Tag Archives: contemplation

August 18, 2014 · 5:37 pm

Intimacy With Unity Of All Things

By: David Xi-Ken Astor, Sensei

 In a wonderful Tibetan Buddhist story, a man tells his friend about an extraordinary spiritual teacher he has met. Although this friend is curious about this teacher, he is also somewhat skeptical, so he decides to seek out this holy man and put him to the test. After asking around, he discovers the master is living and teaching nearby, so the young man goes to see him and manages to obtain an audience with him. He defiantly walks before the teacher, and before he can catch himself, blurts out a challenge: “Show me God! Prove to me that he exists!”

The saintly master calmly extends his hand and, in a soothing, inviting tone, says, “Come with me.” The young person takes the teacher’s hand, in the Asian sign of friendship, and off they go to the neighborhood lake. As they reach the place, the teacher leads the man into the water and tells him to dive in. Then the master does something even stranger. He holds the mans head under the water. As the minutes pass, the man tries three times to come up, but the Lama holds his head firmly submerged. Finally, on his fourth attempt, the teacher lets him out of the water. The poor soul bursts out of the water, gasping for air. “What are you trying to do, kill me?” he yells at the saint. The holy man looks at him with infinite compassion and lovingly, patiently responds: “Forgive me if I caused you undue anxiety, but when your desire for God is as desperate as your desire for air, for your very breath, then you will find the source for Creation!”

This powerful story dramatically illustrates the importance of commitment in the spiritual life. No genuine progress is possible without it. Such a commitment expresses itself in the discipline of regular, daily spiritual practice that paves the way for breakthroughs, for the miracles of grace to happen.

Spiritual practice is the core of our transformation, and it requires what can be called the contemplative attitude, a disposition to life of mystical depth. Spiritual practice often means meditation and other forms of inner exploration. It can also mean prayer. Silence and solitude – the seeking of illumination and wisdom – are further parts of the contemplative experience, a process of our ultimate evolution, our unfolding to higher states of awareness. To understand how this process can unfold in our lives, we need to explore its elements.

This is what I hope we are doing here at OEB. Our personal experiences provides us an opportunity to gain knowledge. Application of knowledge, when done in the spirit of right intent, is wisdom. We live in a mutual causal world. Everything happens as an effect of another action. Either human or not. It started at the moment our Universe was created. We are here as a result of that original event. Everything we think or do is a continuation of that action. Even our deaths contribute to this Universal expression. It is up to us to discover the contemplative dimension of life and experience what it means to be human on a mission to understand the unity of all things.

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March 17, 2014 · 10:19 am

Solitude And The Socially Engaged Monk

By:  David Xi-Ken Astor, Sensei

I speak often about the importance of awakening to how the Four Noble Truths articulate the importance for us to develop the individual as well as social elements of this noble practice we call Buddhism.  We learn how we are, both as persons and as partners, in this web of connections we call life.  As a Buddhist monk that has taken vows to engage others beyond the walls of a temple, it is important for me to confront the realities of the social-self component of my practice.  Without it I do not have much of a Buddhist ministry.  The Buddha emphasized, however, the importance for us to balance our social responsibility with the individual need for our own spiritual renewal.  Siddhartha often removed himself from the everyday activities of the Sangha, and retreated into solitude in order to “recharge” his spiritual energy.  The Ch’an and Zen tradition has a long history of supporting an extended period of retreating into solitude away from all distractions.  This is true in both the East as it is now in the West.

I want to share with you today some thoughts on the nature of this transformative body-mind practice know as “session”, or intentional practice into solitude.  Time or space is not imposed.  It is up to the individual to establish the parameters surrounding the need.  It is always an effect of the causal chain of events that drives the situational aspects of making the choice for withdrawing from social interaction.

Solitude or withdrawal is the state of being secluded or separate from others.  An individual can choose to inter a state of practice of being solitary based on circumstances.  It is an example of situational-practice.  When used at the right time and in the right manner it can have an important role in our spiritual development.

