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Completing Mahler

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Meditation teachers often refer to the restless, self-entertaining wandering mind as the “monkey-mind.” Like a monkey left in a cage, or in a the jungle, the untrained conceptual mind picks up this thought-object one moment, drops it for another emotion-toy another moment, mouths on some some tasty yet inedible memory for another few minutes, snorts some vague future plan another, or chews an imagined idea or feeling the next, sniffing around some ancient hurt or grievance, teething-a-this, licking-a-that.

The monkey-mind is not good, not bad: it has no point to what it does. It’s just the endless play of the stream of random thought-processes, filling our view, leading mostly to nothing, a shadow engaged with insubstantial shadows believing some real life is happening, when, in fact, there are only the shifting shapes of empty-thought, hollowed out of any real meaning, providing no true direction for how to live our lives, from moment to moment. Left unexamined, the monkey-mind follows the gravitational pull of accumulated karma (or, as my Teacher defined it, “habit-mind”), and following this blind force pulls our behavior into actions and reactions which impose further sufferings on our lives. The word for this — monkey-mind following its own tail — is samsara, the wheel of suffering.

Without training in meditation, grounding ourselves in some awareness practices, we tend to float along mainly on the the dancing waves of our flitting thoughts. This burns into our consciousness an unstable, unsteady, even self-terrorizing sense of unfulfilled, unfulfillable sleepwalking through life. 

The tech writer Linda Stone famously referred to this mind-state as “continuous partial attention”: “In a 24/7, always-on world, continuous partial attention used as our dominant attention mode contributes to a feeling of overwhelm, over-stimulation and to a sense of being unfulfilled. We are so accessible, we’re inaccessible. The latest, greatest powerful technologies have contributed to our feeling increasingly powerless.”

More than ever, it is important to stop what we are doing, and return to our originally grounded state. Finding a few minutes in our day, on a regular basis, to sit and be with the breath, is universally recognized for its ability to add clarity and true, substantial seeing and BEing in this ever-shifting meta-flow we call modern life.

Yet the monkey-mind is strong, so even just a few minutes of breathing here and there in the day — or even one of these meditation-on-the-go mindfulness apps — can often not be enough. The mind is trained too strongly by habit to prefer distraction, that it is often quite necessary to put aside time for longer retreats, for deeper and more immersive observation, reflection, and return to our undying, unmoving.

It is humbling to see the power of the monkey-mind lingering, even after more than three decades of intensive Zen practice. One example I use to illustrate this, in public talks, is what I call “completing Mahler.”

A little background is necessary: After the Buddha himself, and Zen Master Seung Sahn, my greatest, most all-inspiring intellectual/spiritual love and teacher is the indescribable cosmic soul of the Austro-Bohemian composer, Gustav Mahler (1860-1911). His symphonic works so completely move my spirit that I limit listening to him to only several times per year. Somewhat shameful to admit that there is something in his expression that is just too overwhelming to my senses, too familiar to my painfully-constructed psychology, that it seems to shake my thinking and emotions for days and days after listening, and I have noticed that the pieces and fragments of his music remain in my meditation, like dust-mote fragments and shards of my own thoughts, floating down into view against the otherwise limitless space of my own original True Nature. I have learned, therefore, to rest listening to him, except quite rarely. So, the way a nicely rolled cigarette of fine tobacco might pleasure after a particularly good meal, yet linger in the clothing and throat for hours or even days thereafter, as a meditator, I choose to forego the pleasure of Mahler to a few, well-considered sessions per year, and not let his terrifying sublimity linger in my meditation practice too often. In the end, I choose the purity of meditative infinity over his sublimity, when given the choice (but please don’t tempt me!).

So, especially during retreats — and for several days to a week before the start of even a 3-day retreat — hearing Mahler is totally “verboten”. I know that if I listen to him, he will waft in and out of my sittings for several days, possessing and ravishing me, absolutely manhandling any clear samadhi back into his exquisite anguish, his yearning, struggling, self-contradicting, explosive mind — too much like my own, in so many respects that it truly frightens me. More than sex or imagined voyages or memories, the greatest temptation in my meditation — the one irresistible one — is having fragments of Mahler float like dust-motes in my near-view.

