Monthly Archives: October 2011

Awakening / Awareness / Magic / Presence / Scrooge / Seeing / Uncategorized / Waking Up — 5 Comments
28
Oct 11

Taking Halloween Seriously

“Many Paths One Truth” is out!  Compelling me to use exclamation points!   Not surprisingly, we who worked on the issue find it beautiful and fascinating, and we hope you do!  Seriously, please support us by buying a copy and letting us know what you think.

As we worked on the issue, this question came up again and again: How can a person find a good or right way?  Especially now, when so many teachings are available and in increasingly user-friendly forms.  Just the other day, Parabola publisher Jeff Zaleski and I interviewed an avowed reincarnated Tibetan Buddhist lama in his borrowed apartment on Central Park West, before he attended a premier of a movie about his life.  Next, we taxied down to the Parabola offices where we picked up the weekly bale of books and dvds from other lamas and teachers from other major traditions and paths and ways.   And now there are so many on-line options!  How can we possibly go beyond the endless stream of inspiring thoughts  and quotes and images (and Parabola in our various forms provides plenty of those)—to actually make contact with a way that will lead inward to our own deepest experience—and outward,  to the truth we share?

Carlos Castaneda writes: “The only question is:  Does this path have a heart?  If it does, then it is a good path.  If it doesn’t, then it is of no use.”   I’ve been mentioning certain famous literary kids in this space lately—kids who found their way by trusting their own hearts and capacity to know and to feel.   Kids can’t help but trust their hearts.  Over the years, we build up dense layers of thoughts, memories, and images that take us away from what is really happening in the moment.  A real path helps us cut through the fog, leading us back to the roots of perception and feeling, re-introducing us to our innate capacity to see clearly and feel and care about what we see.  When we were little kids, we could see very clearly that life has a magical quality.  We understood the power of an act of kindness or generosity; we felt different qualities of presence in different people and animals.

And contrary to what many adults think about children we thought about death a great deal.  Death had dark magic.   Ghost stories and contemplation of scary ways to die brought us intensely alive.  Death had a dark magnetism that called out our best energy and courage and spirit to move in the opposite direction.   Thinking about dying and/or being visited by beings from the underworld made us discover how intensely we wanted to be alive.

His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama:  “Awareness of death is the very bedrock of the path.  Until you have developed this awareness, all other practices are obstructed.”    Real paths are like the ghosts who came to Scrooge:  they show us who we once were and they remind us that we will die.

Top of Form

Bottom of Form

Halloween is coming and my thoughts are naturally turning to ghosts and haunting.  As I mentioned before, I co-lead a meditation group in a yoga studio called Yoga Shivaya, in Tarrytown, near Sleepy Hollow.  The are is now dominated by images of the Headless Horseman all dressed in black, scooping up poor Ichabod Crane and taking him on the ride of his life.  I can’t help thinking of him as an early American version of the young Buddha, being shown the basic facts of sickness, old age, and death—and the possible way out, the monk, who embodied conscious seeing.

Most people believe that Halloween derives from the ancient Celtic holiday of Samhain.  The ancient Celts believed that the border between this world and the Otherworld became thin on Samhain, allowing spirits (both harmless and harmful) to pass through. The family’s ancestors were honored and invited home while harmful spirits were warded off. It is believed that the need to ward off harmful spirits led to the wearing of costumes and masks. The point was to disguise oneself as a harmful spirit and thus avoid harm.  Samhain was also a time to take stock of food supplies and slaughter livestock for winter stores. Bonfires were lit. All other fires were doused and each home lit their hearth from the bonfire. The bones of slaughtered livestock were cast into its flames (such an ancient gesture of offering to the unknown). Sometimes two bonfires would be built side-by-side, and people and their livestock would walk between them as a cleansing ritual. Taking stock of what you have stored up.  Allow yourself to feel the weight of the tensions, the images of you are and what really matters to you that you carry around—allow yourself to really touch and see it without judgment or adding or turning away.  This is purification by fire.

