QUESTION: Is enlightenment a scientific reality? I keep reading about experiences of expansiveness, bliss, etc., that people report having had during meditation or so-called near death experiences; but doesn't science explain these as almost accidental phenomena of brain functioning rather than a perception of some deeper, underlying reality of existence?

There's a large and growing literature on this subject. Some of the most significant early work was set in motion by my late teacher, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who brought Transcendental Meditation to the world (and also held a masters degree in physics). In the 60's, Maharishi encouraged some of his students to get graduate degrees in fields such as neurophysiology and study the effects of TM, measuring such functions as metabolism, galvanic skin resistance, EEG, and many others. Eventually a breakthrough paper was published in Scientific American, and this imprimatur of scientific legitimacy led many thousands of people to learn to meditate. Various studies over the years corroborated the idea that meditation produces a fourth state of consciousness, distinct from waking, dreaming, and dreamless sleep: a state of restful alertness, in which the mind and body are in a deep state of peace, as in dreamless sleep, yet alert to experience this peace, as in wakefulness.

Many centuries earlier, yogis in India had anticipated this finding by calling the meditative state turiya, "the fourth," and explained that, since in this state the mind finds a conscious peace in which it's not caught up in the boundaries of the waking world, it's an experience of boundlessness, a glimpse of enlightenment. They also described a fifth state, in which the fourth becomes permanent, even as waking, dreaming, and sleeping continue to alternate - that is, stabilized enlightenment. Coming back to the twentieth century, other studies in the wake of the Scientific American article indicated that the long-term effects of meditation include normalized blood pressure, quicker reaction time, higher measures of positive personality traits like flexibility and sense of humor, lower measure of negative traits like anxiety and hostility, even higher grade point average in students. All these tendencies are consistent with gradual growth toward the fifth state.

More recently, the Dalai Lama has engaged in extensive dialogue with scientists and "loaned" them some of his most advanced monks as research subjects. In some of these studies, the monks practiced specialized forms of meditation in which they project love and compassion to all sentient beings. Sure enough, the parts of the brain associated with those emotions lit up like a Christmas tree. (Yeah, I know, that's not quite a scientific expression.)

Just this week I've heard some especially impressive testimony in this area from someone who, as far as I know, has had no dealings with meditation per se: Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist who had a stroke that led her to a blissful, expansive, enlightened perspective on life and death, brain function, and our sense of who we are. To see and hear her story, as presented at the recent TED Conference, click here. (Note: Give the video plenty of time to load before clicking "Play," as it otherwise seems to have a tendency to stall. Or better yet, click "Video to iTunes" to download it - you'll probably want to watch it more than once.)

QUESTION: I am a great fan of your commonsense approach to Buddhism and would value your advice in a personal matter. I have been treated for post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and anxiety for several years now, and, thanks to therapy, was able to rebuild my life and feel better. I also recently attempted to resume my meditation practice after fifteen years of interruption. I was discouraged in this intention, however, by an experience I had a few weeks ago. I was on a train to New York City and, while having flashbacks of my traumatic life there, got overwhelmed by intense anxiety. Suddenly, I felt totally dissociated from my body, my feelings, my personality, from any human interests in general. I felt like a consciousness floating in space, unrelated to anything human. It felt terrifying, as if I would never again be able to participate in life, as if nothing would ever matter to me again. My thinking was unimpaired, so I tried to bring myself back by reminding myself of my children, of things that I love, but it was all useless. The feeling lasted about 10-20 minutes, then gradually subsided, and I felt that I was sinking back into my body, back to the human sphere. My therapist recognized this experience as dissociation caused by extreme anxiety, while I recalled existentialist philosophers, like Martin Heidegger, who claimed that anxiety annihilates the world and opens us to a more genuine existential experience. I literally experienced this nothingness, but there was nothing positive there, just sheer terror. Now I'm afraid to continue my meditation practice, of initiating another "bad trip." How do you think I should proceed?

I would encourage you not to give up on meditation because of your one frightening experience. As you may know (and can confirm with a quick Google search), there's quite a bit of research and clinical work being done now on treating PTSD with meditation, so it certainly shouldn't be assumed that meditation would make the condition worse.

Given your fears of another dissociative experience, it would probably be a good idea to use meditative approaches that are very grounding, practiced with the eyes open, such as Vipassana or Gesture of Awareness. Such techniques work by finding the experience of presence in ordinary, moment-to-moment sensory perception, as contrasted with those (such as Transcendental Meditation) that cultivate a meditative state separate from the world of the senses.

Having said that, I would also suggest that you take another look at the experience you've described. You say, "I literally experienced this nothingness, but there was nothing positive there, just sheer terror." You're right that in nothingness there's nothing positive; but, by definition, there can't be anything negative either, including terror. The fear that you experienced is not inherent in nothingness. Fear is simply a (common) reaction to that which is unfamiliar, that which is unlike anything we know - and nothing is absolutely unlike everything.

At the same time, on the deepest level of truth, nothing and everything are equivalent. In the words of the Heart Sutra, "Form is no other than emptiness." To experience this equivalence is to be liberated, to perceive the essential boundlessness (emptiness) of everyday boundaries (form). This may sound scary, especially to someone who has had experiences of dissociation, but that fear is addressed by the Heart Sutra's very next line: "Emptiness is no other than form." That is, emptiness is not some separate, self-existent black hole into which we can slip; it exists only as a quality of form. It is the liberating quality of the forms of ordinary life. It's the "genuine existential experience" of which philosophers like Heidegger had some intuitive sense. Yes, occasional, unsought, unsystematic encounters with it (which those philosophers probably had) might have resulted from anxiety, which might have distorted the experience to make it seem world-annihilating. But the calm, clear collective experience of millions of meditators over thousands of years verifies that it doesn't actually annihilate the world, only its binding influence, its illusory absoluteness. It makes the weight of the world weightless. As I once heard my old teacher, the late Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, say, "It's just nothing - but there's something very good about it."

If this sounds a bit heady, don't worry about it for now. Just find a meditation practice that you can do comfortably, ideally with the guidance of someone who is both a psychiatrist or psychotherapist and an experienced meditation guide, someone who inspires a feeling of confidence and safety. (If needed, I may be able to help you find such a person in your area.) And even if you were to find meditation too challenging at the moment, remember that meditation is only one-eighth of the liberative path as the Buddha laid it out. If you just got up every morning and, as conscientiously as possible, practiced the other seven aspects of the path (right view, intention, speech, conduct, livelihood, effort, and mindfulness), you would be making tremendous progress toward integration of your life - and toward the day when you can comfortably meditate.

I hope this is helpful. Don't hesitate to write back if there's any further way I can help.

QUESTION: I was widowed and got remarried a year and a half ago. Last week, my wife and I sat down together with a financial planner for the first time to try to get ourselves on the same page. What became very clear is that I have some very strong attitudes and beliefs (attachments?) about money that end up dictating many of my behaviors in this area. In fact, "Money=Love" (or is it "Love=Money"?) is, I think, a core belief of mine that manifests itself in lots of ways, many of which don't appear to be directly connected with money. As I start thinking about my relationship with money, it feels like there's stuff all interwoven together; it's a real Gordian knot of entanglements. I'm actually excited about working with this financial advisor and hopefully letting go of some old stuff. I'm not exactly sure what my question is, but I'd very much like to hear your thoughts (and Buddhist perspectives) on money.

The Buddha was quite savvy and practical about the role of money in our lives, including the part it plays in our relationships. (People who think of him only as the iconic monastic figure are sometimes surprised to learn this; they forget that he was the son of a wealthy noble family.) When a businessman came to him for guidance, the Buddha gave him advice about prudent conduct of his business, including the suggestion that he give his wife plenty of responsibility in keeping his accounts - and that he keep her happy by buying her lots of jewelry.

I sometimes think of money as a sea that sloshes up against the shores of all our lives. Virtually all of our activities - our work, our play, our consumer choices, our gestures of affection, our political activism - find economic expression. When you buy a pair of sneakers, your purchase is an economic act that sends ripples of consequences through the entire world, affecting not only the merchant who sells them to you and the Asian factory worker who makes them, but all sentient beings. So to write off money as detrimental to, or unrelated to, the enlightenment journey is short-sighted. Certainly money can be a powerful distraction from our awareness work, but so can anything. In a sense, the whole point of the Eightfold Path is to take those fields of life that could be regarded as distractions or obstacles on the path (speech, conduct, livelihood, etc.) and use them as the path itself. The idea is to take the very things that have entangled us in suffering and confusion and use them as a means of liberating ourselves, along with all those affected by us, from suffering and confusion.

It makes sense, then, to apply such a perspective to money. Here's the problem, and the great opportunity: Since money is so intimately bound up with all our human activities, it tends to become a field of expression for all our human neuroses, all the fixations that prevent us from resting in open awareness of the natural perfection of each moment just as it is, and the frictionless flow in which we can share that openness with others. As you've suggested, one such fixation is the equating of money with love. This particular fixation can create endless cycles of neurotic interaction. We all intuit (correctly) that the love we want to give and receive is, by nature, limitless, since it is the outflow of our own essential nature, which is limitless existence-awareness. Our economic resources - the money we can spend on our spouses and children and other loved ones - are necessarily limited. So, if we're playing the game of Money=Love, it's a rigged game. We can never give or receive enough cash or cars or toys or shoes to express the love we want to share.

So I think a useful first step might be just to acknowledge this situation, to know that it's a no-win game and so let go of any expectation that we can ever win it. Next might be to cultivate ways of, so to speak, marinating our awareness in the pure experience of love, separate from any particular relationship or act. This can be done through the simple practice of natural meditation, of just sitting with wide-open awareness and resting moment by moment in whatever presents itself within the sensory fields. Such practice, when done regularly, leads to a profound appreciation of the richness - and I use that term deliberately - of whatever we're already experiencing, right now, and right now, and right now. As you grow in this appreciation (this love) of the beams of afternoon sunlight that filter through your kitchen window, the dull roar of the refrigerator motor, and whatever else happens along, you naturally become less fixated on whether the tie your kid gives your for Christmas is something you'll wear, or whether he spent enough money on it to demonstrate his love. As everything gradually becomes infinitely satisfying, you gradually become less hung up on whether this or that object, or this or that act of giving, is satisfactory. You're already rich because your awareness is rich. (Haven't you known people who, though wealthy financially, are just as pinched and narrow in their awareness and appreciation as ever?)

In turn, that process of meditative appreciation softens up the money-related neurotic patterns (and, for that matter, all the other neurotic patterns) in which we've been entangled. Certainly it can also be very helpful to consciously examine those patterns and deliberately let go of those that we realize are causing unhappiness, but regular meditation, by softening them up first, makes the patterns more workable; it's sort of like warming up before exercising.