Once, some three years ago, while engaged in a 30-day silent intensive meditation retreat at our Zen Center in Regensburg, I had a surprising experience of the monkey-mind which showed the continuity of this habit, even after three decades of determined practice and untold number of intensive retreats on mountaintops in Asia.

Our Zen Center is located the second floor of a building situated on a tiny cobblestone street, right smack in the center of the Old Town of this beautiful UNESCO-listed city. The street is so narrow, it is basically wide enough for just one car to pass at a time.

Our neighbor across the narrow Gasse is none other than the famed priest, Father Georg Ratzinger, the brother of the retired former Pope Benedict (Josef Ratzinger). Fr. Ratzinger is a trained musician of sacred music, and legendary former head of the world-famous boys’ choir, the Regensburg Domspatzen. He enjoys orchestral music a great deal, and many days, the sound of orchestral music recordings can be heard wafting from his upstairs room. (Due perhaps to his advanced age of mid-90s, the music is played somewhat louder than usual, and in summer, with the windows flung open, the sound of this music is channeled up and down our narrow little cobblestone street, beginning sometimes before dawn!)

It was one day during the summer retreat in 2016. We had resumed the sitting meditation after morning work period, and were settled into the 10-12 period of sittings that would bring us to lunch. Our windows were wide open, to welcome a gentle summer breeze into the Dharma Room, which was filled with about 15 people, all sitting facing the wall, legs crossed, with attention brought to the breath and question inside. “What am I?”

The retreat had progressed well enough along, by that point, that I had already passed though some of the shakiness of the initial days, and was already experiencing such a clear, boundless, unshakeable infinite stillness of just-now vastness in all directions that even the tiniest thought was not arising, and if so, immediately, spontaneously dissolving into don’t-know’s absolute ether. The bliss of this complete become-one is indescribable! Everything and I were just pure inseparable Moment, and Moment was the universe. There were no separate things, no “I” or “it,” no here or  there: vast emptiness without cease, without contour or border. It is the best place to “be.” In fact, it is literally the only place.

At some point midway through the second sitting, the notes of Mahler’s First Symphony came wafting out of Fr. Ratzinger’s bedroom windows. In particular, it was the Second Movement — and in that, the great swinging Ländler, which I have always cherished deeply, and which moves me with particular force, joy, exuberance, and the sweet contentment of something vaguely Central European lurking somewhere in my mind’s DNA.

Mahler Symphony No.1, Second Movement

Of course, I was drawn to the music, pouring into our Dharma Room. It is the first time I have heard beloved Mahler during full-on meditation, so it was such a strange surprise. The music was just music, at first — no different from bicycle sounds or bird sounds or pedestrian chatting-sounds passing by outside. Nothing special. That was interesting. It had a neutral feeling. “Oh, that is appearing.” That is all.

But then, as the minutes passed, and the rolling, swaying movement of Mahler’s exquisitely tortured Jewish-Bohemian soul poured in, I noticed embodied joy arising, and the familiar associations of pleasure and longing that such music naturally had always inspired in my soul. The movement of thinking was becoming apparent! I felt sucked out of pure “emptiness” into the emotional movements of a structured rhythm, melody, phrasing, and Mahler’s own characteristic personality. This suctioning out — back into the whirlwind realm of thinking — was an amazing thing to witness happen, of its own accord.

Yet what happened next truly astounded: During that summer, the Regensburg Synagogue was being expanded just two buildings away from our Dharma Room. The sound of drilling power tools and compressors sometimes momentarily announced themselves out of nowhere, without warning, in short bursts of intense rattling that blocked out all other sounds.

Just then, during the second sitting period, after witnessing several minutes of my own emotions emerging from ether-like emptiness and flowing back into the contoured weightedness of Mahler’s sharply existentialized emotions, a jackhammer suddenly sounded out, loudly. The metallic rattling was so total, it completely blotted out the rolling music of the stamping, pulsing, folky Second Movement. After just about 20 seconds of high-intensity jackhammer rattling, the sound ceased, and the music was there, again, albeit in a later part of the movement. Then the jackhammer rattled back, blocking out another 20 or so seconds, and stopped. This went on and on and on.

