Happiness

Awakening / Awareness / Grace / Happiness / Presence / Radical Acceptance / Seeing / Tracy Cochran / Waking Up — 14 Comments
15
May 12

Car Crash Sutra

The accident happened at the worst possible moment, yet even as it happened I realized there is probably never a good moment a good moment for a car accident. I was driving home through the rain, thinking about how much I have to do before I leave for my daughter’s college graduation this week.  I was thinking about what a difficult week it has been and that I just might triumph over it when the crash  came.  I was driving through an intersection, almost home, when an elderly man turned left and smashed into me, demolishing the front of my car.

Time slows down in an accident, as they say.  A crystalline clarity comes.  I was aware of my thoughts. Didn’t I have the right of way?  Was the driver impaired?  But the thoughts seemed slow and overly simple, like a headline news stream, compared to the full feeling the impact.  There was the sensation of the collision and the sound of crunching metal and breaking glass.  And there was a deeper seeing.  I watched myself try to refuse to take in what was happening.   My mind tried to push it away with objections:   Why did it have to be happening on the week of Alex’s graduation?  It wasn’t my fault.  And why did I have to be in that place at that time?   And at the same time, a deeper awareness watched all this and more, watched how in every cell of my being I DID NOT WANT THIS TO BE HAPPENING.

All my thinking could not undo it. I sat stunned in the rain in my crushed little hybrid car.  The other driver, an elderly man, got out of the big van that hit me and loudly protested that it wasn’t his fault.  He yelled at me to call the police because he did not have a phone.  His bullying manner took me by surprise and I burst into tears.  A nice fireman appeared out of nowhere and asked me if I was hurt.  I told him that I was not although it was clear that my feelings were very hurt.  I told him, absurdly, that my daughter was graduating from college that week.  I told him that I loved my little certified Prius, and that I just bought it a few months ago.  I told him it had been a very difficult week.  These things happen, he told me kindly.  A very similar thing happened to him not long ago, he told me.  Someone was texting and ran into him.  Accidents happen. The important thing is that no one is hurt.

People should pay attention, I told him, realizing even in my shocked state that this was deeply true.  We waited in the rain a long time for the police to come.  The press of errands and tasks just stopped, the flow of traffic proceeded around us, and I realized I would never have life under control.   It struck me as very strange then, that I would choose to live my life this way, taking the counsel of these ordinary thoughts, these fears, this grasping need to, well, get a grip on things.  I have heard that death can find us like this—unprepared, too far behind.  But I saw that we also refuse life, drowning it out with our re, every shutting it out.   Even as the tears flowed, I realized there is another way to live—not to like or dislike but to be receptive, to be interested, open to receiving the truth that is always being offered.  What inner conditions or qualities need to be present to meet life as it is?

A friend recently wrote of the importance of equanimity.  It brings a special kind of insight, he wrote.  We have to build up an inner reliance to external circumstances.  I thought of this as the policeman made a report, as I waited for the tow truck.  What he said struck a deep chord.  For years, I wondered why the Buddha placed equanimity above rapture, made it the ultimate factor in the 7 Factors of Awakening—made it one of the Divine Abodes or Dwelling Places.  During the accident, I realized that this quality allows us to take life in, to literally receive it as a kind of food or guide for the creation of an inner presence.   Suddenly, it seemed just completely insupportable to try to base a sense of happiness or well being—or a sense of life–on how things were going in relation to my own ego.  Is there not a finer happiness or wisdom that can accompany us no matter what? It dawned on me that I might choose to be open to the whole of life, that I could have a different relationship with it–rather than protecting myself from it, I might be in a position to witess and to serve. The spiritual teacher Gurdjieff once said, the worse the outer conditions, the better for inner life—provided one is interested in cultivating an inner life.   Based on what just happened to me—on this fresh reminder of the turns life can take—I am definitely interested.

Take care out there.

Awakening / Awareness / Grace / Happiness / Radical Acceptance / Seeing / Waking Up — 10 Comments
20
Mar 12

Playing At Meditation

“Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens,” wrote Carl Jung.

To look into the heart means to remember how we perceived and felt about the world when we were children.  On this first day of spring, it seems especially fitting to remember that.  In the course of my last silent retreat, it became clear to me that right effort towards awakening is like blooming–a gentle movement of allowing ourselves to open up and be exactly as we are.  It is a movement of stilling the pool  of the mind so that what is in the depths of us can be seen.

