Dean Sluyter

QUESTION: I have a garage full of junk that I can't seem to get rid of. Not just junk junk, but clingy junk: books and pictures that were once meaningful to me, trinkets and tchotchkes from old friends and lovers, notebooks and papers from when I attended college in the pre-computer age, once-snazzy electronic equipment that's now obsolete, once-stylish clothes that probably doesn't even fit me anymore, etc., etc., etc. I know I'll never use any of this stuff, and I don't feel any strong desire even to look at it, yet I somehow can't bring myself to throw it away. Any advice?

It's hard, isn't it? Each piece of sentimental junk feels like a part of your life, a part of you, doesn't it, so that the prospect of throwing it away feels as if you would be ripping out and throwing away a part of yourself.

Most of us have that collection somewhere, whether it's in a drawer or a closet, a garage or a basement. Some people have an entire houseful of the stuff, and eventually they have to rent storage space for the overflow. Some people even have cartons full of stuff that they packed up two or three houses back; every time they move, the boxes move with them, perpetually unopened. And then, when we reach a certain age, we start to realize that, if we don't sift through this stuff, someday our kids will be stuck with it.

Why does this stuff arouse such mixed feelings? Why do we at once cling so tightly to it yet long to be rid of it?

I think it's because it embodies our idea of who we are, as the accumulated sedimentary layers of everyone we think we've been. It's the concrete, three-dimensional illustrations of the elaborate story of ourselves that we've been spinning all these years. At the same time, some deeper intuition tells us we're not just our stories. We're something more, or, better yet, something less than them. We're something free of them: the simple, crystalline Pure Being that is the boundless, silent space within which our varied stories arise and vanish like so many holographic movies. At a deep, intuitive level we yearn to let all those stories just blow away and leave us to marinate in that freedom. Nirvana means, literally, "blown away."

So, back to your garage full of junk. Here's a reality check for you. Imagine that you get a phone call today at work, informing you that it has burned to the ground. Your insurance will rebuild the garage, but all your junk has been lost. On balance, do you feel sad or happy, deprived or relieved? If you feel more relieved -- and I'll bet you do -- that's your confirmation that you want freedom, the unspeakable lightness of Being, more than the weight of your old stuff. And it may be just the perspective shift you need to wade in, roll up your sleeves, and start ruthlessly chucking junk into the Dumpster. Grab the first gewgaw and just do it, quick, like ripping off a Band-Aid. You'll immediately get some taste of that lightened-up sensation, and that will make it easier to throw away the next thing.

If throwing everything away sounds too ruthless, you can imagine you're at home when the garage catches fire and you have four minutes to pull stuff out. Ready? Go!

For that matter, some of the stuff that's just junk to you could be truly useful to someone else. That sweater that you'll never wear could be keeping a homeless person warm. The dollies and stuffed animals of your childhood could be making some other, actual children much happier. (You can keep one or two favorites. That's just human, and fine, I'm sure.)

Here's some wisdom on this topic from Mooji:

Occasionally on Sunday mornings, I enjoy going to flea markets. There you find, in heaps on the ground, objects that were once someone's treasure -- now selling for peanuts. Old family portraits, a wedding dress, a ring, an old ivory pipe, all lying about carelessly in the rain. Once of great sentimental value, now meaningless junk. Nothing you gain in this life can stay with you. … Even this body you cannot take with you. Worms are waiting for it, and vultures; fishes are waiting and fire is waiting. Elements returning to elements, the elemental dance. "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust": the priest's farewell. If you are the body, what can you take with you? … You are not merely the body; you are 100% Pure Being. But you must find this out for yourself. It must become your own discovery, happening in your innermost being.

Ultimately, then, it doesn't matter whether you throw the stuff away or not. (But, at least as a courtesy to your kids, throw it away!) What matters most is that inner discovery, and nothing external can impede it, neither the absence nor the presence of this or that. As that discovery dawns, you realize that all the clutter -- even the thought-clutter of your mind and the event-clutter of your life -- is powerless to obstruct the nirvanic relief of Pure Being. And through the simple process of looking within yourself, it does dawn, and everything is experienced in its glow. Then tasks and situations that once pushed and pulled you in so many ways become frictionless flow, and things that were hard to do -- even cleaning out the garage -- become easy.

QUESTION: I recently attended a teaching of yours in which we engaged in the process of self-inquiry. You brought us back many times to the question "Who are you?" but occasionally rephrased it as "Who or what are you?" I found this a bit confusing. Is it a who or a what?

Neither. Both words are unsatisfactory. That (at least in my understanding) is why they're often used together, to sort of soften one another up, to serve as mutual antidotes, to cancel each other out.

Otherwise, we might fall into the trap of reifying these terms; that is, convincing ourselves that they refer to entities, as in the classic Abbot and Costello routine: "Who's on first," "What's on second," "I don't know," "Third base!"

The problem with the term "what" is that it sounds like a thing - a rock or a machine or some kind of ghost in the machine. In other words, it sounds like some object we can perceive, rather than the perceiver of all objects.

"Who" is generally a better word because it comes closer to the flavor of our experience, that we are not an inert perceived object but rather the lively awareness that perceives, this luminous space (so to speak) within which all perception takes place. Thus "Who am I?" is the classical form of self-inquiry as set forth by the early twentieth-century Advaita master Sri Ramana Maharshi, and down to this day by his students and his students' students, including my teacher, Mooji.

The drawback is that "who" can sound like a person. Self-inquiry must cut through the fiction of personhood, to see that the personal "I" is merely a concept - in fact, the concept that is the source of all other concepts. It's like the little bait-fish that you put on your hook to draw other fish. Once you've bought in to the concept of a personal I - "I am Bill" - you can then wander indefinitely in such concepts as "I am happy," "I am depressed," "I am clever," "I am an American," "I am a loser," "I am spiritual," etc.

All these concepts come and go. One experiences, is aware of, those comings and goings. Another way to say that is, The concepts come and go within awareness. Now, is that awareness a who or a what? Neither.

It's the space (for lack of a better word) within which all concepts come and go, including such concepts as "who," "what," and "Is it a who or a what?"

It's indescribable, not because it's too complex to describe, but because it's too simple. For that matter, "complex" and "simple" are also just concepts within it. It's not even simple.

If you're still trying to think about this, still using your mind, it all might sound obscure. But if for just one moment you'll stop relying on your mind, you'll see that, as Mooji says, "It is embarrassingly obvious."

Just for one moment, be quiet and pay attention. If you feel you can't, that's fine too. Who is unquiet and inattentive? Within what awareness do quiet and noise, attention and distraction, come and go? Who observes it? This one, here now. You are that. That one is neither attention nor distraction but pure awareness, eternally and intrinsically free from both attention and distraction. By the same token, it is free from pleasure and pain, youth and age, birth and death. This is called moksha, liberation.

So . . . who . . . what . . . ? Don't get hung up on the words. You can just as well ask:

What is the nature of this awareness?
Who or what is experiencing my experiences right now?
Where is all this taking place?
Does this awareness appear to have a proprietor? If not, what is there where there's no proprietor? If so, who or what is aware of the proprietor?
All this is already being witnessed; from where?
(Does the self or observer appear to be located somewhere, perhaps in the head or behind the eyes? If so, who or what is entertaining this notion of location? And where is it located?)
Who thinks it's a person?
Who's on first?

Look, it's this simple: Walk a few steps. Then stand still. (Really do this, please.) Then walk a few steps. Then stand still. Naturally, as you have done all your life, you spontaneously observe, you witness, you are aware of both the walking and the standing. Does that awareness walk? Does it stand? Can it ever be affected by walking or standing?

As everything changes - as you feel hungry or full, peaceful or stressed, grieving or joyous - what remains the same?

Right now, someone is reading a web page headed "Who's on First?" and, perhaps, wondering whether what's being read is useful advice or metaphysical blather. Fine - who (or what) is wondering?

QUESTION: Well, it's been a weird couple of days. Yesterday I had an amazing meditation experience of deep peace and relaxation. When I was done, it felt like I'd been asleep for a few hours. But today I read Mooji's book where he said (basically), "Try this: stop trying." So I did it. In an instant I was gone. I mean, nonexistent. But here's the part where you'll drive up here to crack me over the head. I got so scared that it went away. I mean, heart-pounding scared. OK, so I regrouped and started again, but after that, of course, it was the same old thing. I guess you can't try to not try and still try to make something happen. I hope I'm not too chicken to go back there. Can you believe I'm such a scaredy-cat?

I promise not to drive up and crack you over the head. (I don't make house calls) But there's nothing to mourn or beat yourself up over. In fact, this experience is common and completely understandable. What did the caterpillar say when he saw a butterfly? "You'll never get me up in one of those things!"

All your life you think you've been this fictitious character, this "me." As Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj put it, "You have enclosed yourself in time and space, squeezed yourself into the span of a lifetime and the volume of a body and thus created the innumerable conflicts of life and death, pleasure and pain, hope and fear." Yet despite all the conflicts and limitations it inevitably generates, "me" is what we know how to do - we've had so much practice! It's sort of like people who keep complaining about their crummy job or relationship or computer operating system, but they hang onto it because it's so familiar. Even more than your OS, "me" feels like home, because it wasn't built by Bill Gates. Trait by trait, memory by memory, opinion by opinion, hope by hope, fear by fear, you've painstakingly made it yourself.

Then one day, triggered by some meditative experience or by the penetrating words of a sage like Mooji or by anything else (in the case of the Zen master Ikkyu it was the cawing of a crow), suddenly the whole thing comes crashing down. At least it seems that way. In reality, there's nothing to come crashing, since it was all built out of vapor to begin with. Its evaporation is merely the revelation of the weightless, vaporous nature of the entire melodrama of personality and conflict that seemed so weighty and real.

As Shakespeare's Prospero says in The Tempest:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind.

When that which seemed so real, even though it caused so much pain, suddenly vanishes, it makes sense that you might, at first, panic. That's why Prospero starts this speech by saying, "You do look, my son, in a moved sort,/ As if you were dismay'd: be cheerful, sir." With further experience of this evaporation of the illusion of self, we see more clearly that the emptiness that's left in its place is not menacing or depressing or existentially nauseating, or any of the many misapprehensions based on philosophical speculations or incomplete experiences. It is not annihilation.

As the Beatles sang (in "Tomorrow Never Knows"), "Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream/ It is not dying, it is not dying." We see that it is (and here I must use some thoroughly inadequate words) luminous emptiness. All our life the small self has been bouncing like a pinball between the happy-making and sad-making experiences of the world; then suddenly the whole pinball game is revealed to be a game only - GAME OVER - and we're left with the reality of the true, selfless Self, which has no form or traits or limitations, whose nature is indescribable bliss beyond the happy and the sad.

Through continuing practice of self-inquiry and natural, non-meditation meditation ("Try this: stop trying"), this selfless reality will grow more familiar. As you acclimate to it, your fear will evaporate along with everything else; the panic will be seen as the ego's last-ditch attempt to hold onto its throne, to scare you out of disenthralling yourself. This was your first time sticking your toe in the cold (exhilaratingly cold) water. Naturally you yank it out. But don't worry; once you've had that taste, nothing will stop you from going back for more. In fact, there's no "back" to go to, just as there is no "one" to "go" there.

Right now, who is it that is experiencing this sense of failure and loss? "Oh, gee, I'm a scaredy-cat, so I got kicked out of the kingdom of heaven." Quick, look! Who is that I? Identify yourself!

QUESTION: I've been reading Mooji's book Before I Am and loving it. Thanks for introducing him. This is a scarily basic question, but ... When Mooji says "be That," does it mean living in a space that is more witness consciousness? So, if where you put your attention becomes your "reality," do I try to keep my attention on the witness (which isn't so easy, especially when I'm interacting with other people)? Probably it's the type of thing that, when I experience being in that space, I'll know the answer. I must admit that this stuff seems so hard to pin down - much easier to recite a mantra a billion times!

The whole business of "witnessing" or "the witness" is a source of confusion for many people, very commonly misunderstood in a couple of ways. The classic text on the subject is this beautiful image from the Mundaka Upanishad:

Two birds, inseparable friends, cling to the same tree.
One of them eats the sweet fruit, the other looks on without eating.

The first bird represents what we usually think of as our "self": the body+mind, actively engaged in the world of time and space, action and reaction, completely immersed in "eating" the variety of sweets (and bitters) it encounters. The second bird is what we really are, sometimes called the "Self": pure awareness, undefinable, outside time and space, silent, non-engaged, empty, luminous, the neutral witness of all that befalls the "self."

The first common misinterpretation of this lovely picture is that it advocates suppressing natural emotions, as if we are to become like the uninvolved second bird by somehow flattening out all our fear, anxiety, and anger, as well as our joy. For starters, this just plain doesn't work. Over the years I've seen many people attempt it, with exactly a zero percent success rate. What it does lead to, in my experience, is a lot of self-deception. Fortunately, this kind of pseudo-witnessing has nothing to do with the reality of enlightenment. As Mooji puts it, "You are the Buddha, and the Buddha is not a zombie."

The second misinterpretation, also very common, is more subtle and sounds more like the one you've been pursuing. Without necessarily trying to suppress emotions, you've apparently been putting yourself through various mental gymnastics trying to find or create "a space that is more witness consciousness." Perhaps we could say that, rather than trying to subtract emotions from your life, you've been trying to add a "space" of non-emotion, like adding a white, unfurnished room to an otherwise cluttered house.

This is getting closer, but the real thing is still much simpler than that. It's not some kind of detached state that can be cultivated or manufactured or carefully carried like a jar balanced precariously on your head. It's not a new or additional phenomenon to be experienced. Rather, it is and always has been the experiencer of all phenomena. Its quality of noninvolvement cannot be created or destroyed but is intrinsic and spontaneous. We could say that the vignette of the two birds is not prescriptive but descriptive: it's not giving you something to do but pointing out how things are. When you see clearly what's being pointed out, liberation is realized.

What is being pointed out? Everything that you're experiencing right now - the colors in the room, the sounds, the shapes, the thoughts running around your mind (wondering, for example, what "witnessing" is all about) - is taking place before you, the awareness, right now. The shapes and colors being experienced include those of the body; hence the body is not experiencer (the second bird), it's phenomenal experience (the first). The constellation of thoughts that we call "mind" is similarly experienced, hence not experiencer. It's all being witnessed right now, always has, always will be. Just stay as that awareness which you already are, which is not body or mind or any other thing, before which everything unfolds itself. Period. Done.

At first this does involve some effort, or at least some deliberate choice, to keep bringing the attention (not the thinking mind, which never gets there, and not the Self, which is already there) to the Self, the witness. And yes, at first this is easier when you're in solitude and silence than when in vigorous interaction with others. But by just taking a little time every day to rest in the simple, self-evident sense of "I am," without identifying it with body or mind, you'll quickly start to get the scent, like hounds that are given the scent of the escaped prisoner's sock, and then more and more you start to pick up the scent no matter where you are and how much is going on.

And then, more and more, you realize that it has always been there. Slap forehead and repeat the words, "How could I have missed it?" When you talk about "trying to keep my attention on the witness (which isn't so easy)," it's as if you're looking for some nice, neutral place to rest your eyes. The flowers? The sky? But your eyes have been resting all along - in their sockets.

QUESTION: I learned Transcendental Meditation from you in the early 90's and have recently gotten back in touch through your website. It's interesting to see how your meditation approach has evolved over the years. I guess it's best to be eclectic and flexible and not be tied down to one specific school of thought - I suppose it all boils down to the spiritual evolutionary process. One interesting phenomenon I've noticed during the last few years is that, when I'm meditating consistently for a length of time, my body seems to "crave" certain stretching and movement exercises, some of which derive from yoga; I also become more selective with my diet. It seems as though an intuitive force from within is guiding me. If this is the case, I wonder if consistent meditation can help people intuitively resolve various imbalances in their lives. Finally, on your recommendation, I've been watching some YouTube clips of the Advaita teacher Mooji. It's certainly fascinating, but I feel that I have to do some background reading regarding Advaita and self-inquiry, to gain a better intellectual understanding.

First, as to my evolving approach: Yes, I agree that there's value in flexibility and openness to many things. But there's also value in persevering at one thing. Personally, in shifting my main focus from TM to Dzogchen to Advaita self-inquiry, I now seem to be on my third main dish (with occasional side dishes), but that's been over a period of 40 years. As with all things, it's about the Middle Way: finding the sweet spot between excessive rigidity and excessive loosey-gooseyness. And no one else can tell you where that sweet spot is for you. It's tricky enough to find it for oneself.

I've been extremely fortunate in the teachers I've connected with, and, while they come from different lineages, they've had one thing in common: they've all emphasized the naturalness of enlightenment. The infinite is the very nature of your own being, your own awareness, right now, so the harder you strain to attain it, the more you reinforce the illusion that it's hard to attain. I've really only ever taught one thing - just being. Self-inquiry, as taught in the Advaita lineage, is also present in the Dzogchen lineage. Effortless nonmeditation meditation, as taught in the Dzogchen lineage, is also present in the Advaita lineage. Despite some subtle differences in history and vocabulary, the practices are complementary, not contradictory. The point is to gaze out of this little hut in which we've been crouching (the finite) into the vast sky that surrounds us on every side (the infinite); let's not get too distracted by quibbling about whether we're gazing through this or that window.

I do think you're on to something profound regarding the movement exercises. It is said that the traditional yoga asanas (postures) arose out of the spontaneous movements of the bodies of Indian forest hermits who spent long hours in deep meditation. And I do agree that this same deep intuitive wisdom can and does find application in other fields of creative problem-solving. There are, however, two caveats here. First, don't go into meditation looking for an answer to a specific problem. Doing that robs your meditation of the very naturalness and spontaneity that have given rise to whatever intuitive wisdom you've already experienced; it turns the process of just being into yet another mode of doing. Second, be a little careful about interpreting any dream or whim that happens to come along while you're meditating as some great wisdom that you should jump up and act upon. I've seen people indulge in some pretty sketchy behavior that they think is divine inspiration. Use common sense, and before you put any idea into action make sure it still looks good in the harsh daylight.

