”We asked our students to observe water as a way of understanding the power of surrendering. (See the water exercise later in this chapter.) One student described his experience in this way:

I begin to wonder what’s so captivating about water. I can sit for hours looking at the ocean, a creek, lake or fountain, and feel totally absorbed as well as soothed. I wonder why. A breeze comes up and fractures the lake’s placid surface into a wild pattern of dancing ripples. Several thoughts about water come to mind. Water is dynamic, always different and never the same; water is flexible with a fluid adaptability, yet it has a collective force that’s awesome; water is without color of its own - it reflects beautifully the color and lights of its surroundings; water is. Water is? Sure, it never pretends to be something else. This is the essence of its being, its natural intelligence.

Just as he had not urged me to jettison my sense of self, he was neither encouraging an empty mind nor recommending meditation simply as a form of rest and repose. He was asking us to use meditation to look into our minds and examine our behavior, to listen to the way we spoke to ourselves and thought about others, and to explore the attitudes we held in our most personal and private thoughts. From his perspective, inner peace is possible only when one has made peace with one’s own mind, when one’s own inner violence has been dealt with. This requires honesty and an internal ethic that is endlessly challenging. Inner peace comes not from turning off the mind, but from deliberately confronting one’s own innermost prejudices, expectations, habits, and inclinations.

Winnicott, and here the parallels to the Buddha are difficult to ignore, believed that “being” precedes “doing,” and that its recovery is the route back to our original nature. He felt that “being” is everyone’s birthright, but that it is something of a lost art, that compliance often robs people of it, that creativity depends on it, and that therapy can serve as a means of rediscovering it if a therapist is sensitive to the need and does not let their male element, in the form of intrusive interpretations, however erudite they may be, interfere. The Buddha, to my mind, thought along the same lines. He said that our original nature is obscured by our cravings and our frustrations, that the ego that emerges in healthy emotional development, while necessary for some things, also blocks us from our underlying and inherent freedom. “Be here now,” my old friend Ram Dass used to proclaim, making it sound as if it were the easiest thing in the world.

There’s a story told of Milarepa, the great Buddhist saint and teacher. It’s said that one day he left his meditation cave to gather firewood. When he returned, the cave was filled with demons. I like to think of them as little bats, flying around the cave, making a nuisance of themselves.

Unsure of what to do, he begins to wave his arms at them, trying to get them to leave the cave so that he can go back to his meditations in peace. But they don’t leave. Instead, they multiply. So, Milarepa becomes very clever. He says to himself, “I will teach them the dharma, the teachings of the Buddha.” And the demons all quiet down and sit still. But Milarepa notices that, while the demons are quiet, they haven’t left, and their number hasn’t diminished.

Becoming slightly wiser and mildly more adult, he asks the demons, “What are you here to teach me?” One by one, the demons disappear.

Pleased with himself, Milarepa goes back to his meditation but realizes that one demon remains, a big, hairy bloodcurdling demon with big green eyes and bloody fangs. Shaking, terrified, Milarepa puts his head into the mouth of the demon and says, “Eat me if you wish.” With that, the demon vanishes.

Surrendering to the demons that torment you and your organization doesn’t mean abdicating your responsibilities to manage. You are still responsible for dealing with the reality of what is. You are still required to have the strong back, for example, of knowing when you’re wrong.

We must not force our poets to limit the world any further. That is a crime against life itself. If the poet begins to speak only of narrow things, of things that we can effortlessly digest

and recognise, of things that do not disturb, frighten, stir, or annoy us, or make us restless for more, make us cry for greater justice, make us want to set sail and explore inklings murdered in our youths, if the poet sings only of our restricted angles and in restricted terms and in restricted language, then what hope is there for any of us in this world?

Those of us who want this are cowards, in flesh and in spirit. We fear heroic heights. We dread the recombining of the world, dread a greater harvest of being. We sit lazily and demand that our poets draw the horizon closer. We therefore become separated from our true selves. Then even beauty can seem repugnant. Then, we no longer recognise who we are, and we forget what we used to be, what states we sometimes inhabited, what extended moments of awareness.