On the third day, I woke up utterly tired of maintaining my separation, tired of the stories about myself that I carry around like Marley’s chains.  Children can be selfish, but they aren’t haunted by self like adults are.  It’s as if a crust of protective stories form over our molten experience of life over the years.   On retreat it is easy to see how thinking protects us from direct experience, lifting us above it, extracting us by abstracting us.   But as we see how thin and repetitive the thoughts are, we inevitably drift back and become like children again.

It’s not a grand shift, like penetrating to the meaning of emptiness, just that my thinking and my fearful reactivity becomes less dense, a mist I can see through rather than a thick fog that blinds.  The attention becomes free to investigate life rather than being an indentured servant of the self, constantly called back to think about what the self thinks about this or that.  One morning, I tasted a local egg from a local farm that tasted so wild—I swear I could taste the chicken in the egg.   This doesn’t sound like much in this super exciting world, but it was really something to notice—the life inside life.   This is the kind of impression that kids take in all the time–the impressions that come with stillness.  Here is a fragment of a letter Rilke wrote to a young poet:

“And when you realize that their [the adults around you] activities are shabby, that their vocations are petrified and no longer connected with life, why not then continue to look upon it all as a child would, as if you were looking at something unfamiliar, out of the depths of your own solitude, which is itself work and status and vocation? Why should you want to give up a child’s wise not-understanding in exchange for defensiveness and scorn, since not-understanding is, after all, a way of being alone, whereas defensiveness and scorn are participation in precisely what, by these means, you want to separate yourself from.

Think, dear Sir, of the world that you carry inside you, and call this thinking whatever you want to: a remembering of your own childhood or a yearning toward a future of your own — only be attentive to what is arising within you, and place that above everything you perceive around you. What is happening on your innermost self is worthy of your entire love; somehow you must find a way to work at it….”

During the retreat, we rose before dawn to bow and chant to Guan Yin, the female Buddha of Compassion.  Head to the floor, arms extended with hands up in a gesture of surrender and supplication, I practiced sacrificing my separate self to a greater consciousness and force of compassion.   Raised as a white Anglo Saxon Protestant in America, I found this gesture exotic, a trip to a remote part of my own humanity.  But there was also a sense of homecoming in it.  I remembered being a child engaged in a kind of serious play.  I remembered playing outside and creeping over the living room furniture pretending to move carefully through the jungle, entering a hidden kingdom, practicing being awake and aware in my whole body and mind.  I remembered how delicious it was to be alone and unseen,  sensing that I was capable of more than the adults around me guessed as I climbed trees and couches, that I was capable of courage and grace.   I go on retreat to remember what it is like to be a child.  It is not that children are unselfish, they can be fiercely selfish.  But they are not haunted by all kinds of ideas about the self, all kinds of limits about who we are and who we are not.

The teachers who led the retreat urged us to see that our understanding of “sati” really didn’t need to be limited to “mindfulness.”  It could also be called “heartfulness” or “bodyfulness” because it points towards a collected state where mind, heart, and body touch.  As I was able to drop from the head into that place, I began to perceive the impulses under the thoughts.   I began to perceive energies, not just objects.  This is not an abstract realm.  Children perceive this way and so do animals, sensing the emotional weather around them and all manner of changes, sensing trouble and danger approaching like a storm.

In Pali, the language of the earliest Buddhist texts, the word for effort is “viriya.”  It comes from a Sanskrit word called “vīrya,“ which literally means “state of a strong man.” In Vedic literature the term is often associated with heroism and virility.  The Buddha expanded the definition to refer to a practitioner’s energy or vigor or persistence or exertion–necessary qualities for liberation.   But the effort required isn’t  necessarily the outwardly effortful  striving way we usually think of it—that’s often a way to run away from our experience, to purge ourselves of what we don’t want to see.  The effort we need to make to awaken is a gentle effort of allowing—and a child’s willingness to be alone.   Can you think of meditation that way?  As a form of serious play?

Here is Rilke again:  “What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours — that is what you must be able to attain. To be solitary as you were when you were a child, when the grown-ups walked around involved with matters that seemed large and important because they looked so busy and because you didn’t understand a thing about what they were doing. “

Happy spring.

