Prepare

Step 12

Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

Kevin suggests reading the chapter about Step 12  in the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions and Chapter 7, Working with Others, in the AA Big Book.

Step 11

Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood God, praying only for knowledge of God’s will for us and the power to carry that out.

Daigan suggests reading about Step 11 in the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions and the following:

Genjo Koan

As all things are buddha-dharma, there is delusion and realization, practice, birth and death, and there are buddhas and sentient beings. As the myriad things are without an abiding self, there is no delusion, no realization, no buddha, no sentient being, no birth and death. The buddha way is, basically, leaping clear of the many and the one; thus there are birth and death, delusion and realization, sentient beings and buddhas. Yet, in attachment blossoms fall, and in aversion weeds spread.

To carry yourself forward and experience myriad things is delusion. That myriad things come forth and experience themselves is awakening. Those who have great realization of delusion are buddhas; those who are greatly deluded about realization are sentient beings. Further, there are those who continue realizing beyond realization, who are in delusion throughout delusion. When buddhas are truly buddhas they do not necessarily notice that they are buddhas. However, they are actualized buddhas, who go on actualizing buddhas.

When you see forms or hear sounds fully engaging body-and-mind, you grasp things directly. Unlike things and their reflections in the mirror, and unlike the moon and its reflection in the water, when one side is illuminated the other side is dark.

To study the buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the bodies and minds of others drop away. No trace of realization remains, and this no-trace continues endlessly.

When you first seek dharma, you imagine you are far away from its environs. But dharma is already correctly transmitted; you are immediately your original self.

When you ride in a boat and watch the shore, you might assume that the shore is moving. But when you keep your eyes closely on the boat, you can see that the boat moves. Similarly, if you examine myriad things with a confused body and mind you might suppose that your mind and nature are permanent. When you practice intimately and return to where you are, it will be clear that nothing at all has unchanging self.

Firewood becomes ash, and it does not become firewood again. Yet, do not suppose that the ash is future and the firewood past. You should understand that firewood abides in the phenomenal expression of firewood which fully includes past and future, and is independent of past and future.

Ash abides in the phenomenal expression of ash which fully includes future and past. Just as firewood does not become firewood again after it is ash, you do not return to birth after death. This being so, it is an established way in buddha-dharma to deny that birth turns into death. Accordingly, birth is understood as no-birth. It is an unshakable teaching in Buddha’s discourse that death does not turn into birth. Accordingly, death is understood as no-death. Birth is an expression complete this moment. Death is an expression complete this moment. They are like winter and spring. You do not call winter the beginning of spring, nor summer the end of spring.

Enlightenment is like the moon reflected in the water. The moon does not get wet, nor is the water broken. Although its light is wide and great, the moon is reflected even in a puddle an inch wide. The whole moon and the entire sky are reflected in dewdrops on the grass, or even in one drop of water. Enlightenment does not divide you, just as the moon does not break the water. You cannot hinder enlightenment, just as a drop of water does not hinder the moon in the sky. The depth of the drop is the height of the moon. Each reflection, however long or short its duration, manifests the vastness of the dewdrop, and realizes the limitlessness of the moonlight in the sky.

When dharma does not fill your whole body and mind, you think it is already sufficient. When dharma fills your body and mind, you understand that something is missing. For example, when you sail out in a boat to the midst of ·an ocean where no land is in sight, and view the four directions, the ocean looks circular, and does not look any other way. But the ocean is neither round nor square; its features are infinite in variety. It is like a palace. It is like a jewel. It only looks circular as far as you can see at that time. All things are like this. Though there are many features in the dusty world and the world beyond conditions, you see and understand only what your eye of practice can reach. In order to learn the nature of the myriad things, you must know that although they may look round or square, the other features of oceans and mountains are infinite in variety; whole worlds are there. It is so not only around you, but also directly beneath your feet, or in a drop of water.

A fish swims in the ocean, and no matter how far it swims there is no end to the water. A bird flies in the sky, and no matter how far it flies, there is no end to the air. However, the fish and the bird have never left their elements. When their activity is large their field is large. When their need is small their field is small. Thus, each of them totally covers its full range, and each of them totally experiences its· realm. If the bird leaves the air it will die at once. If the fish leaves the water it will die at once. Know that water is life and air is life. The bird is life and the fish is life. Life must be the bird and life must be the fish. It is possible to illustrate this with more analogies. Practice, enlightenment, and people are like this.

Now if a bird or a fish tries to reach the end of its element before moving in it, this bird or this fish will not find its way or its place. When you find your place where you are, practice occurs, actualizing the fundamental point. When you find your way at this moment, practice occurs, actualizing the fundamental point; for the place, the way, is neither large nor small, neither yours nor others’. The place, the way, has not carried over from the past, and it is not merely arising now. Accordingly, in the practice-enlightenment of the buddha way, meeting one thing is mastering it; doing one practice is practicing completely.

Here is the place; here the way unfolds. The boundary of realization is not distinct, for the realization comes forth simultaneously with the mastery of buddha-dharma. Do not suppose that what you realize becomes your knowledge and is grasped by your consciousness. Although actualized immediately, the inconceivable may not be distinctly apparent. Its appearance is beyond your knowledge.

Zen master Baoche of Mount Mayu was fanning himself. A monk approached and said, “Master, the nature of wind is permanent and there is no place it does not reach. Why, then do you fan yourself?” “Although you understand that the nature of wind is permanent;” Baoche replied, “you do not understand the meaning of its reaching everywhere.” “What is the meaning of its reaching everywhere?” asked the monk again. The master just kept fanning himself. The monk bowed deeply. The actualization of the buddha-dharma, the vital path of its correct transmission, is like this. If you say that you do not need to fan yourself because the nature of wind is permanent and you can have wind without fanning, you will understand neither permanence nor the nature of wind. The nature of wind is permanent; because of that, the wind of the Buddha’s house brings forth the gold of the earth and makes fragrant the cream of the long river.

Step 10

Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.

Laura suggests reading the chapter on Step 10 in the 12 and 12 and the following:

The Buddha’s Words on Kindness (Metta Sutta)
This is what should be done
By one who is skilled in goodness,
And who knows the path of peace:
Let them be able and upright,
Straightforward and gentle in speech.
Humble and not conceited,
Contented and easily satisfied.
Unburdened with duties and frugal in their ways.
Peaceful and calm, and wise and skillful,
Not proud and demanding in nature.
Let them not do the slightest thing
That the wise would later reprove.
Wishing: In gladness and in saftey,
May all beings be at ease.
Whatever living beings there may be;
Whether they are weak or strong, omitting none,
The great or the mighty, medium, short or small,
The seen and the unseen,
Those living near and far away,
Those born and to-be-born,
May all beings be at ease!
Let none deceive another,
Or despise any being in any state.
Let none through anger or ill-will
Wish harm upon another.
Even as a mother protects with her life
Her child, her only child,
So with a boundless heart
Should one cherish all living beings:
Radiating kindness over the entire world
Spreading upwards to the skies,
And downwards to the depths;
Outwards and unbounded,
Freed from hatred and ill-will.
Whether standing or walking, seated or lying down
Free from drowsiness,
One should sustain this recollection.
This is said to be the sublime abiding.
By not holding to fixed views,
The pure-hearted one, having clarity of vision,
Being freed from all sense desires,
Is not born again into this world.

Step 9

Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

Stephanie suggests reading pages 76 through 84 of the AA Big Book, the chapter on Step 9 in Kevin Griffin’s One Breath at a Time: Buddhism and the Twelve Steps, and the following passage in Jack Kornfield’s A Path with Heart: A Guide through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life:

Meditation on Forgiveness

If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each person’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.

– Longfellow

Forgiveness is one of the greatest gifts of spiritual life. It enables us to be released from the sorrows of the past. Although it can arise spontaneously, it can also be developed. Like the loving-kindness meditation and compassion practice offered in earlier chapters, there is a way to cultivate forgiveness through an ancient and systematic practice. Forgiveness is used as a preparation for other heart-centered meditations, as a way to soften the heart and release the barriers to our loving-kindness and compassion. Through repeated practice, over and over, we can bring the spirit of forgiveness into the whole of our life.

Before you can do forgiveness practice, you must be clear about what forgiveness means. Forgiveness does not in any way justify or condone harmful actions. While you forgive, you may also say, “Never again will I knowingly allow this to happen.” You can resolve to sacrifice your own life to prevent further harm. Forgiveness does not mean you have to seek out or speak to those who caused you harm. You may choose never to see them again.

