CONTENTS
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Jack Kornfield
Title Page
Dedication
Praise
Preface
Part I: A Path with Heart: The Fundamentals
A Beginning
Chapter 1. Did I Love Well?
A Meditation on Loving-Kindness
Chapter 2. Stopping the War
A Meditation on Stopping the War Within
Chapter 3. Take the One Seat
A Meditation on Taking the One Seat
Chapter 4. Necessary Healing
Healing the Body
Healing the Heart
Healing the Mind
Healing Through Emptiness
Developing a Healing Attention
A Meditative Visit to the Healing Temple
Chapter 5. Training the Puppy: Mindfulness of Breathing
Establishing a Daily Meditation
Walking Meditation
Part II: Promises and Perils
Chapter 6. Turning Straw into Gold
Meditation: Reflecting on Difficulty
Meditation: Seeing All Beings as Enlightened
Chapter 7. Naming the Demons
How to Begin Naming
Meditation on Making the Demons Part of the Path
Meditation on the Impulses That Move Our Life
Chapter 8. Difficult Problems and Insistent Visitors
Expand the Field of Attention
A Full Awareness of the Feelings
Discover What Is Asking for Acceptance
Open Through the Center
Five More Skillful Means
Chapter 9. The Spiritual Roller Coaster: Kundalini and Other Side Effects
Attitudes Toward Altered States
Some Common Altered States
Skillful Means of Working with the Energetic and Emotional Openings
Meditation: Reflecting on Your Attitude Toward Altered States
Chapter 10. Expanding and Dissolving the Self: Dark Night and Rebirth
Buddhist Maps of Absorption and Insight Stages
The Entry to Expanded Consciousness: Access Concentration
States of Absorption
The Realms of Existence
Dissolving the Self
The Dark Night
The Realm of Awakenings
Meditation on Death and Rebirth
Chapter 11. Searching for the Buddha: A Lamp Unto Ourselves
Meditation: Becoming Simple and Transparent
Part III: Widening Our Circle
Chapter 12. Accepting the Cycles of Spiritual Life
Leaving Retreat: Practice with Transition
Meditation: Reflecting on the Cycles of Your Spiritual Life
Chapter 13. No Boundaries to the Sacred
The Near Enemies
Meditation on Compartments and Wholeness
Chapter 14. No Self or True Self?
The Nature of Selflessness
Misconceptions About Selflessness
From No Self to True Self
The Unique Expression of True Self
Meditation: Who Am I?
Chapter 15. Generosity, Codependence, and Fearless Compassion
Meditation: Transforming Sorrow into Compassion
Chapter 16. You Can’t Do It Alone: Finding and Working with a Teacher
Chapter 17. Psychotherapy and Meditation
Chapter 18. The Emperor’s New Clothes: Problems with Teachers
Naming the Difficulties
Why Problems Occur
Transference and Projection
How to Work with Teacher-Community Problems
The Place of Forgiveness
Leaving a Community
Meditation: Reflecting on the Shadow of Your Form of Practice
Chapter 19. Karma: The Heart Is Our Garden
Meditation on Forgiveness
Chapter 20. Expanding Our Circle: An Undivided Heart
Daily Life as Meditation
Moving into the World
Conscious Conduct: The Five Precepts
Reverence for Life
Meditation on Service
Undertaking the Five Precepts: Nonharming as a Gift to the World
Part IV: Spiritual Maturity
Chapter 21. Spiritual Maturity
Chapter 22. The Great Song
Our Individual Song Within the Great Song
A Hundred Thousand Forms of Awakening
Meditation on Equanimity
Chapter 23. Enlightenment Is Intimacy with All Things
Appendix: Insight Meditation Teachers Code of Ethics
A Treasury of Books
Glossary
Acknowledgments
Copyright
Perhaps the most important book yet written on meditation, the process of inner transformation, and the integration of spiritual practice into our Western way of life, A Path With Heart brings alive the possibilities of inner peace, wholeness and the achievement of a happiness that is not dependent on external conditions.
Written by a teacher, psychologist and meditation master of international renown, this is a warm, inspiring and, above all, practical book. Its gentle wisdom will guide you through the ups and downs of contemporary living, such as addiction, psychological and emotional healing, problems with relationships and the difficulties of achieving a balanced life of simplicity.
Now an award-winning classic, A Path With Heart offers wise advice to help you to achieve a deeper, more satisfying existence in the world.
Jack Kornfield was trained as a Buddhist monk in Thailand, Burma, and India and has taught meditation worldwide since 1974. He is one of the key teachers to introduce Theravada Buddhist practice to the West. For many years his work has been focused on integrating and bringing alive the great Eastern spiritual teachings in an accessible way for Western students and Western society. Jack also holds a Ph.D. in clinical psychology. He is a husband, father, psychotherapist, and founding teacher of the Insight Meditation Society and the Spirit Rock Center. His books include Seeking the Heart of Wisdom, A Still Forest Pool, and Stories of the Spirit, Stories of the Heart.