A path with heart leads inward to the root of perception and feeling.  We purify our seeing and our way of relating to what is as we learn to not turn away from what we don’t wish to see, or what we think is not important or desirable.  It is seeing itself that is important, not what is seen. When we remember that we will die, we suddenly remember who we really are—and it turns out that we are not our bodies or positions or points of view, but a flowing state of inner being.  Staring at the Ghost of Christmas Future (and most of us have had this kind of scary shock in one guise or another) we realize that in our inmost essence we don’t have a particular outer shape at all: we are vessels for a common fire.  As Madame de Salzmann once taught:  “I begin to realize that what I am trying to approach is not only mine, not only in me, but immense and much more essential. In front of this, my tensions let go one after the other until the moment I feel, as a gift of unity, a collected Presence.”  Be like Scrooge waking up on Christmas morning and realizing it is not too late.  Follow a path with heart.

Awakening / Awareness / Happiness / Magic / Presence / Seeing / Waking Up — 3 Comments
24
Oct 11

Seeing Magic

Who doesn’t like a good story?  Some facts remain constant in this changeable and unpredictable world.  Among them is the wish to be loved, to be safe, to be free from physical and mental suffering, to be free and at ease in this world, to know life and be known as we really are.  What makes great novels great is the way they embody and convey this constant wish among humans and other beings.   We root for Jane Eyre and for Harry Potter as they rise to the challenge of overcoming the ever increasing obstacles that stand in the way of the fulfillment of this wish.  One reason people love those characters in particular is this wish to love and be loved—to really unfold–comes blazing out of a truly oppressed little kid who proves capable of discovering unknown powers and strengths.  Both characters are stimulated into extraordinary growth.   Their respective authors convey the sense we all have (at least unconsciously):  that we have magic in us.

What exactly is this magic supposed to consist of?   It is our capacity to drop whatever mental rock we happen to be holding, to open the grasping hand of the self and receive life just as it is.  “Bronte’s sense of human personality is that it is pliant, fluid, living, in immediate (and often defiant) response to its surroundings,” writes Joyce Carol Oates. “Not that it is stable and determined.”   We thrill as Jane and Harry are stimulated by circumstances to discover remarkable strengths and capacities.  Our innate story sense tells us there is a way to be heroic in life that does not involve bashing our way through obstacles like a human fist—that involves being open to change.

The chief obstacle seems to be ourselves–literally, our attachment to a fixed notion of self.  Looking at everything that meets us from this fixed vantage point creates a sense of separation and opposition.  We label and judge everything instantaneously, scrolling through the files of memory to place things, separating our “selves” from what we see.   This is a primal tendency and there is nothing wrong with it: what would happen if our cells lost the ability to distinguish between self and other?  What if atoms lost their inherent sense of structure? Everything would be all shapeless and formless and void.  The grand story of life as we know it would cease.

Still, we have to find a way not to be enslaved by the tendency—not to live our lives in a cupboard under the stairs, forever at a remove at a direct experience of life by what we believe we know, by what we believe ourselves to be.  Our relish for books like Jane Eyre and Harry Potter reveal that we believe that we know deep down that there is something wondrous about life waiting for us—and that we ourselves may have extraordinary capacities.  I just don’t feel it because I am lost in thoughts, images, desires, disappointments, physical impressions—lost in old knowledge.   A famous Buddhist teacher once described the great predicament of human race in three words:  “Lost in thought.”

Yet there is another way of being attentive, and we have all experienced it—at least for fleeting moments.  There are moments when we are so astonished by life that we can just stand there are receive it without naming, without judging.  Sometimes, this seems to come spontaneously in the wake of earth-shaking news—sometimes in the midst of a meditation retreat when we allow ourselves to be very still, yet very sensitive and alive inside. This is that rare state when we make no distinctions, when one thing is not more than another—everything is equally astonishing, equally evidence of the wild, strange miracle of life.  In such a moment, there is no separation between the life inside us and outside.  We are seamlessly connected and we have a role to play.  We are to stand there and be astonished (as that wonderful poet and Parabola contributor Mary Oliver has written).  We are to see, to receive, what is taking place.   In such a moment, we realize that the brave and creative and magical act that so many of us aspire to is just this act: seeing what is taking place.

