My friend Bob has a knack for over-hearing conversations. His job requires him to travel alone several times a month and he often has stories about conversations he has heard on the plane. My favorite one is about two elderly women that Bob shared the triple seat of a 737 with.
The plane was making the short flight from Rochester to New York City and several complications arose delaying take-off by over an hour. While the other passengers grumbled and squirmed in their seats, these two women sat calmly knitting exchanging an occasional remark. Finally the announcement was made that they should prepare for take-off. The women stuffed their knitting into their handbags and stored the bags securely underneath the seat in front of them. As the plane began to move, one of the women said to the other very matter-of-factly: "Well, Betty, in the best case scenario we'll get there in about an hour. In the worst case we won't get there at all!" The other woman chuckled.
I love this story because it shows a wonderful and healthy acceptance of the risk that is inherent in living, and of the idea that life is what happens to you while you are making other plans. I doubt that either of these women were Buddhists but they nevertheless had expressed a Buddhist way of looking at life.
Life is what it is and as the Spanish say, "Que sera sera," which means "What will be, will be." Is this what the Buddha believed? Not exactly. It is more accurate to say that this is what the Buddha KNEW.
Let's start at the beginning. 2500 years ago, the Buddha is said to have attained enlightenment. But contrary to what we've always heard, many Buddhist teachers say that isn't exactly right either. More to the point, the Buddha was awakened. In his book, Buddhism Without Beliefs, Steven Batchelor explains "the Buddha was not a mystic. His awakening wasn't a shattering insight into a transcendent truth that revealed to him the mysteries of God. He did not claim to have had an experience that granted him privileged esoteric knowledge of how the universe ticks. Only as Buddhism became more of a religion were such grandiose claims imputed to his awakening."
What happened to the Buddha was that he "woke up and smelled the coffee." He awoke to how things were. And he understood that much of the pain and unhappiness people experience comes from an inability to live in peace with this reality. He understood that by being aware of the true nature of things (including ourselves), we would lead self-aware and purposeful lives that didn't harm others.
Buddhism really became a religion later on as people added to the Buddha's insight. And an unfortunate consequence of these additions and embellishments is that the concept of awakening attained evermore mystic qualities, and thus it became less and less accessible to average people. Today, most of us think of awakening as an incredibly rare occurrence attained only by those who completely detach themselves from daily life and cloister themselves in monasteries spending their days in silence, sitting on cushions, meditating and doing needlework. Not a life many of us are able to lead and in truth even though we all have days during which this lifestyle sounds appealing, most of us really wouldn't want to give up the lives we lead for these detached existences. The good news is that in order to find peace in the Buddha's
message, we don't have to do this. And we also don't need to "believe" anything, for the Buddha's original insight was about knowing and doing, not believing. And the idea that Buddhism is about accepting mystic, complex and often illogical beliefs gets in the way of many people who would otherwise reap benefits from the insights of the Buddha. Actually, this can be said of the original message of the historical Jesus as well, but we have already done Christian pathway.
What the Buddha awakened to was the idea that anguish is an inherent part of life, but suffering does not have to be. Anguish is the result of our longing for life to be other than it is. In fact, he realized that most of us live in a constant state of longing for reality to be something other than what it is and thus construct our own realities in our minds. If you are tempted to think "I don't do that," I invite you to think again.
What are you REALLY thinking about right now? Have you had a stray thought since this sermon began? Was a memory triggered? - an association sparked? Have you had any thoughts about what you need to do after the service today or what awaits you at work tomorrow? Have you looked at your watch or wondered what your kids are doing in Religious Education right now? Have you wondered where so-and-so is today, when the newsletter deadline is or thought about what the Susan B. Anthony Lounge would look like with a huge window which looked into the memorial garden? Did these questions jolt you into the realization that you haven't really been listening to me? It is a constant surprise to those of us who preach sermons to be thanked or rebuked at the door after the service for the things we DIDN'T actually say.
Whenever the mind is engaged in this way it is longing for a reality other than the one it has. How aware are you of how things are RIGHT now? Let's try an exercise:
Close your eyes and don't cheat! Who is sitting next to you? Who is behind you? Who is in front of you? Who else is sitting in your row? What am I wearing this morning? Who is the service leader this morning? Can you smell anything in here? If so, what? What art work currently hangs on the walls? What color is the order of service today? Right now, is anyone sitting at the piano? What are you thinking about right now? Is your mind someplace other than this room RIGHT now?
Now, open your eyes and take a second to see how many of my questions you answered right.
