Shinzen Young

The Zen Ox-Herding Pictures

Note the date on this posting: it has been five years since I last used this blog. A lot has happened since then: two other blogs in fact, two other attempts to find a better blogging solution. My last one here contained 2528 postings, and number that staggers me. I used to wonder what I would do with all my wonderful thoughts after I finished them. What would happen to them? Now I know: I will just let them go. I wrote them mainly for myself, and now it is time to move on.

An Internet friend of mine, Bill, who I have never met in person, was a student of Shinzen Young, my meditation teacher and also the teacher of many others. Shinzen got into distributing his talks by media early, recording them on cassettes. He had tons of them and sold them at his retreats. You could also order them by mail. This annoyed me, because most meditation teachers give away recordings of their talks for free, you can download them at dharmaseed.org, thousands of them. But Shinzen was still selling his. He next made CDs and sold them on Amazon. By then I had moved to Costa Rica and lost contact with Shinzen completely. I couldn't afford to fly back to the States to attend his retreats, which are held in retreat centers in lovely places—but rather expensive.

Recently, Shinzen has become enlightened—he has videos for free on YouTube. You can't get much more enlightened than that :) Check them out at expand/contract: http://www.youtube.com/user/expandcontract. This video was made during one of Shinzen's retreats, this is a dharma talk to this students.

If you haven't experienced Shinzen before, you have a treat waiting for you. Enjoy!

About this blog

I was a student of Shinzen's for many years, beginning when he was at the Community Meditation Center (CMC) in LA. I now live in Central America, and I have a blog about that subject too.

Nobody meditates in Central America, except for me, that I know of. There is not a single Buddist community. There are a few Quakers, but that is all. Meditation is still a big part of my life, but since I am living on Social Security, I don't have enough money to travel to the US to attend meditation retreats.

When I was working with Shinzen, I was very impressed with his tapes, because he talks well. But he is too much of a perfectionist when he writes, and he doesn't write very much. So I decided to get some of his tapes transcribed, and have him publish them after he looked them over. He could never find time to do this, and told me I was not the first one to try put his talks into writing. But the end result was always the same: they never got printed. He did not want to use my transcriptions himself, but said I could put them on my Web site. Finally, many years later, I have time to do this.

You can email me at grownup_kid@yahoo.com

For more information about Shinzen, see his Web site. He has some online recordings there, you might want to try a few. Right now, I have two talks by Shinzen on this blog:

Working with the Scattered Mind

Overcoming Three Seemingly Insurmountable Obstacles to Enlightenment

Working with the Scattered Mind

All over the world, in every spiritual tradition, and in every age, there have been individuals that went beyond the superficial spirituality of their times and came to a realization that transcended their limited identity.

As you may be aware, we tend to identify with or tend to say, "I am" with respect to our ideas and body sensations - in other words, our thoughts and feelings. Have you noticed that? Isn't that where we live? We say, "This is what I am." We are basically creatures of thought and feeling, and one of the things that has been discovered in the Buddhist tradition is that feeling can be tangibly accessed by paying attention to any and all sensations that arise within the body. And that takes us down into the feeling core of our being. Animals and babies live here - at that feeling core that knows pleasure and pain. Adult human beings still have that feeling core, but surrounding that they have a thinking surface. So ideas and body sensations is where we live when we say, "I am."

There is nothing wrong with ideas and body sensations. And in fact, nothing wrong with abiding in ideas and body sensations. But there is a problem if that's the only place that a person can ever abide and say, "I am." Which is the situation for 99.99% of our species.

So there is another relationship to the flow of ideas and body sensations, which is a relationship of, "Sometimes I'm this, but I'm not limited to it." And those that have achieved that relationship develop a completely different paradigm, a completely different model about what they are - about what the world is, about time and space, and about The Source: the source of those ideas and body sensations, the source of the world, the source of the universe, time and space. As I said, in every age, and inside and outside of every spiritual tradition, there have been individuals that have achieved this new relationship to the flow of ideas and body sensations.

