Levine on the rational mind (long)

[Guest guest]

Going Beyond the Ordinary Mind

Levine

Thirty years ago, while I was sitting in the No Name Bar in Sausalito with two long-time acquaintances, one a San Francisco poet, the other a member of a local motorcycle gang, the biker asked, "Who was the most rational person ever to have lived?" Without much reflection I said Lao Tzu. They both frowned, shook their heads, and in unison said, "Hitler!" Victims of a tragic logic, I thought, and bowed out of the conversation.

Within a few years one had committed suicide and the other had been shot in the head during a fight. Although I disagreed at the time, they were in a way correct. The "rational" mind is completely amoral. Offer it a problem, no matter how irrational, and it will solve it. The Jewish Problem, the Gypsy Problem, the Homosexual Problem, the Handicapped Problem. It has the ethics of a slide rule.

To the ordinary mind-the highly conditioned, habituated, blindly reactive first few levels of consciousness-rationality is next to godliness. But as we delve deeper into consciousness, it is noted that "the tightly boundaried rational" is the hobgoblin of corner living, too small for the sacred whole.

Watch the process of thought. Don't get beached in the ordinary mind. It is irrational to expect the ordinary mind to be rational enough to seek the mystery at the heart of the ordinary. It is just a problem-solving device almost exclusively involved with getting the candy from the table to your mouth. It is the way the mind gets what it wants as efficiently as possible with little or no ethical consideration. It is mindful only if punishment is involved. It makes a great servant, but a terrible master.

But before I totally besmirch the term "ordinary" as the commonly uninvestigated, let me say that it is in the moment-to-moment focus on the ordinary that the extraordinary is discovered. Going from the gross to the subtle, we discover ourselves underneath it all.

Indeed, because I misread the ordinary in the beginning, thinking I knew the difference, I saw too little and missed a rich opportunity.

Acting as best man for a friend at his wedding at the San Francisco Zen Center in the 1960s, I met the dharma treasure Zen Master Suzuki Roshi and hardly connected with him. I was disappointed by his ordinariness. I couldn't recognize the invisibility of a perfectly balanced Tao, the miracle of the illuminated ordinary.

I learned a new level of respect for a much deeper level of the ordinary. Missing the mark with one whose writing and living example has been an inspiration to so many in the burgeoning spiritual movement in America repeatedly reminded me over time to clean the windows of my mindfulness.

The rational mind is as amoral as 2 + 2 = 4, or -12 million. Efficiency is one of the highest virtues of the rational. But the rational suspects the non-self-centered quality of compassion. It is like those who came to complain to the Buddha about his teachings, or those who killed Socrates just to make sure, fearing that clarity might steal their children.

Sense the potential for cold indifference in our sometimes "mercilessly rational behavior." Listen instead to the heart. Be wholly irrational and in love. Drink from Kabir's cup. Dance with Rumi.

The healing never ends. Look yourself in the eye and say I forgive you-and mean it.

Perhaps the reason even the profoundly devoted "selfless" aspirants known in Buddhism as bodhisattvas do not recognize at times that they too are among those sentient beings they have vowed to liberate is because at this present stage of human evolution we often don't feel particularly real to ourselves.

To the ordinary mind others may somehow seem realer than ourselves, because when we say "I," we are referring to a flickering pattern of ideas, concepts, and fears, not to some solid, unchanging central figure within. No abiding permanent entity can be found within, only a wide stream of consciousness within which intermingling currents of thought attempt to create, define, and project who we think we should be, or who we think we are or might be, ­given the chance. We pretend to be real. We practice in the great rehearsal halls of the cortex before the mirror of our self-image.

But of course no amount of pretense can make us real. Only love makes things real. The more we love, the more real we become. We are so uncertain of ourselves, we cling to the rational. We have gone mad trying to be sane. We insist that "the furthest one need go is understanding." But understanding is not enough. It's just the beginning. Indeed, there is nothing we know that we could not know at a deeper level.

Ignoring what one teacher called "our buried treasure" would be a terrible price to pay just to appear more reasonable than you know the ordinary mind to be. You have to be metarational to keep your reason, to open your ordinary mind to the experience of your extraordinary heart. The ordinary mind spends its whole life in the skull; that is why identification with its contents is called small mind. Pretending that what is looking out is someone of value, it misses the precious truth of our true enormity.

Pretense is the common lie, performance our predominant strategy for survival. This desire to appear other than we know ourselves to be is very deep-rooted. Even now, every once in a while I get a glimpse of the mind as a starving two-year-old performing for a reward. We live this lie because it is the only truth we know. Our ordinary confusion mistakes knowledge for wisdom. It says we can know, but not be, God. But of course the truth is just the other way around. We can be God, but we are too big for small mind to find the words.

The will to live, to have, to be, maintains the common lie. It is addicted to becoming. And it insists that only something outside ourselves can bring happiness. The will toward mystery reveals a deeper truth.