Forgiveness is simply an act of the heart, a movement to let go of the pain, the resentment, the outrage that you have carried as a burden for so long. It is an easing of your own heart and an acknowledgment that, no matter how strongly you may condemn and have suffered from the evil deeds of another, you will not put another human being out of your heart. We have all been harmed, just as we have all at times harmed ourselves and others.

For most people forgiveness is a process. When you have been deeply wounded, the work of forgiveness can take years. it will go through many stages–grief, rage, sorrow, fear, and confusion–and in the end, if you let yourself feel the pain you carry, it will come as a relief, as a release for your heart. You will see that forgiveness is fundamentally for your own sake, a way to carry the pain of the past no longer. The fate of the person who harmed you, whether they be alive or dead, does not matter nearly as much as what you carry in your heart. And if the forgiveness is for yourself, for your own guilt, for the harm you’ve done to yourself or to another, the process is the same. You will come to realize that you can carry it no longer.

To practice the formal forgiveness meditation, let yourself sit comfortably, allowing your eyes to close and your body and breath to be natural and easy. Let your body and mind relax. Breathing gently into the area of your heart, let yourself feel all the barriers and holding that you have carried because you have not forgiven, not forgiven yourself, not forgiven others. Let yourself feel the pain of keeping your heart closed. Then after breathing softly into the heart for some time, begin asking and extending forgiveness, reciting the following words and allowing them to open your forgiving heart. Let the words, imaged, and feelings grow deeper as you repeat them.

Forgiveness from others: There are many ways that I have hurt and harmed others, betrayed or abandoned them, caused them suffering, knowingly or unknowingly, out of my pain, fear, anger, and confusion. Let yourself remember and visualize these many ways you have hurt others. See and feel the pain you have caused out of your own fear and confusion. Feel your own sorrow and regret, and sense that finally you can release this burden and ask for forgiveness. Picture each memory that still burdens your heart. And then one by one, repeat, I ask for your forgiveness, I ask for your forgiveness.

Forgiveness for yourself: Feel your own precious body and life. There are many ways that I have betrayed, harmed, or abandoned myself through thought, word, or deed, knowingly or unknowingly. Let yourself see the ways you have hurt or harmed yourself. Picture them, remember them, visualize them. Feel the sorrow you have carried from all these actions, and sense that you can release these burdens, extending forgiveness for them one by one. Then say to yourself, For each of the ways I have hurt myself through action or inaction, out of my fear, pain, and confusion, I now extend a full and heartfelt forgiveness. I forgive myself, I forgive myself.

Forgiveness for those who have hurt or harmed you: There are many ways I have been wounded and hurt, abused and abandoned, by others in thought, word, or deed, knowingly or unknowingly. Let yourself picture them, remember them, visualize these many ways. Feel the sorrow you have carried from this past and sense that you can release yourself from this burden by extending forgiveness if your heart is ready. Now say to yourself, In the many ways others have hurt or harmed me, out of fear, pain, confusion, and anger, I see these now. To the extent that I am ready, I offer them forgiveness. I have carried this pain in my heart too long. For this reason, to those who have caused me harm, I offer you my forgiveness. I forgive you.

Let yourself gently repeat these three directions for forgiveness until you can feel a release in your heart. Perhaps for some great pains you many not feel a release, but only the burden and the anguish or anger you have held. Touch this softly. Be forgiving of yourself in this as well. Forgiveness cannot be forced; it cannot be artificial. Simply continue the practice, and let the words and images work gradually in their own way. In time, you can make the forgiveness meditation a regular part of your practice, letting go of the past and opening your heart to each new moment with a wise loving-kindness.

Step 8

Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

Tim suggests reading the following chapter from Kevin Griffin’s book, One Breath at a Time: Buddhism and the Twelve Steps.

When I first looked at Step Eight, I thought, “There’s not much to this. Just make a list.” I picked up the inventory from Step Four and began to write down the names of all the people I’d hurt. But as soon as I saw the names on paper, the Step looked a lot tougher. I was faced with all my destructive  history. Who did I hurt? Why did I hurt them? In what ways did I hurt them?

With Step Eight, once again we are challenged to be willing, to see the strength of our Right Intention. This emphasis on willingness and intention in the Steps points to the stubborn, willful nature of typical addicts and alcoholics. Our self-centeredness and pride often make it difficult for us to see that our way isn’t always the best way to approach life and its problems.

One friend tells me that a woman she sponsors refused to do Step Eight. “She says she isn’t about to make amends to anyone so there’s no point in doing it.” My friend and I look at each other with the shared understanding of people who have been sober for years. What a miserable place to wind up, hanging between one Step and another. Obviously, this list is a preparation for making amends, but if that’s the only way we view it, we miss out on the greater value of looking honestly at who we hurt. Worrying about the next Step isn’t in the spirit of “one day at a time,” nor the spirit of “one breath at a time.” Even if we never make any of the amends, writing this list and looking at it with discerning eyes help us to understand ourselves and our lives. It can also be a gauge of our willingness, as over time we work our way down the list to people we might have thought we could never make amends to.

As we approach this difficult and intimidating process of making amends, it can help if we look again at why we are involved in this work. First: to get and stay sober. The experience of millions who have worked the Steps suggest that cleaning up our personal relationships can help us let go of many of the destructive emotions that feed our addictions. Further, once we see that cultivating a spiritual life is the real route to happiness, we understand that we’ll need harmonious relationships if we are going to live a life of serenity and joy. If we are goig to journey deeply into our inner world, which has its own perils, we’ll want to have as few external obstructions as possible.

THE WHOLE PATTERN OF OUR LIVES

Step Eight takes us to another, deeper level of honesty to consider who we really hurt with our actions when we were drinking or using. At this point it can seems as though the Steps are just an exercise to self-flagellation. “First I admit I’m an alcoholic, then I have to write this awful inventory, then I have to tell someone everything, and now you want me to what? Go through the inventory and make a list of everybody I’ve hurt?” No wonder it says in the Big Book, right after the Steps are enumerated for the first time: “Many of exclaimed, ‘What an order. I can’t go through with it.’”

And yet…what choice do we have? Having seen the truth of our mistakes in the earlier Steps, and having made a commitment to let go, it’s clear that we must get straight with our past. Otherwise we can never be free of the burden of guilt and shame, not to mention the practical problems that come with devoting years of our lives to consuming drugs or alcohol. If we are practicing meditation and are trying to deepen that part of our spiritual lives, all this past history will very often keep coming up until it gets resolved. Part of the process of cleaning up our act is this very work of unburdening ourselves. Otherwise, true peace is never really available. Instead of meditation uncovering deeper levels of truth, it winds up being an escape, a covering over, and the numbing of the truth. While we can never completely resolve our past–some degree of regret almost inevitably follows as we age–the more that we can face our past karma, the less we are likely to be attacked by painful memories in meditation.

Bill Wilson says that looking deeply at the roots of conflict with others can open real insight into our own basic flaws, which may be “responsible for the whole pattern of our lives.” So, the list in this Step is only a window on the destructive patterns we act out in our relationships.

Thanksgiving Weekend, 1980

My first retreat. Five days of meditation in the high desert. The tiny meditation hall holds forty young people, sitting in rows, literally knee -to-knee. The only convenient way to come in or out is in line. Otherwise, you have to step between people’s ankles and thighs.

I struggle over these days, especially with the pain in my knees. I pile meditation cushions high trying to find a comfortable way to sit, some ways that my knees won’t begin to burn and make the second half of every meditation period a battle just to sit still. Mindfulness? What’s that? All I’m aware of is frustration.

On Saturday night, after the last sitting, I step out into the starry night, walking carefully down the sandy track toward the bunkhouse. as I walk I hear my footsteps, the scritch, scritch of rubber-soled shoes crunching sand underfoot. I’m listening to the sound, the rhythm blending with the sounds of the night, the soft breeze, a distant bird call; I stop. This is it. This is mindfulness. I’m present.

Four days of meditation and it seems as though I haven’t felt a moment of this in the hall. Now, on my way to bed, the natural simplicity of walking, listening, being, all come together in this clarity, this immanence. Ahhhh…

The next afternoon the retreat nears its end, and the teacher begins a guided meditation on lovingkindness, metta. He begins by asking us to think about people we have harmed and asking their forgiveness. Before we can open ourselves to love, we must forgive, emptying ourselves of the long-held resentments and guilt from the past.

