Replete With Enlightenment

Continuous Awakening

Last week, I concluded a series on Buddhism and the Twelve Steps that started in November. You can read that offering here and find all posts that form the series under the “Twelve Steps” section of my Substack page. You can find them in the “Recovery” section, too, but starting today, I am moving my recovery writing in a different direction.

In the foreseeable future, that direction will be informed and inspired by Buddhism, often Zen Buddhism, though not exclusively. In the short term, you, the reader, can continue to expect recovery-focused offerings about every other week. 

Some will connect to the Recovery Dharma program; for more than a year now, I have led a weekly Recovery Dharma meeting. I find the program’s message and the community inspiring. You can see this in part of a reading with which I open every meeting:

We are peer-led and do not follow any one leader or teacher, but trust in the wisdom of the Buddha (the potential for our own awakening), the Dharma (the truth, or the teachings), and the Sangha (our community of wise friends on this path). This is a program of empowerment and doesn’t ask us to believe in anything other than our own potential to change and heal.

Yes! to trust in the Three Treasures; Yes! to empowerment; and Yes! to a clear statement that recovery is possible. And it is, for all of us.

Other offerings will spring from a recent book by Ryuko Laura Burges, a lay-entrusted dharma teacher in the Soto Zen tradition. The Zen Way of Recovery: An Illuminated Path Out Of The Darkness Of Addiction offers “tools and practices that can open a road to sobriety,” is grounded in the wisdom of the Buddha’s teachings and informed by Ryuko Laura’s own experience as a person in recovery for decades.

You might purchase a copy of the book and read along as I work with what I find challenging and confusing, encouraging and illuminating. As I often write, recovery is not something we do alone. We do it together.

With that said, I want to return to a thread left dangling in last week’s post. There, I observed a shift in my orientation toward writing. (Writing was not the only place where a shift happened, but it was noticeable.) Gone were the trappings of an academic style; embraced were listening, responding, and trusting. I wrote:

Just listen and respond, listen and respond—and trust. Trust that what needed to appear would appear; trust that what needed to be said would be said. And somewhere in the flurry, I would find that for which I searched.

I did, by the way. Or that which needed to be found found me.

What did I find? Or, from a different point of view, what was it that needed to be found and found me? 

Please permit a windy route of engagement with these questions.

In “Way Seeking Mind,” the first chapter of The Zen Way of Recovery, Ryuko Laura shares her recovery story. Several parts of it touched me, including the use of the following lines, quoted from Herman Hesse’s Demian:

The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world.

Ryuko Laura recalls invoking these lines during a trippy experience from her youth involving Hawaiian baby woodrose. Later, she shares that Zen practice showed her there is no need to “destroy a world” to be born.

[…] I have learned that practice blooms, as Dogen Zenji taught us, in this very mind and body. We don’t have to shut the door in the past or become someone else, a better version of ourselves. In fact, we can share our past with others and give them hope that they too can step out of the darkness and into the light.

Yes—and there is a complimentary perspective from which a bit of “fighting your way out” needs to happen, too, so we can share our experience and strength with others. It does not amount to “destroying a world”; we cannot destroy the past, no matter how Herculean the effort. We can, however, relate differently to that world—a world in which, in my experience, I was self-absorbed and self-destructive.

Dogen describes two ways of relating to the world near the beginning of Shobogenzo Genjokoan (Expressing What Is Most Essential). He writes:

To carry the self forward and illuminate myriad things is delusion. That myriad things come forth and illuminate the self is awakening.

How do we understand these two ways? Ask three Zen students, and you will likely receive nine responses—four from one person, probably.

One response sees the first way, identified with “delusion,” as rooted in I, me, mine. Its manifestations are manifold; for the person abusing a substance or behavior, it often appears as, “I want what I want, how I want it, and when I want it, and I wanted it yesterday.” You can also imagine a toddler with hands clenched and moving in no discernable pattern—the feet too, with toes curled—and a scrunched face, expressing dissatisfaction with the current circumstances. That is a fair representation, too. So, no wonder the person addicted hears of the need to “grow up,” to “take responsibility,” and to “stop acting like a big baby.”

I could say that interwoven with the focus on I, me, and mine is a desire for control. To say only that, however, is to say not quite enough. So, I want to use “imposition” instead. This way of relating to the world that Dogen identifies with delusion appears as the desire to impose on myriad things the means and structures by which our desires, expectations, and preferences will be satisfied, and our judgments and opinions will be confirmed as true. We impose our self, basically—that seemingly stable construction constituted by what was just mentioned and more, and that we tend to believe with great conviction is who we are: separate from everything else and in desperate need of protection.

To the best of my ability, I have tried to describe this first way of relating to the world without moral judgment. While it might feel as if some of my words extend invitations to add more words, specifically “bad” or “wrong,” as in “this is a bad (or wrong) way of relating to the world,” I invite you to consider whether it is the words themselves and the above combinations that extend such an invitation or if what compels you to add “bad,” “wrong,” and other words suggesting value or worth is what you associate with demanding and childlike behavior, a self-centered orientation, and imposing oneself on people, places, and things.

And I say this because Dogen’s description of delusion as “to carry the self forward and illuminate myriad things” is just a description. It is without moral judgment, as best as I can tell. “Carry[ing] the self forward” is one way of relating to the world, a way that all of us relate sometimes, and Dogen is silent about its value or worth.

