The Weight of Mountains

Thomas Merton, writing on the crisis of civilization, noted, "It is a crisis of sanity first of all. The problems of the nations are the problems of mentally deranged people, but magnified a thousand times because they have the full, straight-faced approbation of a schizoid society, schizoid national structures, schizoid military and business complexes, and, need one add, schizoid religious sects."

We're all familiar with such clichés as "the War on Poverty", "the War on Drugs", or "the War on Terrorism", but the use of these terms to me, is like throwing stones at a mirror. Or to quote Pogo “We have met the enemy and he is us". Or to be more effusive, in the words of Walt Kelly creator of Pogo, "There is no need to sally forth, for it remains true that those things which make us human are, curiously enough, always close at hand. Resolve, then, that on this very ground, with small flags waving and tiny blasts of tiny trumpets, we shall meet the enemy, and not only may he be ours, he may be us."

I believe what Walt Kelly was saying (as I believe in what Walt Kelly was saying) is that we are all of us responsible for the myriad problems that afflict our world, private, public and political. By this I do not necessarily mean that we are to blame for the problems, simply that we are, all of us, together, responsible for the solutions. "When we know how to reduce the torment, but we do not do it, then we become the tormentor." (Primo Levi) Its all about recovery, whether of a world, a country, a system or an individual, recovery always begins and ends with the Self.

"Is a mountain heavy? It may be heavy in and of itself, but as long as we don't try to lift it up, it won't be heavy for us." This metaphor as presented by Thanissaro Bhikkhu, is one that his teacher, Ajaan Suwat, often used when describing how to stop suffering from the problems of life. According to Bhikkhu, "You don't deny existence--the mountains are heavy--and you don't run away from them...You deal with problems where you have to and solve them where you can. You simply learn how not to carry them around. That's where the art of the practice lies: in living with real problems without making their reality burden the heart." As a foundational step in mastering this art, it's useful to examine the basis for Ajaan Suwat's metaphor--the Buddha's teaching on dukkha--to obtain a greater concept of how far the metaphor extends.
Dukkha is a central concept in Buddhism, the word roughly corresponding to a number of terms in English including sorrow, suffering, affliction, pain, anxiety, dissatisfaction, discomfort, anguish, stress, misery, and aversion. The Noble Eightfold Path, as taught by the Buddha, is the way to the cessation of dukkha, the fourth part of the Four Noble Truths. The Four Noble Truths in Buddhism are the fundamental insight or enlightenment of the Buddha, which led to the formation of the Buddhist philosophy.

1. Dukkha: There is suffering. Suffering is an intrinsic part of life also experienced as dissatisfaction, discontent, unhappiness, and impermanence.
2. Samudaya: There is a cause of suffering, which is attachment and desire.
3. Nirodha: There is a way out of suffering, which is to eliminate attachment and desire.
4. Magga: The path that leads out of suffering is called the Noble Eightfold Path.
This outline form is exactly that used by doctors of the Buddha's culture when diagnosing and prescribing for a disease: identify the disease, its cause, whether it is curable, and finally, the prescribed cure. Thus the Buddha was treating suffering as a disease in need of a cure. He said, “I, the teacher, am like a doctor. My teachings of dharma practice and path are like medicine, and the followers are like a community of patients. It is up to the patients whether they follow the doctor’s instructions or not, and whether or not they take the medicine regularly. If he could heal the patients he would, but without the patients participation through continuing to take the medicine, it is very difficult if not impossible.”

Because of its focus on suffering, Buddhism is often called pessimistic. But since Gautama Buddha presented a cure, Buddhists consider it neither pessimistic nor optimistic but rather realistic. It is not about beliefs or creeds or dogmas, rather it is about practice or application. How we live and act, within ourselves and within our world. Buddhism is not a set of beliefs to subscribe to but a way of life--the way of sane, harmonious, and balanced enlightened living. It is through this way of choosing to live sanely that we can begin to tip the scale and act to counterbalance the schizoid world outside our Selves.

The Four Noble Truths was the first sermon given by the Buddha after his enlightenment.
The Noble Eightfold Path can be summarized into three broad categories: panna (wisdom), sila (virtue or morality), and samadhi (concentration or mental discipline).

Wisdom
1. Right Understanding (or Right View, or Right Perspective)--samma ditthi
2. Right Thought (or Right Intention, or Right Resolve)--samma sankappa

Virtue/Morality/Ethical Conduct
3. Right Speech--samma vaca
4. Right Action--samma kammanta
5. Right Livelihood--samma ajiva

Concentration/Mental Discipline
6. Right Effort (or Right Endeavor)--samma vayama
7. Right Mindfulness--samma sati
8. Right Concentration--samma samadhi

The Buddha focused his teachings on the matter of suffering, not to depress himself or us with how overwhelming or hopeless our problems are, but because he had discovered a method for transcending it. In Ajaan Suwat's mountain metaphor, the heaviness of the mountain stands for dukkha as a common characteristic: the suffering inherent in all compounded (put together from causal forces and processes) experiences. 7 The fact that the mountain is heavy only for those who try to lift it represents dukkha as a noble truth: suffering comes only with clinging--"the clinging that turns physical pain into mental pain, and turns aging, illness, and death into mental distress."