Mindfulness and Equanimity
There are many ways that a person can cultivate that new relationship. And one of the ways that is particularly appealing is the path that involves two cultivated skills. One is the skill that in Buddhism we call mindfulness, which is the ability to be precise and clear about the components of one's experience moment by moment. And the second is a skill that we call in Buddhism equanimity, which means an attitude of openness or non-interference with the flow of those senses. These are skills that can be developed the way muscle can be developed by systematic exercise. This is one path. It is the core of the early Buddhist practice, which is known by the name Vipassana. But you'll find that these two practices exist outside of Buddhism. People that would never consider themselves Buddhist, or never even heard of Buddhism, will talk about this - but in different words. Krishnamurti talked about choiceless awareness, and in the Gurdjif tradition they talk about being awake.

What is appealing about this is that anybody can cultivate these skills, and that you don't have to become a Buddhist in order to develop mindfulness and equanimity. So you can practice the hardware without necessarily buying into the software, you might say. There are people that follow this path, that even practice with Buddhist techniques, but consider themselves to be Orthodox Jews, and there's even any number of Roman Catholic priests and nuns that do it. They're still Catholic; they still accept the software of Christianity.

By software I mean the philosophical perspective. But they have developed the hardware, the actual mechanics of the mindfulness and equanimity using Buddhist techniques. It's appealing because it's systematic - and it's step-by-step, making it relatively easy to each. And it allows people to have quite a bit of freedom as far as their belief systems go.

However, if you follow this path - the path of mindfulness of equanimity - there are some challenges that come up, and some of those challenges are more difficult to deal with than other ones. And today I wanted to address some of those challenges. But before I do that, I would like to remind everyone that, as you're listening to this talk, ideas are arising as the result of what I'm saying. Some of those ideas are conscious; and some of those ideas are subliminal, subtle processing.

In response to the whole situation of being here, feelings are arising. Some of them are quite obvious and conscious, and some of them are very subtle and subliminal. Feelings are arising instant by instant from the sounds and the visual impact of this talk. If I say something that's interesting, or something that's useful, pleasant sensations arise. If I say something that doesn't make any sense, that doesn't compute for you, the unpleasant feeling of confusion arises. If I say something that you violently disagree with, the unpleasant sensation of irritation arises. And if you get bored, the unpleasant sensation of sleepiness arises, and you start to fidget.

Listening with Your Bellybutton
I point this out because in the very act of talking and listening about this path, it is useful to cultivate the habit of practicing the path. My teacher, Joshu Suzuki Roshi, sometimes says "In order to understand my talks, you have to listen with your bellybutton wide open". Now, that's a Zen teacher's way of talking. What does he mean he says: "Listen with your bellybutton wide open"? It's not like opening your ears. He says, "Open up your bellybutton and listen to what I have to say." That's a center of understanding that's way far deeper than what's between the ears.

In other words, don't be so concerned instant by instant in attaching meaning to what you hear. Instead, be concerned instant by instant with mindfulness and equanimity about your own ideas and body sensations, which are arising in reaction to what you hear. And what will happen then is amazing. If instant by instant you are not so attached to figuring out what the teacher is saying, something can impact you deep down in the core of your being.

So I would encourage you to be aware that each sentence I speak to you today is a burst of sound. Each burst of sound, each transition in the speech, brings a new arising of yourself as ideas and body sensations, in reaction to what you hear and see. And if you can be precise and allowing with respect to that instant-by-instant changing sense of self, then you will be in the optimal situation to appreciate a talk about these topics.

As I mentioned, in a sense the principles of the Vipassana practice are very simple. One has this thing called experience. And one attempts to consistently cultivate precision and openness to that experience. That word consistency is very deep, and very important. If one can remember the principle of consistency, then a lot of the difficulties that arise in the course of this practice can be overcome.

Going from the Surface to the Source
Let me tell you some of the challenges that a person has to pass through in order to go from the surface to the source, in order to go from the top of consciousness down to the activity that gives rise to consciousness. Usually people tend to think of mysticism as an assent, a climbing of a mountain, and perhaps that metaphor is useful - but for me, it's much more of a penetrating, a journey downwards from surface to source.

Substitutes for Actual Practice
In that journey, there are challenges that are encountered. Amongst the difficult challenges, the first thing that most people have to face and come to grips with is the tendency to substitute something for actual practice. That will wipe you out right there, that's a mortal blow right there at the beginning. What do people tend to substitute for practice? They tend to substitute intellectual study and discussion. Not that there's anything wrong with those things, in fact, those things are exceedingly useful. But not when they become a substitute for putting the tush to the cush. People tend to substitute belief and a related phenomenon which I call "wishful thinking."

