Tracy Cochran stories on the way towards awakening

Why not start the custom we call the New Year being forgiven—free of any trace of the wounds and limitations we are all trailing due to the lives we have led?  We can start very small.  Sitting quietly at a quiet time or place, we can practice saying “forgiven” like a mantra or prayer.  We can do this when a memory of old bad behavior or harsh speech arises, or when we are gripped by the vague, uneasy sense that we are, well, painfully limited, controlled by our conditioning.  This can feel like emerging from a dark cave or prison cell into a bright light, opening up to be healed and uplifted by a greater, wiser, infinitely more merciful consciousness.

Throughout the ages, many people have called this greater consciousness God.  But you don’t need to worry about this to practice saying or thinking “forgiven,” to practice recognizing and accepting your humanity.  The act of opening up to something greater than your own conditioning, your own extreme limitation, does not depend on belief or views of any kind.

In the current Parabola (I admit I harbor the hope that you read Parabola, and tell your friends to read it), we explore the theory that the brain is not the sole creator of consciousness.  Instead of being a virtual reality machine (in addition to a capable housekeeper) it may be a receiver capable of receiving a frequency beyond the boring reality show featuring each of us as the center of our known universe.    In my book this interesting theory boils down to old sacred wine in a shiny secular bottle: there is a greater light of consciousness above us and around us and maybe even in us, if we open to receive it.  To receive it, even for a moment, is to be forgiven.

Not surprisingly, the word “forgive” comes from a word that means to give.  To forgive a debt is like giving solvency to another—absolving them, pulling them out of debtor’s prison and back into the light of the living.  We can practice tuning into a frequency outside the prison of the self.  We can practice saying “forgiven.”

Months after the death of his beloved wife Joy, C.S. Lewis had a vivid sense of her as he took his morning bath.  Up until then, he seemed always to be thinking of her absence, of the vast hole her absence left in the world.  Real, living people have a presence that is greater than what we can see and name.  Changeable and elusive, it slips right through the net of memory.   Lewis realized that if we are to be as fully alive and fully ourselves as God (or, if you prefer, that greater outside consciousness or finer frequency) we have to let go of our attachment to our cramped and dark little thoughts and images and “stretch out the arms and hands of love” to the mystery of the unknown.  Practicing forgiveness, asking and granting forgiveness is practicing stretching out the arms and hands of love.

Like many men of his generation, my father was a veteran of World War II.  At the conclusion of his funeral a few days ago, an honor guard fired a twenty-one gun salute.  This ritual came from the custom of ships firing off all their guns to show that they came in peace.  With no time to reload before they were in range of the shore, the ship was voluntarily defenseless.  To ask for and offer forgiveness is to put down arms, daring to show ourselves as we are without defenses.  This New Year, may we all dare to put down our guns–to take off all our armor, even the subtle forms. May we all sail into the New Year disarmed, stretching out the arms and hands of love to the unknown.

Up before dawn on Christmas Eve, writing this by a lighted Christmas tree, I marvel at the expectant hush in the air.  I still feel that something miraculous and unexpected is coming, and it has nothing to do with the presents under the tree.   Conditioned since babyhood to expect wonders on Christmas—and presents, special baked goods, and a wonderful suspension of the usual rules and that adult state of distraction, that buzzing busyness and keeping things rolling—I still sense that something miraculous is coming.   I sense that we are meant to glimpse, to touch, to receive something beyond conditioning, beyond our common capacity for delusion, for making hologram worlds in our minds.

There is something beyond us waiting to be received by us.  We have been seeking it all our lives, and it is right here, right now, hovering above us, surrounding us, in the depths of us.  I call it Christmas presence.  Besides our own capacity for distraction—not just by the sounds or the siren call of the screens in our lives but by hope of praise and fear of blame and the spin-off worries and ways we get worked up in this world—we inherit an ability to touch and listen and see and yearn for what is beyond this self-enclosed world.  Along with a body and brain that passed to us from distant ancestors who noted the darkest day of the year and then the return of the sun, came the capacity to be still, to keep watch.

We can think of presence in a very down-to-earth way.  It is the way we are when we walk in the woods, alert, open to our surroundings, responsive to what might arise.   “Sati,” the Pali word for mindfulness literally means to remember.  In a state of open, responsive attentiveness, we are re-membered or re-collected, heart and body and mind all present—think of the shepherds keeping watch in the fields.  Presence is also something very exalted, something that comes in great stillness (since I’ve brought up the shepherds, I may as well add that “Silent Night” has a coded meaning for me).    Presence is a great force of love, a light of awareness that reaches down to us—reminding us know that we are remembered in a much vaster world than our brain-sized world, assuring us that as improbable it sounds, we are meant to be part of a greater whole.