The Buddha taught dukkha as an ordinary attribute to cause us to reflect on the things we cling to: are they really worth our holding on to? If not, why not let them go? Why carry around the weight of the mountain? The process of letting go of (versus clinging to) can open our hearts to something very positive and precious: that form of nirvana, completely devoid of suffering that only comes from letting go, like blowing out the flame from a candle.

This concept is well illustrated in a Zen Buddhism Koan--Carrying a Girl Across a River.
One day, a Buddhist Monk named I-hsiu (One Rest) took his young student to go to town to do some business. As they approached a small river, they saw a very pretty girl walking back and forth looking very concerned. "Lady", asked I-hsiu, "you look very concerned. What is troubling you?" “I want to cross the river to visit my dad who is very sick, but the bridge had fallen. Where is the next nearest bridge?" "The next closest one is many miles away. But don't worry, I will carry you across the river." So I-hsiu carried the girl on his back and walked across the river stream. Once they reached the other side, he put her down and saying farewell to each other, went on their ways separately. Observing the whole thing, the young student was rather uneasy. He though, "the Master taught us that women are man-eating tigers yet today he carried a pretty girl on his back across a river! That does not make any sense. Didn't the Lord Buddha teach us to keep a distance between a stranger girl?" Over the next couple of months the whole thing was still bothering him in his mind. Finally, the student could not stand it any longer and raised the issue with I-hsiu. Upon hearing this, I-hsiu burst into laughter: "I had put down this girl ever since I had crossed the river. You must be very tired still carrying her around for the last two months."

I think that I heard this concept quite often in another context, although it took some time for the truth of it to penetrate the fog of my dysfunction: "Let Go, Let God" or in the Pith instructions of Dzogchen “Let go and let be”. In our addictions (and virtually anything in life can become an addictive object of attraction or aversion) we want more of what we can never get enough of and we want less of what we always have too much of. And we carry the resultant suffering like a burdensome mountain with us wherever we go, whatever we do. To understand how to let go of this clinging to attraction or aversion, we'll examine the Pali word for clinging--upadana: the act of taking sustenance, such as a plant absorbing sunlight or a fire consuming fuel.

According to Thanissaro Bhikkhu, this act of taking sustenance applies to the mind as well. When the mind clings to an object, it is feeding on that object. "It's trying to gain nourishment from sensory pleasures, possessions, relationships, recognition, status, whatever, to make up for the gnawing sense of emptiness it feels inside. Unfortunately, this mental nourishment is temporary at best, so we keep hungering for more. Yet no matter how much the mind may try to possess and control its food sources to guarantee a constant supply, they inevitably break down. The mind is then burdened with searching for new places to feed."

So suffering boils down to, as Alice found out "feeding our heads": we feed it with our possessiveness and control, our craving and our loathing, but instead of nourishing us it gives us food poison and the toxicity spreads to those around us. To end our suffering we must starve our minds, cut off this toxic diet until we neither need it nor desire it any longer. However, when we endeavor to shut off this food supply, our minds addicted to dukkha, seek out new sources of suffering and stress. It is not enough for us to simply cut out the current or familiar thoughts that feed our negativity, we need to cut of the desire to seek out suffering that has become ingrained in us.

The Pali canon describes four ways in which our mind feeds and clings:
1) clinging to sensual passion for sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and tactile sensations;
2) clinging to views about the world and the narratives of our lives;
3) clinging to precepts and practices--i.e., fixed ways of doing things; and
4) clinging to doctrines of the self--i.e., ideas of whether or not we have a true identity, or, if so, what that identity might be.

And I might as well emphasize here, because we'll get back to this point again and again, we are talking not only individual minds but community, military-industrial complex, national, and global minds and mentalities a well. Review this list for yourself right now and think about how and in what ways it holds true for you. Now substitute an organization or a country, say the marines, or Halliburton, or the United States and rerun this exercise again from that perspective. Eerie, isn't it?

Like a monkey trapped in a cage, jumping from bar to bar, seeking escape, our minds jump from clinging to clinging. No matter where we jump we land on more cage. Perhaps there is no way out? But then how did we get in the cage in the first place: contemplate; strategize. The Buddha stopped all his jumping around and instead sat resolutely and in intense meditation underneath the Bodhi tree until he discovered that in his cage (as in all cages) one of the walls is actually a door, and by grasping it skillfully, it swings wide open. Freed at last, he spent the last 45 years of his life teaching others trapped in their cages this revelation.

He taught the Three Jewels, The Four Noble Truths, The Noble Eightfold Path, and the Five Precepts. "So we start the path to the end of suffering, not by trying to drop our clings immediately, but by learning to cling more strategically. In terms of the feeding analogy, we don't try to starve the mind. We simply change its diet, weaning in away from junk food in favor of health food, developing inner qualities that will make it so strong that it won't need to feed ever again."