Finally, about reading up on Advaita and self-inquiry:

Nahhh! Forget about it.

This is not about accumulating more learning. This is (in terms of the Vedic icons) the thunderbolt of Lord Shiva, the god of destruction, blowing away all your learning and cleverness to reveal the silent awareness-self that has underlain it all along - the irreducibly simple awareness-self that is the sole experiencer of everything you're experiencing right now. Just keep asking, "Who am I?" Who is it (for example) that thinks more reading is required? Where is that thought resonating but within silent awareness? I know, I know, there are orthodox Hindu pundits who say you need years of scripture study before you can approach the experience of the self; some will even tell you that you can't get enlightened without learning Sanskrit. This is bullshit - simply a delaying tactic that the ego adopts to keep enlightenment at the end of an ever-receding rainbow, to keep it from knocking the ego off its throne.

If you must read something, I would say read the transcribed words of the radical sages who have powerfully advocated this take-no-prisoners approach: I Am That by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, Be As You Are by Sri Ramana Maharshi (both available though Amazon), and Before I Am by Mooji (available here). But better yet, watch more Mooji videos (here and here) and let the force of the self-inquiry that he articulates continue to penetrate your experience throughout the day.

QUESTION: I recently attended a teaching of yours. You cited the classic analogy comparing the mind to a jar of muddy water, the instruction being to stop shaking and stirring the water and simply let it be, so that the mud settles by itself and the water's innate clarity shines forth. You also talked about how that innate clarity of consciousness - boundless awareness - usually gets missed because of mistaken identification with the mind's activity, beginning with the thought of "I." I was especially struck by your story about your teacher Mooji saying that the final instruction he would give to a student as his train pulled out of the station would be "Stop identifying." It seems to me (or to "me") that I spend 99.9% of this lifetime in a determined attempt to identify. And perhaps not just to identify, but to claim what or who gets identified as "mine" or "not mine," as "wanted" or "unwanted" by me, etc. Like awareness, I didn't choose this personal imperative. It's there waiting for me every morning when I wake up. It occurred to me, somewhat disturbingly, that, using the analogy of the container of muddy water, I'm shaking and stirring about as diligently as I can.

Of course you're quite right that we spend 99.9% of the time working hard to maintain "me" and to project it into "mine" and our whole constellation of "wanted" attractions and "unwanted" aversions.

The good news, therefore, is that spending even 1% of your time deconstructing "me" through self-inquiry can quickly and radically start to shift the situation. As always on the spiritual path, use what's handy - that is, whatever presents itself in the moment. So, awareness has identified with the thought of "I," which in turn has gotten caught up in an aversion to, say, the music playing through the wall from the apartment next door. In various ways you've been doing this all your life, so you're an expert. Now just follow the same process backwards. Start with the aversion (don't try to repress it, a classic mistake). Follow that back to the alleged "I" who is averse. Think you've found one? If so, follow it back to the silent awareness that has projected itself into an "I." If not, you're already there. Do all this by asking, Who is annoyed by the music? And then, when the music stops and you feel relief, ask, Who is relieved?

Another way to ask the question is, Where are the annoyance and relief experienced? Or, What is that which remains unchanged whether I'm annoyed or relieved? First I was aware of annoyance, then I was aware of relief; we could say that the experience of annoyance arises within awareness and then the experience of relief arises within awareness. That awareness itself, within which those two contrasting feelings arise, must itself be beyond annoyance or relief. It's as if first a red object and then a green object are flashed before a mirror. The mirror's crystalline colorlessness allows both colors, and all colors, to be reflected. Allow your attention to settle back into the colorless (and shapeless, sizeless, weightless, textureless, timeless, spaceless) awareness that equally reflects all sensations, thoughts, and feelings, and which is the basis, the silent background, the blank screen behind every experience you've ever had.

This cognition of shunyata, emptiness (to use the apparently-but-not-really scary Buddhist term) grows clearer through continued self-inquiry and meditation. As it does, among other things you will start noticing that others are innately empty, just like you. Then, among other things, you may notice that "beautiful" faces and shapes are just some rather arbitrarily chosen accidental combinations of features of the outer mask; that "beauty" is just a thought. The thought seems real because it's so insistently reinforced by society, media, and one's own mind, but it's truly in the eye (or the "I") of the beholder. As you come to see more clearly how you're superimposing that judgment - and many others - you start to see what's really before you, without, as Mooji puts it, adding any extra herbs and spices.

With any ingrained habit you feel that you're being controlled, but it's by imagining that you're not in control that you keep the habit going. (Whenever I hear someone say "I'm trying to quit smoking," I know they probably won't; they've already stacked the deck, as if there's some outside force compelling them to smoke. If you really want to stop smoking you don't try; you stop.) So the other good news is that you're mistaken when you say, "I didn't choose this personal imperative. It's there waiting for me every morning when I wake up." It's not waiting for you each morning; each morning you choose it afresh and then work (hard) all day at maintaining it. Imagine what a relief it will be when you finally resign from that job.

And meanwhile ask, Who chooses it? Who will resign?

Have fun!

QUESTION: Have you read "The Secret"? It centers on the Law of Attraction, which states that feelings and thoughts can attract events. There are several positions in "The Secret" that, to me, seem contradictory to the philosophy of Buddhism: (1) The Secret focuses on the end, the result. That's opposed to being in the moment and the concept that life is a road to be traveled, a journey, not a destination to be reached. (2) The premise is that your thoughts create and determine your actions. Isn't that opposite to the goal of meditation: letting thought go, just being and accepting what is? (3) If the Law of Attraction is what causes good things to happen to us (and the book uses money as one example), then what about those people who have "good things," such as great wealth, who don't believe in or practice The Secret? (4) The Secret advises, Don't talk about negative things or you'll attract more of the same. Well, to an extent, that could be true, but it could also be detrimental to bottle up and keep a lid on them. In fact it could be therapeutic to talk about negative things, to a point . . . So,what's your take on all this?

No, I've never read the book or viewed the video. Despite the many friends who have urged me to check it out, I just can't get interested. So I don't really know anything about it, but since ignorance has never kept me from spouting off before, I'll say a thing or two.

I pretty much agree with everything you've said above. "The Secret" strikes me as just the latest repackaging of a product that's been merchandised for years, going back at least half a century to Norman Vincent Peale's "The Power of Positive Thinking." (Peale, by the way, was an anti-Catholic bigot who opposed John Kennedy's election on the grounds that he would take orders from the Pope. The best comment on the situation came from Adlai Stevenson: "I find the Apostle Paul appealing and the Apostle Peale appalling.") As you've indicated, "The Secret," like Peale's version, offers mental means to supposedly attain one's goals. Does it work? Who knows? I suspect there's some element of self-hypnosis involved, or at least self-deluding, highly selective interpretation of data. (I found a parking spot because I thought positively about it. My lottery ticket didn't win, so I must have let some negative thoughts creep in.)

Frankly, I don't care if it works or not. Real dharma, real liberation teaching (whether you call it Buddhism or whatever - I don't care about that either) cuts through fixation on goals. Real dharma reveals that the fulfillment we mistakenly associated with the attainment of some goal is actually available right here, right now, in this moment as it is, if we just rest in open attention. All the manipulation of goals and positive thoughts and negative thoughts merely distracts us further from this moment. There's never a shortage of distractions, but I find the ones dressed up in pseudospiritual wrapping especially annoying. If you're gonna distract me from the spirit, distract me honestly with sex or ice cream or at least some good TV, not with something pretending to have something to do with the spirit.

So I guess if The Secret doesn't work it's dangerous because it reinforces a delusion, and if it does work it's dangerous because it reinforces the delusion, that happiness lies at the end of some rainbow that's not right here. Maybe the best comment on the topic is that of the enlightened sock puppet, Puppetji. You can view his video
here.

Update 11.16.08: A friend has been kind enough to point out that my tone in the above screed is unduly harsh, and upon re-reading it I must say I agree. What's helpful about digging up snide comments about someone who's been dead for years, or adopting such a dismissive I-couldn't-care-less attitude? A lot of sincere people have invested a lot of energy in The Secret, and they deserve more respect than that.

I guess I sometimes can go overboard in the process of trying to be clear. The point I was trying to make was the distinction between, on the one hand, the pursuit of goal-dependent happiness and, on the other hand, authentic enlightenment practice, which (as I understand it) locates baseless, boundless happiness right here, wherever we are, irrespective of goals. That point could have been made without so much slash-and-burn language. Certainly to call The Secret "dangerous" is an exaggeration. Anyone who's already engaged in real enlightenment practice is unlikely to get seriously distracted by the "Law of Attraction" - they understand that enlightenment practice is all about cutting through attraction and aversion to see that everything just is. And for those not so engaged, well, who knows? Maybe exploring The Secret could be a first step in discovering that there's more to this existence business than meets the eye ... a process of discovery that could eventually lead beyond goal orientation to the goalless heart of the matter.

Thanks for keeping me honest!

QUESTION: I am currently reading and studying The Three Levels of Spiritual Perception, a commentary on the The Beautiful Ornament of the Three Visions, a classical Sakya Buddhist text. I took refuge at a Sakya temple earlier this year. In this text, the author says that "by taking refuge in the Sangha, you undertake not to honor non-Buddhist masters as your spiritual teachers." I doubt this will have an effect on my spiritual search, but I'm wondering if you have come across this explanation of taking refuge in the Sangha, and how you respond to it.

Taking refuge in the Triple Jewel - the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha - is of prime importance from a Buddhist point of view. It's the formal entrance onto the Buddhist path. So it's not surprising that many Buddhist scholars and authorities have commented on the meaning of the refuge vow, and that their interpretations vary. As a bona fide non-scholar and non-authority, I interpret the vow as an acknowledgment that nothing will save you from suffering (that is, nothing will give you refuge) except your own innate enlightenment (Buddha), the teachings that facilitate the unfolding of your innate enlightenment (Dharma), and your brother and sister fellow travelers on this journey, with whom you share mutual support (Sangha).

I feel strongly that no one is ever bound to any promise that hasn't been made wholeheartedly and with full understanding. These are contracts made in your heart, not in your lawyer's office. Personally, I feel compelled to honor truth wherever I see it, and lucky to get the chance. And most of the Buddhist teachers with whom I feel the deepest connection enjoy quoting from the Gospels, children's books, or anywhere else they can find the truth in some form that helps wake people up. "Buddha" means "awake," and if a pop lyric from a rock 'n' roller who's never heard of Buddhism helps awaken you, as far as I'm concerned that's part of your Buddha path - if not, strictly speaking, your Buddhist path. And if the repetition of a perfectly orthodox Buddhist prayer is putting you to sleep, it's not part of that path. (You may recall that I've written books about finding enlightened truth in song lyrics, jokes, nursery rhymes, and movies, so if it's an exclusionary approach to teachings you're looking for, I'm not your guy.) As one of my (Buddhist) teachers once put it, "Being a Buddhist is not important. Being a Buddha is important."

No, I haven't heard of this particular interpretation of the refuge before - but, again, I'm not a scholar and this could be one of those things that everyone knows about except me. I could see its utility in terms of saving the one taking refuge (the refugee!) from confusion by keeping the path simple: you're freed from having to sort out all those other teachings, and thus freed to zoom straight ahead on a narrowed path to vastness, much as being married to one spouse doesn't restrict your ability to love but helps you explore love's outer limits by saving you from superficial dalliances. ("Love binds to liberate," as Maharishi Mahesh Yogi once said.)

So it comes down to what works for you. All these vows, teachings, teachers, all of it, are there as tools for your liberation. They're there to serve you; you're not there to serve them. ("The sabbath is made for man, man is not made for the sabbath.") There's a saying in spiritual circles that you get more water by digging one well a hundred feet deep than by digging ten wells ten feet deep. That sounds sensible. But once I asked Ram Dass about this saying, and he replied, "You're only ever digging one well." That sounds right too. Take your pick.

Those of a more orthodox temperament will no doubt take exception to all this, but I think if someone's your teacher - if, as things shake out, he's the one that's poised to give you some small or large piece of the information you need for your spiritual unfoldment - then you don't really have much choice in the matter. What are you going to do, plug your ears and sing out, like a defiant child, "I can't hear you!"?

QUESTION: Is vegetarianism a prerequisite for spiritual enlightenment?

It doesn't seem to be. Some of my main enlightenment heroes, including Jesus and the Buddha, appear to have eaten meat. (In fact, the Buddha died from eating tainted "sweetness of pig" - that is, pork - although some sects of Buddhism have tried to reinterpret the text to mean truffles.) The current Dalai Lama wanted to be a vegetarian but his doctors insisted that he eat meat, so he plays it down the middle and is a vegetarian every other day. And he seems to be spiritually in a pretty good place.

There are certainly strong ecological arguments to be made for vegetarianism: it takes many pounds of grain to produce one pound of meat, meat production pollutes the waters with animal wastes, etc. And of course there are the ethical arguments: eating your pound of meat deprives the less affluent of all that grain, and killing sentient beings is not so good either. (Here is an excellent New York Times article on the environmental, economic, and health benefits to be derived from reducing - not necessarily eliminating - meat consumption.)

I have great respect for vegetarians, and was one myself for years. But personally, I've felt stronger, healthier, and more effective in the world since going back to eating moderate amounts of meat. And in terms of the deepening of my meditative or spiritual awareness, I've been having the best years of my life.

There's one other related factor that I think has been healthy in my case, which I'll mention on the chance that it applies to anyone else as well. For me, being a vegetarian supported my tendencies to be finicky - to pick and poke at what was put before me in order to make sure it contained no animal products, and to be a tad difficult in restaurants and other people's homes. And in turn, that subtly supported my tendencies to be finicky in relating to my environment generally, to pick and poke at the world of experiences presenting themselves to my senses, to cast myself as a fussy gatekeeper who had to keep vigilant about letting in only the "right" kind of experiences. I feel that letting go of vegetarianism helped me move further toward letting go of that attitude, and so to become more easy-going and accepting, to connect with the world on the level where it's all good, where it's all the kingdom of heaven.

Certainly I still can find other pretexts for fussiness, like cigarette smoke. In fact, I was recently on a silent retreat in an old villa in southern Italy. Most of the retreatants were Italians, hence many of them smoked, and smoked their way right through the retreat, right next to where I or others might be sitting in meditation on the verandah or even inside the house. (Being Italians, many of them could barely keep silent either, but that's another matter.) In America, such behavior on a retreat would be unheard of. But there was nothing for me to do but watch my own annoyance come and go and come and go again, let go, and ultimately be OK with it. That was good for me.

QUESTION: I attended your talks at One Tree Yoga in Omaha recently. They were very inspiring and powerful - thank you for that. I have a question that I didn't have a chance to ask you. I am finding that being present comes fairly naturally to me during meditation, at home, in the car, etc. However, I'm having trouble being in the moment at my job. I think part of the struggle is that I'm a graphic designer and have to "judge" things all day long: Is this color right, is the person in this photo the right demographic, etc. In meditation we're taught not to judge our thoughts, but in many jobs, people have to make decisions about something being good or bad all day long. Any suggestions?

First of all, just to be clear, we're always in the present - where else could we be? (I used to joke that one day Ram Dass, the author of the spiritual classic Be Here Now, forgot to follow his own advice ... and disappeared.) Of course, what you're actually asking about is being consciously present, so that your attention doesn't get so lost in thoughts about the past and future that you forget they're being experienced in the present, which is where all experience takes place. (If you're not clear on this point, try moving your finger in the past. Now try moving it in the future. Now move it in the present.)

It's certainly true that, for most people, mental work usually overshadows the experience of presence more powerfully than simple physical work. I love washing dishes, weeding my lawn, or any other such activity that allows my mind to settle into the moment-by-moment ease of just being present, without anything to decide or figure out. You're quite right in connecting such activities with the nonjudgmental simplicity of meditation. This connection is recognized in such traditions as Zen, where "chopping wood and carrying water" becomes a meditative practice at least as important as silent sitting.

It's also important to distinguish between deciding, or evaluating, and judging. Life requires us to make hundreds of decisions a day. Do you drive through that yellow light? (How long has it been yellow? Is it safe? Is there a cop around?) Do you fire that employee? (How is his work record? Have his alleged misdeeds been properly documented? Can you find a replacement?) There's nothing wrong with that, although it's certainly refreshing to take a break from it in the nothing-to-decide atmosphere of meditation or pulling weeds. Judging, in the sense that the Bible and other spiritual texts advise us to "Judge not," means more than just evaluating with our minds. It implies that, based on our evaluation, we close our hearts, we condemn this person or thing as "bad." (I hate that pain-in-the-neck traffic signal. That employee is a total jerk.)

As Hamlet says, "There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so"; beneath the overlay of our thinking, everything just is what it is. When we add the spin of judgment to our experience of the world, we build a world of judgmental spin, and then we have to live in it. Thus the full (and profoundly insightful) advice from the Bible is "Judge not, lest ye be judged." If we insist on putting good-guy white hats or bad-guy black hats on everyone, we eventually wind up (in our own judging minds) having to wear one of those hats ourselves. We deprive ourselves and everyone else of the more human, generous, realistic privilege of wearing shades of gray. Failing to give others a little slack, we find ourselves tightly bound.

But back to your question. When your job requires you to spend the day at the computer (or anywhere else) making one decision after another, there are ways to keep from getting completely sucked into that constrictive mental mode. Perhaps the simplest and most effective is to take frequent mini-breaks. Every time you press "Save," either close your eyes or raise your gaze from the screen and, for a few moments, look out a window or at a wall, settling into the distant focus point that's called "infinity" (!) on a camera. If your software autosaves, you can set a little alarm to go off a few times an hour. In these mini-breaks you'll regain your sense of presence, your consciousness of the vast, silent ocean of being, within which your hundreds of decisions are merely small waves. Through repeated alternation of work/break, work/break, you'll find a growing sense of integration of the two, so that more and more you can surf the waves without losing contact with the ocean. In this way, your work becomes a paradigm of the whole enlightenment path, which is not about finding the bliss of nirvana by rejecting the ordinariness of samsara, but rather finding that nirvana is inseparably present within - is the very essence of - every drop of samsara.