Perhaps you never thought about it like this before, but whenever your mind is wandering like that, you are constructing your own false reality. You are longing for something other than what IS. You are asking reality to be something that it is not. And this is where Buddhist practice starts. Buddhist practice asks us to abandon this falsely constructed reality and engage things as they really are, for at its original inception, Buddhism was about practice, not beliefs. As Batchelor points out, the Buddha didn't see himself as the savior of the world but rather more as a healer, and his insight as a diagnosis to which he had the solution. His diagnosis was that we suffer greatly from wanting things to be other than they are and the solution was to cultivate mindfulness.
Mindfulness is an acute attention to the present moment - being fully present in the here and now. The Buddha gave this example: "A monk knows: when he is going, 'I am going.' He knows when he is standing, 'I am standing.' He knows when he is sitting, 'I am sitting' and he knows when he is lying down, 'I am lying down.'
Most of us do these things unconsciously while our minds are really on something else.
The first year that I taught school, I had a long commute on country roads. At first I found the trip interesting and I'd pay attention to the various. landmarks I'd pass: a dilapidated old barn with a weathervane which pointed toward the ground due to the extreme sag of the roof, the sign that told me I had just crossed from Cincinnatus into Lower Cincinnatus, and the set of four, shiny blue grain silos that my uncle had told me were worth a million dollars each. But as I became accustomed to the scenery, I began to daydream the trip away. By March, I was scaring myself by arriving home with absolutely no recollection of the trip at all. It would seem that I had only come awake as I turned onto my street, yet I had made the trip safely. Where had my mind been? I'd wonder. I'd try to recall passing the old barn or crossing into Lower Cincinnatus and realize that I couldn't.
The Buddha understood that most of our lives are like this. We spend most of them in a fog like I was in on my mindless drives home from school or actively wishing that our reality was different than it is. This way of being serves us well in day-to-day existence because it helps to keep unpleasant thoughts at bay, but it leaves us totally unprepared and defenseless when we are confronted with something that overwhelms our ability to daydream it away such as the death of a loved one. Then we are caught in the anguish of the moment with no experience at handling, dwelling with and embracing pain and sadness.
Those of us with particularly strong resolves can enter into denial which really only delays the pain and keeps it fresh until the day that our ability to deny is overwhelmed. My stepfather has taught me a lot about this. His first wife died of cancer and his daughter
drowned when she was only two years old. Yet, mentioning either of these people is absolutely taboo. He lives his life as if they had
never existed. One day I slipped and mentioned his wife and I saw that his denial had preserved the pain so completely that it was as fresh as it was the day Nellie had died. In a sense, my stepfather lives his entire life wishing for a reality other than the one he has.
What the Buddha urged us to do is to "stay with" what we are feeling and experiencing. If we are sad, we should simply feel sad. If we are angry, we should simply feel angry, and so on. By doing this, we will come to understand that our thoughts and emotions are fickle and transient. They come and go, and while it feels as if we are one with them, we discover if we allow ourselves to really experience them, that we stand apart from them. They are like being caught in a storm. While we are in the storm, it is dictating our feelings and actions. But we don't come to believe that we ARE the storm or that the storm defines us. People like my stepfather are hiding in a hollow tree while the storm rages around them. The Buddha taught us that the storm will pass if you stay out in it long enough. And you come to realize this by doing it, not by believing it.
This spring is the twentieth anniversary of the eruption of Mt. St. Helens in Washington State. When this volcano blew, it leveled everything for miles around. Pristine forests, an entire lake and a town all vanished. At first it looked like the site of a nuclear bomb blast and it was devoid of any signs of life. But it didn't take long for life to return, and today there is a thriving eco-system. It is much different than it was in 1980, but many people say it has its own kind of beauty. Additionally, the event has provided scientists with a rare opportunity to study how eco-systems recover from disaster.
I heard an interview this week on public radio with a woman who had grown up in the vanished town of Spirit Lake. She said it took her a long time to gather the courage to go back and that when she
did, she had to let go of her memories of how it once was and develop a new relationship to how it is NOW. She now finds it beautiful and enjoys her visits to the area. However, she said that many people from Spirit Lake have never gone back and prefer to remember things as they were in 1980. They still talk about how life would be now, if only the volcano hadn't erupted. But, it DID erupt, and while they are stuck in twenty-year-old anguish over what might have been, this woman has moved through the grief and sadness and has established a relationship with how things are and she has found serenity and beauty in this relationship.
This was the central message of the Buddha. Embrace things as they ARE. Abandon the pain of longing for what might have been. Or, in the words of Marcel Proust: "We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves after a journey in the wilderness, which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world."
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