Christmas

Awakening / Awareness / Christmas / Grace / Happiness — 6 Comments
04
Dec 11

Happy Medium

“I know no medium,” says Jane Eyre, speaking of the way she typically responds to people and events.  Like many of us in real life, this great fictional character finds herself reacting automatically, and either passively or aggressively.   “I never in my life have known any medium in my dealings with positive, hard characters, antagonistic to my own, between absolute submission and determined revolt.  I have always observed the one, up to the very moment of bursting, sometimes with volcanic vehemence, into the other.”

What does it mean to find the Middle Way?  Not in the sense of picking up a book on Buddhism or contacting a teacher, but in ourselves and in our lives.  There is always a draw to act, a restless wish to move, to create, to do something.  And there is also a wish to submit–and I’m not talking about depression or being a mouse or some unwholesome slavish quality here but to a wholesome impulse to be still and know a greater wholeness–to bear witness to greater life.

There are always two different currents operating in most of us–a push outward and a pull inward and upward, up out of this worldly mess.  Yet sometimes, when we sit down to meditate or walk in nature or otherwise try to be very aware of what is happening in the present moment, we can find an attitude and an attention that can embrace all the disparate parts of ourselves, including that irreconcilable push-pull.  Sometimes, we can be actively quiet inside–passively active, embracing and observing and delving into what we are like and what life is like.  This is the Middle Path:  it is that vibrant attention that can be medium–that can stay between those opposite pulls, that can unite our thoughts and feelings and sensations–parts that have so little in common they haven’t spoken to each other in years.

This is what I love about meditation.  I can sit down in the grumpiest, most preoccupied state of mind.  I can have a thousand things on my mind; my emotions can be just barely be on this side of overwhelm; and my body can be contracted like a spring, ready to bolt up and do something about all those dire predictions in my ears.  Yet if I can just manage to stay on the cushion for ten minutes or so there inevitable comes a shift, a kind of subtle gift of grace.  I’ve also heard it called a “movement of availability.”  What happens quite simply is that the surrounding stillness, the field of awareness that seems to draw close and surround a person when they meditate becomes more vibrant and interesting and alive than the turbulent thoughts, emotions, tensions and sensations that are usually entrance us (literally entrance us).  When this shift occurs, I become interested in myself in a new way–not taking my own side, arguing my own case–but seeing what I am like with the kind of acceptance the stillness itself seems to express.  You know what I mean.  Think of what it is like to be surrounded by tall trees.  There is a feeling of a grave but peaceful witness, as if we are being shown or fed something about what it can mean to practice patience and peaceful abiding.

I once heard that the Pali word “metta,” which means loving kindness or friendliness (a quality of the heart that supports the cultivation mindfulness) also refers to the sun and to sunshine.  The sun shines evenly on all things; it is not responsible for the clouds that drift by like thoughts passing through the mind.  The sun is naturally radiant; it refuses nothing and demands nothing.  What I’m calling medium or Middle Path awareness is just like that.  And not only is this awareness capable of embracing the disparate parts of ourselves–not passively submitting but humming with quiet interest.  It is also not separate from compassionate and friendly acceptance–and not separate from wisdom.  We discover in such moments that wisdom is not about words and thoughts but about connecting with a special energy that is inside and outside, an energy that brings acceptance, letting go, reconciliation.

In the sunlight of such awareness, we don’t care anymore (for a second) about what the ego cares about, about being right or looking good.  In that beautiful place of being radiantly medium, we would agree with Jane Eyre when she said:  “I would always rather be happy than dignified.”

 

 

Awakening / Awareness / Christmas / Happiness / October Snowstorm / Scrooge / Waking Up — 7 Comments
04
Nov 11

Christmas in October

As I write this, I am struggling to get a good fire going in the woodstove.  We are in the middle of a freak October snow storm—the third freak storm since August—and we have no lights, no heat, and no running water since we depend on a well. A few months ago, during Hurricane Irene, I wrote about tending the stove and feeling a connection to my ancestors.  In the midst of this particular massive and record-breaking storm (there are getting to be so many we have to distinguish), I am feeling a particular connection to my ancestors who lived in very cold climates (I’m washing dishes in snow!)  How hearty they had to be.  It takes an enormous act of will to get up in a cold, dark house and light a fire.  Yet, as I kneel here shivering , I am also thinking of those who are younger than I am.  I am wondering if they will wonder why in the name of all that is good the deeper cause of this wild weather didn’t quite sink in last time.   I’m talking about what the Buddhists call the “three poisons” of greed, hatred, and delusion.

By firelight and flashlight, or in my bedroom under about nine blankets, I am reading and reflecting on a teaching of the Buddha called the “Fire Sermon,” translated from Pali, the earliest Buddhist language,  by the Buddhist scholar monk Venerable Bhikkhu Bodhi.   For a future issue of Parabola  called “Burning World,” he adds a brilliant commentary.  In plain language, the Buddha talks about the way life goes—that everything  human is burning or impermanent, all our impressions and feelings and our life itself, all fleeting.   Yet, as Ven. Bodhi points out, on top of this natural burning, there is the “parasitic”  burning of greed or grasping, hatred or aversion to people and things we don’t like, and delusion or the denial of what is really happening.  These are natural tendencies in all of us, and most of us do our best to overcome them through meditation, prayer, or sheer live-and-learn common sense.   Yet, we now live in an age where we aren’t just impacted by greed, hatred, and delusion on a personal or local level.  There are vast systems fueled by greed, hatred, and delusion—and those systems effect all us, in the economy, in climate change.

