Lawrence Noyes - The Enlightenment Intensive: The Power of Dyad Communication for Self-Realization

The Experiment in the Desert

The Barriers to Enlightenment

An Account

How and Why it Works

Sometimes, Into Divine Realms

PART 2

When I came to sit down and face a partner in this amazing quest for truth, I could look back on a Zen meditation practice that stretched all the way back to the 1980s. Id experienced a lot and got to know myself very well. Daizan promised something different in these sixty-four hours and he was right. I was absolutely amazed. After all those years, I got it. I KNEW what all the old Zen stuff was going on about. For me that changed everything

Matt Farren

Im writing this on almost exactly the fiftieth anniversary of the first Enlightenment Intensive retreat a remarkable spiritual technology that rapidly produces life-changing shifts in awareness.

American spiritual teacher, Charles Berner, created the retreat based on a partner-work growth process called The Relating Dyad. He brought this together with study of the Zen sesshin or retreat structure, focusing on kensho (the enlightenment of Zen, literally knowing who you really are). Even at the very first event a pretty austere affair in which twenty-six spiritual seekers faced themselves and each other in the Californian desert people started toget it.

And so it has continued. Over the past fifty years thousands and thousands of ordinary people have discovered who and what they really are. Leading retreats influenced by Berner, Ive personally witnessed many hundreds of these shifts. Each time it is an awesome and humbling experience. So, what is the content of this awakening?

The foundational Enlightenment Intensive retreat was consciously designed to bear no philosophical or religious imprint. As youll see in this book, the results can enrich the life of a Christian, an agnostic, or an adherent of almost any world view. The investigation is directed toward the self and its experiences in the world. The Buddha appears to have guided students (both monastic and lay) in similar investigations and helped them rapidly to realize what he called Entering the Stream.

The entry requirements for this awakening are that the student has seen through the optical illusion of a separate self ( sakkya-ditthi ), together with abandonment of doubt and attachment to rites, rituals and moralism.

In my view this awakening is not an experience but rather a shift in the way we relate to all experiences. This is important because experiences, however transformative, always have a duration: they come and go. This shift doesnt. Once someone has entered the stream, their lives are then on a certain positive track. The Buddha described this as the practitioner entering the family of the noble ones. I believe that the Enlightenment Intensive process is perhaps the most efficient method in history for helping students to take the monumental step of entering this beautiful stream.

Lawrence Noyes, who worked closely with Charles Berner, and I agree that there is far more to the spiritual life than just the entrance. Without the entrance, however, we are left with formalism, ritualism, emotionalism, judgmentalism, possibly even murderous sectarianism. Those who have entered this stream can still make mistakes; those who havent can do a lot worse.

In this particular scheme of development laid down by the Buddha, the next two stages of awakening deal with the push-pull instincts of attraction and aversion. The second stage brings a lessening of these fetters and seems to be experienced by many in a gradual way. The third stage is entered with a complete freedom from these instinctual drives.

The fourth and ultimate stage involves the breaking of more subtle bonds, including attachments to meditation, conceit, restlessness, and all ignorance. As far as Im able to tell, the process of working with a partner has some value in dealing with attractions and aversions, although other practices are likely to be necessary.

Before coming into direct contact with the work of Charles Berner and Lawrence Noyes, I spent many years studying Zen in the traditional manner. I was fortunate in that it worked for me. I was able to find what Id been looking for. I encountered many people, however perhaps the majority who spent years, sometimes decades, without breaking through. This was such a touchy area that in some Zen quarters discussion of the subject of awakening was and remains practically banned.

There was a very different climate around my current teacher, Zen master Shinzan Miyamae. He used to begin many of his morning talks with: The first priority is kensho . The second priority is kensho . The third priority is kensho . Translated as knowing who you really are or perceiving your true nature, this shift into enlightened awareness is celebrated in countless Zen records.

Looking back into the old accounts, particularly those from the golden age of Zen in the Tang dynasty, my teacher noticed that these dramatic shifts frequently occurred in the most public of settings. Rather than the image of the solitary sage finding illumination in a Himalayan cave, it was the hurly-burly of human interaction that seemed to be most productive.

Much of this open interaction had died out or become fossilized in Japan, largely through historical happenstance. Japan underwent a highly influential influx of senior Chinese Zen masters escaping the Mongol invasions in the thirteenth century. These masters by and large spoke no Japanese. But the characters of the Chinese writing system were widely known among educated Japanese, so teacher-student interactions became largely written exchanges in small interview rooms. Gradually sanzen , the interview between the teacher and student, took on a more and more secret, even esoteric, character.

Zen master Shinzan was happy to maintain the sanzen interview system, but also began to explore more public interactions between practitioners a process he called group sanzen , literally group Zen study. By this time, Id heard of but not practised the Berner method. I suspect Master Shinzan had too.

In introducing this process, Zen master Shinzan said, Original face to original face, asking each other the question and looking, like Myo and Eno. Soon Myo found his true nature. Soon you will too. Please find quickly. You will be very happy, and I will be very happy and the world needs happy, awake people. Your practice is important.

Others in the field of Western Zen have recognized the value of this process. Zen teacher and psychologist, John Crook attended an Enlightenment Intensive run by Jeff Love in the 1970s and subsequently wrote:

I was overcome by tremendous emotion that welled up in great waves from within. My breathing of itself became most strange with enormous full exhalations. I felt I was breathing out all the pain and agony of the last few years getting rid indeed of myself. I cried and laughed for a long time in Hazels armswe both experienced the same unbelievable total emptiness of mind. Silence and emptiness. We were gasping out words like incredible, extraordinary, who would have thought it, and so on. As we embraced, we seemed to be standing literally in the portals of the great voidSuddenly I solved my last question from you and then, turning to older koans , I seemed to get direct insight into them one after the other. Old puzzles that had fascinated me for years suddenly yielded obvious answers. The intellectual trickery was gone here was a direct seeing into the meaning. Every time an answer bloomed like a flower in the mind, I got a shock of discovery. Not as full or as overwhelming as finding out who I was, but nevertheless considerableI looked out of the windows of my eyes in a different way from before. I dared not initially believe that satori (awakening) could be achieved in three days. I am amazedI have read and thought about Zen for years, struggled with it indeed, but only now do I see without any doubts its essential point. I am I and act in that. While I have had important and valuable meditative experiences before, they had never undercut the ego process or let me gain an insight into non-duality. I feel now completely sure.