Beyond the Beyond Pt. 1
Exploring the core.
I first heard the Heart Sutra chanted in a ceremony I attended many years ago. It was in the midst of the most difficult experience I had ever had in a ceremony. I was curled up on the floor, moaning away, feeling horrible in my mind, heart, and body. It was a true learning experience of the variety of “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”
I left the ceremony and found a corner in another room to huddle in. And there I remained, between bouts of abject horror, having brief moments to feel sorry for myself.
I don’t know how long I was there. It felt like the universe had been created and destroyed in eons-long cycles, and I was just a point of misery in the midst of a vastness I could not comprehend.
Then, I heard a chant in a language I could not identify. Within a moment, I was enraptured by its sound and energy. Though I could not identify what was being sung, I held onto each syllable as a drowning person holding onto a piece of driftwood might do.
What I was hearing was a Buddhist monk sitting in the ceremony who could feel my desperate state. With great heart and compassion, he left the ceremony, found me huddling in a corner, and started chanting the most powerful mantras for my benefit. It worked, and by the end of it, I was floating in the bliss of “beyond the beyond.”
That inspired me to learn to sing The Heart Sutra, though in English. It remains one of the more powerful points of a magical evening. I am not a Buddhist. What I write here is based on my own observations and thoughts. Apologies in advance to any Buddhists who may read it for any errors.
This chapter in my upcoming book did not really fit in, so I will share it with you in several parts, as it is quite long.
Beyond the Beyond
People often come to medicine seeking answers to life’s common questions: “Should I stay or leave a relationship?” “How can I be a better person?” “Should I change my profession?” “Maybe I can sell everything and move to Peru?” It is also common in medicine work to chase visions or to seek information and “downloads from Spirit.”
Others may come seeking cosmic and exquisitely beautiful visions. Some want more peace in their lives, to overcome deep emotional wounds, and to find relief from their inner pain. For some, the goal is a deeper understanding of themselves. Likely, there are as many reasons to explore plant medicine work as there are people who choose to work with the teacher plants. No matter the reason, my counsel is always to go deeper. As Rilke said, “Go to the limits of your longing.”
The Sanskrit chant, Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya, is known in English as the Heart Sutra. Its full translation from Sanskrit is “The Heart of the Perfection of Wisdom[1].”
It is one of my favorite chants to sing in a ceremony. The words are powerful and can help to release all of the questions and desires of the mind. It also works well when chanted in English. This way, people understand what is being communicated.
It is not known when The Heart Sutra was first chanted. The earliest written text dates to the 7th century CE on a stone stela found in China. The mythology of its origin is beautiful. Buddha and a small group of his disciples were gathered with the Cosmic deity Avalokiteśvara. The Heart Sutra is an answer to an unspoken question from a monk named Śariputra, who was one of the chief disciples of the Buddha.
Avalokiteśvara in Tibetan Buddhism is portrayed as a male deity. In China, Avalokiteśvara became the female deity Quan Yin, the manifestation of supreme compassion. She is often depicted riding a dragon in an ocean.
In the first line, Avalokiteśvara is called the Bodhisattva of compassion. A Bodhisattva is a being who has Awakened (Bodhi) and achieved a state that opens them to Nirvana, permanent liberation. They have achieved this because they have dedicated their lives to purifying themselves from all the blemishes and wounds upon their soul. They have freed themselves from anger, hatred, guilt, shame, envy, lust, etc., and thus have been able to step off of the Wheel of Karma, e.g., the nearly endless cycles of birth, death, and rebirth.
To become a Bodhisattva, a person must pass through many lifetimes of dedicated practice of understanding and meditation to achieve freedom from the suffering of Karma. They carry no unhealed wounds, no wrongs are yet to be forgiven and released, and they have nothing left to “work out.” Thus, they have earned the opportunity to enter into a state of permanent liberation and enlightenment when their body dies. Never again will they be compelled to enter the world of cause and effect, victory and defeat. They have stepped off of the wheel of life and are beholden to no one and nothing.
Yet rather than choosing to enter a timeless state of eternal bliss, their compassion for all who suffer leads them to make a most powerful vow. The Bodhisattva’s choice is to return to this realm, even though they will experience pain. They will return in great selflessness to act as servants and guides for those who remain in ignorance and suffering. They do this not just for one lifetime, not for a hundred, nor for a thousand, but until all suffering and karma are banished from this Universe. They take on this commitment not because they are asked to do so. There was no pressure, inner or outer. They will gain nothing from doing this. It is only so chosen as a gift of the highest compassion towards all creatures. Were there any other motive, they would not yet be a Bodhisattva.
While humanity can recognize and exalt this role, these beings are the humblest of the humble. They never seek recognition from others, nor do they desire it. They will never seek fame or fortune. They never seek status or egoistic pursuits, for they neither seek, need, nor want recognition. Their lives are devoted to selfless service to all.
Words like enlightened, liberation, and Nirvana are used frequently in our 21st-century lexicon, often with little or no understanding of their true meaning. Enlightened becomes a punchline in a television comedy. Liberation becomes a newspaper; Nirvana becomes a band. But in their original meanings, they pointed to a state of great beauty.
We can imagine what these states might be like. Still, in the very act of imagining, we quantify the unquantifiable, explain the unexplainable, and put into the box of our concepts that can never fit in a box, even if that box were to be as large as all of creation.
These are pointer words - pointing towards an experience that has nothing to do with the words themselves - in the same way, I can point to a tree, but my finger is not the tree.
Without experience, our ideas are only from imagination. We can imagine a state of pure freedom from all attachments, internal and external, but it is only imagination. We can imagine the state of an enlightened being, but the experience of imagining that state is just imagination. We can imagine eating a mango, but unless the experience of eating one was in our past, what it would be like to eat it is only imagination.
