#23 A LATE SPRING RETREAT

I hadn’t been on any extensive retreat in four years, when I went it into a solitary one here at my house ten days ago.  In fact, I can’t really remember the last solitary retreat I did of more than two or three days or how many years ago that was.  I’d been in a cycle of going to a group retreat once a year, until that particular one got consumed by karma and changing conditions.  Subsequently it seemed like I always had to move my household on my vacation time.

Well, finally the day arrived.  I was at the office, hoping to at least start it on Friday night, but then I got hit with a small disaster, thanks to having to cancel my credit card and replace it.  Suddenly I had the nightmare of contacting a number of corporations (that’s become one of my least favorite things to do in life), something I realized late in my work day that I needed to take care of; I had to update my credit card to them or they weren’t going to get their fees and provide their services, and with me about to be unavailable for fixing it.

Hours later, after endless screens and phonebots and chatbots, the new card didn’t work, and I couldn’t sort it out and went to bed exhausted, not ready to start the retreat.  I went to the bank the next morning, etc, etc, and reluctantly put it on a different card, and finally started getting the shrine room up to snuff (it’s a beautiful place to practice, by the way, with golden walls), and almost done, I realized that I’d run out of charcoal for burning juniper.

This may not seem catastrophic, but if you have to do as many lhasangs (Tibetan: “divine smoke offering”) as I do, you’ve got to have charcoal.  After two separate trips to Tibetan shops downtown in the afternoon, I finally got home with the item, walked in the door, felt exhausted and grouchy, and simply took a nap.  I’d waited four years for this moment, and all I did was plunge down on the sofa.

This all’s hardly worth mentioning, except for one curious thing.  I knew this was testing me, prodding my meditative mettle.  I trudged through it with my usual irritated patience.  I reflected, sitting in a line of traffic at a stop light, stuck between here and there, that while in Buddhist analysis there’s no true, ultimate basis for one circumstance being better than another, Milarepa went on retreat in caves pretty much for his entire life in order to avoid this very bullshit.

When I finally roused myself from my nap, my mind did feel better.  I got to practicing in the shrine room, and to my astonishment, my clarity and focus had somehow upped themselves in the course of all that teeth grinding, precisely like I’d already spent most of the day meditating.

Why did that happen? you ask.  No freaking idea.

But my ship had sailed from shore.

That night I had a lucid dream.  I’ve been trying to evolve my dream experience.  On the rare occasions of recognizing the dream state, I’d gotten adept at walking through walls and flying through solid objects, but dream yoga instructions advise you to learn how to transform one object into another.  I had the presence of mind to remember this, though I struggled to do it at first.  I can’t remember what I finally landed on—two people, two animals, two shrubs?—when my mind attuned itself.  I thought, I’ll turn them into birds…and I did!  Two big, hairy, goofy-looking birds, but they could fly, and I took off with them into the sky.  At some point, my flying ability started to falter above the treetops, but the birds carried me along and into the top floor of this tall building (we went through the wall), into a traditional Japanese massage space, where a masseuse came to give me shiatsu.  Deeply intrigued as to what a massage in a dream would be like, I instead woke up.  Wow, I thought, that’s somehow auspicious!

But that was the only lucid dream.  Instead, I went to sleep every night in a state of exhaustion. Even after a lifetime of meditating, it’s not like that’s all I do.  Sitting in meditation posture all day long in, you hope, a maximum state of attention, takes a whole lotta chi.  A typical solitary retreat experience: you’ve been at it since you got up in the morning, you just practiced for three hours straight, your body aches, your mind sags, and now…you have to make supper.  You see the gloriousness of paying someone to cook for you.

Meditation always reminds you that your mind is still your mind.  In retreat, it’s like a museum tour of your habitual mind’s greatest hits.  As the background noise clears out, you’re left with these big open rooms displaying artifacts of your diurnal mental crap, like an obligatory school outing where they stand you in front of displays of junk and force you to listen to some droning lecture, something you’ve literally heard thousands of times before, but there’s no playing hooky.  Now you get to witness it all yet again close up, in full detail.

