A Warning to Buddhists: Keep your eye on the goal

Christopher Titmuss

There is a single responsibility with Dharma practice and that is to keep an unyielding eye on the supreme goal, namely a recognition of our total liberation from being stuck anywhere. There is no measurement to this realisation.

There is an indescribable joy for a life free from the desire to cling to anything. In the depths of our being, there is access to a core wisdom that embraces the dualities of pleasure and pain, life and death, without fear or favour. To settle for anything less than full realisation is a compromise. We can end up making an effort to sustain or preserve forms, practices or lifestyle that have no inherent value.

It cannot be over emphasised how important it is to keep the priority of waking up from the dream of an enslaved existence, so that we have broken out of a defined way of life. It is this determination to discover natural freedom of being where nothing whatsoever is given the power to weigh us down. This realisation reveals a noble consciousness. We are always in danger in selling out to the comfort zone of spirituality where eclectic views, repetitive practices, secure lifestyle and habitual standpoints become shadows over any liberating realisations. Dharma practice then becomes a kind of hobby.

All in all, we shouldn’t forget that the Buddhist tradition, East and West, is very conservative in its approach to authentic emancipation. Its emphasis on preservation of the past - forms, techniques, rituals and the religion – frequently end up as another shadow over the power of the realisation to wake us up. For all of its promotion of free inquiry, Buddhism is not a radical religion. Sadly, it keeps itself locked into a handful of defined forms. Instead of a force for liberation, the forms become a controlling and defining influence over consciousness. At best, Buddhism is a kind of pod for the peas. Throw away the pod. You want to taste the peas.

There is a strong desire among numerous Buddhist teachers to promote the ego of broadmindedness while other Buddhist teachers adopt the ego of narrow mindedness. Broadmindedness shows itself in the compelling need to quote frequently from numerous religious traditions, as if there were no significant differences between the faiths. It shows itself in the fear of showing any critical attitude towards religion, philosophy, science or spiritual practices. Narrow mindness feeds arrogance and clinging and frequently hides unresolved aggression, as well as contributing to living in a dualistic world of believing in what is superior and inferior as truth.

There is a desire of the broadminded to merge everything into the soup of oneness so nothing that is said or written that might upset the great majority of people. Eclectic and new age thinking bears little relationship to the radical and cutting edge analysis of the Buddha. Sharing sweet stories from different religions are generally pleasing to the ear, briefly uplifting, but, frankly, have little to do with keeping the mind single pointed on the realisation of Emptiness. The Buddha preferred to challenge questionable views rather than get lost in the hubris of the unitive view, so frequently adhered to among the spiritual establishment.

Serious practitioners need to get a clear sense from the outset that the Dharma is a body of teachings directly pointing to total letting go and seeing the superficiality of all desire and clinging. If you forget the goal, you may well find your intention settles for preservation of the self, including the lightweight eclectic self, rather than its dissolution.

In settling for something less than the best, namely liberation, the self will also identify with and advocate various spiritual practices. Students may spend years engaged in the endless repetition of much the same methods and techniques, out of loyalty to the instructions of the teacher or through clinging to past experiences.

It takes a single pointed intention to realise truth, the emptiness of clinging and freedom of the heart. Otherwise, the past, blindly preserved through method and technique, rather than being a servant to the present becomes the master over the present. Meditation techniques serve as scaffolding to be disposed of so that consciousness can stand naked, upright and empty of content.

The passion for meditation, awareness, inquiry and shifts of consciousness is an inner adventure, a willingness to let go of one thing, explore and develop something else, and let go of that too. Ultimately, there is nothing worth being identified with. If one has one’s eye firmly on the goal, you will avoid the extremes of remaining stuck with one set of practices and years of repetition and you will avoid the other extreme of getting totally lost in the spiritual supermarket.

If your heart is truly set on knowing the liberating essence of the Dharma teachings, you will be ruthless in your enthusiasm to understand the truth of things. You won’t get lost in dependency on mindfulness, meditation, listening to gurus, loving kindness, yoga or whatever. You’ve got your heart set on something much more important than these spiritual standpoints; something so extraordinary that it is closer to you than the thoughts in your own mind and the objects of your attention or meditation.

Catholic Buddhists

There are Catholic Buddhists who engage in full prostrations before their spiritual master or acharya, as well as Buddha images, light candles and incense recite mantras and engage in various religious rituals. It is no easy task to find the Dharma amidst this cacophony of the religion called Buddhism. Alongside these forms comes a breathtaking cosmology ranging from heaven and hell realms, belief in various forms of rebirth, the hierarchy of sentient beings, embodied and disembodied, angels and devils and the interpretation of the laws of karma.

Little or none of these beliefs are based upon first hand personal experience but our impressionable egos, tired of the small-minded existence of secular culture, takes up the cosmology with enthusiasm to the point that consciousness becomes clearly immersed in its beliefs. Yet the practitioner experiences inner spiritual benefits, cultivates deep religious feelings about life and can generate much in the way of kindness and compassion towards others.