How many times have you heard in the New Age, "It's all perfect, it's all just as it's meant to be." Sounds nice, but those ideas can become a substitute for a tangible experience of perfection. So the next time somebody with a New Age consciousness says something like, "It's all perfect," remember what the litmus test for that philosophy is: you have to be able to find the perfection in your root canal therapy. You have to be able to find perfection in a pain that's so intense that you can't remember the idea that everything is perfect, you can't remember who you are. So where's the perfection then? That experience of the perfection of things cannot be wishful thinking or blind faith; it has to be something that's really tangible.
So one of the biggest challenges that people face is that they find reasons to not do the exercises that will develop the mindfulness and equanimity that will allow them to have real experience, material tangible experience of the source, as opposed to the vicarious experience that comes through intellectual understanding and belief.

That's perhaps the most dangerous of all challenges. Because it could wipe you out right at the beginning. Basically you'll never take the journey; you'll read the guidebooks, and that's the substitute for taking the journey. Or you'll argue about the guidebooks for years. "Well, this one says this is the way to go," and, "This one says this is the way to go," and "This Vipassana teacher says it's this one," etc., etc.

The Force of the Past
Amongst the difficult but not impossible challenges that a person faces, and most of you have had intimate experience with it, is the fact that it's very hard to develop concentration. When you sit down to meditate, your main experience is your mind wanders. You try to pull it back, your mind wanders, and you try to pull it back again and again. And it can be very frustrating to people.

You may have to struggle many years with that phenomenon. I can only say that the frustration that you feel at your inability to be focused and concentrated is part and parcel of the learning process to become focused and concentrated. If you weren't experiencing the pain of the scattered state, you would never have the motivation to develop the focused state.

You've had many decades of the habit of being scattered, compared to the time you have been practicing meditation. So you're dealing with an enormous re-training of consciousness, and it's not just you as an individual.

You may have had years and decades of being scattered, but behind you are centuries, probably millennia, of your ancestors and everyone around you being scattered. That's why the Buddha referred to the path of enlightenment as "swimming against the stream."

There's a stream of human conditioning which we, I guess you might say in the Christian metaphor, we inherit the sin of Adam - our species has been scattered for at least a couple thousand years, in terms of Europe, if not longer. I suspect that in tribal times, ten thousand years ago, life was much simpler and the activities were much more focusing, and life was harsh, which tended to drive people into states of concentration. I don't know how long this addiction and hypertrophy with respect to thinking has been going on, but probably several millennia, at least.

And then you've got all the millions of people on this planet that have no concept whatsoever of the most important thing for any human being to know: which is that the very consciousness which will achieve anything can be honed in terms of its focusing ability. So they try to achieve all these different things without ever being willing to spend the time to sharpen the axe. And then they wonder why the trees aren't being cut down very efficiently and why it seems to take a lot of effort and sometimes you can't cut them down.

In general, you've got a billion people, most of them very unfocused, living at this time, and you've got all your ancestors behind you. That's a huge force of conditioning in the direction of scattering, not to say of your own personal life. And like the indomitable salmon that can swim up seemingly impossibly cataracts, we have to swim against the stream of the habit of scatteredness of our species.
That's a big challenge. But, with time, with effort, with support, it can be overcome, it's just a matter of time, effort and support.

Review
So just to briefly review what I talked about today. There is a universal path, a perennial philosophy found at all times and in all places, where people have gone beyond their limited identity. Scholars of religion refer to them as mystics. Not every saint is a mystic, and not all mystics act the way we think saints should act. One way to get there is through the path of mindfulness and equanimity, or put in other vocabulary, attentiveness and openness. To what? The flow of ordinary experience.

But in order for the attentiveness and openness to work, there has to be a certain critical mass of it. A little bit won't do much. You know what I mean by critical mass? A little bit doesn't do much, more doesn't do very much more, but at a certain point there's enough that something really dramatic takes place. And in order to develop enough, one has to remember in addition to the mindfulness and equanimity, the importance of consistency. Consistency in terms of daily practice, consistency in terms of regular retreats, and consistency in terms of whatever comes up as a reaction to your practice. Consistently have mindfulness and equanimity with that.