It also may be helpful to know that grace (the full-blown, totally vivid, no-doubt-about-it preview of nirvana smack in the middle of samsara) can come any time, unbidden. The New Testament says "The kingdom of God comes like a thief in the night," and a Zen teacher once said "Enlightenment, when it comes, is an accident; all our spiritual practice just makes us more accident-prone." A close friend of mine recently had just such an experience of grace descend upon him as he sat at home at his computer. He'd been completely immersed in a project for several hours, with loud rock music playing on the stereo the whole time. So you never know. So relax.

QUESTION: Let's cut to the chase. How can I get enlightened?

I like your attitude. If you've read enough or practiced enough or stumbled into enough spontaneous experience to have some inkling of what enlightenment implies for our lives - unwavering joy, complete freedom from suffering and fear, no matter what our circumstances - then there's no question more worthy to be asked. On the basis of my very limited qualifications, I'm going to give you two answers, which at first will sound contradictory. They aren't.

Answer #1: You can get enlightened by treading the well-worn path.

Fortunately, thousands before you have asked the same question, have devoted their lives to finding what works, and have left clear footprints for others to follow - that is, teachings. The teachings have been formulated in a variety of languages and styles so that anyone should be able to find those that talk to them, that they can put to use. Personally, I find the Buddhist teachings exceptionally clear and usable: the how-to of enlightenment is laid out as the Eightfold Path of Right View, Right Intention, etc., culminating in Right Meditation.

Since there are many books and websites where the Eightfold Path is expounded in detail by real Buddhist teachers, I won't attempt that here. Suffice it to say that it takes all the areas of our lives where we have to engage anyway and shows how to engage in ways that decrease rather than increase suffering and delusion for ourselves and others. For example, the practice of Right Speech could include refraining from lying, malicious gossip, whining, intellectual maze-building, and any other kind of speech that tends to hypnotize our consciousness and that of others, fixating it in patterns of constrictedness.

The Eightfold Path is not a program of accumulating merit (or merit badges) so that someday the Big Buddha in the Sky will open the gates of nirvana to you. Yes, some of the old texts can make it sound that way, but today sophisticated Buddhists generally give that language a more inward and immediate application. And sophisticated Christians can understand, say, the Ten Commandments in the same way. You may have gotten the impression in Sunday school that heaven is a place where good people play the harp after they die, but that's not what Jesus says; he says the kingdom of heaven is within you, just as the Buddha says that nirvana is right here in the ordinary world of samsara. But it's pretty hard for most people to get their minds quiet and clear enough to recognize this inner heaven if they're busy killing or stealing or coveting their neighbors' wives. Virtue is its own reward. Following the Commandments, being good, helps you get to heaven in the sense that it helps release your consciousness from complicated patterns of aggression and consequences so that it's free to recognize its own inherent heavenliness.

Even Right Meditation, which most people associate with Buddhism and other "Eastern" paths, can be found in Judeo-Christian scriptures and practices, although you may have to look close to see it. When Jesus says to be like little children to enter the kingdom of heaven, he's not saying to crawl around on all fours (although there was once a sect in Russia based on that interpretation). He was, it seems to me, clearly advocating the same freshness, innocence, and spontaneity of awareness that the Buddha teaches as Right Meditation. Sadly, many Buddhists, as they strain to be good meditators, routinely ignore this teaching, turning meditation into a form of (self-directed) aggression just as entangling as aggressive outward behavior.

So, practice Right (natural, unstrained, effortless) Meditation, engage in Right Conduct, put one foot in front of the other, and the outcome - enlightenment - is assured.

Answer #2: You can't get enlightened.

Despite your impeccable intentions, your question is fatally flawed. There are four terms in it that are self-defeating: "How," "I," "get," and "enlightened."

The Buddha reported that his first words upon waking up - upon becoming a buddha, an awakener - were "How wonderful! How wonderful! All things are enlightened just as they are!" The boundless, open awareness that we call enlightenment is your very nature right now. It's the very awareness within which the experience of reading these words is taking place. You are awareness that perceives myriad qualities and phenomena (words, sensations, thoughts) but is itself empty of all qualities and phenomena. Only when you mistakenly identify yourself with the limited objects of perception rather than the limitless perceiver do you feel yourself to be lacking, unenlightened. You're like a king who gets so wrapped up in watching a boxing match that you forget you're a king and feel like a beat-up loser when the boxer you're rooting for loses. Then you seek "enlightenment" as something to win, to assuage your loss, some kind of ultimate object of perception which is separate from the "I" and which you must "get." Any method ("how") that you practice can only deepen this illusion of separateness. So rather than seek enlightenment, abandon the notion of an unenlightened seeker.

Although my expression of it is imperfect, this is the line taken in the Indian Advaita (nondual) tradition. I recently had the good fortune of attending a retreat in southern Italy with Mooji, a modern Jamaican-British Advaita master in the lineage of Sri Ramana Maharshi who teaches this approach with great power, eloquence, and playfulness. Here are some of his own words:

"The essence of all Scriptures, in a nutshell, is this: You yourself are the fulfillment of any Scripture by doing absolutely nothing. You are the Highest. You cannot be achieved at all. You cannot be understood or perceived. Stay as the formless. Drop everything and don't touch anything, any idea about yourself. Drop it and then drop the idea of dropping. ... Mind operates on the notion that if you do this thing and then this other thing, then you're going to receive some reward. The mantra of the mind is: 'If ... Then ... Maybe ...' It always pursues through promises, always later, always some conditions. It's the avoidance of the mind, never now, it's never fine as it is. These ideas of things to do, to improve, to fix, and so on, keep it alive and important. It is telling us: 'Come on, man! You can't do without me! If you ever try, I warn you, your life will be a complete mess!' ... That's why we say you have to dethrone your mind."

(Mooji is coming to the U.S. to offer retreats and teachings this fall. His website is here, and one of his many excellent YouTube videos, "Forget About Enlightenment," is here.)

As I said at the outset, these two answers only sound contradictory at first. Certainly such Mahayana Buddhist texts as The Heart Sutra expound the same ultimate nondual wisdom as Advaita ("No ignorance and also no ending of ignorance ... No wisdom and also no attainment"). And as far as I can see, Mooji's advice to "Drop everything" comes to the same thing (or the same nothing) as Right Meditation, especially as taught in such do-nothing forms as Tibetan Dzogchen ("natural great perfection") and shikantaza ("just sitting") in Zen. True, whenever you're not practicing on that ultimate level of non-practice, it's all too easy to make the path a long, hard trudge, to keep yourself from seeing that This is it, right now, that the trudger merely needs to give up and notice that he is that toward which he has been trudging all along. On the other hand, having some non-ultimate practices (like Right Speech and Right Livelihood, not to mention yoga, breath work, compassion practice, etc.) may help you peel back the corners of your self-imposed delusion, to loosen it up and make it easier to finally peel the whole thing off. Or you can come in from the Mooji/Advaita point of view and see right now that there's nothing to peel and no one to peel it.

So, do you listen to the Buddhist teacher or the Advaita master or, for that matter, the Presbyterian minister? Do you have to pick just one? It's not a question of who's right or wrong. It's a question of who you can hear. As Robert DeNiro asks in Taxi Driver, "Are you talkin' to me?"

QUESTION: A habitual tendency I've recognized within myself has to do with the idea of self-improvement. I seem to direct my life with the underlying assumption that a creative practice is work and that I am working toward a goal. I practice yoga every morning to stay healthy and live a long life; I write and journal endlessly to work through my emotional/psychological/spiritual kinks, and become a better writer so that I may someday get published; I research new areas of thought, brainstorm different cultural outlets, and hunt for new exciting places to live or travel to; I am constantly trying to meet new people to build relationships with; etc., etc. All this is good and healthy and an integral part of an active, engaged life, but I realize that I'm doing it all with the presumption that I am working toward something - some grand place where I will finally find contentment or a sense of fulfillment, some kind of reward, be it material or emotional. Even the recognition of this tendency is simply another tactic designed to bring me closer to attaining something, essentially just another way of avoiding suffering through benign means. And so I would like to ask your thoughts on this seeming catch-22. How might we continually improve ourselves and progress on our path in a day-to-day way, yet keep from feeling as though we have to work to get to some other place where we will be happy and enlightened?

There is no "other place." As my late wife frequently said, "I hope you're having a good time, because this is it." It's never tomorrow (or yesterday), never one second from now (or one second ago). It's always now, this moment, the only moment, and you're always one moment too late to change it. No matter what else you do, I urge you to observe your own experience and confirm whether this is the case.

OK. But then there's the other side of the paradox (as usual). Yes, actual experience is always in the timeless moment, beyond past or future, pristine and ever unimprovable. Yet our lives obviously also have the conventional dimension in which time does seem to pass and we engage in all sorts of time-bound projects: raising kids, managing investments, growing crops, writing books. These are the two aspects of life - absolute and relative, nirvana and samsara, ocean and waves, right brain and left brain - and each needs to be given its due. As Jesus put it, "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and render unto God the things that are God's." Most people are pretty caught up in rendering unto Caesar: working the job, keeping the schedule, feeding the kids, earning the grades, pumping the iron. Far fewer are caught up in rendering unto God, turning their backs on the mundane and devoting themselves exclusively to communing with transcendental vastness. Both situations are unbalanced. All the great spiritual teachers speak, in one way or another, about integration, about rendering unto God and Caesar and thus finding the experience of vastness right in the mundane.

What does this have to do with your question? The issue becomes this: If we do have these two sides of our life, on which side is fulfillment to be found? On the time-bound, goal-oriented, project-completing, scaling-the-mountain-of-self-improvement side, or on the letting-go, grooving-in-the-moment, enjoying-hanging-out-in-the-valley side? This is where people make the fatal mistake. On the gross level, it's thinking that fulfillment equals getting the bigger car or moving into the more prestigious neighborhood or scoring with the more attractive babe or hunk. We "spiritual" types may scorn such folly, but when we equate fulfillment with having the more blissful meditation or moving into the more rarefied heavens or basking in the presence of the wiser guru, we're really doing the same thing, only on a slightly more sophisticated (and hence more seductive and dangerous) level. This is what Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche famously called "spiritual materialism": turning transcendental reality into goals to be achieved, objects to be collected.

I recall once seeing a poster advertising a certain meditation organization's upcoming retreat, with the headline "Have the Best Experiences of Your Life." Can you see how insidious that approach is? (Though it's very effective at keeping meditation organizations in business.) It's like saying "Taste the Best Ice Cream of Your Life." As I write this, I happen to be enjoying a bowl of Cappuccino Chip, and it's delicious, thank you very much. But ice cream experiences and meditation experiences all come and go; unshakable fulfillment is not to be found in either. It's to be found only in the experience of the experiencer of all ice cream and all meditation, which neither comes nor goes. And the faster you run toward that experience, the farther it recedes, because it's none other than being itself - the being that you already are. The harder you work at flushing it out, the more you're caught up in doing, and the farther from the simplicity of resting in just being.

But that's fine. Because it's all part of the process. With rare exceptions, everyone has to go through a certain amount of that drama, of rigorously driving themselves through what doesn't work (or, rather, what works too much) till they're ready to give up working and just be. As Blake said, "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." So, whenever you decide you've had enough, just stop. As my old teacher Maharishi used to say, inherent in the ability to run is the ability to walk; inherent in the ability to walk is the ability to stand still. Whether in your meditation or (as you've indicated in your question) in your relationships, your writing, your yoga, or whatever, if you keep at it long enough, every once in a while you'll forget to work at it, and simple being will sneak up on you unbidden. The kingdom of heaven comes like a thief in the night. It's inevitable. And once your mind gets a few glimpses of it, since it's the mind's own ultimate nature, it will recognize it as a child recognizes its own mother, and then will start to find it more and more clearly as the backdrop to every situation. The very artificiality of all that striving makes it untenable in the long run; it must give way to the natural ease of just being what we were all along.

And in that natural ease, we find every moment to be complete, lacking nothing, just as it is. As the portly blues man Willie Dixon put it, " I'm built for comfort, baby, I ain't built for speed / But I got everything a good gal needs."

QUESTION: I loved the video you featured in last month's question, about Dr. Jill Taylor, the brain scientist who suffered a stroke and experienced (among other things) feeling so large and light that she didn't know how she would ever fit back in her body. I would love to have that experience (not the stroke of course). But I guess that by seeking that experience, I won't get it right? Because the point of sitting is to sit, not to try to feel any certain way. But here's my real question, an idea I've been struggling with, and would so appreciate your thoughts. I understand the idea that the present moment is all there is. I understand that we can only ever be happy in the present moment and that our constant focus on the past and future causes us to miss all the joy of the present moment. What I don't get it the idea that the present moment is perfect. I can be (or try to be) fully present in any given moment, but if it happens to be in a moment at 3 a.m., when one of my kids is screaming and I'm exhausted, it's hard for me to understand in what way that moment is perfect. I know it's the only moment I have, but I don't know how to see it as perfect.

It's not the idea of the moment being perfect, but the experience. And it's exactly the experience you're already growing into through your sitting practice. You're probably already noticing at least occasional glimpses of things being somehow, let's say, lighter - the circumstances of kids, work, etc., are the same, but they impinge less heavily on your awareness. Now, if you can imagine that lightening process extrapolated to the nth degree, you would wind up with something like Dr. Taylor's "too large and light to fit into the body" experience. One traditional metaphor for this process compares the impact of various traumas, be it screaming kids, job pressures, romantic breakups, or whatever, to a line being carved in rock: the impression is very deep and stays there for a long, long time. As we progress in our practice, it becomes more like carving a line in water: the impression is still there, but closes up quickly. And when we've gone beyond practice, to the enlightened state, it's like drawing a line in air: no impression at all.

Another way to think of this is in terms of Dr. Taylor's left brain / right brain explanation. The analytical left brain sees events not only in terms of past and future, as you've indicated, but also in terms of good or bad, depending on how closely they correspond to our preferences. Those preferences are not ultimately reality, but a kind of overlay that the left brain superimposes upon reality. ("There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so." - Hamlet) Our judgments of good and bad can change in time, so that now you probably enjoy red wine more and cotton candy less than you did when you were six. Recently I met with one of the meditation groups I lead, and there was a young guy there who was attending his first session. I talked about how we usually feel good when we make it through a green light and bad when we have to sit at the red light, straining away at mentally trying to make it hurry up and turn green, and how instead we could just sit, breathe, and enjoy being at the red. At the next session he came back and reported that all week he'd been enjoying the red lights so much that he felt disappointed when he hit one on the green!

Of course, the screaming kid at 3 a.m. is a tougher test than a red light; that's on the Advanced Placement level. We have to start on the kindergarten level with red lights while we're driving, noisy lawnmowers while we're meditating, and people ahead of us in line at the supermarket spending five minutes having a problem about the price of bananas. In each case, we can notice whatever resistance might bubble up in us, not trying to repress it but recognizing it as merely based on a "good" v. "bad" judgment, and gently relax our grip on that judgment, just neutrally letting the lawnmower (or whatever it is) be there (which of course it's going to do whether we "let" it or not). Gradually this way of "just being" with things, of being OK with them, percolates into all the warp and woof of ordinary daily experience. As the mind becomes more and more familiar and at home with this way of just being, of resting in the essential OK-ness of every moment just as it is, it can find it in more and more challenging circumstances, such as the A.P. level of the crying kid and eventually the post-graduate level of one's own inevitable deterioration and death. I've had the privilege of watching a couple of people pass this final exam with an A.

So your question really goes to the heart of the matter. This is what enlightenment is: not some new kind of exotic, extraordinary experience, but the perpetual, spontaneous cognition of the infinite OK-ness of ordinary experience, just as it is. "Good" and "bad" things still happen, and the enlightened person still chooses accordingly: she doesn't become an apathetic lump who shrugs off the problems of her friends and the world and doesn't care whether she eats a bowl of ice cream or a bowl of gravel. But all those ostensibly good and bad experiences occur within our own endlessly OK awareness, like birds flying in a sky that is endlessly vast. There's room for countless birds, and they never scar the sky.

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. Donât 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 other conditions and one is wise to learn how these interactions vary by time of day and by season and by weather conditions. I am using the photography not to sell an object of beauty (my print), but to encourage discriminating awareness in the person who looks at the photograph. Do you think discriminating awareness is the wrong path? Art seems to be about discrimination and selection rather than bare attention.

As a matter of fact, in the last two years I've gotten pretty deeply involved in photography myself, so I have some working familiarity with the issues you raise. (Two of my pictures are shown here.) Like you, I've been trying to apply the principles of meditative awareness to my photography and, hopefully, to make pictures that evoke that awareness, or at least some flavor of that awareness, in the viewer.

First, let's be clear about this important phrase "bare attention," or "bare awareness," because it's sometimes misunderstood to mean "barely aware," which would wrongly imply vague or dim awareness. What's actually meant is bare as in "naked" - not clothed or covered by any concept or interpretation or subjective affect, and thus pure, simple, unelaborated experience. This bare awareness is what we want to cultivate - or, rather, we want to leave off our life-long habit of cultivating contrived awareness, so that the bare, natural awareness that was spontaneously underlying it all along is left by itself. Then every moment of such attention will reveal the indescribable beauty of the boundless luminous emptiness that is the nature of all forms. ("Form is no other than emptiness." - Heart Sutra) However, most of us most of the time are so distracted from natural awareness by our habits of conceptualizing, interpreting, preferring - in short, discriminating - that we miss that beauty.

