7.2 Being here for each other
On a Friday night, after years of dropping in and out of Buddhism, I jumped back in and went to an evening talk at a well known sangha. During the half–hour of meditation which opened the meeting, my mind wandered, stubbornly refusing to quiet itself, and my back hurt from trying to sit up straight with no support.
So when the speaker was introduced as “Enlightened,” maybe it was because I was already grumpy that I wanted to raise my hand and ask, “How do we know that?”
“Did he pass a test? Did he receive a sign? Is he self-anointed?”
I mean, that’s quite a claim, that some human could be right up there with the Buddha.
A few minutes into the talk, he began discussing his wife in a dismissive way, not nice at all. Then he fired off a couple sharp–edged zingers at her.
I had thought that Enlightenment was a state of perfection. At the very least, it was supposed to fill you with compassion for all beings. Which seems like it should include your wife.
Okay, so he still needed some work. I understood that, I mean, don’t we all. But a funk of sadness descended on me as I drove home that night, and this Enlightenment thing nagged at me. What was it really?
The next morning I woke in a mood and was determined to find out. But I didn’t have the patience to spend disciplined decades emptying my mind, so I decided to imagine my way there.
I wasn’t scheduled for anything that weekend and right after breakfast Saturday morning, I sat myself down in my darkened room to begin my quest. Over the next hours, I imagined my way forward through year after year of grueling study, retreats, and apprenticeships. I saw myself age and stoop and wrinkle, but I stuck with the journey, even though my devotion to it remained obstinately unrequited.
Then suddenly, finally, happily, at nightfall, right there in front of me, here it was…
Enlightenment! Pulsing with transcendence!
I reached out my hand to grasp it and…
Poof, it was gone.
A trap door opened under me. I tumbled down through all those hard years of study in reverse and landed, softly, back at the beginning of my journey, back in that moment when I was just about to take my first step.
And I thought…
So this is beginner’s mind.
I knew the phrase but not what it meant. Except now I got it. At least I got a beginner’s feel for it.
My thought experiment had paid off to this extent. I got a new understanding of Enlightenment. The way I see it now, it’s not really a thing, because once you get there, it vaporizes and punts you back to the beginning.
Except you’re not back at the same beginning as where you began, because now you don’t see it as a phase to pass through, but as the place to settle in.
Having discovered this perspective, in the next weeks I went looking for spiritual practitioners who took this same view and found several and their words of confirmation were comforting.
Except I didn’t really care about emptying my mind or finding the no–self Self.
What I cared about was love. Upgrading it. Asking more of it. Engaging in the daily practice of nurturance.
I realized what I needed was…
Beginner’s heart.
I first discovered Zen just after I got out of college. I studied it diligently and if someone asked what I called myself, I’d say I was a Buddhist, even though I didn’t like labels because they seemed un–Zen.
Most important to me were the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths. The first one taught that we should recognize there’s suffering in the world. Okay, that’s easy, it’s so obvious. The next three taught how to detach from suffering. I learned how to…
Turn myself into a hot air balloon so I could float above the landscape of human misery, aware of it but untouched by it.
In those days I was trying to achieve even just some minor degree of Enlightenment because…
I thought it would give me protection from the pain of being human.
Looking back, I can see that after I left my childhood church behind, Enlightenment became my substitute for the Salvation I had grown up on. As a kid I learned that we humans were born helpless, hapless, and hopeless, so on our own we couldn’t possibly make our lives work. But if we turned ourselves over to God, he would save us…
From our human selves.
Then in my 20s and on into my 30s, I paid big attention to the success gurus. I didn’t feel quite at home with their happy talk, but I was hooked by their cool confidence. They seemed to have all the answers. Their lives seemed perfect. I pictured them like demigods sitting up there at the top of their Mt. Olympus of Expertise looking down on the rest of us poor mortals.
And what if they were as good as their PR said they were?
What if they had actually transcended human nature?
Then count me in.
It seems to me that we humans are escape artists. Being human is so hard for us, and so hard on us, it’s no wonder that we seek some kind of exit and some kind of refuge. It’s no wonder that so many of us want to…
Detach from our humanness.
And…
Distance ourselves from it.
And…
Defend ourselves against it.
I definitely wanted that for myself. I wanted to pull away and rise above.
But beginner’s heart means…
Going deeper in.
The older I get…
The more I realize how little one person can know.
I’m passionate about my mission to upgrade love. I stand by everything I’ve written here. It’s so much me I can’t not. But at the same time, I’m just me and…
I’m only living my one little life and the world is so big.
There are experts who claim they know exactly what we need to do in this time of trouble. That’s definitely not me. We humans are in such danger, I don’t see how anyone could possibly have all the answers.
What we need, those of us engaged in this upgrade mission, is not experts or gurus or preachers of gospels…
We need each other.
Now more than ever.
And this means our mission is not an expert project, it’s…
A potluck project.
Instead of bringing random dishes to share, though…
We’re bringing our whole selves, as tenderly and fiercely as we can.
I know this journey can be taken solo, because that’s what I’ve done, but I don’t recommend it. I don’t want you to have to walk this path alone. I want you to have support. Even a little bit at the right time can make a very big difference. But I want you to have all the support you need all the time.
And I’m talking about…
Mutual support.
I give to you, you give to me. We’re really and truly in this together. That kind of thing.
Maybe you feel like you’re new to this journey, but I bet you’re not. If you’ve put together a fight biography for yourself, look back through it and I bet you’ll see a history of longing for love to be better.
In my experience, people don’t sign up for this mission unless they already have it at least a little bit alive in them, somewhere deep in their hearts. The mission is too challenging, the journey too hard to engage in it casually.
And no matter what, when you step into this journey, you’re bringing your personality, your life experience, and your core values with you, and that means from day one…
You’ll be making discoveries.
You’ll be opening up new dimensions of this work that myself and others would never find on our own.
So from the start instead of considering you to be a newbie who needs babying, I count you as a peer. Because from the start you’re…
A discovery partner.
Really a partner.
And that means from the start…
You matter.
You matter to the rest of us on this journey, and to the development of the journey itself.
Still, it can be a shock when you consciously launch yourself into your upgrade journey, because of what the journey asks of you and because of the dark side of the journey.
So…
It means the world to me to be there for newcomers.
Who as I said aren’t really newcomers, but who nonetheless can use some help crossing over into the conscious part of the journey. And soon these journeyers will be ready in turn to help people coming into the journey after them.
I know…
I can’t make this mission easy for you.
Nobody can.
But…
I can make it easier for you than it was for me.
And I want to do this.
Please don’t get the idea that this is an act of charity or selfless service on my part. It’s not, because I get so much back.
And let me remind you, there will be sorrow on this journey, always sorrow. Which is not the kind of thing we humans want more of in our lives. It’s so much easier to listen to the siren song of detaching, distancing, and defending.
But those three strategies are…
Heartless.
Each one is…
An incarnation of despair.
So I choose the path of sorrow because…
Sorrow is a living thing whereas despair is not.
But more important to me than sorrow is delight.
Delight in the mission itself. Delight in the fight that propels the mission. And delight in each other—us journey aficionados who are creating, developing, and deepening this mission together.
We might be very different people, with different personalities, interests, and backgrounds, but if we share a passion for upgrading love, and if this is what’s deepest in each of our hearts, now what’s possible?
If we, with our beginner’s hearts, are open to each other, if we are deep in with each other, we get to enjoy affectionate communion with each other, and create…
Communion partnerships.
Then imagine the kind of delight we’ll find ourselves taking in each other. And the kind of lifelong friendships that might form. And how sweet they might be. And the cozy nest we might make of them.
