What About Loving Kindness?

And what about stabilizing as awareness?

I’m responding in this article to several questions I frequently get: (1) What about loving kindness practices and compassion, (2) Why do anything if everything is already perfect, and (3) What do I think about stabilizing in/as awareness?

Loving Kindness and Genuine Compassion

Occasionally, people ask me about loving kindness practices and cultivating compassion. None of the Buddhist teachers and schools that I’ve been closely involved with have utilized loving kindness practices, but having read and heard about them from other Buddhist teachers, I’ve given them a try. They never really resonated with me. I know they work wonders for many people, and I'm certainly not against them. If you’re drawn to them, and if they open your heart, by all means do them.

I'm all for love and kindness and compassion, even for people we don’t like and those who do terrible things. But I find this emerges naturally from open aware presence and clear insight. When we really see someone, we don’t want to hurt them, and we understand that they could not, in this moment, be other than exactly how they are. We may dislike what they do, and we may take action to stop them, but we don’t hate or blame them. And when we really see ourselves, we know that we contain it all, the darkness and the light. There really is no “other” from the awakened perspective.

I'm not big on trying to be compassionate, because that kind of intentional effort seems, in my experience, to come from a more self-centered place, with lots of self-image attached to it—wanting to think of oneself and be seen as a compassionate, generous, good person. That’s ego. And it often gives rise to that sickening, phony kind of oozing, solicitous “help” and “concern” that reeks of pity rather than real compassion. Pity comes from a place of false superiority—not really seeing the beauty and strength in the person one seemingly cares about, but viewing them instead as a poor helpless victim in need of “my” help. I’m no fan of this kind of pseudo-compassion.

But I'm all for genuine compassion when it arises naturally. That’s unconditional love and deep insight, and it’s the very nature of unclouded awareness.

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If everything is perfect as it is, why do anything to change it?

In response to my last article here, One Bottomless Moment, someone who is engaged in social service work sent me an email asking: “From a Big Mind perspective there is really no problem here, but rather what simply is. If I truly accepted that there really are no problems in this world, would I be doing this work?”

My response: As I see it, genuine compassion is what Big Mind (open awareness) naturally and effortlessly brings forth. Big Mind is unconditional love—it sees everyone and everything from wholeness rather than from separation and opposition. It sees everyone as my own Self. And from this recognition, intelligent action (or non-action) flows naturally. 

What disappears from the perspective of Big Mind is the sense that some situation MUST be fixed, that “I" know how things SHOULD be, that “I” am a good person who is saving others, that “I” need to save the world. Big Mind is open—it doesn’t take sides, cling to ideas, grasp simplistic solutions, believe in false certainties, or imagine that “up” can permanently defeat “down.” One Zen teacher described the social justice and social service work that emerges from Big Mind as taking action without expecting a cure, simply doing what we are moved to do.

In the example I so often give, Buddha and Hitler are like different waves on the Great Ocean—both are equally water, both equally a movement of the Ocean, and there is no real boundary between them. They are an undivided movement that can’t be pulled apart, a movement that never congeals or resolves into some solid, fixed, graspable or pindownable thing.

The difference between Buddha and Hitler is that Buddha realizes all this and Hitler does not. Hitler believes he is a separate wave who must vanquish other waves. If he were a do-gooder instead of a mass murderer, he would believe that it was his job to save all the other waves—either way, Hitler acts from delusion, from a sense of separation, deficiency, fear and a desperate need to survive and triumph as the singular wave he imagines himself to be. Because of this difference, Buddha and Hitler will have very different experiences of life, and they will bring forth very different actions. But it will all be an undivided, interdependent movement of the Ocean that cannot actually be pulled apart.

Up and down go together. In delusion, we want “up” to triumph over “down,” and we imagine that this is actually possible. We want only Buddha and no Hitler. This is exactly the same fundamental delusion that is driving Hitler! He wants only Hitler and no Buddha, but it’s the same attempt to split life into parts and keep only the part we like. But life isn’t like that. As Thich Nhat Hanh put it, “No mud, no lotus.” We can’t have only good, only sunshine, only happiness.

But we can discover how we create hell on earth through our self-centered delusions. We can discover how the same situation can be experienced as either samsara or nirvana, heaven or hell, depending on how we see and meet it. We can come to see how thought spins out stories that capture the attention and hypnotize us, creating endless unnecessary suffering and confusion. Waking up from this entrancement is possible in any moment—not on command or through will-power, but through open attention to what’s going on.

