“I seek only discovery,
Of the illimitable heights and depths of my own being.”
—Pauli Murray
 

 belong to a few spiritual communities. One thing I’m always struck by is the kinds of conclusions members reach based on the interpretations they’ve made about the things they’ve read. Or the outlandish questions they pose, the answers to which could never help them in the slightest.

For example, “Can a dead person or one in a coma be considered enlightened because they have no thoughts?”

Seriously?!

And the long stream of responses that followed could equally be called crazy and pointless.

My teacher would say, in the traditional Zen monasteries, this is the moment when the student would get thrown against the wall for asking such a question. It would be the only answer possible to jar the student loose of the discursive mind and perhaps free it of such nonsense.

People are amazed to learn about my training. They are surprised to hear that we didn’t read books. We didn’t study Buddhist scriptures, talk about the Buddha’s teachings, or ponder theories of life and the nature of the universe.

So what on earth did we do?

We meditated. And worked. A lot.

Whenever the monastery held a retreat or a workshop, we had the opportunity to learn how to inquire within. We were shown how to diagram a map of our internal landscape so we could stop being so lost and have the possibility to be free.

You see, if the answers were in a book, a teaching, an inspirational quote, or a finely packaged response provided by some guru, you could have gotten that by consulting Google. A long time ago.

The discussions we held at the monastery were about our experiences and what we discovered when we looked inward. We processed our day-to-day lives by exposing the voices in our heads, the many parts of ourselves, the assumptions we made, and the insights we were blessed to see.

When we did, our teacher guided us to look at what we were not yet seeing. To go look there.

As we accepted her guidance, we began to see what she was pointing at, which helped us turn loose of so much that was holding us down. As we turned loose of the suffering, ego, and limiting beliefs – in practice, not theory – it freed us up to make a difference with what was left.

The illimitable heights and depths of our own being.