In one peculiar hour I had, I revisited at least a half dozen of my most embarrassing moments.  Nothing seemed to connect one to another other than their shaming, cringe-inducing quality of stupid things I deeply regret saying and doing.  Those bits of mind stick like barbs in the alaya-vijnana (Sanskrit: “storehouse consciousness”), still sharply pricking you despite the supposed balm of time and distance.

Nevertheless, that all comes with the meditative territory.  If you don’t want to see your mind, definitely don’t sit there all day looking at it.  However, it turned out to be a rather fine moment for staying in the house, doing nothing.  Boulder remained pretty much socked in with grey weather, raining for stretches every day, often chilly out.  It makes it easier to sit there and ignore the world outside, listening to the patter.  I got a haiku out of it:

In Meditation

Falling rain
envelopes this room
                 & nothing
     can stop it.

As the mind opens up space between, around, throughout your thoughts, finally the hooks of subtle existential distress start to melt away as well.  I suppose there’s nothing that absolutely makes me keep up with the daily ugliness that is the American news, but simply being away from it helped ease living.  What a luxury!  The whole enterprise of human maintenance in this century, with all its screens and digital demands, got to subside into, well, nothing.  The background fills with silence, albeit visited by lawnmowers and intermittent car stereos (“…thump, thump, thump…”).

Then within that clarifying space, appearances become more present, more brilliant.  Not different exactly, just not dulled with the relentless stream of thinking.  The blossoming tree outside my front door grows greener, more effusive with white blossoms, and maybe that’s not my mind, just spring evolving, or maybe it’s my spring-like mind in bloom.

That’s the contrast to habitual thinking that meditative awareness highlights.  Tulku Urgyen comments that when rigpa (Tibetan: “awareness; knowing”) arises, dualistic, discursive mind vanishes and becomes latent, and when discursive mind arises, it’s rigpa that disappears and becomes latent.  That could sum up life on retreat.

Yet there’s another element here, as well.  I designed the retreat to make use of some of my many practices.  It’s maybe both a blessing and curse of vajrayana Buddhism that it gives you so many meditative tools.  Early in the retreat, I wondered whether I should do a guru yoga practice I have, but decided to go ahead.  Though I wasn’t expecting it or feeling it, as soon as I started doing the mantra, I began to weep.  That went on through that hour. There was no conceptual content, and yet I knew exactly what it was about: what I’d been through in my life, what my Buddhist sangha had been suffering, the horrific conflicts growing in America, this darkening time of the Earth.  I feel all of that in one way or another every single day, so my recitation in supplication to the guru came as tears—the superior mantra, no doubt.

When I reached the concluding feast of my retreat, where one eats and drinks and enjoys the senses as a celebration of indivisible space and brilliance, I fished out an old cassette of classical music to play (yes, I still have cassettes and a tape player).  I don’t listen to classical music much, but there are a few pieces I’ve listened to countless times (and because you can’t listen to Metallica every day), and most of them are on this one tape.  Sitting there with a fresh mind, I listened again to “The Lark Ascending” by Ralph Vaughn Williams (English, 1872-1958).

I first heard this at one of the Christian-Buddhist Conferences Naropa sponsored in the 80’s.  Mother Tessa Bielecki, a Carmelite nun (discalced!), of the mystical variety, heard this song as four stages of union with the Godhead.  She had us eat pomegranate and listen to the music as it soared, as a kind of poignant, pleasurable meeting of sense and spirit, and not so different than the tantric feast principle.

That’s how it is, isn’t it?  That longing that drives so much human misery is the longing of the slight and mortal to return to its own sacred sphere.  The vajrayana assures us that the guru’s mind we aspire to meet is none other than our own, though as much as you may want to enter the vast sky of your own nature, somehow it still needs something like a face on it.  That was true for Rumi, Mirabai, and Milarepa.  It was Asanga’s (Indian, 4^th century) helpless truth.  Having meditated for 12 arduous years supplicating Maitreya Buddha, that Buddha finally appeared to him, and the first thing he blurted out was, “Where have you been?”  And of course the classic answer came back, “I was here all along.  You just didn’t see me.”

When I concluded my retreat, it had finally stopped raining and cleared off into sunlit splendor, animated greenery, and blooms everywhere.  I took my camera and headed out the door to do as I pleased.