Each of us includes both Big Mind and small mind—both the sense of wholeness and the sense of particularity, both the sense of being boundless awareness and the sense of being a person in the play of life. Both dimensions or perspectives are part of life.

There is no one way that Big Mind (or small mind) manifests. Two very different manifestations of Big Mind were Ramana Maharshi, who remained mostly in silence, and Martin Luther King Jr., who led a political movement for civil rights.

Big Mind doesn’t manifest as only one personality type either. Compare gentle Ramana and fiery Nisargadatta—Ramana sitting in silence at the foot of a mountain and Nisargadatta smoking cigarettes and yelling at people during his satsangs held near the red light district in Bombay. These were two very different personalities in two very different locations, and yet both were pointing to and speaking from the same wholeness, the same unbound aliveness—call it Big Mind, Buddha Mind, unconditional love, deep insight, or whatever word you like. It is this very same aware presence that is right here, right now—this very same ever-changing but ever-present one bottomless moment that we are.

Yes, from the perspective of wholeness or unicity, everything is okay just as it is, meaning it all goes together—it’s all part of the Great Dance, the Great Waving Ocean, the Tao, the One Self—it can’t be pulled apart. There is infinite diversity, but it’s all one, indivisible, interdependent unicity. But this unicity includes our capacity to make distinctions and to discern the differences between Buddha and Hitler.

Relatively speaking, there are obviously all kinds of diseases, injustices, acts of cruelty, problems, mistakes and other forms of suffering, and we have a natural desire to heal what is broken. Is life perfect or imperfect? It’s not either/or, it’s both/and. Understanding and embodying Big Mind doesn’t mean we leave a flat tire flat because “everything is perfect as it is.” That perfection includes our urge, ability and action to change the tire. 

The relative and the absolute, form and emptiness, are not two separate things. Fixating on one to the exclusion of the other is delusion.

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Stabilizing in Big Mind or Boundless Awareness

You don’t have to stop being a wave in order to be the ocean.

—Thich Nhat Hanh

I get a lot of questions about stabilizing as unbound awareness or stabilizing in awake presence (“being here now”). What I immediately notice about this concern is that it is focused on an imaginary future result, and it is rooted in the belief that this boundless awareness isn’t already fully present now, and/or the belief that a particular state of mindful attention (“being here now”) can or should eventually be here “all the time.” Such questions are inevitably asked from the perspective of an imaginary “me” who supposedly either is or isn’t stabilized. So the concern comes out of delusion, and by focusing on it, we reinforce and sink further into that delusion instead of seeing through it right NOW.

The awakening journey is only right now. Let me repeat that: The awakening journey is only right now. Paradoxically, it can seem to take decades to actually really get this one simple but crucial fact: NOW is the only time that counts. Now is the only time that actually exists. Instead, the mind loves to think about me and my future and trying to figure out how to get there from here, and in the process, we endlessly overlook the only place we ever actually are.

In fact, boundless awareness has never been absent. What comes and goes is the thought-sense of separation and deficiency and the thought-story of being a separate, encapsulated somebody who needs to get to a better, more enlightened, place. Me-centered thinking loves to compare “me” to others or to a future ideal of “What I Hope to Someday Become.” It loves to evaluate how well I’m doing, how much progress I’ve made or failed to make, and how far I still have to go in order to be as fully enlightened as whatever spiritual superhero or ideal we are holding up as our model.

And while it’s true that some people are clearly more lost in delusion than others—e.g., we can discern a difference in this regard between Buddha and Hitler—focusing on comparing ourselves to others and charting our progress or lack thereof toward some imaginary future is a great way to avoid being fully present right here and now.

The awakening journey, which is always only NOW, is simply seeing and seeing through this kind of deluded thinking, waking up from the self-involved hypnotic trance of it, not once-and-for-all or forever-after—those are just fantasies about a future that doesn’t exist—but NOW.

Waking up is NOW or never. This is it. And the great secret is, what is being sought is always already here. It’s not some “thing” we have to figure out. As long as we’re looking for it, we’re overlooking it. Instead, relax into simply being this present experiencing that is effortlessly presenting itself right here and now. Smell the coffee, taste the food, hear the rain or the traffic or the birds, see all the beautiful colors and shapes, the dance of light and dark, feel the breathing and all the myriad sensations throughout the body. Enjoy simply being alive.

