“If you want to climb a mountain, begin at the top.” Saying

Karmaphala Karma: Neither This Nor That Living Choiceless

“Sitting quietly, doing nothing, Spring comes, and the grass grows by itself.”

Zenrin Kushu

Choiceless : The state of unpremeditated, complete awareness of the moment without preference or compulsion.

Webster’s Dictionary

The day I went to “sit” with was indeed special. He spoke of living “choiceless” in order to sustain as a way of life. Later I found out that it was the third Zen patriarch Sosan who taught this magnificent insight on how to bring meditation into daily life, or as I call it, learning how to “hold my water” in order to sustain awareness in consciousness.

Let me share with you Krishnamurti’s sweet insight into living in the state of “choiceless awareness,” as he calls it.

Every day we see or read of appalling things happening in the world as the result of violence in man. You may say, 'I can't do anything about it,' or, 'How can I influence the world?' I think you can tremendously influence the world if in yourself you are not violent, if you lead actually every day a peaceful life - a life which is not competitive, ambitious, envious - a life which does not create enmity. Small fires can become a blaze. Peace is found in neither this nor that. How true this statement is. The key word here is found in “enmity” which, as you know, means the state of feeling actively opposed or hostile to someone or something. When we no longer feel the need for pro and con, right and wrong, we subsequently move into the Zen which Sosan spoke of hundreds of years ago as: Neither this, neither that! I first heard my Master speak on the subject in his Discourses on Sosan, who spoke of consciousness occurring through the sustaining of a judgment that is non-judgmental. This phenomenon of judgment without being judgmental, which was coined by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj in as the state of “neti neti” (neither this, neither that), was stressed in his teachings in order to show how one can bring meditation into daily life.

Before I get into this subject of choiceless awareness, I need to say a few words as an intro. You see if you do not practice meditation with a sense of totality, if you only practice casually or infrequently merely to obey my instructions, you will miss. You will miss the totality of what it means to move into an inner depth that is beyond the emotional nature that most of us suffer from.

Meditation is not something that promotes a about . Meditation is the state we live in with our eyes both closed, as well as open. We live in meditation as a preference that overrides our emotionality and causes the mind to be receptive to no longer being in “enmity” with itself or anyone else. So if you are not devoted to meditation, if you are not totally willing and dedicated to the process of awakening through awareness, then what I have to offer to you today will mean little or nothing. (There goes my audience!)

The effort in an authentic spiritual practice is to bring meditation into daily life. To do everything in “total,” which means to be doing through non-doing by practicing the ONE THING AT A TIME exercise with all of our Heart and with our full attention towards the experience that that “one thing” can offer us. In everything that we “do” there is the blessing of Love. Yes, nothing in this lifetime is without the opportunity for Love to reveal itself. The state of Love can emerge in everything from cleaning toilets to having friends over for dinner. Everything is a divine opportunity for Love.

This insight is difficult in our ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) society. We make everything a chore if it does not fit our emotional preferences. People who are conflicted emotionally (fighting “good” emotions over “bad” emotions) find it very difficult, even futile, to meditate. They can close their human eyes, but they cannot realize anything from the process of meditation due to the fact that they have no inner resolve to live beyond their own small- minded preferences that generally serve the petty aspects of our obsessive emotionality, which formulates in us as the Ego.

If you can understand and become aware of the meaning that is being offered to us through the Zen phrase: Neither this, neither that, then you will find a whole new way of experiencing meditation in your daily life. It will be the meditation of everyday living and how to experience: “JUST THIS” in and throughout everything that you do. So let me begin with the powerful insight of a Zen master, Seng T’San, who said:

The Perfect Way knows no difficulties

Except that it refuses to make preferences,

Only when freed from hate and love,

It reveals itself fully and without disguise. You see it is only our “preferences” (what we like and dislike) that keep us from the authentic aspect of living more consciously. The main culprits here are the preferences we have in “hate” and in “love.” It is in these foolish ideals of emotionalism that we find our folly. When there is no more “hate” and “love,” or no more willfulness to make them our personal preferences, we come into full awareness, full consciousness, and hence do everything from and in the Bigger Picture of our beautiful lives. All Masters that have come to help us in this world have talked about living choicelessly. We just refuse to live without choices because every time we make some sort of “choice” based on preferences we believe that we are separating ourselves from the herd and becoming “individuals.” Making choices looks to us like we are “better than…” others, especially if we seem “better off” than others. What is actually happening is that we are becoming more ingrained in the “herd” of the collective unconscious than we might imagine by making our silly “choices” based in the emotionalism that causes us to become arrogant and self-righteous. Rumi, the greatest lover who ever touched this earth, in my opinion, revealed a great Truth when he said: “Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open?” It is a very good question. Why would I choose to live in the prison of my preferences over the vastness of Love that is calling me at all times to live beyond my fears? I will tell you why!

The human of us likes to believe that it is in “control” of our life, and it is only in our need to control through possessions that we become severe and unyielding to Love. It is here that we go against the grain of the Universe and, hence, cause ourselves nothing but tragedy. Every idea that we have which tells us that we are either “happy” or “unhappy” is an illusion that we act from that creates Karma. So in trying to “solve” our “problems” we merely create more for ourselves down the line. This simple fact is hard for most people to recognize in their own lives.

We live as if we “know” what is “good” for us. We make important life choices based on this simple and selfish ideal. But the issue is that what might appear to be “good” for us in this world may prove to be unworthy of our Heart, and hence cause us great sorrow later on in our life. This paradox is an enigma to most people because they live as if we are only here on earth with its glass ceiling that appears to offer freedom and “happiness” through “stuff.” This is a very shortsighted point of view. You see my dear one…we will never know the meaning of our life, which is the greatest treasure of all, unless we are willing to enter into the mystery of living through Love. This means that we move out of our self-imposed prison and live into the great mystery that is Love. We cannot be concerned with what we are leaving behind or how the mind purports its interpretation of “reality” based in its dedication to emotionalism through a rationalized alibi for fear and hate. What must be of great urgency is that we are willing to be conscious of our unconscious at all costs to the ignorance and the mechanism that supports it through logic and reasoning. So let us take the mystical approach to the state of mind that is: “Neti Neti,” or Neither This Nor That. This state of mind is independent of emotionality. Hence, it negates the emotional interpretations of “self,” or as many like to call it the “ego” self. When neti neti is established as the replacement for pedestrian logic and reasoning–a new era of living is established within us. The reason being that we have disconnected from the inner violence and conflict that we constantly engage in through our unconscious minds. In every moment of our life we are in a constant war with ourselves. It is the ol’ war of “good vs. evil.” Red Skelton’s “Mean Widdle Kid” put it best when he said, “If I dood it, I dit a whippin…I DOOD IT!” We are in a constant battle with the “dood it” and actually enjoy the “whippin” that occurs as we invoke emotionality into our lives as the impulsive emotional manner of our entire lifetime. The “whippin” may come later in our years, and hence we will never be able to connect the dots to what we have done which made our Karma so vivid to us in the present.

Neti neti must replace my logic and reasoning to enact the deeds and states of emotionality that I logically believe are “right” for any given situation. When I am willing to question my attitudes, my beliefs and my judgments with Neither this nor That, I am in a place where the sense of “self,” as ego, is now in jeopardy. Most of us find this rather uncomfortable because, in an authentic spiritual practice, we must question what comforts us! I must begin to observe what makes me a “Gregory,” and hence look deep into the causation of my emotionality, which has its roots in the bias of the DNA that I am surrounded by, living in the body that was invoked upon me through Karma. The effort here is to come to a place where the Anatman or non-self (a state of suchness whereby I live not as a mechanism of Gregory) can become the ultimate reality of my life. This state of non-self opens us up to the intelligence of intuition that does NOT have to pass through the logic and reasoning of a “Gregory,” that is merely trying to live unquestioned in his self- righteousness. Should you or I be willing to enter into this beautiful state of “suchness,” there will be no turning back. Once I got a whiff of this in my own life, it made emotions look absurd by the mere fact of their futility to do anything kind or reveal anything of the Truth. When choiceless awareness occurs, because we no longer act in accordance with our emotionality and come to judgments based in the distortion of selfishness and pride, we intuitively assess a situation for what it is. We can then become keenly aware of the state of our Karma in this world, and hence by acting in accord with intuition can address everything that comes as a “door” that is open to Love. We can at any moment drop our conflict with what is occurring and move inherently through Love.