I noticed that, during these rude interstices of rattle, my thinking-mind was — without conscious effort — soundlessly “threading along” every note of the blotted-out sections of Mahler. Though I remained in meditation (albeit somewhat “compromised” by emotional identification with a favored piece of music), when the jackhammer covered up a section of Mahler, the monkey-mind filled it in, note for precious note. All of the instrumentation — in place! Layer after baklava layer of Mahler’s perfect scoring — in place! Rhythm and tempo — in place! When the jackhammer would pause, the music was there in exactly the place where monkey-mind had left off, not a single note out of order. Layered foreground-instrumentation and layered background-instrumentation were wedded together, seamlessly. Every jackhammered-“blotting out” was meticulously reconstructed, in situ, into Mahler’s sublime world, from years of remembered listening and absorption.

Seeing this was itself a great revelation. It showed the great ambition of the monkey-mind not to be forgotten, his determination not to find unemployment, given the right circumstances. Even in the clear, clear depths of meditation, when baited to life again, the slumbering monkey-mind becomes as industrious as before. He put on the cosmic forms of Mahler’s music, to entertain me with the hollowest

After several minutes of this experience, I was able to return, again, to that borderless realm of before-thinking mind again, and swim again in the smudgeless, no-form bliss of our original nature. The remainder of the symphony passed and could not move the mind so much as before. But it was not before I had seen, with blinding clarity, the ever-industrious workings of monkey-mind, even several days into retreat, to ascend herself so automatically to the level of even such a mind as Gustav Mahler! Anything to get attention, anything to fill empty space with its shadows and forms.

The shape-shifting monkey-mind is actually a product of evolution: many scientists believe that we are somewhat hard-wired to constantly produce alternative scenarios in our brains for use in case attacked or challenged by competitor or foe. “If attacked from this direction, how should I respond?” “If chased from that direction, what are the possible routes to safety?” “If attacked by club, what objects within reach could be weaponized to protect my brood?” This hard-wiring, relentlessly keying up alternative scenarios and realities, ensured the survival of so much DNA to the current age. But it does not serve our complicated lives in a modern world, subsumed in urban settings layered over with complex relationships and calculations, varying social settings. “The mind is a great servant, but a terrible master.” Monkey-mind does not function so well in the driver’s seat.

In his 1819 classic poem, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” John Keats wrote, “Heard melodies are sweet / But those unheard are sweeter still.” I would very much beg to differ, especially when it comes to the melodies of Mahler. But this is especially true for a Zen meditator, for whom these “unheard melodies” are seen to be what they really are: the whipsaw flashings of the tail of monkey-mind.

(Derived from an essay first published in Consider Journal, Winter 2019/20)

Response to an Essay About “Teacher”

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I recently read a very beautiful essay about the power of “Teacher”, posted on Facebook by Magda Bepunkt. I recommend this to everyone. In this case, it is inspired by the rare soul called Niko, the founder and Guiding Teacher of Ashtanga Yoga Regensburg. Although there were/are other very very good Ashtanga practitioners in Regensburg when he first arrived in March 2016, his particular passion and honesty and extraordinary self-discipline have farmed a garden of beautiful flowers which continue to bloom today as a group, a family of strong Ashtangis here in Regensburg, called Ashtanga Yoga Regensburg, still practicing under his clear direction as the main teacher. 

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In Tibetan Buddhism as well as in traditional Yoga, the root teacher (sometimes called “guru,” but that’s not important, because of sometimes strange connotations, and Niko would never accept that) is not just some “phase,” but a lifelong relationship. It is not a “friend.” It is not a “buddy.” And the relationship is never meant to be “easy”. It is meant to inspire and to hone, yes, and also to challenge, to “thwart,” where necessary, a “regular” person of mediocre sensibilties into a true Teacher of others. 

Dae Soen Sa Nim used to say to some of us, his students, “I am not your ‘friend.'” Most people today don’t “get” that dimension of true apprenticeship. They want a teacher like a cuddly object who just agrees with the student’s karma, letting them go on with their karmic movie uninterrupted. In another place, Dae Soen Sa Nim said, “There are two kinds of students: the student who ‘likes’ their Teacher, and the student who completely believes in their Teacher. If a student just ‘likes’ their Teacher, even very strongly, this is mostly emotional feeling. This feeling will change when the Teacher confronts them, challenges some part of their mind that they want to hold onto. One day, ‘I don’t like this teacher so much like before! I cannot follow him!’ This kind of relationship is emotional, based on feeling, and feelings always change. This is not very high-class understanding of ‘teacher.’ But a student who BELIEVES in their Teacher means they believe in their own True Self 100%, because the true Teacher is only functioning as a mirror back to them. So, if you ‘like’ your Teacher only, even very much, that’s not bad, but you will not grow; if you completely BELIEVE in your Teacher, then even this Teacher’s bad actions or harsh speech are always teaching you. It’s like a bad man carrying a candle: if you attach to this bad man’s actions or speech, and like or don’t like that, then you do not see this light in the darkness, and maybe you fall into a hole! But if you completely believe in your True Self 100%, and only see this light that is being shown by the Teacher, then you going anywhere with no hindrance.” 

