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Nothing to Get, Nothing to Grasp Q & A with Enza Vita, author of “Always Already Free”
5 Questions for Lama Surya Das, bestselling author of “Awakening the Buddha Within” Lama Surya Das, affectionately called by the Dalai Lama as “The Western Lama” has spent over forty years studying Zen, Vipassana, Yoga, and Tibetan Buddhism with the great masters of Asia. He has twice completed the traditional three year meditation cloistered retreat and he is an authorized lama and lineage holder in the Nyingmapa School of Tibetan Buddhism. What started you on the spiritual path?
I don't know. I think it must have been my karma. While in college I met my first Zen master at the Rochester Zen Center in New York and I tried to learn to meditate. I wanted to find peace, to embody peace and bring peace into the world. I thought I would find something like that in India, I guess. I went to India when I graduated in the 70s. I met Tibetan lamas in the countries around Tibet and I also lived in Japan studying Zen and teaching English to make a living. I stayed with my teachers for a long time. I was away the entire 1970s and 80s. So you studied under spiritual
teachers of various traditions... I have studied with Hindu teacher, Maharaj-ji (Neem Karoli Baba), Tibetan Buddhist Lamas Thubten Yeshe, Kalu Rinpoche and His Holiness the 16th Gyalwa Karmapa. In 1973 and 1974, I lived in Kyoto, Japan, where I taught English and studied Zen Buddhism under Uchiyama Roshi. I also studied Vipassana in the 1970s, with S. N. Goenka and Anagarika Munindra, of the Theravadin tradition. How would a beginner start on the spiritual path?
By slowing down a little bit and simplifying his life. Our schedules are so cluttered that we just go from one chore to the next. So I think, simplifying and clarifying our life and cleaning out our closets or cleaning out our garage or cleaning out our schedule or cleaning out our mind
a little bit. Meditation really helps us clarify and simplify our minds. So then what's important to us is more evident. So it's not so packed just with commitments and obligations, but we really choose what's valuable to prioritize. What's valuable to us. We’ve lost a lot of our spiritual roots and traditions and everything is kind of a fast supermarket today. So it’s kind of a spiritual supermarket also. Which is good because you can get whatever you want. But there’s a downside to it too. Which is, you can get so much that you don’t know what you want, you don’t know how to decide what you want, you don’t even know what fits. You want what’s new and what’s happening and so we have events instead of training. Spiritual events instead of any kind of spiritual life. So I think that’s a downside. We would like to talk about your practice in the Tibetan tradition of Dzogchen or the Great Practice?
Dzogchen basically deals with the innate intelligence or intrinsic awareness which all beings possess. Remember we are all Buddhas. There is a great story about a cook in Adzum Trungpa’s tent camp. Adzum Trungpa was a great master, and one day his cook, who was unlettered and untrained, burned his hand in the fire and “woke up”. He came running to the master and told him what he had realized. Everything fell apart in that moment of burning his hand; he had a total satori breakthrough and nondual experience. He realized who he was and the nature of all things. The master said, “That’s it!” And the cook said, “Now what?” And the master said, “Keep cooking.” That cook became a great yogi, and he just kept cooking. But he had that big view, which is not intellectual. it’s not a philosophical view. It’s your intuitive highest wisdom. It’s your gestalt, your over view,
which is pre-thought, really. It’s how you see the world. So Dzogchen has nothing to do with knowledge or sophistication, or with this or that school or tradition?
Dzogchen is beyond “isms” and “schisms.” It’s beyond Buddhism. We’re all Buddhas, some asleep and some awakened. A sleeping Buddha and an awakened Buddha are both Buddhas by nature. From a spiritual perspective you have to see that light in all of us. I think that’s really where the future lies: really love life and cherish life in all its forms and cherish each other and not just try to find out who’s right and who’s wrong, or which religion or which culture is the best, and then weed everybody else out. And for that, we have to really open our hearts. It’s a matter of the heart, not just of the head. But the head and the heart in tandem.
Q: I have just read “Become the Sky” in the latest copy of InnerSelf and have a couple of questions.When a concerted effort is made to question reality the mind can throw up many mysterious ‘visions’ relating to the senses which in Buddhism includes consciousness. So when one experiences Emptiness how is it verified as true? Secondly what is in that Emptiness?