So perhaps the role of the photographer is to maintain a delicate balance, practicing bare attention in the initial perception and then skillful discrimination in the subsequent process of presenting the perception in such a way as to deconstruct the habitual unskillful discrimination of the viewer. As the (ideal, enlightened) photographer, you walk around spontaneously seeing equally infinitely glorious "shots" everywhere you look; but then you discriminate in the act of choosing those that will capture the viewer's distracted, abstracted attention by cutting through his mind-woven cobwebs with arresting subject matter, revelatory lighting, evocative composition, etc.

Of course, in the more usual, nonideal situation, we spend a lot of time caught up in unskillful patterns just as the viewer does, so we practice our photography (or whatever our art is) to free ourselves, to open our own eyes. In this sense, art (i.e., artifice) is a necessary but only provisional evil, very much parallel in its role to that of dharma practice, which is traditionally compared to a second thorn, which you use to dig the first thorn (ignorance) out of your skin. Then you throw both thorns away.

I'm really sort of thinking out loud on this one, and would enjoying hearing the thoughts of other photographers (and artists) on the subject. At the same time, I'm a little wary about verbalizing too much - for me as a writer and teacher, photography is a refreshing break from verbalization (which is essentially what I've been saying above). Also, if you're not familiar with it, see the work of John Daido Loori, who's a Zen abbot as well as a celebrated photographer. I believe you'll find the math you're referring to in 1, 2, 3, Infinity by George Gamow, a book that was an important early mind-bender for me, as well as great fun.

QUESTION: I have been enjoying your books and although we share the same philosophy, I found many familiar concepts newly profound. My 14-year-old daughter has bone cancer and something you said regarding your wife's illness spoke to me. I can't seem to find the exact sentence, but it was that perhaps the things you were doing to help might not affect the outcome and about accepting that, too. This unexpected turn is, of course, seriously testing "my stuff." I wondered if you had any words of wisdom for me. It has been difficult on so many levels, as you know.

I'm glad my books have been talking to you. The passage you refer to is on page 294 of Cinema Nirvana: "I found myself melting into each moment of service, letting go of past and future, hope and fear, including the hope that my efforts might do any good."

Society generally tells us to banish fear but hold onto hope, to "keep hope alive." And up to a point, of course, hope can be useful. But when you get out to the edge of things, to that place where the cancer of a loved one pushed both you and me, there's a point where you see that hope is the flip side of fear. Both of them involve investing yourself, your happiness, in a particular future. Investing in the hope that the loved one will recover necessarily has the underside of fear that she won't. Letting go of that investment is the lesson taught by the wise, from Buddha to Jesus ("Take no thought for the morrow") to my own Maggy, who taught me. Gandhi said something like "No matter what you do, it will be completely unimportant, but it's vitally important that you do it."

Birth and death and birth and death and birth and death . . . On the one hand it's all a movie, an ephemeral display; on the other hand, we get deeply involved in the movie, deeply attached to the characters, so that we laugh or cry as they work through their fates. (Our tears and laughter are also part of the movie.) There's a Tibetan story about a great lama whose only son dies. As he cries inconsolably, his disciples say, "Why are you crying? You have always taught that this world is all illusion." He replies, "The death of a child is the most intense illusion." I think letting go of hope and fear, resting in naked nowness, is initially one of the hardest of teachings but ultimately one of the most powerfully enlightening.

I had a discussion about just this topic recently with the inmates to whom I'm the Buddhist chaplain at Northern State Prison. One of them asked about dealing with having been repeatedly denied parole. One way or another, whether it's prison or disease or terrorist attacks or hurricanes or earthquakes, we're all in it. But by resting in present awareness, just as it is, without looking to add anything to or subtract anything from each moment, we really can find the infinite OK-ness of it all.

I wish you and your daughter well. I have recently returned from three weeks in India, and I thought of you and your daughter as I sat under the Bodhi Tree, where the Buddha penetrated through all suffering and saw that, no matter what our circumstances, liberation is open to us all.

QUESTION: A quick question about some rather quotidian stuff. If you aren't feeling naturally compelled to act in a way that is "bodhisattvic," when is it insincere or dishonest to kind of fake it, and try to act in a way that is morally responsible?

This ain't so quotidian - it cuts to the core of the bodhisattva aspiration. (A bodhisattva is one who aspires to altruistic buddhahood.) Remember that you're in a state of total existential freedom. You can do anything. And whatever you do, you'll totally have to live with the consequences. If you do a thing that's morally wrong, meaning that it increases suffering and confusion (not just that it violates somebody's arbitrary code), then you'll have to live in a universe of increased suffering and confusion. As you grow tired of suffering and confusion, you grow increasingly disinclined to do things that are morally wrong.

Another aspect of the question is, beyond this abstention from acts that are wrong, how far do we have to go to do things that are positively, unselfishly right? Do I have to cancel the Netflix account that brings me such pleasure and donate the money to Oxfam or Amnesty International or Doctors Without Borders? Should I be sharing my house with homeless hurricane victims? These questions, I think, are much harder. Maybe it's a cop-out, but I think this is where you can usefully distinguish between sincerity and faking it. If you strain too hard to be more unselfish than you actually are (at this time), I think it becomes an act of aggression against yourself. Certainly you create resentment within yourself, and that's added to the suffering in the universe.

At every point in your development there's a range of behavior open to you, above which it's too much of a strain to be that saintly, and below which it's too repulsive to be that patently evil. The thing, I think, is to lean, gently but persistently, toward the upper end of your range and thus keep nudging it higher over time.

Every great spiritual tradition has its list of guidelines to lend direction to that leaning. The list I personally find most useful is the Six Paramitas ("perfections" or "transcendences" or "transcendental virtues") of Buddhism: dana (generosity - whatever it is, give it away), shila (morality - do the right thing), kshanti (forbearance - the serenity to accept the things you can't change), virya (diligence - being on top of things, taking care of business, changing the things you can), dhyana (meditation - resting in present awareness, however it presents itself in each moment), and prajna (wisdom - knowing what's what, and not mixing it up with what's not).

QUESTION: I have no formal training in meditation or Buddhism. Around eight years ago my mom gave me a progressive relaxation tape to help deal with anxiety issues I was having at the time. At the point where the tape said to stop, I would continue to sit and enjoy the experience. Eventually I stopped using the tape and would just sit. After doing this almost daily for about a year I had an incredible experience while sitting. It's very hard, probably impossible, to explain. It was raining out. Somewhere along the line, almost like someone flicking a light switch, the sound of the rain was not just a sound, but was the rain. All at once I felt like I was a part of the rain and the rain was a part of everything, which must mean that I am a part of everything. I was not me anymore, just a part of the everything-that-is. After this experience I found that I could no longer sit. I would try, but I would feel like I was crawling out of my skin. I know at first I was trying way too hard to experience this again, but even seven or eight months later I would just sit and feel very uneasy. After about a year I gave up. I have recently started sitting again, due to your books and the "Just Being" CD. I can finally sit through a good twenty minutes or so but now my head feels empty. I don't have trouble pushing thoughts away, because there are not very many. Most of my experiences were very visual and now it's like I've been thrown in a dark room. What am I doing wrong? Did I "break myself" with that one special experience because I was not trained properly? Was the experience I had normal?

The main thing to know is, you're OK - much better than OK, actually. You didn't "break" anything with that vivid, spontaneous experience eight years ago. That was a gift. The main pitfall to avoid now is trying to recapture it, or comparing what you experience now to it. Any attempt to manipulate your experience, even subtly, will be counterproductive, including the idea of "pushing thoughts away," which you mention in passing. Visual or nonvisual, many thoughts or few thoughts, flashy or humdrum, deep or shallow, successful or unsuccessful - all these are dualistic value judgments, and harboring them simply cultivates expectations and keeps you busy trying to fulfill the positive expectations and avoid the negative ones.

That's way too much work. Instead, just sit, without hope or fear. Rest in whatever's there, the actual experience of present awareness, however it presents itself. Since in each moment present awareness has already arrived, all our attempts to manipulate it are futile anyway, so you may as well give up. Of course, that doesn't stop us from trying, which is why we have to keep sitting, driving along the road of practice till our vehicle of strategies and efforts finally runs out of gas. Just, every time you catch yourself judging or trying, have another good laugh at yourself and continue to sit with whatever is.

You can see from the above why this makes sense technically, in terms of skillful practice, but it also makes sense ontologically. The "goal" of meditation is perpetual experience of the One, God, Buddha-nature, everything-that-is (or whatever inadequate name you prefer). That One must, by definition, be this moment of squinting at your computer screen as the air conditioner roars in the background and the truck rumbles by as much as it is the moment of some ecstatic experience of inner silence. Sitting without hope or fear, without dualistic judgment, resting evenly in whatever comes along, is the practice for coming to see the One in all its guises (the many).

It also may be helpful to note that an especially profound meditative experience is often followed by feelings of restlessness or uneasiness in meditation for a very good reason: that "good" experience is sort of like a stick of dynamite that blasts open up new depths, but for a while after the blast there's a lot of smoke and dust in the air and debris to be cleared away. So the "bad" meditations are actually good, as they're an essential part of our long-term project of awareness-excavation. Even if you're going through a period of weeks or months of mainly debris-clearing, you may notice that, during the other twenty-three hours a day, you're experiencing greater mental clarity, effectiveness of action, and compassion for others. That's what's important - the incremental improvement of life on earth for all, through growing enlightenment and kindness, not some momentary, solitary internal fireworks. "By their fruits ye shall know them."

QUESTION: I am a 37-year-old non-practicing Methodist and I am running for local office. While I do not practice Buddhism, I do believe that some of the key tenets are very helpful in my campaign to this extent: this is my first run for office and I am trying as best I can to incorporate the run as a part of my own personal and spiritual journey - an effort that will help me grow as a person and perhaps become a better public servant if I won. Campaigning is a tough match with spiritual journeys, because you need to balance your sense of self with your oneness with your constituency . . . you need to lose yourself in the process of campaigning, and you need to submit to the process and submit to the possible outcomes. Any advice?

It's good to hear from someone who has taken on the challenge of entering the political arena while trying to maintain his spiritual integrity - or, better yet, make his political life the very embodiment of his spiritual integrity. I actually grew up in a family of political activists and have long harbored the fantasy of a political career, although that fantasy has always involved my direct elevation to the U.S. Senate, skipping over all the less glorious posts along the way. Never having walked in those moccasins, then, I'm hesitant to offer advice.

I will, however, offer the observation that, when people want to be elected badly enough, even those with a solid core of integrity stand in danger of becoming sort of calculating robots, reflexively computing the position they can take or the expression they can make that will optimally ingratiate them with the most people in their target constituencies while offending the fewest. Certainly some of the people who have run for president in the last few cycles seem to have taken on that robotic quality; you can almost see their younger, more idealistic self suffocating, tragically trapped inside the robot. Ironically, such candidates usually wind up losing the election as well as their integrity; voters can smell the hypocrisy. So I guess, at the very least, there has to be a point where you're willing to walk away and say, The hell with it, I'd rather be right than president.

Beyond that, it would certainly be lovely to have candidates who realized that we are all expressions of the one essence of which all religions speak, whether you call it God or Buddha-nature or whatever, and that therefore everyone - including one's opponent - is worthy of the deepest love and compassion. You might have to dissent vigorously from your opponent's position, you might have to use all your intelligence and energy to articulate precisely why his position is dead wrong, but it would be great if you could somehow uphold his dignity as a person and not confuse that with his position.

Easier said than done, I know, but wouldn't it be nice if it became a trend? Good luck.

QUESTION: Does meditation make you lazy? I've been feeling much lazier since I've been practicing.

Please note carefully the language you've used here. You've actually asked two questions: can meditation make you actually lazy, and can meditation make you feel lazy. The answers are no and yes, in that order.

What causes this confusion is the fact that, for many people, productivity seems to be contingent upon stress. They become so used to feeling stressed when they're being productive that they fail to discriminate between these two very different things: they assume that to be productive they must be stressed, and they may even assume that if they're stressed they must be productive. Neither is true.

Once they start to meditate, their stress drains away (over time, as with all changes that meditation brings about). Because of their past association of stress with productivity, they may feel as if they're becoming unproductive and lazy. A common experience is to find yourself sitting in bed at the end of the day and feeling that you haven't done anything - that nothing has happened. What you've started to perceive is that, in the language of the Heart Sutra, "Form is emptiness." That is, underlying all our busy-ness in the world of forms, where everything always happens, is eternally silent nonbusy-ness, where nothing ever happens, just as the silent ocean underlies all the swelling and crashing waves. But the ocean doesn't abolish the waves; in fact, it's what makes them possible.

At this moment, as you sit in bed with that "nothing happened" feeling, it can be helpful to mentally review everything that you've done through the day. You'll probably realize that you've actually accomplished as much as or even more than you used to accomplish in a typical day. As you practice, your native energy and mental clarity shine through more brilliantly, increasingly free of the distortions and obscurations that stress used to impose. With less gnashing of teeth and foaming at the mouth, your actions become more effective, possibly in quiet ways that are not obvious to the naked eye.

A traditional story about Prince Siddhartha, the future Buddha, illustrates this point. In a competition for the hand of his future bride, the prince is required to chop down a thick tree. Instead of a heavy axe, he takes a fine-edged sword, slicing through the tree so fast and making a cut so clean that the assembled crowd thinks he's missed the tree (he's accomplished nothing). Then a faint breeze comes along and topples the tree. That's how our actions become!

QUESTION: I recently have joined your group meditations, and have been practicing what I call quasi-Buddhism for almost six years. Just recently, I have found the inspiration to take it to the next level. I dont mean I want to start flying over rivers, but just giving myself the freedom to truly enjoy what is right in front of me . . . what I never knew was always right there: Awareness. In my jubilation, I find myself dying to discuss and share this wisdom, but unfortunately, people seem almost afraid of me! In my home, my mother and my extended family have always enjoyed my somewhat "inner light." So Ive started to tell them why I am what I simply am, and guess what is happening? How mean and judging people can be! Sorry it took so long to get to the questioning. Is there a way to show them that I am not going to burn in hell for all eternity? (my whole family is Italian Catholic.) How can I let them understand it is OK, and I am going to be fine? The problem arises is that when discussing this, it can usually turn to an argument, or a silly conversation filled with digs and judgments. Anger is the emotion I am trying to NOT cultivate, but I find frustration with an ignorance, especially an ignorance coming from people who love me. Should I just avoid it? Somehow, I just dont feel in my heart that is the answer. Whats your advice on mi famiglia?

SHHHHHHHHHH!

You're absolutely right to be fired up to take your dharma practice "to the next level." Being fired up like that, zealous for enlightenment, is about the most fortunate thing that can happen to a person in this life. But we have to be careful not to let our zeal become zealotry - not to confuse our inner passion for enlightenment with an outer passion to convert or convince or even explain to others who are resistant.

Yes, it can be frustrating when those who love us (and whom we love) create suffering and confusion for themselves by imagining damnation for us. But dealing with that situation skillfully is part of the bodhisattva challenge. There's no one easy, blanket answer. Easy, blanket answers tend to put us to sleep, while staying aware of the uniqueness of what each person poses to us and sensitively trying to find the most compassionate way to respond is part of our process of waking up.

Remember that we're in this - the enlightenment path as well as the relationships with our loved ones - for the long term. A particular explanation that you give in a conversation may be forgotten in the short term, but what can't be forgotten (or denied) in the long term is the kind of person that you are and that you are even more radiantly becoming. The Bible says, "By their fruits ye shall know them," and it is the fruits of your practice - your growing compassion and tranquility - that will impress people more than anything you can say.
Be patient, be discreet, and over time, the people around you will see again and again that you're the one who keeps her head in a crisis, who keeps a broad perspective, who is compassionate and selfless not just in theory or Sunday-morning doctrine but in moment after moment of real-life situations. Then they'll be asking you how you got that way.

Also, an excellent book that I would strongly recommend for your own understanding of the non-conflict between dharma and the teachings of Christ is The Gospel According to Jesus, by Stephen Mitchell.

QUESTION: What's the difference between spaciousness and spaciness?

This is an important distinction. The word "spaciousness" is often used to describe the nature of awareness. Open space has no color, shape, texture, center, or edge. It's not located here or there; everything else is located within it. We may call it "vast," since it has limitless room for everything, but it's not big any more than it's small - rather, it has nothing at all to do with size. And no matter how many things occupy it (people, starfish, galaxies), its essential quality of vast openness is never diminished.

In the same way, awareness itself has no color, shape, etc. All our experiences - all the sensations we're aware of - are located within it, but its vastness remains undiminished. There's nothing we have to (or can) do to make our awareness spacious; that's its nature. But by noticing that quality, which was there all along, we gain liberation from the otherwise binding nature of all our limited and apparently limiting experiences.

"Spaciness," on the other hand, denotes an out-of-it state where the mind, far from realizing its own essential limitlessness, is limited by some lethargic doziness; rather than finding itself, it's lost in some daydream or fantasy. It may be a very pleasant state, but it's still just a state, not the spacious, liberative background that underlies and transcends all states, both pleasant and unpleasant. People seek spaciness through many means, including beer, pot, television, and a mind-numbing relationship to their jobs or other daily activities. What they really want (whether they know it or not) is spaciousness, but, not knowing where to find it, they accept spaciness as a substitute.

As Alan Watts once wrote, people talk longingly of what it might like to be "way out in space," but of course that's where we are right now - there's nowhere else to be. Realizing the nature of our own awareness is like realizing the depth of space we've been in all along. And alert, wide-awake nondoing, a.k.a. meditation, is the preferred method of inner space travel.

QUESTION: I've been doing regular sitting practice since attending your Easter weekend retreat at Garrison Institute, and it is steadily becoming part of my routine. It's something I enjoy and look forward to, which is awesome, but I also don't want it to be another attachment. How do I not become attached to my practice?

No, become attached to your practice. Because dharma practice is ultimately liberating, it's the last attachment we will have - the attachment that gradually dissolves all attachments, including, finally, itself.

Practice is, in a sense, a necessary evil. It is, in the traditional metaphor, the second thorn. Suffering and confusion are the first thorn, which is lodged in the skin; with the second thorn we dig out the first thorn, then throw both thorns away.