We can also take some guidance here from the Six Paramitas (usually translated as "Transcendental Virtues" or "Perfections"), the six classical practices for transforming our life into one of enlightenment. The one that's always listed first is dana, generosity. Not only with your money, but with your time, your energy, your talents and resources, when in doubt give more. Leave the waitress a bigger tip. Spend more time with your kids. Give your spouse more help with the housework. The mechanics of dana are simple but powerful: Every time you act selfishly (I want the big piece of cake) you reinforce the illusion that you are a finite self, separate from the infinite. Every time you act selflessly (Please, you take the big piece), you poke another hole in that illusion.

Again, all this generosity becomes easier, more spontaneous, as we grow into the experience that every moment, just as it is (say, getting the smaller piece of cake, or none at all), is infinitely OK. And the experience of infinite OK-ness tends to become more spontaneously present as we practice more generosity (as well as the other five Paramitas - a topic for another time). Generosity and enlightenment: each grasps the bootstraps of the other, and together they lift us up.

QUESTION: In his book “Dzogchen,” the Dalai Lama states (p. 33): "In an experiential manner, the student can be directly introduced by an authentic master to the very nature of his or her mind as pure awareness. If the master is able to effect this introduction, the student then experiences all of these adventitious layers of conceptual thought as permeated by the pure awareness which is their nature, so that these layers of ordinary thoughts and concepts need not continue." In your humble opinion, is Lama _________ such an "authentic master"? Or can anyone skilled enough perform this task for his/her students? [Note: Lama's name omitted to keep this from being personal. - DS]

What makes you think my opinion is humble?

Actually, of course, it's very humbling, or perhaps "foolhardy" would be a better word, to venture an opinion on any topic where H. H. the Dalai Lama has weighed in. But, for whatever it's worth, I'll share my imperfect understanding and highly incomplete experience.

In Dzogchen tradition, the awakening process has three phases or aspects: direct recognition, not remaining in doubt, and continuing in the state. The first phase, direct recognition of the nature of one's own mind as pure, boundless existence, is indeed classically associated with direct introduction by a master. But because pure, boundless existence is all there is – because we're surrounded by it and we are it - the recognition can be triggered by anyone or anything, if you're ready for it. If you're not ready, you can hear the highest master in the world give the most profound of pith instructions, and she might as well be saying "Supercallifragilisticexpialidocious." If you're ready, "Supercallifragilisticexpialidocious" might do it as well as anything else.

As Hamlet says, "The readiness is all." The Zen tradition is full of stories about guys who get their introduction to the nature of mind from the cawing of a crow or the casual remark of a butcher in the marketplace. The experience you seek could come when you least expect it, from the unlikeliest source. As Emerson said, "Everything in the universe goes by indirection. There are no straight lines." Authentic masters don't have any exclusive corner on the nature-of-mind market: again, that nature is all there is, in every moment of your seeing, hearing, smelling, etc. As the Beatles once sang, "When you find yourself in the thick of it / Help yourself to a bit of what is all around you." Certainly a master can point it out more reliably than a crow, and can do it more impeccably for peccable schlumps like us whose clarity and receptivity may be sketchy.

I just don't think it's useful for us schlumps to spend a lot of time trying to judge the status of a master. On what basis? That's a bit like an inchworm trying to measure a mountain. If you've achieved such an elevation that you can do that kind of measurement, then you probably don't need a master.

So, sure, as far as I can tell, Lama _________ has the goods. But I can't tell very far. And the goods are everywhere. Pay attention.

QUESTION: Please allow me to make some comments about your review of Charles Genoud's new book "Gesture of Awareness" that appeared in Tricycle recently ["In-Body Experience," Winter 2007]. Mr. Genoud describes a technique that encourages the practitioner to notice presence by directing attention to the body and its sensations. This is wonderful. What concerns me about your review is that it seems to characterize these techniques as a way to transcend the "web" we tangle ourselves in, i.e., our mind and its activities. Could it be that we have demonized the mind in the process of deifying the body? Many Buddhist writers have identified the mind and its movements (thoughts, projections, etc.) as "confusion," "story lines," "neuroses," "samsara," or a "tangled web." The implication is that this aspect of mind is negative and that it must be rectified. The body, on the other hand, is seen as the key to moving beyond the slavery of the mind. But the mind is as useful as the body for revealing our true nature. It is a mistake to say that awareness of sensations is any more real, profound, or true than awareness of the movements of the mind. Why do dharma teachers (and religious teachers of all stripes) insist on exhorting us to avoid the bad and seek out the good? For some Christians the bad is the devil. For many Buddhists the bad is discursive mind. Real freedom is recognizing all things, even our so-called confusion, as being inseparable from wisdom.

Sure - on the ultimate level, confusion is inseparable from wisdom, but then why are you trying to straighten out my confusion?

I think you're quite right to say that it's a mistake to denigrate the mind. In contemplative practice generally, and particularly on a nondual path such as Dzogchen, it's a contradiction and a danger to make a good/bad duality of body and mind. In fact, I cringe when I hear meditators (or meditation teachers) refer to the "monkey mind," usually with the implicit assumption that the naughty monkey must be caught with a big net and chained securely to a tree. When a student uses that phrase, I respond that I like monkeys - they're charming, playful, curious critters. A monkey swings from branch to branch restlessly but not aimlessly. As soon as it finds a banana, it settles right down. Nondual teachings such as Dzogchen point out that the banana (the fulfillment that the mind constantly seeks) is the very nature of every moment's experience. So just let the mind be and it settles down in spontaneous enjoyment of present awareness, without unnatural (and futile) efforts to control it.

The eye sees colors, the ear hears sounds, the mind entertains thoughts. It's all the natural, perfect display of present awareness. Attempting to repress thoughts, or even preferring nonthought over thought, leads to dualism and a retreat into quietism, where we think that fulfillment is somehow available in the quiet forest but not in a New York City subway car, or that it's available in a quiet, passive mind but not in an active, dynamic, creative mind. Thus the great Dzogchen patriarch Garab Dorje taught, "If thoughts arise, remain present in that state. If no thoughts arise, remain present in that state. There is no difference in the presence in either state."

So the problem is not thoughts per se. The problem is not even the linear narratives, or "stories," into which we organize thoughts. The problem is the way we buy into the stories and conflate them into one big meta-story, which amounts to "The present moment is unsatisfactory" - and then believe it. From thoughts ("apple," "hunger") we proceed to stories ("I want that apple because I'm hungry") to our latest version of the meta-story of unsatisfactoriness ("This moment when I'm hungry is a bummer, and, when I get the apple, that moment will be happy"). Note how the myriad of other sensations, such as the pressure of my feet against the ground, or the scent of roses (or bus exhaust) on the breeze, are mysteriously forgotten, because they are "unimportant" - that is, they don't fit into the story in which I'm currently fixated. We can skillfully interrupt that fixation by paying attention to the sensations we've been ignoring.

Yes, on the level of ultimate reality even this meta-story can never obscure the boundless sky of natural perfection, but on the level of the sentient beings who have bought into it, that's where suffering begins. On the ultimate level, the story and the suffering (and, for that matter, the individual beings who suffer) are all dreamlike; but compassion consists of reaching one hand into the non-ultimate level to tap the dreamers on the shoulder and help them awake. In my experience, mindful attention to simple physical sensations, which Charles calls Gesture of Awareness and which was taught by the Buddha in the Satipatthana Sutta, is one of the most powerful means of helping to bring about such awakening. I think the Buddha was wise enough not to deify the body or demonize the mind; what he offered was an antidote, a skillful corrective to the imbalance that plagues us when we get so lost in our minds that we don't feel our feet on the ground.

QUESTION: During the opening prayers we usually recite in the Buddhist group I attend, we say, "Sentient being are numberless; we vow to liberate them." This has never sat right with me. My question is twofold: (1) If we are thinking nondualistically, what are we liberating them from? (2) Isn't that kind of an evangelistic thought? I hadn't thought of Buddhism as evangelical.

First of all, good for you. I think it's very important to think penetratingly about any prayers you recite. In Buddhist practice in particular, everything you do is for the ultimate purpose of making you a buddha - that is, waking you up. If your prayers put you to sleep instead, like the rote recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance we did in school when I was a kid (under God, indivisible, blah blah blah), they defeat their own purpose.

Yes, we're thinking nondualistically. That is, we understand that samsara is nirvana; that life is perfect and complete in every moment, just as it is; that there is no further improvement to be made (the kingdom of heaven, in Jesus's words, is within us, right now, not elsewhere in space or time); that the illusion that this moment is somehow inadequate, that samsara is other than nirvana, results from distraction, a failure to pay full attention to our actual experience, caught up as we usually are in seeking ways to improve it. Thus the cure is not to change anything but, through natural meditation (aka nonmeditation), to simply rest in the moment as it is, however it is. By sitting long enough, you eventually run out of ways to distract yourself and start to notice that samsara, however it presents itself right now (the sound of the traffic in the street, the ache in your knee) is indeed nirvana, and always was.

The problem is that, while our thinking may be nondual, most people's experience, possibly including our own, is not. Existentially, samsara is nirvana, but, experientially, people are caught up in samsara as samsara, so they suffer. It's like when your child tosses and turns in a feverish dream and cries that the tiger is chasing him. Even though you know there's no tiger to save the child from, you don't laugh it off and walk away; you wake him to save him from the dream, and then the child sees that there was never a tiger and you both laugh together. In fact, as we penetrate samsara, we see that the notion of a separate self is also illusory, so there's also no one for the tiger to chase, no one to dream the dream, and no one to wake him up. That's the big laugh. Hence one Buddhist text restates our task in more exactingly nondual terms by saying that it is to liberate so-called sentient beings from so-called suffering into so-called enlightenment.

That's more accurate in ultimate terms, but for someone whose retirement pension has just been wiped out by a crooked CFO's scam, or whose child has just been diagnosed with a fatal disease, it can sound pretty callous. Out of his compassion, the Buddha addressed himself to life as it is usually experienced, as suffering, and used language just dualistic enough so that people could relate to it and avail themselves of the cure. After some 500 years of people curing themselves, they were ready to produce the Mahayana texts, with their greater emphasis on the ultimate, nondual view.

As for evangelism, you're right that it's antithetical to the Buddhist spirit. Evangelism, as I understand it, is an attempt to persuade others to subscribe to your doctrine or engage in your program. We don't do that. If you look more closely at the language of the prayer, you'll see we're vowing to do something far more ambitious: not merely to convince others to follow our path of liberation, but to liberate them, period. All of them, including the maggots and brine shrimp, which, as far as I can tell, can't read our dharma texts, no matter how many we shove under their nonexistent little noses, and can't practice our meditation, no matter how zealously we exhort them to cross their nonexistent little legs. So we're really setting ourselves to a task that, as far as our conceptual minds can see, is utterly crazy. That's one function of this bodhisattva vow, as it's called: to help blow our minds out of their limiting concepts into a more expansive vista, to give us something to devote ourselves to that's too vast to wrap our puny intellects around. In that sense, the vow is yet another form of meditative practice, employed for its effects on us rather than on the numberless beings. By setting the bar impossibly high, we inspire ourselves to keep jumping higher. By committing ourselves to a superhuman project, we keep getting closer to the ideal of spiritual superheroes who don't just jump but fly, their red capes fluttering behind them.