Interestingly enough, it is rumored that the wisdom for which Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden was the uncovering of the common lie. The truth imparted by the serpent expanded through the apple branches that there was no such thing as death. It said that the kingdom of heaven was within and that all we needed to do was be compassionate and free within ourselves. Although the myth has fig leaves and genitals in the telling, in truth Adam and Eve were ostracized for covering their heads before God. For realizing we are love, God, nothing more or less than Itself itself.

The ordinary mind would have us believe that ignorance is bliss, that Maya's Eden was paradise. Lulling us into the garden trap. The common lie says everything is just fine as long as I'm not the one in pain. The will toward mystery, like Suzuki Roshi, says, "Everything is perfect, but there is always room for improvement." The ordinary mind creates reality to suit our misperceptions. None of it really makes sense. The ordinary mind just pretends it does, so as not to incite a riot.

Sometimes we lie even when we mean to tell the truth. Sometimes we tell the truth and don't even know it, like a sightless person who, guessing the color of roses by their fragrance, answers, "The breath of God," and is never wrong.

We hope someday to tell the truth. But first we have to find out what it is. And though we have lost our way ten thousand times, the longing just beyond the boundaries of the ordinary mind continues to trust and taste. We are irrationally hopeful, and that's often what it takes. The way past the common lie lies straight ahead.

The ordinary mind, so full of becoming, has been on the make most of our lives. On the make first for survival, then for supremacy. Driven by ambition, flatfooted, posturing to suit the fear, its guts growling with ego­hunger. Unable to be certain of the difference between pleasure and pain, it is constantly shapeshifting to fashion itself into the key that fits another's heart. We have become rudderless and dissatisfied struggling so long for a place in line. On the make with friends and strangers, with praise and blame, with creation and destruction, with women, men, animals, and ghosts, with soil, plants, time, and space.

Even on the make in our prayers, and on our meditation pillow. On the make with God we bow our heads toward the sacred, seeking serotonin with each breath, our eyes aching with effort. On the make with Jesus and Buddha, with Death and Judgment Day. Driven by becoming even in my dreams until one night I found myself sitting with a cooked dog across my lap. As I began picking at its cheek, surprised even in my dream that I should be doing such a thing, it was sweeter than I ever could have imagined! Waking a bit dismayed, the heart whispered it was time to let go of the dog-eat-dog world. That it was time to sit down and just eat my own dog!

It was a letter of resignation!

To go beyond the ordinary mind is to go deeper than thought. In Buddhism ignorance is often defined as the belief that you are the conditioned mind. We have a mind, just as we have a body, but each is a manifestation of consciousness. What moves thoughts through the mind is precisely what moves the clouds across the sky. All are a part of the same continuum of creation unfolding. Mind and body float on the surface of the enormity of Being.

To go beyond the mind is to ever so irrationally and ever so reasonably go beyond our conditioning to the place, the logos, where unconditional love arises spontaneously. You have to be more than rational to accept and dwell in the mystery. You have to love the truth in all its wild and subtle and indescribable forms. We need to listen with the heart as we turn gently toward the mystery.

My mind keeps slipping out of the left side of my head. It leans away from the coldly self­protective and harmful rationality that insists, like most religions, that it is the only way. Small mind becomes confused and claustrophobic when confronted with the enormity of its own Great Nature. It is forced to stop in its tracks and listen deeper to that which knows that God is not dead, but only broken-hearted Nietzsche's agonizingly rational attempt to love less, to feel less, to become a smaller target.

As the mind goes beyond the ordinary, beyond its conditioning and small knowing, it overflows its banks and becomes the heart. The boundaries of the rational dissolve into a feeling of great spaciousness that seems to be that state of being referred to in the New Testament as "the peace which surpasses understanding." This vastness just beyond the understandings of our small selves is a joy that depends on nothing for its existence, a timeless clarity that has no history, no past or future, but only the living presence of Being, the suchness of "Itself itself."

Ironically, it is in the heart rather than the mind that we discover true rationality. That which seeks the best for all sentient beings. An inclination toward healing that even acknowledges the value of our pain. It learns to let go and trust the process. It knows there is an alternative to our well-guarded suffering.

It recognizes love. The mystery is most audible in stillness.

The great Indian saint Ramana Maharshi, like Jesus, said, "Be still and know." Behind even "the still small voice within" there is yet a deeper quiet. A quiet that, once experienced, makes anything less than the whole seem almost a tragedy.

Even the most pleasant thought can be an unwelcome interruption in a peace that permeates the cells and settles a warring world. In the love that knows no other, anything other than love is just suffering. The restlessness and angst of being separate from our own Great Nature. Locked into a mind that thinks itself too small and trusts not the enormity swelling just beneath its crown.

Levine is the bestselling author of many works, including A Gradual Awakening. He is a teacher and an authority on spirituality, relationships, and issues of death and dying. With his wife, Ondrea Levine has counseled terminally ill people and their loved ones for over thirty years.

From the book Turning Toward the Mystery: A Seeker's Journey by Levine. Copyright (Q 2002 by the author. Published by arrangement with HarperSanFrancisco Publishers.