The Hidden School

by Dan Millman

  Change: death of one thing, birth of another. Humor: true humor beyond jokes or laughter. Relaxed acceptance, nonserious . . . life a game. Paradox: gateway to wisdom . . . apparent contradictions, both true. . . .Buddhist five truths . . . Dickens’s best of times . . . Nasruddin, you’re right . . . four key areas . . . must realize, reconcile.

  Socrates had wanted to elaborate on these ideas. What would Soc have written in a more complete draft? I wondered. Can I grasp his meaning? My mind went as blank as the page in front of me.

  Then I wondered, What if I wanted to share Soc’s ideas with my students? How would I express them? With these questions floating in the air, I began to read and then to write, circling back to scratch out a sentence in my notebook, determined to make my way forward through his jungle of notes.

  When I felt I had done all I could at the time, I went over the words again and again, cutting here, adding there, as the work took on a momentum of its own and I lost myself in it.

  Finally, late in the night, I read over what I had written. Although Soc’s business card listed the three words in the order of paradox, then humor, then change, I chose to save paradox for last, so I began with change:

  Life is a sea that brings waves of change, welcome or not. As the warrior-emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote, “Time is a river of passing events. No sooner is one thing brought to sight than it’s swept away, and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away.” The Buddha, leaving behind both his protected childhood and ascetic renunciation, and having attained illumination, observed, “Everything that begins also ends. Make peace with this and all will be well.”

  Humor, in its highest sense, transcends the momentary tension release of laughter, and expands into a profound sense of ease and a relaxed approach to life’s occasional challenges, large or small. When you view your world through this lens of transcendent humor, as if from a distant peak, you discover that life is a game you can play as if it matters— with a peaceful heart and a warrior’s spirit. You can remain engaged with the world but also rise above it, looking beyond your personal dramas.

  Paradox is any self-contradictory proposition that, when investigated, may prove to be well-founded or true. Once understood, it opens the gateway to higher wisdom. But how can contradictory principles both be true?

  As the Buddhist Riddle of Five Truths puts it: “It is right. It is wrong. It is both right and wrong. It is neither right nor wrong. All exist simultaneously.”

  Charles Dickens expressed the paradox of his era, equally true today, when he wrote, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness,” going on to describe that time as one of belief and incredulity, light and darkness, hope and despair.

  Two opposing statements can each be true depending on the observer: it’s true that spiders are merciless killers from the viewpoint of tiny insects caught in their webs—but for most humans, nearly all spiders are harmless creatures.

  A story of the Sufi sage Mullah Nasruddin expresses the nature of paradox when he’s asked to arbitrate between two men with opposing views. Hearing the first man, he remarks, “You’re right.” When he hears the second man, he also says, “You’re right.” When a bystander points out, “They can’t both be right,” the mullah scratches his head and says, “You’re right.”

  Let’s go deeper and consider four central sets of paradoxical truths:

  * Time is real. It moves from past to present to future.

  * There is no time, no past, no future—only the eternal present.

  * You possess free will and can thus take responsibility for your choices.

  * Free will is an illusion—your choices are influenced, even predetermined, by all that preceded them.

  * You are, or possess, a separate inner self existing within a body.

  * No separation exists—you are a part of the same Consciousness shining through billions of eyes.

  * Death is an inevitable reality you’ll meet at the end of life.

  * The death of the inner self is an illusion. Life is eternal.

  Must you choose one assertion and reject the other? Or is there a way to meaningfully resolve and even reconcile such apparent contradictions? All that follows addresses this question.

  I sat back, intoxicated and exhausted from my mental labors. Are these words mine or his? I wondered. Back in that service station years ago, Socrates had pointed to a few of these contradictory truths. It seemed to me even now, in the light of my everyday reality, that only the first statement of each pair was undeniably true—that time passes, that free choice exists, that we are (or have) an inner self, and that we each die.