Living Buddhist Masters
A Still Forest Pool (with Paul Breiter)
Seeking the Heart of Wisdom (with Joseph Goldstein)
Stories of the Spirit, Stories of the Heart (with Christina Feldman)
Sayings of the Buddha
To my wife, Liana,
from whom I’ve learned so much,
for her love, wisdom,
deep questioning, and heartfelt support,
and for the blessings of our marriage together.
To Hameed Ali, A. H. Almaas,
for his teachings
that so profoundly integrate life, love, and the sacred.
To the spirit of innovation
of Achaan Chah, the Dalai Lama, Mahasi Sayadaw,
Buddhadasa Bhikkhu,
Chogyam Trungpa, Maha Ghosananda, U Ba Khin,
and
so many other courageous modern masters.
“It’s encouraging to find Westerners who’ve sufficiently assimilated the traditions of the East to be able to share them with others as Jack is doing. May such efforts further the peace of all beings.”
– H. H. the Dalai Lama
“It’s no easy thing to follow a spiritual path across the threshold of the 21st century; to understand the teachings fully, to practice them wisely and to integrate them in action in our life. Eight hundred years ago, the Tibetan master Campopa prayed: ‘Grant your blessings so that my mind may be one with the Dharma; grant your blessings so that Dharma may progress along the path; grant your blessings so that the path may clarify confusion; grant your blessings so that confusion may dawn as wisdom.’ These words are just as true today, when anyone embracing the spiritual life needs to learn how to recognize the misunderstandings, difficulties and confusions that can arise, and how to transform them into inspiration and a source of strength. Jack Kornfield is a remarkable and thoughtful teacher. He knows that by making our spiritual journey with love and compassion, with joyfulness and equanimity, with patience and forgiveness, we will discover not only the heart of Buddha but also the heart of what it means to be a truly human being.”
– Sogyal Rinpoche
“This important guidebook shows in detail and with great humor and insight the way to practice the Buddha’s universal teachings here in the West. Jack Kornfield is a wonderful storyteller and a great teacher.”
– Thich Nhat Hanh
“Jack Kornfield offers a friendly, warm and eminently useful guide to the meditator’s path, brimming with clarity. A Path with Heart is an ideal companion for anyone exploring the life of the spirit.”
– Daniel Goleman
“Jack is helping to pave the path for [Western] Buddhism, bringing the essential basics into our crazy modern lives. And the language he uses is as simple and as lovely as our breath.”
– Natalie Goldberg
“Reading A Path with Heart is a rich and satisfying experience. God bless Jack Kornfield! He is always deep, always honest, always cuts to the bone of the matter.”
– Sherry Ruth Anderson, co-author of The Feminine Face of God
“Once again Jack Kornfield demonstrates his breadth of knowledge and experience of the mindscape and heart rhythm of the spiritual, and particularly the meditative, journey. With an open-hearted expertise rare in a Westerner, Jack offers a benevolent travelogue along the Way.”
– Stephen Levine
“It’s the mixture that makes Jack’s book work so wonderfully well. Humor, ordinary stories, exact advice for critical moments, huge learning of his discipline, and a happy heart – what a pleasant path into the depths.”
– James Hillman
“Our psychological and spiritual processes are too often treated as discrete. A Path With Heart happily shows how Humpty Dumpty can be put back together again!”
– Ram Dass
“Kornfield shows that what happens in meditation is a paradigm for life. Through wonderful stories and personal anecdotes, Kornfield shows both the depths and simplicity of Buddhist practice in everyday life.”
– Linda Leonard
“Jack Kornfield, drawing on his combined background as a Buddhist monk and teacher as well as an academically trained psychologist, has succeeded in presenting the most profound Buddhist philosophy and psychology in an easy-to-read, heartful and humorous style. Wonderful. (A) unique blend of spiritual teaching, poetry, psychological insight and simple life wisdom.”
– Stanislav Grof
It is remarkable and gratifying to see the widespread growth and interest in Buddhist practice in the West. Buddha’s teachings clearly speak to modern times. For many, our contemporary consumer society is characterized by an absence of the sacred and offers few tools for inner transformation. Fortunately, those who wish can now benefit from the rich tradition of Buddhist practice in the thousand Buddhist centers that have spread across the West.
Amidst this flowering there has also been an outpouring of Dharma books in English. I hope that A Path with Heart, like the earlier classics Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind and Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, can continue to provide a systematic and inspiring gateway for all who wish to enter the path of Dharma. It was written after nearly 20 years of teaching. In it, I have attempted to include the depth of compassion and the practical approaches found most helpful by Western students in bringing Buddha’s way alive in their lives.
If, in these pages, even a few people find the blessings of loving-kindness, compassion, mindfulness and freedom of heart pointed to by the Buddha, I will be delighted. May it be of benefit to all who read it.
Blessings,
Jack Kornfield
Spirit Rock Center
Woodacre, California
In beginning this book I have emphasized my own personal journey, because the greatest lesson I have learned is that the universal must be wedded to the personal to be fulfilled in our spiritual life.