A: Nothing is in the Emptiness. Emptiness is empty. Emptiness is not a thing, an absolute or a special realm of existence. It is not an object of perception but a mode of perception where we look at everything with no thought of whether there’s anything lying behind them, empty of the ideas and the stories we usually add to our experience in order to make sense of it. The experience of Emptiness is verified as true by the unique ‘aroma’ of nothingness: nothing appears other than emptiness. When we fir st realize emptiness, we can do so conceptually through an image. By continuing to experience emptiness over and over again, the image gradually become more and more transparent until it disappear completely and we see emptiness directly. One never stands apart from emptiness beholding it from somewhere else. The taste of emptiness in the body, mind and spirit, is the knowingness that what happens is just what happens. You see directly that everything is empty, like misty smoke or like the blue sky, floating
and forming and reforming in a vast endless sky. We feel the cloudlike nature of thoughts, emotions, desires, body, actions, and words. If we look at anything it disappears like a cloud, and the cloud disappears into a cloud. We realize that all is emptiness but this doesn’t mean we are apart from life. Quite the opposite in fact: It is impossible not to be connected with everything and nothing is beyond our concern. The only thing real is connection: emptiness touching emptiness, free and yet nondifferent from our self. When we begin to understand and to live in this way, the sense of alienation from a reality existing as separate from us - is gone. The sense of a solid, separate self is gone. The anxiety we may have experienced about the spiritual puzzle (“Am I experiencing Emptiness or is this illusion?) is gone. We know that there is no ultimate truth or view to claim, including a view from nowhere. There is no place to land or stand and so there is no place to fall. Q: Who or what realises enlightenment?
A: It’s the ocean that realizes itself in you. You are the ocean, yet you have believed yourself to be just one of its limited waves. As a wave, yes you are limited. You have a birth and you will suffer a death, crashing against the shore, never to be seen again. We call these waves “conscious-
ness.” They contain your entire life story yet they are limited expressions of what you are. The reality is that you are actually the ocean itself, the very source of all waves. When the wave is no longer interesting, there is the opportunity to step back and notice your infinite presence as ocean. As long as you take yourself to be something contained within the temporary, you will never know the limitlessness that you are. In truth, you are never limited, only seemingly so. Just as the ocean taking itself to be a wave does not actually divide the ocean into parts, so taking yourself to be a limited entity does not limit the totality that you are. Realization is not about you, the wave, realizing it is the ocean. The ocean realizes itself in you and reveals itself to have never been just a wave. Nothing changes except the falling away of a false belief. Enza Vita is the co-editor of InnerSelf Newspaper and founder and director of the MahaShanti Foundation , a non-profit organization dedicated to the awakening of all beings. Through her job, she had the opportunity to meet and study under many of the great spiritual teachers of our age and she was exposed to the wonderful writings of many others around the world. Culminating in a profound spiritual realization in 2007, she began to write and answer questions for those who came to her … which eventually became her soon to be released book Always Already Free. Based on Enza’s own experience, Always Already Free, guides the reader from the seeking process through the integration of enlightenment into everyday life and reveals that spiritual enlightenment is not a faraway dream, but the ever-present reality always available here and now. Free download of 3 chapters from the book are available from www. EnzaVita.com
To ask Enza a question, send a message to EnzaVita@EnzaVita.com
always already free
recognizing what is always naturally present Whatever experience is occurring right now, cosmic or ordinary, supersedes every other one because it is the one happening in this present moment. Every moment is in fact a perfect mirror of the divine impulse to manifest into the world. Life’s mystery and its mundaneness are equally divine. This brilliant contribution to our modern understanding of authentic identity and Presence brings us to a new awareness of ourselves and our innate wholeness and completeness. Enza’s personal awakening story, in the first few pages, is worth the price of admission. Enlightened wisdom is like an endangered natural resource today, which we overlook at our peril; let’s join in exploring and developing our own innate transformational resources for a change. — Lama Surya Das, international bestselling author of Awakening the Buddha Within This is an outstanding offering to our appreciation of the genuine voice of Pure Presence. It brings us to a deep awareness of what it truly means to study and realize the self and our intrinsic true nature as that which is already perfect, whole and complete. A book absolutely worthy of your time and attention. — Genpo Roshi, international bestselling author of Big Mind, Big Heart
For FREE book download (3 chapters) visit www.enzavita.com