Sacred West

Many people are afraid to empty their minds lest they may plunge into the Void. They do not know that their own Mind is the void.

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Last year in August I wrote about my experiences with Shambhala Training Level Five.

I wrote the piece for the Austin Shambhala blog, which I manage, but I didn’t publish it because I wasn’t sure how much I can reveal about the training programs. There’s a legacy culture of secrecy that has grown up around the training path of Shambhala. This is changing – wants to change, is approved to change – and I play my small part in its changing here in Austin.

I will write increasingly more about Shambhala. As I progress along its training path I become more qualified to speak of my own experience in it, and I understand more of the whole path. And I trust my own wisdom more to say only the right things and not the wrong.

Meanwhile, here’s the piece on Level Five.

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Why do we need both merit and wisdom, they asked us in a recent class I was taking?

This morning I thought, well, because we’ll be reborn, for one thing (unless we do really well in the bardo).

And when we’re born, for a time there won’t be a lot of wisdom going on. We’ll want our karma to magnetize not just the right parents but the right teachings from our parents, and from life, as we develop in our formative years. This can be such a great asset for the rest of that lifetime.

I think of investing now for a better return down the road.

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Like many new Buddhists in the West, I had an overlay of moral encouragement applied to concepts such as gentleness. I didn’t realize that it has a purely functional purpose as a core practice instruction.

Gentleness is the way to stay in one’s own being even as one regards the world of the ten thousand things that seems to exist outside our fabricated selves. And this becomes a practice one can perform as a training exercise.

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In distress
Energy arises,
Power from ourselves,
Freely available,
Released at need.

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We can watch ourselves close down our spacious mind in order to fabricate a wall of comfort around ourselves, and we can train through meditation techniques to strip this wall back away again.

Waking from sleep is a good time to watch the wall get built. I’m always astonished at what a simple trick it is happening to me, and yet how unresistingly I get pulled into this delusion.

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I wondered, as I’ve so often wondered: why exactly is it so very hard to rest in this place? We’re supposed to be resting the mind, resting in open sky, resting in mahamudra. If it’s so restful, then tired as I am, why don’t I want to stay here?

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The breathing technique in Shambhala Training’s Level I class is the so-called “open technique”, where the inbreath is not regarded, and one simply waits for the outbreath, merging with the outbreath, becoming the experience of the outbreath, dissolving with the outbreath, and waiting at the end, in the gap, simply waiting.

Fellow Dharma practitioner Chodpa was writing recently about not finding the breath, not finding anything real there, having turned to Shamatha from a long time in the space of mahamudra, and I think he would have liked the teaching of this Level I beginner weekend. The breath, it turns out, is just a place to find yourself lost.

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Shambhala Training’s introductory class of Level I can often be a wearying experience, as I well recall, for meditators to sit endlessly all day and face up to just how much hard work it is to return one’s focus of attention to something so ever-present and simple as one’s own breathing.

But not in this class. This weekend was buzzing with active pursuit of the moment itself, nature of mind, nature of thought, and ways and means to get down and meditate.

On Saturday morning, barely into the first trial run at the experience, one participant wanted to know why we can’t hold the moment, when we can hold all the other junk we call our thoughts. She talked about dotting the “i” of the moment, and learned of course that the dot is moving, the “i” is moving, and it’s all moving.

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This may sound like ordinary words, but I see recently that I’m in a trap of my own making.

And so it occurs to me that I must also be in the freedom of my own making.

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