IN THE SUMMER of 1972 I returned to the home of my parents in Washington, D.C., head shaved and robed as a Buddhist monk, after my first five-year study in Asia. No Theravada Buddhist monasteries had been established in America at that time, but I wanted to see how it would be to live as a monk in America, even if for only a short while. After several weeks with my parents, I decided to visit my twin brother and his wife on Long Island. With my robes and bowl I boarded a train en route from Washington to New York’s Grand Central Station, carrying a ticket my mother had purchased for me—as a renunciate, I was not using or handling money myself.
I arrived that afternoon and began to walk up Fifth Avenue to meet my sister-in-law. I was still very calm after so many years of practice. I walked as if I were meditating, letting shops such as Tiffany’s and the crowds of passersby be the same in my mind as the wind and the trees of my forest monastery. I was to meet my sister-in-law in front of Elizabeth Arden’s. She had been given a birthday certificate for a full day of care in that establishment, including facial, hairdo, massage, manicure, and more. I arrived at Elizabeth Arden’s at four o’clock as promised, but she did not appear. After some period of waiting, I went inside. “May I help you?” exclaimed the shocked receptionist as I entered. “Yes, I’m looking for Tori Kornfield.” “Oh,” she replied. “She’s not finished yet. There’s a waiting lounge on the fourth floor.” So I took the elevator to the fourth floor. Coming out of the door, I met the waiting lounge receptionist, who also inquired in a slightly incredulous tone, “May I help you?” I told her I was waiting for my sister-in-law and was instructed to take a seat.
I sat on a comfortable couch, and after waiting a few minutes, I decided to cross my legs, close my eyes, and meditate. I was a monk after all, and what else was there to do? After ten minutes I began to hear laughter and noises. I continued to meditate, but finally I heard a group of voices and a loud exclamation of “Is he for real?” from the hall across the room, which caused me to open my eyes. I saw eight or ten women dressed in Elizabeth Arden “nighties” (the gowns given them for the day) staring at me. Many had their hair in rollers or in other multiple fishing-reel-shaped contraptions. Several had what looked like green avocado smeared on their faces. Others were covered with mud. I looked back at them and wondered what realm I had been born into and heard myself say, “Are they for real?”
From that moment, it became clear that I would have to find a way to reconcile the ancient and wonderful teachings I had received at the Buddhist monastery with the ways of our modern world. Over the years, this reconciliation has become one of the most interesting and compelling inquiries for me and for many other people seeking to live a genuine spiritual life as we enter the twenty-first century. Most Americans do not wish to live as traditional priests or monks or nuns, yet many of us wish to bring a genuine spiritual practice to life in our own world. This book will speak to this possibility.
My own spiritual life was triggered at age fourteen by the gift of T. Lobsang Rampa’s book The Third Eye, a semifictional account of mystical adventures in Tibet. It was exciting and thought-provoking and offered a world to escape to that seemed far better than the one I inhabited. I grew up on the East Coast in a scientific and intellectual household. My father was a biophysicist who developed artificial hearts and artificial lungs, worked in space medicine for the space program, and taught in medical schools. I had a “good education” and went to an Ivy League college. I was surrounded by many bright and creative people. In spite of their success and their intellectual attainments, however, many of them were unhappy. It became clear to me that intelligence and worldly position had little to do with happiness or healthy human relationships. This was most painfully evident in my own family. Even in my loneliness and confusion I knew that I would have to seek happiness somewhere else. So I turned to the East.
At Dartmouth College in 1963, I was blessed with a wise old professor, Dr. Wing Tsit Chan, who sat cross-legged on a desk while lecturing on the Buddha and the Chinese classics. Inspired by him, I majored in Asian studies and, after graduating, immediately went to Asia (with the help of the Peace Corps) seeking teachings and ordination in a Buddhist monastery. I began practice and when I was finally ordained and retreated to the Thai forest monastery at Wat Ba Pong, led by the young but later quite famous master Achaan Chah, I was surprised. While I hadn’t necessarily expected the monks to levitate as they did in T. Lobsang Rampa’s stories, I had hoped for special effects from the meditation—happiness, special states of rapture, extraordinary experiences. But that was not primarily what my teacher offered. He offered a way of life, a lifelong path of awakening, attention, surrender, and commitment. He offered a happiness that was not dependent on any of the changing conditions of the world but came out of one’s own difficult and conscious inner transformation. In joining the monastery, I had hoped to leave behind the pain of my family life and the difficulties of the world, but of course they followed me. It took many years for me to realize that these difficulties were part of my practice.
