What Power Us? (ultimately unknown)
Some twenty years ago, I had moved from California to Nasa Bay, Texas. a beautiful community just outside of NASA where astronauts used to live (maybe still do). I had bought a house there and was unloading the dishwasher one day, putting dishes in cabinets, and when raising my arm to put one of these dishes away, I saw that my arm had moved without my willing it at all. That is, I saw that some other power had moved me, not myself.
It was profoundly shocking to me when I saw this. I had to stop what I was doing so I could recover. I had been studying Buddhism for perhaps a year at that point, and I was familiar with the Buddhist principle that in the entire universe there is nothing self-powered; rather, everything is powered by causes and conditions outside of it. However, knowing this hadn’t prepared me for the shock of actually experiencing being powered, in normal activity, by something outside of me.
Nisargadatta says that it is a sign of spiritual progress “when one stops thinking that one is living, and gets the feeling that one is being lived, that whatever one is doing, one is not doing, but one is made to do.”[1] Nisargadatta is speaking of a person who had a steady consciousness of being other-controlled, not of someone who, as I, had had a momentary glimpse of it. Nevertheless, it was reassuring to me when I read this passage from The Ultimate Medicine because it was hard for me to retain what I had seen. I was also reassured about being other-controlled by passages in Keizan’s Transmission of Light. Keizan is known as the “Great Patriarch” of Soto Zen. He asks rhetorically, “Do you not realize that you respond when called and you get where you are going by following directions.?”[2] In Keizan’s view, we are controlled by a power that “causes the eyebrows to raise and the eyes to blink.”[3] It “causes you to be born, causes you to die, causes you to move and act, causes you to perceive and feel.” Keizan continues about other-control even more vividly: “Even though you see things and hear sounds, it is not these eyes seeing, not ears hearing.”[4]
I am not sure why, after twenty years, I am again pondering this insight of mine while putting the dishes away. But lately the question has been pressing on me, who or what is the power that is in control of my life? Given the course of my life as I look back on it, although my life has been difficult at times, the power in control of it has been ultimately benign. It has taken good care of me. That I don’t know what it is, is echoed by Keizan, from whom I have read so much that is valuable to me. He says about this power, “. . . It is something whose name you don’t know even though it has always been living with you” and “naturally comes along with you.”[5] I can rest with the thought that this power is a very comforting mystery.
Footnotes
- Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, The Ultimate Medicine, ed. Robert Powell, North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, 1994, p. 97.
- Zen Master Keizan, Transmission of Light Shambhala, Boston, 2002, p. 26.
- Ibid., p. 140.
- Ibid., p. 189.
- Ibid., p. 140.