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Nothing Special
August 2005
I just spent the morning reading, sitting naked on the couch as I often do before starting the day, reading or writing or meditating, or all of the above, Stephen Mitchell's Meetings With the Archangel. I've read this book two ro three times now. We find our scriptures where we can. It's subtitled "A comedy of the spirit," and is as much about Zen as it is about angels, about Rilke, Meister Eckhart, poetry, creativity, sensuality, eros, ekstasis, and what is and what isn't relevant to heaven. The section on angelic sex is amazing, by the way.
What I keep coming back to are two statements, discussed in the book, from Rilke's "Duino Elegies:"
Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels'
hierarchies? and even if one of them pressed me
suddenly against his heart: I would be consumed
in that overhwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains
to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.
—the opening of the First Elegy
Someday, emerging at last from the violent insight,
let me sing out jubilation and praise to assenting angels.
Let not even one of the clearly-struck hammers of my heart
fail to sound because of a slack, a doubtful,
or a broken string. Let my joyfully streaming face
make me more radiant; let my hidden weeping arise
and blossom. How dear you will be to me then, you nights
of anguish. Why didn't I kneel more deeply to accept you,
inconsolable sisters, and, surrendering, lose myself
in your loosened hair. How we squander our hours of pain.
How we gaze beyond them into the bitter duration
to see if they have an end. Though they are really
our winter-enduring foliage, our dark evergreen,
ONE season in our inner year—, not only a season
in time—, but are place and settlement, foundation and soil and home.
--the opening of the Tenth Elegy, my reminder of practice and favorite spiritual poem
Rilke ends the Tenth Elegy with:
But if the endlessly dead awakened a symbol in us,
perhaps they would point to the catkins hanging from the bare
branches of the hazel-trees, or
would evoke the raindrops that fall onto the dark earth in springtime—
And we, who have always thought
of happiness as RISING, would feel
the emotion that almost overwhelms us
whenever a happy thing FALLS.
--Rilke, the Tenth Elegy
This is so like Meister Eckhart's remarks that falling into the Godhead is a "sinking and cooling," rather than a rising. It is so like the old Chinese Zen masters, who spoke of coming to rest in the nothingness. The true face of the Godhead, the Divine, of Spirit, is the abyss of formlessness. It is something we fall into, settle into, cool back into, rather than striving upwards through effort.
Here's what so impresses me, what Rilke knew, and what Mitchell explains in his included biography of one of his Zen teachers: What do you do after enlightenment? The answer: aboslutely nothing different than what you did before; absolutely nothing.
The centuries of spiritual athletes that preceded us, who my think we have to emulate or imitate, who we put up as examples of enlightenment through effort: they all got it exactly backwards. Enlightenment is just stopping. Just stop. Cease. Let go. Nothing more. Nothing special.
My favorite Zen enlightenment poem reads:
Now that I'm enlightened,
I'm just as miserable
as ever.
I just passed through a "night of anguish" last night. I even refused to meet up with a handsome man who I have occasional sex with; I needed to be alone, to go within, to be silent and still. I have been thinking about not going to Zuni Shaman's Gathering at the Radical Faerie sanctuary in Zuni, New Mexico, this year, because each time I have been there has been a time of anguish rather than joy. Each time I have stretched myself; two years ago, without my conscious knowledge at the time, I received a "promotion" from the Powers That Be, that had led to the work I do now, as Guardian and shaman and everyday, ordinary gay man in a world of gravitas.
Is this a fleeing from the habitual drama and joy of human engagement? a fear of being pushed towards the next level? a retreat from constant, rapid change? I no longer live like a monk in a tower, but like a traveling mendicant, living off whatever passing strangers place in my alms bowl. When I drove up to Portland last week to visit my primary relationship, who had just moved there from Chicago, a voice came into my head as I drove, somewhere in the big empty of the north end of the California Central Valley between Sacramento and Redding: "This is my natural state." To be driving. To be moving across the face of the land, in contemplation. Moving meditation. I studied Ki Aikido for years because it was, literally, moving meditation. My natural state is to be in motion across the face of the earth, feeling everything intenself as I go. I am strong in the earthpower; sitting at my desk this morning, I can feel the seismic faults in the land surrounding me; the folds and twists in the many terranes that have been thrown together to assemble California. I can Feel them, or the shapes in the land under the surface, everywhere I go; it's one reason I almost went into geology as a career, before I was called away to instead do creative and healing work.