Thoughts of long-ago girlfriends, my parents, lost band members float through my mind. I breathe and feel the sorrow–why did I hurt you?

Now we’re asked to think of people who have hurt us. I think back and the same people come to mind. What’s going on here?

Six years later, as I write my first inventory, I see the same thing. The people I hurt are very often the same ones who hurt me. I don’t see this as some kind of tit-for-tat, but just the fact that intimacy triggers these struggles for me. I’m seeing the “pattern of my life.” The inextricability of love and fear, of intimacy and alienation. And the truth of this paradox continues to open.

In lovingkindness practice we look at three types of relationships: with people we love, with those we feel neutral toward, and with difficult people. As I recently contemplated these levels of metta, I realized that my wife fell into all three categories. I love her dearly as my life partner; sometimes I barely notice her as we pass each other in the hallway; sometimes she’s the focus of all my frustrations. How convenient, I thought. I don’t have to figure out who to do metta for anymore; just use Rosemary as the focus of all three types.

The self-examination that starts with Step Four’s inventory (and really with Step One) and progresses through seeing what our defects are in Step Six brings the patterns of our problems into focus in Step Eight. Seeing who is on this list–my parents, my brothers, my ex-girlfriends, my wife, my former musical partners–all the people who were most important in my life, all the people I’ve loved most–shows me the work I need to do is right here in front of me. My spiritual growth isn’t contingent upon some transcendent meditative experience, but rather my ability to recognize that the person I’m sitting across the breakfast table from is a precious gift in my life; she is my lover, my teacher, my friend. And yet, how many times do I come into conflict with her? Feeling threatened or fearful. Wanting her to behave differently, thinking she doesn’t understand me, doesn’t appreciate me. On and on. Here again, I’m confronted with the whole pattern of my life. The blaming and judging. The wish to control.

What Buddhism tells me about this is two things: These habits, these patterns, are the results of past actions–karmic resultants; and I can changes these habits this very moment. I can look up from the newspaper and smile. I can start again, a fresh breath, a fresh kindness, in this moment. If there’s something a long-term relationship requires, it’s this ability to let go of the last battle and begin again with kindness. When teaching about forgivenss recently, I found myself saying, “I’m an expert on forgiveness: I’m married.” This got a big laugh, but indeed, if you can’t forgive, your marriage probably won’t last very long, or at least it will be a painful one.

This quality of forgiving and beginning again is the same one we need in meditation. Each time we find that we have slipped from our awareness of the present moment into some memory or fantasy, some judgment or analysis, right then we need to forgive ourselves and start our practice right in that place. When we come out of the dream, that’s when we have the opportunity to begin again fresh. Like marriage, our meditation practice is a long-term relationship. It has its ups and downs, its bliss and its misery; and like a relationship, it needs gentle nurturing and persistent effort.

THE END OF ISOLATION

I’ve talked about how meditators may be a self-selecting bunch of isolators. A practice that requires so little human interaction can be quite appealing for people who struggle with personal relations. The Buddha recommended solitude for meditation practice, and many people take that to mean that living alone and limiting human contact is the most spiritual behavior. This conveniently overlooks the fact that the Buddha set up his monastic communities to be completely dependent on their lay followers and as communal living settings. Since the monks weren’t allowed to store, grow, or purchase food, they had to interact with other people every day or they would, quite literally, die. Theravada monks continue this tradition to the present day. This isn’t to say that meditating in solitude isn’t helpful. Of course it is, and that kind of quiet is especially conducive to the development of concentration and the deeper meditative experiences. However, these activities are not the whole of the holy life. These experiences only give us the basis for a holy life, the tools. We still need to use these tools–mindfulness, compassion, and wisdom–in our lives with others. While deeply developing our meditation practice is a rich and meaningful experience, perhaps the truest expression of Buddhist wisdom is found in our relationshipos, when we act for the benefit of others.

Several years ago, my girlfriend of the time picked me up at the airport when I returned from a retreat. After ten days of sitting, I felt calm and centered. We had plans to go to a party, and as we drove back to town, I started to tell her about the retreat. The more I talked, the less calm I became, getting caught up in the excitement of describing my experiences. She, not being a meditator, wasn’t all that interested, although she listened politely. However, when she didn’t respond with the kind of appreciation I wanted, I became frustrated.

I started talking about how I wanted to go on longer retreats, and she expressed concern about my being away for that long. As we approached the house of our friends who were giving the party, I blew up, telling her that she was trying to control me, that meditation was the most important thing in my life, and that if she wasn’t going to support me, I would go anyway.

We never made it to the party. Of course my calm was shattered, and it took a day or so for us to smooth things out. This experience pointed up for me how mediation itself isn’t a solution to the problems in any relationship. In fact, meditation can put stress on relationships by taking us away for periods of time, and also by allowing us to become absorbed in the pleasure of solitude, quiet, and peace.

When we make the transition out of the retreat environment, it can be quite challenging to begin relating to others again. If we are attached to the states we’ve achieved in meditation, we will often struggle when returning. Just as we must work hard to strengthen concentration and mindfulness on retreat, we also have to work at letting go gracefully, at moving back into relationships with openness. In this process, we have to be gentle with ourselves, remembering to have compassion for the vulnerable places we have touched, and to be sensitive to those around us and how they are feeling in reconnecting with us. A period of intensive retreat is one of extreme introspection; we have virtually no responsibility to others, and this can become a kind of narcissism, where we are so used to looking at our own thoughts and feelings moment to moment that we forget how to pay attention to the needs of others. Step Eight reminds us that our spiritual life isn’t all internal or solitary, that we must be sensitive to others, to see how we might hurt them in subtle ways, and be ready to make amends.

It’s interesting that the Buddha’s instructions on mindfulness suggest being aware of body, feelings, and thoughts “internally and externally.” But we don’t often hear what being mindful “externally” might mean. We are mostly taught to pay attention to ourselves when we meditate. Apparently, though, the Buddha wanted us to be mindful of others as well. To notice what someone else is feeling or thinking by watching or listening to them and to respond to that with mindfulness, is the essence of compassion and the foundation of interpersonal harmony.

As we make our amends list, opening deeply to the pain we’ve caused ourselves and others, the heart begins to soften. The willingness to face pain–internally and externally–awakens love and compassion. The deepest veins of emotion start to reveal themselves in our heart. A sense of great sorrow can come over us, seeing how we–all of us–hurt each other, and ourselves. We tap into the Buddha’s First Noble Truth, the truth of life’s pain, but we do it not from a place of fear or distaste, but from a place of caring and kindness. The great sorrow can open into a spacious love and acceptance. Tears may come as we open the heart chakra, that part of us, physical (in the center of the chest, beneath the sternum), emotional, and spiritual, from which love comes and goes. After my first retreat in the desert, this happened to me. I cried every day for a week. And the tears were cleansing, enriching, fulfilling. When we spend years drinking and using, holding in our feelings, covering over our feelings, wreaking havoc in the lives of everyone we know, running, always running, never coming home to our true self, we bury some essential part of ourselves; we bury it alive. When, through this process of opening, we touch again the truth of our heart’s deepest craving for love, something bursts forth, and often it flows in a river of tears. What joy!

MAKING THE LIST

The day I did my Fifth Step with my sponsor, reading him my Fourth Step inventory, he told me to go home and read the part of the Big Book on Steps Six and Seven. I was sharing an apartment with some friends in West L.A., and I closed my bedroom door and stretched out on the red futon, which was my bed. I looked over the Steps and said the prayers, trying to go deeply into the sense of letting go, of allowing my “defects of character” to be removed. I felt myself in the stream, swimming, yes, but also being carried along by the current of this process. The Steps were working.

Of course, I knew what was coming next. You don’t sit in meeting after meeting for a year hearing the Steps read without knowing that on the horizon, lurking out there like some fanged monster, is the amends. I don’t know if I’d thought about what amends I needed to make. I don’t think so. I didn’t want to face the reality of Steps Eight and Nine until I absolutely had to. And now I had to.

Here was my inventory beside me on the bed, twenty-five pages or so in a notebook, scrawled pages of furious writing in my barely legible, left-handed script. It roughly followed the chronology of my life, starting with the first girlfriend I hurt. My sponsor told me to prioritize my amends and not to try to make an amends unless I was clear about what I was apologizing for. None of these vague, “I’m sorry I hurt you” things. I had to be specific: “I’m sorry for the time I threw the sandwich you bought me against the wall because it was on rye bread.” (This actually happened when I was nineteen–and now that I mention it, I never did make amends. As they say, “More will be revealed.”)

