Mind is the Creator

Mind is the creator3/12/11Mind is the creator of your world. No matter what you might believe, this is anunalterable fact. Everything we experience, everything we think of as solid, orindependent, enduring or impermanent, right or wrong, everything “out there,” or “notme,” is actually only apprehensible through our minds, which even take the impressionsof our senses like soft wax takes the impression of a seal. That is the function of mind.However, people make a very big leap when they hear things like this and they say thatcan’t be true, because there are lots of things that happen that I don’t want to happen,that I would never create out of this mind, things that implode on me. Things I couldnever imagine happen! This is confusing mind and will. The world is not created throughwill, as we learn repeatedly when our will fails to produce the effects we want, or whenour will is thwarted. “Even though we love them, blossoms fall, and even though wehate them, weeds spread,” as Dogen wrote. So because our will fails to construct theworld we want, or to prevent the suffering we experience, we refuse to recognize that infact, mind is the creator of the world.We can know and experience and connect with no other world than the one our mindperceives and represents inside us. Even in interaction we can only process the activitywith mind as the agent. Our bodies relay chemical and electrical impulses and ourminds construct a world from this vibrational activity. How trustworthy is thatconstruction? The gaps and misfires of sensory perception alone, never mindinterpretations, are well-documented in scientific research. We create an illusionalsense of wholeness and completeness from a patchwork of fragments and glimpses.Mind is also not defined by the operations of intellect or conceptual understanding.In the Lankavatara Sutra the Buddha has an extended dialogue with Mahamati aboutthe nature of mind, reason, the nature of reality, and the distinction between theBuddha’s teachings and those of the philosophers of his day, who, even back then,were apparently arguing about the very same thing as philosophers today: subject andobjects, definitions of existence and non-existence, the reality or unreality of the worldand so on. In that sutra the Buddha talks about two kinds of intellect: the intellect thatexamines, and the intellect that analyzes and discriminates, defines and labels. Butultimately mind stands outside of language and its constructs, which necessarily arisewithin Mind, and cannot contain it.---We have all had the experience of our “normal” sense of reality falling away, and theconventional sensory world we know disappearing. Maybe it happened when you werelooking at a sunset, or into a baby’s eyes. Maybe it was when transported by a beautifulpiece of music, or in the moment of sexual union with a beloved. Maybe it was evenunder the influence of some drug, or at the moment of a car accident, or while you werein the checkout line at the supermarket. For a brief period you experience naked realityand your dissolution in it. The “cover” of your world is blown and you surrender to thegreat mystery, even if only for a moment. But quickly—almost immediately— andautomatically, our will overtakes our open undivided mind and begins to try to restoreour familiar, “stable” world.Another name for this will is ego. It masquerades as mind, and specializes in makingdiscriminations and judgments, in carving the world into pieces with labels, categories,names, routines, and predictable patterns, with likes and dislikes. This was anevolutionary necessity for managing chaos and an overwhelming array of sensoryexperiences. Our survival depends on this coping mechanism and the strategies it hasdeveloped over millennia (from “beginningless greed, hate, and delusion”). But in zazen,we open our minds and give our will a holiday so that we can fully and openlyexperience everything. Nothing requires a name or a label, nothing needs to be takencare of, there is nothing to fix or do, nothing to judge.But that is not the way we typically think of our practice. We have a deeply entrenchedbelief in the necessity and power of our will, imposed on ourselves and on our world.We believe that by simply using our will we can lose weight, stop being depressed, bemore organized, stop our unhealthy habits, become kind or even enlightened. When wethink of Zen training, we think primarily of exercising our will to make ourselves into thatperfect, enlightened being we long to be. And we cheer our successes in imposing ourwill on ourselves, losing a few pounds, straightening out a closet, forcing ourselves todo something we have been avoiding or dreading, having a moment of clarity in zazen.We judge ourselves and others as lacking strength of will when there is a setback, orwhen we (or they) don’t “measure up” to our standard. We talk ruefully about trying tofind more time for our practice of