Before his enlightenment Siddhartha Gotama, the Buddha, also spent over six years in extended periods alone in the forests of his ancestral home in what we know today as Nepal.  He was seeking first to understand himself before he could have the wisdom to administer the affairs of others.  That was when he thought his destiny was to govern the region after the death of his father, the King.  That we know now did not happen.  The causal nature of the Universe revealed a different path for him, and we are all the richer for that reality.  Reminiscing on this time many years later he said in the Majjhima Nikaya, “Such was my seclusion that I would plunge into some forest and live there.  If I saw a cowherd, shepherd, grass-cutter, wood-gatherer or forester, I would flee so that they would not see me or me them.”  We know from the many references made in the various Pali Canon that after he attained enlightenment he would occasionally go into solitude.  In the Samyutta Nikaya he is reported as saying, “I wish to go into solitude for half a month.  No one is to come to see me except the one who brings my food.”     Even though Siddhartha came to consider that the fabric of all phenomena-form, including our human one, are interconnected and dependent, it was still vital to withdraw from intentional contact in order to reconnect with renewed vigor.  The notion is that I might be in a room by myself, but I am never totally alone, because all the connections I have with others before I stepped into solitude are never severed, unless that too is an intentional act.   Even then, we are only in a body-mind state of being “alone with others” as Stephen Batchelor puts it. Continue reading →

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February 22, 2014 · 9:56 am

Developing The Art Of Questioning

By: David Xi-Ken Astor, Sensei 

I often speak about the pragmatic and existential importance of validating the information we are learning through direct experience.  In that way we come to really “know” something, which is about gaining knowledge.  Now I would like to expand on that by sharing with you some of my thoughts on journeying through the unknown, and using the skill of questioning.  For you see, questioning is an element of the art of practice.  If we do not question our experiences as they unfold though the various situations we find ourselves in, there will be very little change in our worldview, and without change we are just treading water.  And when that happens in the middle of the ocean, given enough time, we will tire and drown, or the sharks will find us.  The same is also true in our practice.  Questioning is mental action that when done skillfully will lead to awakened moments.   All Buddhist teachers encourage questioning, because without questions, we have no idea where you are in your training and understanding of Buddhist thought and doctrine.  Questioning is a sign of an active mind, silence is another form of emptiness.  That can be either good, or not, depending on the wisdom of the act of silence.  In a training situation, silence is always unexpected.

As we progress along our life’s journey, it’s difficult to avoid encountering some of the perplexing challenges we humans have confronted again and again.  Many of these experiences are related to the big questions that have always confounded the human mind for centuries.   This was the driving force that propelled Siddhartha on his quest for universal understanding over 2500 years ago.  The big questions are still the same as they were for the Buddha, Socrates, Plato,  Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant, Mills, and all other philosophers both Western and Eastern.  These are human questions, no matter what side of the world you stand on.

These big questions our serious ones.  Yet, popular cultural views of some want to focus on cracking the enigmas like the Da Vinci code.  But thank goodness, we also have others that have devoted their lives in bringing into reality the genetic codes that might lead to finding cures for disease.    And what about us?  We can work on breaking through our personal identity codes and develop even stronger characters, with integrity, ethics, and social values.   We can work on breaking through the barriers of other enigmas of our everyday life.  In every moment we work for our own liberation. Continue reading →

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January 23, 2014 · 7:10 pm

Spiritual Life Is A Life

By: David Xi-Ken Astor Sensei

The spiritual life is first and foremost a life in that it is apart of the sum of the phenomena we call “me”.  It is not something we “take out” and wear during periods of contemplation, meditation, or feeling like a Buddhist when we are in the mood.  Either we have it or not.  It is that simple.  A spiritual life is not something we can study.  It is however, like all other dimensions that makes us up, when it is not nourished it will die.  It can be like other interests we develop, spend time with, then move on to other things.  What makes finding a spiritual interest different is that it appears to be a natural progression when we turn our attention to the bigger picture of what life may be about.  Like seeking the wonder of our world, seeking the spirit seems to be connected to our human condition, not something handed to us “by the angels.”    We live as spiritual individuals when we live seeking answers to the big questions.  It is something man has been doing since he walked out of his cave and looked up at the night sky.  The difference between him and us, is that we now have a language to express our spiritual natures, but the experience is the same.