Overcoming Three Seemingly Insurmountable Obstacles to Enlightenment

What I would like to address today are some challenges that come up in this practice that seem to be insurmountable – from a logical point of view. The problem of the scattered mind is not something that is logically insurmountable; it just takes time, effort, support, and encouragement. But there are some challenges that come up in the practice that seem to be invincible – from a logical point of view. You seem to be asked to do something that cannot logically be done. Let me give you three examples of that.

Pure Impurities
Lack of Faith in Yourself
The Awkward Period Between the Self-Self and the No-Self

How to overcome these difficulties?

Have contact with people who have made it through

Pure impurities

In general, we do things for rewards. And in general, the deeper your practice gets the more rewards you get. However, in certain phases of your practice, the deeper you go the worse things you get. Now where’s you motivation to practice?

This is very difficult. In general, the deeper you go into the physical discomforts in your body, the deeper you go into what we call samadhi, and the easier it is to put up with that discomfort. And in fact, its tends to sort of dissolve or not bother you so much. But there are certain kinds of yucky sensations that can come up for no apparent reason. Sometimes people get it in the legs, and their legs shake, it feels like – and those of you that have had this experience will know what I am talking about – it feels like your skin is crawling, like your bones are itching, like you just can’t stand to sit there for a second longer, you just want to jump out of your skin, your blood is boiling.

It’s what in Yiddish is called schpilkish. Some of you know this word. It’s like pins and needles all over you. And the more you relax, the worse it gets. It’s not like the other pains, it’s not like the aches and pains from the posture. The more you open up, the more you relax, the more unbearable it seems. And that is a very difficult thing to overcome, because you seem to be getting punished for going deeper into meditation, not getting a reward. And that is very difficult to overcome in your mind.

But let me give you some encouragement for this particular kind of challenge. Be happy when you get these types of pains, because they are pure impurity. Now you may be saying . "What does he mean by pure impurity? That’s in oxymoron, that’s a contradiction in terms. "

In this case, the impurity is resistance, or what we call aversion, or congealing. Ordinarily, resistance doesn’t come up in its pure form, it comes up mixed with something else. With what? Something to resist. There will be a strong pain, and in general, the stronger the pain is the more resistance. Unfortunately, the subjective experience of suffering is a function of both how much pain there is, and how much you resist. Some of you may of noticed the phenomenon where its like it’s bearable, it’s bearable, it’s bearable, and suddenly it’s not bearable at all, it’s completely gone to a whole other level. Actually, there’s only been another increment in the pain, but because it’s now multiplied with an increment of resistance, suddenly the pain has increased greatly, and it just seems utterly unbearable.

So in any event, what happens when you sit and meditate is that you get the blessing, the wonderful experience (even though you think at the time it’s a horrible experience), you get the wonderful experience of resistance with no pain. It’s just pure impurity, pure resistance. The characteristic of this kind of sensation is that it doesn’t really hurt, but you can’t stand it.

If in your practice you get the experience . "It doesn’t really hurt, but I can’t stand it," this is good, this is what you want to get. That’s ‘good’ that’s high-quality, that’s what you want to get. That is pure impurity coming up.

But the more you relax and open up to it, the worse it gets – seemingly. Because you’re just opening yourself up to level after level. So you don’t seem to be getting a reward, you seem to be ‘punished’ for going deeper into meditation. And that kind of phenomenon is very difficult to deal with, on a logical level, unless you remember what I just mentioned, and you can work through it.

Of course, you’ll always remember what to do if you remember the axiom of consistency. Whatever comes up, you consistently observe it with detachment, including the phenomenon of "the deeper I go in meditation, the worse I feel." Even ‘that’ phenomenon you can consistently observe. But for many people, this obstacle become invincible , because they can’t logically get over the fact, if you follow what I’m saying, it’s like it doesn’t make any sense. Why should things be getting worse the deeper I go?

Lack of faith in yourself

Another seeming invincible challenge that a person faces on this path is that they lose faith in themselves. They feel “I’m not worthy to become enlightened, I’m not good enough.” The Buddha had to overcome this temptation himself. Some of the Buddhist statues show the Buddha in what’s called the brumi sparsha mudra, which means the touching of the earth gesture. After he had that temptation, according to legend, he touched the earth and the earth shook to bear witness to his self-worth.

