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Channel: Relief Meditation
Date: 2021-10-27

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Mediation And Meditation: The Deeper Middle Way!

“Now, there are many, many people in the world, but relatively few with whom we interact, and even fewer who cause us problems. So, when you come across such a chance for practicing patience and tolerance, you should treat it with gratitude. It is rare. Just as having unexpectedly found a treasure in your own house, you should be happy and grateful to your enemy for providing that precious opportunity.” The Dalai Lama
Conflict is everywhere, not only between human beings, but throughout nature, from quantum mechanical particles to dark energy and the soap bubble structure of galactic superclusters. Nonetheless, we each take our conflicts personally, and far from being happy or grateful to our enemies, we often allow ourselves to be thrown off balance and drawn into unpleasant ideas, negative emotions, and destructive behaviors.

So what is the solution? How do we return to balance and equanimity, and perhaps even to happiness and gratitude? We can start by reframing conflict through the lens of the “four noble truths,” as originally taught by the Buddha. For example, we can recognize that our lives are filled with conflict; that conflict is a form of suffering that is caused by attachment; that we can stop, settle, resolve, transform, and transcend our conflicts by reducing our attachment; and that the way of doing so is by following the middle path – in other words, not merely by meditation, but mediation as well.

However, as we quickly learn, while the middle path may seem simple, it conceals a number of profound truths, one of which is that there is simplicity both this and the other side of complexity. As the famous Zen saying puts it, “Before I started meditating, blue mountains were blue mountains and white clouds were white clouds. After meditating a while, blue mountains were no longer blue mountains and white clouds were no longer white clouds. But after meditating further, blue mountains are blue mountains and white clouds are white clouds”

In conflict, we often delude ourselves into thinking we are following the middle path, but are actually, in a simple way, only withdrawing from our opponents, remaining silent, and avoiding engagement or controversy. But if we want to become “Bodhisattvas of conflict,” we need to follow a different path, one that leads us through, and to the other side of complexity and conflict.

This “middle” path consists of engaging with the conflicted parts of ourselves and our opponents, and discovering through awareness and the experience of authentic relationship, a deeper source of compassion than the abstract, purely meditative one that is often devoid of genuine experience, and as a result, does not require us to grapple with or overcome our attachments at their source.

There are actually two different middle paths, leading to entirely different outcomes. The first consists of adding two things together and finding their average. We do this when we add two sums and divide by two, or when we combine something hot with something cold to produce something that is lukewarm.

The second middle way consists of combining entirely different things in a creative way, as when we combine water with flour and heat to create bread, which is not an average, but an outcome that is completely new and different. The same transformation takes place when we ask questions that reveal the underlying reasons for a dispute, which often have nothing in common with the issues people are vigorously fighting over.

This deeper, transformational middle way can be accessed through “skillful means,” which include not only meditation techniques that assist us in becoming more centered, compassionate, and aware of ourselves and others; but mediation techniques that enable us to engage in authentic and committed listening, openhearted communication, empathetic dialogue, creative problem solving, collaborative negotiation, genuine forgiveness, and reconciliation. These quintessential conflict resolution skills allow us to escape the ruts our conflicts draw us into, and reveal to us that it is the mind, and not just the flag or the wind that is waving. How do we reach this awareness?

Within Buddhism, there are not only mindfulness or awareness practices, but concentration and insight practices. These ultimately merge into a single practice that encompasses every part of us. As the great Rinzai teacher Hakuin wrote: “What is the true meditation? It is to make everything – coughing, swallowing, waving the arms, motion, stillness, words, action, the evil and the good, prosperity and shame, gain and loss, right and wrong – into one single koan. ”