Effortlessness
By Michael Erlewine
[I have some questions to share and discuss with those of you who are into learning more about the dharma.]
The idea of meditating and quieting the mind has not always been front and center in the public eye in the U.S. I knew of meditation’s existence in the late 1950s through my interest in Zen Buddhism and Akira Kurosawa movies. We talked about Buddhism, but the word “dharma” was still a mystery to us. I had no definition in mind. That came later for me, much later. I believe the definition of ‘dharma’ only comes with experience of our own mind.
What dharma was and is was then not clear for me, something at the time undefinable. It took me many years to shape some sense as to what dharma actually is. It was a foreign word that I knew was potent, yet I was unable to just unpack it. S mentioned, that took time and experience.
Since I had not yet actually worked with the word ‘dharma, much less actually practice it, I had not evolved a meaning.
It eventually came down to actually being shown how to meditate by Chögyam Trungpa himself that I understood that the dharma is something not just to read about, which I had been doing, but to do something with, to practice. It had not occurred to me that I could actually practice dharma myself with, so to speak, a straight face. I would just be pretending.
I had no idea what being worthy to do that was all about. It had not occurred to me that I could do in my own way what the great dharma saints had at one at a time done, like get enlightened. I was too shy.
Trungpa helped me feel worthy to attempt to seriously practice dharma and that the teachings of the Buddha were no longer just a late-night topic to sit around and talk about while we smoked cigarettes and drank instant coffee with powdered creamer. I was young.
From meeting Chögyam Trungpa in person onward, I was seriously practicing or trying to practice dharma, which involved finding out what ‘dharma” is and learning how to implement it in my life. And dharma was, as mentioned, still just another foreign word back then, something none of the folks I knew (my peers) knew any more than I did. It’s been some 65 years since I first tried to ‘Grok’ the word dharma.
Yet, I no longer had someone like Trungpa Rinpoche around to hold my hand. Instead, some of the instructors I found didn’t know much more than I did, and were needlessly strict about everything, which was their own fear and ignorance speaking. Yet I did not know enough to not listen to them, much less dare to look into my mind on my own. And it was right there all the time.
Plus, back then, in the 1960s and 1970s in general, Tranquility Meditation (Shamata) was considered personal and private, and it was years later when I actually went to Tibet that I found out that Shamata was open for discussion, and the monks talked about it all the time. It was neither private nor secret.
There was so much ignorance here in America, so much fumbling back then, as we Americans tried to learn to practice dharma, that a funny book could be written. Only, it was not funny at the time, just very confusing to many of us.
Great damage was done I am certain by the attempts to force ‘effort-in-practice’, nothing like the gentleness I have learned from the pith teachings in the more advanced dharma teachings. For example, forcing people to sit for long hours when they did not know what they were doing was not, IMO, helpful, at least not helpful to me. I didn’t like it back then either. It rubbed me the wrong way. It went against everything beautiful that I knew.
On top of that, I had to recover from that forced effort, and all the unneeded effort helped me not at all. It was rather widespread, the insistence and shaming others to sit beyond their means. I witnessed it. I was a victim of it. I also refused to go that route or, better said, that route produced nothing of value for me. There had to be another way.
It was too much a case of the blind leading the blind, as I see it now, with not enough authentic dharma teachers and too many ignorant practitioners who were hiding their ignorance under the veil of secrecy, unable or unwilling to reveal they knew next to nothing. We all knew next to nothing because it was that new to us.
I ultimately had to do it all myself, which is just the point. Realization and enlightenment are by definition 100% do-it-yourself projects. Sooner or later we all are going to have to stop looking outside for guidance and instead ourselves just put in the time to become familiar with the nature of our own mind. That’s the ticket. There is no work-around, no back door.
In my case, being asked to sit quietly and focus on a pebble, twig, or spot on the wall was a non-starter. I had long ago, as a young kid, a dedicated naturalist, mastered and learned to concentrate in a very detailed fashion.
