“Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves,” wrote Thoreau.  I think Thoreau was speaking of that descent from our heads into the center of our beings.  At the first shock of loss, we are bereft, shipwrecked.  We search for something of value to guide us or to hold on to and come up nothing but shabby and broken things–shards of memory, old wounds may come alive and old selves come wafting out of their graves like ghosts.  But as we dive down into the wreck, down through layers of habitual postures, lost cultures and worlds, we may find our way to a stillness that is also a listening and a seeing.

Slowly we remember that we secretly knew there was more to life than thought and habit. Slowly we realize that what we need is not a striving but a quieting and letting.  An attention appears that does not take sides or make demands—that is not eager to possess anything, just wishing to know.  “Prayer and love are learned in the hour when prayer is impossible and your heart has turned to stone,” wrote Thomas Merton (who was an orphan in an English boarding school, who knew what it is to be lost).

We understand who we really are when we descend center of ourselves—when we don’t rush to  identify with any habitual attitude or posture, just see and listen in the calm eye in the center of storm of our lives:  “The question we need to ask ourselves is whether there is any place we can stand in ourselves where we can look at all that’s happening around us without freaking out, where we can be quiet enough to hear our predicament, and where we can begin to find ways of acting that are at least not contributing to further destabilization,” writes Ram Dass.

In my last post, I wrote about meeting Ram Dass.  He told me that the stroke—and his times of being lost—acted on him like sandpaper.  “Coarse or fine sandpaper?” I asked. He laughed and said both kinds.  I realized that he meant that life wears you down, scratches the paint off, but it can also polish and refine you, taking away what is false, leaving something real.  Ram Dass had to deal with being lost. Along the way, he was dismissed as a failure and a fool and a fraud (he was called “Rum Dum” in the press).  But all the while there was another process going on (at times—in all of us, this happens in moments)—a descent into the center of himself.  The ambitious academic gave way to a kind of holy child who wished to penetrate to that still place in the center of our being.

I asked him if he had any inkling when he was young that he would have such a life. “Years ago, I had a dream,” he told me.  “I was in a huge amphitheater full of people all in white.  There was a woman on the dais.  I was standing in the back and somebody was guiding me by the elbow.  The woman saw me and said, ‘Take him out, he isn’t ready.’”

“This stroke is an ego drag,” he told me. “But for soul, it got me into that room.”

We all meet in that still place.

If you happen to be in the area, consider joining me at Yoga Shivaya, in Tarrytown, New York, this Sunday, May 13, from 7 to 9 pm.  We will practice the stillness of meditation together, then listen (and see!) the harmonic chant of singer, composer, and new Parabola music editor David Hykes, which renowned violinist and conductor Yehudi Menuhin has called “the music of the spheres.”   For directions contact Yogashivaya.com.  (This event is offered without charge to all mothers and those who have or had mothers, and offerings are happily accepted).

It sounds like child’s play.  In a very interesting interview in “Alone and Together,” the shiny new issue of Parabola, the actor Alan Arkin describes starting workshops by telling participants not to do anything interesting or creative.  Instead, they play with an imaginary ball or something similar, and soon people start being…creative.

“When we leave ourselves alone, when we’re flowing like we’re supposed to flow, without getting in our way and censoring ourselves and trying to please our parents or some teacher or some idea of who we would like ourselves to be,” says Arkin, “we automatically go into creative mode.”

Creativity is our true nature.  But we do get in our own way.   Over the years, we pick up ideas and biases and conditioning.  We use ideas to arm ourselves against life—defending ourselves against the unknown (in Arkin’s terms) with “Saturday Night Live, smart-ass stuff.”  Most of us have to live a bit before we can shift from grasping an idea to holding an intention.   Being really willing to be open to receive and to serve life can take living through a failure or two.

When I was in high school, I had a boyfriend who liked to wear only wore black, including a long black leather trench coat.  He liked to draw very pen and ink drawings of dead ravens.   He made delicate trees out of blown glass—which he would dramatically smash them from time to time.  These days, I’m sure he would be called Goth.  It is also clear to me that he (and probably many contemporary Goths) was living at a considerable distance from his own body, his own life.

This boyfriend’s father was a doctor, and along with a consortium of other doctors he owned a sizable tract of the Adirondacks and a big lodge.  This boy of cultivated darkness and smart-ass remarks would go there to indulge in rare pastimes like falconry.  (Even at the time, I found that over the top.)  He also liked to go there alone in the winter because–as he once told me in a dramatically hushed voice—“ the cold cauterized all sorrow.”   Towards the end of our bleak little relationship, he told me he plagiarized that phrase and that thought.

