Kurt Spellmeyer

Correspondent

Ordinarily, we experience the world as somewhat separate from ourselves. When we look at flowers, cars, and people on the street, it can be like watching a movie screen from a seat 10 or 20 paces away. So familiar does this sense of distance feel that we almost never notice.

Early Buddhists shared this distanced point of view, and, like us, they seldom questioned it. They thought of themselves as individual minds separate from their surroundings, and when they sat down to meditate, their goal was personal liberation. They never believed that their enlightenment would change anything or anybody else. Enlightenment would simply mean that they had gotten free from their personal attachments — most of all, an attachment to the self, which they could now see as an illusion.

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But later Buddhists questioned this reasoning. If the existence of the self is an illusion, they said, then how could liberation be personal? There was something wrong with the idea that we reach enlightenment as individuals when we transcend our individuality.

Early Buddhists made a big mistake by imagining people as separate minds observing from a distance the world “out there.” Instead, each person is one element of a larger unity that includes absolutely everything. Later Buddhists viewed this basic unity as infinite in all directions. And if they’re right, it’s a radical change.

Early Buddhists saw attachment as the basic obstacle to enlightenment, and so they taught the method of detaching from it all. But if the self belongs to a bigger unity, then detachment is the wrong way to go. Connection is really how we can wake up. Trying to detach ourselves only intensifies the sense of separation that produces most of our suffering.

Later Buddhists took to heart the idea that oneness or connection is our natural state. All our problems arise when we begin to see ourselves as separate, and that confusion starts when we assume that our minds are the source of our own consciousness. Instead, later Buddhists said that we should view consciousness as trans-personal — something we all share. Consciousness comes first at the time of our birth, and only later on do we divide the world into you and me, human and animal, animate and inanimate.

In Zen, we accept the view that consciousness isn’t our property but a common resource, like air or water, which no individual can own. And as we work through the obstacles we face on the meditation cushion and in our lives, we’re actually helping to clean up a mental environment that all of us share — and one that we’ve all helped to degrade. Of course, this way of thinking makes enlightenment much harder to attain, since none of us will wake up completely until everybody does. But the good news is that everyone who does something good — or even thinks about doing it — also is helping us to wake up. In a much deeper sense than most people recognize, we’re all in this together.

Kurt Spellmeyer directs the Cold Mountain Sangha throughout Central Jersey (coldmountainzen.org/). His most recent book is "Buddha at the Apocalypse: Awakening from a Culture of Destruction." He teaches English at Rutgers University.