Expert: Joe McSorley - 2/3/2009

Question
Hi Joe, A couple of weeks ago I went to this talk by leo houlding a famous, young climber and base jumper he climbed elcapitan in unicemy park and then another, and dodged the police all in 24 hours it was fantastic... anyway his achievements are incredible and he must experience a kind of freedom from doing these things I am yet to comprehend, Firstly i wondered from doing extreme stuff does the freedom experience or however its described bring you closer to achieving ultimate freedom from yourself, almost like your brain has had a taster and so its a step closer to dropping the ego and all its false limitations? Thats just loosely how I understand the self fallin away and being enlightened.
Another thing that got me thinking was when he talked about a trek up Everest and the weather was quite good and he was taking layers of clothing off and having a bit of a joke with friends about the sunny experience on everest when he came across a dead body and this was a shock to suddenly be alert to the fact that this guy must of been having a totally different experience at this point to him. It gives me a dark feelin to imagine that nature or life can hit you with something like that. On the top of everest it would probably be clear the changing moment of life and death coz the weather can change so quickly and you might go from being in ecstacy at the view to being gripped by fear of life being snapped away. I was just wondering over that void between those too experiences of everythings ok to the realisation of how vunerable you are in this world, how do buddhists talk about it, deal with it! it just feels to close to home that trying to get head round the size of the universe or whats beyond it... hmmm not that I've got much further with that.

Answer

Hi Stephanie,
 What you describe in the story is more like wei-wu-wei (doing without doing) or no-mind in Eastern philosophy. It is a temporary loss of the self because you are so compressed into the present.  Mountain climbing is often given as an example of this because of the life and death intenseness of the experience.  If you let the mind wander you might easily make a mistake and fall.  This experience happens in many areas of life from something as simple as knitting to sky diving.  It is why people are drawn to dangerous sports because it forces them to live in the moment.  Ultimately you always return from that experience to the ordinary mind and it is often a let down.  These experiences are not cumulative, that is, they don’t add up to awakening.  They are all from the ego side of consciousness and although they might be life transforming they do not add to awakening.  Awakening is the annihilation and reconstruction of ego consciousness and not the fulfillment of it.
  There is a Buddhist expression that goes, “the changes of impermanence come quickly” and it was often spoken to me by Masao Abe Sensei when I would bring up situations.   At any moment life can be taken from the living, swiftly and uncaring.  Humans love to think they are beyond it but they are not. Our lives are just as precarious as the squirrel’s who is trying to cross the street.  When this is fully realize we can either fall into despair or try to find something deeper to life.  Chuang tzu said “Nature treats man as straw dogs” meaning that nature has no concerns for the whims of man, we are blown about like straw.  Because of the precariousness of life it is imperative we make the best of it at all moments.  In the Buddhist sense this is why we must strive to awaken at every moment.  Life and death are the natural cycle of nature and we don’t have a problem with that until it relates to us.  All of nature is constantly in the state of living and dying; it is the way things work.  We as humans can’t stand the idea of life as so precarious and we create all kinds of things to escape that fact.  This is the major function of religion, to allay this fear. You cannot have life without having death and you cannot have death without life.  They are the root of each other.  It is the Buddhist goal to go beyond living and dying by breaking through the cycle and realizing the root of our existence.  
 The ecstasy of the moment as with the view from the mountain can always be offset by something else.  All joys can be swept away in a moment because they are conditional to the moment, thus, ‘the changes of impermanence come quickly’.  True bliss is not conditional to the human experience, it is a universal bliss.  
   This is not something you can ‘wrap your head around’, it is the maintaining of your head as being yourself that prevents you from seeing the universe. That which tries to perceive the universe is the very thing that blocks us from seeing the universe.  We stand in between ourselves and the universe.  It is the goal of Buddhism to stop this process and to awaken to the universe as it is to itself.
  I hope this helps you. Take care,
       Joe