Tracy Cochran stories on the way towards awakening

“Not those speaking the same language but the ones sharing the same feelings understand each other,” writes Rumi.

I have no idea if the great 13^th-Century Persian Muslim poet and mystic actually said this, but it has proven true in my life.  It deserves to have been said by a great being.

A few weeks ago, I met my second cousin and his wife for the first time.  I was excited to meet him and also very anxious because on the surface our lives are very different.   He has spent his life in the greater Salt Lake City area, as a banker and a Mormon.  I am a New Yorker, a writer and editor who was days away from leaving for the Spirit Rock Meditation Center near San Francisco,  for the final retreat in a two year training to become a “Community Dharma Leader.”

Entering that program grew from my growing conviction that we need to go local—just as there is a growing call for local food there is a need for local meditation groups, reading groups, places for daylong retreat.   Also, this particular program aimed at being diverse and inclusive.  It was wonderful practice in being open to other views while being aware of ourselves, in cultivating a two-way attention that includes heart and mind, wisdom and compassion—and awareness the program’s founder Jack Kornfield calls “loving awareness.”

As I cooked and otherwise prepared for my cousin’s visit, I remembered hearing that before humans knew how to make fire they carried a live ember with them from place to place.  I remembered that my mother, who didn’t have many happy memories of childhood, often spoke of taking a train with her mother to Salt Lake City to visit her uncle and aunt, my cousin’s grandfather and grandmother.   The memory of how kind they were glowed like an ember, kindling a wish to extend loving awareness.  Suddenly, this seemed so much more interesting than thinking about how different our thinking might be.

Loving awareness draws on what the Buddha called “Wise Intention,” meeting what arises with an attitude of renunciation or letting go—not clinging to our views or grasping for anything else.  Besides letting go, Wise Intention includes an attitude of good will and the intention to do no harm.  I had an inkling that this generous inner attitude, this three-note chord of welcome, can lead us to the gates of the divine kingdom of the Golden Rule: a state that allows us to see in others what we wish to have seen in ourselves—that we are part of a greater whole.

Wild storms hit the day of the visit.  The power went off. The power came back on.  As I drove to LaGuardia to pick them up, traffic slowed to a crawl.  There was a report of a tornado touching down on highway nearby.  Frontier Airlines from Denver was re-routed to Boston before it could land.   And from the moment my cousin and his wife walked towards me, they were lovely.

They seemed to be engaged in the same practice, to have the same feeling that I did. From the moment they got in my car for the long, rain-lashed ride home, they seemed to practice meeting what arose with loving kindness.  They showed me how insidious it can be, making assumptions.  It turns out we some of the same views about the current political scene, but that wasn’t what what touched my heart, even felt revelatory.  The real lesson was that when we drop into the heart instead of the head, when we really aspire to practice Wise Intention, the Golden Rule—we drop into a field where we can meet.

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing/ there is a field.  I’ll meet you there,” writes Rumi.   There are human values and practices that are beyond all fixed ideas.  They are like glowing embers that can kindle fires to warm and connect us, to lead us the Whole.

My cousin asked me about Buddhist mindfulness.  I learned a little bit about the sacred meaning of family—and I learned about my family.   I learned that I’m the direct descendent of a Danish lord who assembled a vast estate in the 12^th Century.  There were deeds of land

“I don’t know how to tell you this but that means you—we–are definitely descended from a Viking,” said my daughter, who is studying medieval history in graduate school in England, and knows about such things.  “In the 1100’s, that would be how a vast estate was assembled.”

For a few days, my husband called me “Tracy the Terrible.”

My daughter reminded me that I am made up of Danish and an English, Scottish parts—oppressor and oppressed.  As are we all.   Days later, at Spirit Rock,  Jack Kornfield led us in a visualization exercise that involved expanding until we included the whole of the Bay Area, then whole of the Earth, holding the experience of all people as they migrated around the earth in the embrace of loving awareness—then the Earth itself, out and out to the cosmos, allowing ourselves to imagine being one with the Whole.

Some people who write into this blog space seem to disdain subjective experience—and probably an exercise like the one Kornfield offered.  But I remembered hearing Lord Pentland, a brilliant man and leader of the Gurdjieff Work, once talk about the symbolic meaning of the cross.  The horizontal and the vertical intersect, he said.  The horizontal trajectory of our ordinary experience, our lives in time must intersect with the timeless, the highest.   In my cousin’s visit, in the two year training of CDL, I glimpsed that there is a Truth that cannot be thought.  But we learn to open our hearts to others–to practice loving awareness, the Golden Rule, call it what you will–it can shine through our small subjective stories.  When when two or more meet, there can be another Guest.

It took me a long time to realize that reading and dreaming about seeking truth–seemingly wasting time and escaping into fantasy and deluding myself that I had all kinds of powers and potential I don’t possess–has actually played a valuable role in my life and in my inner search.   Here is an example from my teen years.