Presence also has a quality of forgiveness, an open, responsive, loving acceptance that delivers us from the cruelty of our own judgments, resentments, guilt, all that is unresolved in our lives–and we humans all carry such things, and to be cut off from a sense of being part of a greater, moving whole is to be haunted by the sense that we aren’t really fully living the life we are meant to be living (not that we don’t have bright spots, cherished memories).

A wonderful thing about presence is that it can be practiced right now in the down-to-earth form—and even (especially) if you don’t feel at all wonderful.   We can practice giving open, responsive attention—and heaven knows what we may receive. Think of those shepherds keeping watch in the field.  Think of them being mindful, open to the unexpected that might arise, ready to respond to anything that might threaten the flock.  And then came the unexpected….

We tend to see ourselves as fixed, static, small, but deep down we know that we are not at all fixed but made of energy that is in movement, tethered to a greater truth, a much greater whole, drawing it down to us. We realize this in love and in loss—the invisible presence of a loved one painfully apparent in absence.  We marvel at the size and quality of this energy field (it’s hard to know what to call it). An enormous hole looms open in the atmosphere, much larger and more indescribable than the physical person we knew.  I have sensed this since last Thursday, when my 93-year-old father, Paul Cochran, died peacefully.   And Friday, when in a nearby town so many small and innocent children died violently, along with the brave educators who died trying to save them.

On Sunday, my local mediation group sat in a circle and shared stories of loss and grief and the compassion that followed (or didn’t follow).  We all had wisdom to share. A friend remembered being asked if her old mother’s death was sudden.  “Yes, it was: one moment she was alive and the next she was dead.”  One minute she was in the seemingly manageable world of the known, the next moment she slipped into the unknown.  One moment life seems manageable, even routine.  The next moment we are surrounded by mystery.

And sometimes what we must confront is incomprehensible.  Another friend in our circle told us he worked with several parents who had children in that school in Newtown.  Breaking down in sobs, he told us he knew a mother who lost a little boy.  “It seems so senseless, “he said.  “What do you say?  The best I could think of is that millions of people are reaching out to you with compassion now.”

Compassion can flower from grief.  Sometimes this happens instantly and spontaneously—the Buddha described it as the quivering of the heart in response to suffering.  Suffering loss, we know how it feels to suffer loss.  Sometimes it takes a long time for the bitterness of loss to flower into compassion (“It takes as long as it takes, my old father used to say.”)

As we meditated in a circle around a little altar with candles and pictures and the names of those who died, we practiced silently offering the ancient phrases of the” karuna” or compassion practice to our neighbors in Newtown:  “I see you suffering, I share your suffering, May suffering cease.”   Gradually we opened the circle of our compassion, to all mothers everywhere who have lost children to violence, to all who have lost loved ones.  Sitting on yoga in stillness in a circle in candlelight, we remembered what really matters.

“People should not worry as much about what they do but rather about what they are. If they and their ways are good, then their deeds are radiant. If you are righteous, then what you do will also be righteous. We should not think that holiness is based on what we do but rather on what we are, for it is not our works which sanctify us but we who sanctify our works.”
–Meister Eckhart

‎The truth cannot be thought—it must be lived.  The truth of what we are slips through the net of our conceptions. On Sunday in Newtown, President Obama quoted Scripture, seeking to turn a stunned nation towards the unseen.  In Buddhism also, there are hints that the truth is in movement. The seven factors of awakening are a causal progression—the state of mindfulness leads to investigation, which leads to a burst of energy, which leads to joy.  Joy leads to tranquility, and that calm leads to concentration.  Finally comes equanimity, upekkha, an ability to be in the midst of life no matter what is happening, the inspired, dynamic state of equipoise that leads on to  awakening.  It is the ability to be with life no matter what is happening.   In a sense it is an act of faith, an act of opening to what is seen and unseen.  It is a way of living that is constantly responsive, always in movement, ever renewing.  I read a quote I loved on the internet this morning:  “True compassion is always in state of readiness.”

May are hearts be in a constant state of readiness.  May our hearts be first responders.  May all who suffer find peace.

Via The Guardian

There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change.  But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.

