LOOK WITHIN!

The great theme throughout the ages is this---look within.

For years and years I looked outside of myself for the answer to life’s problems. I looked to others for help, especially my friends. I demanded their approval, attention and admiration. Not surprisingly, I lost most of them a few decades ago. I also beseeched a deity I thought was outside of myself for deliverance from my woes. Nothing happened. No, that’s not actually correct. Quite a bit happened. My problems and woes greatly increased in number and intensity.

When Gautama Buddha was on his deathbed he noticed that one of his ten principal disciples was weeping. 'Why are you weeping, Ananda?' Buddha asked. 'Because the light of the world is about to be extinguished and we will be in darkness.' Buddha replied: 'Ananda, be a light unto yourself.'

The same theme is present in Christianity as it also is in the other major religions of the world. Jesus may have said, ‘I am the light of the world’ (cf Jn 8:12) but he is also reported as having said, ‘You [that is, you and me] are the light of the world’ (Mt 5:14). He never claimed anything for himself that he didn’t also claim for you and me. Never forget that. 

Here’s something else Jesus reportedly said: ‘The kingdom of God is within you’ (Lk 17:21). In Matthew's Gospel the expression 'kingdom of heaven' is used (cf 'The kingdom of heaven is at hand' [Mt 3:2]) but it means the same thing as the expression 'kingdom of God'. 'Heaven', as Jesus used the term, refers not to some future place but to an inner and very present potentiality and power. It is within all of us, whether we be Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, atheists or something else altogether. The kingdom of God is like the oak tree which is always present within the acorn---both presence and potentiality. In one of his many parables Jesus used this analogy: ‘The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and sowed in his field, which indeed is the least of all the seeds; but when it is grown it is greater than the herbs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and nest in its branches’ (Mt 13:31-32). In other words, we are talking about the invisible essence of reality. So, when Jesus said that 'your Father has chosen gladly to give you the kingdom’ (Lk 12:32) he was saying that the creative spirit of life (the 'Father') indwells everyone. It is individualized in you as you and in me as me. 

The Japanese swordsman and rōnin Miyamoto Musashi [pictured above], in his wonderful text Go Rin No Sho (The Book of Five Rings), said more-or-less the same thing, albeit in different words and thought forms:

There is nothing outside of yourself that can ever enable you to get better, stronger, richer, quicker, or smarter. Everything is within. Seek nothing outside of yourself.

The great Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius gave us the same piece of wisdom:

Look within; within is the fountain of all good. Such a fountain, where springing waters can never fail, so thou dig deeper and deeper. 

I also like this Sufi saying:

Within your own house swells the treasure of joy, so why do you go begging from door to door?

You see, the theme of 'look within' is truly universal. I think it must be part of the phylogenetic heritage of the human species.

Be a light unto yourself. Look within. The answer to all your problems and woes is within you. More importantly, the power to solve and overcome those problems is also within you. And don’t listen to anyone who says anything to the contrary.

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THIS TOO SHALL PASS

Equanimity---what an incredible word!

Equanimity refers to calmness, composure, evenness and stability of mind and emotions. It refers to a state of mind which is and remains undisturbed in spite of changing events, occurrences and phenomena. Listen to these wise words from the great Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius (pictured right):

All that happens is as usual and familiar as the rose in spring and the crop in summer.

Life is tough even at the best of times. We must expect pain and suffering, for they are inevitable. We must expect to lose friends and loved ones as we pass through life. We must expect to lose possessions. And we must be prepared to meet our own death with courage and dignity. Yes, we must expect to lose all that we hold dear---even our memories of good times, for they too will pass.

All things are impermanent. Only the essence of life itself---which goes on and on despite ever-changing forms--is permanent for the essence or source of life is not a ‘thing’. It is a ‘no-thing’. Things come and go. They appear and vanish. They arise and decay. So will you. So will I.

There is a wonderful Jewish folk tale that I love. King Solomon (pictured left) is said to have instructed one of his most trusted minister Benaiah Ben Yehoyada to bring to him a certain ring. ‘It has magic powers,’ said the king. ‘If a happy man looks at it, he becomes sad, and if a sad man looks at it, he becomes happy.’ Actually, Solomon knew that no such ring existed in the world, but he wanted to teach Benaiah a lesson in truth and humility.

Benaiah had no idea where he could find the ring. One night, while taking a walk in one of the poorest quarters of Jerusalem, he passed by a certain merchant. Benaiah said to the merchant, ‘Have you by any chance heard of a magic ring that makes the happy wearer forget their joy and the broken-hearted wearer forget their sorrows?’