In meditation, their consciousness may touch realms outside the known and the familiar. There are numerous beautiful benefits for consciousness and only a foolish person totally decries the value for Catholic Buddhists of their practices.

Catholic Buddhist tend to enjoy the immersion in such a religious cosmology that sustains itself through uncritical devotion and the need to believe in something greater than oneself and the rigid operating principles of society.

Protestant Buddhists

The counter to Catholic Buddhists is Protestant Buddhists who feel that the religion of Buddhism with its endless beliefs from rebirth to the various realms needs to be renounced, or at least doubted. Holding to their version of reality, the Protestant Buddhist sees Catholic Buddhism as a distraction to clear thinking.

Protestant Buddhists regard anything dependent on faith as questionable, if not naïve. Generally intellectual, Western educated and rationalistic, Protestant Buddhists do not like being reminded that their views are merely another set of beliefs. They believe primarily in the data arising from the sense doors and sense objects as the only worthwhile reference point. They believe that rational thought can discern the way things really are. This is a form of self-delusion.

Protestant Buddhists forget that Dharma teachings have little or nothing to do with the arguments around theistic, agnostic and atheistic standpoints. Dharma practitioners remain determined to explore what is conducive to end clinging to standpoints rather than taking them up. Despite perhaps years of retreats, protestant Buddhists, whether monks, nuns or laypeople, seem to have little or no experience of altered states of consciousness, the depths of the inner life and the range of mystical experiences.

Protestant Buddhists remain rooted in an anti-mystical, anti-transcendent view of things. They find it difficult to cope with people’s faith so they create a culture of doubt. They weave together a web of clever views that cannot see the significance of acts of faith or the authenticity of the religious experience and its interpretation.

The Buddha referred to such people as ‘eel wrigglers.’ The eel wrigglers have little faith in complete enlightenment, in total realisation of the Non-Dual and a pervasive seeing of the emptiness of all ego-making activities. Eel wrigglers usually experience inner doubts, if not angst, and assume it is the same for everybody else. ‘It could be like this or it could be like that’ is one of their common views. They replace Right View, the first link in the Noble Eightfold Path, with Right Unconducive View. Protestant Buddhists often promote mindfulness at the expense of the mystical, which rarely gets any mention.

There is a strong attraction in the West to the Protestant position since it upholds the small minded self that resists waking up to the fact consciousness has the potential to move into wavelengths, different from the field of conventional thought, as well as the known and the familiar. The mind of Protestant Buddhists is in stark contrast to Catholic Buddhists.

There is an underlying mistrust of each other, thus making Buddhism, as any other religion, a polarised faith. Vipassana, Insight Meditation, Zen training, Tsog Chen and the range of Mindfulness practices tend to attract Protestant Buddhists. Numerous Catholic Buddhists adhere to the religious forms and rituals, as well as beliefs, in the Mahayana, Theravada or Zen traditions, East and West.

The practices of Protestant Buddhists tend to be dry, minimalist and precisely defined. They will till the same old inner ground due to using the same old methods and techniques that in time gain a status beyond their worth. For such practitioners, the form of practice and attention to detail matters; sometimes at the expense of radical vision and enlightenment. There are other Buddhists. East and West, who mix together the Catholic and Protestant outlook.

Stay Awake

Both Catholic and Protestant Buddhists listen to teachings of ‘impermanence.’ Birth, aging, pain and death. ‘Sabbe dharma anicca’ (everything is impermanent). What arises must fall. Moment to moment existence. Life and death. Impermanence of body, mind and consciousness. All the traditions give frequent teachings about impermanence in such ways. While acknowledging impermanence, Buddhists often seem to find it very hard to see it clearly in spiritual practices and contemporary beliefs. There is often a desire to uphold the tradition, the forms, the practices rather than see the emptiness of all these constructions of mind, even the helpful ones.

There are ‘doorways’ that have the potential to be truly liberating providing the experiences reveal genuine insights. It is a matter of seeing deeply with wisdom (instead of the power of concentration) into the nature of things. The true nature of the world may not be as we think it is. ‘Objects’ reveal ‘impermanence’ and ‘impermanence’ reveals ‘objects.’ In the true nature there are no objects and therefore… Our eyes, ears and mind deceive us. If we keep our inner eye on the ‘Goal,’ it all becomes clear like colour is to a person with good eyesight, said the Buddha.

It would be a great pity for Catholic and Protestant Buddhists to spend hours, weeks, months and years tied to certain practices, teachings and teachers, as if that was taking them closer to an enlightened view.

Just as we mustn’t be afraid to give up the secular culture with its bizarre beliefs in ‘I’ and ‘mine, ‘us’ and ‘them,’ we must also be ready to renounce Catholic and Protestant Buddhism. It’s all a human story, reborn again and again, and barely worth a second thought. Keep your eye on liberation. Stay awake!