If you live in the area, please consider coming to sit with me on Sunday evenings from 7-9, at Yoga Shivaya in Tarrytown, New York:  yogashivaya.com.

Awakening / Awareness / Grace / Happiness / Presence / Radical Acceptance / Seeing / Tracy Cochran / Waking Up — 4 Comments
01
Mar 12

Retreating and Advancing

Several times a year, I go on silent meditation retreats.   I go to practice solitude in the company of others— withdrawing from the world of striving for a time, mindfully receiving what is given and trusting that more will be given without always leaning forward, grasping for more.  “Sati,” the Pali word for mindfulness means to remember.  I go on retreat to remember there is more to life than I think.

Yet for the first few days, I think, think, think, and in the most shallow and superficial way.  Should I wear my purple sweater or the fleece thing?  I am sick of oatmeal , etc.   I am full of the heightened self-consciousness of a traveler, eager to fit in yet maintain the boundary between myself and other.   Around the third day, I wake up utterly tired of maintaining my separation, tired of the stories about myself that I carry around like Marley’s chains.

It’s not a grand shift, like I penetrate to the meaning of emptiness, just that my thinking and my fearful reactivity becomes less dense, a mist I can see through rather than a thick fog that blinds.  The attention becomes free to investigate life rather than being an indentured servant of the self.  One morning, I tasted a local egg from a local farm that tasted so wild—I swear I could taste the chicken in the egg.   This doesn’t sound like much in this super exciting world, but it was really something to notice—the life in life.

My favorite time of day came before dawn and before the first sitting.  All of us gathered in the meditation hall to bow and chant to Guan Yin, the female Buddha of Compassion.  Born in the West and Protestant, I found this ancient practice thrilling, a trip to distant parts of my own human being.  Head to the floor, arms extended and hands up in a gesture of surrender and supplication, I offer my small self in exchange for a greater awareness, a greater compassion.   I remember that we humans are made to worship, to serve, and to seek.

Over the years, I have come to know some of the people who go on retreat, and I am comforted by their presence.  But when we bow together, we are not as we are in life, doctors, students, professors, writers.  We are fellow beings, seeking peace and freedom.  The teachers tell us the Buddha compared nirvana to the experience of being forgiven our debts, to having a fever break, to emerging from the wilderness of loneliness and longing.  In the dawn light, we bow out a version of the Lord’s Prayer, seeking forgiveness of debts, seeking to receive our daily bread without trespassing into future, without taking more than is offered.

Over the course of the week I realize that enlightenment may be a practice, not a destination.  It may be a slow process of opening to the radiance at the heart of life— not something “out there” but right here in the midst of things.  Like a puddle after the rain, nirvana appears as we learn to attend to the life that is here and now, as we learn to let go of longing and receive.  What does it mean to be present in the body?  I realize I barely know.

Up wells the ego without warning, reconstituted in a heartbeat.  I remember reading that it is impossible to kill the ego because it is not really alive.  What we usually take to be ourselve is a force of habit, a current of thought that pulls us away from life towards a separate “self.”   At other times, there are bursts of anxiety about work,  sudden feelings of deep fatigue, piercing sadness, or restlessness, as if I am trapped in heavy traffic on the highway and impossibly late for a very important date,  like the Mad Hatter. The gift of a retreat is the chance to accept all these unexpected visitors, all these orphaned children of our consciousness.

Several days, I served as “practice leader,” sitting up on a stage in front of the sangha during a meditation.  I picked up a cold and as I drew in breath I swallowed my cough drop whole.  I wondered if I would be the first practice leader ever to choke.   Somehow being in this pickle, sitting up there with the big bronze bell, trying not to choke, helped me let go and open up.   We practice enlightenment in the small act of renunciation that is returning to the present moment.    Then we see that it doesn’t need to be called mindfulness, it may as easily be called heartfulness or bodyfulness.    It means coming to a gathered state, a collected state, where mind, heart, and body touch.  Then you can begin to perceive the deeper impulses under the thoughts.   We begin to perceive energies, not objects.

On retreat, we have a chance to see that impressions can open up like a lens. Sitting up there with the bell, leading the meditation, I glimpsed there is something that comes through us in spite of our thoughts, our stories.  Sitting up on the stage, I forgot about myself and felt the energy pouring in from my fellow seekers.  I noticed our expectations make a sound and when we surrender all expectations there is a very deep silence.  The question “who am I?” became “why am I here?”   I was not there to be a someone but a seeker, an opening to a greater light and a stillness that was a search because it needs to be constantly renewed.