Out of this two important elements of conscious living will appear. These are more than important; they are vital. The first is that everything we faced in our lifetime was seeking to free us from our interpretation of our Karma and was not some form of punishment. Second, to have this kind of moment through insight we must live from the state of mercy that can only reveal itself from the “other shore” that lives within us. It is only through meditation and the futility we face in our lifetime that we can come to the awareness I speak of here. The method we must use to invoke the “other shore,” which is a place within us whereby we live in energies that have their origins in Life itself, is very important. Our willingness must be to just drop everything. Living choicelessly must be invoked by self-observation. In other words, we are no longer interested in the psychological entity that we believe ourselves to be. This entity is our enmity. Until we can recognize this, we will not be able to realize the seat of our Soul in the shrine of the “other shore.” Living as the “observer” is deeply important. Through the practice of observation we come into “,” which is a state of suchness whereby the mind is no longer used to facilitate emotionality, but rather choiceless awareness. From here, we do not think in terms of “what to do” or how to act out our desires in order to avoid fear. Rather we come to a place of “suchness,” as the Buddha talked about, whereby we invoke MERCY as the basis of our insights. This is judgment through non-judgment. You see the enmity of our entity is that Love makes the human of us feel inferior. Many people that I have met throughout my career are totally obsessed with their emotionality. They will do everything in their power to sustain the obsession of emotionality through pride. It is pride that is the first thing that we must “observe” as we seek to move more deeply into choiceless awareness. This “observation” of pride is a big step to living in awareness rather than emotionality that overwhelms us with fear. It took me years to come to the place where I could truly understand that Love frightened me more than my fears. When I came to this insight, all of my silly fears came to a place where they were set to pit me against them. When it came to me that I did not need to fight them, but to drop the “me” that is “Gregory,” all sorts of beautiful things occurred. The first momentous moment was that I no longer had to fear Love as my enemy. Here is a sweet story about a Samurai and a Zen Master that I have collected from India. The story is to the point and when I heard my Master tell it, it took the sword out of my hands for the first time in this lifetime. A samurai, a very proud and well-known warrior, came to see a Zen Master one day. In those days for a samurai to visit a Zen Master was unheard of. The samurai came with many questions, but looking at the Master, looking at the beauty of the Master and the grace of the moment, he suddenly forgot his questions and felt inferior to this unassuming man. He said to the Master, “ I came here with questions and now I am feeling inferior. Just a moment ago I was fine but now I am confused. As I entered your court suddenly I felt inferior. I have never felt like that before. I have faced death many times, and I have never felt any fear -- why am I now feeling frightened?” The Master said, “Wait. When everybody else has gone, I will answer.”

People continued the whole day to come and see the Master, and the samurai was getting more and more tired waiting. By evening the room was empty, and the samurai said, “Now, can you see me?“ The Master said, “Come outside.” It was a full moon night; the moon was just rising on the horizon. And he said, “Look at these trees -- this tree high in the sky and this small one beside it. They both have existed beside my window for years, and there has never been any problem. The smaller tree has never said to the big tree, ‘Why do I feel inferior before you?’ This tree is small, and that tree is big -- why have I never heard any whisper of it?” The samurai said, “Because they can’t compare.” The Master replied, “Then you need not ask me. You know the answer.”