If the above is an acceptable interpretation of “carry[ing] the self forward and illuminat[ing] myriad things,” it becomes tempting to understand “myriad things com[ing] forward and illuminat[ing] the self” as the polar opposite. Spend some time observing how you behave, how others behave, how you behave with others and how others behave with you, and how others behave with others, and you will notice a way of establishing a dichotomy that snaps with the force and speed of a once stretched-tight rubber band. It feels instantaneous when you witness it.

If “delusion” is “I want what I want, how I want it, and when I want it, and I wanted it yesterday,” then awakening can become “I do not want anything, in any way, and at any time, ever.” This shift from one position to its opposing extreme can happen and feel automatic, if not inevitable. And it does; I suspect it contributes to certain representations of Buddhists and what it is to be an awakened, enlightened, or spiritual person generally as non-feeling, non-sensing, and desireless—in a word, hollow. And from one point of view, it is appropriate to ask: Who would want to live like that?

I am suggesting, then, that awakening as “myriad things com[ing] forward and illuminat[ing] the self” is not the extreme or polar opposite of delusion. It is possible to understand awakening in other ways, and I want to share one of them now.

Lately, I have discovered a “middle place” between things. I use the expression “middle place” because this exploration has thus far used spatial language, even though what I am referring to is not spatially located between two fixed—or even shifting—extremes. Sometimes, the word “beyond” is used in similar cases. I understand why. However, “beyond” also feels too widely in circulation to hold much meaning; if everything is beyond something, then nothing is beyond anything, and we are ultimately talking about what is present at any particular time.

Perhaps that is the beginning of an insight.

Although we sometimes find ourselves “carry[ing] the self forward,” imposing ourselves on the world with much effort and, consequently, suffering because of that activity and effort, this does not mean that we are not in the “middle place.” The same is true when the baggage that we continue to carry from the past has been, once again, dragged into the present, or we are busy conjuring possible future baggage to occupy the present, as though what is here is not enough.

This “middle place,” as I call it, is where things are just as they are—and that includes ourselves. It has a lightness about it, though it is not weightless, and it is not uncritical. Moral judgment is absent, and still, there is discernment and response. It encourages sitting down for a while, too. Everything is always in this place; we are always in this place, I am starting to see. 

When we become aware of this place, we begin to see that what it is to be awake—or, if you prefer the verb, awakening—is not the polar opposite of delusion. It cannot be; as Dogen writes in Shobogenzo Bendowa (A Talk On The Pursuit Of The Truth): 

Know that fundamentally you do not lack unsurpassed enlightenment, and you are replete with it continuously.

If I do not lack unsurpassed enlightenment, if I am replete with it continuously, then it must be present even when deluded, even when I am all-consumed by I, me, and mine, even when I am in the throws of active abuse and addiction. It is not simply that always present is the capacity for awakening; awakening itself is always present. And that is quite different from the standard frame, especially in matters of a religious and spiritual bent. 

This is the invitation: not to view things from the familiar, snap-judgment point of view, but from which the familiar point of view is turned upside-down.

Immediately following the often-quoted lines about delusion and awakening, Dogen writes:

Those who have great realization of delusion are buddhas; those who are greatly deluded about realization are sentient beings. Further, there are those who continue realizing beyond realization and those who are in delusion throughout delusion.

There is more, though these are my words. There are buddhas who are deluded within awakening, and there are sentient beings who are awakening in delusion. There are sentient beings awakening within awakening, and there are buddhas swimming in the delusion of delusion. And all of this together contributes, if you can remain upside-down just long enough, to witnessing the entire spectrum-way of understanding the world collapse in on itself.

It is wondrous and terrifying—and it is the way everything originally is.

At the risk of heads spinning too much, I want to close by quoting the second half of Song Of Trusting Mind by Kanchi Sosan. It offers another way of approaching what I am trying to describe. For some, perhaps it is a better way:

At the moment of profound insight you transcend both appearance and emptiness.
Don’t keep searching for the truth, just let go of your opinions.
For the mind in harmony with the Tao, all selfishness disappears
with not even a trace of self-doubt; you can trust the universe completely.
All at once you are free with nothing left to hold on to,
all is empty brilliant perfect in its own being.

In all the world of things as they are, there is no self no non-self.
If you want to describe its essence, the best you can say is “not two”;
in this “not two” nothing is separate, and nothing in the world is excluded.
The enlightened of all times and places have entered into this truth;
in it there is no gain or loss. One instant is ten thousand years;
there is no here, no there; infinity is right before your eyes.

The tiny is as large as the vast when objective boundaries have vanished;
the vast is as small as the tiny when you don’t have external limits.
Being is an aspect of non-being; non-being is no different from being:
until you understand this truth you won’t see anything clearly.
One is all, all are one; when you realize this what reason for holiness or wisdom?
The mind of absolute trust is beyond all thought, all striving, is perfectly at peace,
for in it there is no yesterday no today no tomorrow.

In sobriety, I found a different way of relating to writing and the world. I found that “middle place” in which I am always resting, with encouragement and support from others and the courage to stay upside-down long enough to see that upside-down is the same as right-side-up. As Kanchi Sosan puts it, I saw infinity right before my eyes and felt it underneath my feet, where there is no yesterday, no today, and no tomorrow.

And though all this has happened, I still carry the self forward from time to time—arguably more often than not—while continuously replete with enlightenment. All it required was fighting my way out of the world formed by my opinions.

If you benefitted from this offering, you might consider reading:

Looking Back And Bowing

The Moon And The Water

Showing Up For Your Life