We’ve talked about the inner workings of meditation: meditation itself, the mind that engages in meditation, and the faculties of mindfulness and awareness. Taken together, these are like a vehicle we use to go on a journey. Today we’ll talk about the map we use to make the journey, and tomorrow we’ll talk about how we learn the map.
These last two emails will be fuller reads, probably ten minutes each.
In these, path and teacher, I’ll put what must be said into as few words as I know how to do. But this really is the heart of the matter, so allow yourself a little more time.
You’ve long heard about mindfulness, and you’ve long heard about meditation. Maybe the specifics of mind and awareness were new to you, but now they all fit into a picture that makes sense, I hope.
But chances are whatever you’ve heard about meditation involved the “how-to” or even the “why-to”. In other words, technique and benefits. Because meditation has been presented to us in the marketplace, it is presented as a product: there is the thing you buy, and the reason you buy that thing.
That’s the world we live in. But it’s not the world we thrive in.
thriving comes from a bigger view
The modern world of the marketplace can easily swallow up the meaning and depth our life could touch. If we do nothing to counter it, we could spend our remaining days shopping for solutions that promise a lot more than they deliver. We will fail to thrive, because our outlook will fail to appreciate the possibilities available for us.
Thriving doesn’t mean vibrating with the energy of a 24 year old when we are in the second half of life. It doesn’t overvalue youth, beauty, wealth, or power. It means understanding what you have no matter your age, even if you are old, nearly broke, and largely invisible. Those aren’t marks against a person who wants to go deeply into the adventure of understanding what we are. The adventure is just as open to them as to anyone. That is thriving, no matter your age.
This world we thrive in takes a deeper and more mature approach to life. It sees and respects the pattern of unfolding perspectives that come with years and knowledge. It accommodates the bigger perspective of a human life, the journey. Not just the pretty bits, but all the bits. If we are ready to take a deeper look at our life and not worry about what “stage” of life we are in, then meditation is exactly what we should be considering. It is the ultimate deep dive into life and meaning.
Meditation has never, ever been about something small and quick. There are no “hacks” or “tips” in the great library of living meditative literature.
Meditation is a product of deep maturity. It has always been something for real adults, elders. It brings us into a very deep and meaningful human perspective, and it sheds light on the confusion felt all around us. It makes us useful, and it increases our compassion for everyone and everything.
meditation is for adults
Meditation reaches beyond what the immature parts of ourselves want. It isn’t a toy to rattle, it isn’t a race to win. Meditation is about timeless reality, and it is for the would-be brave adventurer. Many meditators start from square one: they have never done anything brave, but they genuinely long to before it is too late. And this is their entry point to something marvelous.
It is for the adult within us, not the child within us. The child runs from reality, but the adult looks directly into it. And this takes time. Time is something the adult appreciates, but the child does not.
Yes, it is ironic that the people most willing to put in the time of this great adventure are also those with the least amount of time left to them. But that shouldn’t get in the way.
the perspective that changes our life: path
The path is the most overlooked part of the meditative experience. But the path is where the magic is: it transforms meditation from a technique to an adventure.
The notion of path acknowledges how a meditator has begun the journey out of confusion and fear, which is a different thing than applying remedies and solutions to relieve confusion and fear. A journey out of implies a bigger vision. The path operates with such a vision, supplying a well known map and a friendly atmosphere to travel within.
The path is the journey part of the journey.
what we need: a path (not just a technique)
The path is what comes down to us when we begin our journey. And by “come down” I mean “through history” — not down from a divine source. It’s a human tradition, not a mystical tradition. It does have plenty of mystical expressions, if you are looking for that, but the basics, the stuff everyone begins with, is solid as a rock and as practical as boiled potatoes.
The full path, from beginning to end, has been understood, mapped, trained, celebrated, cherished, and carefully passed from generation to generation from the 5th century BCE, to today. That puts its origin just before the Golden Age of Greece, and well before Imperial Rome.