The English root of the word “suffer” means to hold.  When we hold our suffering—our striving, our desires, our insecurity– consciously, it can become a liberating energy,  a vibrancy that opens inward, revealing deeper truths.

When I go on these silent retreats, I realize that I usually have it upside down.  It isn’t our seeming successes but our failures that are really interesting.  It isn’t when we are full of being someone but when we are no one that we are really useful.   I mean the times when we don’t know what to do, are the times when we are open. Our real strength, wisdom, and compassion are in the broken places.   Those places and those times of not knowing are where the light of that inner radiance can shine through.

And I’m glad to be back.

Awakening / Awareness / Happiness / Presence / Radical Acceptance / Seeing / Tracy Cochran / Waking Up — 14 Comments
13
Feb 12

The Ones Who Burn

The seraphim angels that ring God’s throne are “the ones who burn.’” This came by text from a friend who spotted the “Burning World” issue of Parabola in a Whole Foods in Pittsburgh.  “Why do those closest to God have to burn?” I texted back (my friend has spent the last several years studying Christian theology).  Do people think of this when they pray to be close to God? My friend sent a text quoting C.S. Lewis, “Why should heaven be boring?”

Yet we do make heaven boring, at least I do.  In my midnight projections, I am not just free from anxiety and stress about work and money, I am standing still and serene on a heavenly higher ground above all struggle and uncertainty.  I have been around Parabola long enough to know that in Christianity, in Judaism, in Greek mythology, in many religions and ways, to behold God (or the gods, in the case of Greek mythology) is to be incinerated in one way or another.  To be close to Truth is to burn.  Instead of glossing over this detail which is embedded in many cultures and in the ages, can I accept it investigate it, maybe even embrace it?

Take this down, many notches from God to our own particular human situations. Notice that seeing the truth does sometimes burn.  What burns and exactly when?  The false “I” burns, and at those moments when we see that we are not what we dream we are, not what we want to project to the world that we are, when we catch ourselves being small.  Sometimes life shows us how bound we are by our conditioning–not even integrated creatures but a collection of disparate pieces.  And in those moments, we burn, not with the usual egocentric fire the Buddhists label as “greed, hatred, and delusion” but with a purifying internal fire, a fire that sheds light.  We can burn with embarrassment or a kind of being shame—or even with a kind of quiet and holy remorse of conscience, which  the spiritual teacher Gurdjieff called the most sacred kind of intelligence.  Conscience is an intelligence that relates us to the whole.

More and more, I am growing to appreciate how great fiction can capture the inner drama of such moments.  One cold night last week, I watched Martin Scorsese’s film version of “The Age of Innocence,” Edith Wharton’s great novel of high society in Old New York in the 1870′s.  The film sweeps us through opulent scenes–evenings at the opera, archery contests on Newport lawns, lavish dances and dinners—yet its tale of love experienced and lost is very wrenching and timeless.  Viewing it, I understand why Henry James and is friends gave Wharton nicknames like the Eagle and the Angel of Devastation.   She shows the truths that burn.

The great Scorsese was lauded for being exquisitely faithful to the novel. (Mr. Scorsese happens to be a Parabola reader and I like to think that his exquisite sensitivity is reflected in his reading Parabola). The hero of “The Age of Innocence,” Newland Archer (played in the film by Daniel Day-Lewis), is engaged to May Welland (Winona Ryder), the innocent and shallow girl his society wants him to marry. But Newland falls in love with Countess Ellen Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer), an interesting, independent woman who is never really accepted by Newland’s tribe – and that tribe that smoothly closes ranks to keep the lovers apart.

At the time of the film’s release, Francine Prose wrote about the thrill of watching “Newland discover, Columbus-like, the existence of female intelligence. We see a man schooled to value May Welland’s goodness, docility and malleability slowly realize that he prefers Countess Olenska, a woman with experience, wit, even her own opinions.”  Watching it a decade later, I was startled by how well it captures the way we are all trapped by conditions—not by class and social custom but by human nature itself.  We are conditioned.  “The Age of Innocence”—the book and the film–is art and not life.  Yet it conveys those moments in life when we see what is yet also see that we are inextricably bound by our conditioning, that as we cannot change.

