Infinite Smile

While several of Michael's students have gone through the trials and tribulations of going through the shuso ceremony, where students offer up (among other things) their first Dharma talk, David Fitzgerald was the first to have his inaugural talk to the community recorded. An artist, a father, a retired informational technologist, a poet (as you'll soon hear) and an all-around great guy, David's talk is a reflection of deep wisdom and timeless beauty. Cheers and nice work, David.

So what is it that gets in the way of Awakening? If we are already Awake, why don't we feel it? According to Michael, wisdom traditions seem to offer up some suggestions. Among the most important pointer is stillness itself. Without stillness there can be no authentic awakening. Period. This simple fact, according to Michael, points us, at least in Buddhist terms, toward the 4th Turning of the Wheel. In his talk he references Ken Wilber's recording titled, The Five Reasons You're Not Enlightened, where the the simple question, "If it's all Spirit then why am I not Awake", is addressed. Each of the turnings of the Wheel of Dharma is briefly addressed in Michael's talk. Put simply, we miss the Great Perfection because we're so busy clinging.

If we're willing to follow our fear and our negativity with our whole being, according to Michael, we are offered an opportunity to awaken. The loosening of our individual consciousness into a universal awareness is the byproduct of an authentic meditation practice that helps us face these fears and negativity with grace. Watching the bondage inherent in our individual consciousness, he continues, allows for the Freedom of universal awareness to open through us. Practicing this "watching" supports the development a virtuosity for each of us no matter what we might be facing. In the face of all threat, all danger, all stories we find that there is an invitation to evolve past what has always held us back from realizing what is forever beyond anything we see as limiting.  

In this talk, Michael walks meditators through the rough stages of spiritual ascendancy. With practice, he shows, the egoic structures as their practice deepens. He goes on to suggest that the felt-sense of what's real is what we call, "love." Also, he talks about the spiritual journey, from his own writing, where he suggests that we have a chance to recognize that everything is an extension of who and what we think we are. We see, as he suggests that from the nondual perspective, we are extensions of all things that ever arise in our awareness. This witnessing awareness, rather than something that is a dissociative experience, is instead something that is profoundly integrated. While in his talk he uses a whiteboard in his talk, all of it relates to the Infinite Smile Sangha logo.  

The more we can forgive, the deeper our practice becomes.

"This deep, spiritual work," according to Michael, "is ultimately, is about resolve." In Stephen Batchelor's, Buddhism Without Beliefs, this idea of committed, fearlessness is supported where he suggests that we continually take accurate stock of our lives and then live from this place of honesty with resolve. While these suggestions are simple, they are not necessarily easy. Accepting as Suzuki Roshi says, "Things as it is," and then acting consciously from this recognition. Anything less sets us up for suffering. This suffering is caused the wars that we often subtly declare with things that are external. These declarations then fuel our own interior conflict. So what is our resolve? Rumi says, "Pain wil be born from that look cast inside yourself and this pain will make you go behind the veil." While Rumi leaves it to us to see what's behind the veil his words direct us into the direct experience of using our own dissatisfaction in order to heal the world. Doing so helps us lead embodied lives of fearlessn

Michael points out, in this talk, how we  must be willing to let go of our old habits in order to develop new ones. As Joseph Campbell says, "We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come." With this in mind, the issue of love and it's fire unfold in the Dharma talk. Do we have the strength, so to speak, to truly let go; to allow for the Universe to have its way through us? A practice of stillness puts this question squarely in front of us and allows for the light from love's fire to shine through us.

It's about meeting every experience without avoidance or greed. In this radical honesty fearlessness will always reign.

Whether you are a beginning meditator or a seasoned practitioner, fear can be a useful tool in this work. Practicing, for example, in the midst of our fear shows us a path toward a new perspective where we no longer end up getting paralyzed by fear but instead are inspired by it. This may sound counter-intuitive but when we get to know our fear intimately, we are offered the chance to see through it. In these moments of transparency, we begin to recognize the temporary nature of fear as well as all of the clinging that leads to it in the first place.

Michael works with The Book of Serenity's, Case #76 as a way of describing the path of attainment. He also weaves into this description an application of how people come together and separate in relationships. By using the phrase, "The moon sets, midnight going through the marketplace," he points toward the teaching that there is a peace underneath whatever tangle, or karma, that we might face. With this in mind, he then pushes forward into the realm of his own situation, where he and his wife are currently employing mindfulness in how they are working through their own separation. He speaks to this by reminding us that love is fearless and fear is loveless.  

In this evening's talk, Michael looks at the three components to truly letting go. He first begins with the aspiration for awakening. Secondly, he points to the appreciation of what we have been given in this life. Thirdly, he points to the need for there to be a resolve when it comes to practice itself. In this letting go, freedom, fearlessness and joy tend to arise of their own accord, even when situations might not be to our liking. Michael points to a deep unity that we can feel when we commit fully to walking the path. He suggests that this unity is the most fundamental sources of our felt sense of love and deep peace, and then asks how our lives might change if we knew that we had nothing to fear. The more there exists a recognition of this fearlessness and the more we see the permeability of the separation we typically feel between self and other. From this place we have an opportunity to deeply experience a congruence with living a life we've always wanted to live.  