  With that thought, I blew out the lamp and lay down for the night, breathing in the rich barn aromas of straw and earth, which pervaded the air like Chinese incense.

  I spent the bulk of the next morning helping to remove stones from a new plot of land. I saw Master Ch’an in the distance, looking in my direction. I can’t just ask him to tutor me personally, I thought, but if he sees how hard I’m working and how sincere I am . . . I took large steps, grunted, and occasionally wiped my brow to announce my efforts. I glanced back at Master Ch’an in time to see him turn his back and enter his house.

  Later that morning, Chun Han pushed one of the large stones we’d gathered that morning into my arms and gestured for me to follow. He led me to the stream, where we placed my stone and the one he’d carried deep in the water. Continuing this process through the long morning, stone by heavy stone, we gradually constructed a dam several feet high with an opening at the top, resulting in a waterfall. Both of us were covered in sweat despite the chill air. Fatigued from the labor, I felt irritated at Chun Han’s smiles and cheery manner until the words from the song arose from the recesses of my mind: “Gently down the stream . . .”

  When I returned to the barn, I found winter clothes waiting for me—a new pair of wool pants and a thick cotton jacket. At least someone appreciated my work, even if not Master Ch’an.

  The next morning, I saw Mei Bao head into the forest, accompanied by a student.

  That afternoon, since Mei Bao still hadn’t returned, Master Ch’an stood alone, watching us all as we moved through the t’ai chi forms. I could feel my practice improving. Now more attuned to internal energy flow, I felt a warmth in my fingertips, a sign that my joints and sinews were opening. It wasn’t, I realized, an esoteric achievement, but a natural result of mindful practice and repeated reminders to relax. As Master Ch’an watched, I allowed the movement to unfold without an ounce more effort than necessary. As usual, he spoke little, and never to me.

  When Mei Bao returned just before acrobatics practice, I asked about her trip. “Gathering herbs,” she said. “This way each student learns where to find them.” I hoped she’d ask me to come along one of these days but understood that the Chinese students had priority.

  The exuberant tumbling routines later in the afternoon served as a perfect complement to the internalized slow-motion t’ai chi practice. Making the most of this contrast, I tried to vary our lively workouts for fun. So, near the end of practice, with Mei Bao translating, I proposed a race between Chun Han and another of the older students down a long row of mats. They would begin the race at the same moment. The other student’s task was simply to run as fast as he could, parallel to the length of the tumbling strip, to the other end of the room. Chun Han would sprint a few feet forward and do a roundoff to turn his body around, followed immediately by a series of backward handsprings to propel him rapidly down the tumbling area.

  I posed the question: “Who will win the race?” The students excitedly gathered to watch. They cheered loudly when Chun Han won the race by about a second. They all wanted to take turns trying similar races—I didn’t need Mei Bao to point out to them how their tumbling would soon become lighter and faster.

  TWENTY

  * * *

  Even as I moved through the routines of farmwork, martial art
s, and acrobatics, I couldn’t stop ruminating on the paradoxes that formed the heart of what Socrates had intended to express in the journal. At first these paradoxes made me uncomfortable. It wasn’t until I’d become completely absorbed in watching my students’ flight through space that an idea—the first glimmer of something like understanding—took shape. I returned to my desk that evening, knowing what I wanted to write, what I had to write, even before I opened my notebook. I wrote and revised, wrote and revised, into the early-morning hours.

  I put the journal aside and waited until the next morning to discover where my pen, with Soc’s guidance, had taken me—to read what I had somehow written.

  There’s a way to reconcile the four central paradoxes of life, and to embrace the truth of each. In order to make this leap, consider that all of these paradoxes revolve around a so-called self that is born and dies. In everyday life, you identify with an “I” that seems to be rooted somewhere inside your head. But what if this sense of an inner self is an illusion? What might lie on the other side of such a discovery? To better understand, let’s explore another illusion that seems as true as your individual identity.