Again, that's on the dualistic side of the equation. (Both sides must always be present.) On the nondual side, we awaken all beings with ease, in one moment, simply by waking ourselves and seeing that there's no one to sleep.

QUESTION: I have the opportunity to possibly attend a retreat of several months duration sometime next year. However, I'm having a big problem getting the needed amount of time off from work. I feel I could earn enough money for a living just by doing temp work, but I don't dare quit my job because I need the health insurance. While I haven't given up hope yet, I need a pep talk. Could you say something about the benefits of longer retreats and your experience with them? Also, do you have any tips for getting that much time off? (Anything!)

Well, this is the age we live in, isn't it? Even when all we want to do is leave the world, we have to make sure we have enough quarters to keep feeding the meter.

You're quite right in your feeling that attending occasional meditation retreats is a valuable thing to do - so valuable that it's worth making some sacrifices for. On retreat you have the opportunity to really marinate in that hot tub of boundless Being which, in your home practice, you may feel that you're just sticking your toes into. You usually have the chance to attend dharma talks and Q&A sessions with seasoned teachers. Most retreats are held in some degree of noble silence (at some you don't talk outside of teaching sessions, at some you don't talk at all, at some you don't even make eye contact), so you get the delicious, all-too-rare experience of finally shutting up. It's amazing how refreshing, invigorating, and liberating it is just to stop talking for awhile, and how much more clearly it allows you to hear all your noisy thoughts, till they too begin lapsing into noble silence. Retreats also give you a safe (and often beautiful) space, removed from your usual relationships and life situations, where you can go through some of the changes (the mood swings, the processing of unresolved emotional material, etc.) that you have to go through between here and nirvana.

So yes, retreat is worth sacrificing for. The question is how much, and as with most things it's a matter of balance. On the one hand, most of us do need that paycheck and those benefits. On the other, we see the inspiring procession of the thousands of others who have gone before us on the enlightenment path, often sacrificing everything they had. Depending on factors such as your age, how much you like your job, and whether there are others depending on you, I think you have to find your own balance point between rendering unto Caesar and rendering unto God.

There might be a few ways to help finesse the matter. One would be to compromise and attend a shorter retreat; there are plenty of one-week retreats led by great teachers, and perhaps you can get away for that long without losing your job. Even a week-long retreat can have a profound impact on your life. Another way, if you're lucky enough to have a receptive employer, is to convince him or her to give you a leave of absence so that you can undergo this experience, which is ultimately going to make you a far more effective worker. Don’t dismiss this possibility out of hand; these days, even if they don't practice meditation themselves, most people respect it and at least dimly understand that it helps transform people into their best possible selves. Many people in the business world understand the value of high EQ in the workplace, and would suspect that a meditation retreat might be a good place to develop it. If you have particularly enlightened (so to speak) employers, you might even convince them to help fund this advanced form of professional development. Surely it would be a better investment for them than many of the employee workshops and seminars they already subsidize.

Another thing to look into is connecting your retreat experience with a degree program or certification program, which in some people's eyes will give it more legitimacy and may even make you eligible for student financial aid. I spent almost six months of my last year of undergraduate work on retreat, then came back and wrote papers about it from the perspectives of psychology, English, and one or two other disciplines. A friend of mine is now planning to attend a three-month retreat next year which she will link to a certificate program in counseling, which will in turn help her advance in her profession.

Retreats have changed my life, again and again. When I first starting going to them years ago, my then girlfriend told me that every time I came back from one I was a nicer person, with more of my sharp edges sanded down. From there it's just gotten better. It's worth doing some hustling to get yourself to that site of non-hustle. Good luck.

QUESTION: What is the space between pain and pleasure? What I believe is, Relax in the space between pleasure and pain. That's the most natural state of relaxation. Once you start being in it, feeling it, you will learn the taste of it. That is what I call the taste of Tao. It is just like wine. In the beginning it will be very bitter. One has to learn. And it is the deepest wine there is, the greatest alcoholic beverage of silence, of tranquility. One becomes drunk with it. By and by you will understand the taste of it. In the beginning, it is tasteless because your tongue is too full of pain and pleasure. Your comments on this, please.

I would concur with most of what you say, and I like your poetic way of saying it. The duality of pleasure and pain, like dualities in general, turns out to be essentially a projection, a concept. Is heavy metal music pleasurable or painful? It depends on who you ask. Beauty is in the eye (or ear) of the beholder. Or, more precisely, in the mind of the beholder. The eye and ear and other senses simply experience sensations; then the mind attaches labels such as "pleasant" or "unpleasant," "beautiful" or "ugly," to the sensory experiences. These labels are just thoughts. There's no need to abolish such thoughts; it's natural for the mind to think thoughts, just as it's natural for the nose to smell smells. What's important, though, is to recognize the thoughts as merely thoughts, to know that they're just a conceptual overlay, beneath which the experience itself abides, just is, simple and singular, beyond all mind-made dualities.

So yes, the practice of meditation can be usefully described in terms of "relax[ing] in the space between pleasure and pain." Or, in less poetic but perhaps slightly more precise terms, we could say to just rest in the experience itself, the display of the senses in each present moment, without buying into the mind's judgments of it as pleasant or unpleasant or anything else (for example, as music or noise). As you've said, at first that experience can seem "bitter" (or, to put it more prosaically, boring), but the more familiar we become with that space, the more clearly we cognize it to be limitlessly rich and lively - to be life itself.

In Buddhist terms, our practice at first might be dominated by the experience of "emptiness" as our categories of pleasant and unpleasant, meaningful and meaningless, etc., are seen to be empty, void of reality; but in time that emptiness is seen as not flat and dead but "luminous" - a quality I don't know how to describe, but you know it when you experience it, and you're really glad when you do. That's when life becomes no longer problematic. In that luminosity, you know that everything's boundlessly OK and has been all along.

Luminous emptiness; empty luminosity; radiant unconditioned awareness - that's all there is. The more you gently let go of your judgments, your fabricated dualistic categories, the more you grow into that sublime reality.

QUESTION: I can't understand what love is right now. If I love another person and he doesn't love me back in the way that I want to be loved, then I have conditions on my love - I am loving with an expectation of what I want to receive in return, which isn't fair or conscious. If I accept that his love may not show up in the same way that mine does, then that doesn't make him wrong for not giving me what I need, but if I stay around feeling bad because I'm not getting what I need, then I'm not honoring myself, I'm using him to abuse myself. So how do I love him without hurting myself? Maybe by recognizing that he doesn't have to give me anything. I have everything I need - he can't give me anything I don't already have. Then why do I choose him over someone else? Because I can? Because he is the one I want? Because I'm afraid that if I don't choose him, someone else will and then I'll be really sorry? I want to love unconditionally and be loved the same way - I don't think that's putting some unreasonable request out there, but somehow wanting always registers as desire which is not the same as love. And then I get confused. Isn't spirituality all about simplicity? Why, then, as I get closer to myself and to God in my spiritual practice, do things seem to get more and more complicated and my writing about it more and more dull?

I'm not sure I can help you with God or your writing, but I do think I have (slowly) been learning a few things about love. (Socrates claimed that love was the only topic he felt qualified to speak about.)

We all want love in our lives. We usually seek it by seeking someone else to love us. That's a very, very deep human drive which is profoundly connected to all kinds of emotional, biological, and spiritual issues, all the way down to our most fundamental feeling of well-being, of feeling OK in the world and with ourselves. The problem is that those people whose love we seek won't hold still. Like everything else, they're impermanent and ever-changing; they keep failing to behave in accord with our desires. That doesn't mean we must give up on relationships, but it means that if we invest our happiness in the behavior of others we're setting ourselves up for disappointment.

So the alternative approach to having love in our lives is, instead of waiting to receive it, to give it. That is something we can take charge of. And we don't have to limit it to one person or object: we can make it a practice to deliberately go through our day loving one thing after another. That might sound, at first blush, like some kind of mushy, New Age-y, smiley-face mental fabrication, some psychologically inauthentic, made-up mood. But it doesn't have to be that way. If we think of people like Mother Teresa, Mahatma Gandhi, the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela, or Dr. King, we can get some idea of what authentic, omnidirectional love looks like. Among other things, it looks happy - it doesn't feel sorry for itself even in the face of great hardship. And it looks world-changingly powerful.

The classic cop-out, of course, is to say, "Well, Gandhi and Mother Teresa are special beings; I'm just a regular shmo." But none of those exemplars of omnidirectional love started out that way. Each cultivated the power of love very deliberately. For Nelson Mandela, for instance, a crucial moment came during his 27-year-long imprisonment, during which he was subjected to all kinds of gratuitous cruelty. (While he was doing forced labor in the dazzling sun and white sands of Robben Island, his jailers denied him the right to wear sunglasses, knowing that his eyesight would be permanently damaged.) Mandela knew that the easiest emotional course would be to hate his jailers, but he also knew that if he gave in to that temptation he would be lost. So he made the decision to love them instead. Exactly how to do that in an authentic way is impossible to put into a simple, one-size-fits-all formula. Certainly it must involve some very deep, unflinching introspection. But all those who have found it have said, in some kind of language or other, that they are not special beings, that what they have found within themselves is within everyone - that it is, in fact, fundamental to what it is to be human.

In certain streams of Vajrayana (Tibetan) Buddhist teaching, there are systematic techniques for initiating that introspection and cultivating the power of love. They usually begin with the deep inner acknowledgment of others who have loved us (our "benefactors") and a total meditative opening up to fully receiving that love, as if bathing in a warm, gentle rain. Then the meditator allows that rain of love from the benefactors to pass through her to others, starting with easy targets - those we're already fond of in uncomplicated ways - and progressing to those with whom our relationships are problematic, and eventually to those who trigger our fear or hatred. With some experience of radiating love on the meditation cushion, it starts becoming easier and more natural to practice it as we go through our daily lives. This doesn't mean we have to carry a rose in our teeth, throw our arms around the bus driver's neck, and tell him we love him. Most of the practice doesn't involve outwardly saying or doing anything new or different. It's an inner shift.

"Ordinary people," as Buddhist texts call them, go through life seeking love, like heat-seeking missiles. With this inward shift we become like heat generators. Or to switch metaphors, we stop being like little Oliver Twist, holding out his bowl and pleading, "Please, sir, I want some more"; instead, our cup runneth over, spontaneously nourishing others. We've all probably known such naturally nurturing people - perhaps a wonderful first-grade teacher or a kindly uncle that we just felt good around. (Indeed, such people make ideal benefactors to use in one's practice. The litmus test is that you feel like smiling the moment you think of them.) An excellent new book by one of the leading teachers of these practices for cultivating love is Awakening Through Love: Unveiling Your Deepest Goodness, by John Makransky.