The other traditional metaphor is that the dharma is like a raft, which we ride over the dangerous waters to reach the far shore of enlightenment. While crossing the water, it's good to be securely attached to the raft. Once across, we leave it in the water rather than carry it on our back.

Or another way to think about your practice is simply: Don't be attached to it - just do it!

QUESTION: The actor Larry Hagman recently said that he's not afraid of dying because many years ago he experienced "ego death" while on LSD. Why is the former star of "I Dream of Jeannie" unafraid of his final judgment while I'm still terrified? How do I get some of this "ego death" for myself? Please, enSluyten me!

Not only "I Dream of Jeannie," but "Dallas," where he played the ego-tripping J.R. Ewing.

I think this term "ego death," while it describes a powerful and important experience, is a bit of a misnomer. Our actual situation is more accurately described by the Heart Sutra: "Not born, not destroyed." What we are is nonself (anatta), oceanic being, which is empty (shunya) of all boundaries and definability. What we think we are is a bounded, definable wave of ego, or self (atta), on the ocean's surface. Irked by that wave's limitations and haunted by the knowledge that it's doomed some day to crash against the shore and cease to be, most of us spend most of our lives trying to pump up our wave as much as possible. We work overtime to aggrandize the ego with a sense of specialness - trying to be, like the narcissistic Queen in "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," the fairest (or smartest or strongest or coolest) one of all. Even if we think we're a schlemiel, we're special because we're the biggest schlemiel on the block.

When psychedelic voyagers speak of "ego death" (or used to, back when they used to speak of things other than the parking lot at the Phish concert), what they really mean is the falling away of the illusion that we're the wave rather than the ocean. I suppose if we define ego as that very illusion, then we could say that ego dies, but I don't think it's a helpful expression - it's unnecessarily scary. We simply stop identifying ourselves with something that lacked substantive existence all along. We're sort of like an actor who has been playing, say, Stanley Kowalski in "A Streetcar Named Desire" and gets so caught up in the role that he thinks he's Stanley. What finally happens is not that Stanley is killed, but that the curtain comes down and, coming to our senses, we realize he never existed. Not born, not destroyed. Then we're liberated into realization of our true nature, something much more vast and real than Stanley - with all his frustrations and macho posturing - could ever have dreamt of.

How to get there? Practice, practice, practice. The main thing is to keep sitting down for your simple, dumb practice of nothing-doing meditation, day after day. This is the most direct method of settling into your oceanic nature and transcending illusory wave status. There are also auxiliary practices, especially in the Tibetan tradition, that address the question of dying very specifically. One is phowa, which you can read about in Sogyal Rinpoche's The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. (This whole book, actually, belongs near the top of your reading list.) Another is chö or chöd, an elaborate visualization process in which, in your imagination, you systematically dismember yourself and then abide in what's left after the pieces are gone: luminous emptiness, skylike awareness-space.

The psychedelic method is flashy and dramatic because it's sudden; many people have found that it provides a life-changing epiphany. But its very suddenness also indicates its fragility. What goes up must come down, and there are plenty of people who, say, dropped acid at Woodstock but are now indistinguishable from all the other ego-intoxicated strivers on the block. And by the same token, even leaving off the question of illegality and the difficulty of finding pure, authentic substances in a black-market environment, psychedelics can be highly confusing, disorienting, and, for some people, seriously destabilizing. Much safer and, in the long run, more reliable, are the time-tested meditative methods, which dissolve the illusion gradually, so that fear of death, along with all other baseless fears, quietly drops off almost while you're not looking.

QUESTION: Can one be in an almost constant state of meditation without actually being in a formal meditation sitting? I am a newbie, only practicing for three years now. I have experienced sitting through the sort of good, ecstatic, having-visions sort of practice, as well as the not-so-good, experiencing all the seemingly lousy feelings one can feel. Due to physiological challenges I find myself sitting a lot throughout the day, and feel as though I might be in constant meditation. But am I just fooling myself, because at the same time I don't sit in formal meditation very much anymore? If the goal is to look inwardly and discover stuff about myself and learn to chill out, neither of these things seems to be increasing. So, then what exactly is the point? Thanks.

The short answer to your question is yes and yes. Yes, you can "be in an almost constant state of meditation without actually being in a formal meditation sitting." And yes, you can fool yourself about whether you're there yet.

To elaborate a bit: Meditation is the path, not the goal. All the enlightenment teachings and techniques are, as the Buddha said, like a raft to take one to the far shore; once you're there, you don't carry the raft around on your back. So actually, the far shore is better described not as a constant state of meditation, but as a constant state of not having to meditate, of spontaneously perceiving the essential boundlessness of every experience in the world of boundaries, or, to put it in Buddhist language, the nonduality of form and emptiness.

"The point of it all" is liberation, the indescribable but effortlessly experienceable "one taste" running through every sensation in every moment. At first that state is glimpsed, usually for brief moments, whether during sitting practice or while watering your house plants, blowing your nose, or doing anything else. Sometimes gradually, sometimes dramatically, that one taste comes to saturate your life. Once it's firmly established, you know - life is no longer experienced as problematic. The questions and dilemmas that were once pebbles in your shoes (or rocks in your head, or boulders on your shoulders) have somehow evaporated into weightlessness while you weren't looking. Everything still is what it is, but everything's fine. (Thus have I heard.)

So yes, nonmeditation is where we wind up. But because it is easy to fool oneself, if there's any doubt (as there is in your case, or you wouldn't be asking this question) it's best to err on the side of continuing to sit. The cost of erring on that side is wasting a little time harmlessly squashing a cushion. The cost of erring on the other side is missing the brass ring of liberation, and opportunities to go for the ring are rare. For starters, you need a human nervous system. The Buddha once picked up a bit of dirt on his fingernail and said that if all the dirt in the world represented all the forms we can be born in, the bit he was holding was equivalent to our chances of manifesting as a human.

Also, I note your distinction between ecstatic "good" and lousy "not-so-good" meditations. When you're ready to stop sitting, you'll no longer be making that distinction - not necessarily that it's all ecstatic, but that you're liberated from seeking ecstasy and being averse to nonecstasy. That's the taste of liberation.

QUESTION: Noise during meditation generally doesn't bother me, as long as it's natural sound like the wind or the birds, or the usual ambient sounds such as traffic outside the window, the heater or air conditioner, or the refrigerator humming away. But if it's produced by the other humans I live with, and it strikes me as the kind of noise they could easily avoid when they know I'm meditating - banging things about, having animated conversations in the next room, playing loud music - I find myself getting angry at them, and then disappointed with myself because of my anger. Why can't I just treat this like any other sounds? Any suggestions?

First, remember that meditation is a process of repeatedly getting caught up in things, whether they're sounds, sensations, thoughts, moods, or anything else - and then, when we realize we've been caught up, letting go. Letting go doesn't mean pushing away, but relaxing our grip on whatever we've been caught up in, relaxing again (and again, and again) into the totality of whatever's there in the present moment. That's the process; that's why we practice. When you reach the point where you don't get caught up, you don't have to practice anymore.

Second, remember that the totality of whatever's there in the present moment includes whatever feeling may be present, in this case anger with your friends or disappointment in yourself. They're called "feelings" because they're not just abstract concepts, but sensations that we feel. (A good experiment to do throughout the day is, whenever you have a strong emotion, notice what it feels like viscerally or energetically. A tightness in the gut? An expansiveness in the chest? A quickening of the pulse and flutteriness of the nervous system?) A key instruction in meditation is "Whatever's there, just rest aware." Aware, not oblivious; but resting in the experience of whatever's there, not engaging with it. So, just as we rest aware of the sounds (along with everything else that's there), we can also rest aware of the feelings.

One way of thinking about this that may be helpful is, as I've heard some teachers put it, to rest aware of whatever arises in the body-mind-environment continuum. Another helpful insight comes from Buddhist psychology, which regards thought/feeling as the sixth sense. That can be quite freeing: to see specific thoughts and feelings as not particularly good or bad, and not particularly special, any more than the colors in the room (or, for that matter, the sounds you hear) are good or bad or special. Red color, green color, birds singing, friends talking, anger, disappointment - it's all just there, and all to be rested in evenly. They all arise on their own, and, when we just let them go and let them be, without judging or resisting, they all dissolve on their own.

QUESTION: This time of year I always feel out of synch with all the holiday cheer. First of all, I resent people go around wishing "Merry Christmas" to others who may well belong to other religions. And all the hanging of lights on houses, the frantic shopping for gifts, etc., just seems so overblown. The whole thing seems like such a massive distortion of a spiritual ideal. Do you feel that this makes sense, or am I just being a Scrooge?

Up to a point, I think that there's a lot of sense in what you're feeling. Certainly for many people, perhaps for most Americans, holiday gift-giving has become an orgy of stuff: a past-the-point-of-diminishing-returns attempt to bring fulfillment to those who already have plenty by showering them with yet more. For myself, I've found a satisfactory solution by doing most of my giving through a wonderful organization called Heifer International, which helps poor families and villages in developing countries gain self-sufficiency by giving them chickens, pigs, llamas, water buffalos, etc. You can go to their website, select animal gifts from $10 to $10,000, give them in honor of the various people on your holiday list, and print out or email cards that explain the gift.

As for "Merry Christmas," I have noticed that in recent years people generally seem to be growing more sensitive to religious diversity and increasingly wish people "Season's Greetings" or "Happy Holidays" instead, so that's getting better. Of course, most elements of Christmas have nothing to do with Christianity anyway: the trees and lights and Yule logs (like the eggs and rabbits of Easter) come from good old pagan nature worship. And, despite the artificiality of much of the season, for many people it's most of all a matter of family tradition, a ritualized and heightened way of being together with the people they care most about. And that caring is real.

Of course the sense of franticness is also real, but I think the underlying reason for it may not be obvious. In a sense, we've arbitrarily decided that one day or a few days out of the year, which we call "holidays," must be the best, the happiest, the most ecstatic of the year. Then it takes a lot of work to fulfill such an arbitrary decision, attended by a lot of anxiety in the anticipation that all our work may not pay off.

What authentic spiritual or meditative practice shows us is that every day is the holiday (the holy day), every moment the holy moment. But let's face it: most people don't engage in such practice and so don't have that experience. And in that context I think that, in spite of all the stress and the commercialization, there's a kind of wisdom in designating at least one day to acknowledge that which is really the essence of every day. Me, I love seeing all those lights on the houses. I see them as an outward expression of the essential luminosity of existence itself. If most people can't see that luminosity, and so can't see their way clear to celebrating it all the time, fine, let them celebrate it for a couple of weeks. And if their celebration requires, for a pretext, the story of a loving savior born among the beasts of the manger, that's fine with me too; I understand that story, like all poetic stories, metaphorically, in this case as a metaphor for the loving, saving enlightened being that is constantly in the process of being born forth from our otherwise beastly lives.

The Bible, if that's the holy book we want to rely on, doesn't speak only of an exclusive son of God (manifestation of the infinite within the finite) that came and went 2,000 years ago. It calls for all of us to be that manifestation: "The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed" (Romans 8:19). So this time of year I enjoy the trees, enjoy the lights, enjoy my wonderful friends and family, and at the end of the day sit down on my cushion for my next meditation.

QUESTION: Often while meditating I find that my breathing has become very shallow. Occasionally it can even seem as if there's no breath at all. Since relaxation comes from deep breathing, I feel that meditation is unsuccessful. I sometimes try to deepen my breathing, but that it never lasts long - soon I forget about my breath and it becomes shallow again. Help!

Your question points out the importance of correct ... no, not breathing, but understanding. This is an excellent example of a situation where the experience is fundamentally perfect but the understanding is a bit skewed, with the result that it becomes an obstruction to the experience.

Changes in the breath during meditation are natural. Because of the connection between mind and body, whenever a change in the functioning of the mind takes place, there's a corresponding change in the functioning of the body. So when the mind settles down into the restfulness of meditation, the breath tends to settle down along with it. Just as we breathe harder when we become more intensely active (say, running around the block a few times), in the "just being" state of meditation breathing tends to become minimal. Note that this happens - and can only happen - spontaneously. If we try to minimize the breath, that trying is a form of doing, which pulls us out of just being. Similarly, trying to maximize the breath by breathing more deeply only interferes with the spontaneity and innocence of our practice.

The fact that, as you've mentioned, you quickly forget about the breath and it minimizes again on its own is actually testimony to the power and the naturalness of the process, even in spite of our best efforts to manipulate it. So my advice here is to do just what you say you already wind up doing: forget about the breath, let it take its own course, let it go, let it be. Concerning the breath, do exactly what (in meditation) we do concerning everything else - in the words of the great Edwin Starr, "Absolutely nothin'."

This advice is not to be confused with the practice of pranayama, which consists of specific forms of directed breathing. Pranayama is a practice in its own right, often done at the beginning of a session to help relax and enliven the mind-body prior to meditation proper. In its various forms, pranayama might involve very deep breathing, alternation of nostrils, visualization of the breath in different colors or running through different subtle channels, etc. But meditation and pranayama are two different things. Different game, different rules.

QUESTION: What do you think about meditating in a sauna?

I'm in favor of meditating everywhere - carrying your practice moment to moment into every situation, no matter where you happen to find yourself, whether it's on a meditation cushion, in a sauna, or on a crosstown bus. As it happens, this summer I spent a week or two staying with friends who had a deluxe sauna in their house, and I logged some delicious meditation time there.

On the other hand, it's not a good idea to become dependent on any special environmental situation, whether it's your sauna or your favorite incense, and start to feel that if you don't have your favorite props you can't meditate. That's probably part of the reason why traditional texts recommend a neutral, middle-of-the-road set-up for your usual meditation routine. For example, the Bhagavad Gita says, "The yogi should sit on a firm seat that is neither too high nor too low." We can apply this principle a bit metaphorically, interpreting "neither too high nor too low" to mean avoiding all extremes: too hot or too cold, too uncomfortable or too cushy (hence "firm"), etc.

But the main thing is to practice every day, every day, every day. Anything that will encourage you to do that can't be too bad.

QUESTION: Does praying for strength, or believing in a God that will be there for you when you need him, make us weak? As I contemplate how to bring up my newborn child, my own belief is that individuals who have been brought up in an environment of love and understanding need not be introduced to the concept of prayer or God as a "crutch," but instead grow up as strong, self-sufficient individuals. However, my wife feels that it can only help to know that there is a higher power one can bank on in times of need.

Thanks for asking this excellent question, which I suspect troubles many parents.

I would suggest that you (and your wife) start by backing up a step and asking what you believe before trying to choose beliefs for your child. You can't fake it. Children are smart, and if what you profess doesn't arise out of deep conviction - or, better yet, deep experience - they'll sense the hollowness at its core. They may repeat your prayers or attend your church for years, but any structure with a weak foundation will eventually collapse.

So what do you really believe (as opposed to what you believe you believe)? When they speak of God, many people - including many sophisticated clergy in various religions - are referring to what we might call a dimension of limitlessness rather than some Superperson in the sky who grants wishes in times of trouble. That dimension of limitlessness has all the qualities for which the Superperson is a metaphor: it's ever-present, it's never-changing, it's the source and goal of all existence, and it provides joyous liberation from our troubles. The problem (in my view) comes when we try to view the Superperson as a literal reality rather than a beautiful metaphor. Then we're confronted with examples such as the people on the upper floors of the World Trade Center, who no doubt prayed the most fervent imaginable prayers for help. Those who made it to safety may believe their prayers were granted, but are they willing to look the relatives of those who didn't make it in the eye and tell them, "God saved me but not your loved one?"

These are the kinds of questions that your children - being intelligent, like their parents - will eventually ask. Personally, I find the concept of a God who has preferences and makes choices, who intervenes in human history in large ways or small, to be highly problematic. Once you grant the idea of a God who has a will, you inevitably get people who claim to know what that will is. That seems pretty benign when they say that his will is for us to love one another, but what happens when, for example, they say his will is for white people to enslave black people? Millions of people once believed that, and right now millions believe things just as obnoxious.

Fortunately, giving up the God of will - if that's what your conviction leads you to do - does not mean you have to give up the dimension of limitlessness which comforts and liberates us in good times as well as bad, and which goes by various names in various traditions: Tao, Brahman, Shunyata, as well as God. Regular meditative practice - not mere belief, but practice - really does give the experience of immersion in that dimension. Even without formal practice, you've probably had momentary spontaneous glimpses of it, perhaps while watching the sun rise or looking into your baby's eyes. If your life is centered on a sincere effort to live more and more in that dimension, your children will imbibe the spirit of that effort. They'll get it in their milk and in the lullaby you sing them at night, much more effectively than in any indoctrination.

I'm speaking from experience, by the way, having raised two children without any God in our household. They are now completely wonderful young adults with a strong moral compass - caring, giving people whom all their friends know can be counted on. They're both secure people with much inner silence, a strong sense of who they are, and a lively sense of fun.

Finally, please consider the following, from Thich Nhat Hanh's "Fourteen Guidelines for Engaged Buddhism":

"Do not force others, including children, by any means whatsoever to adopt your views, whether by authority, threat, money, propaganda, or even education. However, through compassionate dialogue, help others renounce fanaticism and narrowness."

QUESTION: I was at your U. Penn speech last month, and I actually had a question only tangentially related to your meditation books: I was wondering how exactly you got published the first time. It seems that, when your book first came out, the current craze for such things wasn't quite in full bloom. What was the process like? Thanks for your answer in advance, and the "playshop" was terrific! I am really trying to practice.

I had been working with a very fine agent in New York, trying to sell a completely different book, one that was a fabulous idea that no one else had done before and should have been a natural for publishers to snatch up. But after a year or so of our trying, they still hadn't. So one day, having decided it was time to try something else, I sat in my agent's office with my little notebook in hand, reading through my list of ideas.