The merchant picked up a gold ring from among his wares on display and engraved something on the ring. When Benaiah read the words on the ring, he smiled. The merchant had engraved three Hebrew letters along the band of the ring: gimel, zayin, yud, which began the words ‘Gam zeh ya’avor’ — ‘This too shall pass.’

So, when you are going through a difficult period in your life, say to yourself, ‘This too shall pass’. Do likewise when you are experiencing joy and happiness. That is a bit harder to do.

That, my friends, is equanimity.

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HOW EMPTY IS YOUR MIND?

Is there a ‘secret’ to successful living? I have come to the view that there isn’t. Certainly, there is no one thing that must be done, or not done, in order to live a happy and fulfilled life. However, having said that, there is one thing which seems to me to be of great, even paramount, importance. It is this---live in the now. The now is the portal through which we experience the present moment, indeed every moment.

All too often we ‘live’---if you can call it living---in either the past or the future. We all know that is not the way to live, but we all do it. Many books have been written in recent years about the importance of living in the now … so many books that you would think it is a new idea. It’s not. All the great religious teachers spoke of the importance of living in the now, as did others such as Seneca and Marcus Aurelius. I love these words from Seneca:

True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future, not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears but to rest satisfied with what we have, which is sufficient, for he that is so wants nothing. The greatest blessings of mankind are within us and within our reach. A wise man is content with his lot, whatever it may be, without wishing for what he has not.

Marcus Aurelius had much to say about the importance of living in the present moment. He wrote, ‘When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive - to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.’ He also gave us this wonderful advice: ‘Confine yourself to the present.’ Yes, more than half of our problems would vanish---indeed, die from atrophy on the altar of life---if only we confined ourselves to the present.

Buddhists have had much to say over the centuries about the importance of living in the now, that is, from moment to moment. How many of you have heard of Layman P'ang? Not many, I suspect, but that’s OK. The important thing is what he had to say about successful living, for it should help you greatly.

Layman P'ang (Páng Jūshì [Ch]; Hōkoji [Jp]) (740–808) [pictured left] was a highly respected lay Buddhist monk in the Chinese Chán (Zen) tradition. A bureaucrat, he worked for the Chinese government of the day. He studied with a Zen teacher named Shítóu Xīqiān (Sekitō Kisen [Jp]). It is written that Shítóu asked of Layman P’ang, ‘How have you practiced Zen since coming here?’ P’ang is said to have replied, ‘My daily activities,’ by which he meant activities such as drawing water and chopping wood. Yes, it’s in those little, daily activities of life---even the most humdrum things of life---that we are to practise truth principles. And that’s where we find truth itself. Don’t look for it elsewhere. You’re wasting your time if you do.

P’ang wrote much on the subject of ‘empty-mindedness,’ that is, on the need to develop what I call ‘a mindful mind of no-mind.’ Sounds goobligook? Well, in a way it is. You see, what we are talking about is a state of mind that is transrational. Anyone who meditates regularly will know what I am talking about. Listen to these words of P’ang:

The past is already past. 

Don't try to regain it. 

The present does not stay. 

Don't try to touch it.

From moment to moment. 

The future has not come; 

Don't think about it 

Beforehand.

Whatever comes to the eye,

Leave it be. 

There are no commandments

To be kept; 

There's no filth to be cleansed.

With empty mind really 

Penetrated, the dharmas 

Have no life.

When you can be like this, 

You've completed 

The ultimate attainment. 

There’s a saying in Alcoholics Anonymous and other twelve-step fellowships, ‘Let the past stay in the past.’ That’s damn good advice. The past is already past. It’s gone. Yet it is an undeniable fact that most of our thinking pertains to matters in the past. And almost all the rest pertains to hopes, expectations, and fears about the future. It’s crazy, isn’t it? Worse, because so much of our thinking pertains to the past, we are conditioned to act ‘out of the past,’ so to speak. We do not act rationally but rather on the basis of misbeliefs that are grounded in our conditioning, which is the past.

The Dalai Lama [pictured right] was asked what surprised him the most. He said:

Man, because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then he dies having never really lived.

Wow! That’s the truth, isn’t it? So, the ‘secret’ (except it’s no secret) is to live in the now. We cannot really live ‘in’ the moment because, as Layman P’ang says, the present ‘does not stay.’ It is so very ephemeral. But we can live ‘from’ moment ‘to’ moment, and that is the advice of Layman P’ang and almost every other wise person who has ever considered the matter deeply.