I knew who had to be first on my list.

When I was twenty-one I was living with my brother who had bought a house when my father retired. This was my next older brother. (I’m the youngest of five boys.) Although he drank heavily, he wasn’t into drugs. But I was. We moved into the house in late winter, and by the following fall, my so-called best friend, Rick, a drug dealer, was using one of the attic bedrooms as his crash pad. My room was the constant site of drug use. I smoked pot every day, often upon awakening; I drank every night, sometimes mixing booze with barbiturates or psychedelics; I snorted cocaine when it was available. Here I watched my friends shoot heroin and nod out. Although I never used needles, I would scrape up their leavings and snort it. And, as a drug dealer’s friend, I was more or less involved in ongoing drug sales.

I had a job at the time waiting tables at a local bar. And I was working with some musician friends putting together a band doing original music. We’d become frustrated with the local music scene in southeastern Pennsylvania, and had decided we’d move to State College soon.

After hours at the bar, the employees would do rounds of ouzo and Rolling Rock until we couldn’t drink anymore. One of those drunken nights I stumbled the few blocks home with a wild idea. In the flush of drunkenness, I climbed the attic stairs and found Rick in bed with someone he’d met earlier that evening.

Paying no attention to the girl, I said, “Let’s split right now. I want to get out of here. Let’s head up to State College.”

In the blur of that alcoholic memory, everything is white; the sheets, the freshly painted walls, Rick’s pale skin, the cocaine.

Rick, naked beneath the sheets, looked at me thoughtfully. In a fine rock ‘n’ roll tradition, he’d agreed to the be the “manager” of our band, a role often assigned to drug dealers, who were usually the only people hanging around with bands who had any money.

“Now?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Let’s just do some lines and drive.”

He considered this. “I don’t really have enough coke,” he said.

“I don’t need much,” I said.

He reached over to a small aluminum foil package beside the bed. Peeling back the foil, he examined the white powder.

“Okay,” he said. “We can probably make it.”

So, by deciding that we had enough cocaine to travel a couple hundred miles–an odd form of measurement if there ever was one–Rick agreed to go. Soon we were on the road, both of us buzzing on cocaine and alcohol, speeding through the pre-dawn fall chill.

We arrived early in the morning and went to a friend’s place in State College. We fell asleep, only to be awakened a few hours later by a phone call. Hung over, my mouth dry, my head imploding, my body aching from sleeping on the floor, I tried to take in the news: my brother’s house had been busted. Everybody was in jail.

Apparently, just a few hours after our impulsive departure, the police had burst into my brother’s house, rounding up everyone: two of my brothers, their girlfriends, and several other people who were either living in or staying overnight in the rambling three-story house. One person who had dropped by to make a purchase ran down the street, only to be tackled by the police as he tried to escape with a pound of pot.

Over the next months, charges were dropped for most of the people, but my brother who owned the house was put through a grueling and stressful legal battle. Here was someone who didn’t even smoke pot who was being accused of possessing all sorts of things, including traces of drugs found in the carpet in my room.

I stayed away from my hometown for a few months, and when I returned I didn’t say much to my brother. Somehow we got back to being friends, and the past was, at least theoretically forgotten. A year later I left my hometown for good, and although my brother and I remained cordial, the dark past that I’d caused always lurked in the shadows of our relationship. And now, having written my Fourth Step and looked at the people I’d hurt in my life, it was clear what call I had to make first.

Step 7

Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.

I suggest reading the following article from Gil Fronsdal’s book, The Issue at Hand, titled “Virtue: The Five Precepts.”

Buddhist spiritual practice falls into three general categories known in Pali as sila, sammadhi and panna, which can be translated into English as virtue, meditation and wisdom, respectively. They function like three legs of a tripod; it is essential to cultivate all three. Wisdom and meditation will not develop without virtue. Developing virtue and understanding the full depths of its possibilities requires wisdom and meditation.

No single English word adequately translates sila. Sometimes, in its etymological origins, sila is said to come from the word for “bed.” Certainly we can see it as the bedrock or foundation upon which the rest of our spiritual practice is built. Sooner or later, anyone who begins to develop some sensitivity through mindfulness practice will discover that without the foundation of virtue, the depths of sensitivity are hard to develop.

Sila is usually translated as “virtue” or “ethics,” but we need to be careful not to confuse it with Western ideas of virtue and ethics. A traditional foundation of Western ethics is commandments and values often handed down  from a god. These values include ideas about right and wrong, good and evil, and absolute rules that we have to live by. This approach to ethics leads easily to guilt, an emotion that is pervasive in the West, but which is considered unnecessary and counterproductive in Buddhism.

Buddhism understands virtue and ethics pragmatically, based not on ideas of good and bad, but but rather on the observation that some actions lead to suffering and some actions lead to happiness and freedom. A Buddhist asks, “Does this action lead to increased suffering or increased happiness, for myself and others?” This pragmatic approach is more conducive to investigation than to guilt.

As guidelines for virtue and ethical behavior, the Buddha formulated precepts for us to follow. For lay people, there are five basic guidelines. These are 1) to abstain from killing, 2) to abstain from stealing, 3) to abstain from sexual misconduct, 4) to abstain from lying, and 5) to abstain from intoxicants such as drugs or alcohol.

The Buddha referred to these five in different ways, giving us different perspectives from which to understand them. Sometimes he called them “the five training rules” (pancasikkha), sometimes “five virtues” (pancasila), and somtimes simply as “the five things” or “the five truths” (pancadhamma). The expression “the five things” might seem odd, but perhaps it helps to free us from fixed ideas about what these “things” are, and how they function.

There are three ways of understanding these “five things.” The first is as rules of behavior. These are not considered commandments; rather the Buddha called them “training rules.” We voluntarily take on the training precepts as a discipline for the support of our spiritual training. Following them promotes the development of meditation, wisdom, and compassion.

As training rules, the precepts are understood as rules of restraint. They are phrased as, “For the sake of my training, I vow not to kill, not to steal,” and so forth. We agree to hold back on certain impulses. Instead of following our inclination to kill a mosquito or to steal pencils from work, we hold back and try to bring mindfulness to the discomfort we are impulsively reacting to. Rather than focusing on whether the actions are bad or immoral, we use these restraints as mirrors to study ourselves, to understand our reactions and motivations, and to refect on the consequences of our actions.

Following the training rules offers us a powerful form of protection. Primarily, the precepts protect us from ourselves, from the suffering we cause others and ourselves when we act unskillfully.

The second way the Buddha talked about the precepts was as principles of virtue. The fundamental principles that underlie all five precepts are compassion, not causing harm, and generosity. We follow the precepts out of compassion, out of a sense of the suffering others, and out of the possibility that others can be free of suffering. We also live by the precepts out of compassion for ourselves. We want to be careful about our intentional actions, how we act, how we speak, even the kinds of thoughts we pursue.

So that the precepts do not become a rigid ideal that we live by, we practice them together with the principle of non-harming. We can keep in check any tendency to create harm through narrow minded or callous use of the precepts by asking ourselves, “Is this action causing harm to myself or others?” The understanding of what causes harm brings humanity to the precepts.

Living by the precepts is itself an act of generosity; we give a wonderful gift of protection to ourselves and to others. Indeed, one pragmatic reason to follow the precepts as rules of restraint is to bring joy to our lives. Many people meditate because they feel they are lacking joy and happiness. According to the Buddha, one of the best ways to cultivate and appreciate joy is to live a virtuous life.

The third way the Buddha talked about the precepts was as qualities of a person’s character. The Buddha described someone who was spiritually well developed as endowed with the five virtues. The Buddha said that once you reach a certain level of awakening, it is simply not possible to break the precepts. Following the precepts is a direct by-product of having discovered freedom.

In summary, these five things can be understood as rules of training, as principles to guide our actions, and as a description of how an awakened person acts. The world needs more people with the intention, sensitivity and purity of heart represented by the five precepts.

May the precepts be a source of joy for everyone.

Step 5

Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

Jeffrey suggests reading the following section about Step 5  from 9 Essays on Buddhism & the 12 Step Model of Recovery, a booklet published by the San Francisco Zen Center, before his talk:

Once a month, either on or near the full moon, here at San Francisco Zen Center we gather in the Buddha Hall for what is sometimes called the Bodhisattva Ceremony, the Full Moon Ceremony or, in Japanese, Ryaku Fusatsu. This later means something like “simplified [ceremony] to continue good practice.” Whatever the name used, the ceremony itself is a descendant of what is likely the oldest ceremony in Buddhism, itself based on pre-Buddhist practices.

