FromIntroduction

This book encourages spiritual awakening. Initially I called it “waking up from the nightmare of materialism.” The approach presented here begins with wakefulness as our original, basic state of being alive. The journey of meditation practice follows as a natural unfolding of this innate awareness and kindness. The result of walking the spiritual path is experiencing the openness and warmth of life in community. These are the three main sections of the book: (1) contemplating wakefulness and sleep, (2) the practice of meditation as a way of uncovering our original nature, and (3) gathering with others as the expression of wakeful compassion. It seemed particularly important, given that we live in a time of such pervasive fear and doubt about each other’s fundamental goodness, to end by reflecting on the essential importance of establishing sane communities. Dr. King called this the “dream of beloved community.”

Before you take the journey through what’s written here, let me say something about how I came to write this. I entered the path outlined here in the early 1970s at Tail of the Tiger Buddhist meditation center in northern Vermont. There, following some summer seminars in buddhadharma, I received instruction in sitting practice from the Tibetan meditation master Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. I do not recall the words he used to convey the meditative state, but the atmosphere I experienced while sitting with him was vivid and seemed the essence of the communication.

Following some years of practice—including in particular several month-long meditation retreats—I began leading group meditation retreats in the mid-1970s at the suggestion of my teacher. I was still a relatively inexperienced meditation instructor, having taught just two courses in mindfulness and insight, both at the recently formed Naropa Institute (later to become Naropa University). The first group retreat I led was a small (perhaps twenty participants) monthlong program in northern California. When the retreat’s coleader informed me that she needed to leave for an important weekend with our teacher in Boulder, Colorado, I greeted this news with much late-night pacing, worrying, and general anxiety about the well-being of the fledgling meditators temporarily left in my care. I was not quite twenty-four.

The month passed uneventfully—one night a bat got into a participant’s room, and we gently coaxed it back outside. In the long hot days of sitting, there were several earnest requests for midday treks to a local river. We persevered, rising near dawn for sitting and walking, and then sitting and walking again and again until nine or so every evening. The mostly vegetarian food we all helped prepare was decent, and the overall spiritual companionship of the group was supportive and encouraging.

I do not recall anyone’s attaining enlightenment—or even any of the temporary experiences of satori and kensho I had read about years earlier as an impressionable teenager poring over The Three Pillars of Zen and the writings of D. T. Suzuki in my messy college dorm room. Over the course of the month I gave several nervous, stammering talks on the relationship of awakened nature and meditation practice, and I met one-to-one with each of the participants. Amid the meandering recounting of stories of previous engagements with other spiritual practices and encounters with various swamis, roshis, lamas, druids, Gurdjieff teachers, and Krishnamurti (this was, after all, not that far from the 1960s), I eventually noticed a theme.

All of us tended either to approach our meditation practice with much more exertion than was necessary (or helpful) or, tiring ourselves out from a day of gung ho sitting, to lapse into looseness. Basically, we were either trying too hard or not making enough effort. I remembered the Buddha’s early instruction on finding a “middle way” between excessive tightness and excessive looseness. As with learning a dance like the Argentine tango, this simple yet profound teaching is something one has to actually do to understand fully. Tightening and loosening are said to be skills used by even advanced meditators practicing mahamudrameditation.

Eventually a key connection dawned: tightening and loosening are directly related to joining nature and training, two important principles along the path. There is the need for both trust in our innate wakefulness and confidence in the path to uncovering that nature. When we are excessively tight, vigilantly on guard, there is not enough appreciation of our fundamentally awake nature. Right meditation is not a matter of successfully manipulating our experience. Practicing with relaxed appreciation of basic wakefulness can become a part of living a life of nonaggression. On the other hand, if—hearing the message of original goodness—we confidently lapse into daydream upon daydream, then clearly there is not enough application of discipline and exertion. The teachings in this book are based on appreciating original nature while training in meditation.

Beginning with a three-month intensive training program in 1999, I received a second wave of classic instructions in the practice of Buddhist meditation, this time from Trungpa Rinpoche’s lineage heir and eldest son, Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche. In the dozens of weekend, weeklong, and monthlong group meditation retreats I have taught over the last decade, the dharma streams of these two teachers have merged into one river of instruction. Natural Wakefulness is dedicated to these two meditation masters, holders of the treasury of oral instructions of the Practice Lineage, because they are the source of the meditation teachings in this book and in the group retreats it is based on. If there are mistakes in transmitting this pure gold, the fault is solely my own.

A Note on the Book's Format
Natural Wakefulness contains, alongside teachings about this particular approach to the spiritual path, a sequence of guided contemplations and meditation exercises. At the back of the book, there are notes giving the sources for most quotations, as well as explanations of some key terms. Occasionally there are also dialogues—question-and-answer exchanges—with comments and insights from many meditators practicing these instructions in group retreats. The questioning voices in these dialogues appear like this:

Question: If we’re all naturally awake, why do we need to train in meditating?

These exchanges are essential to the experience of reading this book. They display and celebrate the interweaving of confusion and insight that is the experience of walking the path for many of us. Your own questions and discoveries while reading and meditating become an important part of this shared unfolding of basic wisdom. Welcome to the twenty-five-hundred-year-old conversation!