There is more good advice from Layman P’ang. Here’s another gem---‘Whatever comes to the eye, / Leave it be.’ That’s the law of non-resistance. Don’t fight against what is, nor cling to it. Enjoy the reality of the present moment, from one such moment to the next, but learn to let it go. The present moment is ever renewing itself as another present moment, then another, and then another … . To live is to let go, but before we can let go we must---‘let be.’ If we analyse, judge, interpret, evaluate, compare or contrast the present moment we are not letting be. By identifying with the present moment we end up getting stuck in the past because before we know it the present moment in question is the past.

An ‘empty mind’ is not a dull or unintelligent mind. It is a mind that it so open to whatever be the content of the experience of life from one moment to the next it has penetrated the very core and essence of be-ing-ness. It is a mind that contains no 'shoulds' or 'oughts,' that is, beliefs and misbeliefs about how life ought to be. It is a mind that, so far as is possible, is free of all conditioning. In a previous post I wrote about the ‘empty mind’:

It does not mean the absence of mind, or absentmindedness, but rather a mind which is non-discriminating, uncoloured,  fluid, unbound and free from deluded thought ... indeed, a mind where there is no conditioned thinking, desiring or controlling ... a spontaneous and detached state of mind characterized by inward silence and no knowing awareness ... a mind which effortlessly thinks what it thinks ... without there being any interference (judgment, analysis, etc) by some 'thinker' or 'ego' within the mind.

When you live moment-to-moment with such a mindset Layman P’ang says that ‘the dharmas / Have no life.’ I interpret that to mean that the teachings on the right way of living are exhausted, and have no more work to do. In a sense you have become those teachings, for you have come to fully embody them in your daily life. Yes, you have attained enlightenment. That means you have---woken up!

Here’s some more wisdom from Layman P’ang:

My daily activities are not unusual,

I’m just naturally in harmony with them.

Grasping nothing, discarding nothing.

In every place there’s no hindrance, no conflict.

That’s what is meant by an empty mind.

So, what are you waiting for? Go empty your mind.

Calligraphy [below]: Mushin (empty mind).

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MINDFULNESS ACCORDING TO EPICTETUS

Epictetus (c55--135 CE) [pictured left as well as below left], who was born in Hierapolis in Phrygia (modern-day Turkey), was a Greek sage and Stoic philosopher of some renown. He was one of the last of the Stoics---even though he adhered very closely to the early Stoic tradition---and he was possibly the greatest of them all.

When only a boy he was made a slave in Rome, banished by the Roman emperor Domitian, but he managed to study under the great Roman stoic teacher Musonius Rufus. After being freed---we are not sure when or why that occurred---he went to Greece, to a little town in Epirus, where he opened his own school of philosophy. 

It seems that Epictetus wrote nothing himself, and we are indebted to one of his students, Flavius Arrian, for committing to writing the Encheiridion (‘Manual’), the work that represent Epictetus’ teachings, being lecture transcriptions of Epictetus. Sadly, most of Arrian’s writings, including those that purport to record the philosophy of Epictetus, are no longer extant. What is of interest is that the Encheiridion was much used in the Middle Ages as a guide to the principles of the Christian monastic life.

Now, Epictetus was not a mere theoretician or speculative philosopher, for he saw and wrote about things-as-they-really-are. As Epictetus rightly saw it, life is ever so often harsh and cruel, and there is much that happens to us that we have not actively or even passively brought about. Acceptance, he said, is the answer to all our problems and difficulties. As the Indian spiritual philosopher J. Krishnamurti would often say, ‘In the acknowledgment of what is, there is the cessation of all conflict.’ Not only the cessation of conflict, but serenity, peace of mind, and freedom. Epictetus expressed it this way:

Happiness and freedom begin with a clear understanding of one principle: some things are within our control, and some things are not.

Epictetus' idea of acceptance is well-expressed in this statement attributed to him: 'I do not obey God, I agree with Him.' In other words, we must accept things-as-they-really-are. One of the most important things to learn in life is this---events, in particular things that happen, are, in and of themselves, impersonal. They do not happen to us. They simply happen. Yes, we must take responsibility for making an appropriate response to events  for which we are responsible, but we are not responsible for the actions or opinions of others. Events don’t, or shouldn’t, hurt us. It is our perceptions of those events that hurts us. In that regard, Epictetus wrote, ‘We are not disturbed by things, but by the view we take of them,’ and ‘It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.’ He went even further, saying:

Does the tyrant say he will throw me into prison? He cannot imprison my spirit. Does he say that he will put me to death? He can only cut off my head.