To keep our spiritually alive we must constantly work at it.  This is the reason we engage meditation and contemplative practices.  I am reminded of the experiences I have had on my sailboat at sea in the fog, peering into the gloom listening for sounds and hoping I stay on course in order to avoid being lost and reach the harbor.  The spiritual life is all about keeping awake.  We must not lose our sensitivity to what inspires us to sit in contemplation keeping alert for “signs” we can use to stay on course.  We must always be able to respond to the slightest warnings in order to avoid running our life on the rocks that can sink a spiritual life as well.

Meditation is one way in which the spiritual man keeps awake.  The reality of a contemplative life , however, is that it puts us at risk of becoming distracted and falling asleep.  Meditation is a strict discipline, and not so easy to do well, at least in the beginning.   It requires perseverance and hard work to avoid falling into the trap of compromise.  When our zazen and contemplative practice is compromised, it is a failure.  Even when we keep at it without much focus.   A contemplative practice is a body-mind practice, that is the orientation of our whole body, mind, and spirit.  When you enter into such a meditation practice it is not without a kind of inner upheaval.  By upheaval I don’t mean a kind of ciaos, but a braking away of a normal routine of thought.  We move away from ordinary mind into an extra-ordinary inner space.  We move away from all those distractions that preoccupy us in our work-a-day world.  We move beyond all that.  It is not something that is easy moving from an active mind to a passive one so we can experience the quiet necessary to transcend the ordinary.  The bridge is not easy to find either.  It may take years to find the bridge.  But once found, we know the way again.

Neither imagination or raw feelings are required for the transcending nature of the contemplative state of mind.  It is hard to put into human language, but there is a very real and recognizable sense when we tune into our inner space.  Our inner eye opens to the center of our spiritual natures.  Meditation and contemplation is the opening of this eye.

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January 19, 2014 · 6:57 pm

A Spiritual Life Is Not A Mental Life

By: David Xi-Ken Astor, Sensei

A spiritual life is not a mental life.  It is not thought alone that creates a contemplative state of mind.  It is not a life of sensation or felling of ecstasy.  Contemplation is not about stepping on the mystical carpet and flying away.

The contemplative aspects of a spiritual life, however, does not exclude thought and a deeper sense of awareness either.   But it is not just a life where the body-mind and imagination are excluded.  If that were the case, very few individuals would be able to have a successful contemplative practice without retreating into a cave for a decade or two.  Considering man’s social natures, that would not be a life enriched by an engaged social practice, but one totally turned inward toward the self excluding others.  Even though the intent of such a life might be honorable.  It would not be one most would associate with Mahayana Buddhism.    If we are to be truly alive, we must be committed to our practice body, mind, heart, and spirit, directing our compassion towards helping others.  For a monk, that is the heart of our Bodhisattva vows.

It is unproductive to try to achieve a contemplative state of mind merely by stringing thoughts together and then “thinking” about them.  While thinking is the first step in our contemplative session, we must use those thoughts as a springboard into our inner world that reflects the state of our practice beyond words and thoughts.  The quality of such a practice depends on the depth we venture into as we activate our inner-vision.  A purely mental practice may destroy any chance we have to go beyond the ordinary.  In that case we substitute thought and ideas for the real thing; for real awakened moments.  Any activity associated with what makes us human is not purely mental as we are not just a disembodied mind.  This is why validating our experiences is so important to our contemplative practice because it keeps us balanced.

What we achieve from a contemplative practice must also be brought back into our everyday lives in order to move our knowledge to wisdom that gets us ready for more awakened moments.  As we make it apart of ourselves, we enter into the reality that is signified by our concepts.  This is the cycle-of-life of a contemplative.