Most of us know this experience, and then we forget, and this is perfectly natural.  We have to get on with the business of living.   Yet a feeling lingers, a longing to know ourselves and know life in a more complete way.  What to do?  I think we may need to acknowledge that longing in an honest and straightforward way, like Jane Eyre yearning for the moon and the stars and adventure, and then hearing the clock strike and going in to do her job, letting” little things recall us to earth.”

Uncategorized — 2 Comments
20
Oct 11

The Swinging Door

What does it take to find our path to a greater, richer life?  What do we need to do to open up and let the magic in?  It is entirely possible to spend most of our limited time not really inhabiting our own life,  just a blur of thought and memory gliding over the surface of things like a ghost without really touching in.  This is a horrible fate when you think about it.  What is the way out?   Lately, I’ve been the journeys of great child characters, of Harry Potter and Jane Eyre.

Like Harry, Jane is an unwanted and unloved child, grudgingly taken in by an aunt who has no intention of helping her find her way in the world.  When we meet her, she is tucked away behind curtains, imagining the world based on the pictures in a History of British Birds, and on scraps of fairy tales she hears from a maid, or later from the then-popular novel Pamela.  In short, the world Jane lives in is very, very limited but she doesn’t feel limited. She feels intensely interested—and her awareness of herself having an interest that is a world beyond her grim immediate surroundings is part of the intensity and the interest.  Don’t you remember that feeling?  I remember being a little girl standing on the shore watching ships with international flags pass by on the St. Lawrence River.  I remember learning the flags of different countries and feeling a thrill of connection I couldn’t describe.   Even though I was small and stranded on the shore in Northern New York, there was something large in me—vast, even–something that could encompass a ship that came all the way from Sweden.

Bronte describes young Jane hiding behind velvet drapes, finding the pictures and stories profoundly interesting, even though her understanding and feelings are extremely undeveloped.  There is something about that special way of being interested that is an important clue about what it takes to find a path–in a certain state there is no separation between the subject and the object of our attention.  There is a state in which the objects of our attention are swinging door, inviting us into a deeper knowledge of our true nature, into a deeper way to be alive.  Last Sunday in our local meditation group, we spoke of this in modern terms, as flow.

Most of us know those luscious moments when we move from the shore to the river, from surface of things to the depths, when we move merely looking and labeling to opening up and receiving—to becoming part of what we see.   How do we get there?  This was spoken of a great deal in the “Seeing” issue of Parabola.  We’ve talked in this blog about those moments when you are so confounded that you give up–on a writing project or an artwork or on life.  This moment of abandoning hope of thinking up a solution can feel like facing our true inner poverty—or even like going up into the attic and confronting crazy Mrs. Rochester.  All our thoughts and images and memories are just mice running round and round in our brain, leading us nowhere.

I think of this as a koan moment, a moment of being stopped in our tracks.  In “Seeing,” the artist Jane Rosen describes intentionally giving her students conflicting directions on drawing, so that “their minds are so busy trying to figure it out, that something more essential can come out and it goes I’ll try. “   Plain, honest, sincere, artistic, “tenacious of life,” Jane Eyre is a personification of that little impartial person Rosen describes who comes out to see and draw when the personality just won’t serve.

The journey of Jane Eyre (and Harry Potter, and all children—or the lucky ones) is a journey from isolation to being part of a much greater life.

What would it be like if we approached our lives with a spirit of investigation, if we were keenly interested in investigating the nature of our connection to life so that we could discover the role we are meant to play? Yes, I am proposing that the thought (or, better, attitude) experiment of living as if we are Harry Potter or Jane Eyre.   I remember doing this sometimes when I was young, don’t you?  Looking at life with an intense and happy interest, seeking the role I might be able to play.

Out walking one winter day, Jane Eyre (who has survived her horrible childhood to become an educated young woman) came upon the dark and brooding Mr. Rochester.  His horse slips on the ice and he sprains his ankle, compelling him to ask her to help him back to his horse.   Jane doesn’t yet know who Rochester is (the master of the estate where she works as a governess) much less the impact he will have on her life.  Yet Jane feels that something has changed.  “My help had been needed and claimed:  I had given it:  I was pleased to have done something; trivial, transitory though the deed was, it was yet an active thing, and I was weary of an existence all passive.”

