Words themselves are the problem. Everything that can be said is so unimportant, and yet it’s critical to contribute
These days there is so much noise in the world, so much spiritual noise going on. All the time. It’s hard to add anything to it. Except for, like… stop it. Just stop it already, it’s too much.
That in itself is one good reason to chant. Because when we chant we’re reducing the amount of words flipping through our brains. If we can’t get silence then reduction is the next best choice.
Without enlightenment nothing can be trusted. Even with enlightenment nothing can be trusted… because enlightenment is nothing. A complete groundedness in nothing. That’s why enlightened people smile.
All efforts at being spiritual are fruitless. Trying to wake up or trying to attain anything, or trying to get spiritual is all greed. You end up with the exact opposite of what you are going for. There’s a beautiful heart sutra: Gate Gate, Paragate, Parasamgate, Bodhi Svaha. Gone gone. Gone beyond. Gone beyond the beyond. Oh, what an awakening.
Gone, Gone, Gone Beyond
People think that means trying to get away. Get away from their self, get away from their pain and misery. I want to disappear. I want to dissolve into the nothingness of the universe.
That’s not the case at all. It’s not what it means. You already don’t exist in the way that you think that you do, so there is nothing to dissolve.
The real trick is to find a way to stay constant. Dissolve the craziness that you’ve invented about who you are. That’s what needs to go away. The false goes away, the real stays.
From the point of view of the ego I suppose it feels like what you are trying to do is destruction of the self, but only because the ego believes it is the self. It’s not. It’s at all. Awakening is revealing the nothingness, the connection, the dissolvedness of yourself.
An Analogy
A good analogy is relating your mind experience to a computer program. Your interpretations of the world creates all these programs that run in your head. All the things that happen to you from the moment you are born create all these programs. Ideally you’d be the master programmer. There would be someone in charge; someone who is deciding what gets added to this program or not. What’s important what’s not important? What’s real what’s not real? You, the master, design how these programs grow and evolve as you interact.
Most of us, instead, live on default and let our imprints decide who we are.
We believe ourselves to be separate. Kind of like a computer that is not hooked to the Internet. We imagine we are a computer sitting there by itself running its programs.
If you’re old you can remember back in the day when a computer ran a DOS program. You insert the floppy disk in the program runs. That’s how we envision ourselves. Sitting there in our little bubble as the program chugs away, creating our experience.
A closer analogy to how it actually works though is that you are a program connected to the Internet. Your program can’t run without the Internet, just like a browser window on your computer cannot run without the Internet.
Everything that happens in your programming comes from this connection to the Internet. Everything that happens to you in your life, your brain, all your connections, all the things that you think of as yourself actually come from your interactivity with the physical world and the people around you. You don’t have a single unique cell or a single unique thought. Your experience is inexorably mixed with the culture of all the human beings that you have any contact with.
You as a separate being does not exist at all. You are this connection. Everything that happens around you leaves a little imprint, everything that happens you learn.
It’s much more useful to think of yourself as “learning in action”, rather than as a set thing. We are constantly growing and changing, living, sloughing off old cells, creating new cells. The food you eat the water you drink creates the physical body. Same thing with your brain. The thoughts you think. The things you are told when you grew up. The sensations in your body. Every single thing about being alive is intermixed.
That’s why you hear the saying “never lived never died”. It’s really true. All experiences, molecules, bits of electricity, hormones, conglomerate together to become you. Your molecules, your thoughts. At some point they dissolve. It’s nothing into nothing.
There is however a very distinct consciousness in the whole amalgamation of everything. That is you.
Neuroscientists, molecular biologists, enlightened beings have all discovered the same thing. That everything exists and doesn’t exist. Everything is imagination and everything is real.
For human beings in the modern world this really matters. Our instincts were created to live in a tight small group. We are designed to be connected to this small “internet” of a cohesive group of people in an environment that changes slowly. You are programmed to fit in. Our biggest urge is to live in harmony with our small group.
These days it’s become our ability to be brainwashed.
Things have changed so we need to always consider context in everything we do.
If you look at Buddha in context with the society where he lived you can start to understand his realization. He came into human existence 800 years before Christ. There in India they had a pretty good civilization going on. They had come from being hunters and gatherers and were starting to create the society where some people were rich and some people were poor. Some people were happy and living off the backs of others. Many people were sad and miserable. It was discovering this that put Buddha into crises and caused him to look for a solution.
He strove to change himself instead of changing the world. So he could see clearly.
Buddha showed a way. The brain doesn’t, naturally, have the circuitry to make sense of this kind of a world. It takes an effort to set ourselves here firmly. Meditation is a door. Chanting can be a window.
Another interesting exercise is to look at what happened to indigenous people in the Americas. Not very long ago people on Turtle Island were living lives that made total sense, before the white man came. They didn’t need enlightenment because they hadn’t gone dark. The change was violent and abrupt.
The disruption to native life caused a huge rift in people. Same thing happened to the Celts in England and Ireland. Same thing happened to literally every human being everywhere. We all come from people who have been hurt and gone crazy. Civilization has not been a smooth easy transition.
Our job today is to fix this. To figure at how to live in this world that is so mixed up.
In today’s world we can’t believe everything that we’re told. We have to learn how to pick and choose out of the billions of options that are going around.
Buddha, in his enlightenment, came up with the perfect solution. You have to discover the point of intersection of everything and nothing. It’s actually a thing. It’s like a sound that you can hear when you close your eyes and look inside. Who are you? I am that.
Ground yourself in that and you can be useful in this world.
Chanting
The language of Sanskrit was written to describe this inner nothingness and that’s the basis of a mantric chant.
One of the goals of chanting is to soften and thin the veil of illusion surrounding us. The chant is also an illusion. Make sure you know that. Don’t get stuck in the idea that the chant is actually going to do something for you. You’re not going to get anything out of it all. You’re not going to get peace, you’re not going to get prosperity, or protection and or whatever the mantra is about. What we’re trying to do is soften and heal the physical cells in our brain (so that they fire in a healthy manner) and also heal the belief in structures that we’ve created around ourselves.
These things will help us both recognize the nothingness when we see it, and know what to do with the realization when it comes.
Enjoy this chant with the idea that enlightenment is possible. Sing along as the sound and vibration of your own voice is important.
With that softness let’s move on…