When we don’t compare, all inferiority, all superiority, disappears and we are living in choiceless awareness. Then you “ARE” and you are simply there, or as I call it: JUST THIS. A small bush or a big high tree -- it doesn’t matter, you are yourself. A grass leaf is needed as much as the biggest star. The sound of the cuckoo is needed as much as any Buddha -- the world will be less rich if the cuckoo disappears, just as if we were to lose a Buddha. Just look around. All is needed, and everything fits together. It is an organic unity; nobody is higher and nobody is lower, nobody superior and nobody inferior. Everybody is incomparably unique. You are needed and unique unto yourself. If you cannot feel this, then it is because of the ego’s need for higher and lower, better or worse. It is all a game that we play with the ego. Everything is happening just as it needs to according to the Karma we are holding within us. My Karma is the suchness of this life experience for me. My Karma will present itself in many different forms. These forms are not to be considered “good” or “bad.” The form they take is actually a device for us to realize as a method for spiritual awakening. If we leave situations and conditions at the doorstep of “good and bad,” we will miss the meaning of it all. Everything has its purpose. Everything is meaningful, everything is important. YOU ARE ALL OF THIS: JUST THIS! Choiceless awareness is a deliberate effort to diminish the compulsion to have preferences that define and separate us from the authentic reality of Life as a process of living in the Way, as the Masters speak of; The Way that is harmonic to the vibrations contained in everything, every molecule of substance here on earth. Everything in this world resonates to the basic tone of the Universal ONENESS that we are derived from. Our Souls are the alchemy of the very Love that is our basic spiritual chemistry. In Truth, we are the process of a transformation that takes place only through consciousness. SUGGESTIONS FOR THE WEEK: To enter into choiceless awareness, we must first do away with our compulsion for duality and conflict. We must allow the human part of us to be what it is, compulsive and judgmental, but at the same time feel the subtle BEING that is the authentic within us, the real YOU, as the JUST THIS and allow it to become the only focus in our inner life. A person practicing choiceless awareness cannot live and act on autopilot to live in daily life. This kind of person must constantly be watching the life they are presented with through Karma without the preferences of “good” or “bad” and seek only the suchness of Life through the intuitive feel of the Heart.

When we live as JUST THIS we find ourselves on the “other shore” and learn how to keep our attentions there while allowing the human to live out its Karma. But there is a big difference here. When the Karma is realized from the “other shore” of our Being, we then realize that living in emotionality is futile. It is here and only here that we can now live consciously, in conscious awareness, and no longer make the human experience devoid of Love and its order, which is so very important to not only our lives, but also this world in general.

Accept What Karma Brings

“To go from mortal to Buddha, you have to put an end to Karma, nurture your awareness and accept what life brings.”

Bodhidharma

Nothing is happening the way the “Gregory” thinks that it is. The human aspect of us is narrow- minded and can only seek what it can process through the means of emotionalism. We are myopic when it comes to our interpretation of anything that might seem to be some sort of human event.

If something “pluses” our human experience and gives us some sort of “break” or “advantage,” then we believe we did something “right” and deserve it! If something “subtracts” from us and takes way something that we had or the hope of something that we wanted, we just know that there has been some “mistake” made and that we did not warrant this. Sometimes both merely confirm the “winner” or “loser” opinion we may have of ourselves. All of this is just foolish and a waste of time in our precious life.

What we must be willing to explore is the humility that Lao-tzu spoke of in his precious Tao, which is to ACCEPT WHERE YOU FIND YOURSELF. If we are willing to do this, we will find that everything that seems to enter into our life through Karma (and everything does) comes to serve the purpose of transformation from willful spiritual ignorance to that of awakening. If I take the situation as a personal affront to the personage of “Gregory,” then I will miss. Everything that is occurring in this world is not about “gain” and “loss.” It is about our willingness to see behind every event in our lives, and hence to discover the “little man” behind the curtain who is running our show.

Again I defer to the Master Lao-tzu who taught us the way of all this when he spoke this powerful insight: “Give evil nothing to oppose and it will disappear by itself.”