Am I running away from enlightenment, or towards it? Perhaps it is an inescapable angel, ready to embrace with overpowering love, mirroring whatever I am putting out. Is a restless spirit the sign of an unenlightened spirit—that is the traditional judgment I feel shoehorned into by others, at times—or the sign of some work still to be done, work that requires doing rather than contemplation? movement rather than Just Sitting There? There is very, very little in the Zen or (other) Buddhist literature about what you do AFTER enlightenment. Your practice has to change, or does it, because you are at your core different now. Killing the Buddha is only the easy, first step. "I ask God to relieve me of 'God'."—Eckhart
But it is within our times of anguish that we grow. It is when we feel the furthest from "God" that we must remember we are come closest to God. The principle is the same as when you do the moving meditation of walking the Labyrinth: note how the path moes you so that, when you are walking the loop that is farthest, most outward circumfrence, from the Center of the Labyrinth, you rae almost there, and only one or two turns away. The paradox is also that, when you first enter the labyrinth, within one or two turns you are brushing right at the edge of the Center—a first kensho, a first satori, that necessary first taste of enlightenment and exaltation that keeps us walking onwards, or we might quit before actually arriving—but there are many, many winding turns before one reaches the Center, and, again, it is paradoxically when one is furthest away from Center that one is closest to actually arriving there.
When you give up looking for enlightenment, and have no expectation of it ever arriving; when you accept that your fate is to remain unenlightened, disturbed, filled with rage and sorrow, and that no matter how often you bow to your Master, nothing will ever change, you will never reach the goal; it is only then that you are ripe for actually reaching it. Give it up! Give it all away. And only then: gather it in. This is the root of the teaching of non-attachment: if you want to become the Christ, the Buddha, you have to stop wanting it first. And when you cease desiring it, wanting it as a goal, projecting it as an image, when you cease caring if you ever get there: you one day realize, I'm already there. Nothing special. Nothing dramatic. Just a quiet realization that you already are where you thought you mever would be.
Just because one has had one, or several, enlightenment experiences, doesn't mean that it's "finished." There can still be karma to burn off; first you have to kill the Buddha, then you have to kill your father, then you have to kill your Master, your Teacher. People think I am anti-guru; I am not; I have just been killing the Master. The image of the Buddha, the Image of God, is both inspiration and hindrance, signpost and roadblock. You can have love and rage at once for your beloved teachers. And among my teachers I do count one or two Zen masters. Every night I cry myself to sleep is a step closer to post-enlightenment clarity. Oh, I have received many enlightenment experiences; they feel very natural at the time; but it is only when the exhilaration wears off, as it inevitably does, this being a realm of gravitas in which we now exist, that one can see that nothing has really changed. I still have to earn a living, somehow; although, since I now see it doesn't matter WHAT I do to earn a living, I can do pretty much anything. Or, learn to do it.
The things I am learning to do now, that support me, I notice that I am learning them in a more non-attached, less dependent way than before. I revised my photography portfolio, these past few months, fine-tuning it to present it to galleries; I go through the big book of images, now, myself, and feel no connection to some of them, although I remember the occasion of taking them. (These are all available for review here.) The lack of attachment to the outcome of the possible purchase of this art, by others, is interesting, but nothing special. That's the whole point: it's all nothing special. Getting hung up on the visions, the powers, the visitations by angels, is to get hung up on the form rather than the content; it is to confuse oneself by setting up an illusory goal, when all there is, is the path. The anguish comes from my still-existent doubts, and inability to let go, to trust, to RADICALLY trust. For me, this works out as getting in the truck, pointing myself down the road, and going, with no destination in mind, no sense of timing, and no real sense of arrival anywhere. If I run out of gas, or the engine fails, or I blow a tire, whatever comes down the road towards me will be even better than what I just gave up, what I just let go of, what just "failed" or "betrayed" me. One can stop along the way, but you never really arrive anywhere. We tend to view "enlightenment" as an arrival point; but it's not: it's just another stop along the way. Nothing special.
