Nov.21.2008
12:37 pm
by joseph
Who Am I?
The only question that has ever mattered to me is - “Who am I?” This one question has always seemed to be the main knowledge, the ultimate knowledge, the one answer that resolves all other questions about meaning, purpose, relationship to myself and others.
So what have I discovered through this questioning? More than anything, I am a storyteller, at least on the conventional level. From an absolute view, it is all there in the first word, “Who?” In the beginning there was the word and the word wasn’t “It”.
We’re all storytellers. In fact, it is through our storytelling that we create the separation. Storytelling, in itself, isn’t a problem though, because there really isn’t any problem at all, except that our story keeps telling ourselves that there is. Sometimes though, it is better to start with a problem, if your looking for an answer to solve all problems. Keep in my mind that the problem seeking the answer is smack dab in the middle of the answer itself. It is like an ourobourous, a dragon eating its own tail.
This can be a good thing, to plunge right into it completely, like a rich banquet, everything is food for the journey. This is the “meditation in action” that Trungpa Rinpoche advocated. Of course, for this to work, you have to have some kind of a practice, a container to hold it in, a crucible. Like an alchemist searching for gold, you go into your shit, wallow in it, with your eyes wide open, your meditation practice being the eye.
If you do this long enough, a shift occurs, and a gap of spaciousness begins to appear. Then, you may discover that the only problem was thinking there was a problem. This seems to be the path most of us have to take if we are to wake from the dream.
Usually, this first glimpse of spaciousness fades, as we are quickly taken over again by the dream itself. The dream is powerfully seductive because we have mistaken it for ourselves. So the dream will, normally, at least in my own experience, appropriate the spaciousness as an object of ownership, which instantly diminishes the spaciousness. It becomes a memory, an idea. This is why all the great Zen masters have said that this glimpse, kensho as it is sometimes called, is really the beginning of practice.
This is also why it is really crucial to have a teacher, because nobody else is going to tell you this. Nobody else is going to be able to tell you with conviction, with insight, that this story you are telling them about, how you are vast and wide, nothing at all really, is now just a memory and not it.
And yet, this gap you have experienced is important, in the sense, that if you have a practice, and a teacher, you can now begin to develop some confidence in the practice itself. So you return to the mat and forget about it. That is how you begin to develop spaciousness in your life, spaciousness as activity itself, as a human “being”.
So who am I? Am I the dream or the spaciousness? We are both, for the time being. And this is just a wonderful story I am relating to the spaciousness itself.
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