In ancient India, the four quarters of the moon were marked as special days devoted to spiritual practices. During the lifetime of the Buddha, they are the times when the ordained community would preach Dharma to lay people. Eventually these days (sometimes reduced to the full and new moon days) became times for the Sangha of monks to come together to recite the pratimoksha, the rules of training. If a monk had transgressed the guidelines, he would make confession of his fault, receive whatever corrective was considered necessary and the Sangha would be pronounced pure. A version of this ceremony continues in countries which practice the Theravada school of Buddhism (Thailand, Burma, Sri Lanka, etc.)—the so-called Southern School.

The version of this ceremony that we practice at Zen Center is a collective one. Each person does not confess his or her individual faults, but each of us joins in a general confession of failing to live up to our ideals. The verse chanted goes like this:

All my ancient, twisted karma,
From beginingless greed, hate and delusion,
Born through body, speech and mind,
I now fully avow.

We then go on to renew our vows: taking the three Refuges (in Buddha, Dharma and Sangha) and the precepts.

Thus, even in a non-theistic tradition such as Buddhism, the efficacy and necessity of confession is acknowledged.

In both Buddhism and the Steps, confession is essential for further spiritual growth. It not only relieves us of the burden of our secrets, but—just as importantly—creates or deepens the intimacy we have with our sponsor or teacher. This relationship is of great importance in both traditions. In the Lotus Sutra, it is said that “Only a Buddha together with a Buddha can fathom the true nature of reality.” And specifically in Zen, the teaching is said to be passed from warm hand to warm hand, through the succession of ancestors. In AA, all of our recovery work can be traced to the initial conversation between Bill W. and Dr. Bob, in an unbroken line from drunk to drunk. In both traditions we enact this central relationship—– of teacher to student, sponsor to sponsee.

We cannot proceed on our own without risking grave dangers to our recovery and our spiritual life. Even with the best intentions, the tendency to cover up, rationalize and give ourselves over to imagination is “cunning, baffling and powerful.” The eye cannot see itself. We need someone else, someone we trust to be on our side, who will give us accurate and loving feedback. As Bill writes in Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions:

Hence it was most evident that a solitary self-appraisal, and the admission of our defects based on that alone, wouldn’t be nearly enough. We’d have to have outside help if we were surely to know and admit the truth about ourselves . . . Only by discussing ourselves, holding nothing back, only by being willing to take advice and accept direction could we set foot on the road to straight thinking, solid honesty, and genuine humility.

For most of us this is a huge undertaking as we have spent a long time hiding, lying— directly or by omission—covering up and pretending. It is a risk we are sorely tempted to pull back from. And yet, we have to ask ourselves how well our lives have gone without trusting another person, without being willing to be known. To deny ourselves this basic human need for intimacy leads to spiritual death as surely as to deny ourselves food leads to physical death.

To quote The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions again:

What are we likely to receive from Step Five? For one thing, we shall get rid of that terrible sense of isolation we’ve always had. Almost without exception, alcoholics are tortured by loneliness. Even before our drinking got bad and people began to cut us off, nearly all of us suffered the feeling that we didn’t quite belong. . . There was always that mysterious barrier we could neither surmount nor understand. It was as if we were actors on a stage, suddenly realizing that we did not know a single line of our parts . . . Until we had talked with complete candor of our conflicts, and had listened to someone else do the same thing, we still didn’t belong. Step Five was the answer.

[Although it is beyond the scope of this essay to expand on this, it is important to point out that we are told it is not enough to find relief for ourselves through the Fifth Step. It is also necessary to be the one who listens----lovingly, carefully, and with no agenda other than to be of service. To be asked to hear a Fifth Step is a great honor and trust and demands our full attention and all that we have to bring of our own recovery.]

This Step talks about admission of our wrongs. In many cases this is true. We need to look at and take responsibility for the actions that have caused harm to self and to others. However, this isn’t the whole story. In the Fourth Step we have also looked at our fears and often will find it necessary to talk about things which are not included in the categories provided by the Big Book. We will need to talk about our suffering, no matter the origin of it. For many of us, it is easier to talk about our wrong behaviors. At least we are the actors there, and not passive. To discuss our suffering seems somehow shameful or weak. Anger, as expressed in resentments, is a response to the world that can seem stronger than revealing our hurt. To be vulnerable in this way is something new and frightening for many of us; and often with good reason. We have not always been met with understanding and support in the past. Nor, to be fair, have we been able to offer it to others when we were active in our addictions.

As with so much in our recovery, we are driven to this by suffering. Until the burden of our pain becomes unbearable, it is difficult to let another in. By and large, we are not people who have much experience in trust. Can we tell another person our most painful and secret hurts? How can we know that what we say will not be used against us? These are not trivial concerns and must be addressed. As much as we have been hiding until now, it is important not to go to the other extreme and indulge in compulsive disclosure with just anyone. And yet, if we are to remain sober and have any chance at reasonably happy lives, we must take the risk. Sometimes what makes the gamble possible is the experience that holding back has not relieved, but rather increased our suffering. Many people in recovery have told us that doing a Fifth Step has helped them. Why not try it ourselves? There isn’t that much left to lose.

Having made the decision to go forward, we need to determine who will receive our history. The process of choosing a sponsor is not all that different from choosing a spiritual teacher. First, we look and listen. In Buddhism, we may want to listen to many different people speak, usually at first in public lectures. Do they seem to know their subject well? Do they explain things in ways that we can understand and that seem pertinent to us? Is the path they describe one that attracts us? Do we feel some warmth from them? Humor? Humility? The next step in the process might be to schedule an individual conversation, telling them a little about ourselves and what we are looking for and listening closely to what they have to say in response. It is probably well to think twice about someone who seems to know all the answers, what we should do and how we should do it. Perhaps we should listen to someone who shares his or her experience with us, rather than his or her opinion. It is also good to know what the expectations are on both sides. If you are looking for a relationship that is regular and close, and the teacher already has fifty students and travels a great deal, you will need to decide what compromises you are willing to accept. If we have carefully and slowly gathered information, listening both to our head and our heart, and the match seems a good one, we can ask to be a student of that teacher and see what happens.

In choosing a sponsor, we follow a similar path. We listen to the person speak in meetings. Perhaps we have heard his or her story and found it like our own. When the person speaks, does he or she seem to have a good grasp of the principles of the program? Does he or she have significant sober time? And, having made our choice and asked someone to sponsor us, we can also make clear that at first it is a trial. We can proceed in the spirit of experimentation. If after a time the fit doesn’t seem to be a good one, either party can withdraw with gratitude for the time spent together.

A sponsor can help us to see the patterns in our lives—the habitual behaviors that contribute to our suffering. And he or she can also point out where we are carrying blame that is inappropriate or misplaced. Too often we give ourselves responsibility for things which are beyond our control.

Speaking our Fifth Step to a sponsor can create a new context for self-examination and help us to exit the solitary confinement of internalized guilt and shame. Telling somehow objectifies the behavior, the history, and allows us to begin to see it clearly—what actions of ours (more often caused by ignorance than malice) create or continue the cycle of suffering. Often our own view is warped by the stories we tell ourselves and we cannot recognize what our part actually has been, either denying any part in our own suffering, or piling on a load of blame that is too heavy for anyone. Bringing these feelings and histories into the light is absolutely necessary for healing.

This healing is not only of ourselves, but of our relationships with others. And in experiencing this, we begin to develop a new understanding of who we are. This is the essential work of recovery: deconstructing the addicted self, just as in Buddhism we deconstruct the self based on greed, hate and delusion. What happens, whether we are conscious of it or not, whether we can articulate it or not, is that the boundaries of the self expand. We are no longer prisoners of the small, dark cell with walls of fear and shame and anger that we have inhabited for so long. Rather who we are begins to stretch beyond our customary definitions to include the other as well. Others become, in American writer Carson McCuller’s phrase, “the we of me.” As we will explore in greater detail in Steps Six and Seven, the concept of the self becomes more fluid and our experience less heavy, solid and immovable.

Our stories—true or imagined–are the stuff of us and by sharing them with another we can begin to retell them in a fashion that returns us to the world. In Step Five we really begin to be restored to sanity as we are promised at the beginning of the path.