It’s been fresh and real for 100 generations and counting. It’s older than the bicycle; older than our ways of cooking bread. Older than any form of money or economic structures that rely on them. Older than any modern spoken language.
The path is more human than most of the things we involve ourselves with every day. That is one reason it merits our attention: just to see and understand what is so compelling that it has endured, and thrived, for thousands of years, through every type of change and upheaval, without being substantially altered.
the journey is more than just living and dying
Reflecting on our lives, we see a journey from birth to death. While much happens in between, without meditation this journey may not unfold anything beyond a biological process.
Maybe it’s a journey of some kind. But it could be a journey into an understanding that removes fear and confusion. That’s the journey of the meditator. It takes place on a path.
People new to meditation often think meditation is a technique. And the path of meditation does involve techniques, but they are largely interchangeable. As long as you have a coherent path along which your training moves you, the techniques are all going to have passed the test of time. Practices that were too difficult, or involved too many complexities of lifestyle have been put aside in favor of what really works for people year after year. We have the best of everything that has been tried.
journey + dharma = hero’s journey
What is important, what makes or breaks your efforts, is the content of your path — the teachings — the knowledge that meditation makes you fit to incorporate.
Meditation gets you in shape to understand something bigger and vaster than anything you have understood before. The traditional word for this is dharma and it means the teachings that lead us out of fear and confusion.
Remember how we said meditation is a practice that leads us out of fear and confusion? Well, that requires that your meditation is guided along a path that leads out of fear and confusion.
And that’s a major qualification. You want a path out of fear and confusion? So do I. But not every path leads out, most lead in. And that means our path has to be guided by knowledge of fear and confusion and the journey out of it. And that, in a word, is dharma.
samsara: the endless cycle
Most paths we have in our life lead directly into fear and confusion. That’s the problem.
Everywhere you look people are clamoring for you to follow their lead. But where will they lead you? Almost certainly into another neighborhood of fear and confusion. They don’t actually have a path for you that does anything new, just the same old fear and confusion all over again. The word for that, from the tradition, is samsara.
hooray for the path
The legacy of dharma teachings is: a path has been found that leads us out of samsara.
This path is what teachers uphold so that people like us can find it too. They train to a very high standard of meditative expertise and knowledge of the dharma so that the next generation (us) has access to the path. People dedicate lifetimes to ensuring that they can support others in this journey. And they’ve been doing it in every single generation for nearly 3000 years.
We don’t need to waste time “reinventing” a path, or “finding our own path.” There is no “your own path.” That is just the trickery of samsara luring you back into another sorrowful round.
Trying to customize a path to suit our preferences is recklessness. We have nothing to add to the path, we are not in a position to improve it — rather it is in a position to improve us. That can be a turnoff to some, but the desire to leave our mark on everything is part of the cycle of suffering. The path doesn’t accommodate anyone’s graffiti.
This path is outlined and made clear through the teachings of dharma. Dharma is like a guidebook through a densely overgrown forest. The guidebook has two functions.
- It informs you that a path exists to guide you safely through this forest.
- It gives you everything you need to find it, day after day, moment after moment until you are in the clear.
This guidebook (dharma) is so clear and responsive that after a year or so upon it you know with confidence that you are no longer walking back into fear and confusion, but out of it. The dharma is a terrific guidebook. The first years of practice often involve surprise, even awe, at just how clear and coherent the dharma is. How did we not know of this before?
the guidebook for future heroes
The dharma tells you what to look for at various stages of your journey, to confirm that you are on your way to freedom. It also tells you what to look for as signs that you’ve become lost again. In general, it teaches you the skill of knowing what to align yourself with, and what to distance yourself from, what to do and what to avoid, what to trust and what not to trust. In Tibetan this is called langdor and means what to accept and what to reject.
This is a similar skill to what any expert in any field has: they know better than the amateurs around them where the opportunities are sure to be, and where the hidden pitfalls are likely to be.
