have to be intimate with that ultimate truth itself, which is always – and only – here and now. The breath, which is our focus of meditation in the beginning, is the perfect doorway to enter the truth the Buddha spoke of. Our breath is always completely in the present. You can’t breathe “before” and you can’t breathe “after”. Now, we all experience occasions of being aware in the moment. Perhaps you’re listening to me right now. Or your awareness may be moving in and out: you get the first part of a sentence, but you don’t get the rest. Or maybe you haven’t heard anything – which means that you’re not hearing what I’m saying right now. And this is what normally happens in our life. Even with things that are important to us, our attention wavers. But at least in those fleeting moments we have some experience of being present. The Buddha said that that’s true and it’s important, but there’s much much more than that. Compared to our potential, we have only really experienced the present moment as a passing breeze. But it’s a beginning. What the Buddha realised in his enlightenment was a most profound experience of what we call the present -- which is not the word. In Buddhism we speak of it as “suchness”: the totality of this moment which is experienced without any mental construction. In fact it’s so complete that there’s no past and no present. It’s so unified that there’s no perceiver and nothing perceived. There’s no distance; there’s no separation. It’s interesting that in all the great religions there’s a recognition of the distress of life. As Henry David Thoreau said, “Most people lead lives of quiet desperation.” Our world religions teach that “quiet desperation” arises from distance or separation from some basic principal: whether God, grace, the earth, or truth in some manner. The Buddha also said that this is true. But he taught that the most important quality of our sense of separation is that it is an illusion. It’s not true, has never been true, and can never be true because our fundamental nature is undivided. He realised that all along the way there’s been no permanent, essential being that we can identify as “me” or “you”. When the Buddha realised that directly he was liberated from all of his suffering. This is very curious to us, because we think that it’s our identity which makes everything worthwhile. The Buddha said, “No, that’s the illusion.” He said that everything in fact works perfectly, but for that sense of separation. That’s what gums up the works. That’s why there’s human suffering. That’s why we go to war. That’s why there is inequity and injustice. Buddhist meditation is directly encountering or meeting that fundamental truth of the present moment which liberates us from the mistaken idea of separation and of a self. Now, what do we do
about the world, though? Realising that that self is empty of fixed identity, it might seem that life would appear meaningless. In actual experience, what happens is that everything becomes meaningful, but in a different kind of way: not because we have attached meaning to it, but because in itself it has virtue. The thirteenth century Zen master Eihei Dogen said, “Everything always covers the ground on which it stands. Everything completely fulfills its own virtue.” Nothing is inherently lacking. What Buddhism teaches, and what we find for ourselves, is that the human sense of insufficiency – “I am lacking. That’s why I’m unhappy, and so I need to find that thing that will fill that void” – that thought is creating my identity and leads to the pursuit of desires, whether it be through relationship or family, work etc. But when we accomplish those things, satisfaction is fleeting. As soon as you’ve climbed one mountain, you have to start seeking for the next one, because the sense of aliveness, or elation or accomplishment, or whatever we’ve been seeking, is present, but then fades. Then we have to look for the next thing to attain or acquire. The Buddha said “This is what we call samsara.” He said it never ends, and we will fail to find fulfilment through this kind of activity. Such failure is inherent in the system, because the system is based on the illusory idea that we are fundamentally insufficient and lacking. The very act of seeking something outside to find fulfilment fails, because it doesn’t have the capacity to fulfil, because we are not inherently lacking a single atom. But saying that doesn’t really change the experience that we have. Even if the Buddha were here and said it with great confidence, we might want to believe it, we may actually believe it to a degree, but on a deeper level we wouldn’t, because we’d think, “If that were true, I wouldn’t be experiencing my life this way.” And so we go looking outward again. That’s why the meditation process is so important. In a sense, it sidesteps all of what I’ve described and goes right into the heart of the matter, so that we can experience that completeness for ourselves. But in going very deep within ourselves we have to be careful that that doesn’t blind us to the rest of our lives. In other words, sometimes people are practising, and they’re so focused on the breath, they’re so intent on their concentration, that they’re ignoring things that are arising from within which are calling out to them, and which need to be examined deeply in a particular kind of way: not analytically, not therapeutically (though that can have value), but in a very direct way, through bare awareness. They’re ignoring that because they’re “being present in the moment” – except they’re not, actually. They’re calling that being present, but in fact they’re pushing what’s present in the moment away. They’ve turned their meditation into 5