Near the end of the film and the book, Newland learns that the Countess Olenska is moving back to Europe.  At a farewell party organized by May, now his wife, we watch Newland’s ordinary “I” drown in a flurry of unexpected impressions.  Newland suddenly sees that in the eyes of his world he is not the self-sacrificing man he dreams he is.  In the words of the novel, “to all of them he and Madame Olenska were lovers. . . . He guessed himself to have been, for months, the center of countless silently observing eyes and patiently listening ears, he understood that, by means as yet unknown to him, the separation between himself and the partner of his guilt had been achieved, and that now the whole tribe had rallied about his wife on the tacit assumption that nobody knew anything, or had ever imagined anything . . . ”

Nothing has ever happened between the two and nothing ever will. The heart burns, watching the scene because life is like this.  It slips away while we yearn and dream we have control.  Yet, thankfully, in real life in the midst of such a searing kind of seeing, a new energy can appear, a new willingness to open to what is.  These are “clearings” when real change is possible. We notice that we were living in a world of thought, of illusion, and see beyond.   There is a flash of direct perception—a seeing through “truths” we have become attached to—that can lead to an opening of the heart.  Sometimes, at such a moment it can feel like a new influence is flowing in.  There can be forgiveness, a letting go and transcending of all that was previously held to be true in order to take our place in a greater wholeness.  We can love and accept ourselves and others as we are, not caring about the judgments of others.

A moment like this, accepting what is without illusion, greed, or aversion, can be wildly freeing and creative. As J.K. Rowling said in a speech at Harvard, in June 2008:  “An so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.” In such a moment we begin to know who we really are and what we can trust.  As Goethe said (at least according to Google): “All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire, but my heart is all my own.

 

Awakening / Awareness / Grace / Happiness / Seeing / Tracy Cochran / Waking Up — 2 Comments
18
Jan 12

Humility

The world is burning, taught the Buddha.  Even if we aren’t in the midst of a battlefield, we sense that this is true.  Everything changes, passes.  What can we possibly trust?  Yesterday, my daughter and I went to see “War Horse,” Stephen Spielberg’s visually beautiful and unabashedly sentimental movie about a war horse in World War I, and about the power of love to prevail even in the midst of the savagery of war.  I thought my anglophile daughter would be moved by the English sunsets and young English soldiers in the trenches, but I don’t think she was, at least not as much as I.  I loved it. I cried.

I feel that the appeal of movies like “War Horse” is in the vicarious thrill of witnessing great feelings and deeds, unimpeded by inner and outer conditions, the way life really is.   Spy movies and crime shows actually offer a related kind of satisfaction—they allow us to watch people doing nearly impossible things very quickly and well.  This affirms the buried hope in us that there is a quality or energy in us that can meet conditions and prevail no matter what is going on. The great Shakespearean director Peter Brook once explained that he had actors flying across the stage on trapezes in his groundbreaking version of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” because he thought very quick, skillful movement conveyed the spirit in action.  Watching it, we may feel something in our own hearts and minds elevate and quicken, the way we feel sometimes watching a cat move or the way I felt watching that beautiful horse gallop across no man’s land, away from the madness of war, never mind the barbed wire.

Yet as much as I love watching all kinds of movies, I also secretly know that my real possibility for freedom, the source of the energy that might lift me up out of the narrow and repetitive band width of my thought is not up on the screen but in that act of awareness that turns me back on myself—on the projector and the act of projection, if you will.  The potential for liberation dwells in the gap between what we dream and what we see we really are in any given moment.  A day or so ago, for example, my daughter and I were sitting opening a big pile of Parabola donation letters.  I was full of gratitude and also full of the dreamy thought that Alex might see how fulfilling and meaningful this work is for her Mom, that she would glimpse something beyond the humble conditions and wages.  Instead I heard this: “Why don’t you take this pile of envelopes and make sure they’re empty before we throw them away.” My capable daughter had swiftly and deftly taken the job away from me, organizing everything into neat piles, leaving me to check the trash…leaving me with a very familiar taste of ashes and a sense of coming out of the clouds and landing hard on the ground.