Step 4

Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

Okay, people, get out your Big Books and turn to page 64. This is all Paul wants you to read before his talk:

Being convinced that self, manifested in various ways, was what had defeated us, we considered its common manifestations…Resentment

Step 3

Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

Ren suggests reading the following chapter Religion in Everyday Zen: Love and Work by Charlotte Joko Beck before her talk:

People who come to Zen centers are often upset or disillusioned with their past experiences of religion. The original meaning of the word “religion” is interesting: it’s from the Latin religare, which means “to bind back, to bind man and the gods.” Re means “back,” and ligare means “to bind.”

What are we binding? First of all, we bind our self to itself–because even within ourselves we’re separated. And we bind ourselves to others, and eventually to all things, sentient and insentient. And we bind others to others. Anything that is not bound together is our responsibility. But most of the time our task is to bind ourselves to our roommate, to our work, to our partner, to our child or friend, and then to bind ourselves to Sri Lanka, to Mexico, to all things in this world, and this universe.

Now that sounds nice! But in fact, we don’t very often see life that way. And any true religious practice is to see once again that which is already so: to see the fundamental unity of all things, to see our true face. It’s to remove the barrier between ourselves and another person or another thing: to remove or to see through the nature of the barrier.

People often ask me, if this fundamental unity is the true state of affairs, why is it almost never seen? It’s not because of a lack of the right scientific information; I’ve known a lot of physicists who had the intellectual knowledge, yet their dealings with life did not reflect this awareness.

The main cause for the barrier, and the main reason we fail to see that which is already so, is our fear of being hurt by that which seems separate from us. Needless to say, our physical being does need to be protected or it can’t function. For instance, if we’re having a picnic on a train track and a train’s coming, it’s quite a good idea to move. It’s necessary to avoid and to repair physical damage. But there’s immense confusion between that kind of hurt, and other less tangible occurrences that seem to hurt us. “My lover left me, it hurts to be alone.” “I’ll never get a job.” “Other people are so mean.” We view all these as sources of hurt. We often feel we have been hurt by other people.

If we look back on our lives we can make a list of people or events who have hurt us. We all have our list. Out of that long list of hurts we develop a conditioned way of looking at life: we learn patterns of avoidance; we have judgments and opinions about anything and anyone that we fear might hurt us.

Our innate capacities are exerted in the direction of avoidance, in the direction of complaining, of being the victim, of trying to set things up so that we maintain control. And the true life, the fundamental unity, escapes us. Sadly enough, some of us die without ever having lived, because we’re so obsessed with trying to avoid being hurt. One thing we’re sure of: if we have been hurt, we don’t want it to happen again. And our mechanisms for avoidance are almost endless.

Now in many religious traditions, and particularly in the Zen tradition, there is great stock placed in having what are called “openings” or enlightened experiences. Such experiences are quite varied. But if they are genuine they illuminate or bring to our attention that which is always so: the true nature of life, the fundamental unity. What I have found, however (and I know many of you have found it too), is that by themselves they’re not enough. They can be useful; but if we get hung up on them they’re a barrier. For some people these experiences are not that hard to come by. We vary in that respect–and the variation is not a matter of virtue, either. But without the severe labor of unifying one’s life these experiences do not make much difference. What really counts is the practice that we have to go through moment by moment with that which seems to hurt us, or threaten us, or displease us–whether it’s difficulty with our coworkers, or our family, or our partners, anyone. Unless in our practice we’ve reached the point in our practice where we react very little, an enlightenment experience is largely useless.

If we truly want to see the fundamental unity, not just once in a while, but most of the time–which is what the religious life is–then our primary practice has to be with what Menzan Zenji (a Xoto Zen scholar and teacher) calls the “barrier of emotion-thought.” He means that when something seems to threaten us, we react. The minute we react a barrier has come up and our vision is clouded. Since most of us react about every five minutes, it’s obvious that most of the time life is clouded over for us. We are caught within our own selves; we’re caught in this barrier.

Our primary practice is with this barrier. Without such practice, without understanding all the ins and outs of the barriers we erect—which is not an easy matter—we remain enslaved and separate. We may see our true face once in a while, but still we find it impossible to be ourselves, moment by moment. In other words the religious life has not been realized: humanity and the gods remain separate. There’s me and there’s the life out there that I view as threatening—and we do not come together.

This barrier of emotion-thought often takes the form of a vacillation between two poles. The one pole is conformity: sacrificing to the gods, sacrificing ourselves, pleasing life, pleasing others, being good, trying to be an ideal person, stifling what is true for us at any given moment. This is the person who tries to be good, who tries to practice hard, who tries to be enlightened, who tries, tries, tries. Such efforts are extremely common, particularly among Zen students. But if we practice with intelligence we begin to sense the conforming style we’ve been immersed in and then we tend to swing to the opposite pole, to another kind of slavery: rebellion or nonconformity. People then insist, “No one can tell me what to do! I need my own space, and I want everyone to stay out of it!” In this phase we judge others harshly, and have strong negative opinions. Instead of seeing ourselves as inferior and dependent, we now see ourselves as superior and independent. These states (conformity and nonconformity) flow into each other moment by moment. In the first years of practice most people swing out of the first stage and into the second. At that point it may seem that their lives are getting worse, not better! “Where’s that nice person I used to know?” Both states are slavery, however; we are still reacting to life. Either we conform to it or we rebel against it. People and the gods are still separate.

We all swing between these two stages. One day last week I made up my mind at 9 a.m. that I was going to answer a letter, a difficult letter I didn’t want to answer. At 3 p.m. it dawned on me that I still hadn’t answered that letter. I’d found fifteen things to do from nine to three that were not answering the letter. My initial response was, “I should answer the letter.” That’s conformity. “It’s required of me, I should do it.” The second is, “You can’t make me. I don’t have to do that. I can leave it sitting there.” But the minute the observer sees both states, what happens? When I observed both thoughts I sat down and answered the letter.

What is the resolution? What resolves that continual battle within ourselves? What brings us and the god together? Until we understand the riddle we’re caught in it. The first thing to see is what we’re doing. And when we sit that will reveal itself. At first we’ll have the thought, “I should do that.” And if we sit a while longer the second thought will come up: “I don’t want to do that.” We begin to see that we swing between these thoughts, back and forth, back and forth.

In this whole back-and-forth process, there’s nothing but separation. How do we resolve it? We resolve it by experiencing that which we don’t want to experience. We need to experience non-verbally the uncomfortableness, the anger, the fear that is sitting beneath this vacillation between the two poles. That’s true zazen, true prayer, true religious practice. Eventually the anger (as physical experience) will begin to shift. If we’re really upset, the shifting may take weeks or months. But if we surrender to the experiencing, if we “embrace the tiger,” it will always shift—because when we are the experience itself, there is no subject and no object. And when there’s no subject or object, the barrier of emotion-thought drops and for the first time we can clearly see. When we can see, we know what to do. And what we do will be loving and compassionate. The religious life can be lived.

As long as we don’t feel open and loving, our practice is right there waiting for us. And since most of the time we don’t feel open and loving, most of the time we should be practicing meticulously. That’s the religious life; that’s “religion”—though we don’t have to use these words. It’s the reconciliation of people and their separate notions, the reconciliation of our viewpoints of how it should be, of how people should be, the reconciliation of our fears. The reconciliation of all that is the experience—of what? Of God? Of just what is? The religious life is a process of reconciliation, second by second by second.

And each time we go through this barrier something changes within us. Over time we become less separate. And it’s not easy, because we want to cling to that which is familiar: being separate, being superior or inferior, being “someone” in relationship to the world. One of the marks of serious practice is to be alert and to recognize when that separation is occurring. The minute we have even a passing thought of judging another person, the red light of practice should go on.

We all do some harmful actions that we are not conscious of doing. But the more we practice, the more we see that which we previously could not see. That doesn’t mean we’ll ever see it all—there’s always something we do not see. And that’s not good or bad; that’s just the nature of things.

So practice is not just coming to sesshin or sitting each morning. That’s important, but it’s not enough. The strength of our practice, and the ability to communicate our practice to others, lies in being ourselves. We don’t have to try to teach others. WE don’t have to say a thing. If our practice is strong it shows all the time. We don’t have to talk about the dharma; the dharma is simply what we are.