At the very bottom of the list was the one idea that I was shy to even mention because it seemed so wacky and idiosyncratic - the one I personally loved but didn't think anyone else would get. Just for my own amusement, I had been making notes on epiphanies I had been having re the amazing, unexpected dharma implications of pop songs, nursery rhymes, jokes, etc. As soon as he heard this, my agent said, "That's the one. If you can get a proposal for this on my desk on Wednesday, I'll have it to the publishers on Thursday." I think there's a lesson here about doing your own thing, as we used to say - expressing yourself with authenticity.

That was the origin of the book I originally called Radio Free Buddha, which eventually became Why the Chicken Crossed the Road and Other Hidden Enlightenment Teachings. There were more thrills and spills to come - almost any writer can tell you stories about the hazards and delights involved in the production of a book, the tussles over the editing process, the arguments about cover design, etc. I was very fortunate to work with the people at Tarcher/Putnam, who are about as nice and accommodating and open to writers' creative ideas as anyone in the business. The really fabulous part of the experience for me was the opportunity to work with the founder of the imprint, Jeremy Tarcher, as my editor on both Chicken and the next book, The Zen Commandments. Jeremy is sort of a legendary figure; he's been doing this forever and is a font of writing/publishing wisdom. Many times along the way, he saved me from my worst impulses and steered me toward my best ones. He kept pushing me to make the books clearer and more concise, and whatever virtue they have is largely due to his contribution.

The first book is the hardest to sell. Selling The Zen Commandments and the new one that's coming out next February was relatively painless. Writing them is another story, of course - tremendous fun, tremendous work.

QUESTION: I've heard that there's a special, sacred mountain in Tibet that is now under threat by the Chinese government. What's this all about?

Mt. Kailash (also spelled Kailas) is an extraordinary place of pilgrimage for Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains. Hindus identify it with Mt. Meru, the traditional dwelling place of the gods. As literally or as metaphorically as you like to take such things, it's considered the navel of the earth. No one goes to the top of the mountain - it's regarded as too sacred - but the usual practice is to go partway up and circumambulate the mountain in three days.

Last year my late wife participated in an incredible trip there, starting with eighteen days of travel across the desert by Jeep and camping in tents at night. Everyone in her group had a sherpa to help them with the climb and a yak to carry their things. Shortly after her group began their kora (circumambulation), it began to snow; on the second day, when they got up to 18,500 feet, they were in a snowstorm so thick that pilgrims who had arrived a day behind them were turned away. At one point Maggy started having trouble with the altitude and so rode on the back of her yak, which had a bad habit of chasing after monks or charging straight up the mountainside when it felt like it. Of course the Westerners had good hiking boots, thermal clothing, etc., but were very much inspired by the Tibetans, Indians, and Nepalese they saw on the trail, mostly in thin sneakers and jackets.

All this, however, is just an outer description of what happened. What Maggy told me - as has everyone I know who has made this trip - is that what really happens is a life-changing inner experience that defies description.

The sad news is that the Chinese government has plans to pave the kora trail and develop Mt. Kailash as a tourist attraction. To learn more about the situation and help save Mt. Kailash, please click here.

QUESTION: Can enlightened people still kick people's asses?

Jeez, do you have someone specific in mind?

Enlightened people can do whatever's appropriate, and they do it with maximum effectiveness and grace. If there are asses that need kicking (whether literally or figuratively), enlightened people are the ones you want on the case. The point here is that enlightenment does not mean becoming passive or ineffective or wimpy. Quite the contrary. Enlightenment, to describe it one way (and all descriptions are inadequate and misleading), is the clear perception of the luminous emptiness of all things, events, and so-called selves. In that emptiness is total, uninhibited freedom. This freedom is not used to rob banks - since luminous emptiness is boundlessly fulfilling, there's nothing more to gain - so it's used to do what needs to be done in one's own little corner of the world to maximize happiness for all and minimize suffering.

At that same time, we should note that much of the ass-kicking that seems necessary to us in the unenlightened state may turn out, from an enlightened perspective, not to be so. We've probably all seen little kids squabble over a toy, each one convinced that he's right and the other is wrong and that the only acceptable resolution is total victory for his side and total defeat for the other. Then an adult steps in and shows them how they can share or compromise or otherwise work it out. Enlightened people, we could say, are to us as we are to children. Much (probably most) human conflict, whether on the level of individual relationships or international affairs, has its roots in selfishness, irrational hatred, and old-fashioned, garden-variety stupidity - all traits that enlightenment pierces through.

QUESTION: Often I feel antsy in meditation, as if I'm coming out of my skin. Help!

Congratulations - you are coming out of your skin! That is, you're coming out of your identification with a limited form, a definable self lodged in a body, and into realization of your true nature, which is limitless, formless undefinability. Naturally, such a fundamental transformation is, at times, going to involve some shaking and rattling. Sometimes you're going to feel like you're perking away like Mr. Coffee. Because I put so much emphasis on the effortlessness of natural meditation, sometimes people misunderstand that to mean it should always be smooth and pleasant. But that's something entirely different. You feel antsy? Feeling antsy is effortless. (It didn't take any effort for you to feel antsy, did it?)

The main thing here is to know that this is part of the process, that it's fine, that it's part of what's "supposed" to happen. At such times it's helpful to be specifically aware of the purely physical nature of whatever sensations arise, without interpreting them as desirable or undesirable. You may feel what you at first interpret as anxiety or impatience, but if you look to the physical sensation you'll experience it as, say, some warmth or pressure or tingling here or there in the body. Tingling is just tingling - it's not good or bad, it's not this or that mood, and it's certainly not the necessity to get up and do something else.

If this sort of thing happens a lot, you may also find that it smoothes matters out if you start each session with some pranayama - breathing exercise such as alternate nostril breathing. (See instructions in any good yoga book or in The Zen Commandments, pages 180-181.)

QUESTION: I learned Transcendental Meditation (TM) over 20 years ago and practiced it for some time, but eventually it fell to the wayside as I went on to pursue other ways and means of spiritual development. In the meantime I've had a very fulfilling life and many interesting pursuits and adventures, both spiritual and material. This past summer I suddenly felt inspired to pick up TM again. I found a TM instructor here who has checked my meditation a couple of times and I must say that I'm enjoying the practice very much and feel like I'm getting a lot out of it. My question is this: I am considering taking the TM-Sidhi course when it is given this summer, since I would like to go further into the experience I am now having with TM, but the price is absolutely astonishing: 7,000 euros (approximately US $9,000). I infer from your website that you've broken with the whole TM movement (and I must say some of what they're up to is completely bizarre), but I was nonetheless curious what your take was on the Sidhi program. In retrospect, do you still feel that it is worthwhile? Is it worth the significant investment of time and money? If I remember correctly you had done the Sidhi program yourself; did/do you feel that it made a contribution to your meditative practice? I don't know whether you feel that you can be objective on the whole TM phenomenon as I don? know the circumstances that led to your breaking away from it, but if you would be willing to tell me about your own experiences I think it could be very helpful to me.

You're right, it is impossible for me to be completely objective about the TM movement. More to the point is that my feelings are very mixed. I still have great affection for Maharishi and probably don't go through a week without somehow, inwardly or outwardly, making use of his particular formulations of enlightenment wisdom. I continue to feel that TM is an extremely effective meditation technique, and I always encourage anyone who asks me about it to continue if they feel they're benefitting from it.

At the same time, I feel there are limitations to TM. In the vocabulary of the Buddhist tradition, the two vital aspects of meditative practice are tranquility and insight. Tranquility would equate to what TM-ers call TC, transcendental consciousness - the experience of silent, boundless Being, without characteristics, as separate from the world of boundaries. From my own experience and my observation of others, I now feel TM is indeed a deluxe, gold-plated tranquility technique. But I feel that it lacks the second aspect: development of nondual insight, the perception (not mere theoretical understanding) that the transcendent and the mundane are not two but one.

Maharishi's famous "bubble diagram" is interesting in this regard: describing meditation as the journey from the surface of the ocean (the bounded, changing relative) to its depths (the boundless, changeless absolute) is a convenient metaphor, but right from the beginning it implies dualism, separation between the two. When I teach meditation these days, I usually use a model with an important modification: instead of finite waves separated from infinite bottom, it's finite waves on infinite ocean, with the understanding that waves are none other than ocean expressing itself. This may sound like a theoretical quibble, but I think it's more. People who get deeply involved in the TM movement and its advanced courses often seem to slide into quietism, an aversion to engagment in the richness of the manifest world as somehow antithetical to their experience of the unmanifest.

As for the TM-Sidhi program - Maharishi's course for developing siddhis, or "supernormal performances," particularly focused on levitation, or "yogic flying" - it's a little hard to have perspective on it. From my experience, the "yogic flying" phenomenon was highly exaggerated. I and the others I practiced with certainly felt some exhilarating energy as we went hopping cross-legged around the room, but you can feel exhilarating energy at a rock concert too. I heard rumors of people transcending the laws of gravity but I never saw it happen. And even if it did - well, there's a story about a monk who meets the Buddha and excitedly tells him that, after working at it for twenty years, he's gained the ability to fly over the river. The Buddha tells him he's just wasted twenty years - he could have just given the boatman a nickel. More recently, the 20th-century saint Neem Karoli Baba, who was famous for supposedly performing all kinds of siddhis, simultaneously warned his students away from being fascinated with them, saying specifically, "Siddhis are pigshit."

As for the costs ... Well, don't get me started. When I took the progam I was a full-time teacher in the TM movement and so paid no fee or a much smaller one (can't remember). But I feel that ALL the fees, starting with the cost of initial instruction in TM, have become scandalously inflated. I studied to become a TM teacher in the heady days of the late 60's and early 70's, when we really felt we were going to change the world from the inside out by making meditation accessible to millions of people. When Maharishi started charging thousands of dollars to learn to meditate, I felt (rightly or wrongly) that he had abandoned that goal. That's still my goal, which I'm pursuing by somewhat different means.

All I can tell you about is my experience. Your mileage may vary. If you write back in a year and tell me that you took the program and it provided the great spiritual opening of your life, I'll be delighted. Good luck.

QUESTION: I was wondering if you have any good ideas or techniques to properly time a meditation. I've made an audio file where I took the first track from your CD, cut out the words, and made it long enough to cover a 20-minute sit with the bell left in at the end. But in situations where I'm not near my CD player, what would you recommend? Should I just sit until I feel it's time to get up? When I do that, I feel that I often sit for less than I would have liked to.

I use a supersecret technique of the Tibetan lamas, formerly not available outside the Himalayas: I peek at my watch.

Your digital approach is ingenious, but really, nothing that elaborate is needed. Meditating for a precisely measured time is not that important. In reality, of course, the Tibetans had no timepieces until the incursions by the West in the twentieth century. Traditional texts commonly say something like, "Do this meditation for about the amount of time it takes to eat a meal." I do think it's good that you want to make sure you're putting in a certain amount of cushion time every day - there is some settling down and opening up that will happen in 20 minutes that probably won't happen in 10, so in that regard using a watch or clock makes sense. Also, because we do live in a world of schedules and responsibilities, using the watch allows you to relax and forget about the time rather than worry about being late to class or work.

Some people, however, feel that peeking at the watch is an "interruption," that it takes them "out" of meditation. In that case you could set an alarm instead, preferably one that's not too loud and jarring (as you've done by creating the audio file with me ringing the bell at the end). But the more profound solution is to apply the nondualistic view and recognize that there are no interruptions, that there is no in or out, that whether you'ree gazing at a mandala or Guru Rinpoche's eyes or the insides of your own eyelids or your watch, you're gazing at the infinite.

QUESTION: When I just sit on the beach and look at the ocean, is that the same as meditating?

Maybe.

What I like about your approach is its spontaneity and naturalness. You're not getting caught up in outward forms, postures, and rituals; you're acknowledging that "meditation" is where we find it and not some Eastern cultural product or special "spiritual" exercise; and, most important, it sounds like you're doing something effortless, something non-doing. The open-eyed aspect of your ocean-gazing is certainly not a problem. In fact, it's very much in tune with some of the most venerable and effective meditative techniques.

But to feel confident that this is really "the same as meditating," we'd have to ask a few questions. Are you able to completely let go into the ocean-gazing experience, at least at moments? Does it make you feel more alert and aware as well as settled and relaxed, or just relaxed in a dull way? And does it "addict" you, leaving you dependent on the ocean as your only way into meditative experience, or do you find that repeated exposures to it help you to find that sense of transcendental spaciousness wherever you go?

Many of my most spacious moments happen not when I'm doing some formal meditation practice but when I'm standing in my backyard at night, looking up at the treetops and the sky. But I also find it useful to integrate such informal moments with daily formal sittings, so that they become reproducible independent of where I am or what's going on around me.

QUESTION: In The Zen Commandments you write about the importance of fidelity in marriage. Could you ever conceive of a situation where being unfaithful seems like the better path for an individual to take, even though it will always involve moral compromise and the risk of causing pain?

All generalizations are fallacious, including this one. Moral principles are generalizations, and as such they cannot cover all conceivable circumstances. Is it good to lie? No. Is it good to lie when the storm troopers come to the door and ask if you have relatives hiding in the attic? Well, that's another story.

But the generalizations that recur in the moral codes of most or all civilizations are probably there for pretty good reasons and are not to be dismissed lightly. These days I like to think that most people are sophisticated enough that they can behave properly without the threat of some muscular God on a cloud who will smite them if they disobey; we can understand that moral "laws" are like laws of physics, describing the kinds of actions that usually entangle both the actor and those acted upon in increased pain and confusion. As far as I know, every culture includes among those laws certain kinds of sexual misconduct, although there's a lot of variation as to exactly where the line is drawn. For example, right now our culture seems to be in the process of deciding that gay relationships don't hurt individuals or society after all.

Might extramarital relations be similarly benign? Certainly some cultures are closer to that attitude than ours. A few years ago, when the French president Francois Mitterand died, the official mourners at his graveside were headed up by his wife and his mistress, and no one found it shocking or surprising. What the French (and many others) did find incomprehensible was our willingness to impeach a president over a little Oval Office hanky-panky.

Having said all that, it's still my observation (and again this is a generalization) that infidelity usually causes deep unhappiness. We're not living in France or among Margaret Mead's easy-going islanders. Very few people in our society are capable of happily accepting the idea of a spouse fooling around on the side, and if it's done in secret it obstructs the openness and honesty that are essential to any friendship, especially the profound friendship of marriage. Certainly there might be situations where it's very tempting to conclude otherwise, such as when one member of a couple loses interest in sex and the other doesn't. But I suspect that many of the people who convince themselves that they're sophisticated enough to handle an adulterous situation in a way that's healthy and happy for all involved are kidding themselves - maybe even the French.

Fortunately, garden-variety maturity and the higher maturity promoted by spiritual/meditative practice place the whole question in a larger, more relaxed context. When we're hormone-driven teenagers, sexual release appears to be the ultimate bliss. Both age and the gradual growth of the vaster, clearer, simpler bliss of enlightened awareness take the false edge of ultimacy off of all these sexual matters. Whatever your sexual situation is, it - like everything else - turns out to be just fine.

QUESTION: Do all spiritual paths ultimately lead to the same place?

I don't know - I haven't followed all spiritual paths. So anything I or anyone else says on this question is largely theoretical. Of course, the extreme negative position, that only belief in Jesus will save you from hell or only Transcendental Meditation will foster enlightenment or only Nichiren Shoshu Buddhism is true religion, is so abhorrent that it's tempting to adopt the extreme positive position, the nicey-nice liberal eclectic idea that all roads lead to the top of the mountain. Well, maybe they do, but maybe some roads lead straight over a cliff. But then, from a larger perspective, maybe going over the cliff is itself a part of the path, necessary for the particular kind of person attracted to that particular kind of cliff, a preamble to his dusting himself off and resuming the climb, this time from a new angle, and maybe in a new lifetime.

So I think the truth must lie somewhere in the middle. It just seems unlikely that only one specific path of practice always leads to realization of ultimate reality (for all practitioners) and the rest always fail, but it also seems unlikely that, say, a guy whose path is sitting in vividly alert yet relaxed meditation and a guy whose path is roaming the streets and beating women for dressing immodestly are going to arrive at the same place anytime soon. But it's really an academic question because, no matter what you tell them, those two guys are not going to trade places.

QUESTION: I attended last night a talk by Lama Surya Das and remember two things in particular from it: that the point in meditation was not to have no thoughts or quiet the mind, but to see through the mind; and that for Surya, his own experience now is not that he has a Buddha nature, but that the Buddha nature has him. (Something like that). In attending a one-day event with Larry Rosenberg today, at one point he likened mindfulness of thoughts to being on a train station platform as a vipassana meditator, and watching a train of thoughts go through the station. The issue is whether we remain on the platform and observe the passing trains of thoughts, or do we jump on the train of a passing thought. At another point as I remember it, he said that vipassana meditation was not about separating yourself from your experience, but actually participating in it. Meditation served to widen our capacity to let in all our experience but in the midst of it to stay steady and awake. Could you say something more of this skill of remaining steady and awake without separating yourself from the experience of, say, thoughts? Is the only thing steady and awake our Buddha nature? And is there a connection between "seeing through the mind" and "participating in your experience"?

Whew! There are a lot of questions here. Or maybe not.

You've quoted a few penetrating expressions. I think an important thing to keep in mind is that the main function of such expressions is to shake us loose from our old conceptual structures, not to build new ones. The whole point of this endeavor is to open ourselves to reality, to our own nature, to Buddha nature - whichever inadequate term you want to use. That ultimate nature is beyond all concept. So, for example, Lama Surya Das starts by playing off the central Buddhist tenet that all things have Buddha nature. He's probably more or less alluding here to the famous story of the Zen master Joshu, who, when asked whether a dog has Buddha nature, answered, "Mu!," or "Not!" One explanation of this reply is that Joshu was trying to shake the student loose from the error of looking for Buddha nature as an entity or component, as a thing that he had, just as you might look for your belly button. I can't pretend to know exactly what Surya had in mind, but it seems to me that the beauty of his expression is how it sort of blows the old expectation apart by turning it inside out.