One of the things that Zen practice leaves out, according to Michael McAlister, is a more direct approach to uncovering the Witness. This simple awareness, is all there ever is, and in this talk, Michael uses a piece by Ken Wilber in order to point out this constant Witness as a way for deepening a practice. Following this part of the talk, Michael goes on to describe what can be expected as practice deepens and what meditators can expect as the process unfolds.  

When we let ourselves truly recognize what lies beyond our preferences and our attachments, we begin to get a sense of how expansive we really are. This recognition can be an explosive experience that rattles us to our core, scaring us from continuing our practice. In this talk, Michael encourages us to stay the course, and as he points out in his book, Awake in This Life, letting the magnitude of what we are work its mystery through us. Doing so tends to break down all sorts of areas of identification not only in relation to our sense of self but also our sense of the tribes and the causes that we feel we feel connected to. Despite this questioning, however, we often find that we have a chance to bring a deeper consciousness into our "normal" world, thereby enabling an even deeper, even more profound participation in our lives.  

"There is only choice," as Michael has pointed out. Even not choosing is a choice. Even in spontaneous expressions of joy or pain, we choose how we will relate to the ways in which we meet these experiences. When we open to the truth that all things are temporary, our choices begin to take on a different kind of quality; one in which we consciously begin to see that all of our choices either take us into the light of awakening or away from it. With this in mind, Michael points out the ways in which we cling to the very things that prevent enlightenment. Past and future orientation, for example, in addition to preferences, will always point us in the direction of our attachments. These attachments end up defining the boundaries of our delusion. But the gift of these limitations are that each of them shows us what we need to get past in order to awaken to the Truth that lies beyond name and form.

In this evening's talk, Michael discusses the opportunity that each and every life event, no matter how great or how small, how wonderful or how dark, gives each of us the chance to awaken. He points to what is always prior to any experience and equates this "priority" to the teaching at the core of the Zen koan: What did your face look like before your parents were born. From here the talk points to our tendency to cling to all aspects of our mind: our memories, our convictions and our plans. Tending to our awareness of this clinging is precisely, according to Michael, what frees us from it.

When we commit to directly knowing, as we say in Zen, our True Nature, we have to be willing to give everything up. Everything. Lingering attachments work to insulate us from a full exposure to this very life that we are leading, according to Michael in this evening's talk. "When awakening happens," he says, "there is the realization that all form is experienced within the emptiness of the True Self... this is Buddha." To what extent are we committed to uncovering this realization? Do we hedge our bets as we approach our spiritual path by clinging to whatever doubts or excuses we may have no matter how subtle they may be? These and other questions provide the structure and inspire the content of this Dharma talk.

In this talk, Michael addresses several issues; among them, how we often lose the view we've been offered by insight. He's written about this and calls it "The Rubber Band Effect," and suggests that we take pains to examine its source. Doing so helps us see not only how practice helps us develop a greater steadiness as we meet the world, but also our meditation helps to cultivate deepen our acceptance of what is actually happening in each moment. He also addresses an article that was shared with him in which Joseph Goldstein offers a way for busy people to "turbocharge" their practice in nine minutes a day. While this isn't enough time to get at the roots of our delusion, both Michael and Joseph Goldstein agree that the exercises application can do wonders to deepen wherever we might be on the path.

To begin with, all of us at Infinite Smile offer each of you well wishes as we begin the holiday season. We also are so thankful for all of your support and participation in this project of awakening. Recognizing our gratitude elevates our experience as human beings, so taking this time to appreciate all of the blessings each of us has seem appropriate. The fact that you listen and support us as a community makes a difference to many people. With this in mind, we seem to be trained in this culture to always want more, or less, of things and experiences. We seemingly spend very little time appreciating what we have in the here and now. What's more, the nondual teachings of "Emptiness" and how it appears to be an utter void to the mind, can be experienced as total fulfillment to our deepest sense of being. Michael approaches this evening's talk with this paradox and offers up pointers on how to bring about the fullness of Emptiness in the midst of every single experience we might have.

Regardless of our tradition, we can reduce our spiritual practice to its component pieces and find that Buddhism's Four Noble Truths offers us a path toward freedom. We first recognize our anguish, we then see it's cause as our clinging, we then realize a freedom from our clinging is possible and finally we see that there is a teaching that helps support a stabilization of this realization of freedom.

Michael begins this talk with the following quotation from Rilke's Duino Elegies: For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so, because it serenely disdains to destroy us. This sets up his talk by making the point that it's in our desire to categorize and compartmentalize experience that we defile what's being offered. He goes on to say that "if we don't mess with suffering we free ourselves from suffering's mess." While this may sound counterintuitive, it is the path offered to each of us as our meditation practice deepens. Gaining a sense of safety is usually what attracts us to practice. We seek an escape from what our reality is offering and initially meditative work can offer us refuge. But at some point, what initially appeared to us as a refuge begins to reveal itself as something entirely different. As our practice deepens and our individual consciousness is loosened on universal awareness, we begin to see that all manner of negativity and