And even if it’s not enjoyable right now—maybe there is severe pain or grief or sadness or fear or a dark mood—instead of trying to push these things away, and instead of thinking about them and analyzing them or telling stories about them, experiment with simply letting them be exactly as they are. Feel the sadness or the fear or the pain as sensation, without the storylines and the labels. Open completely to the bare sensory experiencing. Go right into the very heart of the sensations. Explore what’s actually here. Allow it to reveal itself, to unfold and dissolve in its own time.

And see the thoughts that generate and sustain certain emotions or that make pain seem unbearable. Be awake to this whole present happening, just as it is, without judging it or trying to change it in any way. From this awake presence, intelligent action will flow naturally if it is needed. But when we’re lost in the trance of thought, the action that tends to come forth is habitual, conditioned and reactive. It often makes the situation worse.

Life itself is always fully present. Aware presence is always here. It’s always Now. We’re always Here, in this present immediacy. What comes and goes are the infinitely diverse shapes this presence takes, the endlessly varied experiences, including sometimes the experience of being lost in thought or hypnotized by delusion, and also including the intermittent sense of being a particular person. And being a person is indeed an undeniable aspect of what we are. We are life itself showing up as an ever-changing bodymind person, the ocean waving, the universe people-ing, consciousness dreaming.

No person can be pulled out of the whole. No person would be here without air, water, food, sunlight. The person’s boundaries are porous or non-existent; it exists interdependently with the whole universe. And where does this person actually begin and end? We put dates on a gravestone. But do we begin at birth? At the moment of conception? At the moment our parents met? At the moment their parents met? At the moment when humans emerged from apes? At the moment of the Big Bang? And in what way is the old person the same as the baby? We can’t deny birth and death and the person who grows and ages and moves through many life experiences and eventually disappears, but the more we try to pin any of this down, the more elusive it seems to be.

We are life. Words break this unfathomable living reality up into apparent parts: mind and matter, consciousness and quarks, brains and awareness, birth and death, me and you—but the living actuality is seamless—one flowing whole that never stays the same while never departing from Here-Now. This living reality is infinitely diverse, but it all goes together. And it includes absolutely everything. You can’t have up without down or heads without tails. You can’t have Buddha without Hitler, and these are not historical figures “out there” somewhere—they are aspects of each one of us. We each contain multitudes. We are at once no-thing and everything.

The one who is concerned about stabilizing as awareness is a thought, a mental image, a kind of mirage. The future stabilization that is being sought is an imagination, a dream. The problem is imaginary. The one who seemingly has this problem is imaginary.

Instead of trying to stabilize as awareness or “be here now” all the time, simply notice how thought creates these stories and problems out of thin air. Stop looking to the future for what you imagine is missing right now. Turn your attention to this very moment, right here, right now. Be what you already are and cannot not be.

And see how thought pops up to tell you that “this isn’t it,” that something more or better is needed. See how seductive thought can be, how it hypnotizes, how attention gets so easily lost in mental movies, in suffering and confusion. In the seeing (or awaring), these thoughts gradually lose their believability and their power to capture the attention. Come back, NOW and NOW and NOW, to the simplicity of present experiencing, just as it is. This is a lifelong, present moment, awakening.

And from the perspective of unicity, even the mental movies and delusions are simply changing shapes that this aliveness is momentarily taking, fleeting moments in a dream, nothing of any real substance. Awareness is always allowing it all to come and go, and everything that appears is instantly dissolving. The waves come and go, but the ocean (aware presence/present experiencing) is ever-present.

Experience takes place only in the present, and beyond and apart from experience nothing exists.

—Ramana Maharshi

In each instant, things are as they are and cannot be any different. Whatever one perceives, thinks, and feels in each moment is ‘myself.’ Except in memory or a fantasized future, there is no other myself. No ‘myself’ stands apart from events and phenomena as the ‘experiencer’ of those occurrences. That myself is an illusion. One is not having experiences. One is identical to the totality of experience, conscious and unconscious. That’s what ‘I’ am: experience, and experience is only this aliveness, right now, in this very moment.

—Robert Saltzman

No creature ever comes short of its own completeness. Wherever it stands, it does not fail to cover the ground.

—Dogen

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Gratitude and information:

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Love to all…