, full awareness and full sensitivity, it can become spiritual. Totally there If it seemed infinite, then we would all be beginners and could just be happy to continue to develop and practice this ability without striving to get anywhere.
This article is based on a conversation between Brother Phap Linh and David Sloan Wilson for the nonprofit organization ProSocial World.