I found the admission deeply shocking, proof that I made the right decision in ending the relationship. And yet I’ve come to see that in a sense we are all plagiarists most of the time—a bundle of borrowed ideas and phrases.  My friend was in flight from real feeling.  The wish to feel intense cauterizing cold—all the intense risks that certain kinds of adolescents take—it was a reaction to the numbness that comes from living at a distance from life.  For all the talk of ultimate subjects we did in those days(discussed by the light of dripping skull candles) death didn’t mean anything—and life didn’t yet mean anything.  Being in a body in life was a terrifying prospect we hadn’t really explored.   And yet, most of us are like this, most of the time.

Yet slowly, I am learning to appreciate that we need to show up for life in a direct and simple way to have certain realizations: we find true equanimity in the midst of unquiet life, we find compassion as we suffer. There is a kind of alchemy that can happen only when we put aside all our ideas and agree to be deeply in our bodies and our lives, like children.   I’m convinced this takes certain grounding experiences.  Here J.K. Rowling addresses a Harvard graduating class on the value of failure:

“Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure. But the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. Failure means a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself to be anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena where I believe I truly belonged.  Rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I built my life.”

The truth appears in us only when we let go of all we think we know.  The kind of truth I speak of is the rock bottom truth, the deep truths all human beings share.  Often it comes in the midst of loss–living water welling up in an empty cup.   The writer Isabel Allende describes it when her 28-year-old daughter Paula fell ill. She was in a coma for a year and Allende took care of her, until she died in December of 1992:

“The pain of losing my child was a cleansing experience. I had to throw overboard all excess baggage and keep only what is essential. Because of Paula, I don’t cling to anything anymore. Now I like to give much more than to receive. I am happier when I love than when I am loved. I adore my husband, my son, my grandchildren, my mother, my dog, and frankly I don’t know if they even like me. But who cares? Loving them is my joy.

Give, give, give — what is the point of having experience, knowledge or talent if I don’t give it away? Of having stories if I don’t tell them to others? Of having wealth if I don’t share it? I don’t intend to be cremated with any of it! It is in giving that I connect with others, with the world and with the divine….”

This is the way it is.  We go through life as an isolated and fretful little noun until something happens that shows us we are all meant to be verbs—giving, loving, being still and knowing.  We suffer as nouns, acquiring and or pining for certain adjectives—young, powerful, acclaimed, rich—only to find that nothing stays fixed, young becomes not-so-young, things change. The irony is that it takes so much to let go of who we think we are and what we have to do—failure, loss, shocking changes—before the noun becomes the verb, the giver gives way to the giving.

Yet in the depths of our solitude we can rediscover the way to be with life as it is.  This strikes me as amazing lately: peace comes as we let go and give ourselves to life, mingling with it, changing it a little with our giving.  Rather than spending our lives trying to pile up money or cling to youth and power (which never ends well), we might aim to make ourselves mindful vessels for life.

Here is Dag Hammarskjold, a secretary-general of the United Nations and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize—a man no one could accuse of holding back:  “Each day a life.  Each morning we must hold out the chalice of our being to receive, to carry, and give back.  It must be held out empty—for the past must only be reflected in its polish, its shape, its capacity.”

A learned friend informs me that Hammarskjold was re-articulating a truth from an ancient Chinese source.  This is the way it is with real truth, it wells up from the ground of our common humanity—but only when the cup is empty, only when the noun lets go and becomes a verb.

On Saturday, after lunch at a Thai restaurant in Chelsea with two friends and new Parabola comrades, I found a wallet on a train platform in Grand Central Station.   Lunch had been festive and the conversation deep, just right for Bright Week or Renewal Week, the week after Eastern Orthodox Easter, according to one friend, who was still jet-lagged from an Easter trip to St. Petersburg.   I walked back to Grand Central after lunch, indulging in one of the great pleasures of t New York— public solitude.  The train was to be more of the same, feasting on the passing scene yet being alone, resting and reflecting. And now this—for some reason I was the only one on the crowded platform who noticed the wallet.  Settled in my seat, I checked the driver’s license and found it belonged to a young man, just 20 years old.  He was carrying a bank card that I guessed belonged to his mother, and a fair amount of cash.   Suddenly, I realized how bereft he must be feeling just then– I’ve had my wallet stolen several times. Bleak scenes—and scenes of kindness I had received when I was in that situation—flashed before my eyes.  My heart lifted because I knew I was about to lift that young man out of a very bleak place.

