Wake Up to Your Life: Discovering the Buddhist Path of Attention

Rating:
Summary: Review of Ken McLeod's "Wake Up To Your Life"
Review: Originally published in the Northwest Dharma News www.nwdharma.org

Hundreds of books on Buddhism have been published in recent years, but Wake Up To Your Life, a new book by Ken McLeod, is one of the first systematic curricula written by a Westerner thoroughly trained in traditional Tibetan ways. With deep insight, clear instructions, and entertaining stories, McLeod has given us a comprehensive manual for a lifetime of spiritual work.

Wake Up To Your Life begins as many books do, introducing the context and motivations for practicing meditation, and covering basic topics such as the four noble truths, the three disciplines of morality, meditation, and understanding, and the cultivation of mindfulness. It continues with contemplations on death and impermanence, karma, reactive emotions, and the four immeasurables, and ends with difficult practices for mind training, insight, and direct awareness.

McLeod breaks new ground from beginning to end. For example, the differences and synergies between mindfulness, awareness, and attention are clearly delineated, and active attention ("volitional, stable, and inclusive") is the central principle. That has practical implications, one of which is that ethical behavior becomes primarily a natural expression of attention, rather than a set of rules dictated by an authority or tradition.

Wake Up To Your Life is especially valuable in making explicit what has been hidden from or confusing to many practitioners. Those who have struggled to practice with insufficient instruction will benefit from McLeod's pragmatic approach. For example, he makes clear the important differences between the purpose, methods, effects, and results of meditation practice. Thus the meditator who has been instructed to "open your mind" or "be centered" will learn that being open and feeling centered (as well as distraction, clarity, sleepiness, and euphoria) are effects of meditation, and not methods. The book is packed with tools for choosing and working with a teacher, for cutting through confusion and self-deception, and for discriminating between genuine insight and passing mental states and energy surges.

Those who have been bewildered by Tibetan visualization and contemplative practices will see how they are rooted in basic Buddhist principles, and those who have been confused or put off by cosmology and deity practices will find clear explanations and a sensible approach. We see how the six realms are the worlds projected by our reactive emotions, and how an understanding of the five elements and five dakinis can help us transform the energies of our reactive emotions into pristine awareness.

The chapter on karma is a significant contribution to our understanding of meditation and of psychology. Detailed analysis of how our beliefs, reactive emotions, and habituated behaviors create and perpetuate the suffering in our lives is integrated with practical exercises for dismantling the components of those beliefs and behavioral patterns. McLeod has formulated the practices in terms directly relevant to modern audiences, and encourages the reader to rely on experience rather than belief. Waking up to your life does not depend on exchanging Western assumptions for Eastern ones; it depends on direct experience.

In the debate over whether teachers should transmit the Dharma just as it was received, or whether each culture and each generation must make the Dharma their own, McLeod is squarely in the second camp. He integrates age-old Buddhist methods with modern psychological sensibilities, and uses science and Sufi teaching stories to make his points, but the result is no sweet New Age concoction. Confusion is cut at every juncture, and no slack is given for wishful thinking. "You would probably prefer not to look at some parts of your life, but to ignore the areas of life that are uncomfortable to look at is not a good idea. If we protect any aspect of our life from the practice of attention, the habituated patterns connected with that part of our life absorb the energy of practice and gradually take over our lives. We become what we don't dismantle."

While Wake Up To Your Life is intellectually challenging and satisfying, it is ultimately a manual for spiritual practice, and not an exercise in cultural reeducation, religious history, or philosophical doctrine. Its only purpose is to provide a set of tools to deal with the challenges we encounter while engaging the work of "waking up from the sleep in which we dream that we are separate from what we experience."

Both beginning and experienced students and teachers of Buddhist meditation will benefit from using the methods in Wake Up To Your Life, but McLeod's pragmatic and integrated approach applies the power of attention to social, work, and personal relationships as well as to formal meditation practice. The book will be valuable to psychologists, mediators, managers, parents, and anyone else who deals with people and their reactive emotions. It's for anyone who has felt the suffering and confinement caused by their habitual patterns, and is serious about cultivating presence and freedom.

