The Buddhist Path to Simplicity: Spiritual Practice in Everyday Life. Christina Feldman
and entanglement have many sources in our lives. One of the main causes lies in the fear of losing what we have and the anxiety of not having enough. In fear of solitude and loneliness, we fill our lives and minds with distractions and busyness. Personal productivity has become the mantra of our time, the idea of stillness and simplicity terrifying—a sign of apathy or aimlessness. In the rush to be occupied endlessly and in the pursuit of stimulation, we neglect the quality of life, forget the simple joys of listening to the song of a bird, the laugh of a child, and the richness of one step taken with complete attention. George McDonald said:
Work is not always required of a person
There is such a thing as Sacred Idleness, The cultivation of which is now Fearfully neglected.
We may dream of a time when we can lie down beneath the night sky and do nothing but be present in its vastness with total attention. But our dreams are too often sabotaged by the busyness generated by anxiety. We seek evidence of our worth through what we produce, become, and surround ourselves with. Boredom has come to be regarded as one of our greatest enemies and we flee from it by generating endless complexity and busyness. Boredom may be no more than a surrender of sensitivity, yet, rather than turning our hearts and minds to rediscover that lost sensitivity, we thirst for even more exciting experiences, drama, and intensity. A young man about to bungee jump into the Grand Canyon was asked why he was engaging in such a perilous act. He answered, “These are the moments that shatter the boredom of living.” When alienated from inner vitality we mistake intensity for wakefulness.
In the search for calm simplicity it is important for us to remember our dreams of intimacy, stillness, and happiness; to value their discovery. We may need to remember that boredom is a state of mind and not an accurate description of reality. A meditation master listening to his student’s complaint of being bored, advised, “If you find something boring for ten minutes, stay with it for twenty minutes. If it’s still boring do it for an hour. Stay present until you know what it means to be alive.”
Some time ago the keepers at the Bronx Zoo became concerned when Gus the polar bear was observed swimming repetitively back and forth in his pool for hours on end. Animal psychologists and experts were consulted and the conclusion was that Gus was bored. Not that Gus wasn’t somewhat aggrieved at living in New York rather than bounding through snowdrifts, or may have missed his freedom; boredom was the problem that needed solving rather than the issue of Gus’s captivity. The solution—fill his pool with toys and distractions. As one keeper stated, “Hey, it works for us.”
The times when we feel most discontented are the times when our minds flee most readily to the past or future in search of guarantees, control, and safety. Inner complexity is easy to identify—the mind swirls with a burden of thoughts, images, anxiety, speculation, and obsession. The feeling of “I can’t let go” is a painful one. Seeking to end the pain of being trapped in our own turmoil, we make confused and desperate choices that lead to greater entanglement. Feeling adrift and fragmented, we search for happiness in the world of people, things, and fantasy, and find ourselves falling into familiar pits of frustration and discord.
The young Prince Siddhartha left the comfort and security of his palace and family to lead a homeless life, in search of enduring happiness and freedom. The homeless life is often praised as being the model of greatest renunciation. For many of us it is a much greater renunciation to discover what it really means to be at home in ourselves. To commit ourselves to being at home in our bodies, minds, hearts, and life, asks us to renounce the habit of abandoning ourselves and the moment. We often practice a kind of unconscious renunciation and homelessness—fleeing from where we are into the past or future and into the disconnected world of our daydreams and fantasies. To renounce the inclination to flee may be the greatest of all renunciations.
We find simplicity in our hearts and lives through paying attention to the roots of our complexity and then letting go. Albert Einstein advised, “Out of clutter, find simplicity. From discord, find harmony. In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.” Simplicity does not rely on divorcing ourselves from the world or on adopting a path of austerity, but on a careful examination of our relationship to the acquisitions, opinions, objects, and dreams which crowd our lives. We bring a simple question into this maze of complexity: “What leads to happiness and what leads to complexity and confusion?”
Baker Roshi, an American Zen master, said that the definition of an enlightened person is that they always have what they need. Whether sitting alone on a mountain, or in the middle of a crowd, there is no sense of anything being absent or lacking. Each moment, each situation, and each encounter offers everything that is needed for deepening sensitivity, compassion, peace, and understanding as long as we are paying attention. The mind calms, we step back a little from the forces of craving and aversion and turn our attention to this moment, discovering our capacity to be delighted by all that is before us.
Releasing Anxiety
We live in a culture that trains us to believe that we never have enough of anything and that we always need more in order to be happy. This is a training in anxiety and complexity. In the Tibetan Buddhist tradition there is depicted a realm of beings called “hungry ghosts” who sadly inhabit bodies with enormous stomachs yet whose throats are as narrow as needles. Unable to satisfy their appetite, they desperately roam the world in search of gratification. Trained in anxiety and complexity, we come to believe that life is made meaningful by possessing more, gaining more, and achieving more; protecting ourselves from loss and deprivation by holding on to all that we gain as tightly as possible.
Every year my insurance salesman visits me to assess my various insurance policies. Of course, his unspoken agenda is to persuade me to purchase more insurance cover. With a smile on his face he begins a long discourse on the unspeakable terrors and tragedies that may befall me. What if you had no work? What if you or your partner contracted a terminal illness? What if your children were in an accident? The list of possible disasters seems endless. Listening to him my eyes grow wider and wider, yet I also glimpse the bottomless chasm of fear I could inhabit if I lived by the rules of “what if?” The choice seems simple: do I choose to make fear my companion in life or do I choose to live with trust and skillful means?
We tend to believe that there will always be a better moment for us to find simplicity and happiness than the moment we are in. We cling tightly to all that we have and want, not seeing that this desperate holding and wanting only generates greater depths of fear. We look upon the world as an enemy or thief, intent upon depriving us of all we have accumulated. There is a story of an elderly, cantankerous man, miserly with everything including his love and trust, who awoke one night to find his house on fire. Climbing to the roof for safety, he looked down to see his sons holding a blanket for him to jump into. “Jump, father, jump, we’ll save you,” they called. He answered, “Why should I believe you? What do you want in return?” “Father, this is no time for arguments. Either jump or you’ll lose your life.” “I know you boys,” he shouted, “lay the blanket on the ground and then I’ll jump.”
We believe that it is difficult to let go but, in truth, it is much more difficult and painful to hold and protect. Reflect upon anything in your lives that you grasp hold of—an opinion, a historical resentment, an ambition, or an unfulfilled fantasy. Sense the tightness, fear, and defensiveness that surrounds the grasping. It is a painful, anxious experience of unhappiness. We do not let go in order to make ourselves impoverished or bereft. We let go in order to discover happiness and peace. As Krishnamurti once said, “There is a great happiness in not wanting, in not being something, in not going somewhere.”
In the search for simplicity we are drawn to ask ourselves: “What is truly lacking in this moment?” Would even more thoughts, possessions, experiences, sights, or sounds have the power to liberate us from complexity and unhappiness, or would they add more clutter to an over-cluttered life and heart? When we are lost in these states of want and need, contentment, simplicity, and peace feel far away. We become fixated upon the next moment, the moment we arrive at the rainbow’s end, fulfilling our desires and gratifying our needs. The promise of happiness and peace is projected into the perfect moment, the ideal relationship, the next