At some time you may feel “Yes, the practice is good, I can see it is important, but I can’t do it. I’m not good enough, I’m not this enough, I’m not that enough.” When that comes up, that comes up as ideas and body sensations, “I’ll never get enlightened, I can’t get enlightened. Maybe my teacher is a little bit enlightened, but I won’t be enlightened.”

When that comes up, that’s an idea. It expands in the mind and then fades, and then once again expands in the mind and fades. And associated with it are feeling tones that well up in different locations in the body and then fade. The axiom of consistency in this practice dictates that you will observe even that idea, the idea that “I can’t meditate, I’m not good enough, I’m not disciplined enough, I can’t do it. This won’t work for me.” Even ‘that’ if you remember the axiom of consistency, you can overcome. But it’s a seemingly invincible obstacle, because it’s an obstacle that says “there’s no sense in trying any obstacle, I can’t do it.” Remember the axiom of constancy.

Once I and another American Buddhist teacher, and a Japanese Zen master were interviewed for Japanese television. The guy who interviewed us was a very interesting guy, his name was Rocky Aoki – that’s really his name. Do you know who he is? He’s the guy who started the Benihana chain, all those restaurants. He is a sort of celebrity in Japan. Sometimes Japanese celebrities take English nicknames. He did a very good job of interviewing us, and was very sympathetic, and knew how to interview Buddhist monks.

At one point he asked the question “What is enlightenment?” There were three of us, my friend Daizen, and me, and Maezumi Roshi, the Zen master from the LA Zen Center. He asked Daizen, “What is enlightenment?”, and Daizen looked at me, and I looked at the Roshi, and it was really funny, we were both definitely going to pass on that one. You have to leave that to the senior. And he said, I forget the exact words, like “Well, I think you could say that it is the passing away of the distinction between enlightenment and non-enlightenment.”

So how does of the distinction between enlightenment and non-enlightenment pass away? One way that is passes away is by seeing that the very thought “I’m not good enough to meditate, I’m not enlightened, I can’t get enlightened” that that very thought arises and passes away within the folds of expansion and contraction, within the flow of impermanence. It comes from enlightenment. If you observe your own conviction that you’re not enlightened long enough, then you will see that that very conviction has as its substance enlightenment itself. It’s made out of the activity of impermanence. And then the distinction between “I’m enlightened,” and “I’m not enlightened” will pass away for you. And if that idea causes confusion in your mind, then watch how the confusion wells up and passes away.

So if a seemingly invincible obstacle is “I’m not good enough, I can’t do it, this ain’t for me, I’m not enlightened, I’m not enlightenment material.” Then watch that come up in the mind and the body. And if that’s all that comes up for you for two or three years, then that’s your homework assignment from the universe.

The awkward period between the Self-Self and the No-Self

Finally, I’d like to talk about one of the most difficult and seemingly invincible obstacles that comes up in this path. And this is a very advanced obstacle. It typically doesn’t happen to people until they’re well along in the practice, but I want to mention it to you because it has already happened to some of you. And those of you who persevere with this practice, that remember the axiom of consistency, and keep consistently doing it (including right now, because some of you aren’t) it will become relevant.

What can happen after this practice has begun to be successful is you get real calm, you don’t have the problem with the wandering mind so much anymore, and you’re really peaceful. And there’s a sort of sense of oneness and connectedness, which is wonderful. But, you notice that your old motivation, the fire, the passion for life has waned. It’s very peaceful, it’s wonderful, and it beats the old bullshit by far. But its rather disconcerting, because as the result of success with this practice, something seems to now be lost.

What I mean by the old bullshit – I hope I don’t offend anybody by that vocabulary – is that before, you didn’t have what we would call motivation very much, what you had was compulsiveness, and that goes away. Compulsion and internal suffering was motivation a lot of your endeavors.

Well great, a lot of the internal suffering has cleared up. But now, what about the passion for life’s activities? That seems to have waned. It’s hard to motivate yourself, like it’s All One, okay? That’s the dark side, the shadow side to the oneness. If it’s All One, it’s hard to get passionately involved on one side or the other, there’s a certain flatness in the emotions. A friend dies, and it hardly makes a ripple. It’s like, “What am I becoming? Am I losing my humanness?”