Huddling by the woodstove, I suddenly realize that as much as I may want to I really can’t separate myself from the global situation.   But I bring good news.   Having the power cut off has a way of drawing out the power of kindness and generosity.    In the midst of dramatic news reporters talking about what was happening being beyond anything in recorded history and the millions without power in our region, individuals and groups quietly set about helping their neighbor.  The Salvation Army set up a warming station in the local Middle School.  My neighbor came over and told us about it and over we went to charge phones and laptop.  It was incredibly warming illuminating, watching the look on peoples’ faces as they entered and saw tables set out with food and big vats of coffee.  I live in a middle class pocket of a generally very affluent area, and it was especially touching to see people coming in who looked just astonished to see smiling Salvation Army and other volunteers there offering not just basic necessities like food and army cots and blankets but smiles.   For a time, the gym looked like an old time town square, kids watching movies on lap tops, groups of old people talking.  It made me realize how wonderful it would be, to have more community life, not just Manhattan and rushing home to your own house.

But the real food for thought came with simple individual acts of generosity.  My neighbor Keith, who was getting up at 4:30 to start a fire for his family before heading for his job in the city, came over after dark to see if we needed water.  He was headed to the fire station where there was a hose for everybody’s use.  I remembered what our ancestors knew, that survival depends on cooperation.  And not just practical cooperation—but offering a smile and a laugh, fellowship.  Love your neighbor, do unto others as you would have them do unto you–or don’t do what you would you would not have done—however you frame it, I learned that this is a very profound and spiritually developed way to live.

In his commentary on the Fire Sermon, Ven. Bodhi  offers that our culture has to shift our notion of success, away from the achievement of more and more wealth, power, and domination, to the actualization of truth, goodness, and beauty.   When the lights and heat went off, I realized that this shift really is possible in the moment—and there is a great deal of good will and generosity out there that just seems to flower when it is needed. I had five long cold, dark days to reflect on what is really essential to a good life, and what is not.  I feel a little bit like Scrooge on Christmas morning, resolved to live by different lights (not that I ever did amass wealth or fame.   I realized that I the direction I want to move in is out of separation into no separation.  Now how do I remember this when the lights and the heat come back on.

Awakening / Awareness / Christmas / Grace / Presence / Scrooge / Tracy Cochran / Uncategorized — 23 Comments
21
Dec 10

The Three Spirits

“We need to see that there is no ‘thinker,’ that this imagined ‘I’ which thinks ‘me’ and ‘mine’ is simply an illusion.” writes Jeanne de Salzmann in The Reality of Being.  “In order for us to receive truth, this must be dispelled, as well as all the other illusions of the thinking, including those behind our desires for pleasure or satisfaction. Only then can we see the real nature of our ambitions, struggles and sufferings.  Only then can we see through them and come to a state free of contradiction, a state of emptiness, in which we can experience love.”

Last week, I wrote about Scrooge and I’m still thinking about that great teaching.   I see Scrooge dining alone in a restaurant close to Christmas.  The waiter asks him if he would like bread with his soup.  The penny extra it will cost is too much for the brilliant businessman.   The hurt he experienced earlier in his life has closed his heart not just to others but to himself–to his larger capacities and possibilities.  The ghost of Marley, Scrooge’s miserable old business partner, appears to Scrooge in the middle of the night and shows him how we make chains of habit out of our thinking and our desires for pleasure and to avoid pain.  Even single-pointed concentration can become a habitual way of avoiding pain and a chain to bind us.  Habit can become character and finally destiny, but habit can change.  We can wake up to the true nature of our ambitions, struggles and sufferings.  After Marley,  three spirits–three moments of greater awareness–appeared to Scrooge.  The Ghost of Christmas Past shows Scrooge how the hurts he suffered early in his life led him concentrate on making money to the exclusion of all else.  The Ghost of Christmas Present introduces him to the reality of others and his impact on others for good or for ill.  From Ghost of Christmas Future he comes to grips with his final destiny and what it means to live a life untouched by love.  At the end of the night, Scrooge says “I am not the man he was”.   He has seen through the embattled fortress of the self.  Awakening, he is determined to keep Christmas well, to live in the light of love.

“What is important is to live with this void in which the self is abandoned,” writes Madame de Salzmann.  “With this abandonment arises the passion to be, a wish beyond thought and feeling, a flame which destroys all that is false.  This energy allows the mind to penetrate the unknown.”

A higher consciousness or greater awareness can sometimes visit us.  This greater awareness can have a penetrating wisdom and insight and it can reach us, chained as we are with our habits and striving for plearure and the avoidance of pain.  Really seeing ourselves as we are can bring about a state of emptiness–and the stillness of the grave.   Love can find us there.  It can descend into the void where all seems lost and reconcile us to Reality.

“No movement from the periphery toward the center will ever reach the center,” writes de Salzmann.  “A surface movement trying to become deeper will never by more than of the surface.  In order to understand itself, the mind has to be completely still, without illusion.  Then with lucidity we can see the insignificance of ‘me’ dissolve in an immensity beyond all measure.  There is no time, only the present moment.  Yet to live in the present is wholly sufficient unto itself.  At each moment one dies, one lives, one is.  Free of fear and illusion, moment after moment we die to the known in order to enter the unknown.”

Past, present, and future all here and now.   This Christmas, may we all be still and know ourselves as we really are, and know Love and the Peace that passes all human understanding.   Bless us everyone.