I showed the driver’s license and the wallet to the conductor.  I told him I thought the kid was sitting a car or two back.  He is probably looking very bereft and scared, I told him.  And we can turn that around. Awhile later, the conductor came back with a big smile on his face.   He found the kid sitting one car back and gave his wallet back.  “He was soooooo happy,” said the conductor, beaming. “  So were all the people around him who knew all about it.”  This was one of those marvelous moments in New York—and I’ve had several on trains—when people go from being alone to together, from solitude to community.  The next time the conductor came by he was humming.  Both of us, the young man, and the people around us were lifted up out of our isolation and infused with a special kind of enthusiasm, as if we had been invited by the universe to take part in a mission.

The word enthusiasm comes from the Greek root entheos, “having the god within.” There are moments when we feel we are flowing along with life—when we become agents of life forces rather than forcing things on our own behalf.  I loved functioning this way—helping the universe.   At lunch and walking back to Grand Central, I had been thinking about Parabola’s upcoming issue, “Alone and Together.”   And now the universe had given me an example of what it is like to be part of a greater wholeness—the conductor, the young man, his supporters, and I—all of us part of a seamless whole, an exchange that involved the intricate turning of many wheels, of karma.

Do you ever wonder what your purpose and your passion is?  On Saturday, I saw that our purpose can change  moment by moment—that it is a matter of noticing and allowing rather than a great act of will.  When I was a little girl, I loved pretending to be a secret agent.  On Saturday, the universe gave me a chance to be a secret agent of larger forces.  It handed me a wallet and all I had to do was hand it on.   A small deed, but for a moment I glimpsed what was really being accomplished, as effortless as breathing.  How expansive and bright it felt to be part of the giving back of the wallet—as if I was joining the flow of life.  How constricted and dark it would have felt to hold on to it, as if I was freezing life, binding myself, casting myself into darkness (and I believe Dante portrays Satan that way, frozen in ice, unable to move).

I decided that remaining anonymous was too isolated, too full of self conscious modesty—I wanted more of this adventure.   Almost at my stop, I walked back one car and introduced myself to Robert (that was the young man’s name).   As he thanked me, I noticed there was a look that took years of conditioning off his face.  I could see the child in him.  “You made his day,” said the lady sitting next to him. He made mine.   Just before I stepped off the car, I turned around.  Robert smiled and waved–and the lady next to him and a few others who had witnessed the unfolding story of the wallet smiled and waved.   But it was as if the whole car lit up, taking in all those who were oblivious, isolated, dreaming.  We really are all alone in this—wishing and striving to find our purpose–and together.   A wise man once told me to just try to see what is needed in any given moment—that this can be a light to guide you on your way.

Parabola’s “Alone and Together” is coming soon!

Have you ever wondered why the Buddha offered Four Noble Truths?  Why not just Two—Suffering and the Way Out?  Better yet, why not skip straight to the point:  The 8-fold Path out of Suffering?   Did the Awakened One stretch out the explanation because he lived in a leisurely, pre-literate culture and didn’t have access to the many examples of Steps to A-New-You that abound on the internet and bestseller lists?

No, the Buddha knew that liberation takes place in the wild and woolly space between the recognition of suffering (in one of its infinite guises, even mild boredom at our unrelieved success) and our conscious awareness of stepping on a clearly defined path.   Awakening—or the movement towards awakening—takes place in those times when the bubble of ego is popped and you are in pieces and overwhelmed.   The work of awakening takes place in that wild interval of not knowing.

“Those times, when you absolutely cannot get it back together, are the most rich and powerful times in our lives,” teaches contemporary Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön.   In such moments we look at life and ourselves in a kind of detached wonderment–and sometimes we are met by another kind of awareness that seems to take mercy on us—a free attention from another level.  It can feel as if we are being seen and embraced by a higher consciousness that is there all the time (inside and outside) only we are too caught up in our little world to notice.  Madame de Salzmann called it a “look from above.”  At certain moments, we are joined by this attention in our efforts.

In the “Burning World” issue of Parabola, Rafe Martin retells “The Brave Little Parrot,” a traditional Buddhist Jataka tale—or past life story of the Buddha.   Here is my retelling of his retelling:   A little grey parrot lived in a green forest.  One day a storm sparked a fire that set the forest ablaze.  The little parrot reacted in the usual way, flying away to safety.  Yet because of her past efforts and many other factors in her conditioning, she couldn’t forget the sight of the trees and animals that couldn’t escape.   When she reached a river where many of the other animals were huddling, she didn’t fly on to safety.  She dipped her wings in water and flew back to the burning forest to shake a few drops on the blaze.  The other animals thought her effort was ridiculous, pathetic—such a tiny effort against such an out-of-control fire.  But she flew back again and again. Finally, her brave effort attracted the gaze of a god—who wept at her sincerity (or in other versions banged clouds together and made it rain).  With this special help from above, the fire is put out.