I was determined to make the room to be a psychedelic sanctuary, an exotic private sanctum that was open to the innermost secrets of cosmos–just completely separate and closed to the oppressive atmosphere of the rest of the house.  I prevailed on my father to bold a three-foot black light to the ceiling.  This plunged most of the room in darkness and cast certain things—anything white and the bold fluorescent “Day Glo” paint in my psychedelic posters–in an intense ultraviolet glow.  Like the psychedelic movement that inspired me, I wanted to make what was usually invisible visible, to open new doors in perception.

I remember lying in that bed reading Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse, imagining myself as young Siddhartha in ancient India, leaving home to become a wandering ascetic.  I pictured myself in a vast forest, fasting and meditating, becoming one with the animals and the stars in the night sky. There was no doubt that I was searching in the dark, daydreaming instead of really seeking. But there was an intuition in the midst of all that imagination that glowed like my white sheets under black light. I knew instinctively there was enormous hidden potential in my own body and mind.  I sensed the truth—the real truth–was not an equation or a verbal proposition to be thought.  It was a reality that had to be perceived.  I didn’t know how to go about it but I knew that I was meant to receive and transmit the truth, to live it.

The summer after I graduated from college, the black light and the posters were gone, but sadly so was that sense of self worth and possibility.  In college, I imagined I would experience discovery and relief—that I would find a path or a way—and I didn’t.  There were bright spots, interesting people and courses, but one night in a college library there came a reckoning.  I really didn’t want to study the Tao Te Ching or the Upanishads or the New Testament—I wanted to find someone to teach me how to live them.  I wanted to see and feel and live a new way more than I wanted knowledge.

I tried to hide my spiritual longing under a protective layer of decadence—although I couldn’t look all that dangerous because I looked about 12 years old.  But my friends chided me for my hippie leanings. In the end, my advisor warned me away from graduate school, calling me a “seeker of truth.”  I graduated sad and lost.

Today I realize that this open, wondering, wandering time, this time of feeling lost, was crucial.  Very, very slowly, it allowed unused muscles in the heart and mind to develop.  I learned to be with the unknown.

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue,” writes Rilke. “Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

It has become a cliché these days to talk about the numbing effect of our technology, the way the constant stream of information and entertainment we receive can leave us passive, vacant, sterile.  I will never again bolt a black light to the ceiling of any bedroom I inhabit.  But I vow to unplug from time to time, to sit and walk and be aware.  I’m going on retreat tomorrow for a week.  But I won’t be meditating all the time.  I also vow to wander in the hills around the center, and dream.

“After great pain, a formal feeling comes,” writes Emily Dickinson.  “The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs.”

This line powerfully evokes the stillness and composure that can descend in the wake of great pain.  Recently, I wrote about the shock of seeing a ghost.  I received a great shock last week—a normal not a paranormal shock.  I realized that all shocks are similar in jolting us out of our dream of life, pushing us to glimpse reality beyond the filter of thought.   And last night, I glimpsed the role of the body in helping us open to the unknown.

When I first heard my shocking news (there were several installments over several days), I was plunged into disbelief.   Every cell in my body wanted to shut out this unwelcome news.  I wrote about witnessing this same reaction during a recent car crash—how the body and mind shut down, as if we are conditioned not to take in too much reality.   But sometimes, when we are hit by a driver having a senior moment or when we see a ghost or hear shocking news, it washes in over the cellular flood gates.   There can be a feeling of immense vulnerability—and can be an extraordinary opportunity.  This can be the body and mind opening—but then the thinking mind kicks in.

The thinking mind can kick in like the Navy Seals, like Seal Team Six, fanning out across the beach, storming the house where terror is hiding, taking no prisoners in the effort to protect us from our true vulnerability.   After I had my shock, after the pain and the cold, numb feeling, I started thinking and thinking and talking and talking about this news, as if words and theories could shoot before I was pierced through by the true wildness of reality.

But in the middle of last night, I had the sensation of being pulled from sleep by the sensation in my body.   I felt very still inside.  There were no thoughts, just the physical sensation of being alive and the sense that I was radiating an energy. I thought of Mary Oliver’s beautiful phrase about “the soft animal of the body.”  It was clear that the only thing to be done was to be still and allow my body to feel this energy—a more pure, direct form of attention than the thinking part of the mind can know.    I grew more and more quiet, allowing the shy animal of the body to draw closer.

I held this sensation as long as I could.  I let it be a wordless force that was not separate from wisdom and compassion, until slowly the thoughts came back. I thought of the word “understand” – to stand under, to allow life to rain down on you.   I realized that if I grew quiet enough, my heart–shut tight against the onslaught of words–might also open.  I noted that the heart is also an organ of sensation.

I thought of the Buddha touching the earth when he was confronted with the demon Mara.  I realized that without connecting with the earth of the body, we are always swept away by a thought or a passion or the impulse to fight or run away.   We are always trapped in our small “I,” cut off from our true potential.  To my own very quiet shock, I realized it is not the thinking mind but the body that can be open to the Unknown, the Whole, the Father.  The door opens inward.

As Meister Eckhart writes in The Unknown:  “The bride says in the Book of Love, ‘I have crossed all the mountains, aye, even my own powers, and have reached the dark power of the Father….”

From time to time, we must dare to go beyond thought.  We must dare to be still and open to the dark power of the body.  We must sit ceremonious, Tomb-like.  We must allow a formal feeling to come.