I was fortunate enough to find wise instruction and to undergo the traditional ancient trainings that are still offered in the best monasteries. This entailed living with great simplicity, possessing little more than a robe and bowl, and walking five miles each day to collect food for the single midday meal. I spent long periods of meditation in traditional practices, such as sitting in the forest all night watching bodies burn on the charnel grounds, and I undertook a year-long silent retreat in one room, sitting and walking for twenty hours a day. I was offered excellent teachings in great monasteries led by Mahasi Sayadaw, Asabha Sayadaw, and Achaan Buddhadasa. I learned wonderful things in these periods of practice and am perennially grateful to these teachers. Yet, intensive meditation in these exotic settings turned out to be just the beginning of my practice. Since then I have had equally compelling meditations in quite ordinary places, arising simply as a result of committed systematic training. I did not know what lay ahead at the time of my early training and left Asia still very idealistic, expecting that the special meditation experiences I had found would solve all my problems.
Over subsequent years, I returned for further training in monasteries of Thailand, India, and Sri Lanka and then studied with several renowned Tibetan lamas, Zen masters, and Hindu gurus. In nineteen years of teaching I’ve had the privilege of collaborating with many other Western Buddhist teachers to establish Insight Meditation, the Buddhist practice of mindfulness, in America. I have led retreats of one day’s to three months’ duration and worked in conjunction with many centers. Christian, Buddhist, transpersonal, and others. In 1976 I completed a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and have worked ever since as a psychotherapist as well as a Buddhist teacher. And mostly, as I’ve gone through these years, I have been trying to answer the question: How can I live my spiritual practice, how can I bring it to flower in every day of my life?
Since beginning to teach, I’ve seen how many other students misunderstand spiritual practice, how many have hoped to use it to escape from their lives, how many have used its ideals and language as a way to avoid the pains and difficulties of human existence as I tried to do, how many have entered temples, churches, and monasteries looking for the special effects.
My own practice has been a journey downward, in contrast to the way we usually think of our spiritual experiences. Over these years I’ve found myself working my way down the chakras (the spiritual energy centers of the body) rather than up. My first ten years of systematic spiritual practice were primarily conducted through my mind. I studied, read, and then meditated and lived as a monk, always using the power of my mind to gain understanding. I developed concentration and samadhi (deep levels of mental absorption), and many kinds of insights came. I had visions, revelations, and a variety of deep awakenings. The whole way I understood myself in the world was turned upside down as my practice developed and I saw things in a new and wiser way. I thought that this insight was the point of practice and felt satisfied with my new understandings.
But alas, when I returned to the U.S. as a monk, all of that fell apart. In the weeks after Elizabeth Arden’s, I disrobed, enrolled in graduate school, got a job driving a taxi, and worked nights at a mental hospital in Boston. I also became involved in an intimate relationship. Although I had arrived back from the monastery clear, spacious, and high, in short order I discovered, through my relationship, in the communal household where I lived, and in my graduate work, that my meditation had helped me very little with my human relationships. I was still emotionally immature, acting out the same painful patterns of blame and fear, acceptance and rejection that I had before my Buddhist training; only the horror now was that I was beginning to see these patterns more clearly. I could do loving-kindness meditations for a thousand beings elsewhere but had terrible trouble relating intimately to one person here and now. I had used the strength of my mind in meditation to suppress painful feelings, and all too often I didn’t even recognize that I was angry, sad, grieving, or frustrated until a long time later. The roots of my unhappiness in relationships had not been examined. I had very few skills for dealing with my feelings or for engaging on an emotional level or for living wisely with my friends and loved ones.
I was forced to shift my whole practice down the chakras from the mind to the heart. I began a long and difficult process of reclaiming my emotions, of bringing awareness and understanding to my patterns of relationship, of learning how to feel my feelings, and what to do with the powerful forces of human connection. I did this through group and individual therapy, through heart-centered meditations, through transpersonal psychology, and through a series of both successful and disastrous relationships. I did it through examining my family of origin and early history, bringing this understanding into my relationships in the present. Eventually this led me to an initially difficult relationship that is now a happy marriage with my wife, Liana, and to a beautiful daughter, Caroline. Gradually I have come to understand this work of the heart as a fully integrated part of my spiritual practice.
After ten years of focusing on emotional work and the development of the heart, I realized I had neglected my body. Like my emotions, my body had been included in my early spiritual practice in only a superficial way. I learned to be quite aware of my breathing and work with the pains and sensations in my body, but mostly I had used my body as an athlete might. I had been blessed with sufficient health and strength that I could climb mountains or sit like a yogi on the bank of the Ganges River through the fiery pain for ten or twenty hours without moving, I could eat one meal a day as a monk and walk long distances barefoot, but I discovered that I had used my body rather than inhabiting it. It had been a vehicle to feed and move and fulfill my mental, emotional, and spiritual life.
As I had come to reinhabit my emotions more fully, I noticed that my body also required its own loving attention and that it was not enough to see and understand or even to feel with love and compassion—I had to move further down the chakras. I learned that if I am to live a spiritual life, I must be able to embody it in every action: in the way I stand and walk, in the way I breathe, in the care with which I eat. All my activities must be included. To live in this precious animal body on this earth is as great a part of spiritual life as anything else. In beginning to reinhabit my body, I discovered new areas of fear and pain that kept me away from my true self, just as I had discovered new areas of fear and pain in opening my mind and opening my heart.