Thomas Merton in his work, Thoughts In Solitude, said, “Living is the constant adjustment of thoughts to life and life to thought in such a way that we are always growing, always experiencing new things in the old and old things in the new.  Thus life is always new.”    It is yet another illusion when we think that our contemplative mind state is separate from how we live our lives as though it is separate and two different concrete realities.  When we sit in contemplation we are not sitting in a dream state.  We must keep an alert mind not distracted by our personal filters that dilutes how we see the world, AND the Universe around us.  This is why zazen is so important.  In mindful meditation we are preparing the mind for the contemplative.  A quiet mind, is a ripe mind.  That is the platform upon which our contemplative practice stands.

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January 12, 2014 · 4:48 pm

Ideas Aren’t The Real Thing

by: David Xi-Ken Astor

As we engage mindful meditation and insight practice in the beginning of our encounter with zazen we are taught that there are different ways of understanding the states of mind that can be realized during periods of meditation.  If our initial study of meditation is gained through books, we quickly read about terms like no-mind, quiet the mind, oneness, and realize your true nature.   Unfortunately, all these terms can add to our confusion about a contemplative practice because we come to think about them as things to be acquired or achieved.   We Westerns feel comfortable with this approach because we know how to go about getting something that we consider substantial, either as a material object or a tangible achievement.  No problem, because with a little bit of hard work we earn the right to grab the golden ring.   Then we have something to show for our efforts, an object, even if that object is a certificate.

Because of our mental confusion, we quickly trap ourselves by trying to make our experience match our ideas.  The notion of a quiet mind is a good example.  We think we know what “quiet the mind” means.   We assume there is a mind, that it can be made quiet, and that if we work hard we can do it.  Usually when we think of a quiet mind, we have some notion that we have stopped the thinking process and that this state of mind is sustained over time.  This would suggest that we have stopped being aware too, because thoughts come from awareness.  With this idea, individuals can spend years trying to get rid of thoughts so that their experience will match their idea of quiet mind.

For those of us that have dedicated ourselves to zazen for years (decades even), it is kind of sad to see others mired in a helpless quest for the experience they think they should be able to get, but can’t.  True, from the perspective of noisy mind there is a state of less noise for them.  But in experiencing a deep sense of quiet, there is no awareness between quiet or active mind.   Old Zen masters would say we come to realize mind as “Just like this.”  It exists only from the perspective of the knowing mind.  Enlightenment is as well, existing only as an idea held by the mind of separation.  Oneness exists only from the perspective of two-ness.  We must awaken to the lessons that point to no-mind found in understanding the difference between the dual and the non-dual.

It is essential that we have aspirations in our Buddhist practice.  But these are only pointers, like the North Star helping us to point the spiritual path we tread headed in the right direction.  Experience can’t always be expressed with words.  What is the experience of eating an orange for example?  How do you put in words the feeling when you look into a baby’s eyes.  What is loving kindness feel like?  If we think our conceptual understanding touches the real thing, we are like someone watching a video of someone ascending the Himalaya Mountains who thinks they understand mountain climbing.

Instead of trying to match your conceptual understanding with what you imagine as real, cultivate great doubt.  To do this, let go of ideas.  When we have no ideas, we position ourselves for the potential of realizing our unique Universal expression.  The Buddha nature that encompasses the spirit and wonder inherent in the face we see in our mirror.  Or is it the face behind the face reflected back to us like the reflection in a clear pond?

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January 10, 2014 · 11:38 pm

Deeper Self, Encountering Silence

by: David Xi-Ken Astor

The sixteenth century mystic John of the Cross said “Silence is God’s first language.”  However, he did not have the advantage we do in the 21st century to know what every kid learns in their physics class that the universe is really noisy.  Just the term “Big Bang” connotes the potential for that reality, even in it’s apparent quite as we look out into space.  We might even say that it depends on what you mean by quiet.  Of course we know what St. John was really saying.  Silence is the normal context in which a contemplative practice takes place.  Not the physical, but the mental state of quite.  There is the outer silence that can surround us at times.  But it is the inner silence that is the challenge.  The quieting of the busy-busy mind we work to achieve in mindful meditation or zazen.  In zazen, we practice to not follow our thoughts.  But the contemplative state moves beyond this.  We sit to listen to the quite.  And that quite is heavy by nature.  We become quiet itself.  As Mother Theresa once said, “If you don’t understand that, I can’t explain it to you.”   It is at the intersection of mindful mediation and this inner quite that a contemplative practice begins.   Our meditation practice prepares us for our contemplative one.  They are not the same.  Zazen is study of the self in order to know the self.  With that accomplishment we become ready to experience the Universe beyond just it’s material expression.  Contemplative thought is a practice that brings about this third aspect of zazen, while mindful meditation works to achieve the first two.  Insight beyond the spoken language is the mind state of the contemplative.  We focus on a thought so we can manifest a contemplative-state of mind no longer requiring the thinking process.   We are propelled into inner quite.  It is an awareness of “something” beyond language to express, but our human capability to experience this wonder does not require a language to understand.