Rating:
Summary: What the Buddha taught . . .
Review: This is definitely a book that will remain close at hand as I struggle through my meditation practice (such as it is, or isn't at times!). This guidebook helps to set up a meaningful meditation practice that will achieve results and give direction to the hard work of analysis and finding inner truth.

The author writes clearly and makes difficult mental images come alive. Stephen Batchelor claims that "Ken McLeod's eminently practical manual goes straight to the heart of what the Buddha taught." Becoming fully alive, living joyfully and with compassion are goals that the reader can clearly see being set out and achieved.

But this is hard work. I have read through the book once, but must read each step in the practice to keep on track. I think that this will be a life time endeavor and will, as pointed out in many places, eventually require a teacher.

Rating:
Summary: "Cracking the egg of ignorance."
Review: This is not only a how-to-meditate guide, but a "wake-up" call about why we should meditate. "The path described here does not promise quick results," Buddhist teacher, Ken McLeod writes. "It consists of taking apart, brick by brick, the wall that prevents us from knowing who we are. To dismantle that wall is the work of a lifetime" (p. 16). Just as the Buddhist path "is the path of attention" (p. 29), reading this meditation guide is an exercise in attention. Read his book "carefully and slowly when you are clear and awake" (p. 18), McLeod recommends.

We arrive at Buddhist practice, McLeod observes, "because of a feeling of separation, emtiness, or lack of presence in life" (p. 43). McLeod's practice guide demonstrates that Buddhism may be viewed as "a collection of methods for waking up" from our confusion (p. xi). "To live authentically," McLeod writes, "we have to stop trying to avoid suffering and death by looking for meaning. We have to enter the mystery of life itself" (p. x). Following an excellent introduction to Buddhist dharma, McLeod then offers a series of east-to-follow guided meditations on cultivating attention (Chapter 3), confronting "the cold breath of death" (p. 108; Chapter 4), equanimity (pp. 259-268), loving-kindness (pp. 268-275), compassion (pp. 276-285), and tonglen taking-and-sending (pp. 314-352), among others.

Whether you are Buddhist or not, if you are interested in entering the mysteries of life, McLeod's book will become a well-travelled path on your bookshelf.

G. Merritt

Rating:
Summary: splendid array
Review: While this text indeed provides a refreshing and vibrant presentation of contemplations conventionally used in Tibetan Buddhism for centuries, I disagree that it avoids central Buddhist principles of, for example, karma and rebirth. In fact, one of the strengths of this text is its presentation of these and other critical aspects of Buddhist philosophy so subtly that it could go unnoticed. The discussions and meditation exercises are not in any way heavy-handed and would be comfortable for those who have not had the opportunity to study and practice Tibetan Buddhism directly with a genuine lama. Those who have had that chance will find fresh new ways to expand and enhance their regular practice. The meditation exercises are nothing to sneeze at--they would take years to finish, even following the minimum time guidelines, and that would miss the point. These are reflections to take up and continue throughout one's life, just as the Tibetan tradition has encouraged students since the Dharma came to Tibet.

Mr. McLeod's own insistence that one undertake them in conjunction with consistent resort to a spiritual teacher knowledgeable about the path and able to guide students makes this one of the few books written from a Westerner's perspective that honors the dual importance of spiritual guidance and commitment to practice in this tradition. Kalu Rinpoche, Mr. McLeod's own lama, to whom he dedicates this book, was widely regarded as a great meditation master and spiritual guide. Through Mr. McLeod, he continues to present the Dharma to Westerners in a manner that is true to the principles of Buddhism while taking into account the differences between our cultures.

This book is not for the faint of heart. It requires a sincere commitment to spiritual growth to do justice to the splendid array of reflections it presents. Many explicitly require the guidance of an authentic lama, and all of them would benefit from that input. Doing these practices as set forth, however, definitely can bring greater authentic awareness, increased openness to helping others, and deeper peace to one's life-- visible here and now, and onwards...

May all beings benefit!