Mind Waves
Shunryu Suzuki on calming the mind, the “practice” of meditation, and expressing your true nature.
Imagine, for a moment, that you are a fish. You’re way out in the middle of the ocean, and a storm is raging. The surface of the sea is turbulent. Waves are rising and falling and crashing all around you, picking you up and tossing you about. You’re at the ocean’s mercy, up here on the surface of the sea, carried away by the rise and fall of its every wave. So, you dive down beneath the surface, and you swim deeper. The deeper you go, the more tranquil the water becomes. Swim deep enough, and you discover that, beneath all that chaos on the ocean’s surface, the water is comfortable and calm. The water is peaceful, deep down underneath it all, unaffected by the storms that rage up above.
Your mind is the ocean, in this cute little parable-ish story. Your mind is an ocean of consciousness; it is vast and it is deep. On the surface of your mind, storms of thoughts and emotions rage. In the depths of your being, there is peace and calm. The fish is your awareness, to continue the analogy. And the act of diving down beneath the surface of this ocean that is your mind is the practice of meditation.
To meditate is to become aware of just how chaotic and turbulent our minds can be. Waves of pleasure and pain. Winds of anger and jealousy, envy and desire. Tsunamis of heartache and heartbreak and confusion. Hurricanes of guilt, shame, and self-hatred. Such storms rage in our minds all of the time, but many of us aren’t aware of them; not until we sit down and close our eyes and try to focus on our breathing, and find ourselves carried away.
To meditate is to find ourselves adrift on the sea of our own minds. It can be an uncomfortable place to be, to say the least. So uncomfortable that it scares many people away from meditation altogether. Many of us prefer to numb ourselves to these crests and troughs of the human psyche, in one way or another. Sex. Drugs. Social media. Pick your flavor of distraction and self-medication. There’s a reason that pirates used to prefer rum over water, after all. For the Sea of Samsara is treacherous indeed, and the last thing that many of us want to do is see with newfound clarity and feel with heightened sensitivity these storms of thought and emotion that rage on the cusp of our consciousness.
“I’ve tried meditating, but I can’t do it. I just can’t stop thinking!” If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard these words, or words like them… It’s a common misconception about meditation: that if you think so much as a single thought, or feel so much as a single emotion, you’ve failed to meditate, and the clock resets to zero. We expect ourselves to be Buddhas and bodhisattvas the very first time we practice, only to discover that we are all too human, and that meditation is indeed a practice. For many of us, to begin a meditation practice is to see more clearly and feel more acutely than ever before the patterns of negative thoughts and emotions that have been running in the background of our minds, all our lives.
The Sōtō Zen monk and meditation teacher Shunryu Suzuki (May 18, 1904 — December 4, 1971) called these patterns of negative thoughts and emotions “mind waves.” In his book, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Suzuki wrote:
When you are practicing zazen, do not try to stop your thinking. Let it stop by itself. If something comes into your mind, let it come in, and let it go out. It will not stay long. When you try to stop your thinking, it means you are bothered by it. Do not be bothered by anything. It appears as if something comes from outside your mind, but actually it is only the waves of your mind, and if you are not bothered by the waves, gradually they will become calmer and calmer.
The goal of meditation isn’t to stop thinking (and feeling) entirely. It’s to become aware of what you are thinking and feeling in the first place. To meditate is to notice the waves of thought and emotion that are rising and falling on the surface of your consciousness.
“Even though waves arise,” Suzuki wrote, “the essence of your mind is pure; it is just like clear water with a few waves. Actually water always has waves. Waves are the practice of the water. To speak of waves apart from water or water apart from waves is a delusion. Water and waves are one.”
I like that phrase: waves are the practice of water. In the same way, noticing our mind waves — our patterns of thought and emotion — is the practice of meditation. To find yourself lost in thought during meditation isn’t a failure to meditate. That is, in fact, the practice of meditation itself. The practice of meditation is to find yourself lost in thought after thought, carried away by mind wave after mind wave, and to bring your awareness back to the present moment.
“It will take quite a long time before you find your calm, serene mind in your practice,” Suzuki wrote. “Many sensations come, many thoughts or images arise, but they are just waves of your own mind . . . If you can leave your mind as it is, it will become calm.”
To clarify muddy waters,
you must hold them still and let things settle.To glimpse the secret of the Tao,
you must keep still and quiet your mind.— Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
Keep your meditation practice up long enough, and you will discover that you are more than your thoughts, more than your emotions. You will discover that you aren’t that little fish, being tossed about by the waves; and you aren’t the waves that are rising and falling and crashing on the surface of your mind. You will discover that, deep down beneath the surface of your ordinary, day-to-day consciousness, at the core of your being, there is a calm and compassionate awareness. You’ll discover that you’re aware that you are aware. You’ll discover that “you are awareness,” in the words of Jon Kabat-Zinn; that you are “loving awareness,” in the words of Ram Dass; that you are the ocean that is this calm, compassionate, loving awareness.
This is what I’ve been told, anyway, by the sages and poets and mystics and monks throughout history and across cultures whose words I’ve read and listened to, the Buddha among them. So many fingers, pointing at the same moon. The Buddhists call this calm, compassionate, bedrock quality of awareness “Buddha nature.”
And the Buddha, Shunryu Suzuki wrote:
. . . was not interested in some metaphysical existence, but in his own body and mind, here and now. And when he found himself, he found that everything that exists has Buddha nature. That was his enlightenment. Enlightenment is not some good feeling or some particular state of mind. The state of mind that exists when you sit in the right posture is, itself, enlightenment. If you cannot be satisfied with the state of mind you have in zazen, it means your mind is still wandering about. Our body and mind should not be wobbling or wandering about. In this posture there is no need to talk about the right state of mind. You already have it. This is the conclusion of Buddhism.
The conclusion of Buddhism is that you are, deep down in the core of your being, this calm and compassionate and loving awareness that the Buddhists call Buddha nature. The conclusion of Buddhism is that the world is empty of a self; that you are the universe itself. The conclusion of Buddhism is that “everything that exists has Buddha nature,” as Shunryu Suzuki put it, yourself included.
To come to such a conclusion is to attain Enlightenment, Liberation, samadhi, satori. It is a conclusion that can’t be arrived at or expressed in words alone; it can only be felt and intuited and experienced firsthand. It is the moment in which you realize that all is one, and words fall apart and lose their meaning.
“Everything has Buddha nature,” the Buddha said.
“Everything is Buddha nature,” Dogen replied.
You are Buddha nature.
You aren’t the fish, and you aren’t the waves of your mind. You are the ocean itself. You are this ocean of awareness that the Buddhists call Buddha nature. This is your “true nature,” Shunryu Suzuki said, and meditation is the direct expression of it.
“Our purpose is just to keep this practice forever,” Suzuki wrote. “This practice started from beginningless time, and it will continue into an endless future. Strictly speaking, for a human being there is no other practice than this practice. There is no other way of life than this way of life. Zen practice is the direct expression of our true nature.”