The yogins to whom the Buddha first went seeking serenity weren’t interested in the ordinary things of everyday life. Their goal was to abolish normalcy and expunge their ordinary selves.
The Buddha became proficient at yogic meditation, rising to the highest levels of trance.
But the Buddha was also an astute observer of human behavior and human nature. Consequently, he paid attention to his experiences and drew lessons from them.
The Buddha noticed that as long as he was in trance, he was fine. He felt peaceful, relaxed, at ease. This is the way he longed to feel in everyday life, and why he meditated so much.
The problem was, whenever he came out of his state of trance, he found that he was just the same troubled person as he had been before entering trance. He was anxious, worried, fearful. Trance didn’t transform him. It failed to bring him a lasting peace that transferred into the rest of his life.
Spiritual growth requires honesty. It demands self-confrontation. We have to observe what we are experiencing, pay attention to it, and face up to the challenge it presents us with.
So the Buddha abandoned his quest for deeper and deeper states of trance. Instead, he became a monk, living a life of severe austerity.
The Buddha had come to believe that craving things was the root of the dissatisfaction we humans experience. There could be no inner peace as long as we were always restless, searching, seeking to get.
So the Buddha isolated himself from all that might cause him to crave things. He spent a lot of time in seclusion. During this period of his journey he moved out into the forest, sleeping in the open even in freezing weather. He was trying to kill his craving for material satisfaction.
There were periods when the Buddha lay on a mattress of spikes. At times he held his breath for so long that his head felt like it was splitting in two. He gave up eating solid food, subsisting on such a meager caloric intake that before long his bones stuck out, his hair fell out, and his skin became withered.
All of the Buddha’s extreme efforts proved to be a waste of time. In terms of killing his craving, they were a failure. As for bringing him inner peace, they were as fruitless as meditating himself into deep trance.
At the end of six years, all this devout man had achieved was weakened health. Instead of becoming free of suffering, he had in fact created more suffering for himself.
Because the Buddha was honest with himself, he didn’t keep telling himself that someday his practice would succeed if he could just be committed enough, rigorous enough. He had gone the limit. No one could possibly do more. Finally he admitted that what he was doing wasn’t working.
And that’s when the light went on for the Buddha.
There sprang into the Buddha’s mind a recollection of an event from when he was a young boy. It was time for the annual plowing of the fields, and he went with his father to the ceremonial event. As he watched the grass being torn up and the lives of the insects being disrupted, he experienced a sadness. Then, out of nowhere, the beauty of the day simply took hold of him, despite his sadness, and his spirit soared with ecstasy.
In the midst of his sorrow for the insects, the Buddha was experiencing the sheer joy of this lovely day. He didn’t create this sensation, didn’t ask for it—it simply came upon him. It was a foretaste of enlightenment.
Now, after his years of seeking, the Buddha realized that enlightenment is natural for humans, if we don’t suppress it. It arises spontaneously, without effort. All it involves is allowing ourselves to become fully present in each moment, as happened to the Buddha on that day in childhood.
Enlightenment is seeing with open eyes. It’s hearing with open ears. Far from escaping the world either through meditation or isolation and deprivation, it’s plunging more fully into life. It’s connecting profoundly, intimately, with what’s happening in our lives at any given time.
The paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin said it well: “Purity does not lie in separation from, but in a deeper penetration into the universe. It is to be found in the love of that unique, boundless Essence which penetrates the inmost depths of all things, and there, from within those depths, deeper than the mortal zone where individuals and multitudes struggle, works upon them and moulds them.”
Michael Brown’s The Presence Process takes into account the hard lessons learned by the Buddha. It provides us with a simple ten-week process for entering awareness—without struggle, without deprivation, without even trying to control our thoughts.
All it invites us to do is to become aware. As we become present in our experiences—fully aware—the joy of being, the deep peace of eternity, and the love that generated the universe well up within us. We are living in an enlightened state, and life is truly wonderful.
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