But language is always double-edged. If, instead of just going with the flow of that explosion, we then proceed to turn it into a new structural concept and start looking for Buddha nature as a big hand holding us rather than a belly button - well, that's an improvement but still ultimately limiting.

. . . Yes, our Buddha nature is the only thing that's steady and awake, but that's because our Buddha nature is the only thing there is. And making the connection between seeing through the mind and participating in our experience is, we could say, a definition of the entire path of practice. Initially they seem like two different, in fact opposite, things. When we see that they're exactly the same thing (and, in fact, the only thing - two more names for Buddha nature), then we've won. Game over.

QUESTION: Are meditation and prayer the same thing?

The short answer is no. The longer answer is that there can be a relationship and even a certain amount of overlap between the two.

Meditation, in its purest form, is a matter of "just being." As such, it is nondoing, nonactive. This makes it not only supremely simple but also supremely accessible to all kinds of people, including those who would never dream of engaging in prayer.

There is a wide variety of ways that people pray, but generally there is some active element involved. You might be asking for something (Get me out of this jam, restore my loved one's health, bring peace to the world), you might be expressing something (Hi, God, this is me, this is how I feel), you might be giving thanks. In Buddhist prayer, since the underlying view is nontheistic, there's no one there to address one's requests or feelings or gratitude to. Buddhists generally pray (if it's even appropriate to use that term) by setting forth and committing themselves to certain outrageous aspirations. There are also practices, used heavily in some schools of Buddhism (especially Tibetan) but also in other traditions including Hinduism, Sufism, and the more "mystical" (experiential) forms of Judaism and Christianity, that employ chanting of verbal formulas, or mantras, sometimes in a devotional context, sometimes not - anything from "Hail Mary" to "Om Mani Padme Hung." This might be considered a gray area between prayer and meditation, as it generally tends toward a transcendental state: although the sound may have some meaning and some active intention at the surface, its repeated use leads the user to deeper levels of experience where meaning gives way to simple sound, and then sound gives way to simple being.

Maybe this is obvious, but the good thing is that you don't have to choose one or the other. You can do this or that or both or neither. As we used to say when I was a kid, it's a free country. (Do kids in other countries say that?)

QUESTION: How 'bout this weather?! I live in the Northeast, and this freakish couple of MONTHS now of rain and gloom almost every day is really getting me down. It seems like everybody I know is making jokes about jumping out of windows. And when I get depressed like this, my meditation practice and spiritual aspirations also sort of seem like a bad joke. Any suggestions?

It's interesting that the word "enlightenment" has "light" as its root. It's true that it's a lot easier to feel expansive and spiritual - as if enlightenment has some kind of growing reality in your life - when there's some sunlight available. On the other hand, spiritual practice exists because we're not enlightened; it's the medicine for that disease. So it's the times when we feel down in the dumps for any reason, whether it's the weather, personal problems, or whatever, that we should be especially strong in our practice. This is one more reason why regularity of practice is emphasized. If you make a habit of meditating every day, no matter what, without thinking about it, just like brushing your teeth, then that habit is there to support you when your mood and your thoughts turn dark.

There are, however, a few additional things you can do when inner and/or outer gloom prevails. One is to put more emphasis on active forms of practice in addition to silent sitting. Do more mantra-chanting or singing, more vigorous breathing, more yoga or prostrations. Also, these full-spectrum lights that you see advertised, which are supposed to replicate the frequency-array of natural sunlight more closely than ordinary lights, do seem to work. I'm writing this under one of those lights right now, and my subjective experience is that it does keep me feeling more cheerful and energetic.

Thoreau wrote, "In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer. " My wife once had an experience that exemplified this saying in a very dramatic and literal way. She was on a month-long solo retreat in a small, isolated cabin in the Catskills. Her first day there it snowed heavily, and then the sun stayed pretty much hidden for the next month. But from time to time, as she sat in the cabin meditating, she felt the glare of bright light penetrating her eyelids and thought, "At last, the sun has come out!" Sometimes she would peek, but there was no change in the weather. What she was experiencing was inner light, so bright that it fooled her every time.

QUESTION: I have a 14-year-old son with autism. Autism is a neurological condition that affects his concentration, conversational skills, auditory processing (so I'm not certain he would comprehend your meditation CD, because "words" do not always get his attention), and social interaction with others. I began homeschooling him last September, due to pronounced anxiety he was experiencing at school, especially in the lunchroom at noon. I usually get up early and meditate (I'm a beginner . . . ) for about 20 minutes. I would like to introduce him to the relaxation and peace this could provide him, but so far have been unable to really communicate how to do it. I have taught him relaxation-breathing, which he does adequately at times, but I'm not sure he is capable of "meditation," per se. What do you think? He needs peace in his life.

For this one I put my head together with some people who have more expertise than I do in child development and in working with kids with special needs, and I invite further input from anyone who has information in this area.

Part of the answer seems to be that it depends on the severity of the autism in the particular child. Those who are "high-functioning," after working for awhile with such activities as the relaxation-breathing that you have taught your son, might be able to comprehend and follow meditation instructions if the teacher were sufficiently clear, empathetic, and patient; those who are "low-functioning" would not.

Still, there could be other experiences short of formal meditation that an autistic child could be introduced to that would help bring the peace that he needs (that we all need). Again, any kind of relaxation-breathing can be helpful. For kids who are amenable to being touched (and some are not), some sort of touch-healing such as Reiki could be very soothing. Some might respond well to mantra practice, repeating a short verbal formula such as OM AH HOONG again and again. This can be tricky, though, since autistic kids tend to be self-stimulating and might use the mantra in a compulsive, stimulative way rather than a settling way.

The other important element here is your own meditative practice. You've indicated that you're a beginner. As you continue to sit regularly through the coming weeks and months, you'll find that your own sense of peace, openness, and balance in the face of whatever comes your way will grow stronger and stronger. This will be beneficial for you and for everyone who comes in contact with you, including your son. Your patience in working with your son and your ability to draw on the depths of your love for him which are, of course, already there, will grow stronger.

There's also a traditional understanding that, even aside from such interaction, your meditation itself has a direct affect on everyone else in the world, especially blood relatives. Perhaps the commonality of DNA makes our family members more closely resonant with whatever is going on in our awareness. (There are numerous stories of mothers intuitively knowing when their children, who might be miles away, are in trouble; sibling often report having "telepathy" with one another.) So be strong in your own practice, sit every day, and know that, even if your son can't practice himself, you're helping him. Just as you ate for two when you were pregnant, now you'll be meditating for two.

QUESTION: In the world that we currently live in, it is becoming increasingly apparent that our leaders are "leading" towards only global suffering. As conscious human beings, what can or should we do to effect change? Ram Dass once said that in order to protest effectively, you must love the people you are protesting against as much as yourself. Once we can do that, what else can we do to lead our world in the direction of sustainability, tolerance, and consciousness?

Whew! If I had the answer to that one - a really compelling, satisfying answer that was not merely cute or comforting but a true blueprint for effective, world-saving action - I'd be some kind of messiah or buddha. But I'm just a guy from New Jersey. I think that, in a very commonsense way, you just have to inform yourself as best you can, see what kinds of action are possible for you, and do what you can do.

I can tell you two things not to do, the two classic pitfalls for enlightenment seekers who are alarmed about the direction of world affairs. One is the spiritual cop-out, the attitude of, Well, I've got my meditation practice or my devotional practice, I'm melting into the bliss of the infinite, I know that the finite is just a cosmic illusion anyway, so I don't have to concern myself with it. I've got mine. The opposite mistake is to become so overwhelmed by the enormity of affairs, so desperate to change that which may not be changeable, that you make yourself crazy. Somewhere between these two extremes, sanity and balance are possible.

Exactly where that balance point lies will be different for each individual, and you have to work that out yourself. Maybe it involves finding good political candidates and donating money to their campaigns. (By the way, if we're talking about the current race for the 2004 presidential nomination, early money is the most important, so find your candidate's Web site and donate now!) Maybe it involves working with political action committees (again, most of them now are Web based). Maybe, if there's something you feel very strongly about, it might involve civil disobedience and the willingness to be jailed for your cause. Thoreau's one night in jail inspired Gandhi and Dr. King, whose own determination to be jailed on matters of conscience certainly changed the course of history.

And you're right, from a spiritual practitioner's point of view it's important to love the people whose actions we're protesting. Not that that directly does anything for them, but it saves you from getting caught up in negativity that will turn your consciousness toxic. Of course, loving them as much as you love yourself is an ideal, a tall order. I know I can't do it. But what we can always do is bless them, through practice of metta or tonglen or any other technique that works for you.

Finally, remember the words of the Bhagavad Gita, the advice given to Arjuna the warrior just before he goes into battle in his struggle to save the world from evil. "You have a right to your actions only, not to their fruits." We can do what we can do, and we do it as conscientiously as we possibly can, but then whatever happens as a result will happen. Maybe we'll attain our particular goal and maybe not; maybe we'll attain it and it will makes things worse. Nonattachment to the fruit of the action is what will ultimately keep you sane, especially in times when the tide is against you. Then you're like Sisyphus, eternally rolling his rock up the mountain, only to see it come crashing down, over and over. If you're attached to the fruit of the action - the idea that the rock should be at the top - then you're bound to failure. This is true not only for political activists, but for everyone. If doctors define success as saving lives, they must ultimately fail in 100% of cases, as every patient eventually dies. Everything that I teach as a teacher will one day be forgotten. But if you're doing it not for the sake of the result but for the sake of doing it, then you're always successful. Take care of business on the level of the finite, and offer up the results to the infinite. This is the path of karma yoga, action as a path of enlightenment.

QUESTION: I have fallen passionately in love with writing poetry, particularly as an expression of my growing spiritual experience. All my work so far, though, is in traditional rhyme and meter, which feels somewhat limiting. I don't really know much about contemporary poetry, but I know that most of it is free verse, without rhyme and meter. Can you recommend a starting place as far as what to read and how to start writing in a freer way?

I would suggest that, to understand and write contemporary poetry, you have to go back to its source, the nonidentical twin pillars that hold the whole thing up: Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. Each of them is intensely concerned with the same matters of love and world and spirit that matter to you, but approaches them with a very different sensibility that expresses itself in a very different poetic voice. Dickinson: reclusive, droll, skeptical, introspective, introverted. Whitman: gregarious, effusive, omnisexual, extraverted. Dickinson's voice: clipped, manicured, exquisite little rhyming quatrains. Whitman's: the original free verse, sprawling, huge, all-encompassing, like he's trying to compose a collage portrait of the universe . . . life-size!

You can learn just about everything you need to know from these two.

Note, for instance, how Dickinson uses the same meter/rhyme structure in most of her poems (derived from the hymnal - you can sing most of her poems to the tune of "Amazing Grace"), but how she'll sometimes deliberately throw in a nonrhyming or almost-rhyming word where you'd expect a rhyming word, to shade the mood or meaning; she does the same with subtle alterations of rhythm. Note how she starts almost every poem with a clear, simple image ("A bird came down the walk," "I taste a liquor never brewed," "A fly buzzed when I died," etc.), then makes that the spine of the poem, with everything else coming out of it. And note how she uses concrete things and experiences to show, not tell, spiritual experiences (again, "I taste a liquor never brewed," "There's a certain slant of light," etc.).

With Whitman, read "Song of Myself" in Leaves of Grass and note how, though his poetry lacks meter, it doesn't lack rhythm. It's urgently rhythmic, in the way that the ocean waves or the seasons or sex is rhythmic, but you don't have sex in iambic pentameter (I hope!). You have to read all this stuff out loud, by the way, to really hear this. Note how each long, sprawling line is one (often long) breath and one image or string of connected images. And note how, in the absence of rhyme, he provides structure by repeating words at beginnings of lines. (You see the same thing in "Howl" by Allen Ginsberg, his 20th-century successor.)

If you can absorb even a little of Dickinson's miniaturist precision and Whitman's expressionist freedom, that will be a lot. I think imitation can be an extremely valuable exercise for getting things moving: try to write some counterfeit Dickinson and Whitman poems, something that would fool the scholars into believing they're from dusty manuscripts that turned up in your attic. Then go from there and (eventually, hopefully) find your own voice.

QUESTION: I have a friend at college who has had a horrendous past with two alcoholic parents, which has led to an incredible state of suffering here in the present moment. I've been trying to impart to her that her suffering, as real as it is, can be liberated from, that it simply is possible. She doesn't believe me, despite anything I try. I was wondering what your thoughts on this were. I'm giving her a copy of your CD, but any other ideas you have would be great.

When someone has burrowed as deep into the darkness of the tunnel as your friend sounds to have done, it certainly can be hard to believe that there's light at the end. There's no simple, instant "Aha!" that you can give her (this is real life, not the movies), but there are a number of ways you can chip around the edges, some of which you're apparently already doing.

Probably the most important one is to just continue in your own life to be the best example you can of someone who's growing into the light. That doesn't mean making a big show of being Mr. Enlightenment, but just continuing to be the kind, open person you actually are, who incidentally does some meditation and whatever other activities you may do that open your awareness. The Bible says "By their fruits you shall know them," and the fruit of all your practice is your openness and kindness in each moment. Sooner or later people will see that and acknowledge where it comes from. Preaching can sometimes be counterproductive. Think of how many times you've changed your way of thinking or being because someone told you to, vs. how many times you were inspired by someone's example.

Another thing you're already doing is introducing her to sitting practice through the CD. If she takes to that, you might eventually think about bringing her to a workshop or group practice. (Check my "Events" page. Those are mostly in New York - New Jersey area, but I may be able to direct you to others in other areas.) Then she can get the blast of group practice and also meet other living examples like yourself.

Yet another angle to chip away from is not overtly dharma-oriented at all. There are private therapists who specialize in such situations, groups such as Al-Anon, books about the challenges of being adult children of alcoholics, etc. She's not the first person to walk this path, and it certainly makes sense to learn from the experiences of others who've gone before. This will at least help her see that the psychological patterns and assumptions she's caught up in (typically including a lot of feelings of self-blame and hopelessness) are just patterns and assumptions, pretty much standard among people who've had that background, and not inherent in life itself. Once she sees that it's her that's projecting the patterns, it opens up the possibility of stopping projecting them.

An important point here is to continue to take care of yourself. When you get deeply involved with someone who's caught up in so much darkness, it can sometimes get to the point where it feels draining or even disorienting, as if she's dragging you down rather than you pulling her up. Be sure to stay strong in your own practice and just get out in your own space, taking a walk in the woods or across the field by yourself. And stay plugged into the Bodhisattva attitude, as expressed so beautifully by Santideva: "One should always look straight at sentient beings as if drinking them in with the eyes, thinking, 'Relying on them alone, I shall attain Buddhahood.'" Then your giving of yourself cannot be a diversion from your meditative practice because it is your meditative practice.

QUESTION: Are tulkus for real?

I like to think so.

Tulku is a Tibetan word that literally means "transformation body." It refers to a reborn lama; that is, an enlightenment teacher who is recognized as having functioned as such in previous lifetimes. The best known example is the Dalai Lama. When he's referred to as the fourteenth Dalai Lama, it doesn't mean he's the fourteenth guy to hold the post; it means he's holding the post for the fourteenth time. But there are many other lineages in Tibetan tradition held by tulkus.

Of course, there's nothing special about being reborn - according to Buddhist teaching, everyone goes through innumerable births. What's special is the continuity of awareness that tulkus supposedly represent. The idea is that, with the intensive training they have received and the highly developed awareness they have cultivated, it would be wasteful to lose it all into the ocean of rebirth just because an old body has worn out. So, when a tulku is about to die, he commonly writes a poem containing some hints about where he'll show up next time or what his name or appearance will be; also, after he dies his senior students may have visionary experiences giving further hints. Traditionally, a few years after the old lama's death a search party is formed to find candidates - one or more young children who fit the description, and whose parents often report that as toddlers they spontaneously recited mantras and prayers that no one taught them. A candidate would then have to pass tests, including picking out certain objects, such as a bowl that he used in his previous life, from similar looking ones.

At its most inspiring, the tulku phenomenon can be seen as an expression of the Bodhisattva ideal, the commitment to work tirelessly for the liberation of all sentient beings into enlightenment, no matter how long it takes. A more cynical view is that, in the days of the Tibetan theocracy, when controlling a temple could entail considerable political and economic power, the concept of the tulku was invented and manipulated as a way to keep the temples in the "right" hands. Since the monks were celibate, there had to be a means for inheriting the power in each generation.

Sad to say, there are some contemporary instances that give one pause. One important teaching throne is currently the subject of a bitter dispute between two rival (adult) claimants. And in recent years, the supreme head of one of the four major schools of Tibetan Buddhism officially recognized two American tulkus. One is a woman who, as a self-appointed guru, has a record of highly abusive, probably sociopathic, behavior toward her students. The other is a famous action film star better known for his appearances in the pages of tabloids than for his spiritual proclivities; he reportedly made a large monetary contribution to the lama's organization just before being recognized.

But one or even several bad apples don't spoil the whole bunch. Personally, when I look at the present Dalai Lama, I find it easy to believe that he embodies more enlightened wisdom than can be accumulated in one lifetime. Whether or not that's literally true may not be as important as the fact that such a person can inspire us to strive for such wisdom ourselves.

QUESTION: I've been practicing for awhile now in the effortless, nonmeditating-meditation, nontechnique-technique that you advocate, and I generally find it quite liberating. Sometimes, though, I find that I'm so caught up in thoughts or agita that the whole session seems wasted. At those times wouldn't it be more helpful to introduce some element of effort and structure into the practice?

Effort, no. Structure, yes. They're two different things.

You're right that at such times it makes sense to have some focal or structural element. The simplest way is to rest your attention in one of the senses: hearing, seeing, feeling, tasting, or smelling. Without making an effort to concentrate or exclude anything else, just pay attention to (say) the totality of hearing in each moment, or the totality of feeling (the contact of the body with the chair or cushion, the air against the skin, etc.), or the colors that present themselves before the eyes (whether the eyelids are open or closed). Then, after awhile, when things seem more settled, you can allow the attention to widen out to include all the senses, and just rest in omnidirectional openness.