Knowing it, the ignorant become wise, and the wise become speechless and silent. -Kabir
I often chant the Heart Sutra during an intense part of the ceremony. While doing so, I always ask people to sit up, which most do. I have found this to be an incredibly powerful way to induce a deep state of meditation and a way to help people find release from all the mental and emotional processes they may be going through. It will often open levels of deep recognition and experience of the Self. There can be the deepest releases and healing.
“Avalokiteshvara, the Bodhisattva of compassion, meditating deeply on the Perfection of Wisdom, saw clearly that the five aspects of human experience are empty. And so released himself from suffering…”
At the beginning of the Heart Sutra, Avalokiteśvara is sitting in complete, focused meditation. He is deeply aware that everything in normal human experience is subjective and filtered through judgment and the dualities of good and bad, right and wrong. So, all of life is then experienced through the interpretations of our sensory experiences. It is the interpretation of what we experience that creates an individual's experience of suffering.
We live within the limitations of our sensory organs and, more importantly, how we interpret what we are experiencing, like a blossoming duality, spinning in the infinite permutations of the mind. One tiny moment of judgment towards ourselves or others starts a cascade that inevitably leads to suffering. To paraphrase a refrigerator magnet I once saw that was attributed to the Fifth Zen Patriarch:
“Judgment the size of a grain of sand locks one out of the gates of Heaven forever[2].”
How many times a day do we judge ourselves or others? How often do we reflect on life events and measure ourselves against others or our incomprehensibly high ideals? How many times a minute do we experience only a shadow of reality because of the judgments and interpretations of the mind being filtered through the shadows and clouds of past experiences? An astounding sunset is compared in an instant to all other sunsets. A meal, with all other meals. Making love while wondering if it was as good an experience for the other as the last time it was really great.
Judgment and interpretations blind the soul from true experience simply because the actual event is not experienced as it is but is influenced and experienced via an incredibly complex brain and mind. There is some neuroscience behind this that has to do with the brain's economic way of functioning: Our way of thinking is shaped by brain waves that go down from the evolutionarily advanced areas of the brain, like the frontal lobe, towards the older, sensory areas of the brain, and in the process shape our perceptions to fit preconceived notions. Our predictive models interact with novel sensory information that travels in a bottom-up direction from the older parts of the brain, which serves to disrupt and update habitual ways of seeing[3].
A thought comes. Where does it come from? Who is thinking the thought? When I have a conversation with myself, who is talking to whom? The voice in the head can be influenced by parents, teachers, friends, media, and societal and cultural prejudices. Plus, thoughts and judgments can change according not just to circumstances but from the neurophysiology of the brain.
For example, stress can cause the logical intellect to freeze, making thoughts muddled. Every thought causes a cascade of neurochemicals that influence, on an unconscious level, the ability to know what is true from what is false. The instinctual level happens at an unconscious place that hearkens to the primitive hypothalamic regions of the reptilian brain. It is further complicated as, in response to stress, the brain is flooded with the excitatory neurochemicals of dopamine and norepinephrine. Then, in response to this, the adrenal glands secrete the stress hormone cortisol into the bloodstream[4].
Different people have different levels of sensitivity to the neurochemical cascade. One person’s enjoyable ride on a roller-coaster can have another person so frightened and at the effect of this cascade that they have one of the worst experiences of their life, perhaps even soiling themselves from the terror.
“Who is talking to whom” can quickly morph into “Who is judging whom”? It is so easy to create judgments of others, our spiritual paths, our place in life, our relationships, our age, the things that we could have done but did not do, and our progress or lack of it altogether. There are countless things we have done that we wish we could undo. How many times a day does this happen? How many times in an hour or a minute does a judgment cause a lack of clear emotional and mental vision?
[1] Heart Sutra. 18 Oct. 2020, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_Sutra
[2] I have no source for this nor do I know if the 5th Zen Patriarch actually said it. I saw it on a refrigerator magnet many years ago and have not been able to confirm it. But I like it.
[3] Teufel, C., & Fletcher, P. C. (2020b, March 10). Forms of prediction in the nervous system. Nature News. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41583-020-0275-5
[4] Arnsten, A., Mazure, C., Sinha, R. (2012, April). This is your brain in meltdown. Retrieved November 10, 2020, from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4774859/
As always, if you have any questions or comments, please feel free to make them. Please feel free to share this with anyone.
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Hi Richard,
I’ve been thinking about your Beyond the Beyond series these last few weeks and have been wanting to write you an email in response – one as thoughtful as the essays themselves, but with my mother’s husband dying a few weeks back (I received and read Beyond the Beyond Pt. 1 on the day he died), then helping her prepare for his service, and now, tomorrow, we're heading out to NYC to spend time with Tsoknyi Rinpoche up at Garrison, I just haven’t had a long-enough moment to write anything of worth – my brain being akin to a wet-rag of late. But the bottom line would have been: I hope this is all in preparation for a book, since the piece in full allows for some of the tenderest and insightful entry points into the Heart Sutra I’ve yet read. And, from a writer’s perspective, I’m doubly impressed that you can go so deep in so short-a-time (seemingly only a few weeks). I wrote a book over the pandemic, Entering the Mind, which moves through the Dzogchen teachings from a practitioner’s perspective, and so I know how grueling, time consuming and, in retrospect, self-liberating such treaties can be. In other words, I truly appreciate how much work you’ve put into those three essays alone — the subtly of thought, the consideration and refinement of Word, et al. As said, I hope it’s all moving toward a larger work that might one day get out to a wider audience. For now, though, rather than a lengthy email, I’ll take the easy route and thank you here for your thoughts on that timeless masterwork, The Heart Sutra.
Much love,
C von Hassett