Step 2

Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

Jason suggests reading the following chapter, The Rebel Saint in  Buddhism, A Concise Introduction by Huston Smith and Philip Novak before his talk:

In moving from Buddha the man to Buddhism the religion, it is imperative that the latter be seen against the background of the Hinduism out of which it grew. Unlike Hinduism, which emerged by slow, largely imperceptible spiritual accretion, the religion of the Buddha appeared overnight, fully formed. In large measure it was a religion of reaction against Hindu perversions—an Indian protestantism not only in the original meaning of that word, which emphasized witnessing for (Lat., testis pro) something, but equally in its latter-day connotations, which emphasize protesting against something. Buddhism drew its lifeblood from Hinduism, but against its prevailing corruptions Buddhism recoiled like a whiplash and hit back—hard.

To understand the teachings of the Buddha, then, we shall need a minimal picture of the existing Hinduism that partly provoked it. And to lead into this, several observations about religion are in order.

Six aspects of religion surface so regularly as to suggest that their seeds are in the human makeup. One of these is authority. Leaving divine authority aside and approaching the matter in human terms only, the point begins with specialization. Religion is no less complicated than government or medicine. It stands to reason, therefore, that talent and sustained attention will lift some people above the average in matters of spirit; their advice will be sought and their counsels generally followed. In addition, religion’s institutional, organized side calls for administrative bodies and individual who occupy positions of authority, whose decisions carry weight.

A second normal feature of religion is ritual, which was actually religion’s cradle, for anthropologists tell us that people danced out their religion before they thought it out. Religion arose out of celebration and its opposite, bereavement, both of which cry out for collective expression. When we are crushed by loss, or when we are exuberant, we want not only to be with people; we want to interact with them in ways that make the interactions more than the sum of their parts—this relieves our isolation. The move is not limited to the human species. In northern Thailand, as the rising sun first touches the treetops, families of gibbons sing half-tone descending scales in unison as, hand over hand, they swoop across the topmost branches.

Religion may begin in ritual, but explanations are soon called for, so speculation enters as a third religious feature. Whence do we come, whither do we go, why are we here? People want answers to these questions.

A fourth constant in religion is tradition. In human beings it is tradition rather than instinct that conserves what past generations have learned and bequeath to the present as templates for action.

A fifth typical feature of religion is grace, the belief—often difficult to sustain in the face of facts—that Reality is ultimately on our side. In the last resort the universe is friendly; we can feel at home in it. “Religion says that the best things are the more eternal things, the things in the universe that throw the last stone, so to speak, and say the final word.”

Finally, religion traffics in mystery. Being finite, the human mind cannot begin to fathom the Infinite, which it is drawn to.

Each of these six things—authority, ritual, speculation, tradition, grace, and mystery—contributes importantly to religion, but equally each can clog its works. In the Hinduism of the Buddha’s day they had done so, all six of them. Authority, warranted at the start, had become hereditary and exploitative as brahmins took to hoarding their religious secrets and charging exorbitantly for their ministrations. Rituals became mechanical means for obtaining miraculous results. Speculation had lost its experiential base and devolved into meaningless hair-splitting. Tradition had turned into a dead weight, in one specific by insisting that Sanskrit—no longer understood by the masses—remain the language of religious discourse. God’s grace was being misread in ways that undercut human responsibility, if indeed responsibility any longer had meaning where karma, likewise misread, was confused with fatalism. Finally, mystery was confused with mystery-mongering and mystification—perverse obsession with miracles, the occult, and the fantastic.

Onto this religious scene—corrupt, degenerate, and irrelevant, matted with superstition and burdened with worn-out rituals—came the Buddha, determined to clear the ground that truth might find new life. The consequence was surprising. What emerged was (at the start) a religion almost entirely devoid of each of the above mentioned ingredients, without which we would suppose that religion could not take root. This fact is so striking that it warrants documentation.

1. Buddha preached a religion devoid of authority. His attack on authority had two prongs. On the one hand, he wanted to break the monopolistic grip of the brahmins on religious teachings, and a good part of his reform consisted of no more than making generally accessible what had hitherto been the possession of a few. Contrasting his own openness with the guild secrecy of the brahmins, he pointed out that “there is no such thing as closed-fistedness in the Buddha.” So important did he regard this difference that he returned to it on his deathbed to assure those about him, “I have not kept anything back.”

But if his first attack on authority was aimed at an institution—the brahmin caste—his second was directed toward individuals. In a time when the multitudes were passively relying on brahmins to tell them what to do, Buddha challenged each individual to do his or her own religious seeking and rational investigation. “Do not go upon what has been acquired by repeated hearing; nor upon tradition; nor upon rumour; nor upon what is in a scripture; nor upon the consideration, ‘The monk is our teacher.’” Rather, he said, test ideas and actions in your own laboratory of common sense: When you yourself know they lead to harm or ill, abandon them; when you yourself know they lead to benefit and happiness, adopt them. Self-reliance was key: “Be lamps unto yourselves. Those who, either now or after I am dead, shall rely upon themselves only and not look for assistance to anyone besides themselves, it is they who shall reach the topmost height.”

2. Buddha preached a religion devoid of ritual. Repeatedly, he ridiculed the rigmarole of brahmin rites as superstitious petitions to ineffectual gods. “To seek to win peace through others, as priests and sacrificers, is the same as if a stone were thrown into deep water, and now people, praying and imploring and folding their hands, came and knelt down all around saying: ‘Rise, O dear stone! Come to the surface, O dear stone!’ but the stone remains at the bottom.”

Rituals were trappings—irrelevant to the hard, demanding job of ego-reduction. Indeed, they were worse than irrelevant; Buddha argued that “belief in the efficacy of rites and ceremonies” is one of the Ten Fetters that bind the human spirit. Here, as apparently everywhere, the Buddha was consistent. Discounting Hinduism’s forms, he resisted every temptation to institute new ones of his own, a fact that has led some writers to (mistakenly) characterize his teachings as a rational moralism rather than a religion.

3. Buddha preached a religion that skirted speculation. There is ample evidence that he could have been one of the world’s great metaphysicians if he had put his mind to the task. Instead, he skirted “the thicket of theorizing.” His silence on that front did not pass unnoticed. “Whether the world is eternal or not eternal, whether the world is finite or not, whether the soul is the same as the body or whether the soul is one thing and the body another, whether a Buddha exists after death or does not exist after death—these things,” one of his disciples observed, “the Lord does not explain to me. And that he does not explain them to me does not please me, it does not suit me.” There were many it did not suit. Yet despite incessant needling, he maintained his “noble silence.” His reason was simple. On questions of this sort, “greed for views tends not to edification.” His practical program was exacting, and he was not going to let his disciples be diverted from the hard road of practice into fields of fruitless speculation. His famous parable of the arrow thickly smeared with poison puts the point precision:

It is as if a man had been wounded by an arrow thickly smeared with poison, and his friends and kinsmen were to get a surgeon to heal him, and he were to say, I will not have this arrow pulled out until I know by what man I was wounded, whether he is of the warrior caste, or a brahmin, or of the agricultural or the lowest caste. Or if he were to say, I will not have this arrow pulled out until I know of what name of family the man is;–or whether he is tall, or short, or of middle height; or whether he is black, or dark, or yellowish; or whether he comes from such and such a village, or town, or city; or until I know whether the bow with which I was wounded was a chapa or a kodanda, or until I know whether the bow-string was of swallow-wort, or bamboo fiber, or sinew, or hemp, or of milk-sap tree, or until I know whether the shaft was from a wild or cultivated plant; or whether it was feathered from a vulture’s wing or a heron’s or a hawk’s, or a peacock’s; or whether it was wrapped round with the sinew of an ox, or of a buffalo, or of a ruru-deer, or of a monkey; or until I know whether it was an ordinary arrow, or a razor-arrow, or an iron arrow, or of a calf-tooth arrow. Before knowing all this, verily, that man would have died.

Similarly, it is not on the view that the world is eternal, that it is finite, that body and soul are distinct, or that the Buddha exists after death, that a religious life depends. Whether these views or their opposites are held, there is still rebirth, there is old age, there is death, and grief, lamentation, suffering, sorrow, and despair….I have not spoken to these views because they do not conduce to absence of passion, or to tranquility and Nirvana.

And what have I explained? Suffering have I explained, the cause of suffering, the destruction of suffering, and the path that leads to the destruction of suffering have I explained. For this is useful.

