Base Metal into Gold

Start Here Now: An Open-Hearted Guide to the Path and Practice of Meditation by Susan Piver.  Shambhala Publications.  193 pp.  $14.95

The Buddhist Enneagram: Nine Paths to Warriorship by Susan Piver.  Lionheart Press.  270 pp. $18.95.

On Becoming an Alchemist: A Guide for the Modern Magician by Catherine MacCoun.  Trumpeter.  272 pp.  $24.95

“The wind of the buddha’s house brings forth the gold of the earth and makes fragrant the cream of the long river.”  –Eihei Dogen

Susan Piver is a Buddhist teacher who has found her own way to success.  She has a fascinating personal story, which she tells scraps of in various of her books.  A total misfit in school and in her home life, at some point she took off from everything and drove to Austin, Texas (having intended to go further, but her car broke down) and found success as a cocktail waitress at a bar that hosted some of the most famous musicians in the world.  She eventually got into the music business, moved around some, reading a huge variety of books all the while, trying to find out what was wrong with her life, and at some point read one that particularly struck her, The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching by Chogyam Trungpa.

She knew nothing about Buddhism but was struck by the viewpoint which that book expressed.  She didn’t know what to do with that, but some years later was talking to a colleague in Boston and expressed an interest in learning meditation.  He asked what kind and she, having read Trungpa, said Tibetan.  He said he knew someone who might be able to teach her; that man, it turned out, was soon leaving the country, but would be back in a month.  She said she could wait.  She began sitting meditation and soon discovered, not what was wrong with her, but that nothing was wrong.  She began writing books of her own—her first book was about relationships, and became a national bestseller—and has since continued to write, and also founded the Open Heart Project, a group which is not quite affiliated with the Shambhala organization but which reflects their teachings.  It is a secular organization which teaches its students a very simple variety of meditation, beginning with ten minutes of sitting, and goes on from there.  I believe she has 10,000 plus members.

I stumbled across Piver when I heard about the latest sex scandal in the Shambhala organization—Trungpa’s son was a chip off the old block, but not as open about things as his father—and was trying to find some independent voice who could make sense of it.  I discovered the blog that she was keeping at the time, in which she admitted she was a follower of this man and had no idea what to make of his behavior.  She was as bewildered and stunned as everyone else.  (Pema Chodron chose to dissociate from the organization altogether, even though she’d been dedicated to Trungpa).  Piver’s very human reaction struck and impressed me.  Other people were attacking or talking their way around the situation.  She just said, basically (not in so many words), what the fuck.

I’ve continued to be marginally involved with the Open Heart Project ever since.  Piver does some kind of weekly mailing, sometimes a blog entry, sometimes a short YouTube where she talks; she seems to do both things equally well.  She’s true to Buddhist teachings but states them in a clear, lighthearted way.  She never claims to be an expert, or a guru, or—God help us all—an enlightened being.  But she doesn’t shy away from difficult subjects.  She’ll wade in and talk about anything.

Start Here Now is her book about beginning a meditation practice.  It may seem strange that I, who have been meditating for thirty years, should read such a book, but I’m an absolute sucker for meditation instructions.  I never tire of them, comparing one to another, reminding myself of important pieces of advice.  Meditation is so mysterious a practice that I still, after thirty years, wake up some days and think, Wait a minute.  How the hell do you do this again?  Piver’s is as good an explanation as any[1].  And she peppers the instruction with personal stories.  I always find her stories inspiring.

Like many other people who read widely in the self-help field, Piver is very much into—I don’t think obsessed with is too strong a term—the enneagram.  I’ve been hearing about it for years, mostly from undergrads who are trading information about everybody’s numbers.  What’s your number? seems to correspond to the question What’s your sign? in my generation.  I’ve never taken the test and never knew my number.  But Piver links the system with spiritual practice, specifically with the Shambhala concept of warriorship.  She points out that, if you have some understanding of who people are, and why they’re the way they are, you’re better able just to leave them be, and allow yourself to be the way you are, with all your weaknesses and virtues.

One interesting facet of the enneagram is that it seems to indicate that your most characteristic weakness leads to your greatest possible virtue.  Fear, in my case, being the direct route to courage.  Chogyam Trungpa himself, of course, expressed that truth in a number of places, as have various other people.  But it’s interesting to see it systematized this way.  I find myself better able to understand people’s flaws and virtues as one package.

On Becoming An Alchemist shows up in the bibliography of Piver’s enneagram book, where she says it is “not about the enneagram, but the best book I have ever read about how transformation actually takes place.”  I actually have no interest in the literal practice of alchemy (“turning base metal into gold, or finding a universal elixir”) or in magic (except possibly the magic that Trungpa describes in chapters twelve and thirteen of Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior), but I read the early pages of the book and was hooked by various statements, including its definition of hermeticism (“A hermeticist—literally an associate of Hermes—is one who seeks to understand the mundane world in light of the spiritual world”) and the idea that the alchemist cannot transform anything in the outer world until she transforms herself.  I was also drawn in by the fact—here I go again—that the book included meditation instructions at the end.

It’s obvious from the instructions that MacCoun is also a student of Trungpa’s, though in the text of the book she speaks of her Buddhist days as being behind her, but I love some of the things says about meditation.  “It opens a space in which subtle perceptions can arise by teaching you to make friends with boredom.  . . . On those occasions when your attention is so scattered that you can’t for the life of you control it, sitting still anyway develops control of impulsiveness.  That’s a very good ability to have.  The beauty of this practice is that you can’t fail at it.  If you’ve remained seated for the allotted time, it counts as meditation.  Often the greatest gains come from persevering when meditation seems to be going very badly.  The more regularly you meditate and the longer the time you devote to it, the better.  Half an hour every day is good.  An hour a day is twice as good.”  Finally, she says, “If you were to ignore every other exercise in this book and simply do mindfulness meditation every day, you could still make excellent progress with the Great Work.”  The Great Work being that of becoming an alchemist.

MacCoun is obviously a person who has done her spiritual practice—whatever it is—for many years, thought about it extensively, and absorbed it deeply.  Her writing isn’t heavy—it’s surprisingly lighthearted in places—but her subject is a deep one and takes us to some places I’m not used to traveling.  She speaks of the subtle body, for instance—something I believe I’ve encountered in meditation—and also states that it survives our death, that we are surrounded by beings that are not embodied—some of them having been previously embodied, some not—and of the way all of these beings can be of help to us in our spiritual journey.  I sometimes felt I was entering Edgar Cayce territory here, but MacCoun writes with such assurance and authority that I kept reading even when I wasn’t entirely buying what she said.

This is indeed not a book about the enneagram, but the system she describes (she says that alchemists describe various steps in the process of the Great Work; she describes seven) resembles it in some ways, especially the chapter on fear, which naturally caused me to perk up.  The virtue she sees fear leading to is confidence, a suitable substitute for courage.  She follows that with a chapter where the base matter is desire, which is eventually transmuted to devotion.  She doesn’t exactly talk about how to do all this, though she hints at it.  She talks about how it happens.  She does include various exercises, but the only one I do is meditation.  I recently went on a five-day retreat where, as usual, fear and desire came up together (desire being my classic way to escape fear).  She says we’re never entirely through with any of these steps (something which my experience seems to agree with).  Life is a perpetual process of transformation.

I expect to read On Becoming an Alchemist again.  It’s a startling book.

[1] My current favorite instructions are in the book What is Zen? by Norman Fischer and Susan Moon.  Fischer has a long knowledge of meditation and a way of putting things.  I read his instructions on a regular basis.