The Best Buddhist Writing 2010 - Melvin McLeod [80]
In the same way, when we pay attention to our breath, body sensations, and to the awareness that arises, then all the illusions, suffering, confusion, sorrow, and personal issues, all of this begins to dissipate. We see that all of these experiences are born of delusion. This is the sense of “I.” “I am real. I am truly existent.” Everything is gone except this “I,” this sense of self. Then, when we continue meditating, the sense of self also goes away. When we just keep meditating, when we just remain in that present awareness and observe, then the self dissolves too. When the self dissolves there is just pure awareness. When the self completely collapses, there is this inexpressible, simple yet profound and ecstatic, compassionate awareness. Nobody is there. “I” is completely nonexistent in that place. There is no separation between samsara, bad circumstances, and nirvana, good circumstances, and there is nobody pursuing the path or chasing after enlightenment. In that moment we realize the essence of the Buddha’s teaching.
I’ll tell you a bit of my personal story. When I first went to the monastery I had many fantasies. I thought that it was going to be a journey full of visions, revelations, and angels with flowers descending upon me. Then one of the first prayers that we learned was called the Heart Sutra. The Heart Sutra can be very dry to those who haven’t realized its true meaning. It is not like some of those beautiful, ecstatic, mystical verses. The line goes, “There’s no nose. There’s no mouth. There’s no tongue. There’s no sound, no smell, no taste, no touch.” Anyway, we kept reciting the Heart Sutra every day until we had completely memorized it. More than memorizing it, we were able to recite it so fast it was unbelievable. Then one day many years after memorizing and reciting the Heart Sutra, I finally came close to a sense of affinity with the meaning of the Heart Sutra and the meaning of this notion that there is nothing there in the ultimate sense. There is not even the nothingness. This truth is the great emptiness. Having even a glimpse of that understanding can be very transformative for the rest of our life.
The very essence of all spiritual teaching is about dissolvingattachment to the self, and about dissolving every attachment to form, sound, smell, taste, touch, good and bad ideas, and all concepts. It is about dropping all attachment without exception. In Buddhism we often say that one has to be a renunciant in order to bring about awakening or complete liberation in one lifetime. When we say “renunciant” we are not really speaking about becoming monks or nuns officially or externally but more about becoming monks or nuns internally. The ultimate way of becoming a renunciant is by giving up attachment internally, attachment to everything, not just attachment to samsara and the things that we don’t like. We give up attachment to nirvana and the things that we love too, because when we are attached to nirvana that is just another way of lingering. It’s another way of sustaining this flimsy ego. Therefore, we have to give up attachment to nirvana and to every form of ego because ego takes all kinds of forms. Sometimes ego can even take the form of spiritual phenomena.
Believe it or not, we often use the spiritual or religious path to construct ego identity, even when this is not conscious at the time. That is not a surprise, since the function of neurosis is to suppress awareness of reality. Fear, pride, exclusion, even bigotry—not only are they far from being dissolved, rather they’re being well maintained. This is what we’ve been doing for thousands of years, since the dawn of civilization, and it is still one of our favorite behaviors, not in any one particular circle, but in every religious tradition. This may continue indefinitely