Bearing the Unbearable

(Continuing with talks on the Mountain and Rivers Sutra)  (based on talks by Norman Fischer)

Soon after we start a regular meditation practice we realize we are stuck in patterns. We suddenly become aware that things aren’t solid. They just slip away.  At this point, mountains are mountains, in the narrow way. Then as our idea of a solid self stumbles until there is nobody there, mountains are not mountains any longer; rivers are not rivers. There is nothing to hang on to.  We have realized a deep truth about absolute reality.

This experience is both terrifying and freeing.  When we reenter daily life, mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers once more. This coming back to ordinariness, this knowing that you can’t hang on to ordinariness, brings awareness that our lives aren’t ordinary at all. We begin to cultivate the realization of completion in every moment.
I’ve talked to many whose experience of life threatening illness has awakened them. It seems like we have to go through a horrible experience to find out that who we thought we are, we aren’t, and that who we want to hang on to, we can’t. And then this ordinariness has a whole different quality.

When cultivating practice of ordinariness, although it is not as unconscious as it was before practice, delusion still comes up: grasping, judgment, competition. For Zen Master Dogen, the 13th Century founder of Soto Zen in Japan, it is sitting meditation that brings awareness that delusive thought is coming up, and that we are not it. With practice, human foibles still arise, but we know what they are so we no longer identify with them, grasp after them, and insist on them. You recognize them as suffering.  It’s easy to forget this and go down the road of suffering, but if we meditate, at some point we recognize what is actually happening.  “Oh, yes, that’s right, suffering.”

With Zen practice there is a consolation that when profound reality – even if it is horrible profound reality – presents itself, there is a part of the mind that knows to say, “This is a delusion, and it’s passing. This doesn’t have substance. Don’t hang on to it.”
Profound reality has no substance, it comes and goes. That’s what makes it profound; and that’s how we bear the tremendous difficulties of a human lifetime. Horrible and unacceptable things happen to each and every one of us.  There is no one who doesn’t have to meet loss, or a defeat that strikes us so hard that we can’t imagine how to live another day. This happens to every single person in a human lifetime, and the way we bear that reality is by recognizing that it too is coming and going. What we are experiencing is not the absolute. That’s how fully realizing impermanence helps us to bear the unbearable – even when it is very difficult.
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Suggested practice: If something happens that upsets you, step back from your emotions, turn your attention to your breath and remember that this will arise and pass, like everything else.