As my practice has proceeded down the chakras, it has become more intimate and more personal. It has required more honesty and care each step of the way. It has also become more integrated. The way I treat my body is not disconnected from the way I treat my family or the commitment I have to peace on our earth. So that as I have been working my way down, the vision of my practice has expanded to include, not just my own body or heart, but all of life, the relationships we hold, and the environment that sustains us.
In this process of deepening and expanding my commitment to spiritual life, I have seen both my effort and motivation change greatly. At first I practiced and taught from a place of great striving and effort. I had used strong effort of mind to hold my body still, to concentrate and marshal mental power in my meditation, to overcome pains, feelings, and distractions. I used spiritual practice to strive for states of clarity and light, for understanding and vision, and I initially taught this way. Gradually, though, it became clear that for most of us this very striving itself increased our problems. Where we tended to be judgmental, we became more judgmental of ourselves in our spiritual practice. Where we had been cut off from ourselves, denying our feelings, our bodies, and our humanity, the striving toward enlightenment or some spiritual goal only increased this separation. Whenever a sense of unworthiness or self-hatred had a foothold—in fear of our feelings or judgment of our thoughts—it was strengthened by spiritual striving. Yet I knew that spiritual practice is impossible without great dedication, energy, and commitment. If not from striving and idealism, from where was this to come?
What I discovered was wonderful news for me. To open deeply, as genuine spiritual life requires, we need tremendous courage and strength, a kind of warrior spirit. But the place for this warrior strength is in the heart. We need energy, commitment, and courage not to run from our life nor to cover it over with any philosophy—material or spiritual. We need a warrior’s heart that lets us face our lives directly, our pains and limitations, our joys and possibilities. This courage allows us to include every aspect of life in our spiritual practice: our bodies, our families, our society, politics, the earth’s ecology, art, education. Only then can spirituality be truly integrated into our lives.
When I began working at a state mental hospital while studying for my Ph.D., I naively thought I might teach meditation to some of the patients. It quickly became obvious that meditation was not what they needed. These people had little ability to bring a balanced attention to their lives, and most of them were already lost in their minds. If any meditation was useful to them, it would have to be one that was earthy and grounded: yoga, gardening, tai chi, active practices that could connect them to their bodies.
But then I discovered a whole large population at this hospital who desperately needed meditation: the psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, psychiatric nurses, mental health aides, and others. This group cared for and often controlled the patients through antipsychotic drugs and out of fear, fear of the energies in the patients and fear of these energies in themselves. Not many among these caregivers seemed to know firsthand in their own psyches the powerful forces that the patients were encountering, yet this is a very basic lesson in meditation: facing our own greed, unworthiness, rage, paranoia, and grandiosity, and the opening of wisdom and fearlessness beyond these forces. The staff could all have greatly benefited from meditation as a way of facing within themselves the psychic forces that were unleashed in their patients. From this they would have brought a new understanding and compassion to their work and their patients.
The need to include spiritual life in treatment and therapy is beginning to be recognized by the mental health profession. An awareness of the necessity of integrating a spiritual vision has spread to such fields as politics, economics, and ecology as well. Yet to be beneficial, this spirituality must be grounded in personal experience. For the reader who wants to learn firsthand, chapters throughout this book offer a series of traditional practices and contemporary meditations. These exercises are ways to directly work with the teachings presented here, to enter more deeply into your own body and heart as a vehicle for spiritual practice. The core of the meditations presented here comes from the Theravada Buddhist tradition of Southeast Asia. These are the mindfulness practices of Insight Meditation (vipassana), also called the heart of Buddhist meditation, which offer a systematic training and awakening of body, heart, and mind that is integrated with the world around us. It is this tradition that I have followed and taught for many years, and it is this central teaching that forms the basis of almost all Buddhist practice worldwide.
While this book will draw upon my experience in the Buddhist traditions, I believe the principles of spiritual practice it touches on are universal. The first half introduces the ground of an integrated spiritual life: ways of practice, common perils, techniques for dealing with our wounds and difficulties, and some Buddhist maps of spiritual states of human consciousness and how these extraordinary experiences can be grounded in common sense. The second half of the book will speak more directly to the integration of this practice into our contemporary lives, addressing topics such as codependence and compassion, compartmentalization, psychotherapy and meditation, and the benefits and difficulties encountered with spiritual teachers. We will conclude by looking at spiritual maturity: the ripening of wisdom and compassion, and the ease and joy it brings to our life.
In beginning this book, I have emphasized my own personal journey, because the greatest lesson I have learned is that the universal must be wedded to the personal to be fulfilled in our spiritual life. We are human beings, and the human gate to the sacred is our own body, heart, and mind, the history from which we’ve come, and the closest relationships and circumstances of our life. If not here, where else could we bring alive compassion, justice, and liberation?