You can also check page 179-180 of The Zen Commandments for related approaches to dealing with this situation.

QUESTION: I attended your "playshop" (as you called it) at New York Open Center last week. I was the one who asked, among other things, a question about "effortless effort." I am still trying to understand your concept of "doing nothing" while meditating. Listening to your CD, I understand your point that doing nothing and just being is our original and "natural" state. But, for me, and probably for most human beings, our "natural," or learned, or habitual, or addicted mental state is not doing nothing. We have become "thinking reeds." So, this is my point/question: do we not have to make some sort of effort in order to at least establish awareness of (not control) this habitual "monkey mind," with all of the internal dialogue, etc.? You spoke of the difference between effort and volition. That is where I become lost - because, mental volition seems to me to be really the same thing as mental effort - perhaps just a matter of degree. "Letting go" of something that I am grasping (whether from habit, learning, whatever) seems like an action or some sort of subtle effort. Am I just misunderstanding something? I don't think it's just a matter of semantics. Is the letting go of something that you are used to doing not effort?

There's a difference between volition and effort. Volition is choice, and we can make a choice to leave off our effort. There's a difference between the natural state and the "learned, or habitual, or addicted" states with which you have lumped it together. Unlumping the natural state from the other stuff is what it's all about.

Forget about meditation for a moment. We can see the same patterns more easily in more outwardly active situations. Think of someone you know who is always creating problems for himself. You can see how much energy he invests in perpetuating neurotic patterns - dredging up old resentments, carrying on internal and external arguments (in some cases, continuing to fight with people who have long since gone out of his life or even died), etc. It's a whole lot of work to stay that miserable. Because you're on the outside of his neurotic patterns looking in, you can see how unnecessary it all is (just as someone else can see how unnecessary yours is!). At any moment, if your friend would simply desist from his old patterns, all his self-generated, illusory, habitual, addicted unhappiness would fall away and he could rest in the natural state, which is boundless freedom from all that.

But if you try to tell him to just stop, he'll probably dig in his heels. If you try to tell him that he's creating all this drama himself, he'll get angry at you and make you a new part of the drama. Samsara is very powerful. Its power lies in its nature of going around in circles, which is just what the word means. "That's some catch, that Catch-22." "It's the best there is." It's kind of a miracle that anyone ever breaks out of it, or even tries to.

But if your friend does decide to try, because of the strength of his habitual patterns, not engaging in them will initially seem like an effort, whereas continuing to engage in them seems almost to go on by itself, like a wagon rolling down a hill. In the beginning of his journey your friend may go through all kinds of contortions and psychodramas, trying to work out (with the emphasis on the word "work") how he can stop being neurotic. From his point of view, it's entirely necessary that he go through this stage, and in that sense it is necessary. But the clearer he gets, the more he sees that there's nothing to it. Being sane turns out to be not a job but a vacation, and a permanent one - not doing, but being, having vacated all your former neurotic busyness. Then it's almost unbelievable that you could ever have been stuck in all that confusion or that you thought you had to put forth an effort, to do all that flailing around to get out of it. Flailing around is confusion. Thus the Buddha, upon attaining enlightenment, said, "How wonderful! How wonderful! All things are enlightened just as they are!" He was (and we are, and the rocks and the chairs are) enlightened all along. But the catch is you don't realize you're already enlightened until you become enlightened.

So you're quite right that, early in our practice, letting go of the thought can seem like effort. There's nothing wrong with the fact that it seems that way. It is, in a sense, necessary. The phrase "effortless effort" does express this paradox quite eloquently, and if you find it to be a useful cue in your practice, fine. Personally, I don't use that phrase - it makes me a little nervous that it can become the justification for plain old effortful effort.

But as you proceed in your practice, you'll come to see more and more clearly that just sitting, just being, letting go of thoughts, really is effortless, despite how it looked earlier on the path. You'll see that thoughts really are self-liberating and that all the convolutions we went through about effort and thinking and not thinking was really quite laughable. All we had to do was let the self-liberating nature of thought (and everything else) go on without interference. There's an ineffable beauty to that. That vision is precisely why we practice. If we could see it right from the beginning, practice would be unnecessary.

It's much like the use of koan in Zen. How can the deliberate choice to let go of the thought not involve effort? How can one hand clap? In each case, the appearance of contradiction at the beginning is not a mistake: it's the challenge we take up.

QUESTION: I was at your lecture at the Open Center this past Friday. What I wanted to ask you is, how is your technique of relaxing into whatever thought comes up different than the technique I'm used to of just letting the thought go, not putting any energy into it and letting it pass by? If there is a difference, is your technique any more effective and why?

We're probably talking about the same thing, but let's be sure. Meditative experience is subtle; language is a bit of a blunt instrument. Sometimes talking about this stuff can be like trying to cut diamonds with a sledge hammer. So it's important to be as precise as possible.

First let's be clear about the language I used the other night. I didn't say (I never say) "relax into whatever thought comes up." That could be understood to mean consciously indulging in the thoughts - that is, realizing that you're in the middle of the reverie about ice cream or sex or unemployment or whatever else is on your mind, and making the conscious decision to continue along that path. That ain't it. So make an effort to push the thoughts away? No, that ain't it either. What's left? Relax your grip on the thought. (That's what I said Friday night!) Don't resist thoughts, don't indulge thoughts, but know that once you realize you've been lost in the thought you're no longer lost in it - it's already dissolving. Just allow it to continue to dissolve, without further entangling yourself through either resistance or indulgence. Relax into the totality of the experience of the present moment, the 360-degree openness in which the thought, whether it's persisting or dissolving, occupies only a few degrees anyway, so it's not a big deal either way.

This may well be what you mean by "not putting any energy into it and letting it pass by." If so, we're on the same page.

QUESTION: Do you think that dreams can convey information about past lives? I once had a very clear, vivid dream about being a plantation owner in the South before the Civil War. My husband and I were involved in helping fugitive slaves escape through the Underground Railroad. There was a violent confrontation in the rolling hills behind our house, where I was shot in the back and then died. I experienced all this very clearly, including the pain of the gunshot and the process of dying. I woke up convinced that all this had really happened to me in an earlier life. What do you think?

Anything's possible. The question is, what's useful? The possibility of past lives can be very fascinating. If that's really the way things work, information about them might conceivably provide helpful insights into our present personalities and life situations. I have a good friend who has had several clear dreams involving aspects of Tibetan Buddhist culture, in which she wielded certain ritual objects and received empowerments from certain lamas. Only later did she see pictures of those lamas in books and learn who they were. Does that mean she once lived in Tibet? Maybe. Does it mean she should be involved in Buddhist practice? Maybe. (She already is.) As one of my teachers used to say, the past is always a lesser state of evolution. Its importance to us in the present is that it got us here.

If we really do undergo rebirth, our situation could be compared to that of an actor. When he's onstage playing Lear, he needs to be immersed in being Lear; it's not useful for him to be distracted by his memories of last month when he was Macbeth.

The dream state does appear to be a sort of premium channel, the way they were broadcast back in the 80's, where the picture was present but scrambled unless you paid for it. As awareness becomes clearer through meditative practice, the signal gradually gets unscrambled and we could receive information that's useful to our development. But in the meantime it's probably wisest to shrug, say "Who knows?," and continue to strive to lead a balanced life and alleviate suffering here in the present.

QUESTION: Sometimes during meditation I find myself in a state that's restful and enjoyable but kind of dull and spaced out - sort of a blissful fuzziness. Is this OK?

The general principle is that we rest in whatever presents itself in the moment, without judging it. But another general principle is that what we're cultivating through sitting practice is restful alertness. I think that's a very useful term. We're uncovering the intrinsic nature of our own awareness: mirrorlike clarity in which everything appears vividly without our having to do anything about it. A mirror perfectly reflects every fine detail of each object, yet it does nothing, it just is, as the images pass over its surface with perfect frictionlessness. By cultivating restful alertness during sitting, we find it in the rest of our lives. That's how we find freedom in action, as well as greatly enhanced effectiveness in action.

The blissful fuzziness or fuzzy bliss that you describe is not uncommon. It's sometimes described as feeling as if a hood has been pulled over your head. The problem is that, while it's certainly a state of restfulness, it lacks alertness. So when you notice that you've slipped into it, it's good to straighten your spine, maybe fill and empty your lungs forcefully a couple of times, or even shout suddenly. (There are traditional "cutting" syllables that are shouted in Zen and Tibetan tradition, but "Hey!" is also fine.) If this happens a lot, check the external factors such as your posture, whether the room is overheated, etc.

But don't let any of this make you feel you need to be on your guard against such a state treacherously creeping up on you. The watchword of meditation is innocence, letting be, taking things as they come. If we start being on our guard against a lot of different things, that's not innocence.

QUESTION: I frequently notice that what I would describe as a meditative state - a sense of clarity, settledness, everything's perfect just the way it is, there's no "me" involved - creeps over me as I'm doing activities that don't take much thought, like taking a walk or doing simple manual work. But when just sitting in meditation, I tend to get bored and restless. Would it be more beneficial for me to mindfully take more walks, etc., rather than sit, since that's when the "good stuff" seems to happen?

Funny you should ask. This is precisely the question I asked Tsoknyi Rinpoche, a wonderful teacher headquartered in Nepal, at a retreat a few summers ago. His answer: do both. If our practice is comprehensive, we should (eventually) be able to experience the freedom and simplicity of being, under all circumstances. We shouldn't limit ourselves to one venue or another.

Before you give up sitting meditation to spend all your time chopping wood or walking through the fields, it might be useful to ask yourself if you've always felt such clarity while doing those activities. You'll probably realize that you haven't. In our sitting practice, even when it subjectively seems to be all restlessness at the time, we're cultivating familiarity with the simple state of being, so that it starts to naturally percolate through the rest of the day.

QUESTION: Often when I meditate, I find myself drifting off into fantasies of walking in the woods, floating in the ocean, and so forth. It's all very pleasant, but is it really meditation?

Meditation is resting in present awareness. Whether you become engrossed in pleasant fantasies or in unpleasant memories or in making your shopping list, the dynamics of engrossment are the same. While you're engrossed you don't know you're engrossed, because you're engrossed. So at that time there's nothing you can do about it. The moment you realize you've been off on the fantasy or the grocery list, you're no longer engrossed, so there's nothing you have to do about it - you've already snapped out of your quasi-self-hypnotic spell and are once again present. At that point there's nothing to do but continue to rest in present awareness.

So when you realize you've been off on a thought-story or sequence of any kind, just let it go. Don't try to push it away, which would actually be another way of getting tangled up with it, but rather understand that at this moment it's already dissolving on its own. On the other hand, don't deliberately indulge yourself in the fantasies, persisting in them consciously. Then, indeed, you're practicing fantasy rather than meditation.

Happy new year . . . and let's go, Nets!

QUESTION: Being a meditating high school student, I find that my friends tend to consider me a little eccentric. Those students at my school who do meditate generally don't do so enough to gain the full benefits. Do you suggest any way to approach the nonmeditating public and maybe encourage them to start practicing?

High school is sort of like life, only more so. People are searching for happiness, people are distracted by flashy entertainments, people go through cycles of stress and relaxation, people are insecure and self-conscious, people try on different attitudes and identities, etc., etc. When we discover something that makes all of this better, something that helps us realize natural happiness and fulfillment no matter where we are in the midst of all this drama, and especially when it's something that demands so little of us - just sitting down, shutting up, and doing nothing on a regular basis - of course we want to shout it from the rooftops. Watch it! Rooftops are precarious places; they make us highly conspicuous targets. During adolescence in particular, people tend to be so insecure that anyone or anything "weird" or "different" can be a threat. By attacking whatever is weird, they prove to themselves that they're OK.

So my advice is, as hard as it seems, to keep a low profile. Don't plant yourself in the front lobby of the school in the full lotus position, don't try to describe your meditation experiences when they're bound to be misunderstood, don't go around offering unsolicited advice, don't proselytize. As they say, you know how hard it is to change yourself - how much harder to change others. And as Jesus says, don't cast your pearls before swine, because they'll get trampled.

True, Jesus also says not to hide your light under a bushel. But your light shines through what you are, not what you say. Just take all the energy that wants to go into proselytizing and put it into making your own practice even more diligent, so that you become the best possible example of what this stuff does. Eventually people will notice, and when they're ready they'll ask you why you don't get stressed, why you can handle challenging situations with such grace, why you're so happy.

It takes some patience, but in the long run it's the shortest way.

QUESTION: I attended your workshop at the Lighthouse in New York last October and am now religiously practicing meditation. I would like to thank you for the simplicity of your approach. Now to my question. I recently finished reading Neale Donald Walsch's Conversations with God (Book 1) and I am quite taken by it. On page 30, in a discussion about the Trinity, Walsch says: "God the Father is knowing - the parent of all understandings, the begetter of all experience, for you cannot experience that which you do not know. God the Son is experiencing - the embodiment, the acting out, of all that the Father knows of itself, for you cannot be that which you have not experienced. God the Holy Spirit is being - the disembodiment of all that the Son has experienced of Itself; the simple, exquisite is-ness possible only through the memory of the knowing and experiencing." Since meditation practice = being in the moment (letting go and letting be), am I right then to conclude that by practicing meditation, by just being, I am one with the Holy Spirit, the third part of the Trinity?

Of the passage you've reproduced here, what I like best is the phrase "simple, exquisite is-ness." That's the stuff. But then when Walsch goes on to say it's "possible only through the memory of the knowing and experiencing," it seems to me that that confuses the issue. Is-ness is right now; being is always in the present tense; memory of the "past" is just mental traces experienced in the present. I have to say I also don't understand the distinction he is making between "knowing" and "experiencing." True knowing is experiencing. (H.L. Mencken once wrote, "We are here and this now. Beyond that, all human knowledge is moonshine.") Walsch may be using "knowing" to refer to pure, undifferentiated awareness, which is the basis of all specific experiences, just as white light is the basis of all colors. In that case, his formulation makes more sense.

But to address the heart of your question, I would say yes, to abide in pure being, as we do initially in meditation and eventually all the time, is to be one with the Holy Spirit. You may get something out of exploring some of the extensive literature within the tradition of Christian mysticism that makes this point (Meister Eckhart, Thomas Merton, etc.). Also note that the word translated as "Lord" in most English versions of the Bible is Yahweh, which more properly should be translated as "pure being" or "is-ness." Having made that adjustment, you can go back and reread the Bible in a new light. Not only does this connect the Holy Spirit of the New Testament with the Lord of the Old, it even more importantly transforms the Lord from the image of a distant, power-wielding patriarchal ruler to the most intimate essence of your own experience in each moment.

QUESTION: You're always saying (and writing) things like "Rest in openness" or "Just be." But what about people living in Nazi Germany? Should they have practiced just being, resting in openness, as the atrocities were being committed?

There is a difference between meditation and the other 23 hours of the day. Different principles apply. "Just be," "Rest in openness," and so forth are meditation instructions, for the time that we're sitting silently by ourselves. They don't imply that we should be passive doormats in our interactions, allowing suffering to be inflicted on others or ourselves. Unfortunately, we don't have to go back to the Third Reich to confront suffering - just open up today's newspaper, or open your eyes and look around you. The clear course for a conscientious person, whether in the context of global politics or some local problem like a sick neighbor or an unhappy family member, is to see what you can do to help matters and do it.

That being said, it's also true that, as you develop greater clarity of perception through regular meditative practice, you start to see more clearly what's helpful and what isn't. There's a lot that's out of our control, and making ourselves crazy over it doesn't help anyone. Some people spend a lot of time watching the news and shouting at the TV: "Bush [or Clinton], you jerk, how could you do that?!" Bush [or Clinton] can't hear you. Better to channel that energy into some kind of political action that can be heard. The same principle applies to personal relationships. How many hours have you spent in imaginary dialogues with another person, airing your grievances? He [or she] can't hear them. It's like straining at the red light, impatiently trying to make it turn green; better to relax and enjoy those few moments of utter purposelessness.

This is where the habit of just being or resting in openness that we cultivate in meditation percolates into daily life. It turns out that there are hundreds of moments every day where there's nothing productive we can do, and just being in those moments not only opens vistas of inner freedom but helps to refresh and clarify the mind so that we can be more effective in action a moment later.

QUESTION: I'm a computer programmer. I enjoy the clarity and unfocussed expansiveness that I experience in meditation and would like to integrate it with the more focussed, task-oriented state of mind that programming requires. Is that possible?

Sure. The thing is to bring the meditative state into the task-oriented state and not vice versa. It's like the old joke about the guy who asks his priest, "Father, is it OK if I smoke while I pray? No? Then is it OK if I pray while I smoke?"

In other words, don't try to solve programming problems during meditation. Naturally, programming-related thoughts may arise spontaneously, like any other thoughts. As with any other thoughts, don't try to block them but don't deliberately pursue them; just relax your grip on them and allow them to fall away on their own.

While you're sitting at the computer, you can bring in that meditative expansiveness by taking occasional "letting-go" breaks. A good way to remember is to do this every time you hit "Save." Raise your gaze above or away from the screen (looking out a window if one is available), allow your gaze to soften and relax, take a deep breath, open your mouth, and let out a deep sigh, with the idea of breathing out into 360-degree openness. Hang out in that state for a few seconds, and then go back to work. Obviously, this technique can be creatively adapted to any work situation. The more you do it, the more you'll find the unfocussed expansiveness "sticking" to the mind and coexisting with the focussed state.

Of course, that's just a manner of speaking. It's not really something sticking to something else - it's the mind becoming more vividly aware of its own nature, which is skylike openness. If you're sitting in meditation regularly, more and more awareness of that silent openness starts to percolate through all your activity, whether it's programming a computer or driving an ambulance or whatever. All of your doing is experienced in the context of just being.

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