~ William Stafford ~

There are stories that imprison us and stories that liberate us, entering us, changing our circuitry and our chemistry, lifting us out of our isolation and relating us to a larger whole.  Even if we consciously reject such a story, it is impossible to not know it because it has become part of us.  Our brains are wired to receive and remember stories, especially unforgettable stories–stories that hold out a thread to a higher level of being.  As a friend told me recently, the story of Jesus of Nazareth is now coded in her DNA, not a proposition that she “believes,”  but a response wells up from the depths, offering itself like the instinct to pray in times of dire need, a way of touching what is beyond understanding.

A few years ago, Stephen Colbert  pinned down the religious scholar Bart Ehrman, who was bravely  pressing the case that there are discrepancies in the Bible, and particularly in the New Testament. Colbert asked him if he ever considered that Jesus is like the parable about the blind men and the elephant.   In Colbert’s version four blind men stumble into a pit in which an elephant has also stumbled.  How to understand this enormous thing that was in there with them? One touched a side, one blind man said the elephant was like the wall.  Touching the leg of the elephant, another said the elephant was a tree.  A third touched the trunk and concluded the elephant was like a snake.

“Isn’t it possible that you are missing the point?” asked Colbert.  “And that Jesus is an elephant?”  Colbert beamed, explaining that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were each only able to convey a small part of what happened because the story is just too vast to be encompassed by any one witness.  Great stories are like this, mysteriously incomplete, asking something of us, asking to be part of us.

There is a particularly juicy bit in the latest issue of Parabola, embedded in “Does Consciousness Depend on the Brain?” by Chris Carter.  Ferdinand Schiller was in Oxford philosopher in 1891 when Riddles of the Sphinx was published, authored by a “Troglodyte” (or cave-dweller). This cave-dweller turned out to be the learned Schiller, who likened himself to the man in Plato’s Republic who glimpses the truth beyond the cave but finds that his fellow cave dwellers cannot believe him.

In his book Schiller proposes that the material brain is a receiver, not the creator of consciousness—that it is “admirably calculated machinery for regulating limiting and restraining the consciousness which it encases.”  The simpler the brain, the more limited the level of consciousness that we can receive.  A squirrel has a more limited, more squirrely capacity to hold consciousness than a human but the function is the same in both cases:  the material brain is not what produces consciousness but what limits it, what confines its intensity.

This was a radical concept in Schiller’s day and it still is our day.  It is also an idea that makes near-death experience conceivable. It is also the idea—or the taste of inkling– that makes many people spiritual seekers of some sort or another. At some point or other, in nature or sitting in meditation or in the solitude of prayer, many people have at least a fleeting experience of receiving consciousness, of being filled by an impression of beauty or stillness or God’s presence, something they do not create.

Lately I’ve been thinking of this in relationship to the way the brain works.  Apparently, there is growing scientific interest in something that most of us know instinctively:  we are born to receive information by way of stories.  In dreams, in ancient myths and folktales, even in child’s play, we practice solving life’s thorniest challenges by way of stories.  Jonathan Gottschall’s The Storytelling Animal stresses the point: Stories the world over are almost always about people (or personified animals) with problems. The people want something badly – to survive to win the girl or the boy, to find a lost child. But big obstacles loom between the protagonists and what they want. Just about any story – comic, tragic, romantic – is about a protagonist’s efforts to secure, usually at some costs, what he or she desires.”

Beneath all the wild variety of stories that have been told, there is this common structure—this common expectation.  We human have brains that are designed to like and remember stories.  We like beginnings, middles, ends.  The spiritual path becomes journey, a quest, a drama, a passion.  And consciousness—full, deathless Consciousness—is the endlessly satisfying ending. The world’s religious traditions impart wisdom not just by means of rituals or symbols but through stories.

What’s interesting to consider however, is that our human brains makes stories out of propositions that aren’t even intended to be stories.   In earliest teachings of the Buddha, there are many lists—for example The Seven Factors of Awakening or Enlightenment.  The seven factors are meant to be a progression, not a static list.  And it is full of implied drama and struggle.  The first factor is mindfulness– the sky or the ground of awareness, the moment we realize there is something to be known, to be sought.  In the midst of pure, bare knowing, interest appears. Our attention is drawn to some aspect of being present in particular: the sensation of sitting here, or the breathing, or a particular sound or thought.  Interest or investigation brings a burst of energy– blossoms into delight into joy. William Blake said “Energy is pure delight.”  As contradictory as it may seem, joy or rapture can lead on to the quiet factors, to tranquility concentration, equanimity.  In our culture, we think of rapture as heedless, hair-blowing-back state, but think of people paying rapt attention. Think of a monk or nun in meditation and prayer.

How strange it is to reflect on that we seek to awaken to higher consciousness in these bodies, with these brains.  To know there is no escape but through our human experience.