Mitchell also quotes in his book one of Meister Eckhart's most essential writings, from one of his sermons; these ideas are as close to Zen as the Christian mystics ever get; Eckhart writes of the One that becomes Two, the necessary game we play of separating ourselves from Godhead, so that we may play the joyous game of returning to Godhead.
When I was in my first cause, I had no God, and I was cause of myself. I lacked nothing and I desired nothing, for I was an empty being and a knower of myself, rejoicing in the truth. I wanted myself and wanted no other thing. What I wanted I was, and what I was I wanted, and thus I was empty of God and of all things. But when I went out, by my own free will, and received my created being, then I had a God; for before there were creatures, God was not 'God': he was simply what he was. But when creatures came to be and received their created being, then God was not 'God' in himself, but he was 'God' in the creatures. Now God, insofar as he is only 'God,' is not the ultimate goal of creatures. For the least of creatures IN God has just as great a position. And if it were possible that a fly had intelligence and could with its mind search the eternal abyss of divine being out of which it came, we would have to say that God, with everything he is as 'God,' would be unable to fulfill or satisfy that fly. Therefore let us pray to God that we may be empty of 'God,' and that we may grasp the truth and eternally rejoice in it, there where the highest angels and the fly and the soul are equal, where I was pure being, and wanted what I was, and was what I wanted. In that very being of God where God is above being and above distinctions, I was myself, I wanted myself and understood myself in order to make this man that I am. That is why I am my own cause according to my being, which is eternal, and not according to my becoming, which is temporal. And therefore I am unborn, and according to my unbornness I can never die. When I flowed out of God, all things said: God exists. But this can't make me blessed, for by this I understand that I am a creature. But when I break through and return where I am empty of my own will and of God's will and of all his works and of God himself, then I am above all creatures and am neither 'God' nor creature; but I am what I was and what I will remain now and forever. Then I receive an impulse that will carry me above all the angels. In this impulse I receive such vast wealth that I can't be satisfied with God as he is 'God,' or with all his divine works; for in this return, what I receive is that I and God are one.
—Meister Eckhart
There is no separation. One, not two. Tat tvam asi: thou art That. "Thou art God, and I am God, and all that groks in God." What we imagine to be "God" is only a mask or mirror we have placed over God: another illusion. Meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha. Even the Buddha and the Dharma transmission are illusions and hindrances; you must receive your own Dharma transmission from yourself, post-enlightenment.
These words from Eckhart are what "woke up" Thomas Merton, who bloomed into a wise mystic of the last century, an awakened soul who was both hermit and deeply engaged with the world. After your heart chakra opens past a certain point, it is impossible to remain a hermit, a monastic, sheltered from existence by withdrawal from it: you can feel the world's suffering from anywhere you stand, and you can't get away from it. There is no escape, only engagement. One small act of compassion can heal the world's pain. At least for a time, or for all time, in some way, because all time is no-time in that abyss of nothingness that is the uncreated Godhead before God became "God."
So, in my state of anguish last night, unable to sleep, I got up and spent a long time researching desert locations in the Southwest, downloading maps from online sources—always remembering that even a good map is not the terrain—and writing about how maybe what I really need is time wandering in the desert. I have done the literal forty days and forty nights of wandering in the desert. I can only take a week off work this month, even though it's only a temporary part-time job for now, and even though it doesn't really matter in the end what I do or where I go. Have you noticed how many spiritual seekers cannot yet deal with paradox? or live within contradictions? I wonder sometimes if it is spiritual arrogance to see oneself as having progressed at all down the path of spirit, of heart, of warriorship; sometimes all I can see are my failures, especially my failure to "get it," and I collapse into anguish.
Then an angel comes by, and lifts me up, for awhile. I realize that even if a beginning seeker cannot yet inhabit a given paradox, they will have an endless amount of time, an endless number of lives, an endless number of chances, to inhabit paradox. "Not one soul shall be lost—not one!" My vice of impatience speaks up, then, as: "If not now, when? If not us, who?" This is the point of paradox of contempation versus activism, monastic retreat from the world, which can seem like mere escapism, and full political engagement with the world. The enlightened master can stir the political pot safely only because she or he is able to remain non-attached to political outcome, is focusing rather on the growth of the human spirits who are engaged in the political arena. It does no good to hate our enemies till we realize that they are simply the mirrors of those forces in ourselves that we don't like. It is when I embrace my inner rage, my inner capacity for violence, for hatred and bias and prejudice, that I catch myself from acting it out in the world of embodiment.
