The Best Buddhist Writing 2010 - Melvin McLeod [81]
People always ask me what it means to be Buddhist. My reply is, “It means being nobody.” The true spiritual path is not about becoming. It is about not becoming. When we let go of this futile effort to be or become somebody, freedom and enlightenment take care of themselves. We see that we are inherently divine already and we are enchanted to see how effortlessly liberation unfolds.
Ultimately we must dissolve all of the defense mechanisms of our ego. This includes the spiritual ones too, because sometimes ego manifests in different forms, in camouflage. Therefore, true liberation requires the complete renunciation and transcendence of our ego, the self. We might think, “This is the same old message, this idea about eradicating attachment to the self. I’ve heard it many times. More than that, I have failed at it many times. Actually I came here looking for a different solution. I still want enlightenment but I want a different method.” Ego says, “I still want enlightenment but without this whole business about eradicating self-attachment. I will do anything except that. Please give me a break. Let’s bargain a little.”
Ego likes to bargain, to have an argument with the truth. “Ask me to do anything. I will jump off a cliff. I will restrain my sexual impulses. I will do anything. But don’t ask me to do this. I can’t do this because if I do I will die into the great unknowable truth.” Once again, we start wiggling around this last assignment of dissolving the self or melting into what is. Actually there is no way to bargain with the truth, emptiness. Whatever we call it—truth, emptiness—dissolving into it is the only way. And the more we realize the truth, the more we realize that there isn’t any other way.
The only way we can bring about perfect, total awakening, right now in this moment, is by dissolving the self on the spot. But there are two ways to do that: a painful and an ecstatic way of transcending. The ecstatic way is known as the path of bliss. The reason that we call it the path of bliss is because it involves an effortless way to go beyond the self. How do we dissolve the self blissfully? When we try to wage a war as a means of eradicating ego’s empire we won’t be very successful in the end.
As spiritual practitioners, especially as Buddhists, we have been declaring war on the ego and blaming it for all of our problems and confusions. Ego is our scapegoat. We blame everything on our ego as if it were a separate entity. We have a war with ego and sometimes we feel that we are winning the war and sometimes we feel that ego is winning the war. Sometimes the very self that is fighting ego is actually ego and that’s even trickier. But sometimes we can just look directly into our consciousness and ask, “Who is fighting against ego?” Often everything collapses right there. Therefore, the path of bliss is really not about declaring war on the ego in order to get rid of anything we see as a stumbling block on the road to our imagined final destination. Rather it is about allowing the self to dissolve spontaneously by giving up nothing and going nowhere.
How do we do that? There are many, many ways. But in the end, it turns out that these many ways are ultimately the same. Sometimes we just rest and that is all that we need to do. In Buddhist teachings, meditation is defined as the art of resting. When we rest, we pay attention to our breath. We pay attention to our body sensations. At first we see a huge empire of concepts and ideas, but if we keep paying attention to that present awareness, that peace and serenity, then the empire of ego, that