Of course, while we're still on the way to perfecting the power of universal love, ordinary romantic love can be very tough, especially when it's unrequited or when a relationship comes to an end. But even when a romance is "officially" over, if there has really been a deep connection it doesn't just go away. As a student of mine recently wrote in a poem, "I can't unlove you." It's natural that at such times we might want to unlove the other person in order to stop hurting. But repressing love is never the answer. (Repression feeds obsession.) Instead, I think what works best is to use even the rituals of break-up as a way of making love more expansive. So, for example, even as you're burning or shredding old photos and love letters, instead of seeing it as an act of devastating destruction - instead of seeing it as the death of love - you can think of the smoke as merging into the sky or the shreds as joining the earth, to spread throughout the world the love that was once expressed within the narrow confines of one relationship.

It's tempting to believe otherwise at such times, but love is never a mistake. Every relationship eventually ends, either in break-up or in death. The fact that it has ended does not invalidate the love that was given and shared. Every moment and every act of love and kindness that you gave or received brought more light into your life and his, and, on some quiet level, into the life of the whole world. That never goes away. It's hard to see it at the time - for both people - but no matter how things end, that light shines forever.

QUESTION: To become enlightened, at some point along the way do I have to sort out my personal crap and confront my inner demons, or does realization ultimately allow me to just sort of jump over them?

I've changed my mind on this one. I used to think you could jump over all the demons. In fact, one of my earliest meditation teachers encouraged that attitude: he would refer to meditation as "watering the root" of our lives and ridiculed all forms of therapy and counseling as "watering the leaves." I still think that the idea of watering the root is fundamentally sound, since meditation expands awareness and awareness is indeed the common root of all our thoughts and actions. So as you continue with your spiritual or meditative practice over the months and years, many of your psychological kinks do tend to straighten out spontaneously, or at least to soften up so that they're easier to work with. And certainly your vision becomes clearer, so it's easier to see the problems, and you become more relaxed so that they're less threatening.

Still, in retrospect, I think that I (and many other of my old teacher's students) used this water-the-root teaching as a rationale for neglecting active participation in the kind of psychological introspection that most people need to become a fully functional, mature, responsible adult (or, as we say in Tibetan, a mensch). It can be very comfortable, very tempting, to avoid looking at hard truths, inner pain, entrenched patterns, and say, "Well, one fine morning I'll wake up over the rainbow in Nirvanaland and everything will be great." I even saw some students of my old teacher engage in behavior they knew was deeply unethical, with the excuse that it was no use trying to water those behavioral leaves, that they'd just have to wait till enlightenment made them better people.

That's one extreme. Another extreme is to become so deeply engaged in picking your way through your traumas that you never come out the other end. If you make a lifestyle of wrestling with your demons, you're in danger of becoming a professional wrestler, and we all know how loaded with exaggerated theatrics professional wrestling is.

So I do think that psychological introspection on your own is important, and that, for many (perhaps most) people, working with a counselor or therapist can be extremely valuable at some points in your life. Of course, the ideal is to have a therapist who's knowledgeable about and sympathetic toward your spiritual path, and who will help you see your own patterns in the context of the truth of that path.

As usual, the correct answer is the Middle Way. The extreme of denying your crap doesn't work, and the extreme of wallowing in it doesn't work. Between those two extremes lies the way of balance, growth, sanity. Find it!

QUESTION: How do Buddhists think about the creation of the world? Where did it all begin? If there's no God to start the ball rolling, how do we get here?

We can't say that the world started at some time in the past because it's never the past. It's also never the future. Have you noticed that? It's only ever the present. And, since the present is the gap between the past and the future, without a past or future even the word "present" loses its meaning. There's just ... this.

So there's only one time when the world can start: right now ... now ... now ... now (for lack of a better word) - in every moment (whatever a "moment" is), as you create it, as you project it within your own awareness. And of course, when we say "you" and "your," that has nothing to do with the body or personality you normally identify as "you." The body, personality, thoughts, etc., are merely features of the world you keep creating. You are indefinable, inconceivable awareness-space: luminous emptiness. Where does that luminous emptiness come from? As soon as you start talking about things coming and going, you're talking about time and causation, which are also features of the movie (known in Buddhist lingo as samsara) projected within awareness-space. So, to talk about where awareness-space comes from is inside out. There's nowhere for it to come from, and no time for it to come. Yes, this is all difficult (impossible, actually) to comprehend logically, but that's because our logic has evolved to describe the projected world of events, not the non-projected non-event within which it's projected. Here our logic is out of its element.

The Dalai Lama, who can be very ecumenical about many things (he's famous for saying "Kindness is my religion"), is a stickler on this one point: "No creator God." As soon as you posit a God who creates the world, you create the false duality of a creator and a creation, a duality that you'll just have to dissolve on the way to realizing liberation. And by imagining some such scenario as "In the beginning, God did x, y, and z," you reify (give false reality to) the illusion of time, yet another obscuration to clear seeing.

Walt Whitman sums this up very powerfully in "Song of Myself":

I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end,
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.

There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.


QUESTION: My boyfriend and I recently attended an event at a church in New York where devotional chanting was led by a man named Krishna Das. My boyfriend was really into it, seemingly transported to another plane as he sang along and even got to his feet and danced. While I found the music kind of moving, I couldn't get past the fact that the chants were addressed to various Hindu deities. Images of Krishna, the blue-skinned flute-playing god, and Hanuman, the monkey god, kept coming to mind and were a stumbling block that kept me from feeling anything deeper. Any insights?

Krishna Das, born Jeffrey Kagel, and (like me) originally a Jewish boy from Long Island, happens to be a great favorite of mine. His soulful baritone voice wells up from a place of devotion that's so deep and pure that I personally don't care what the object of devotion is. Also, his musical style - he's a former rock 'n' roller whose backup band usually includes a thumping electric bass guitar and heartful violin along with the traditional Indian tabla and tambura - nicely balances its Indian roots with a sound that appeals to Western ears. And not just Western. A couple of years ago, when I was in Varanasi, India's most sacred city, I took a sunrise boat ride on the Ganges. As the jostling crowds did their morning ablutions on the ghats (stone steps) of the west bank, I suddenly heard a familiar voice. Along came a little boat with a generator driving a TV on which Krishna Das was singing, as a couple of guys in the boat attempted to hawk their stacks of bootleg DVD's to the morning pilgrims.

Here's the thing. Krishna Das himself has said that, as far as he knows, he's not a Hindu. It just so happens that he was in India when he "got the juice," so the juice comes through him in that particular flavor. The juice, the essence, is devotion - the experience of connectedness to that Something Bigger which is not a thing at all and is neither big nor small but is beyond all size and shape, beyond definability, beyond name and form. To have a way to connect with it, various names and forms are employed, then chanted or contemplated till you go beyond them. It's helpful that in the Hindu tradition there's a pretty clear understanding that specific gods such as Krishna and Hanuman are all different aspects or faces of Brahman, the faceless infinite. And the key statement on Brahman, from the Chandogya Upanishad, is, "I am That, you are That, all this [manifest creation] is nothing but That, and That alone is."

As a result, Hindus are generally easy-going about whether their neighbor connects with the same god that they do. Technically speaking, Hinduism is neither monotheistic, with one limitless god, as in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, nor polytheistic, as in the Greek pantheon, with its many limited gods, but henotheistic, with many limitless gods - whichever one you're contemplating at the moment is supreme, the embodiment of all there is. One way to think of it is that Brahman is like a many-faceted diamond: there's only one diamond, but, depending on what fits our hand and what pleases our eye, you and I will each hold it differently and so wind up seeing different facets. But if we peer at it long enough, eventually we'll both get to the same experience of its essential brilliance, which illuminates all the facets yet transcends them.

Having all those different gods (literally hundreds of them in Hindu tradition) while knowing that they're all ultimately the same reflects a deep wisdom. Each particular form of God emphasizes different psychological and poetic qualities that enrich our appreciation. For example, Krishna's blue skin reminds us that, like the sky, he is the manifestation of that which is vast beyond all measure (and all color). He wanders through the countryside, playing his flute and making all the gopis (milkmaids) fall in love with him, representing the all-attractive quality of the infinite; we are the gopis, and eventually, each in his or her own way, we hear the sound of that flute and have to follow it wherever it leads us.

Your particular path in following the siren song of enlightenment may or may not happen to include chanting with Krishna Das (the name means servant of Krishna, by the way). If not, fine - there are plenty of paths. Personally, I find his work so inspiring that I think it's a shame to miss its full impact just because you're put off by the apparent limitations of deity-forms when Krishna Das himself is not really singing about those forms. He's singing through them, into the one light of which they're all the radiance. Your boyfriend was dancing in that light, and in my experience it's an ecstatic dance. I recommend it.

(More on Krishna Das, including tour schedule, sound clips, etc., are here.

QUESTION: I am an aspiring novelist (although I have a good day job which I've no intention of quitting just yet!), and I am in the process of finishing up a story which is in some ways reflective of my own ongoing study of Buddhism. I would not call myself a Buddhist, strictly speaking, but I would be lying if I said that studying Buddhism (especially Zen) hadn't influenced my outlook on life enormously and in a generally positive way. The story doesn't cite Buddhist teaching explicitly, but is reflective of a key part of it that I picked up along the way and which you've yourself made mention of in a number of your writings: the mutability of the self, that the person we are now isn't the person we were five minutes ago, or a year ago, or ten years ago - but that a chain of causality extends between all of them nonetheless. I may not be the "same person," but I'm still responsible for that person and all he did. My question is this: If I tell a story about such things, with the intention of communicating that and its implications to other people, what mistakes should I avoid? Obviously I don't want to lecture the audience, but that's only one of the broadest possible errors; other insights are welcome.

First of all, I congratulate you and anyone else who finishes writing a book. As you know, it's a lot of work. The best advice I've ever seen on getting it done is, "A page a day is a book a year." (Hey, where's my book a year?)

You're right that lecturing the audience is the biggest pitfall. You don't like being lectured, and neither will your readers. In fact, the statement that has become my mantra when I'm teaching writing is, "Everything you need to know as a writer you already know as a reader." Do you like to read passages that go on and on without giving you anything to see, hear, taste, touch, or smell? Then don't write 'em! Do you like to follow a character's actions for ten pages and then be told he has red hair, so that you have to retroactively revise the movie that's been running in your head all that time? Do you like to hear a character tell another character information he would already know, but that is obviously being trotted out strictly for the reader's benefit? Do you like having to figure out who's speaking a line of dialogue, or who a pronoun refers to? Do you like being told, before you've been shown, that a character is, say, "renowned," as in the infamously crappy first sentence of The Da Vinci Code? (Note that crappy writing and writing that makes a lot of money are not mutually exclusive categories. If you want to know how to produce writing that makes a lot of money, I can't help you with that.)