This is a hard one for most of us. We like to fight useless battles that make us believe that we are “empowered” by “good.” This arrogance is hard for most of us to overcome due to our belief in fighting for the “good” over the “bad” which is very subjective. Most of us think that what we “sow,” we “reap.” And while the basic axiom of this is true, it is not as self-serving as I would like to believe it to be. If we look at great Souls that have entered into this world to help us, we can see that they had very difficult lives, going against the grain of the collective unconscious, and all of them were killed for it. All of them!

Was Socrates getting his “karma” when he was forced to drink poison? Or how about Buddha running from his brother, who wanted to kill him all of his life? Then there is Jesus and the crucifixion, Gandhi and his murder. We could go on to lesser people, spiritually speaking, who just grazed the surface of peace in this world only to be killed for their efforts.

Did all these people die due to their “karma” as it were? Well, not like we would like to think it. These people went against the “grain” of human desire and entered into the laws of this earth that were established by the state of our energies long before we ever entered into this world in our current form.

The only antidote to all of this is choiceless awareness, which occurs when we do not make judgments about where we find ourselves in this life through this world. Only through neti neti (neither this, neither that) do we realize the folly and futility of trying to change the world. People who try to change others are not seeing the light of changing themselves. Which reminds me of the ol’ Mullah Nasreddin story that I love to read, because it is so true.

The Mullah Nasreddin was now an old man looking back on his life. He sat with his friends in a teashop telling his story. “When I was young I was fiery -- I wanted to awaken everyone. I prayed to Allah to give me the strength to change the world. In mid-life I awoke one day and realized my life was half over and I had changed no one. So I prayed to Allah to give me the strength to change those close around me who so much needed it. Alas, now I am old and my prayer is simpler. ‘Allah’ I ask, ‘please give me the strength to at least change myself.’ ”

Yes, it is about authentically changing my focus from the “Gregory” as the main culprit in this life. “Gregory” is being experienced only through spiritual mischief. He causes nothing but difficulties and hurdles that must be overcome, and that cause our lifetime to seem useless and futile. The true effort is to self-realize, and then to recognize that the authentic lives as a simple “nobody” within us all. Hence, the “Gregory” does not need the constant pleasuring of the skin in order to emotionally be maintained as the mainstay of an unconscious life within a lifestyle that does nothing but misinterpret Karma and its ways.

What we are doing by living in the human experience is ignoring the essential aspects of the Being that lives within everything in this world, as the state of Oneness. This Oneness occurs through choiceless awareness, which comes out of neti neti. When we are willing to no longer be a slave to our emotional needs and fears we enter into a whole new experience in this lifetime–we are “born again” as it were. It is an experience that is not governed by impulse and obsession. This state of being is something that most people simply have no room for in their lives, and yet it is the whole essence of our many lives.

The state of being that I am referring to is called the Atma. Atma does not have a definition that the mind can wrap around. Atma is the state of the Heart, Soul and Being that is combined into a Oneness and a Presence that defies human understanding. The only way to understand it is to experience it as a Presence that emulates from meditation. This is why we cannot recognize it past our thoughts. Why we are constantly trying to “improve” in this world the futile state of the human being. Because we cannot accept where we are, in the human, because we believe we are the human. Hence, we set into motion the ideas that cultivate living as “reward and punishment.”

We live as a slave to the worst part of our humanness. We never question this, and hence find ourselves living as if there is nothing else. Everything that comes to me has its roots, its origins in Karma. To accept the Karma that is before me requires something called awareness. This awareness has nothing to do with logic and reasoning. Awareness is the state that occurs when I am living in neti neti. It is a choiceless awareness that opens to consciousness and allows for the Atma to emerge from within us, like a lotus blossom unfolding from the muck and mire of dirty water.