In other words, having a greater life, a magical life doesn’t just depend on Mr. Rochester showing up.   We have to being open—and being active inside.   Growing up to live conventional worldly lives, we are used to living on the surface.  We are oriented towards the outside, leaning forward to grasp what we need or to defend ourselves.   Yet there are times when we are in a different relationship with life.  Another way of life begins not when we decide we are strong enough and accomplished enough or rich enough to give but when we have nothing left to take.   When all we want to do is receive life with empty hands.  Then life can pour in.

At those moments, I begin to realize that what I may really be in my essence is not an isolated and inviolate little “I” at all, but part of something immense and essential.  It may turn out that we really are connected to those British birds, those ships passing on the St. Lawrence, to all that we see.  The secret is knowing that all those things that interest us are doors that swing inward, inviting our own deepest experience to be part of what we see.

Awareness / Presence / Radical Acceptance — 8 Comments
16
Oct 11

Jane Eyre Sutta #2

What does it take to fully awaken, to open up and receive life– to really see and hear and life beyond the usual limitations imposed by our fearful little “I”?   What if all we want is to be able to concentrate a bit better on the task in front of us, to be able to listen more deeply and be a little bit less numb?

Strange as it might seem, there is a clue given in the famous Victorian novel Jayne Eyre.  I’m thinking of the scene where young Jayne talks with saintly Helen Burns, her only friend in Lowood, the low and miserable institution for orphans where she has been abandoned by her family to be abused and starved.  Helen has been unfairly punished and humiliated by a horrible teacher, yet she rises above the insult:  “Life appears to me to be too short to be spent nursing animosity, or registering wrongs.  We are, and must be one and all, burdened with faults in this world: but the time will soon come when, I trust, we shall put them off in putting off our corruptible bodies; when debasement and sin will fall from us with this cumbrous frame of flesh, and only the spark of the spirit will remain—the impalpable principle of life and thought, pure as when it left the Creator to inspire the creature; whence it came it will return….”

No doctrine of sin or karma for Helen Burns.  She admits that she “holds another creed, which no one ever taught me….”  Close to death from consumption, the girl understandably wants to make eternity “a mighty home—not a terror and an abyss.”   She can clearly distinguish between the criminal and the crime and  “revenge never worries my heart…injustice never crushes me too low; I live in calm, looking to the end.”

This is nothing at all like Jane, who will go on to live a long and eventful life.  Jane tells Helen that she has no problem accepting her own natural inclination to strike back or at least resent those who hurt her.  Helen assures her that this will change, “as yet you are a little untaught girl.”  But Jane begs to differ:  “But I feel this, Helen:  I must dislike those who, whatever I do to please them, persist in disliking me; I must resist those who punish me unjustly.  It is as natural as that I should love those who show me affection, or submit to punishment when I feel it deserved.”

Helen reminds Jane that Christians and civilizations do not hold this view (although she herself is a heretic).  She sounds like Buddha (and MLK for that matter) when she cautions Jane:  “It is not violence that best overcomes hate—nor vengeance that most certainly heals injury.  She tells Jane to read the New Testament and learn how Jesus spoke and acted, loving his enemies, blessing and doing good to those who hated and cursed him.  This is the ultimate example of how to live a nonviolent, transformative, selfless way of life.

Yet we ordinary humans must be someone before we can be no one.   We must make constant efforts to know and accept ourselves in all our parts, not just our best thoughts.   An attitude that is allowable for an angelic and rather one-dimensional character on the brink of very early death, is for the rest of us “spiritual bypass.”  To open to life, we must open to our inner untaught little child.  We must sense and feel what we are in our body and feelings, not just our thoughts–not acting on every angry impulse but seeing what we are without judgment.

“There is an essential energy that is the basis of all that exists,” writes Madame de Salzmann, Gurdjieff’s closest pupil.  “I do not feel it because my attention is occupied by everything contained in my memory—thoughts, images, desires, disappointments, physical impressions. I do not know what I really am.   It seems that I am nothing.  Yet sometimes something tells me to look, to listen, to seek seriously and truly.”  Usually when we try (at least when I do) we see that we listen poorly.  We seem to have the attention of a fly, and we are constantly judging what we see.  Madame de Salzmann stresses how pervasive judgment, and how it separates us from what we see.  How can we escape?  The proximity of death is one way.

