PRACTICING WISDOM
This is how I emulate being a Buddha. In the Buddhist sense Wisdom is the capacity to see the core "what is" of a situation, person or thing rather than seeing it through the filter of an opinion, idea or a judgement about it. Developing the ability to see this deeper Isness of things requires practice. In Buddhism we practice this by training our ability to see the Isness of the world around us. As our capacity to connect to that particular Isness improves (i.e. the Isness of the physical world) so too does our ability to see into the Isness of anything that comes up in our everyday lives.
According to Buddhist psychology when we normally experience the world we are not experiencing what is truly there. We are only experiencing a judgment-distorted version of the world. If we were to remove that overlay of judgement and instead experience the world as it truly Is we would find that it is completely saturated with a profound and blissful energy that is intensely positive, vibrant and deeply personal. By not evaluation or ignoring the world around us we will discover for ourselves that mind-nature resides within each and every detail of our physical environment. Then, simply seeing a cloud or smelling the rain on pavement or hearing the sound of the wind moving through some leaves all become transformed as a result of our recognition of that inherent mind-nature. However, from the Buddhist point of view, this deeper reality is completely unknowable to our usual state of consciousness because in it’s typical condition the mind is too busy interpreting every bit of incoming sensory phenomena. This interpretation filter is part of the psychological machinery that's been set in place to compensate for the mistaken belief that we are somehow fundamentally flawed. The switch that turns on the interpretation of a sensory experience is the act of judgement. The act of judging creates the context for an interpretation and this interpretation then filters and significantly isolates us from the thing being judged, separating us from the true blissful experience of its Isness.
Trying to see through this filter is a journey into a profoundly higher state of consciousness.
My journey began when I decided to make a disciplined effort to find the universe of Isness.
I made this decision when I fully accepted the limitation of my "normal" state of consciousness. Buddhism recognizes how deeply entrenched normal consciousness is and suggests regularly setting some time aside specifically to try and awaken to a new awareness of the world. I do this by going for a twenty minute walk a few times every week and then gradually integrating the new Isness focus into my everyday activities. The walking exercise itself involves continually trying to connect to the Isness nature of my surroundings. This is a full body exercise. All of my physical senses are involved. As I walk along I just try to experience the Isness of the things there around me. I make an effort to override my habitual pattern of ignoring my environment just because I am used to it being there. In other words I work hard to stop buying into the perceptual/sensory belief that I'm already familiar with those surroundings and therefore automatically judge them as irrelevant.
I ensure I don’t have any expectations about what I will be experiencing
and instead deeply open my senses to the environment around me
and try to experience it as if for the first time.
Buddhist psychology tells us that when we first begin to try this exercise we will think that we are experiencing (seeing, hearing, smelling, etc.) the things that we are experiencing but in fact we will not be experiencing those things at all. We will only be experiencing a sensory interpretation of those things. These sensory interpretations are deeply entrenched in our minds and they very are hard to dislodge. They are the building blocks of the filter through which we normally experience the world. These fake sensory impressions take the form of emotional interpretations such as "I love trees" or "I hate trees" or intellectual interpretations such as "that is a tree" or "that is a pine tree" or neutral interpretations such as "that is only a tree". However, all such sensory interpretations hide the actual Treeness from us. Therefore when I do my walking meditation exercise I am very persistent in my efforts to free myself from such hallucinations. When I walk I am absolutely determined to connect with the Isness instead.
Even though I fully intend to awaken to the Isness and experience the mind-nature of the world for myself my attention nevertheless becomes sidetracked with various concerns from time to time as I walk along. These concerns and the cloud of mental activity they generate can completely remove my attention from the world around me even as I continue to walk along. However, when I notice that this has happened I immediately apply the meditative skills that I've developed in my sitting meditation practice and quickly free my awareness from that cloud. I then return to the exercise of trying to see the Isness of the things around me.
When I regularly persist in this exercise and work through the many layers of interpretation-debris that pollute my senses, my habitual perception of the world eventually begins to waver. When this happens my awareness slips right through the hallucinations and into the Isness heart of the here and now where I start to catch experiential glimpses of the mind-nature of the world around me. These profound Awakenings occur sometimes while I am walking and sometimes suddenly right in the midst of some very mundane everyday activities and are sparked by very ordinary sensory events. A purified, higher awareness emerges right into the middle of that sensory experience and through it I awaken to the mindness of things. In other words when I connect to the Isness of something I also experience its deeply personal mind-nature. This mind-nature is deeply personal because I also recognize that I am that mindness. This is because the Isness of the here and now is a true singularity where the experiencer (me) and what I am experiencing (the universe) are actually one thing and the essence of that oneness is mind.
My glimpses of Isness have had a profound impact upon how I relate to my everyday life. Since we are fundamentally connected to everything (in the oneness) an intuitive Knowing of the bigger picture spontaneously awakens whenever I can see into the Isness of a given situation. I then can respond to that situation with a decision or response that's based upon that deeper awareness of it. Again, in Buddhist terms this deeper awareness is called Wisdom. This is how I emulate being a Budda.
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