This is a very big obstacle, it becomes very relevant, not for everyone, but for some people, because it seems to be a negative consequence, and actual behavioral negative consequence of the practice. The first obstacle I talked about as being logically very difficult, which is the deeper you go, the yuckier the sensation gets. That’s a subjective difficulty that would discourage a person from going deep. But what I am talking about now is objective, and your actual behavior and your actual expression of things. Things seem to have gone flat. What to do about this?

Keep observing, no matter what

Again, the axiom of consistency. But this is hard, okay? Somehow you have to consistently observe that state of consciousness, watch the thoughts and feelings that go with that. And that becomes difficult because you might tend to think, “Well, the more I do that, the more things are getting flatter and I’m going to get less human and less motivated.” But I can assure you, I can promise you, that’s not what happens. What happens is that you are going from being a thing to being a process. Your going from being a noun, to being a verb. And there’s an awkward intermediate zone that you have to pass through where the human thing within you does in fact pass away. And what it gets replaced with is a very full human activity.

How does that happen? It happens from several causes. One is that you don’t give up on the practice, but you consistently observe even those mind-body states. That’s one cause. A second cause is that you take feedback from the people around you. If the people around you are telling you you’re not doing your job, you’re not being motivated, you’re not expressing yourself, you’re not acting in a human way, you listen.

How does a baby learn? It learns from getting feedback from its environment, its physical environment and its parents, and it learns how to behave. The no-self, which is arising within you, has to learn to take over the all the activities the self-self did before. And that’s a whole process. Just as when a baby who is born into the world has to develop a self-self, it learns to cope with the world.

When you go from being an adult to being a super-adult, you have to go from being the self-self to the no-self. And the no-self has to learn all the stuff the self-self had to learn. It has to learn how to be motivated and do things, it has to learn how to be feeling and expressive. The old personality was a material thing, it had a entity or substantial quality to it.

It’s like a whole process of being born again, but you’re being written with a different ink. It’s a new substance, but it’s not a substance, you are being born as spirit. I know we talk about the spiritual path and it sounds great. “Oh yeah, I’d like to be spiritual”. Okay, take shard of ice and melt it, it turns into fluid water, and they you vaporize it. And that vapor is what in Latin is meant by Spiritus. It’s still H2O, but in some ways it’s a very different critter, not chemically different, but it behaves in a different way.

But what has to happen is that the pure activity of impermanence has to learn how to be a human being. The great Christian mystic, Meister Eckhardt, referred to that as the birth of Christ within each person, the birth of the Son within each person. You become nothing, and yet you become a feeling nothing, a motivated nothing. It seems like a total contradiction in terms that transcends all logic. How can something without will or desire or feeling manifest will and desire and feeling? And manifest it passionately?

The way it happens is that, as you enter the void:

1. You continue to observe all states of thought and feeling as they come up, no matter what.
2. You take feedback from the people around you. You just listen.

And pretty soon the no-self regains its motivation and it learns to be expressive and feeling. You can make a statue out of gold, or out of lead. The statue may look the same, but the substance is different. So when emptiness, when impermanence, when spirit learns to act human, it’s really human. It’s like any other human, it has the form of a human, but the substance is different.

Have contact with people who have made it through

One thing that gets you through that emptiness is contact with people that have made it through. In my own personal case, if I hadn’t had the living proof of an enlightened teacher in front of me that I could see, it would have been very difficult for me to make it over the pit of the void. By the way, this expression, “the pit of emptiness,” is a Buddhist phrase. I would look at Suzaki Roshi, and that would give me the living proof that nothing bad was going to happen as the result of going into that emptiness.

I can remember vividly my first interview with him. Again, I can’t remember the exact words, I’m sort of paraphrasing. In the first interview, you officially become that person’s student, and there’s a certain intimacy because we’re speaking Japanese and he doesn’t get to speak Japanese with his students very often. It has a real intimate quality to it. And he said, “You’ve been a monk in Japan, you’ve been in this a long time, you know what this is all about. I’m tired of these wimpy American students. I expect you to get to the point where you no longer need to make an object of the self or the world ever again.”

That’s quite a trip to have laid on you! Listen carefully to his choice of vocabulary, ok? Every one of those words was chosen as carefully as a mathematician chooses the words when they want to express some deep insight. I mean it was the E=MC² of spirituality. “Reach the point where you no longer need to make an object of the self, or the world, ever again.” He didn’t say “Don’t make an object of the self or the world.”, okay? A very subtle distinction. He said, “Reach the point where you don’t need to make an object of the self or the world.”