But back to the pitfalls that are specific to Buddhist, or Buddhist-tinged, fiction. Other than making your characters mere dharma mouthpieces, I'd say the next biggest pitfall is making them dharma puppets - that is, making your plot a schematic demonstration of how, oh, the pig that builds his house out of straw gets gobbled by the wolf, etc. And the next is trying to write about monks or lamas or, for that matter, cowboys or construction workers, if you don't know any. Mark Twain said, "War talk by men who have been in a war is always interesting; whereas moon talk by a poet who has not been in the moon is likely to be dull." "Write about your own backyard" is a cliche, but it's gotten to be a cliche for a good reason. And since dharma is the essential reality of everything everywhere, you don't need recourse to exotic locales or situations to demonstrate it. Just as dharma is all that's going on in the Dalai Lama's teaching hall, it's also all that's going on in a New Jersey diner.

If you can get yourself to Barre, Massachusetts, this July 15, a workshop on writing Buddhist fiction is being conducted there by two people who know much more about it than I do, Lila Wheeler and Jess Row: info is here. There are also two excellent books of Buddhist short stories you might find of interest: Nixon Under the Bodhi Tree and You Are Not Here (in which I have a story - set in a New Jersey diner).

I wish you all luck with this project. I feel that your premise, the paradox of our having responsibility for the actions of the "self" we are not, cries out to be expounded. Just last night, in a session at the prison where I'm a Buddhist chaplain, one of the guys - about the sweetest, kindest, most conscientious person you could hope to meet - told me his story. He has served 28 years of a life sentence for felony murder. "I was 17," he said, "and now I'm 49. I was so stupid." Everyone's stupid when they're 17.

QUESTION: My question is a simple one: Am I meditating if I'm sitting on the bus or I'm on the couch watching television and my mind wanders freely? And do I stop meditating when I realize that I've let go?

I'm not sure I can keep my answer as simple as your question, but I'll do my best.

I like the fact that you're looking for the meditative experience not just during formal sessions but in spontaneous, everyday situations. And in your key phrase, "wandering freely," I like the "freely" part: it indicates a sense that the meditative state is one of natural ease. The part I would question is the "wandering." If you simply mean that thoughts come and go without your resisting them or attaching to them, then that's perfect. But the word could also suggest more of a daydreaming, zoning-out experience, which would explain why you feel that you lose it when you realize you've let go. In a funny way, if our transcendence depends on our being unaware of it, then it's too fragile - we can't keep playing peek-a-boo with it forever.

The meditative state is defined as restful alertness; mental wandering, in the sense of spacing out of daydreaming, may have the element of easy-going restfulness but it lacks alertness. This is why (for most of us, anyway) spontaneous, informal meditation must be "fed" by formal sitting sessions, in which the mind learns not only to wander freely but to be freely - that is, to have the same sense of natural unrestrictedness you describe, but to have it while settling down in the quietness of just being rather than wandering in reverie. Then, through continued practice, we start to find that same freedom everywhere, whether we're riding the bus, watching TV, running for president, whatever.

This is what is called undistracted nonmeditation: moment after moment, the mind realizes its own innate boundlessness spontaneously - without making an effort to "meditate" - and none of the experiences of the outer world can distract us from it. They are seen as not different from it.

QUESTION: I read a story about a man who keeps asking a master to teach him the secret of meditation. Finally the master says, "You know that space between two thoughts? Prolong it." Do you feel that that's a valid approach to meditation practice?

"The space between two thoughts" is a venerable notion in a number of meditative traditions. I like the way it points out how close to us the silence of illuminated awareness always is; rather than being in some remote, transcendental realm, it's never more than one thought away.

But, in my experience anyway, the idea of trying to prolong that space can become another way of tying ourselves up in knots rather than letting go. It can promote a sense of striving, of trying to change or accomplish something. It can make meditation a sort of competitive sport, where you try to win by minimizing the number of thoughts, the way you win at golf by minimizing the number of strokes. Any such striving tends to make meditation artificial; it encourages the effort to forcibly repress the next thought's arising. To prolong something means to extend it in time. Instead, we can rest in whatever happens to be happening right now and thus discover timelessness.

Meditation is an inherently subtle activity, and subtleties tend to get lost in translation. Perhaps in the original language the master actually said something closer to abide in, or rest in, the space between two thoughts. Taking that more natural, easeful approach - just making yourself at home in the space, and, like a gracious guest, gratefully accepting it as it is, rather than trying to change it - you may start to feel received into it in a deeper way than you expected. Rather than a tiny gap in a linear sequence of thoughts, you start to see that silence as completely surrounding the thoughts, and even pervading the thoughts, and, eventually, pervading all the sensations that constitute our day-to-day experiences in every moment, even at their busiest and noisiest. The true silence, you eventually discover, does not depend on the absence of thoughts or of anything else.

For the definitive word on this subject we can turn to the great master Garab Dorje. In a famous meditation instruction, he said:

If thoughts arise, remain present in that state.
If no thoughts arise, remain present in that state.
There is no difference in the presence in either state.

So I guess I would understand Prolong the space between two thoughts to mean Rest in the space, the silence, the presence within which all thoughts and sensations arise, persist, and vanish.

QUESTION: Do Buddhists believe in God? I'm confused by what I have read.

Buddhists don't believe in anything. Nor do they disbelieve. Buddhism is not a belief system but a practice path. It's an ongoing project of cutting through our beliefs, attitudes, concepts, desires, and aversions, and then seeing what's left: the simple actuality that presents itself to our experience. The Buddha set the tone for this project when he repeatedly said Ehi passiko: "Come and see." Don't attitudinize, don't indulge in wishful thinking, don't succumb to fearful intimidation, but observe, see for yourself.

He also said, "Do not believe something just because it has been passed along and retold for many generations, or merely because it has become a traditional practice, or simply because it is well-known everywhere, or just because it is cited in a text, or because the speaker seems trustworthy, or thinking, 'This is what our teacher says.' " Thus he ruled out, as bases of valid belief, all varieties of faith, whether it be faith in scriptures, gurus, majority rule, or anything else. But when people escape the trap of blind faith they often fall into a second trap, the hypnotizing sound of their own voice, the hum of their own intellect, so he also said, "Do not believe something solely on the grounds of logical reasoning, or merely because it accords with your philosophy, or because it appeals to 'common sense,' or just because you like the idea." Finally he concluded that we should accept something and put it into practice when we know it directly and can confirm that it is "praised by the wise" and leads to "well-being, prosperity, and happiness."

So, leaving behind what others and even what his own reason says, a Buddhist will believe in God if and when he experiences God. Then, to make sure his experience is not just a hallucination, he will reality-check it with "the wise" (people who seem to be, at minimum, not crazy) and with its practical effects on the earth plane. The Buddha was essentially advocating what we now call the scientific method: go into the lab and experience the phenomenon directly, corroborate your findings with those of others, and then check out their ramifications in the real world.

Now, if by "God" we mean some kind of big Superperson, a divine personality who has preferences, issues commands, doles out punishments and rewards, and perhaps takes a hand in human history from time to time, I personally must report that I haven't experienced any such entity. And frankly, I doubt that anyone else has either. Plenty of people claim they have, and of course we can't jump inside their heads and see what they've seen, but circumstantial evidence makes their testimony smell pretty fishy, starting with the fact that their testimony is so mutually contradictory. God seems to tell different things to different people, and in most cases what he tells them is suspiciously consistent with their own desires, prejudices, and neuroses. Even when God's alleged commands are beautiful and inspiring - to love one another, for example - it makes me nervous, because doing even that on God's say-so opens the door to burning folks at the stake or flying planes into tall buildings on his say-so. I prefer loving people because it's a good thing to do.

But this kind of Superperson is not the only possible definition of God. Many spiritually oriented people - including many Jewish, Christian, and Muslim worshippers (and clergy) - understand the anthropomorphic representations of God in art and scripture as metaphors for something vaster. The misunderstanding arises when metaphors are taken literally. When Macbeth conveys his psychological agony by saying, "O, full of scorpions is my mind," we don't expect to X-ray his skull and see a bunch of venomous arachnids crawling around in there. In the same way, when scriptures refer to God as the King of the Universe or the Lord, or when religious art portrays him as an old man with an impressive white beard, sophisticated religionists understand that these are symbols that point beyond themselves. But unsophisticated religionists are always among us, which has prompted some religions (Judaism, Islam) to prohibit all visual representation of God. Even that, however, doesn't solve the problem, as there are plenty of Jews and Muslims who are so convinced they know "God's will" that they're willing to be highly unpleasant to people who are convinced they've heard God say something different.

I suspect that what more sophisticated people usually mean by God is, let's say, a dimension of boundlessness - a vastness that is somehow the source, context, and ultimate point of our lives. If they follow theistic religions such as Judaism, Christianity, or Islam, they understand that all the praises of the Lord are metaphorical gestures toward something ultimately unnamable and inconceivable, and that God's "commands" are indications of ways of behaving that may help us avoid entangling ourselves and others in the suffering that makes it harder to open to the experience of vastness.

For me, the advantages of Buddhism in this regard are twofold. First, Buddhism is nontheistic. There's no talk of God or the Lord but only of shunyata, "emptiness," which means not that the dimension of boundlessness is a gaping black hole but that it is empty of all boundaries, characteristics, and definitions (including this one). So there's no danger of taking metaphors literally because the metaphors aren't there in the first place. Second, rather than merely singing hymns to the boundless or spinning theories about it, Buddhism offers a systematic path to experiencing it directly - come and see - through practices of meditation and mindfulness, and gradually integrating it into daily life.

The definitive statement on this subject, in the Heart Sutra, is that "Form is no other than emptiness, emptiness no other than form." The dimension of boundlessness and the dimension of mundane daily life are not remote from one another; when experienced clearly, the two are seen to be identical. As Jesus says in the Gospel of Thomas, "The Kingdom of the Father is spread out over the whole earth, and people do not see it."

QUESTION: What can I do about my anger?

Push that terrible, shameful feeling deep down inside you where no one else will see it and it can't do anything bad except give you an ulcer.

No? No good? OK, how about this:

Express it freely, without restraint. Just tear into that terrible person who's pissing you off. Let 'er rip.

No good either? Well then, what does that leave us? How about this:

Notice the feeling of anger. Notice that anger - as well as shock, sadness, elation, surprise, confusion, etc. - are called "feelings" because they feel certain ways, just as different colors look certain ways and flavors taste certain ways. What we call the feeling of anger may, in fact, be a whole constellation of feelings - say, tightness in the chest, pressure in the head, sweating palms ...

