I had some sincere reflections that I'm sending out to my Rain Tree members and wanted to share them here too. It has to do with the nature of meditative work, the word "enlightenment" and the importance of working personally with someone in whom the simple nature of life functions with some stability.

I hope maybe these reflections will at least help convey where I seem to come from and my sense of sharing and working together. Thanks for listening!

Jay

Reflections on the Nature of Meditative Work

As I mentioned earlier, what we're looking at here is really nothing short of exploring the truth of our nature and the possibility of a resolution to the doubts, confusions, anxieties, fears that so often disturb so much of humanity, including ourselves.

I'd like to start by looking at the word "enlightenment". I don't think it's a very apt word but it holds a lot of powerful connotations among meditators so we can start with it.

For some people, "enlightenment" becomes a goal that keeps them meditating. These people may undertake a lot of different activities to reach the goal.

For other people, it's the opposite. The idea of "needing to achieve enlightenment" becomes a distraction and frustration. From that perspective, we like to think that I'm okay as I am or that I'm already enlightened.

Both of these perspectives reflect our usual habits of how we relate to things that we think we should do. They really don't have much to do at all with the real issue that lies behind the word "enlightenment."

Let's take a careful look at what "enlightenment" may be pointing to. First, I'm thinking of the story of the Buddha. It's usually presented as being about the Buddha becoming enlightened, at least in English translations. And it's presented as a grand struggle against [not sure what], culminating in achieving his goal. Nobody says, "and then the Buddha decided that he was working too hard toward enlightenment and that he was okay as he was." But it's hard to know if the traditaional way of describing the Buddha's efforts is really accurate. In the retelling, it certainly gets more attention when it's presented dramatically.

But let's put aside the drama for the moment and remember that we're talking about a young man who was growing up in a family that provided a lot of comfort and privilege. At some point he began to notice people who were suffering with illness or old age. He began to notice that people died. He probably became anxious that these things could happen to him or to people he cared about. He may have begun to wonder what the point of his life was. This isn't hard for us to relate to.

Because he couldn't get himself to be interested in the details of the life that his family had laid out for him, he began to wonder how to find out if there was some meaning to life that he wasn't aware of - some answers or resolution to his anxiety. And he may have felt that the people around him were also suffering from anxiety about their fate. He heard that there were holy people who might have answers. He went to them and they told him to do various practices to find the answers. He fasted, denied himself comforts, endured pain.

He did what he had been told but probably at some point he realized that these things hadn't provided any answers and were hurting his body. Maybe something clicked intuitively that exhausting and weakening your body couldn't really be helpful. But that left him with nothing to hold on to, no answers, no path. He may have just sat down in one place under a tree simply because there was nothing else motivating him. And yet his concerns and anxieties remained. This is natural. If a person looks up for a moment from their own personal world and looks at the world around them, it's clear that there is a lot of anxiety and fear haunting humanity and a lot of suffering coming from how we treat each other.

So he may have sat their with all of these concerns fresh in his being, not knowing any longer what to do about it all. He was back to where he had started. No path. No answers. No way to know. And at some point something dearly held on to dropped away in him. And with that cloud dropping away, the world became visible as it is, in utter simplicity and wholeness. In that moment it was clear that there was nothing but the wholeness of life. This was the nature of all things, including himself. It wouldn't disappear when his body died.

And somehow all of the concerns that he had had no longer applied. They may have come back from time to time but his relationship to them was different.

So we can say that for the moment when the cloudiness had dropped away, what became visible was the actual nature of things, including his own existence. In Japanese, the word "kensho" means seeing one's true nature, as opposed to a word like enlightenment, which can't seem to help but sounding grandious and brilliant. Just the nature of Life becoming visible because something that was obscuring its visibility drops away.

When this takes place, the thing that drops away can no longer convince us that it is something permanent. We begin to live in a different way, seeing the clouds for what they are - obscuring the wholeness of ourselves. Eventually a person may begin to be able to live more stably in wholeness. There is a ripening that can happen as the clouds of confusion, concern, and temporary identity are seen more clearly and begin to resolve on their own.

I find that when the mind is open and functioning in wholeness, it seems to function in a very different way from what we can call the ordinary or conditioned mind. Difficulties begin to resolve. Traumas heal. The body/mind begins to relearn how to function in a healthy way. Relationships - with their challenges - begin to work through with a little more fluidity.

All of this happens on its own when the things that arise inside and outside are visible, transparent. This is a radically different life than how most of us live most of the time.

So for me, in offering to sit together and talk together, it would be a huge disservice to say that meditation is just about getting more relaxed, feeling calmer, living in the now (we don't REALLY see what the now is most of the time).

It's about our very lives. It's about coming to relationship with the vast difficulties of humanity.

Until our nature is clear, we are operating from a misguided place. Our first emphasis should be to find out for ourselves what this true nature is.

The purpose of our group is to explore that. To wonder how that can be discovered.

This inquiry is difficult to approach. This is why I feel that it's vital to work together, with someone in whom this wholeness has come to function with at least a bit of stability. That's why the focus of our group, from my perspective, is to have ways of working together through dialogue and extended sitting.

Some people tell me "I know what to do. I just have to do it." Some say, "I don't really have any questions or anything to talk about." And yet when we actually come together, there is always much important that comes up, often unexpectedly.

The only way to find out for yourself if working together with me is helfpul is to give it a good try. If it's not, then I encourage you to find someone - there are a number of people at the Springwater Center who lead retreats and work with people - with whom you can work personally, live, one on one. This is completely different from listening to talks or reading books.

The vital thing is to find someone in whom the wholeness of life functions with some stability. Then Life can work through the both of you to reveal itself and heal that which blocks the view.