Does the path begin with "me" or "we"?

Contemplation (Photo credit: Susan Hall Frazier)

No, I'm not answering the question. It's for you.

In the Summer 2012 issue of Tricycle magazine Fleet Maull ponders:

Conventional contemplative wisdom states clearly that the path begins with ourselves, that we have to do our own work of cultivating mindfulness and awareness. We are told that we need to make friends with ourselves and develop loving-kindness and compassion before venturing very far into the sphere of bodhisattva activity or engaged spirituality. But what if this is an unnecessarily limited or even mistaken view? What if the path actually begins with us, the collective us, with interbeing, as Vietnamese peace activist and Zen master Thich Nhat Hahn teaches? What if the paths to both genuine liberation and collective awakening are inseparable and best informed by a social view of spirituality from the beginning?

He does not give an answer. I have no idea how we would actually answer any of these questions. How would you answer them?

The thoughts that initially occurred to me centered on the fact that the traditional teachings of contemplative wisdom were framed in historical and cultural context in which the hyper-individualism of many industrialized nation states, particularly the modern United States, was practically unknown.

The basic precepts of Abrahamic and Dharmic teachings (along with other major and minor religious paradigms), which are heavy on ethics, charity, and introspection, would have assumed a more intimate and collectivistic sense of identity and associated relationships. These basic precepts and the teachings in which they were grounded would have been expected then to be worked out in close relationship to others. In fact, virtually all of them must be worked out in relationship to others. You cannot cultivate (or discover) qualities such as mindfulness, loving-kindness, and compassion in a social vacuum.

In that sense, the work one is supposed to do for herself through an exploration of her inner landscape is directly connected to her perceptions of and behaviors in her outer landscape.

Unitive experience

Try to guess what tradition the person who wrote the following was a part of:

"Many times throughout my years of meditation, in coming out of a session with a group, my perception of others is dramatically altered. I notice something completely extraordinary. Rather than perceiving these people as completely separate from me, as I normally do, I feel that difference disappear; I realize that no differences exist between and among us, that we are united in a deeper, ineffable reality. Although I perceive us as distinct, all sense of separation is gone. "Another way to express this perception is to say that distance is overcome. There is no real sense of distance between these people and me. Much of the separation that seems to exist is cultural and psychological, determined by our socialization. Time and space fold into unity, and I experience others -- and, I hope, they me -- in a timeless, spaceless now, an immediacy of the real ground of love from which we are always coming forth and to which we are returning. It is an incredible beautiful, organic, peaceful state."

So, what do you think?

Tibetan Buddhism?

Zen?

Taoism maybe?

Hmm?




The quote comes from A Monk in the World (pp. 38) by the late Brother Wayne Teasdale, a Catholic mystic. Yet they could have just as easily been the words of a Ch'an (Zen, Soen, etc) monk, or a Tibetan lama, or a Nichiren teacher, or a Pure Land priest, let alone a Taoist sage. Formlessness giving rise to form, form melting back into formlessness, simulataneously and perpetually, ancient and new, always changing and forever the same. This same realization is of course expressed in Buddhism through the teachings of emptiness, no self, and dependent coarising, but as with all such teachings based on direct experience, it does not belong to any one person, or one group, or one tradition.

Have you ever known such a unitive experience?