What do we experience in any given moment? The six senses: seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting, smelling, and thinking. Notice that thoughts - in this case, the thoughts about why you're angry, about the person or situation that is allegedly causing your anger, the whole story - are different from the feelings, but they are also sense objects; each thought has its own unique weight or tone or texture, as it were. These various sensory experiences are neither good nor bad but just are. The colors of the objects you're seeing right now, the temperature of the air against your face, the pressure of your body against the seat ... all are neither good nor bad but just sensory experiences. Our judgments of them as positive or negative are just more thoughts. ("There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so." - Hamlet) They are what they are.

The more we come to notice this essentially neutral situation (not create it, but notice that it's the way things always are), the less we find ourselves fixated on or overwhelmed by any one sensory experience, whether it's the feeling of anger or a thought about its associated situation or the texture of our cotton shirt against our skin. And the more we can just be in the display of the six senses in each moment, the more the natural great perfection of existence-as-it-is comes sparkling through: it's experienced as not merely neutral or flat, but boundlessly, luminously perfect. And in that luminosity, anger (and despair, and many other things that once plagued us) naturally dissolve, without the need for artificial suppression. When existence is luminously, inconceivably perfect, what is there to be angry about? Again, it's important to emphasize that this is not merely a matter of copping an attitude - "Life is perfect, I read it in some book or on some website somewhere, I'm not going to let myself get angry" - but an experience as natural and spontaneous as our experience that the sky is blue.

As we gradually grow into that state, we are increasingly able to deal with interpersonal situations with clarity and compassion, seeing with growing sharpness the best possible response to each challenge, the response that will take the best possible care of ourselves as well as the other people involved. This last point is important: growing realization doesn't mean becoming a passive, apathetic doormat any more than it means being an aggressive, vindictive knucklehead. Freedom from anger doesn't incapacitate us from being forceful when the need arises. On the contrary, it helps us to see clearly what needs to be done and to do it impeccably, like enlightened warriors, now that we're no longer caught up in anger's blinding storm.

Of course, when the storm strikes it's too late to begin practicing this neutral noticing. That's why we meditate, to temporarily withdraw from the complex challenges of situations and relationships and have some little pockets of time and space when not much is going on, when there's not much to deal with but the motion of our own breath and the thoughts buzzing around our head. The emotional reactivity in which most people get caught up is a habit pattern, and old habits are hard to break. What's easier is to replace them with new habits, and, in a sense, meditation is nothing but cultivating a new habit of noticing the six senses and just being with them. The next step is to start carrying this new habit into daily life, dozens of times a day during ordinary activities such as walking, driving, shopping, working. As the new habit becomes more strongly established through practicing it during these non-crisis times, it will be more and more available to automatically kick in when a crisis arises, whether it's the arising of anger or fear or the arising of the cancer or the drunken taxicab that's going to kill you. These crises are like exams (death is the final exam), and you don't want to walk into the exam room unprepared.

QUESTION: I bought your CD on natural meditation and have been meditating over a year now. My question is: When I lose myself in the moment, at times I get a shudder. Is that normal?

Shuddering, buzzing, twitching, warmth, coolness, laughing, crying, all of the above, none of the above - it's all normal. As you've indicated, such things tend to happen particularly at moments of completely letting go, which we might experience as a sinking into timelessness, or thoughtlessness, or a falling away of effort or concepts or expectations. These phenomena been well known in the meditative tradition for centuries; the Tibetans call them nyam. They are explained as being symptoms of release of tension, from gross, acute tensions such as the stress of a current emotional trauma to the very subtle, chronic tension generated by the lifelong effort to maintain a sense of self.

Think of what happens when you twist up a rubber band. As long as it's held under tension, the twists maintain their shape. When we put the rubber band down on the table and release the tension, the twists spontaneously dissolve - they liberate themselves. In the case of our awareness, that's a good thing; emotional traumas are being resolved, and ultimately the fiction of "self" deconstructs. But while the process is happening, the rubber band tends to dance around on the tabletop. That "dancing," or nyam, can be experienced physically (shudders, twitches, temperature changes, etc.), emotionally (sudden mood changes), or mentally (streams of unlikely thoughts). It's futile to try to analyze the specifics and identify what particular tension is being released at a particular moment, and it's counterproductive to try to suppress such experiences. Just know, as one of my teachers used to put it, that "something good is happening," and leave it at that. It's also good to understand that this is one more reason not to get entangled in analyzing the thoughts you have in meditation, or taking them seriously. They may well be the mere by-product of this cleansing process. Just let the dirt go down the drain.

One caveat: Nyam should generally take place only while we're sitting in meditation. Indeed, that's one reason why we go off and sit, to allow such release to proceed uninhibited (and why it's good to go on an occasional retreat, where more rapid, intense release can take place). But we shouldn't be going back into activity with twitches and mood changes still going on, such that people might say, "What's wrong with that guy?" If you ever feel that nyam is spilling out of your meditation and affecting your activity, you should not indulge in it but take steps to change the situation: take more time to come out of meditation, perhaps lie down for a little while afterward, and do more yoga postures and pranayam (breathing exercises).

And if you don't experience any of this kind of obvious nyam, it doesn't mean that meditation isn't working for you. While the methods of practice on the enlightenment path can be the same, the sequence of experiences while practicing can be quite different for different people. Some folks get a smooth ride, some folks bump along. It's all good.

QUESTION: I've recently been introduced to some meditation practices from Tibetan Buddhism that involve developing compassion by contemplating, and in some cases mentally taking on, the suffering of other people. I find this prospect rather unsettling, and even frightening. Part of my problem is the idea that taking in that negative energy could affect my own physical or mental health. Any thoughts?

Buddhist teachings define compassion as empathy - that is, clear unflinching awareness of the suffering of beings - combined with the wish for them to be liberated from that suffering. Cultivating compassion is considered a key element in the development of enlightenment. So yes, there are a number of practices that focus on the suffering of other beings.

But if done properly, these practices are perfectly safe. One of the advantages of doing spiritual practices within a tradition is that you know the techniques have been extensively test-piloted by millions of practitioners over the centuries. Consider the evidence before your eyes rather than some vague conjectures. Look at, say, the Dalai Lama. He's logged probably thousands of hours doing these practices, and he sure looks physically and mentally healthy to me. And I can testify personally, on the basis of my own far more modest record, that the various forms of compassion meditation that I've done have only made me feel more alive, open, and free.

There are some recommended safety factors, which any skillful teacher will observe. Any compassion practice, especially the kind that involves mentally absorbing the suffering of others (tonglen), should be commenced only after you've done enough regular meditation that you've had some experience of emptiness (shunyata). Then such terms as "suffering," "self," and "others," although they continue to have relative reality, are to some degree experienced as ultimately insubstantial and hence not overwhelming. Another safety factor is that compassion practice is usually preceded by love practice. Buddhism defines love as the wish for beings to be deeply happy, so love practices involve mentally extending the wish of happiness to others. Because suffering is not part of the picture, this is a less challenging exercise than compassion. Also, the compassion practices themselves have a number of stages, often beginning with opening yourself up to receive compassion before attempting to give it, and a good teacher will emphasize taking as much time as you need on each stage.

Finally, you should know that it's natural for these practices to kick up a certain amount of fear and anxiety. To a certain degree, we've all spent our lives trying to evade the reality of suffering, both others' and our own, so when we deliberately reverse that direction it's going to stir the pot, no doubt. But the practices are structured so that they create a safe space within which those stirrings can take place. Remember that suffering is the First Noble Truth, the basis of the Buddha's teaching. From a Buddhist point of view, without confronting the reality of suffering, real growth of awareness can't happen.

These practices are power tools, and like any power tool they should be used with some care. But their potential for liberating your awareness is powerful indeed. In our New Jersey Dzogchen sitting group, we've been emphasizing compassion meditation a lot in recent months. Not long ago a woman in the group said to me, "These last three weeks of practice have done more for me than my last six years of therapy." I also recently received some wonderful testimony from an inmate in the prison where I'm the Buddhist chaplain. He came up to me at the end of a session, took hold of both of my hands, looked intently into my eyes, and told me his story. He's been locked up for fifteen years and has been denied parole six times. His seventh parole hearing is coming up sometime this month, and the anticipation of being turned down again was making him feel so hopeless that he didn't know what to do with his pain. Finally, in desperation, he opened himself to the pain of all the beings in the universe. And in all that pain, suddenly his own pain dissolved. It was gone. "It's a miracle," I said, and he nodded agreement as he continued to clutch my hands. "It's the miracle of compassion."

QUESTION: My boyfriend says Buddhism doesn't really accept the idea of reincarnation: he says that karma / the energy goes forward and can affect another being in the future, but there is no "soul" per se. That doesn't seem to jibe with the ideas I've heard about striving to get off the wheel of samsara - or about Tibetan Buddhists searching for the reincarnation of the next Dalai Lama when one has passed away. Having originally developed in India, within the context of cultural beliefs in reincarnation, I thought that Buddhism takes reincarnation as a given. Am I wrong? Is there some subtlety I am missing? Or are my boyfriend and I just arguing semantics about what carries the karma forward?

Nothing carries the karma forward. There's nothing (no thing, no self) to go forward but activity itself - karma.

To elaborate: Your boyfriend is right that Buddhism, unlike Hinduism, does not posit a soul or self (atman in Sanskrit, atta in Pali) that reincarnates. One of the three basic tenets of Buddhism is "anatta" - no self. That's why Buddhism usually talks of "rebirth," not "reincarnation," as the word "reincarnation" implies that there is some soul to take flesh ("carne"). What moves forward is indeed karma, patterns of activity, but it's not the case that it picks some "other person" to land on. The person affected is you, to the extent that there is a you.

But the point of anatta is that there is no you. All "you" are is patterns of activity (karma), which you have mistakenly reified ("thingified") into an alleged self, which is really just a concept. In reality we're like little eddies in a river: we look like some "thing" but are actually complex patterns within the larger medium of the river (existence), constantly changing as they move downstream (time). When an eddy hits a big rock it breaks up and seems to disappear for awhile (death), but in fact its momentum continues to push bits of water around, which eventually organize themselves into another eddy a little further downstream (rebirth). Is the new eddy still "you"? Yes and no. Are you the person you were ten minutes or ten years ago? Yes and no.

If, however, we confine our discussion to supposed future lives, we're just indulging in metaphysical speculation, which can be fascinating but not especially useful. How can we inquire meaningfully into the future unless we're clear about the present? On the other hand, if these questions lead us to examine our actual experience in the present, that can be extremely useful. What do you actually experience right now? Seeing? Hearing? Touching? Tasting? Smelling? Thinking? OK, those are the six senses. Do you experience anything else outside of these six senses, some "I" or "self" that sees, hears, smells, etc.? Or is your concept of self just that - merely a concept? This is not a question to answer in a casual, superficial way. It's an invitation to rigorous investigation - not by merely thinking, but by looking again and again and noticing whether you ever experience anything you can call yourself, or if instead your notion of self is just a vague amalgam of traces of sense experiences (memories of your face in the mirror, of the sound of your voice, of expressions of personality traits that are not things but patterns of activity over time, etc.), all rather carelessly assembled in the mind into an unexamined notion of self.