We keep doing what we do because we are stuck in the loop of our self-righteous emotionality– which makes us stubborn. We live for only one thing: GETTING WHAT WE LIKE OR WANT, and we are insistent upon this with all of our energies. That is it; there is nothing virtuous or noble about our motives in this lifetime or this world in general. Hence, we live very desperate and tedious lives. If we retain through our rational mind the smallest notion of a truth or of falsehood, our petty minds sink into confusion and we are lost. All of this is due to the fact that we live in the preferences of our desires, which mislead us into believing that anything we like is good and anything we don’t like is bad. We are that rudimentary in our thinking and in our living. Here is a funny story of the Mullah who is so cheap (which he thinks is good) that he will hurt himself for the sake of his rationalized miserism! (I have just created a new word! I love it!!!) His piker mentality, of which so many in this world have, turns on him as he stubbornly insists upon eating hot chili peppers in order to get his “money’s worth.” I am sure you will get the gist of this one. We all know people who would and do this kind of thing!

Mullah Nasreddin went to the market and saw a big bushel of hot chili peppers on sale. He bought them, returned home, and began to eat. A little while later, his disciples came and saw the Mullah with tears streaming down his face, his mouth and tongue burning. "Mullah, mullah, why do you go on eating them?" As he reached for another, Nasreddin replied, "I keep waiting for a sweet one." Neither this nor that, neti neti, would have given the Mullah a different point of view about what he was doing. But Nasreddin, being Nasreddin, could only try to find the “sweet one” that does not exist. So he wills to torture himself for the sake of “getting a deal,” as he so thought. Questioning his own rationale, his obsessive compulsive desire to “buy low and sell high” placed him in the midst of his human desires and of course, through pride, led him to keep on keeping on per his pedestrian mentality. I know many a person who is living in the bitterness of their Karma waiting for the “sweet one” to come along. It never does. But the emotional hope and the desire keep the illusion going that it could. We are not here in this world to interpret the events of our daily living as either a matter of reward or punishment. Like the Mullah, we are the ones punishing ourselves by believing that hot peppers could be sweet. Hot peppers are hot, not sweet! A simple fact that eludes us due to our emotional insistence upon compulsion, obsession and the passion most of us have for living in this kind of sickness. Karma is there to help us and never to punish. We make everything a matter of reward and punishment via our need to follow only what “misleads” us. When we become willing to live in choiceless awareness through the deliberate practice of the mentality of neither this nor neither that, we come to a place of objectivity and can then realize the state of our life in proportion to our Karma. This is more important than I could ever tell you through words. We suffer like the Mullah because we insist that we can keep doing what we are doing and somehow find the “sweet” one. Ah, the true mark of insanity. Most people in this world do not have the willingness to live consciously, and hence have lost their ability to be objective with themselves. Self-examination is not something that many relish. I talk about this in all of my Commentaries to nausea. I can do nothing about the state that many in this world willfully suffer from. I have, though, found in the midst of a heap of pain and sorrow in people’s lives a diamond that is priceless. It is that of not coming to conclusions about anything that we may be going through. Neti neti (neither this nor that) opens up many a door to awakening. It offers us that “gap” and that “pause” that exists between our thoughts, which opens us up to a whole new world of possibility. For me, this is my only salvation in this lifetime. It has shown me the futility of the “Gregory” who is merely running amok trying to find a safe harbor where he can live the hate which he calls love. It is important for all of us to accept what our Karma brings to us. Some of it looks “good” and some not so “good.” I will close with a beautiful teaching by Kahlil Gibran on Pain. He tells it like it is. Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain. And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy, And you would accept the seasons of your heart, even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields. And you would watch with serenity through the winters of your grief.

Much of your pain is self-chosen. It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self. Therefore trust the physician, and drink his remedy in silence and tranquility: For his hand, though heavy and hard, is guided by the tender hand of the Unseen, And the cup he brings, though it burn your lips, has been fashioned of the clay, which the Potter has moistened with His own sacred tears. Well, I hope some of this helped you. It must be hard for many of you to read, of that I am sure. I am deeply sorry about that. But it must be said and presented to you by someone. Few on the planet will tell you the truth of the facts of living. This is my Karma in this world, in this lifetime. It is what it is. Enough of me for today…please forgive me. Metta to you,

Swami Chaitanya Siraj

(Gregory Penn)

Copyright 2015, Gregory E. Penn. All rights reserved.