Most of us encounter effective quite moments when we attend retreats.  The reason for this is that in a retreat we get a chance to step back from our busy lives.  It is a time to “get into” quiet.  We may even “get a way for the day” and go out into the woods for some quiet-time.  In these moments we get a chance to draw inward and allow our mind to wander.  Then something happens and we experience a quiet state where are body-mind for a few minutes is at rest.  Sometimes we can create this moment from reading a special inspirational piece, especially if we are in our “scared” place, a place we find peaceful.  Your mind free-associates away from normal dispositions and personal preferences that provides the key to renewal and transformation.  Silence is the backdrop where this awakening takes place.

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January 7, 2014 · 5:55 pm

Spiritual Transformation

By: David Xi-Ken Astor, Sensei  曦 肯

Being transformed by experiencing our human nature’s drive to seek the spirit and wonder of our own nature is a rather grand-sounding phrase, but that is what we are engaged in.  And hard work it is too.  There can be pain and weariness, and there are many doubts and questions along the way.  It is not just sitting and thinking, but becoming dynamically aware, sensing with our entire body-mind.  Our zazen posture is a posture of awakening.  It is open and alert; we are aware of our breath as it moves through us.

The word meditation comes from the Latin ‘meditare’, which is the passive form of the verb, meaning “being moved to the center.”  It is not the active form, which is “moving to the center.”  Do you hear the difference?  This center is our own essence.  Sitting after sitting, letting everything drop away, we become more aware of our own personal center.  We become more rooted in it.  This simple act of sitting absolutely still, letting everything go,  has far-reaching effects.  Those of you with a dedicated meditation practice know the intent of what I am expressing, but my words are inadequate to express it completely.

Sitting still is not what some of us may have imagined a practice of spirit to be.  We may think that it involves something more impressive.  But those of us who do it, those of us who are ‘present’ at this moment, know that this is it.  Sitting absolutely still, body AND mind are not separate.  Our state of mind at any given moment becomes clearer in this condition of being present, completely present.  And there is great healing power in this simple act.  Of course we may experience some pain.  The true taste of contemplation really cannot be understood unless we have some challenges.  After our contemplative practice experience begins to develop and mature, we do not find the challenge over whelming.  Our teacher works with us in order for us to learn not to move against it; we do not struggle with it; rather, we simply remain aware of our breath and work to change our condition.  We become aware of what happens when we pay attention to it, and practice with positive intent.

When I begin to work with a new formal student I often ask, “Why did you come to sit?  What is your reason?  Do you have a reason?  What happened in your life that brought you to the cushion?   In essence, “Why are you here?”  And most students say they came because they wanted to have some peace of mind.  As we sit, there is some temporary peacefulness, of course.  But we want to come to a condition of mind that takes us in the beginning through all the circumstances of our life, no matter how difficult.  Then, no matter what happens, there is this quiet, truly peaceful space within.   All of us with a meditation practice has gone though this phase of development.  And still work, at times, to conquer our devils.  So you see, it is an ongoing process, not an event.   And I am so thankful that I have a Dharma Brother to talk these things through with.  Please do not misunderstand.  This does not mean we should inflict anything on ourselves.  It simply means that if issues come up, we let it come, and we let it be our teacher.  Thus, even our personal challenges can be a wonderful teacher for us.  We work to cultivate a beginners-mind.

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