It is humbling, every time life reminds me that I’m not that swift at any number of practical things (and it happens with some frequency).  The root of humble is from the Latin “humilis,” meaning low, from “humus” or ground, earth.  It is also related to the Latin word for human and humane or kind, and this connection between down-to-earthness and kindness makes a great deal of sense to me, doesn’t it to you?  Isn’t it a liberating joy to be around a person who doesn’t think he or she is above the rest of us?   In other languages the connection between humble and the earth is the same.  More and more, I see humility as a crucial quality for living and helping in this burning world.

Mother Teresa said, “If you are humble, nothing can touch you, neither praise nor disgrace, because you know who you are.”  I often think of the Buddha touching the earth before his enlightenment, asking the earth to bear witness, to sit with him.  Humility or touching the earth, as Mother Teresa knew, is the best way to open the mind and heart and to find our balance in this shifting world.  It is the best way the keep the big picture in view.   In my own experience, being humbled can give rise to equanimity (eventually).  This quality is held to be a very fine attainment in the Buddhist practice.  It is a state of mind is grounded yet wide and free, lowly, but not low. The Buddha described a mind filled with equanimity as “abundant, exalted, immeasurable, without hostility and without ill-will.”

The English word “equanimity” is translated by two separate Pali words (Pali is a dialect similar to the one used by the Buddha). Each represents a different aspect of equanimity. The most common Pali word translated as “equanimity” is upekkha, meaning “to look over.” It means being able to see the way Mother Teresa said we can see when we are humble, without imposing our judgments and reactions on what we see, just peacefully abiding with what we see.  It means peacefully and patiently keeping the big picture in mind.

Here is a little more on equanimity from Buddhist teacher Gil Fronsdal: “Colloquially, in India the word was sometimes used to mean ‘to see with patience.’ We might understand this as ‘seeing with understanding.’ For example, when we know not to take offensive words personally, we are less likely to react to what was said. Instead, we remain at ease or equanimous. This form of equanimity is sometimes compared to grandmotherly love. The grandmother clearly loves her grandchildren but, thanks to her experience with her own children, is less likely to be caught up in the drama of her grandchildren’s lives.

The second word often translated as equanimity is tatramajjhattata, a compound made of simple Pali words. Tatra, meaning “there,” sometimes refers to “all these things.” Majjha means “middle,” and tata means “to stand or to pose.” Put together, the word becomes “to stand in the middle of all this.” As a form of equanimity, “being in the middle” refers to balance, to remaining centered in the middle of whatever is happening. This balance comes from inner strength or stability….”

In my experience, balance or stability comes with humility, with touching the earth.  It is hard to fall off the earth.  Echoing Mother Teresa again, equanimity in the Buddhist tradition is held to be a protection against the “eight worldly winds”: praise and blame, success and failure, pleasure and pain, fame and disrepute.   There are moments in life that are so humbling that the mind and heart open completely to the truth of the impermanence of our lives and all the qualities we usually cling to.  Letting go of our usual defensive reactions can bring an extraordinary sense of equanimity, of calmly and humbly opening to the mystery of life.  Never mind how others may judge us.

The two slightly differently forms of equanimity, seeing the big picture and finding our balance in the midst of it all, come together at moments.  There are moments, as Mother Teresa points out and as I saw glimpses of it in “War Horse,” when we let go completely of any hope for gain or praise or anything else. These moments are completely under the radar of the worldly winds of fame and ill repute  (and part of the vicarious thrill of movies like “War Horse” can include comparing your pretend fineness to the cowardly behavior of others). And yet, sometimes when we are engaged in the most humble and unsung of occupations or actions, we may experience an unusual degree of peace and freedom.   We may even feel like war horse, galloping free across no man’s land.

Awakening / Awareness / Grace / Happiness / Presence / Radical Acceptance / Seeing / Waking Up — 12 Comments
05
Jan 12

Epiphany

Lately, I’ve had a visit from a savage cold and cough.  The enforced rest allows me to do things I don’t usually allow myself to do during the work week, including watching Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris” yesterday evening.  It has also given me a chance to have an epiphany–just in time for the feast of the Epiphany tomorrow.