An integrated sense of spirituality understands that if we are to bring light or wisdom or compassion into the world, we must first begin with ourselves. The universal truths of spiritual life can come alive only in each particular and personal circumstance. This personal approach to practice honors both the uniqueness and the commonality of our life, respecting the timeless quality of the great dance between birth and death, yet also honoring our particular body, our particular family and community, the personal history and the joys and sorrows that have been given to us. In this way, our awakening is a very personal matter that also affects all other creatures on earth.
Even the most exalted states and the most exceptional spiritual accomplishments are unimportant if we cannot be happy in the most basic and ordinary ways, if we cannot touch one another and the life we have been given with our hearts.
IN UNDERTAKING A spiritual life, what matters is simple: We must make certain that our path is connected with our heart. Many other visions are offered to us in the modern spiritual marketplace. Great spiritual traditions offer stories of enlightenment, bliss, knowledge, divine ecstasy, and the highest possibilities of the human spirit. Out of the broad range of teachings available to us in the West, often we are first attracted to these glamorous and most extraordinary aspects. While the promise of attaining such states can come true, and while these states do represent the teachings, in one sense, they are also one of the advertising techniques of the spiritual trade. They are not the goal of spiritual life. In the end, spiritual life is not a process of seeking or gaining some extraordinary condition or special powers. In fact, such seeking can take us away from ourselves. If we are not careful, we can easily find the great failures of our modern society—its ambition, materialism, and individual isolation—repeated in our spiritual life.
In beginning a genuine spiritual journey, we have to stay much closer to home, to focus directly on what is right here in front of us, to make sure that our path is connected with our deepest love. Don Juan, in his teachings to Carlos Castaneda, put it this way:
Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary. Then ask yourself and yourself alone one question. This question is one that only a very old man asks. My benefactor told me about it once when I was young and my blood was too vigorous for me to understand it. Now I do understand it. I will tell you what it is: Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good. If it doesn’t, it is of no use.
The teachings in this book are about finding such a path with heart, about undertaking a path that transforms and touches us in the center of our being. To do so is to find a way of practice that allows us to live in the world wholly and fully from our heart.
When we ask, “Am I following a path with heart?” we discover that no one can define for us exactly what our path should be. Instead, we must allow the mystery and beauty of this question to resonate within our being. Then somewhere within us an answer will come and understanding will arise. If we are still and listen deeply, even for a moment, we will know if we are following a path with heart.
It is possible to speak with our heart directly. Most ancient cultures know this. We can actually converse with our heart as if it were a good friend. In modern life we have become so busy with our daily affairs and thoughts that we have forgotten this essential art of taking time to converse with our heart. When we ask it about our current path, we must look at the values we have chosen to live by. Where do we put our time, our strength, our creativity, our love? We must look at our life without sentimentality, exaggeration, or idealism. Does what we are choosing reflect what we most deeply value?
Buddhist tradition teaches its followers to regard all life as precious. The astronauts who leave the earth have also rediscovered this truth. One set of Russian cosmonauts described it in this way: “We brought up small fish to the space station for certain investigations. We were to be there three months. After about three weeks the fish began to die. How sorry we felt for them! What we didn’t do to try to save them! On earth we take great pleasure in fishing, but when you are alone and far away from anything terrestrial, any appearance of life is especially welcome. You see just how precious life is.” In this same spirit, one astronaut, when his capsule landed, opened the hatch to smell the moist air of earth. “I actually got down and put it to my cheek. I got down and kissed the earth.”
To see the preciousness of all things, we must bring our full attention to life. Spiritual practice can bring us to this awareness without the aid of a trip into space. As the qualities of presence and simplicity begin to permeate more and more of our life, our inner love for the earth and all beings begins to express itself and brings our path alive.
To understand more deeply what evokes this sense of preciousness and how it gives meaning to a path with heart, let us work with the following meditation. In Buddhist practice, one is urged to consider how to live well by reflecting on one’s death. The traditional meditation for this purpose is to sit quietly and sense the tentativeness of life. After reading this paragraph, close your eyes and feel the mortality of this human body that you have been given. Death is certain for us—only the time of death is yet to be discovered. Imagine yourself to be at the end of your life—next week or next year or next decade, some time in the future. Now cast your memory back across your whole life and bring to mind two good deeds that you have done, two things that you did that were good. They need not be grandiose; let whatever wants to arise show itself. In picturing and remembering these good deeds, also become aware of how these memories affect your consciousness, how they transform the feelings and state of the heart and mind, as you see them.
When you have completed this reflection, look very carefully at the quality of these situations, at what is comprised in a moment of goodness picked out of a lifetime of words and actions. Almost everyone who is able to remember such deeds in this meditation discovers them to be remarkably simple. They are rarely the deeds one would put on a résumé. For some people a moment of goodness was simply the one when they told their father before he died that they loved him, or when they flew across country in the midst of their busy life to care for their sister’s children as she was healing from a car accident. One elementary school teacher had the simple vision of those mornings when she held the children who were crying and having a hard day. In response to this meditation someone once raised her hand, smiled, and said, “On crowded streets when we get to parking spaces at the same time, I always give the parking space to the other person.” That was the good deed in her life.