This is a very important teaching. I once practiced under another really great and fearsome Zen master in Korea who made me eat things and drink things (in massive quantities!) and do things that felt really really uncomfortable. He cursed all the time, he was impatient, even sometimes a bit aggressive. But his Dharma light really changed my life. If I had only attached to this “bad man’s” actions, I would not have stayed around long enough to benefit from his light.

Jesus was also so: he was a very very “bad” rabbi, by the standards of the day — very bad. Eating too much, drinking too much, hanging around with the “unclean” and people who were collaborating with the Roman occupiers ((Luke 7:33-34; cf. Matthew 11:18-19)). He even cursed sometimes and had arguably racist views (Matthew 15:21-28). Yet his light travels into our hearts until today. A real bad-ass with a candle.

I worry about students these days. In the age of social media “liking” and “friending/unfriending,” inevitably this consumerist mentality enters the teacher-student relationship. There is a vast marketplace of so-called “teachers” (mostly, “instructors for hire”). Do a few boldface workshops, have a few good Instagram poses, and you’re good to go. But are you really a Teacher? Even after 30 years of this apprenticeship, I am still deeply afraid of asking that question to myself.

So, you cannot push a student these days to really shape and re-shape them from the inside-out: everybody clings to their comfort zone. This is a terrible disease in meditation communities. It is something which yoga practitioners must be especially careful about, not because of the teaching itself, but because of the vast, highly-commercialized marketplace of yoga opportunities. If I don’t like this product or service, I can just choose another. Collect a few teachers at this or that workshop, with no allegiance to any single one of them. Maybe get some new teaching by Amazon Prime, in the future.

But this is not the way the sacred alchemy of teacher/student works, whether it’s in Zen or in yoga or in becoming a great violin virtuoso.

Working with a true Teacher is never meant to be a simple or easy or even entirely pleasurable affair. This relationship was never meant to reaffirm your ego and make you feel “good.” It’s not even meant to get you “certified” to get paid to lead classes for others. If it was, the people would not be filling stadiums and concert halls and festivals for noisy spectacles — they would be crowding yoga shalas and meditation halls. Our parents don’t raise us well by indulging us, and keeping danger far away: they teach us with whatever the situation demands, always knowing that our growth will only happen strongly when we have met the challenge through serious and constant trial and error.

My relationship with Dae Soen Sa Nim was one of — if not THE — most significant relationship of my life. Yet it was quite often a very very very hard struggle. It went through periods of real hurting, and I was often angry with him. (This was common among many practitioners in those days, especially those with strong egoistic attachment, like me.) I and others who now consider him to be our lifetime Teacher even went through periods of significant estrangement from him. He used to say, “A Zen monk is most dangerous thing in the world, more than atom bomb!” Well, he was positively off-the-charts in that regard. But it wasn’t the karmic package of the “him” that I followed: it was the shadowless light radiating from his great candle that I followed, and it led me to the equally-strong light burning from within my own life. This was the power of our relationship. It’s not about “him.” And it’s definitely not about “me.” But it might take a really significant commitment of time and energy to get there.

In another situation, he would say, “The greatest sword in the world is a samurai sword. It is a piece of special metal that is stuck in very very hot fire, then taken out and beaten with a hammer. White-hot fire, then beating; fire fire fire, then beat beat beat; fire fire fire, then beat beat beating. This makes a samurai sword. A samurai sword can cut anything, even most kinds of metal.” Then he would look at us and say, with a smile on his face, lowering his head a little and looking over the rims of his glasses, “So, what do you want to be? A samurai sword, or just another kind of knife?”