In “Midnight in Paris,” an unhappy young screenwriter played by Owen Wilson (acting like Woody himself) visits Paris with his fiancé and future in-laws.  Walking alone one evening, he discovers that he can travel back in time to Paris in the 20’s, every evening after the clock strikes 12.  Among other heroes, he meets Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and the wild and dazzling Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald.  I bet most readers of this blog can guess the resolution (spoiler alert, as they say): it has to do with accepting the present rather than living in the past.  The protagonist learns that present is unsatisfactory because real life is messy like that, the wheels don’t turn as smoothly as they do in dreams.  Before I drifted off to sleep, I picked up A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway.  I read a harrowing account of the hellish life of poor Scott Fitzgerald, who looked so glamorous in his brief cameo in the movie.

This was my epiphany:  there is usually quite a story submerged under the insights we have on the path.  Take the experience of letting go.  In one way, it is a very simple and direct action.  Whatever the mind is clinging to right now, drop it and return to an awareness of the present moment,.  We all take this action of letting go of thoughts of Fitzgerald or what you had for lunch, returning to the simple, rich experience of being here and now.  No matter how raw or unsatisfactory that experience may be (it’s not so much fun when you have a cough), that action of returning to or remembering ourselves usually brings a burst of a fresh, new energy and attention that attunes us to the larger world— a larger intelligence.  Yet, as refreshing and energizing as this is, we don’t remember to do it all that often, and we rarely let go completely.  We start to make the effort and very quickly remember an email that needs sending.

My epiphany involved realized that letting go completely is the tip of a very big ice berg, the end of a long and winding road, the resolution of a gripping drama—choose your cliché.  There are moments of letting go in which a luminous, clear energy and attention appears.  The formidable French teacher, Madame de Salzmann described this way:  “It is an attention that will contain everything and refuse nothing, that will not take sides or demand anything.  It will be without possessiveness, without avidity, but always with a sincerity that comes from the need to remain free in order to know.”  This is a revolutionary state in which the act of seeing and receiving is greater than any object, any perceived outer goal.  What would it take to land in such a place, to be truly impartial and nonpossessive, to see through to the real aim and meaning of our life?

In the Christian tradition, the Epiphany marks the day the wise men from the East came to pay homage to the infant Jesus. According to Matthew 2:1–12, they followed a miraculous guiding star to Bethlehem and brought gifts of “gold and frankincense and myrrh.” These three wise men or Magi saw through surface appearances to the divinity of Jesus. Their visit was seen as evidence that the Gentiles as well as the Jews would worship Jesus.   “Magi,” from which the English word “magic” comes, denotes follower of  Zoroaster and was associated with an ability to see through things, including the ability to read the stars and the fate that the stars foretold.

The word “epiphany” comes from an ancient Greek word meaning “”manifestation” or “striking appearance,” and it refers to that sudden realization or comprehension or illumination of the larger essence or meaning of something. Usually such moments, even when they come to brilliant scientists, happen after significant labor.  Often this labor involves wrong turns and humilitation which leads to humility—which derives from “humus” or earth.  Often epiphanies come in moments when we are touching the earth.

After long labor and struggle, much drama, a moment comes when we let go, when we drop it all and return to the simple experience of standing on the earth.  There may be a beautiful sensation of putting down the chain we usually drag through life, the chain of karma, or (to put it more modestly) the chain of caring what other people think of you, caring how things come out and if you are a success in the eyes of the world and all that.   Instead of being broken by this world like poor, gifted Scott Fitzgerald, we can break free.  We can step off the wheel of seeking, of greed, aversion, delusion about better times.  We can stop and be still and return to ourselves, which (irony of ironies) is the same as forgetting the self and becoming one with others.

Enlightenment may turn out ot be the simple yet radical act of stopping in the tracks of our seeking and returning to ourselves—to the ground of our real being. It may turn out to involve an action of the heart more than the mind (In other cultures the mind includes the heart and the body).  It involves opening to and allowing ourselves to be pierced by the whole blessed story.  Sometimes, allowing ourselves to try this–just giving up and letting go and being here–we may discover that miracles never cease.

 

Awakening / Awareness / Grace / Happiness / Radical Acceptance / Seeing / Waking Up — 5 Comments
22
Dec 11

Winter Solstice 2011

Today is Winter Solstice.  As I write this, I’m having morning coffee, watching the sky change from dark to slate to a more luminous blue, glad as I am every year that the sun seems to be returning.  Modern educated woman that I am, there is something in my Nordic genes that makes me a little unsure every year that this great slow-spreading natural act of grace will happen:  the return of the sun.