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life,” said Steve Jobs at a commencement address delivered at Stanford University in 2005. “Because almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.  Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.  You are already naked.  There is no reason to follow your heart.”

Living with nothing to lose, going for broke, gambling, taking that one leap over the chasm to freedom or out the prison window—all these things point toward a state of intense concentration.  The key  is not thinking—or not thinking from our usual ordinary egocentric place.

As we usually are, we are thinking all the time, constantly creating images and applying them to what we see.  But this is not deep seeing.  It is merely looking (as the artist Jane Rosen describes it in the “Seeing” issue).  Looking is labeling. It comes from a place of separation from what we see.   It comes from the surface of our mind.  There is judgment involved.

And yet there are special conditions and times when the attention is not dominated by the thinking, not not cut off from the sensations of the body, from the feelings.  There are times when we are not hypnotized by thoughts about my desires, attachments, times when we realize that the attention—and that we ourselves–are capable of more and meant for more.

This realization usually brings a great stillness.  Suddenly we see without naming, without separating.  Yet in order to maintain this open, undistracted attention we must accept our true nature, excluding nothing, rejecting nothing, judging nothing, observing ourselves and life without comment.

Sometimes, we don’t make the usual distinctions.  Sometimes the separation between the life inside and the life outside falls away.   We see the way artists do.  We see that seeing itself is a creative act.  Our deepest wish is to go on seeing, receiving life, being part of it.   Years ago, a friend of mine had reason to believe she was dying.   The funny thing about it, she told, was that she lost all interest in herself.  She grew interested in life.  Suddenly, everything seemed miraculous, the way the sun hit the wall, the doctors’ white coats, the doctors, everything.

It turns out there are more terrifying things than dying—and worse things than being a spirited, untaught little bad girl like Jane Eyre. There is the possibility of passing your life hypnotized by thought, never touching your true passions and feelings—and consequently never opening the whole package you have been given.  You are gifted with multiple ways to be attentive, to connect with life.  Discover and explore them all.  Pull yourself together.  To concentrate comes from a word that means to come from the center.  “Sati” or mindfulness means to re-member, to become a whole.  Live a whole life.

“Your time is limited.  Don’t waste it living someone else’s life,” said Steve Jobs.  Come down out of the attic of your mind and inhabit this life.

Uncategorized — 4 Comments
12
Oct 11

Blessed Are the Meek

Picking up on what I posted last time, something surprising happened once that showed me the power of humility I found myself sitting in a small room in the majestic Riverside Church in Manhattan, face to face with the Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hahn.  I was there to interview the famous master about his just published book Anger.   Yet this meeting came weeks after the attacks of 9/11, and the state of the city jostled me out of my usual roles of magazine interviewer interviewing celebrity author.   Along with the rest of the city, I was shocked into state of open awareness and questioning.  One journalist called what happening all over the city a “suspension of  distraction.”  I fwas full of the kind of questioning that bubbles up when something shattering happenns–How can we live fully knowing we might die at any moment; How can we live fully knowing that reality is really wildly uncertain?  How can we be in the moment when the moment feels unbearable?  Thich Nhat Hahn sat listening, saying nothing.

An elderly nun beside him about broadening the field of awareness, about finding something of beauty to focus on, the blue sky, the green grass.  But in that moment, beauty itself just heightened my sense of the fragility and impermanence of life.  Two things happened very quickly.  First, I was aware that my attention was not in my head as it usually was when I was playing the role of reporter but lower down, in the center of my being.  I felt collected and focussed and strangely free of the usual sense of separation between self and other, reporter and illustrious subject.  I felt mindful in the most primal sense, thought, feeling, sensation all collected and focused in the same direction, and this seemed to bring a new freedom and a new force.  It felt urgently important to hear something fresh and real.   Under the circumstances, something in me just refused to do the inane job of elicit a few canned quotes about anger and go back to the office and write a description about his serene and Buddha-like nature.  There was a glorious revolt going on inside me, a Jane Eyre moment of wild freedom. Did the Zen master have wisdom and compassion or did he not?   I would not take no answer for an answer.   Andrew Young, the former mayor of Atlanta, a former top aide to Martin Luther King Jr., who had dropped by to pay his respects to the man King had nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1967, suddenly leaned forward.