4. Buddha preached a religion devoid of tradition. He stood on top of the past and its peaks extended his vision enormously, but he saw his contemporaries as largely buried beneath those peaks. He encouraged his followers, therefore, to slip free from the past’s burden. “Do not go by what is handed down, nor on the authority of your traditional teachings. When you know of yourselves: ‘These teachings are not good: these teachings when followed out and put in practice conduce to loss and suffering’—then reject them.” His most important personal break with archaism lay in his decision—comparable to Martin Luther’s decision to translate the Bible from Latin into German—to quit Sanskrit and teach in the vernacular of the people.

5. Buddha preached a religion of intense self-effort. We have noted the discouragement and defeat that had settled over the India of Buddha’s day. Many had come to accept the round of birth and rebirth as unending, which was like resigning oneself to a sentence of hard labor for eternity. Those who still clung to the hope of eventual release had resigned themselves to the brahminic teaching that the precess would take thousands of lifetimes, during which they would gradually work their way into the brahmin caste, the only one from which release was possible.

Nothing struck the Buddha as more pernicious than this prevailing fatalism. He denied only one assertion, that of the “fools” who say there is no action, no deed, no power. “Here is a path to the end of suffering. Tread it!” Moreover, every individual must tread this path himself or herself, through self-arousal and initiative. No god or gods could be counted on, not even the Buddha himself. When I am gone, he told his followers in effect, do not bother to pray to me; for when I am gone I will really be gone. “Buddhas only point the way. Work out your salvation with diligence.” The notion that only brahmins could attain enlightenment the Buddha considered ridiculous. Whatever your caste, he told his followers, you can make it in this very lifetime. “Let persons of intelligence come to me, honest, candid, straightforward; I will instruct them, and if they practice as they are taught, they will come to know for themselves and to realized that supreme religion and goal.”

6. Buddha preached a religion devoid of the supernatural. He condemned all forms of divination, soothsaying, and forecasting as low arts, and, though he concluded from his own experience that the human mind was capable of powers now referred to as paranormal, he refused to allow his monks to play around with those powers. “By this you shall know that a man is not my disciple—that he tries to work a miracle.” All appeal to the supernatural and reliance on it amounted, he felt, to looking for shortcuts, easy answers, and simple solutions that could only divert attention from the hard, practical task of self-advance. “It is because I perceive danger in the practice of mystic wonders that I strongly discourage it.”

Whether the Buddha’s religion—critical of authority, ritual, speculative theology, tradition, reliance on divine aid, and supernaturalism—was also a religion without God will be reserved for later consideration. After his death all the accoutrements the Buddha labored to protect his religion from came tumbling into it, but as long as he lived, he kept them at bay. As a consequence, original Buddhism present us with a version of religion that is unique and therefore historically invaluable, for every insight into the forms that religion can take increases our understanding of what in essence religion really is. Original Buddhism can be characterized positively as follows:

1. It was empirical. Never has a religion presented its case with such unequivocal appeal to direct validation. On every question personal experience was the final test of truth. “Do not go by reasoning, nor by inferring, nor by argument.” A true disciple must “know for him- or herself.”

2. It was scientific. Not only did it make the quality of lived experience its final test, it directed its attention to discovering natural cause-and-effect relationships that affected that experience. There is no effect without its cause, and no supernatural beings who interrupt the basic causal processes of the world. The Buddha himself considered his greatest contribution to be the discovery of a causal law—dependent arising—whose short version runs, “That being present, this becomes; that not being present, this does not
become.”

3. It was pragmatic—a transcendental pragmatism if one wishes, to distinguish it from the kind that focuses exclusively on practical problems in everyday life, but pragmatic all the same in being concerned with problem solving. Refusing to be sidetracked by speculative questions, Buddha kept his attention riveted on predicaments that demanded solution. Unless his teachings were useful tools, they had no value whatsoever. He likened them to rafts; they help people cross streams, but are of no further value once the farther shore is reached.

4. It was therapeutic. Pasteur’s words, “I do not ask you either your opinions or your religion; but what is your suffering?” could equally have been his. “One thing I teach,” said the Buddha, “suffering and the end of suffering. It is just Ill and the ceasing of Ill that I proclaim.”

5. It was psychological. The word is used here in contrast to “metaphysical.” Instead of beginning with the universe and moving to the place of human beings within it, the Buddha invariably began with the human lot, its problems, and the dynamics of coping with them.

6. It was egalitarian. With a breadth of view unparalleled in his age and infrequent in any, he insisted that women were as capable of enlightenment as men. And he rejected the caste system’s assumption that aptitudes were hereditary. Born a kshatriya (warrior, ruler), yet finding himself temperamentally a brahmin, he broke caste, opening his order to all, regardless of social status.

7. It was directed to individuals. Buddha was not blind to the social side of human nature. He not only founded a religious community (sangha) that he hoped would become the nucleus of an enlightened society, he insisted on the importance of having “spiritual friends” to reinforce individual resolves: “Noble Friendship is the entire Holy Life.” Yet in the end his appeal was to the individual, that each should proceed toward enlightenment through confronting his or her individual situation and predicaments. “Therefore, O Ananda, be lamps unto yourselves. Betake yourselves to no external refuge. Hold fast as a refuge to the Truth. Work out your own salvation with diligence.”

Step 1

Admitted that we were powerless over alcohol and that our lives had become unmanageable.

Jennifer suggests reading the following essay, The Perfection of Truth, by Gil Fronsdal before her talk.

Without a commitment to truth there is no Buddhist path. Dharma is a synonym for truth and Dharma practice is synonymous for living a life of truth. In Buddhist mythology, it is said that, in his many lifetimes of training, the Buddha-to-be never lied. While there are stories in which he transgressed other ethical precepts, his dedication to truthfulness was unwavering.

One of the primary characteristics of psychologically or spiritually mature people is that they never lie to themselves. Being honest with oneself is a prerequisite to personal growth and genuine liberation of the heart. This is so important that we can safely say, as an absolute truth in Buddhist practice, that deceiving oneself is never acceptable. Serious practitioners strive to be impeccably honest with themselves.

Truth brings inner peace by overcoming the conflicts and turmoil we carry within our own minds. Truth can bring an inner security that frees us from neurotically defending, apologizing for, hating, or hiding ourselves from ourselves. Truth can also help overcome conflict between people, as we have seen with the profound work done by South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Truth is not the same as facts. Facts alone carry no power whereas truth does. Mahatma Gandhi expressed this in coining the term satyagraha or “the power of truth.” (Inspired by Gandhi, Martin Luther King translated truth as “soul,” and satyagraha became “Soul Power” in the American civil rights movement of the 1950’s and 60’s.)

A variety of forces come together to give truth its power. One is the force of inner purity and calm that can only be found in truth and honesty. Another is confidence that comes with knowing what is true. Yet another is the strength of the good intentions that stand behind speaking truth. Still another is the way that truth makes reconciliation and forgiveness possible. And finally there is the impact of the many beautiful qualities of heart released when truth helps liberate us from fear, hatred, or greed.

One place we see the power of truth is in AA and other twelve-step groups. AA may have saved more lives than any other spiritual tradition in our modern times. It insists that alcoholics tell the truth. By admitting their powerlessness over the addiction and making a careful moral inventory, alcoholics learn how to use the truth to release themselves from their compulsions.

Buddhism also uses truth as a way to find release from clinging and the suffering that ensues. The Four Noble Truths are not meant to be truths in the sense of a creed that a Buddhist much believe. They are pragmatic truths much like how it is true that if you cut yourself deeply with a knife, you will hurt and if you keep the wound clean, you promote its healing. The Four Noble Truths is the Buddha’s way of saying that, if you cling or grasp to anything, you will suffer; if you let go of that clinging, that suffering will end. The Four Noble Truths have no value in the abstract. They are verified through direct experience, by discovering how to be directly honest about our suffering and its causes.

The need for personal honesty is the reason that Buddhist practice depends on mindfulness. Mindfulness is sometimes defined as the practice of being honest about what is happening in the present moment. The awesome freedom and profound peace toward which the Buddhist path moves has nothing to do with how much we know, whom we know, how rich, smart, or beautiful we are, or who admires or even loves us. Rather, this path has everything to do with telling ourselves the truth and, in doing so, becoming a true person.

Through mindfulness we discover a truth that is deeper than beliefs. These truths will transform our character, our deepest sense of being. What we say and do comes to be in harmony with who we are. If we don’t become someone who is true, we have no peace nor freedom. When our life is firmly based on truth, peace is not something we have – it is who we are.