So the real point is to look into your experience right now and see if you can find anything in it that's a self: a solid, permanent, continuous, definable experiencer of your experiences. If you find one, let me know immediately - this I want to see. If you find there's none ... no one there to suffer, no one there to enjoy ... nothing but unconfined, undefined awareness with no proprietor ... where the light's on but no one's home, and the light is centerless, luminous boundlessness ... and the old separation between "self" and "others" is seen clearly to have been a joke all along ... then you're liberated.

QUESTION: Does it matter what I sit on when I meditate? I see ads in magazines like Tricycle and Yoga Journal for various kinds of meditation cushions, and would like to know whether one kind is best or if it makes any difference at all.

The important thing is to sit. What you sit on matters less. Many people practice for years sitting on a living room chair or couch, or in bed with a pillow or two between their back and the wall, and they seem to derive the usual benefits from their practice. It is good to sit up, in a position that's relaxed yet alert, so generally a hammock or La-Z-Boy would not be recommended. (But I do think it's good to shake things up once in awhile and do something different. In that spirit I've been logging some meditation time in my hammock since the weather turned warm.)

That being said, there are real reasons for the traditional sitting postures. Sitting with your back straight and unsupported promotes an alert state of body and mind; it may also facilitate the unhindered flow of energy through the nadis (subtle energy channels) that's supposed to take place as awareness grows clearer and more expansive. And keeping the legs folded makes the body and mind feel more collected, balanced, and centered.

The most popular posture for accomplishing all this is the so-called half lotus pose, with the right heel pulled in front of your crotch at the body's midline and the instep of the left foot resting on the right thigh. (When your knees get tired, you can straighten them and then recross your legs with the left on the bottom.) If you're not flexible enough to do this easily, you can start by just sitting cross-legged. You'll probably find that your joints and muscles limber up faster than you expect. On the other hand, if you're exceptionally limber you might want to try the full lotus pose, where each instep rests on the opposite thigh.

Both of these positions require cushions. One or two old bed pillows or a couple of cheap throw pillows are probably fine to get started. The technique is to sit with your hips on the front half or one-third of the cushion, a few inches higher than your knees. This pitches your center of gravity slightly forward, making it much easier to sit up straight for long periods. To keep your ankles from getting sore, you'll want them resting on something softer than a hardwood floor.

The traditional equipment, which you'll probably want to get sooner or later if you're sitting regularly, is the zafu (small round cushion) to park your hips on, with a zabuton (larger, thinner square piece) under that. These are available from a number of online suppliers, as a quick Google search will reveal - you'll also find instructions for making your own. Most are filled with kapok, a flossy white material that comes from a tree that grows in Asia and which, for most people, provides the right balance of firmness and softness. (It's good to "punch it up" once in awhile to restore the kapok's loft.) Some people prefer cushions that have different shapes or are filled with other materials, such as buckwheat hulls; I personally like the classic version.

No matter how you sit or what you sit on, the idea is to forget about how you're sitting and what you're sitting on. If you're leaning back on a rickety wooden kitchen chair - or, for that matter, hanging onto a strap in a crowded subway car - as long as you're resting nonjudgmentally in each moment's experience just as it is, you're accomplishing the purpose.

QUESTION: I've been very much enjoying practicing meditation and feel that I'm getting a lot out of it. I find that I seem to get some extra "juice" out of the practice when I sit with my local group, but that creates one possible conflict for me. It's a Buddhist group, and I don't particularly consider myself a Buddhist. In general, the Buddhists seem to have the most effective meditative technologies, but I just don't know how to relate to some of the Buddhist mantras and prayers that precede and follow the core practice of meditation.

First of all, don't feel coerced into doing anything you're not ready to do. If you prefer not to do the prayers, don't do them. Second, know that others have dealt with this question before and have reached a satisfactory resolution. For example, at Buddhist retreats that I attend there will often be a rabbi or two participating, and sometimes a Catholic priest and maybe a couple of Protestant ministers.

There's no problem of a conflict between one's religious belief (or nonbelief) and Buddhist belief, because there are no Buddhist beliefs: Buddhism is not a belief system but a practice path. Like any scientist, the Buddha made certain observations (the Four Noble Truths) based on his direct experience, and he indicated a path of practice, or lab work (the Eight-Fold Path), whereby others could verify those observations through their own direct experience. In a sense, the images of the Buddha, Tara, Padmasambhava, or others that you'll see in some Buddhist temples and practice halls are like the pictures of Newton or Einstein you might see on the wall of a physics classroom: they're there to commemorate the greatest geniuses of the field and to express our gratitude for the dramatic breakthroughs they made so that, in each generation, we don't have to start our investigations from scratch.

If you look closely at Buddhist prayers, you'll probably see that they're far subtler, more profound, and less dualistic than they at first appear. For example, a centuries-old prayer used universally throughout the Buddhist world is "Namo Tassa Bhagavato Arahato Samma Sambuddhassa." A typical translation is, "Homage to the fully awakened, perfectly enlightened Lord Buddha." Now, for many of us in the West, and especially in America, the idea of paying homage to anyone, especially some "Lord," can stir up a lot of inner resistance. We founded our democratic nation by rejecting all political lords, and we waged our scientific revolution by setting aside, if not necessarily rejecting, the traditional doctrines associated with belief in a divine Lord. But in fact there's no word corresponding to "Lord" in the original Pali language of this prayer; the closest is "Bhagavato," which means something like "blessed one." Certainly "Namo" denotes "homage," but I think that, if we look closely at our lives and those of others, we'll see that we're already paying homage to any number of things: money, fame, worldly achievements, our own egos. The question is not whether you pay homage, but what you pay homage to. Jesus makes a similar point in insisting that the kingdom of heaven is within us. It's a matter of evicting whatever limited entities (money, ego, etc.) are occupying our inner throne so that the experience of limitlessness, or "heaven," can take their place.

In this Buddhist prayer, that experience of limitlessness is denoted by the word "Buddha," which literally means "awakener." While it's certainly associated with Buddha Shakyamuni, the specific human teacher who fully awoke some 2,500 years ago, the reality that he woke up to was precisely that he was not limited to his human form but was, in his deepest essence, limitless formlessness - and so is everybody else. So what we're really paying homage to here is our own deepest essence. We're paying homage to the possibility of our own full awakening, as modeled by Shakyamuni. The fact that one person "made it" changes everything, just as, in those old prison films, when Steve McQueen finally escapes, all the other prisoners cheer. Even though they're still behind bars, the fact of his escape radically transforms their existential situation. It means that the walls that hold them are not impregnable after all.

So, for the Buddha's achievement to be meaningful to us, for it to be worthy of homage, it's crucial that he be not some kind of divine god or Lord but an ordinary person like ourselves who nevertheless made the extraordinary commitment to pursue his investigation of the human situation till he penetrated to its essence and awoke to liberation from all limitation and suffering. If he could do it, then we other ordinary humans, through a likewise extraordinary commitment, can do it too.

All the Buddhist prayers and mantras yield to a similar analysis of their meaning. But ironically, most of them are sonically structured in such a way that we quickly forget their meaning and dissolve into their sound, as in this "Namo" prayer, with its sustained vowel sounds at the end of each word. It's actually not a prayer at all in the usual sense of some request or message being communicated to some higher power that (hopefully) listens and responds. When you close your eyes, resonating these sounds from your belly and losing yourself in them as you let them fill all of space, you go beyond sound and meaning to gain an immediate taste of the limitlessness to which we're awakening. So it turns out the "prayer" is not some pointless, merely traditional ritual to be dispensed with before you can get to the "real stuff," the silent-sitting meditation: it is the real stuff, it is meditation.

All this (the deeper, nondual levels of meaning and the transcendental power of sound) can, of course, also be found in the prayers of other traditions besides the Buddhist one. It's usually not so explicit, so you may have to dig a little deeper to find it.

QUESTION: I just attended one of your workshops (or, as you prefer to call them, playgrounds) and found it to be very enlightening as well as entertaining. One of the other attendees, however, cornered me afterwards and said Buddhism, and especially the first two Noble Truths, are all about blaming the victim. Obviously it's not OK for even the most enlightened - Jesus, Buddha, the Dalai Lama - to let a child run out in front of a car, or to look on when it happens and think, "Oh well, it's just another area of high-density wave functions being rapidly transformed to an area of low-density wave functions." How do I answer this person and explain that Buddhism doesn't just "blame the victim," and that resting in present awareness does not preclude, for instance, taking action to prevent harm to another person?

This is one of those classic questions that seem to crop up again and again in various forms. First of all, the whole notion of blame is one of moral judgment - of determining, as it were, who should bear the stain of guilt for a given problem. Such thinking is completely foreign to the kind of analysis that the Buddha is making in his formulation of the Four Noble Truths. He is functioning not as a moral arbiter but as a scientist, observing phenomena and, on the basis of his observations, suggesting how they might be changed. Specifically, in the First Noble Truth he observes that human life, as it is usually lived, is largely characterized by suffering or "unsatisfactoriness" - an observation from which few adults will dissent. What goes against the grain of most people's thinking is the Second Noble Truth, that the source of this suffering is not external circumstances but the faulty way we internally process them, seeking in each moment for our experience to be other than it is.

Again, this is not a moral judgment (or a point of doctrinal faith) but a clinical observation that we are each invited to verify or falsify through our own observations. I think it's very important not to try to decide these things hastily, but to look closely at our own lives and the lives of those around us for corroboration. For example, we might note the case of two people who lose their homes in a hurricane. The external circumstances are the same, yet one person falls apart while the other takes it in stride. It would certainly appear that some difference in internal processing makes the difference.

The gist of the question here, however, is the old fear that enlightenment equals apathy: that we'll use the Second Noble Truth as a cop-out from our ethical responsibility to save the child from the oncoming car or, by extension, to save the world from violence and injustice. This fear is precisely why Buddhism, especially since the Mahayana reformation about 2,000 years ago, has always emphasized the importance of both transcendental wisdom and transpersonal compassion. Through transcendental wisdom we do indeed see that, on the absolute level, it's not the car that causes the child to suffer, and that in fact the child's suffering is ultimately as empty and unreal as a dream. But we also see that, as unreal as the dream may be, the child (and his parents, and the driver of the car, and most people on this planet) really are caught up in it. And so, through transpersonal compassion we reach out and do our best to prevent their dreams from becoming nightmares (save the child from the car, oppose injustice and violence) - and, even better, help them awake.