“I have something to say,” he said.  And he proceeded to tell me how it was that Martin Luther King Jr. lost his fear of death.   Martin “knew what was important, and he made sure he did it every day.”  I had the impression from what Young said that Martin learn to seek the Truth, and that when you live that way, beyond narrow self-interest and in alignment with a greater Truth, neither death nor suffering can destroy who you really are.   I had come seeking wisdom from a Buddhist monk and received it from MLK.  I was so moved by what Young shared, I went home and read some of MLK’s famous sermons.   I learned that he believed the universe is governed by moral laws just as surely as there are physical laws, that there is a law of love just as there is a law of gravity, and that we reap what we sow.   I learned that he was in such a state of fear and weakness one night in Montgomery, Alabama, that he got down on his knees and prayed as he had never prayed before–and that he came to experience the Presence of God and learned that it was always available and would always be with him, no matter what happened–and that unarmed truth and unconditional love will always win in the end.

MLK’s reference to “unarmed truth” reminds me of what Steve Jobs said about learning that you are about to die, that it leaves you naked and beyond embarrassment.  I felt naked that day before Thich Nhat Hahn and Andrew Young.  I wasn’t clothed in thought, or hiding behind a role. I was raw and real, and I learned that connecting with our basic humanity in this way confers power.  I learned there is a vast difference between being meek in the sense of being an onlooker, disempowered, benumbed, fragmented inside, and being meek in the ancient sense of humble.  I learned that the word “humble” comes from the Latin word “humilis,” which comes from “humus” or earth, ground.   That day at the Riverside Church, I touched the earth.  Sensing the whole of myself, I asked questions that came from the ground of my being–not from the narrow confines of what my magazine wanted and what might have satisfied my narrow individualistic sense of myself but from the common ground of our shared humanity.  Through Andrew Young, Martin Luther King Jr. met me there.   From his example I learned that conscious humility can be a great power.  To be truly humble and open to Truth, is to have the earth, the ground of your being, supporting and empowering you.   I began to glimpse that the way to freedom is to serve something greater than yourself.

 

Uncategorized — 2 Comments
10
Oct 11

Blessed are the Poor

Blessed are the poor in spirit.  On Sunday evening, I walked into the big empty yoga studio in Tarrytown, New York, pretty certain that the best thing I had to offer as a community dharma leader was an honest account of my inner poverty.   I was not having an attack of low self-esteem, although only a couple of people attended.  The air was warm and all the windows in the studio were open.  All through the meditation we listened to the sounds of cars and people going to and from dinner, on their way to a huge pumpkin festival of some kind.  Thanks to Washington Irving and The Legend of Sleepy Hallow, Halloween in Tarrytown and the adjoining village of Sleepy Hollow area is not just one night but a season like the Christmas season.  As I sat, I thought of leading my own lantern tour of Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.  I thought of the Headless Horseman as a guide to the reality of impermanence and the horror of spending our brief time here heedless, driven this way and that by the wild horse of our emotional reactions and changing thoughts.   I thought of telling people that without the rider of consciousness, without mindful awareness holding the reins, we are like Heedless Horsemen, charging this way and that, sometimes terrifying people.   Then I noticed that I was being carried away by thought and returned to simple experience of being in a room, breathing.

Engaging in this experience, especially on a balmy October night when there is a certain crackle of excitement in the air, can seem like a very boring alternative to activity.   Before the sitting, my friend and I were having soup in a nearby café. We told the server we were in a hurry (in a nice way, naturally).  “Oh, are you going to the pumpkin something?” she asked brightly (I couldn’t make out the words).  No, my friend explained.  We’re going to meditate.  “Okaaayyyyyyy,” said the server, as she hurried away.  But as a friend recently told me, you have to Occupy Yourself before you can really Occupy Wall Street.  In order to have real force and bring results, our actions must flow from real wisdom and compassion, which are forged in the crucible of the moment—the inescapable work of being here and now, coming back to the body, heart, and mind, touching in with what is present–including the sense of not being a harmonious whole, but pulled this way and that on a wild horse.

