The Chinese Master Yunmen referred to the most profound Buddhist teachings as simply being “an appropriate response” to the circumstances of our lives. Any time we see egolessness in action, we are looking at an appropriate response. Whenever we can watch someone act without wanting anything in return for his or her action, we are seeing an appropriate response in action. Essentially, an appropriate response is participation that arises from a space of non-resistance. Unlike the reactions of resistance offered by an ego that thinks it’s enlightened, an appropriate response is unimpeded, open and unattached to any outcome or agenda, just like any of us might return a heartfelt smile or help someone who is struggling with his grocery bags and car keys. Since any of us can meet our circumstances like this as long as we show up to what is really going on in our lives, each of us can express the Awakened capacity that has always been available underneath all of the interests of our small selves. This is what is meant when the sages of today as well as those of old say that we are already enlightened.

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Only a Buddha with a Buddha realizes enlightenment.

—Lotus Sutra

All real living is meeting.

—Martin Buber

When I see that I am nothing, that is wisdom. When I see that I am everything, that is love. And between these two, my life flows.

—Nisargadatta Maharaj

When there is a meeting among beings grounded in the commitment not to harm, Spirit enriches everything. This enrichment happens because unattached Knowing supports the dissolution of clinging with its infinite field of helpful compassion. In any place that is consciously free of clinging, there is a chance to meet, as we say in the Zen liturgy, “an unsurpassed, penetrating, perfect Enlightenment.”

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The only difference between us is that I am aware of my natural state, while you are bemused… We discover it by being earnest, by searching, enquiring, questioning daily and hourly, by giving one’s life to this discovery.

—Nisargadatta Maharaj

Those who enter the gates of heaven are not beings who have no passions or who have curbed the passions, but those who have cultivated an understanding of them.

—William Blake

If you gaze long enough into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

The commitment to walking along the Path of Awakening challenges us in ways that most of us don’t expect. Truly dedicating ourselves to anything is hard work, but this is especially true for this process. Devotion to deep spiritual work is perhaps one of the most treacherous areas for any of us to explore since it involves nothing short of an all-encompassing promise to live our lives as profound expressions of the Truth that all the great spiritual teachers, whether they be Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Christian, Buddhist, or anything else, have been pointing out over the course of human history.

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“Whenever you feel a judgment arise in your awareness, you are feeling the ego’s energetic pull,” the Zen teacher said to a group of us in the meditation hall.

It was late in the afternoon and I was tired, worried that I might fall asleep during this lady’s talk. I wasn’t bored with what she was saying, I just wanted a little sleep.

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My first day of kindergarten was interesting. I wasn’t yet five years old, and as my parents began to leave me in my new classroom, I noticed that my mother was crying. Why in the world would she do that? I wondered. As time progressed, so too did the depths of our dinner conversations, and since the school was parochial, I eagerly shared biblical stories with my parents that had been offered up in class. I remember being obsessed with the stories of Jonah inside the whale, Job’s really bad luck, Abraham nearly killing his son, and especially Cain beating down his brother Abel. This last story had real significance since I was always beating down my brother Mark, and I was worried that I might be punished by God if I wasn’t careful. How scary it all was, and yet for some reason I couldn’t get enough of it.

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Things derive their being and nature by mutual dependence and are nothing in themselves.

—Nagarjuna

Among the great things to be found among us, the Being of Nothingness is the greatest.

—Leonardo da Vinci

Descending the Mountain means that we are able to engage each moment in life from an unattached position of discriminating awareness rather than from a position of judgment. It can be helpful to think of discriminating awareness as simply the recognition of whatever presents itself to us without any positive or negative mental evaluation. Judgment, on the other hand, involves the ego’s assessment and appraisal. For example, as I began my meditation practice years ago, there were times when I would finish my morning meditation and then think, Wow, that was a great meditation. I hope I can do that again this afternoon. This egoic evaluation was metaphorically putting clouds in what otherwise would have been an open, blue-sky mind. In my contracted striving to recreate my personal judgment of what was great, I inhibited the expansion I’d tasted in the first place.

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Tonight Michael talks about facing the terror of our own mortality with integrity. This allows for each of us to lead a deeper life.

As we come off the Mountain of Spirit, we recognize how little about us needs to be defended. This is because we have begun to build lives out of our realization of Emptiness. This Emptiness is the Source of everything. This Source, once again, is totally still and gives birth to all that moves. It is an eternal, unmoving Awareness that generates everything that evolves. It has no opinion about anything, no judgments, no beliefs, and no convictions. It is neither happy nor sad and is concerned with neither gain nor loss, neither praise nor blame, neither pleasure nor pain. These, after all, are personal concerns, and Emptiness has nothing to do with any of these things that we recognize as being personal. There is no I, you, we, or they associated with any part of Emptiness—and no mine, yours, ours, or theirs. Nor is there, oddly enough, anything missing from it. This Empty Source, this Spirit, is exactly beyond all form, and as such, it is beyond anything that can be confined.

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