  In this moment, you sit or stand on what appears to be, what feels like, a solid object, something real. When you extend a hand to shake, or to reach for a loved one, or simply to open a door to the next room, you feel as if you’re making physical contact. But so-called solid matter, we now know, is made from molecules, composed of atoms, which consist mostly of empty space. No object truly touches any other, not in the popular sense. Rather, fields of energy interact with one another, as in the t’ai chi exercise of push hands, where partners alternately assert and receive, playing with energy in motion.

  I found myself poking the desktop, noticing how real and solid it seemed. But thinking about mostly empty space and energy fields drew me back into the mystery and magic I’d experienced with Socrates years before. I continued reading.

  You can imagine the atomic level, but you can’t truly navigate there. Yet something changes, both profoundly and subtly, when you consider how reality may differ from what you sense in ordinary awareness. A gap opens up. And if you gaze into that gap, that small tear in the lining of the universe, a new vision becomes possible.

  In ancient India, a forest wanderer encountered the Buddha without recognizing him. “Are you a wizard?” he asked. The Buddha smiled and shook his head. “Surely you’re a king or a great warrior!” Again the Buddha said no. “Then what is it that makes you different from anyone I’ve ever met?” asked the wanderer. The Buddha turned to him. When their eyes met and held, the Buddha said, “I am awake.”

  Such an awakening is a primary aim of most spiritual paths. Also referred to as realization, union, kensho, samadhi, satori, fana, enlightenment, and liberation, it involves seeing through and beyond the so-called inner self. Why do so many of us yearn for this awakening? Perhaps because we fear death in all its incarnations—the death of those we love, the death of hope, the death of meaning, the death of the body, the death of the self.

  But before you can awaken, you need to notice that you’re in some sense asleep—dreaming within a consensual reality until you taste the transcendent. Even a glimpse can change lives. You need not realize absolute enlightenment to find relief. Even in the midst of an ordinary day, a subtle shift in awareness can bridge the temporal and the transcendent, momentarily liberating you from the fear of death and revealing the gateway to eternal life.

  Practicing enlightenment before enlightenment, I thought. What a novel idea. Or is it? What has Socrates been trying to tell me all this time? And how, exactly, can seeing through this separate, inner self—a kind of death in itself—offer an escape from death and a doorway to eternal life? Another paradox, another riddle.

  TWENTY-ONE

  * * *

  By early February, we were doing most of our labor indoors, focusing on repairs and maintenance work, and making sure the animals were well tended. We stored and dried more food and prepared outdoor ice chests to be left in the cold earth.

  Soon the frozen winds were sweeping in across the unprotected North China Plain. Dry, dusty winter monsoons blew in from Mongolia and the distant Gobi Desert. There were days that felt colder, much colder, than the biting Ohio winter. At night, a small wood-burning stove kept us warm from the wind but could do nothing about the dust that settled over everything.

  In our t’ai chi sessions, we intensified push-hands practice, working together in pairs as partners alternated between active and receptive roles, pushing and yielding, shifting weight, as we had learned, from fullness to emptiness. The more relaxed of the pair easily uprooted the other, sending the partner careening backward to be caught by another student. I had little previous experience with push hands, and was forced to take one or several steps backward many times when my partner detected a point of tension. It was as frustrating as anything I’d ever practiced, and left me feeling inept day after day.

  For some time now, I’d also found the writing challenging. Over the first few sessions, I’d produced pages with what, in retrospect, seemed like ease. Now I sometimes spent an entire evening on one or two sentences.

  Even as I found both t’ai chi and writing frustrating, in training I always had the example of the other students to push me onward, not to mention Chun Han’s good-natured encouragement. Once, as he and I stretched each other’s limbs, I even caught a rare smile of approval from Master Ch’an. I had no time to enjoy the moment, due to a pain in the muscles of my right thigh, which had never fully recovered from my motorcycle crash years before.

