Exploring "In the Moments of Non-Awakening" with Benjamin Hohl this Sunday at Minneapolis Insight

Dear Community,

Sunday 10am Community Practice & Discussion

This Sunday Benjamin Hohl will lead an exploration of Larry Yang’s Lion’s Roar article, "In the Moments of Non-Awakening.” All are welcome! Registration and Zoom information available here.

Here is an excerpt from the article:

As Buddhists, we spend so much of our time talking about awakening, about developing a compassionate heart and an enlightened mind, about freedom and liberation. While the centrality of those experiences can’t be disputed, neither should they become an excuse for denying the reality of our situation right now. We give short shrift to the places where we get caught, where we are not inspired or really not living up to our vision of who we aspire to be. From my perspective, spending our time longing for some idealized state of mind is not genuine Buddhist practice but merely spiritual bypassing. If we focus only on awakening, we miss most of the spiritual practice. I’m much more interested in how we practice with not awakening, with not being enlightened, because, frankly, those states of being are more present in my life than not.

…The inspiration for our practice often rests on one single moment: the Buddha’s awakening beneath the bodhi tree. But that is not the totality of his biography. Tradition tells us it took him thousands of lifetimes to awaken... All those moments of non-awakening serve an indispensable purpose in the path to awakening. We must fully live the moments of non-awakening in order for freedom to arise. We can’t simply aspire to enlightened states of mind and heart without a realistic, flawed human path.

…That means, at least metaphorically speaking, before the precious moment of awakening, there were thousands of other times the Buddha-to-be did not awaken. If he was practicing mindfulness… at some point in each of his unenlightened lives he must have become mindful of the fact that he was not awake. He became aware of his own limitations, his own failures, and his own shortcomings, which, despite his very best efforts, cumulatively were not going to lead to enlightenment in that lifetime.

…Yet the Buddha returned to practice—whether he was enlightened or not, despairing or not. That, to me, is significant. What would you do? What do you do? We have all been there, when we have done our best and yet, we may be far from perfect. We try for the best solution we can, and there might be some collateral injury, even serious harm, incurred along the way. We are not enlightened. How do we reconcile the aspiration to be of benefit with the inevitable harm we cause? How do we make all of it our spiritual practice?

With metta (loving-kindness),

Minneapolis Insight