Really seeing that you don’t have much in the way of inner attainment or balance at any given moment this can leave you with a taste of ashes and a stranded, no-money-and-nowhere-to-go kind of emptiness.  You become like a beggar with empty hands.  And this turns out to be a very good place to be.  Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of reality.  Truth, insight, help can flow into the empty places like grace.   I learned a powerful lesson about this about a decade ago, weeks after the terrorist attacks in New York.  I was sent up by a magazine to the Riverside Church in Manhattan, to interview the famous Zen monk Thich Nhat Hahn.  The night before, the Zen monk sat before a huge crowd that was seeking comfort and leadership for a kind of nonviolent resistance to what had just happened and what was about to happen, a crowd that was grief-stricken and afraid of dying and full to bursting with the sense that we live surrounded by the unknown.  New York just after 9/11, was one of those extraordinary moments when many people collectively realized how much we really don’t know.  That smell and taste of ashes was still literally in the air.

Thich Nhat Hahn set out a plan for world peace that hinged on dissolving anger.  He happened to be publishing a book called Anger, which is why I was going to interview him.  A special one-on-one audience had been set up by his publishers so I could help publicize the book.  All the way uptown in the cab, there was this interesting collision going on inside me between playing the role of journalist carrying on, business-as-usual, and the deeper questions blasted open by the enormous act of violence we had all just witnessed.  It also called forth a kind of forthright strength and honesty that I didn’t always have—just the opposite.  I was known (still am) for hanging back, relishing the role of observer (journalist).

So, dear reader, I stood up to the famous Vietnamese Zen monk who sat before me serene and Buddha-like.  I had a Jane Eyre moment, a moment when “my soul began to expand, to exult with the strangest sense of freedom….”  Feeling as though you are no one in particular in a world governed by unpredictable and sometimes violent forces can do that for you.  You stop worrying about your own little life—and feeling like a little mouse is just another flavor of conceit.  So I told the master that even though anger was certainly at the root of this great tragedy, it felt that there was more to be said to the people of New York, who were afraid of death and the unknown.  I yearned to hear something fresh, something of the moment, and wasn’t this the very thing that Thich Nhat Hahn was famous for?  I observed that most people in New York were not struggling with anger just then, and I asked him how we might be fully alive in the face of death and uncertainty.  I asked him how to find joy and peace in a moment when the body is full of fear, when the moment seems unbearable.  What is interesting all these years later, isn’t the particular words but the force of the questions that day.  They didn’t come just from my head but from the center of my being, and they didn’t feel like they were for me alone.   I was a beggar, completely aware of my inner poverty, begging for something real.   No show biz.  I had this extraordinary sensation of coming out of separation, of wishing to be with the truth.

Something very surprising happened….to be continued.

Uncategorized — 2 Comments
06
Oct 11

A New Old Flame

Welcome to my new blog address!   I’ve heard Buddhist teachers explain rebirth by asking them to picture  a candle being lit from a dying flame.  Something carries on, but what?   It isn’t one small flame hopping from one wick to the next.  Trungpa told people it was their neurosis, their unwholesome tendencies that carried on.  Doesn’t that send a shiver?   Back at my old address, we were talking about negative conceit, about the tendency to hang back and judge self and others harshly, the tendency to meet life with a negative expectation–imagine that charming set of attitudes, automatic behaviors, unexamined beliefs carrying forward, leading the way into the unknown?

And yet there is always hope.  In any given moment there is the possibility of stopping and seeing ourselves and really accepting the truth of the way we are.  Rather than tightly identifying with the behavior or attitude and therfore preemptively judging it or covering it up, we might try non-identifying, approaching it as if it was the behavior of a friend, investigating it with an attitude of friendly but impersonal interest:  “I wonder why he or she lunges out of their seat and heads to the fridge when the subject of money comes up?”  At any given moment, another life can spring up in the guttering hopes of the old.

In those openings when there is a bit of free attention and we are interested in our lives in a new way, help appears, and from surprising sources.  One of the things I love most about working as an editor at Parabola and seeking to help it become a true community, is that it is beginning to offer material in the spirit of bringing evidence, not just offering guidance from above.   Hopefully, there is and will be something in each issue that reminds a reader that there can be these free moments, this other order of insights, this other life, no matter what is going on around us.