The Pali canon lists these five qualities as 1) conviction in the principle of karma-- our happiness depends on our own actions; 2) persistence in abandoning unskillful qualities and developing skillful ones in their place; 3) mindfulness; 4) concentration; and 5) discernment. Of the five, concentration--at the level of jhana (intense absorption)--is the strength that the Buddhist tradition most often compares to good, healthy food. Discernment arises as the fruit of the labor of concentration. It contemplates the disadvantages of having to feed, something that goes against the grain of denial, since feeding, in every meaning of the word, is our principal way of relating to and taking pleasure in the world around us. "Our most cherished sense of inter-connectedness with the world--what some people call our interbeing--is, at its most basic level, inter-eating. We feed on them and they feed on us. " Inter-feeding is not always pretty.

In our relationships we sometimes nourish and are sometimes nourished; sometimes we poison and sometimes we are poisoned; but in all genuine relationships, even if only with ourselves, some sort of physical or mental nourishment is taking place. We can hardly imagine a self or a world where feeding, even if it leads to suffering, and it inevitably will, isn't an intimate and inseparable part of our selves. This is where the Buddha's teachings on dukkha become a radical intervention into our lives (or into the lives of communities, industrial-military complexes, nations and the world). Like a Zen slap, it rattles us out of our denial and delusions regarding our suffering. It lays bare the fact that our physical, emotional, and psychic pain is brought about by our clinging and that even our pleasure and joy when clung to become stressful in as much as everything the mind latches onto is by its very nature compounded, and therefore, inconsistent, unsteady, and impermanent. "When we see stress as a characteristic common to all things we latch onto, it helps dispel their allure. Pleasures begin to ring hollow and false. Even our suffering--which we can often glamorize with a perverse pride--begin to seem banal when reduced to their common characteristic of stress. This helps cut them down to size."

Dukkha is inherent not only in the objects on which we feed, but also in the very act of feeding itself. If we believe we have to feed we become enslaved to our appetites. The mind isn't free to wonder where isn't any food, and where there isn't any food are precisely the places we need to go. Once we realize that the feeding’s not worth the price it exacts, we lose our compulsion to feed. "This is where you discover something unexpected: the mountains you've been trying to lift are all a by-product of your feeding. When you stop feeding, no new mountains are formed."
No longer need nor can I blame my childhood, my job, my family, my country, or my "karma" for my anguish, grief, and despair; they are but mountains, I set them down. No longer can I rationalize drinking, food, work, sex or relationships as medication for my anguish, grief and despair; they are but mountains, I set them down. Their weight is no longer a problem. Once I quit trying to hold them up there remains nothing to hold me down.

One of the great lessons of Gandhi's life remains this: through the spiritual traditions of the West he, an Indian, discovered his Indian heritage and with this his own "right mind." And in his fidelity to his own heritage and its spiritual sanity, he was able to show men of the West and of the whole world a way to recover their own "right mind" in their own tradition, thus manifesting the fact that there are certain indisputable and essential values--religious, ethical, ascetic, spiritual, and philosophical--which man has everywhere needed and which he has in the past managed to acquire, values without which he cannot live, values which are now in large measure lost to him so that, unequipped to face life in a fully human manner, he now runs the risk of destroying himself entirely.

The mind that was awakening in Gandhi was at once both Indian and global: valuing inclusion rather than exclusion. His was a mind of love, of understanding, of infinite capaciousness, rather than one of hate, intolerance, accusation, rejection, or division. The spirit of non-violence arose from an inner realization of spiritual unity within Gandhi himself. His concept of non-violence and satyagraha ("holding onto the truth") that he offered up to the world was only possible because he had realized it within himself. For Gandhi, the first and most essential thing of all was the inner unity, "the overcoming and healing of inner division, the consequent spiritual and personal freedom, of which national autonomy and liberty would only be consequences." For Gandhi, the liberation of India was only a step to the liberation of all humanity from not only the tyranny of violence by others, but also, and primarily, in themselves.

I propose that Hungry Ghosts arise out of the disease process (dukkha, samudaya and nirodha) and in order to put them to rest, to return them to the human realm, we must treat (magga) the disease, whether it has taken root within ourselves or within our society or civilization at large. Remember, as much as anything, Buddha was a physician, who first healed himself and then taught others the art of self-healing.

I wish for such a world. The question is what can I, Michael, help do to bring this wish to fruition? What can any of us do? It depends. I will approach the answer from two perspectives, first from a more global outlook and than from an individual viewpoint. In looking at the global issues, I feel both hopeful and overwhelmed. I am aware that there is much to do and I have a very small, if any voice, in these "big doings". I imagine I feel rather like Samwise as he contemplated the destruction of the "One Ring". But through A.A I learned a powerful truth that allows me to hold on to the hope and let go of the overwhelmed.

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change,
courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.
-The Serenity Prayer-