Another woman, a nurse in her sixties who had raised children and grandchildren and had lived a very full life, came up with this memory: She was six years old when a car broke down in front of her house, steam spouting from under the hood. Two elderly people got out and looked at it, and one went off to the corner pay phone to call a garage. They returned to sit in the car and wait for much of the morning for a tow. As a curious six-year-old, she went out to speak to them, and after seeing them wait for a long time in a hot car, she went inside. Without even asking them, she prepared a tray of iced tea and sandwiches and carried the tray out to them on the curb.
The things that matter most in our lives are not fantastic or grand. They are the moments when we touch one another, when we are there in the most attentive or caring way. This simple and profound intimacy is the love that we all long for. These moments of touching and being touched can become a foundation for a path with heart, and they take place in the most immediate and direct way. Mother Teresa put it like this: “In this life we cannot do great things. We can only do small things with great love.”
Some people find this exercise very difficult. No good deeds will come to their mind, or a few may arise only to be rejected immediately because they are judged superficial or small or impure or imperfect. Does this mean that there are not even two good moments in a lifetime of one hundred thousand deeds? Hardly! We all have had many. It has another more profound meaning. It is a reflection of how hard we are on ourselves. We judge ourselves so harshly, only an Idi Amin or a Stalin would hire us to preside over their courts. Many of us discover we have little mercy for ourselves. We can hardly acknowledge that genuine love and goodness can shine freely from our hearts. Yet it does.
To live a path with heart means to live in the way shown us in this meditation, to allow the flavor of goodness to permeate our life. When we bring full attention to our acts, when we express our love and see the preciousness of life, the quality of goodness in us grows. A simple caring presence can begin to permeate more moments of our life. And so we should continually ask our own heart, What would it mean to live like this? Is the path, the way we have chosen to live our life, leading to this?
In the stress and complexity of our lives, we may forget our deepest intentions. But when people come to the end of their life and look back, the questions that they most often ask are not usually, “How much is in my bank account?” or “How many books did I write?” or “What did I build?” or the like. If you have the privilege of being with a person who is aware at the time of his or her death, you find the questions such a person asks are very simple: “Did I love well?” “Did I live fully?” “Did I learn to let go?”
These simple questions go to the very center of spiritual life. When we consider loving well and living fully, we can see the ways our attachments and fears have limited us, and we can see the many opportunities for our hearts to open. Have we let ourselves love the people around us, our family, our community, the earth upon which we live? And, did we also learn to let go? Did we learn to live through the changes of life with grace, wisdom, and compassion? Have we learned to forgive and live from the spirit of the heart instead of the spirit of judgment?
Letting go is a central theme in spiritual practice, as we see the preciousness and brevity of life. When letting go is called for, if we have not learned to do so, we suffer greatly, and when we get to the end of our life, we may have what is called a crash course. Sooner or later we have to learn to let go and allow the changing mystery of life to move through us without our fearing it, without holding and grasping.
I knew a young woman who sat with her mother during an extended bout of cancer. Part of this time her mother was in the hospital hooked up to dozens of tubes and machines. Mother and daughter agreed that the mother did not want to die this way, and when the illness progressed, she was finally removed from all of the medical paraphernalia and allowed to go home. Her cancer progressed further. Still the mother had a hard time accepting her illness. She tried to run the household from her bed, to pay bills and oversee all the usual affairs of her life. She struggled with her physical pain, but she struggled more with her inability to let go. One day in the midst of this struggle, much sicker now and a bit confused, she called her daughter to her and said, “Daughter, dear, please now pull the plug,” and her daughter gently pointed out, “Mother, you are not plugged in.” Some of us have a lot to learn about letting go.
Letting go and moving through life from one change to another brings the maturing of our spiritual being. In the end we discover that to love and let go can be the same thing. Both ways do not seek to possess. Both allow us to touch each moment of this changing life and allow us to be there fully for whatever arises next.
There is an old story about a famous rabbi living in Europe who was visited one day by a man who had traveled by ship from New York to see him. The man came to the great rabbi’s dwelling, a large house on a street in a European city, and was directed to the rabbi’s room, which was in the attic. He entered to find the master living in a room with a bed, a chair, and a few books. The man had expected much more. After greetings, he asked, “Rabbi, where are your things?” The rabbi asked in return, “Well, where are yours?” His visitor replied, “But, Rabbi, I’m only passing through,” and the master answered, “So am I, so am I.”
To love fully and live well requires us to recognize finally that we do not possess or own anything—our homes, our cars, our loved ones, not even our own body. Spiritual joy and wisdom do not come through possession but rather through our capacity to open, to love more fully, and to move and be free in life.
This is not a lesson to be put off. One great teacher explained it this way: “The trouble with you is that you think you have time.” We don’t know how much time we have. What would it be like to live with the knowledge that this may be our last year, our last week, our last day? In light of this question, we can choose a path with heart.
