Buddha is not known because of his scholarship or philosophy. He is cherished for his serenity and clarity of vision, which combined to allow him a kind of equanimity that most of us can only admire.
This does not mean that he found a way to elevate himself above the rest of us. All contrary beliefs notwithstanding, Buddha never escaped his human nature. In fact, it was his ongoing awareness of all things human as they manifested in his daily life that provided the invaluable grist for his enlightenment practice.
Regardless of how deeply he was able to enter a meditative state, and in spite of all the release from suffering and strife he experienced while in those states, he always cycled out of the states and found life to be essentially the same as when he went in. Over time, entering a deep state, returning to fear and desire, and re-entering a deep state formed just another of the cycles everyday people unconsciously existed in, making the monks who practiced that way equally caught in unconscious living, though they may have thought differently about it.
Buddha’s brutal honesty would not allow him to believe that he had reached the state that he and his colleagues were seeking. Instead of floating in any relief he might temporarily feel, he used his quiescence to dispassionately observe everything that passed in his mental field. When he began to feel any investment in a particular thought or feeling, he repositioned his awareness so that again the material was separate and transient as if it wafted in the space in front of his eyes. This practice of continuously repositioning his awareness in relationship to what was produced by his mind is referred to as the Middle Way.
There are a couple of ways of envisioning this practice that might help grasping how it works. One is to imagine moving on a mechanical walkway such as is often found in an airport. Once you get to the middle of the area you are crossing, you begin to step backward so that your relative position in the room never changes regardless of everything and everyone on the conveyor continuing onward.
With this repetitive practice of re-positioning you get to look at all of the components of the space around you without having more than a passing relationship with them. There is no felt connection and no observable association. All of life is merely the action of passage. Nothing can grab onto you and take you with it. And you have no sense of having a destination. You just stay in the relative middle.
Another way to envision the Middle Way is to imagine looking at your image in a mirror that is centered in a hall of mirrors, so that you can always reposition your vision and see the image you had been looking at from yet another degree of separation. Every time you sense that you are locking on, you move your view. The letting go in such a place is endless and all you have to do is reposition your focus.
What this kind of practice requires is mindfulness of what we are trying to accomplish and a heightened ability to not become caught up in what is going on. There is no body of knowledge involved, no philosophical musing about life or the nature of reality. There is just seeing and letting go, seeing and letting go.
The Middle Way is, then, a process that has no end. It recognizes transience as the key feature of everything and every experience in creation, and like a good martial arts technique, it fairly effortlessly uses the momentum of any thought or emotion to move it away and keep it from landing a blow.
(from “Live Like a Window, Work Like a Mirror: Enlightenment and the Practice of Eternity Consciousness”)
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