Keep On Truckin (by Danaeah B.)

I’ve always found solitude nourishing and over the last ten years have tried to take annual personal retreats at an abbey in northern California. Excitement mounts as the time draws near. Even though I know better, I always anticipate calm and serenity.

It never works out quite like that. A lot of good happens, but only, it seems, after working through things like loneliness or boredom, that are waiting for me when I check in. This past weekend it was a little more humorous; it was my vanity that took a beating.

I made excellent time going up highway 5, with cars in the slow lane doing 75. I pulled into a rest area in a eucalyptus grove, north of the town of Willows.

A heavyset woman passed me on the sidewalk and said, “Are you a trucker?”

“No,” I answered, startled out of my reverie.

“Aren’t you glad?” she asked and walked away.

I hurried to the rest room to check the mirror. Had to be the sweatshirt, and shades – right?

The ironic thing is, back in the day, when my husband and I were travelling in a Volkswagen van, we used to joke about getting an eighteen-wheeler. Pedal to the metal (to the tune of “Born to be Wild,” of course). And “10-4, good buddy.” We were going to be cute truckers!

Cute is harder to pull off these days. That evening I put on a long cotton dress with lace at the neckline and hem. “So what?” said one of my inner voices. “Even truckers dress up.”

It could have been much worse. The last time I stayed at the abbey I was facing surgery – minor surgery, but still scary. And someone I knew was dying of cancer.

Sickness, old age and death were three of the inevitables that sent the Buddha searching for the roots of human suffering. We read about suffering in spiritual books, and hear about “awakening.” That suggests it’s something like waking from a nightmare. Whew, the bogey man wasn’t real.

But what do we do in the meantime, when the things that threaten us seem so real? People who die of cancer are gone, whatever we may believe about afterlives.

Some teachers suggest we don’t need to learn more doing, but to stop doing things that never have worked. The teacher I spoke of last time, Anam Thubten, has written a book, with a title that sums up his teaching, No Self, No Problem, (Dharmata Press, Point Richmond, CA, 2006, ISBN-10: 0-9788608-0-2). I’d like to give an extended quote that presents his reasons for meditating:

…this I is a fictitious entity that is always ready to whither away the moment you stop sustaining it…As you begin to rest and pay attention…you see that the self has no basis or solidity. It is a complete mental fabrication. You also realize that everything you believe to be true about your life is nothing but stories…”I am an American. I am thirty years old. I am a teacher, a taxi driver, a lawyer…whatever.” All of these ideas or identities are stories that never really happened in the realm of your true nature. And watching the dissolution of these individual stories is not painful…It is not like watching your house burn down…spiritual dissolution is not like that because what is being destroyed is nothing but this sense of false identities. They were never real in the first place.

Try this. Pay attention to your breath in silence. Look at your mind. Immediately you see that thoughts are popping up. Don’t react to them. Just keep watching your mind. Notice that there is a space between…the last thought…and the next one. In this space there is no I or me. That’s it!

Fine, but so what? Well, next he describes an inquiry we can make, after we’ve had a bit of this meditative experience. In my previous post I described a time when this question simply “happened” to me, so I know its potential power.

You might like to apply this simple inquiry whenever problems arise. If you feel angry or disappointed, simply ask who is the one being angry or disappointed. In such inquiry, effortlessly inner serenity can manifest.

It won’t work right off the bat for cancer or surgery, but with practice it can take the sting out of things like parking tickets and burned casseroles – and even hearing that you look like a trucker. That’s not a bad beginning!

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