meditation. More often, though, we are confronted withthe failures of our will to change ourselves or fix ourselves. It should be humbling for ouregoic will, but it seldom is. We bring this same core belief in the power of will intopractice.Meanwhile, we are also busy imposing our will on our world and the others in it.Sometimes it is through outright projects or “goals,” and at other times it is in the form of---subtle manipulations to get others to do what we want, or to treat us in the way we want,to fix them in some way, or to somehow get others to stop being themselves. We seekcomfort, security, approval, and predictability. As with the attempts to impose our will onourselves, there are patchy successes and abundant failures in this effort to exert ourwill on the world. The intermittent successes, however, have us convinced that we havethe right idea, but we just have to try harder or get smarter, or find a new situation, anew job, a new partner. Maybe a workshop or a training will strengthen our will power.Maybe a new meditation technique, a new book, a new teacher will push us over theedge of enlightenment. This is the relentless optimism of our will, which is constantlyaffirming its capacities and skill, constantly making promises and projections of its futuresuccesses. Those of us who are parents have a poignant sense of the shortcomingsand failures of this approach. Unfortunately, the will is a delusional by-product of ourimmature interpretations of experience and our requirements and demands of life: inBuddhism we call this conditioning. And it is a poorly-crafted imitation of our aspiration,which is the natural, unforced expression of Mind as activity.The whole process is arising within Mind, which is without agenda, without agitation,without manipulation of anything or anyone, including yourself. I can hear the will wailingnow: this is a recipe for failure! How will anything get done? How will there be anyprogress? You can’t just sit there and let everything go to hell in a handbasket! Whatabout your job? What about your family? What about the world? In a full-blown panic itwill accuse you of abandoning your dreams, of becoming a passive stump, of neglectingwhat ought to be done.But awareness of Mind and the constructions arising in mind is certainly not the path topassivity, apathy, or dissociation from the activity of the world and the tumult of everydaylife, or our responsibilities and our work. It is about being fully present to everything, andnot believing any story we might create about it. It is about wholehearted participationand energetic care, without any gaining idea: what we will get from it, how it will fixthings, how it will “help.” In the Zazenshin, Dogen wrote:Realization, neither general nor particular,is effort without desire.Clear water all the way to the bottom,a fish swims like a fish;Vast sky transparent throughout,a bird flies like birds.---We can hardly imagine such a life. That is, the will can hardly imagine it, and it reallydoesn’t want to. Because it means a life in which our will becomes merely a tool orinstrument like any other, rather than the organizer of experience, the judge of“progress,” “effectiveness,” and “attainment,” the manipulator of ourselves and others.We don’t try to get all of our information about the world from Fox News, we don’tbelieve the stories told by delusional conspiracy theorists wearing tin-foil hats, we don’texpect a three-year-old to drive the car to Dallas. And we can’t depend on our will todetermine the practice path of waking up and growing up. So what is there to do, if wecan’t actually do anything?I think the best use of will as an instrument on the practice path is in support of arousingcuriosity, in cultivating friendliness with all that arises, and in discovering the way that isin accord with life as it is. So we are not banishing will, because we banish nothing inpractice. We are simply turning it inside out, so that it points toward Mind, rather thanaway from it, so that it helps us accord with life rather than oppose it, and so that it canhelp us recall our fundamental orientation toward liberation, for ourselves and all beings.That liberation is not the product of will, no matter how skillfully applied, because it isalready fully present, in the vast, boundless Mind that permeates every being, place,and time. You cannot lose it and you cannot attain it, no matter how hard you try,because you are never, despite your own terrifying and despairing ideas about this,even one atom apart from it.The Buddha called his teachings the path to disenchantment. When we awaken fromthe trance of will we find ourselves quite naturally and easily here, right now. So let ussit, not to achieve enlightenment, nor even to “free all beings,” not to get “better,” butbecause in zazen we fully express Mind, we fully experience ourselves and the entireuniverse as Mind, and we fully rest in Mind as our true home.