What the heck does he mean by making an object of the self, and what the heck does he mean by making an object of the world? When the ideas and body sensations that produce the sense of self are experienced with less-than-perfect mindfulness and equanimity, the sense of self appears as a thing, an object. And when the six senses that produce the sense of an outside world are experiencing with less-than-perfect mindfulness and equanimity, the outside self appears as a thing, rather than a flow. So you don’t need to make an object of the self or world” means the compulsion to solidify the six senses into subject and object has been worked through. It doesn’t mean you don’t make an object of self or world, it just means you don’t have to.

All around the world there are individuals who have come to the point where their relationship to the sense of self - their ideas and body sensations - has gone from being a relationship of a prison to being a relationship of a home. They don’t need to make an object of those ideas and body sensations. When they experience those ideas and body sensations that produce the sense of self fully, then the sense of self doesn’t exist as an object and they’re not limited, they’re not limited to be only that.

When I looked at him, when I’d watch him in day-to-day life, it was very evident, just from his demeanor, from his body language, that he no longer needed to make an object of the self or world. In other words, he had gone from always being a thing, to only occasionally being a thing, and being mostly an activity. And two things became very evident: (1) his efficacy, his motivation, and his ability to impact and get the job done was way beyond that of a ordinary person. And (2) his happiness was beyond unbearable. So I have living proof that absolutely nothing bad could happen if I went into emptiness, because he was obviously there, and he was obviously exceedingly dynamic and exceedingly happy and effective as a human being.

So when you find yourself – if you should find yourself - facing this experience of the pit of the void, that is to say, as a result of your practice everything is peaceful, but your motivations and your emotions are going sort of flat, I would suggest you keep three things in mind.

1. Remember the axiom of consistency. Observe that state, even that. See the ideas and body sensations that come up as the result of that reaction to meditation.

2. Understand what is happening, and that it’s only a temporary stage that you go through. When you bit into an apple, the first thing your teeth encounter is the skin of the apple. But what the skin feels like is not what most of the apple feels like. In the same way, when you have your first experiences of no-self or emptiness, it may present itself as an emotionally flat, dehumanized and unmotivated state. It’s not always that, but it’s that way for some people. But understand that’s just the skin of the apple. The main meat of emptiness is much more nourishing than that.

3. Be in contact with people that have made it past the skin and are now really enjoying the meaty part, the rich part of emptiness. And that will give you some encouragement. You can talk to these people and you can also see by the way they live their lives that nothing bad will happen as the result of going from a thing to being an activity. Nothing bad will happen.

What will happen is that your compulsiveness gets replaced by dynamic behavior. So what you called motivation before is going to go, but a new kind of motivation will arise for you, which I contrast with compulsiveness. I call it dynamic. And the seeming flat emotion is just an intermediate stage along the path of your emotions being congealed to your emotions being like mist.

You might pass through a stage where they sort of flatten out. But when they become mist, they become really vibratory again, really complete, really elastic. I don’t know how else to put it. You may wonder what the heck I am trying to convey. Think of the difference between a piece of wood and a piece of rubber. Most people say they are having feelings, but it’s actually very wooden. And what happens is, the more liberated you become, the more elastic and rubbery your feelings become, the more bouncy they become.

Developing a healthy no-self

And the other thing is: take feedback from your environment. Listen to everyone. If they tell you you’re not responding in ways that are appropriate, let the no-self hear that and it will learn, it will process that feedback. How does a baby learn to walk? It falls to the right, it falls to the left, it makes a mistake in this direction, and it makes a mistake in that direction. And when it falls, it gets the feedback: “I put too much weight that way.” When it falls that way, it gets feedback. Eventually, it learns how to be balanced. That’s how the self-self learns.

The no-self learns in exactly the same way: it makes mistakes. And if it’s willing to listen to ordinary people, its environment, then it will learn from those mistakes and will become a healthy no-self. You might think it’s hard enough just to enter the no-self, but that’s only part of the challenge. Because there’s a whole range of no-self experiences from totally pathological to super-healthy. And there’s a whole range, and there’s a lot of in-betweens. But that’s another topic, and I don’t want to get off on that now.