Living in the foothills north of Los Angeles, and being – yet again – surrounded by wildfire, Karen Maezen Miller has seen with her own eyes this week the startling science of extinguishing fires. Here’s what she’s learned, and what it might mean for our practice.
“Diligently practice the Way as though putting a fire out on top of your head.”
There is engaging language in my spiritual tradition, in the old writing and the poetic phrases. It’s easy to take the language as inspiration or as metaphor, inclined as we are to analyze everything for deep meaning and exalted purpose. This is what religious scholars do, what intellectuals do, and it’s obvious why. We can almost never believe that things are simple or straightforward, that they are what they are. What do we use our brains for if not figuring things out? Everything has to mean something else.
I’ve heard a phrase more or less like the one above many times and thought it conveyed urgency and desperation. It does. But then I saw with my own eyes this week the startling science of extinguishing fires. How you put out a fire is exactly how you should practice. How you put out a fire on the ground is exactly how you put out the fire on your head – your insane, compulsively anxious, fearful ego mind.
Like you, I wish practice was merely a matter of writing this post, or reading a book, or making a list, or thinking positive thoughts, or losing five pounds. But I’ve seen the firefighters, and how they practice. They do not waste a moment to theory, philosophy, inspiration or appearances. This is what I learned with my own eyes:
The best fire prevention is fire.
When an area burns fully it does not burn again. To extinguish the fire of ego, you must burn the concept of self completely. Then it does not re-ignite or flare up in trouble spots. Have no more inflaming thoughts of yourself: what you want, what you need, what you wish, what you think, what you feel, what you don’t have, what you don’t like, your dramas and intrigues, the world according to you. It is not enough to comprehend this, though. You actually have to burn the brush away, and let the fire rouse you from the bed you sleep in tonight.
A fire isn’t out until the roots are upended.
When a mountain catches fire and the flames soar from a vertical surface, the battle begins from the air. Water and fire retardant are dropped over and over. It’s impressive. It buys time, but it doesn’t finish the job. To finish the job, they send in the ground crews. Foot solders, who scale the blackened slope with picks and shovels to turn up the smoldering roots. The roots of burned vegetation can hold a fire for months, I’m told, like the roots of ego attachment, ageless embers of ignorance and anger, all the delusive ways in which you hold fast to the idea of yourself.
Fire erupts from conditions.
An inextricable set of causal conditions including heat, dryness, fuel and a spark. Unfavorable conditions sustain a fire, no matter how valiant the strategy. When conditions change, the wind turns, humidity climbs and the temperatures drop, the fire goes out. Like that, it goes out.
To practice the Way is to change the conditions of your personal suffering. Like that, it goes out.
And it's beautiful that only from the aftermath of fire, from all the heat and destruction, do new seedlings come to life.
I thank you for your skillful translation of the "fire on the head" metaphor. In social circles where I hung around, people would always say "practice like your hair's on fire." And I always thought to myself, "If my hair were on fire, the LAST thing I would think about is meditation." 🙂
Fire metaphors are also found in the Madhyamaka teachings, in the context of analytical meditation, or contemplative meditation. It is said that, when one analyzes any particular object on a level of determining whether the object exists (i.e. is really there) or not, the intelligence that is investigating and the object of investigation are like two sticks being rubbed together to create fire. Once the fire (i.e. the insight into no-thingness) is lit (i.e. transforms from a superficial inference into a more felt experience), both sticks are burned (i.e. there is no longer any reification of the object investigated or the investigating mind).
Thank you for this post. I didn't mean to babble so much. 🙂
I very much appreciated how your post, which mostly centered (explicitly) around the wisdom of selflessness, also integrated compassion by referring to the example of the firefighters acting without hesitation. This freedom from preconception and sense of being overpowered into action reminded me of a similar example that the 17th Karmapa used during his 2008 teaching tour in the U.S.
I certainly send prayers and good wishes to those experiencing fear due to the fires raging in southern California, as well as great appreciation for the skillfulness and altruism of the firefighters.
Karen, I would love to see a follow-up post that would detail some of the ways and methods by which the Zen tradition uses meditation, both on and off the cushion, to "change the conditions of [our] personal suffering."
Many thanks!
How kind you are to respond, and to ask, but please don't wait for a follow up post. Simply don't dwell in thought. Attend to your breath, naturally, with the whole of your attention. The winds of samsara are transformed into a fresh and cooling breeze. Start there, and carry this zazen everywhere you go. Then you cannot help but help everyone.
Thank you, Karen!
Hi Karen, great post! I was especially struck by the image that once you have "burn[ed] the concept of self completely … it does not re-ignite or flare up in trouble spots."? I know I'm still just learning but whenever I have that wonderful experience of my sense of 'self' falling away (or burning up) through practice it always seems to be temporary. Take me out of the meditation room and put me on a four week road trip with my boyfriend's best friend – a perky woman seven years my junior who thinks that arriving one to two hours after the agreed time for any appointment is close enough – and that ego flares up like summer wildfires. I guess I didn't get to the smouldering root of the problem?
You're right, everything is temporary, we do not hold to anything, so we practice for the whole of eternity. No longer judging outcome or deceiving yourself, when you detect a whiff, an acrid undernote, blow it out before it spreads! Every year, every day, every moment brings a new fire season. As my teacher says, "the Buddha is still refining his practice." Welcome home. 🙂
you know how much i adore you, i do. i think too much about this so here goes: how do you enrich yourself then. how do you separate learning something new and becoming proficient at it from yearning and the ego that started the whole thing….you cant just sit there right? aren't we supposed to light a fire sometimes?
hugs and buckets of water to you and your neighbors.
besos.
Only when we think about "how" this might work does it seem not to work. Take care of what is in front of you when it is in front of you. Do what you need to do when you need to do it. What is in front of you is always changing, isn't it? Aren't you always learning to do things you've never done before? It is the judgment that is stultifying; the craving that is incendiary.
Practice makes the view clear, and the path obvious.
What about the yearning of thinking someday that a new thing won't be in front of me? I sit, it gets better, but so often I just want to be at the proverbial finish line. I can laugh because I don't crave power or money these days I crave utter, permanent contentment.
Thanks for your blogs, they are always heart opening for me.
The good news is that you are at the finish line. It's just not proverbial. Thank you for meeting me here!