Back at my old address, I touched on the meaning of Harry Potter and spirited young Jane Eyre .   Consider this rich evidence of the open or selfless nature of self:  Joyce Carol Oates observes that much of the power of Jane Eyre comes from the fluid, flame-like nature of her character.  The novel “is about a character stimulated into growth–truly remarkable growth–by place….Just as these carefully rendered places differ greatly from one another, so Jane differs greatly in them; one has the sense of a soul in ceaseless evolution….Bronte’s sense of human personality is that it is pliant, fluid, and living, in immediate (and often defiant) response to its surroundings; not that it is stable and determined.  Jane Eyre is no portrait of a lady but the story of a young woman in ‘heroic’ mode….” And what she seeks, according to Oates, is not any stereotypic male prize (since some commentors have objected to “hero” in the past) but “a power of vision that might overpass the limits of her sequestered life, pastoral as it is.”

Call it synchronicity.  When you are thinkig of bicycles, you see bicycles.  But I think there may be more to it. When you are searching for a way of to be free–to be more alive while we are alive- reality can take on a magical quality.  Help comes.  As the Buddha himself discovered, the path rises up to meet us.  The trick is finding our way following one little flame at a time.

 

Uncategorized — 8 Comments
03
Oct 11

Harry and Jane

We are hard at work, pulling together a new issue on the many paths people take to find truth, and the articles in this particularly lively issue range from sacred music to the spiritual home that is Harry Potter.

Lately, I find myself pondering the similarity between Harry Potter and Jane Eyre. Jane, as some of us may remember (and as I am rediscovering) was an orphan who is grudgingly taken in by a resentful and nasty aunt. Little Jane is as viciously bullied by a fat spoiled cousin John as Harry was by Dudley, and is as wretchedly excluded and unloved by the whole family—she listens to Christmas parties while shut up in a little cupboard with only a doll to love. By her own admission (told many years past childhood), Jane isn’t as sweet or as loveable a child as little Harry. She is completely opposed to her adoptive family, “incapable of serving their interest, or adding to their pleasure; a noxious thing, cherishing the germs of indignation at their treatment….”

She doesn’t receive an invitation by owl that affirms what she knows in her heart to be true, that she is indeed very different than those around her. She is not whisked away to Hogwarts but to a wretched school called Lowood. And yet she finds in the depth of her misery, a spirit and a self awareness and self-acceptance that work a kind of magic. Banished to boarding school, abused beyond all endurance, she at last confronts her aunt as children never did in the Victorian age, calling her bad and hard-hearted.

“Ere I had finished this reply, my soul began to expand, to exult with the strangest sense of freedom, of triumph, I ever felt. It seemed as if an invisible bond had burst, and that I had struggled out into unhoped-for liberty.” Even though Jane later feels that this act of vengeance was like a sweet but poisonous wine, it is as necessary to her future development as Harry’s rollicking escape from his tormentors with its dash of sweet revenge.
As Jane’s nurse Bessie tells her, at least some of the scolding that comes to her is “because you’re such a queer, frightened, shy little thing. You should be bolder.” If you cringe and dread people, if you hide yourself “they’ll dislike you.” Jane and Harry both have to learn to affirm and express themselves.

“You have to be someone before you can be no one,” this statement is repeated in Buddhist circles, and it is equally applicable in Christian, yoga, Gurdjieffian or any other kind of circle dedicated to inner development. It seems like the biggest paradox. If the goal of spiritual life is to be liberated from a sense of separation from life, why value separating, becoming individuals? Why not stay in the cupboard and skip straight to transcendence?
What is the value of affirming a self, identifying the life force as our own—of getting out there in the world and proclaiming ourselves and struggling and trying? We need to really be ourselves, to really live without holding back, or nothing can really be known.   Transformation is not a thought. It is a drama that must be lived.  Also–and I’m really interested in what you think of this–I’ve heard it said that holding back, being timid, not daring to step up and show ourselves and be responsible, is really a kind of negative conceit.  What do you think?