What do you do after enlightenment? You can afford to be eccentric, or humourous, or angry, or intense, or the whole range of human possibility; it is all equally uplifted, and all equally nothing special. When we suppress our anger, because we have been told that enlightened beings are all-serenity, all-passivity, we do ourselves harm, because we are creating an attachment to an image of enlightenment. To be enlightened is to be truly free—free from social censure, free from expectation, free from the many images of what enlightenment is supposed to be, free from the ridiculous idea that you have to be a vegetarian or practive certain rituals or believe certain ideals in order to be called enlightened (all illusory images). We are free to do whatever we do. What keeps us from abusing these freedoms, once enlightened? from taking advantage? from becoming teachers who abuse our students? The very thing that causes us continued anguish: our opened hearts. I can no more willingly cause another person pain, because my heart will instantly feel their pain. What pain I inflict on another is the pain I inflict on myself. There is no separation. Call it empathy, but that's just another label. Compassionate non-attachment only looks like passivity; when in fact the Master knows full well the suffering he is capable of inflciting on others, and chooses not ot, continuously and daily, because she knows that it will rebound on himself threefold. "And ye harm none, do as thou wilt." True freedom, enlightened freedom, is not a lessening of engagement with the world, because one's opened heart still cares deeply about everyone and everything; it can be, though, to all appearances a withdrawal, even though it is not. What it is, as Rilke tells us, is restraint: knowing that every tiny action one undertakes could have huge results, one ceases to want to intervene very much. One reserves one's tiny actions for those events that will lead to growth, to the enlightenment of others; one remains silent in the face of major political events, and catastrophes, because one knows that by acting, one creates results, and keeps turning the wheel. It is a choice to re-create as little karma as possible, by simple non-action in the usual arenas. Sometimes, one begins to teach. Sometimes, one becomes the sort of activist who works in a soup kitchen or the post office, brightening in tiny, mustard-seed-level ways, the lives of everyone you meet. The ordinary reality takes on a glow for others, when you interact with them. Nothing big, dramatic, or sublime; just an everyday sort of activism, making the world a finer place in little, little ways, that create big ripples. Nothing special.
And the ripples we create rock the non-physical realms. Every word has power. You learn to monitor your passing thoughts, not to suppress them or force them into some channel of "right thought," but because you realize the powerful effects they have. It is again a choice of non-action, non-intervention. It is a postive choice, not a nihilistic one. After the ecstasy, the laundry. Do what little service you can, and the ripples spread. You act more consciously, with more conscious awareness of the fruits of your actions.
What is so terrifying about angels? They are awesome because, when we first encounter them, they enact possibilities we still fear to seek in ourselves. We too could become that freed. After we grow past a certain point in our spiritual paths, though, we no longer fear the angels. We might pity them, at times. The angels, like all beings or pure spirit who do not know embodiment, have limitations. Yes, shocking as that might seem, it's true: they have limitations. There are things they can't experience, for example: Sorrow. Envy. Anguish. The compassion that arises in us when we open our hearts to the sorrows and anguish of others. The angels may seem to be all-compassionate, but is this not a mirror they are holding up to our own compassion? are they not simply embodying our own inner need to be compassionate unto ourselves? The suffering we discover in ourselves, that seems to have no cause, that seems endless, bottomless, abyssal, the angels hover around it, helplessly, wanting to enfold us in their bliss, their joy, their lovemaking; but they can't touch us in those moments, or even perceive us. It is when we sink into anguish that what remains for us to touch, our only shelter and comfort, is the abyss of Godhead, the sinking and cooling, the vast nothingness into which we shout. The Smile on the face of the Void.
What we do after enlightenment is not going to change, very much. It's all nothing special.
A Spiral Dance essay © 2005 Arthur Paul Durkee / Black Dragon Productions.
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