In Western yoga, with this emphasis on Asanas and getting some resume to be able to teach as soon as possible, it must be very hard to train and shape real and true Teachers, I imagine. Frankly, it would be somewhat depressing to have to work in that field, just because the marketplace and the commercialization mitigate so pervasively against all of the teachings and training regimens. These wines are often rushing to market before the real and true fermentation takes place. Economic necessity does that, social affirmations do that, and the superficial flow of life in the modern world — saturated with a constant, withering blast of cheap sensory over-stimulation and instant public approval — makes it hard, I hear, for even the most sincere yoga practitioner to rise above the degradation. People come to believe that a temporary elevation of dopamine levels is, in fact, true spiritual experience. And they become addicted to that, and they do not want to go any further. The lotus-eaters, of ancient Greek myth, one could say. No one can teach them!

The Chinese Zen master Ta-Hui (1089–1163) once said, ““In the conduct of their daily activities, sentient beings have no illumination. If you go along with their ignorance, they are happy; if you oppose their ignorance, they become vexed.”

I had one student. She is a yoga teacher in France. She always likes me when I talk about practice and give soft affirmations for her work and study and have coffee with her and tell interesting Zen stories and talk about her kids. But when there are significant rough spots that need smoothing out, and I challenge that with clear and direct speech — when I hold up the mirror of Zen — she doesn’t like me anymore. As an Ashtanga teacher, she is very comfortable giving physical adjustments to other people — that is her job. And they can often be quite painful, because of my body condition. But when a Zen monk gives “mind-adjustments,” somehow it is too painful. “How can you say such things?” Such is life. She is a good person and I love her very much. But I feel very sad about her resistance. If the mirror reveals some blemish or problem, and you punch the mirror, is that a correct way? All you do is destroy the mirror and bloody your own hand! Is that true wisdom?

One time she asked me for some advice on an important matter in her family-life. “What should I do about this? I want your view…” she asked. I gave two alternatives, very clear and simple, and not really that difficult. Then I said, “With these two alternatives, you have a choice: You can be a Big ‘T’ Teacher, or a Small ‘t’ teacher. You decide.” Well, as expected (sadly), she followed her karma and chose the Small ‘t’-route, and things eventually ended up in a total stupid disaster which caused (and still cause) great pain for several people. Naturally, she stopped asking for advice on difficult matters, and I stopped offering it. I just told her pleasant Zen stories and made her laugh and talked about her kids, because that was all she was ready to accept. She wanted a teacher she could really really “like.” And so I gave that to her, and she was really really happy. She said that we “got along” even better than before, better than when I was trying to give her real and true adjustments, which I do with all the other students. She was much happier being petted, but inside, I was very sad. She did not believe in her True Self, only her feelings and attachments. She thought of her little karmic-prison as the Palace of Versailles, and she did not like when I tried to break a hole in that wall. Now, she’s a queen of her beautiful little prison.

When Niko Miko founded Ashtanga Yoga Regensburg four years ago, he had nothing in Regensburg, nothing in Bavaria, nothing in Germany. But he was definitely known for one important thing, among the Greek yoga community of which he is a particularly respected and beloved member: He served teacher and lineage with untiring energy, always deferring to the teacher, always serving the teacher. He handled everything with impeccable grace and true respect, no matter what. First meeting him in 2011 reminded me of the attitude of a newbie Zen monk. And that is why he is the Teacher today who many love and respect. This is very very different from someone who has attended a few yoga workshops here and there, flitting around collecting yoga “experiences” under this teacher or that, saying that they “teach” just because they have an Instagram account which promotes their asanas.

In my 30 years actually living in spiritual community — in the temples of Asia and in the Zen centers of the West — it is only the practitioners who make a strong CONTINUOUS effort under one Teacher, enduring everything that that Teacher throws at them (as long as it is ethical, instructive, consensual) who become the true vessels of the practice, the tradition, the Way. Only they are the ones who can develop the practices and souls of others. Anyone who claims or acts like they are a Teacher before their own teacher has affirmed that work to be complete is merely an Instagram-instructor, and maybe not much else. At least as far as true practitioners view things.

It’s great to see the students continuing to work strongly with Niko through the Ashtanga Yoga Regensburg community which he built out of nothing, together with the support of the Zen Center Regensburg family. We are so happy and proud to be a part of this wonderful, challenging journey together.

Thank you for your beautiful reflections on the power of t/Teacher, Magda.