  Meanwhile, the winds rarely abated. When their frigid whispers turned to howls and the dust and the snow blew in flurries, the farm lost a measure of its charm. In quiet moments, I closed my eyes and retreated into memories of lying in the warm sand on a California beach.

  One morning I woke up so stiff that I had to run in place to thaw out. Later Chun Han and I continued our custom of sharing a pot of tea and trading a few new words in English and Mandarin. I found it challenging to remember that each word in Mandarin had a different meaning depending on which of four tones was used. Chun Han found it equally challenging to master English pronunciation, such as when he asked me if I wanted a “snake” when he meant “snack.” But with the help of funny stick figures we drew to convey ideas, we managed to understand each other most of the time.

  As my t’ai chi training continued and I began to execute the forms with more precision and deeper levels of relaxation, I occasionally experienced what I called “zaps,” energy pulses flowing through me. As grosser layers of tension fell away, I became aware of the stuck places where subtle tensions remained. Gradually my push-hands practice showed signs of improvement. But as soon as I thought I’d mastered something, no matter how small, someone would send me flying.

  Would I have made any real progress by the time Hua Chi appeared? If only I could spend just a little time working one-on-one with Master Ch’an! But that didn’t seem too likely. Even the most advanced students trained only with one another. I felt grateful that Mei Bao, at least, often wandered by, always willing to translate a question or to explain a subtle point.

  After dinner one evening, in a moment of ill humor, I asked her how Master Ch’an avoided turning the place into a sort of cult. “After all,” I declared, “it’s an isolated farm under the sole authority of a central, charismatic figure. . . .”

  Mei Bao’s eyebrows twitched. She said she would ask Master Ch’an this question.

  The next day she returned with an answer. With a wave of her arm, she pointed to the barn, the fields, the small house, and the pavilion. “Perhaps in one sense we are like a cult. But does it seem like an evil one? Are the students hypnotized? Are they sickly or unhappy or exploited? Or are they being served even as they serve? Look with your eyes. Feel with your heart. And you might as well think with your brain.”

  What she said next showed unexpected candor: “If you look beyond this far
m to the whole of China, you’ll find millions of people living under the absolute authority of the ‘great helmsman,’ whose words everyone must memorize and recite aloud. Absolute decrees and pronouncements, manipulation and propaganda. Brothers have turned against brothers, children against parents, parents against each other, all trying to outdo one another in their enthusiastic shows of zeal and unquestioning support, all seeking the approval of the ‘supreme leader.’ That’s where you’ll find your cult, where God is the state, and the state is one man, served by those who fall into line or are purged.” She stopped abruptly; I wasn’t sure she’d intended to speak so freely or forcefully. “Master Ch’an and I believe that our people will move beyond this period in our history.”

  “Are those Master Ch’an’s words or your own?” I asked, speaking more bluntly than I’d intended.

  “It doesn’t matter whose words express this idea,” she said deliberately. “It remains true.”

  These final words echoed in my mind as I returned to the barn after the meal. Before I continued writing, I read over the few pages I’d managed to produce over the last few weeks:

  As an infant, were you aware of an inner self? Or was this sense of identity learned as a social convention? In the first month or two after birth, pure awareness existed in a dreamlike state of undifferentiated oneness, swimming in a soup of sensations that made no sense, had no meaning. But gradually, during the first year of your life, this new sense of “you” began to understand what your parents meant when they pointed to your body and called you by a name.

  Every child who toddles away from this state of expansive awareness learns to organize perceptions around a focal point called I. Only later, as an adult, can you discover the pathway back to the garden of innocence while retaining the wisdom of experience. You can even learn to cross back and forth between the two worlds. Spiritual masters, artists, gardeners, doctors, manicurists, students, or panhandlers may, in any moment, and for whatever reason, seek out something they cannot name—the desire for a higher vantage point from which to grasp the larger truth and possibility of their own lives.