And best of all, I had done it with no forced effort, instead using my natural interest in whatever the subject I was focused on as the driver, in my case Mother Nature, and perhaps one of her critters.
Then being asked to sit and contemplate on a twig or pebble, having been told to do this, the instruction to do this was not natural to me. I was asked very clearly to make effort to achieve this, something I had long ago achieved without effort other than the love of nature and my natural interest, which had long been my only driver. For me, it took no effort beyond that interest.
So, of course I sat on the cushion, and yet balked at having to introduce effort into what for me had been an effortless natural achievement. I could not make that dog hunt, no matter how hard I tried, if only because using effort instead of natural interest was for me an oxymoron.
I tried to learn Shamata (Tranquility Meditation) for a good 32 years and never got anywhere but bored. LOL. My own fault for not fighting back, not standing up to it sooner and calling a spade a spade.
Am I, as they say, the Lone Ranger? Or do others have the same problem I did with learning Tranquility Meditation (Shamata), not wanting to stain with effort something that had always been intuitively effortless?
And I felt the same when through the influence of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche and his western students, asked would-be meditators to sit long sessions, hours, days, weeks, and months, to achieve what?
If all that effort was to allow the mind to come to rest, then what are the myriads of pith texts from the great siddhas that endlessly tell us to ‘not meditate’, but instead suggest non-meditation, involving no effort whatsoever?
Which is correct? Or, more likely, both are correct methods, but perhaps both should be presented and laid out, instead of only accenting the need for determined effort. What happened to wanting to do something because we were interested?
Here I’m just speaking from experience and painful experience at that, 32 years of it, non-stop.
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It’s true that none of us knew what we were doing back then, including our American instructors, especially them. Of course, they were doing the best they could.
Back then, something as simple as basic Tranquility Meditation (Shamata) was considered private or even secret, when in the history of the Tibetan introduction to Shamata was anything but secret, AND in Tibet Shamata was not even presented to beginners until the Common and Extraordinary Preliminaries (Ngöndro) had been completed. That fact was a shocker. Who then overrode that tradition?
That’s the real fault or mistake, not waiting until after the Preliminaries to introduce Shamara (Tranquility Meditaton).
That’s what I found out when I actually went to Tibet a couple times and saw how the thousands of monks who live there behaved, argued, and debated at least about the various preliminaries.
Huh?
How did that happen? That here in America our attempts to learn and practice meditation, our experiences were somehow to be kept secret and not to be discussed?
The reason seems to be: confusion, ignorance, mistake, all the way up the food chain until the bridge between English and Tibetan had to be crossed. Trungpa’s western students highlighted and accented the ‘effort’ to sit Shamata and tended to shame those who balked at doing it.
Or was it a mix of Tibetan and Rinzai Zen that decided that effort was essential? I did sit all day Zazen, and that was all about effort. How is it that the great Indian Mahasiddhas and most of the pith dharma teachings say, “No Meditation.”
Or is it a requirement that first we squeeze our concentration tight and once tight, learn to release it? Grip and let go, grip and let go.
Yet, that begs the question: do we have to grip tighter to then be able to let go? Are we not already tightly gripped, attached through Samsara, certainly enough to appreciate letting go?
All I know is that having gone through the various preliminaries (Common, Extraordinary, and Special), then deity practice, to finally come to Mahamudra and be told don’t meditate. Do not meditate. Instead, do (yet not with effort) non-meditation. That’s what. And don’t even ‘do’ anything. Just “Relax, As It Is.”
Or is all of this about some kind of dharma calisthenics? Dharma exercise is what all this is, limbering up the mind to where we don’t mind anything at all. Why not just say so?
That’s my question and I look for your views on this.
[Midjourney graphic prompted by me.]
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As Bodhicitta is so precious,
May those without it now create it,
May those who have it not destroy it,
And may it ever grow and flourish.