Sometimes it takes a shock to awaken us, to connect us with our path. Several years ago I was called to visit a man in a San Francisco hospital by his sister. He was in his late thirties and already rich. He had a construction company, a sailboat, a ranch, a town house, the works. One day when driving along in his BMW, he blacked out. Tests showed that he had a brain tumor, a melanoma, a rapid-growing kind of cancer. The doctor said, “We want to operate on you, but I must warn you that the tumor is in the speech and comprehension center. If we remove the tumor, you may lose all your ability to read, to write, to speak, to understand any language. If we don’t operate, you probably have six more weeks to live. Please consider this. We want to operate in the morning. Let us know by then.”
I visited this man that evening. He had become very quiet and reflective. As you can imagine, he was in an extraordinary state of consciousness. Such an awakening will sometimes come from our spiritual practice, but for him it came through these exceptional circumstances. When we spoke, this man did not talk about his ranch or sailboat or his money. Where he was headed, they don’t take the currency of bankbooks and BMWs. All that is of value in times of great change is the currency of our heart—the ability and understandings of the heart that have grown in us.
Twenty years before, in the late 1960s, this man had done a little Zen meditation, had read a bit of Alan Watts, and when he faced this moment, that is what he drew on and what he wanted to talk about: his spiritual life and understanding of birth and death. After a most heartfelt conversation, he stopped to be silent for a time and reflect. Then he turned to me and said, “I’ve had enough of talking. Maybe I’ve said too many words. This evening it seems so precious just to have a drink of tap water or to watch the pigeons on the windowsill of the medical center fly off in the air. They seem so beautiful to me. It’s magic to see a bird go through the air. I’m not finished with this life. Maybe I’ll just live it more silently.” So he asked to have the operation. After fourteen hours of surgery by a very fine surgeon, his sister visited him in the recovery room. He looked up at her and said, “Good morning.” They had been able to remove the tumor without his losing his speech.
When he left the hospital and recovered from his cancer, his entire life changed. He still responsibly completed his business obligations, but he was no longer a workaholic. He spent more time with his family, and he became a counselor for others diagnosed with cancer and grave illnesses. He spent much of his time in nature and much of his time touching the people around him with love.
Had I met him before that evening, I might have considered him a spiritual failure because he had done a little spiritual practice and then quit completely to become a businessman. He seemed to have forgotten all of those spiritual values. But when it came down to it, when he stopped to reflect in these moments between his life and death, even the little spiritual practice he had touched became very important to him. We never know what others are learning, and we cannot judge someone’s spiritual practice quickly or easily. All we can do is look into our own hearts and ask what matters in the way that we are living. What might lead me to greater openness, honesty, and a deeper capacity to love?
A path with heart will also include our unique gifts and creativity. The outer expression of our heart may be to write books, to build buildings, to create ways for people to serve one another. It may be to teach or to garden, to serve food or play music. Whatever we choose, the creations of our life must be grounded in our hearts. Our love is the source of all energy to create and connect. If we act without a connection to the heart, even the greatest things in our life can become dried up, meaningless, or barren.
You may remember that some years ago a series of articles ran in the newspapers about plans to start a sperm bank for Nobel Prize winners. At this time a concerned feminist wrote to the Boston Globe pointing out that if there were sperm banks there should also be egg banks. The Boston Globe printed a letter of reply to her from George Wald, himself a Nobel Prize-winning biologist from Harvard University, a gentleman and a man of wisdom at that. George Wald wrote to her:
You’re absolutely right. It takes an egg as well as a sperm to start a Nobel laureate. Every one of them has had a mother as well as a father. You can say all you want of fathers, but their contribution to conception is really rather small.
But I hope you weren’t seriously proposing an egg bank. Nobel laureates aside, there isn’t much in the way of starting one technically. There are some problems, but nothing as hard as involved in the other kinds of breeder reactors. . . .
But think of a man so vain as to insist on getting a superior egg from an egg bank. Then he has to fertilize it. When it’s fertilized where does he go with it? To his wife? “Here, dear,” you can hear him saying, “I just got this superior egg from an egg bank and just fertilized it myself. Will you take care of it?” “I’ve got eggs of my own to worry about,” she answers. “You know what you can do with your superior egg. Go rent a womb. While you’re at it, you’d better rent a room too.”
You see, it just won’t work. The truth is what one really needs is not Nobel laureates but love. How do you think one gets to be a Nobel laureate? Wanting love, that’s how. Wanting it so bad one works all the time and ends up a Nobel laureate. It’s a consolation prize.
What matters is love. Forget sperm banks and egg banks. Banks and love are incompatible. If you don’t know that, you haven’t been to your bank lately.
So just practice loving. Love a Russian. You’d be surprised how easy it is and how it will brighten your morning. Love an Iranian, a Vietnamese, people not just here but everywhere. Then when you’ve gotten really good at it, try something hard like loving the politicians in our nation’s capital.