The dharma has always been considered the crowning knowledge of a lifetime. At the beginning of our journey we have very small ideas of what is possible in our life. But as we grow through meditation, our vision expands, and we come to see far beyond what we could have seen at the outset. We look back and realize we were thinking like pets, not like people. Pets just lay on carpets and mosey to their bowl. That’s all they want, and that’s all they get.
Dharma expands our outlook of what is possible for ourselves dramatically. We outgrow everything we ever thought, and our heart beats like a big bass drum rather than like chopsticks against a tin pan. The dharma opens our eyes to the existence of the path, and then the path stabilizes us stage by stage as we grow beyond our small worldview of fear and confusion.
freedom comes from a path of dharma practice
Nobody attains freedom without both the path and the collected knowledge that guides the path, which we have identified as dharma. Without these two, we would just be imitating real meditators. One of the great masters of the 12th century, Sakya Pandita, said that those who meditate without dharma are simply breathing like pigs on a meditation cushion. They achieve nothing whatsoever in their minutes or hours of doing so, but are tempted to imagine that they have.
Another great meditation master, Jamgon Kongtrul said that those who study dharma without meditating are like misers unwilling to use their wealth to benefit themselves or anyone else. They live like paupers on a mountain of wealth, not even taking care of their own health.
The true legacy is to practice meditation with good instructions along a path supported by a living tradition. This is typically referred to simply as dharma practice.
knowledge means no longer having to pretend
Meditators on a path of knowledge avoid the delusion and arrogance of having to make up “spiritual experiences” or any other falsifications that appease them.
On a path imbued with genuine knowledge, you’ll never pretend again. You’ll be an authentic person on an authentic path heading toward a full evolution of authentic wisdom.
And when we reflect on the incredible consistency of practice through the centuries, and the variety of excellent practice opportunities all over the world right now, why would we waste time with a pathless effort? Why spin our wheels in samsara and pretend that the next shiny thing will make it all better?
Samsara is called an ocean of suffering. Wherever you paddle, through whatever storm you face, you only end up in another world of suffering. The path of dharma and the practice of meditation takes you out of this ocean.
Oh, the tears, the tears of this pointless, unnecessary suffering. Much better to practice dharma.
where to look, what to do
You just don’t need to keep that stupid cycle of suffering alive. You can end it. Many have.
If you want a classical, traditional training, you can investigate any meditation group representing the traditions of Theravada, Zen, or Vajrayana dharma traditions. These all maintain the fullness of a legitimate path.
I have trained a little in all of these, but primarily in the last, the Vajrayana, specifically in the meditation paths of Mahamudra and Dzogchen (awareness based teachings with deep history). I know of a dozen communities all over the world that are flourishing, welcoming, and reliable. You don’t need to wonder if this stuff is alive and well. It is.
Start with Finding Ground, and you’ll have everything you need to move forward.
we’re almost to the end!
So now we’ve covered the four important inner components: meditation, mind, mindfulness, and awareness. These are the aspects of the journey that we engage directly, day after day. They are personal activities, inner things.
Today we introduced a bigger perspective, the path, which includes the body of wisdom that makes it potent, the dharma.
The path of meditation is the visible footprint of dharma right in the middle of the confusion of the world.
The journey is built from the very stuff of our everyday life. It doesn’t involve becoming someone else or acting/dressing/speaking differently. It begins right here, right now, before we even do the dishes or vacuum the stairs. The path threads through all of our day-to-day experiences, our journey is strung together carefully over the course of our lifetime.
tomorrow
Tomorrow’s email will honor and acknowledge the world that has made this possible for people like us for generation after generation. Teachers.
These are the women and men trained to uphold the powerful teachings and practices for the sole purpose of keeping them available for people like you and me. Every student has a teacher. And every teacher was once a student. Every teacher I have had has spent a great deal of time learning with their teachers and then sharing with students like me what their teachers taught, did or said that made an impact.
We are students. We are one half of the experience. The other half are the teachers of the path. And that will be our topic tomorrow.
See you then,
Jeffrey