At certain moments in life, we cannot deny our suffering.  At certain moments we see all the way down to root of it—that we are limited and usually in ignorance of the forest in which we dwell.   We spend our time and efforts desperately wanting things to be other than they are, blind to immense fact of our conditioning—we live in an inextricable web of causes and conditions, just like that parrot in the forest.   Yet sometimes, instead of trying to fly away and relieve our suffering as quickly as possible—we dip our wings in the living water of understanding.  We turn back and bring the cool water of understanding to our situation.  And sometimes making the brave effort to be in the fire—to see and feel the heat of our situation– attracts help from above.  It might even attract help from below—or transform the way we look at our lives.

“If you are working inwardly, Nature will help you,” taught G.I. Gurdjieff.  “For the man who is working, Nature is a sister of charity; she brings him what he has need of for his work.”    From the perspective of awakening, a forest fire is not a calamity but a crisis that brings the ultimate healing, liberation from suffering.

And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles,
no matter how long,
but only by a spiritual journey,
a journey of one inch,
very arduous and humbling and joyful,
by which we arrive at the ground at our feet,
and learn to be at home.
―Wendell Berry: “A Spiritual Journey”

Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous “I don’t know.”
―Wisława Szymborska from her Nobel Lecture: “The Poet and the World,” 1996

Last Sunday as the sunset over the Hudson River, a small group of us gathered at Yoga Shivaya Yoga Studio in Tarrytown, to meditate and explore the rich topic of suffering.  It was my evening to lead the meditation, and I thought it would be interesting to go back to the core insight of the Buddha—that life inevitably contains suffering or unease or dissatisfaction.  “Can this be true?” I asked.  I shared an experience of intense embarrassment I had recently—that feeling of flushing with heat, of being caught (between two stools, as Gurdjieff put it).  I described the feeling of things going terribly wrong—just not according to plan.  “When you get right down to it, nothing really unfolds exactly the way you plan.”  The others shared their own fresh examples of life not going to plan.  “Everybody’s got a plan until they get punched,” said one man, quoting Mike Tyson.  Life can throw a hook. It was marvelous taking a single word—“suffering” —and really questioning it, drawing on the material of our own lives.  Here is Walt Whitman, in “Leaves of Grass”:

“Now I re-examine philosophies and religions,
They may prove well in lecture-rooms, yet not prove at all under the
spacious clouds and along the landscape and flowing currents.

Here is realization,
Here is a man tallied—he realizes here what he has in him,
The past, the future, majesty, love—if they are vacant of you, you
are vacant of them.”

In the course of our exchange, I realized that turning back towards our own experience with curiosity has a way of opening up our experience, enlarging and stimulating heart and mind.  Questioning loosens identification.  Examining our experience, we become brighter (if not fully enlightened)—we are less likely to just pugnaciously side with ourselves.

And truth has a way of emerging in a group.  The conversation about suffering began to reveal the way out of suffering. One man wondered why suffering couldn’t just be transcended—couldn’t philosophy and strategy be applied?  A woman said that in her experience there was a kind of understanding that can only be earned by consciously being with suffering—without indulging or repressing it.  It has to be earned to be yours.  It can’t be found in a book or a thought.  I could tell she had lived this.  It struck as marvelous—to be in that sunset washed room hearing someone’s own realization.  Seeing—in the full sense of receiving and holding—is transforming.

When I was young, I dreamed of going to India on a spiritual quest.  I loved the novel Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse.  Now that I’m not quite so young, I realize that life itself is a teacher—if we can learn to turn and see ourselves.  Here is Siddhartha, after his long, strange journey.

“No, it is perfect at every moment; every sin already carries grace within it… I learned through my body and soul that it was necessary for me to sin, that I needed lust, that I had to strive for property and experience nausea and the depths of despair in order to learn not to resist them, in order to learn to love the world, and no longer compare it with some kind of desired imaginary world, some imaginary vision of perfection, but to leave it as it is, to live it and be glad to belong to it. “

What do think?  Does suffering contain freedom from suffering?  Does sin contain grace?  Can every moment be perfect?