Putoshan, a dreamy place indeed
Dreams are so easy to leave. We just wake up when we’re rested. It seems quite automatic.
If this life is but a dream, a bubble, a flash of lightning in a summer storm as the Buddha said at the conclusion of The Diamond Sutra, why don’t we just wake up to enlightenment just as easily as we awake from a dream? We don’t have to work at waking up from a dream, it happens all by itself. Do we have to work to wake up from the human dream?
What triggers ordinary awakening? When the body feels rested, it wakes up.
So why doesn’t the big awakening from the human dream occur in the same, practically automatic way?
It does. Enlightenment happens automatically when the mind is rested. And most of us never allow our mind to rest. A daily thirty minute meditation might feel nice, but the mind seems to need more rest than that. So we try two thirty minute meditations, morning and evening, and that doesn’t do the trick either. The mind still won’t wake up.
How much rest does it need? Seven days of sesshin? At The City of Ten Thousand Buddhas, the sesshin day is from 2:00 AM ’til midnight. But thousands of practitioners have sat through thousands of seven day sesshins without a single person waking up.
The problem is that we continue to stir the mind even when we sit. We can attend sesshin after sesshin, and still not wake up because the mind has not been allowed to rest.
When we try to meditate, we are working too hard, using the mind and not letting it rest. So we have to just let go and give the mind its freedom. The natural, default state of the mind is a state of quiet serenity. We have to get out of the way and let the mind settle down on its own without interference from us.
Yogi Berra famously said: “You can’t hit and think at the same time.” He was referring to the art of hitting a baseball, but the maxim applies to the art of meditation as well. To think a thought requires the passage of time, so if we can stay in the present moment, time stops and so do thoughts.
We don’t need to sit for seven consecutive days. A single moment of true present moment awareness puts an end to time. When time stops, thinking stops, and the mind rests.
A fully rested mind will wake up from the human dream. When we cultivate with the ambition of waking up, that ambition prevents the awakening we seek. When we cultivate with no ambition, no desire for enlightenment, wanting nothing, only then do we get everything.