Epictetus wrote much on the right disposition of the will---the will to live, the will to survive, the will to overcome, and the will to be happy. Will is the ability, that is, the power, to make a decision, and then do what is necessary to see things through, but no more power than that is required for the task. Will, and not so-called 'will power,' is the way to go. We must, however, learn to properly control our will, and use it wisely, if we wish to be masters of our own fate. 

Then there’s this gem of Epictetus, which says much about the nature and ‘purpose’ of both philosophy and life itself: ‘The essence of philosophy is that we should so live that our happiness shall depend as little as possible on external things.’ Yes, Epictetus was an early apologist for living simply. One other thing---he never speculated on life after death; indeed he never dealt directly with the subject at all.

Here’s another wonderful thing about the man. He understood the power and workings of the human mind in a way that was very much ahead of his time. He wrote: ‘In all people, thought and action start from a single source, namely feeling.’ In saying that, Epictetus showed that he had more than a little understanding of the workings of the subconscious mind. You see, thought must be backed up by feeling for it to have any power. Thought and feeling blend together in forming conviction. Without conviction no thought (eg ideal, hope) can take hold in the subconscious mind, and it is only when the subconscious mind accepts one’s thought is there any chance of its actualization. Epictetus was an early exponent of self-image psychology and creative visualization. He wrote: ‘First say to yourself what you would be, and then do what you have to do.’

Epictetus also saw the inter-connectedness and interdependence of all things whilst resisting an overall monism. He also held that, despite our preconceptions (prolepsis) of good and evil, there was only one ultimate Power (‘God’) and that Power was All-Good and very near to us. Yes, the Power can be used by us and others for purposes that are either relative good or relative bad, but unity, not duality, is the name of the game. Unhappiness is due to opinions and beliefs that we hold---preconceptions that not only stand in objective contradiction to things-as-they-really-are but also prevent us from seeing things-as-they-really-are. Happiness comes from a mindful acceptance of things-as-they-really-are. And difficulties? Well, they are things ‘that show a person what they are.’ Further, ‘you are not free unless you are master of yourself.’ On the subject of what we now call mindfulness Epictetus wrote:

Open your eyes: see things for what they really are, thereby sparing yourself the pain of false attachments and avoidable devastation.

Over the years many writers and commentators have remarked upon the similarities between Stoicism and Buddhism. Both systems of thought espouse the view that pain and suffering are largely the result of attachment and not seeing things-as-they-really-are. Both systems of thought stress the importance of acceptance and non-resistance. Both systems of thought assert that happiness and freedom are attainable---even in a most imperfect and often harsh world that is not entirely or even substantially of our own making.

Epictetus was also an early apologist for the art and science and practice of mindfulness. What does he say on the matter? Here's this gem, which reminds me of the Buddha's advice, 'When you walk, just walk, when you eat, just eat, when you sleep, just sleep, and when you sit, just sit,' and St Paul's 'This one thing I do' (Phil 3:13):

When you are going about any action, remind yourself what nature the action is. If you are going to bathe, picture to yourself the things which usually happen in the bath: some people splash the water, some push, some use abusive language, and others steal. Thus you will more safely go about this action if you say to yourself, ‘I will now go bathe, and keep my own mind in a state conformable to nature.’ And in the same manner with regard to every other action. For thus, if any hindrance arises in bathing, you will have it ready to say, ‘It was not only to bathe that I desired, but to keep my mind in a state conformable to nature; and I will not keep it if I am bothered at things that happen.

'Open your eyes: see things for what they really are,' says Epictetus. The result? You are then spared the pain of false attachments and avoidable devastation. False attachments take many forms, perhaps the worst being beliefs, misbeliefs, and delusions. We are in direct and immediate contact with what is real, but beliefs, misbeliefs, and delusions distort reality and obstruct our moment-to-moment experience and awareness of reality. That is why I rail against all the traditional religious belief systems, especially those of the three great (or not-so-great) monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, at least in their conventional, exoteric forms. Buddhism, at least in its early forms---still found in many parts of the world today---is not a belief system; indeed the historical Buddha also railed against beliefs, asserting that there was nothing to believe.

Open your eyes. See things for what they really are. Know. Understand. But don’t believe.

P.S. This is my 250th post on this blogsite. Heartiest thanks to my many loyal readers. IEJ.

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