A potent traditional symbol of the bodhisattva, or aspiring buddha, is the Garuda bird, whose two wings represent wisdom and compassion. To soar to enlightenment we need both wings. And, beyond symbols and traditions, our actual day-to-day experience tells us that as we stop blaming our suffering on externals (the Second Noble Truth) and start to liberate ourselves from it (the Third), we don't become indifferent to the suffering of others. Rather, as we see how avoidable suffering is, we are touched by the poignancy of others' immersion in it. And as we are gradually freed from the old preoccupation with our own suffering, we gain the luxury of devoting our attention to liberating the others.

Most tellingly, the exemplars of enlightenment whom you cite - Jesus, Buddha, the Dalai Lama - have all stressed compassion in their teachings and lived it in their lives. None was apathetic. Each devoted himself one-pointedly, even while resting in the natural great perfection of present awareness, to the eradication of the suffering of others.

QUESTION: In Cinema Nirvana you mention "Stephen Mitchell's indispensable book, The Gospel According to Jesus." Are there other books that you have found to be indispensable? I'd appreciate your suggestions.

First, let me emphasize the importance of Mitchell's The Gospel According to Jesus, especially for anyone trying to reconcile meditation practice and the enlightenment journey with Christianity - because of either your own Christian upbringing or the concerns of friends or family who fear that your practice is somehow in conflict with Christ's teachings. Even for someone like me, for whom none of this was an issue, the book very powerfully demonstrated that enlightenment is not only not in conflict with Christ's teachings but may be their very essence. As both a scholar of ancient languages and religions and a longtime Zen practitioner, Mitchell does a superb job of distinguishing between the liberating core of Christianity and the layers of tragic misunderstanding that have grown around it. (By the way, there are a few other books with very similar titles; be sure to get Mitchell's.)

Another excellent book by Mitchell, in this case edited by him, is The Enlightened Heart, his anthology of poetry both Eastern and Western, ancient and modern. Whether or not you consider yourself a poetry fan, this book will provide numerous "Aha!" moments. It may also send you off to read more Rumi, Hafiz, etc. And while you're in the poetry department, read (or re-read) Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman's brilliant revelation, in which his cosmically expanded vision of America, himself, and the universe forced him to invent a new, expanded poetic form. (If you read this in high school but now have a few years of meditation practice under your belt, try reading it again - you may be surprised at how clear his transcendental view is, at least in his best moments.)

What the Buddha Taught is a fine, concise introduction to the core teachings of Buddhism, with a chapter on each of the Four Noble Truths and a few other fundamental doctrines, plus well-chosen excerpts from the sutras, the transcriptions of the Buddha's actual teachings.

If you're interested in dipping your spoon into the Zen stream, the classic first taste is Zen Flesh Zen Bones, especially its opening section, "101 Zen Stories," which treats you to a series of colorful, sometimes baffling, often very funny mondo (anecdotes) about flashes of enlightenment and encounters between Zen masters and their students, all in the Zen style, which involves a lot of pulling of rugs out from under one's expectations.

To investigate the Tibetan Buddhist teachings, with an emphasis on meditative practices, an excellent book is The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. The author, Sogyal Rinpoche, is a contemporary lama who presents a wealth of very practical information in clear, lively, modern language. One of the topics he treats is Dzogchen, the "natural great perfection" teaching that is considered the most simple and direct of enlightenment paths. To pursue this topic more extensively, read Natural Great Perfection, by Nyoshul Khenpo Rinpoche with Lama Surya Das. This one is truly indispensable for the cultivation of Dzogchen view and practice.

There are many more Buddhist books that I'd want on any desert island where I was going to be stranded for a few years. Two personal favorites are Mother of the Buddhas , Lex Hixon's mind-blowing free translation of the Prajnaparamita Sutra, and The Flight of the Garuda, which takes Dzogchen teaching simultaneously into the outer stratosphere and into the palm of your hand.

Also, if you're hungry for bigger helpings of the sutras than What the Buddha Taught offers, try the recently published In the Buddha's Words. Reading the sutras straight through is a daunting task, as they constitute thousands of pages and are usually presented in a sequence that is not helpful to the nonscholarly reader. This book gives many lengthy excerpts, but for the first time organized coherently by topic.

One more by Stephen Mitchell is his translation of, and incisive commentary on, The Book of Job . Even though you're a good person, if bad things haven't happened to you yet just wait. Job challenges God, searingly asking why, and the answer, especially as Mitchell presents it, is breathtaking.

For works of fiction with enlightenment themes, see Flatland, an imaginative little novel narrated by a square (literally), who lives in a world of two dimensions but suddenly encounters the third; and another quirky little book, the unfinished Mount Analogue, which uses mountain climbing as an allegory for the spiritual quest.

The Razor's Edge is a fine Somerset Maugham novel concerning a young American who, after cheating death in World War I, finds himself wondering what life is all about; he turns his back on his fiancee and his comfortable, moneyed lifestyle to hang out in Paris and India, where he encounters a guru who helps him toward illumination, modeled on the great 20th-century saint Sri Ramana Maharshi, whom Maugham once met. A contrasting theme is found in a must-read in the enlightenment fiction department, Franny and Zooey, J. D. Salinger's funny but forceful affirmation of the spiritual life as something to be found not by dropping out of conventional life but by embracing it. Another fine mid-century novel of the quest is Jack Kerouac's barely fictionalized tale of his own exposure to the teachings of the Buddha and attempts to live them, The Dharma Bums. Kerouac and his Beat compadres may have gotten a lot of things wrong, like equating spiritual liberation with sexual promiscuity, but, considering how little guidance these pioneers had, they got a lot of things right, especially their wonderful dharma exuberance.

Another modern classic is Paramahansa Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi, his memoir of growing up in India and encountering all sorts of miraculous beings and events on the enlightenment path, from a vegetarian lion that roars OM to a guru who's occasionally transparent. Was Yogananda writing strict nonfiction, or did he spice things up with some tall tales? I have no idea, but over the years this book has whetted many appetites for realization.

And at some point, everybody has to read the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu's sage run-down, in 81 pithy sections, of what's what for the individual and for society. There are numerous translations, and in this case I'm not going to recommend Stephen Mitchell's very popular version; I don't like the rather presumptuous way he declares certain sections obsolete and makes up brand-new sections rather than looking more closely at the old ones to find the kind of deep truth that's never obsolete. A lesser-known version worth checking out is Ellen M. Chen's.

QUESTION: In your "Just Being" meditation CD you point out that there really is no distinction between "in" and "out" of meditation. And although I am tremendously enjoying my hatha yoga classes and the meditation and mantra singing that we are practicing, I still sort of laugh to myself silently at the end of every class when we're lying down, relaxing, rubbing our hands together, and touching our faces, and our teacher says, "Do the movements you need to do to come back to this room." I think to myself, "Where else would I be?" Last Monday when he asked if anyone was cold, I'd already jumped the gun and gone to get myself a blanket, and he told me not to. He said, "You can't walk and meditate at the same time." I held my tongue, wanting to say, "I beg to differ," and then we spoke about slow walking meditation. He said, "Oh, that's from Buddhism - it's relaxation, but it's not meditation." Our conversation ended on a friendly note, but I do sometimes walk with the feeling that I could be walking in this meditative state all of the time. Isn't that the point?

Yes, that is the point. The point of meditation is not more meditation. The point is liberation: crystal-clear experience of the boundlessness that at first is glimpsed only in meditation, but is eventually seen in every moment as the true nature of ordinary life.

In Buddhist terminology, there are two aspects to meditation: tranquility and insight, called shamata and vipashyana in Sanskrit, shiné and lahtong in Tibetan. The yogic tradition has focused mainly on the tranquility aspect, going back some 2,000 years or so to the Indian sage Patanjali (his dates are uncertain). In the second verse of the influential text The Yoga Sutras, Patanjali wrote Yogas chitta vriddhi nirodha: "Yoga [union with the Infinite] consists of the silencing of the activity of the mind." So tranquility meditation produces that feeling of inner silence, of being "in" as distinct from the noisy "out." Tranquility is very pleasant (like a tranquilizer), but still dualistic, as now you're stuck with the contrast between in and out.

The Buddhist approach also uses tranquility practices, but they're almost considered a necessary evil, merely a stepping stone to insight practice. Insight, as the name implies, means seeing into the ultimate nature of things, which is not merely nirvana but the nonduality of samsara and nirvana, of noisy ordinary life and silent, boundless freedom. Insight practice means resting in the fact that whatever presents itself in each moment of awareness, whether it's the rosy sunset or the garbage truck, is IT, that which we've been seeking - resting in it as it is, without looking to add or subtract anything. As the Buddha explained, what keeps us from experiencing our natural enlightenment is tanha, craving - that is, looking for the present moment of awareness to be in some way different from what it is, as if there could be some way to improve upon it.

Now here's the kicker, courtesy of Buddhist teaching. You can spend your life developing tranquility and not necessarily gain insight, but if you gain insight you'll automatically have tranquility. In practical terms, of course, it makes sense to do both. Getting the mind sufficiently settled helps give us the clarity to see that "All this is nothing but That" (the "outer" finite world is none other than the "inner" Infinite), but many people practicing in the yogic tradition or even certain Buddhist traditions never get past the dualistic emphasis of concentrating on the breath, trying to still the mind, etc. Taken all the way, this approach leads to quietism, withdrawal, as one flees the ups and downs of human existence, regarding them as disturbances of one's peace of mind.

What I personally find much more effective is the approach taken in the Dzogchen and Mahamudra lineages of Tibetan tradition, where tranquility practice is there but always in a supporting role. You keep abiding in this moment, just as it is, and then this moment just as it is, perhaps asking yourself potent questions such as "If I were a Buddha, an enlightened being, what would I want to change about this moment?" Most people intuitively understand that the answer is "Nothing" - because this moment is perfect as it is. That's the insight that confers perfect tranquility, and that's what you practice whether you're sitting on a cushion and calling it "meditation" or moving your feet and calling it "walking" or doing something with a computer or a sledge hammer and calling it "work."

QUESTION: I make photo essays consisting of images and words. I am currently working on an essay that attempts to communicate the notion of mindfulness: what sorts of things could you notice if you walked this way? I am bothered by elitism. I believe that there is plenty to be gained by paying attention to anything at all: a brick, dogshit, the Taj Mahal. When I select the "greatest hits," I am saying that some selected things are more perfect than others. Photographers do this all the time - it may be a beautiful stairway, but if it is lit in a certain way it is supposedly even more beautiful. I dimly recall that in college mathematics I proved that you could have two infinitely large sets, one of which was nevertheless larger than the other. For example, the set of all positive even integers is infinitely large, but the set of all positive integers is also infinitely large and twice the size of the set of even integers. I think I have an analogous situation. Infinity resides in a grain of sand, but it gets even better if you light it seductively. Also, it is impossible to photograph a pure object. We can only photograph the interaction of the object and light, and light on the earth is inevitably an interaction of the sun's rays with the atmosphere. Again, I am saying that certain conditions are superior to othe