Seeking A Path Beyond Thought. But How?

I recently got this e-mail from a close friend of mine in New York:

On the whole, I'm a firm believer in meditation, yoga, mindful living and the like. But of late I haven't been living that way. Mindful living is just that and it was getting very emotionally exhausting to basically be thinking all day. Don't get me wrong, I still do breathing, but I've taken a meditation hiatus... I'm trying to follow the whole "go with the flow" philosophy, but every so often the other side of my brain pops in and starts making trouble.

Trust me, I've been there--the thinking flooding in during meditation. Frustrating.

At those times, it seems like meditation is actually conspiring to create its own worst nightmare: more thought.

People usually abandon meditation at this stage. But they risk not realizing that the massive and exhausting inner noise is the ego's last gasp attempt to keep its integrity. It always--hear me--always gets better under these battle conditions. It is here that the mind is about to make a leap. Let it. Keep working.

Actually, at this stage, mind has already made the jump.

The Zen Masters teach us that we are already enlightened! We just don't recognize this.

At first blush, this may look like a typical religious tautology. But it's not circular thinking. I can report this is so from repeated experiments. The result: all training becomes redundant when you get the flash of insight. This is "Beginner's Mind."

OK. Fine. But how to do this?

Imagine your happiness as always with you, already smiling under your conscious mind. I'm guessing that we all trend towards desiring help from the outside. Especially when we want in to "the zone."

I'm not sure, but if most people see life this way, I think they are partially correct. While everybody (everybody) in our life are wrathful Bodhisattva (literally: compassionate warriors), helping us to slice away at our delusions of mind, they cannot ultimately go to war for us.

And so sadness always follows peak experience because at some level the drug of outside help wears off.

However, when we encounter that favorite helping other again, we naturally give ourselves permission to enjoy ourselves with them. This unconsciously cements the mistaken understanding that they are meeting our needs.

No. Primarily, we make ourselves happy. Mind is fully responsible for this state. But we've been conditioned to interpret the source of that happiness as external. It's not.

The ego has a great deal of trouble with this cognitive shift. And it even seems somehow ungrateful not to acknowledge external sources of joy.

And, indeed, it would be incredibly selfish if one remained stuck in a solipsistic framework wherein we were totally obsessed about our own inner worlds.

However, I cannot overstate how valuable it may be as an exercise to vigorously work out just how much mind creates our external reality.

Once you enter meditation from this vector--and, if possible, remain inside this angle of approach--I suspect you will better know what you already know.

However, if you would like some "outside" assistance in this process from a guided point of view, please watch the video below. It is the first in an eleven part series on "Facilitating Big Mind" (all the lectures are on youtube). The workshop is led by Genpo Roshi.

Despite very valid criticisms of this method, I believe this is a powerful adjunct to zazen.

If you wish to go through the process, it is advisable to set aside about 90 minutes for uninterrupted engagement with the material.