And hope returns with it.  People speak of Seasonal Affective Disorder or SAD, and I definitely have at least a touch of it (hence the big mug of coffee and early morning fumbling to light the Christmas tree lights in December).  Yet I have come to appreciate that I am also part of a greater natural cycle and that something precious would be lost if I sought to cut myself off any part of the process.  I am beginning to see that as we must make way for a greater whole—and this wholeness encompasses our connection to the earth, to our fellow beings, and the whole of ourselves.

For over 35 years, Parabola sought to bring this timeless wisdom contained in myth and all way and traditions to individuals.  These days, we aspire to bring this timeless wisdom to the burning issues of the day. Nature heals.  As we learn to let it be, as we expose what is hurt or in darkness to the light and the air of a greater awareness, it heals.

Nature can heal.  This is true on the level of the Earth, as the hard-working little team at Parabola is learning as we pull together our “Burning World” issue.   It is also true for human beings.   As we learn to practice a radical acceptance of the whole of ourselves, as we see and allow ourselves to be seen, we are healed.  As Christmas approaches, I find myself thinking of Scrooge, that “squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching covetous old sinner!  Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.”   As we come out of our closed and oyster-like isolation (I never did buy that “happy as a clam” business, did you?) we find a new life.   As Scrooge eyes were opened to the whole of his life by the three ghosts, he was healed.   He reconnected with life, with the light of wisdom and compassion. May we all.

I and others in this blog space have written before in this blog space about the extraordinary liberating experience of being seen and accepted just as we are—and not just by ourselves or by loved ones but by the great light behind the universe.  After an embarrassingly long number of years, it is dawning on me that this experience of being seen and accepted is not just a great timeless moment of liberation or salvation, but a gradual unfolding of the heart and mind that takes place over long period of time.  It seems that we must build up the muscle of heart, so that we hold more and more of what is always being given.   As counterintuitive as it sometimes seems, this opening to a greater light of awareness, this opening to the sublime, requires that we develop the capacity to hold—really hug—the wounded , abandoned, and wild little child within.

As I mentioned here before, I’ve been finding a lot of inspiration in Jane Eyre, that great Victorian wounded and wild child.  There comes a moment when Jane despairs of ever seeing Mr. Rochester again.  After an hour of prayer with St. John Rivers, she comes close to marrying the impassioned but cold and rigid religious idealist  and becoming a missionary in India.  She knows this will mean turning down her own fire and burying her own true nature.  She knows this decision will be what is called in these days a “spiritual bypass” – an attempt to transcend messy or uncomfortable parts of our nature.  She knows that St. Johns “nature was not changed by one hour of solemn prayer: it was only elevated.”   And yet..

“All men of talent, whether they be men of feeling or not, whether they be zealots, or aspirants, or despots—provided they only be sincere—have their sublime moments, when they subdue and rule.  I felt veneration for St. John—veneration so strong that its impetus thrust me at once to the point I had so long shunned.  I was tempted to cease struggling with him—to rush down the torrent of his will into the gulf of his existence, and there lose my own.”

To be fair to Jane, she didn’t just want to abandon the messy whole of herself, she was inspired by the zealot St. John to remember that life is brief and then comes the darkness of the unknown:  “life rolled together like a scroll—death’s gates opening showed eternity beyond:  it seemed, that for safety and bliss there, all here might be sacrificed in a second.”

But the voice of Mr. Rochester and her own deeper nature called, and she followed that voice.   Reader, in case you don’t know, she married Mr. Rochester and lived happily.  Yet they didn’t live a closed life. Both partners had a long but profound journey to acceptance of the whole:   “Jane! You think me, I dare say, an irreligious dog: but my heart swells with gratitude to the beneficent God of this earth just now.  He sees not as man sees, but far clearer:  judges not as man judges, but far more wisely. ”

It is Winter Solstice.  The light returns.  Trust nature.

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.”

 

 

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21
Nov 11

The Art of Reflection

The dark season is here.  With the shorter days, there comes a feeling of drawing in.  It is the time of the harvest, and a time for reflection on all that has been given in the best season.   I love the word reflection because it reminds me of the moon, which casts a reflected light.  I recently learned that in the ancient Buddhist language of Pali, reflection has the same double meaning it does in English—it means to be like a mirror, to receive and impression and hold it without adding anything; it also means to contemplate or consciously consider.  A good word, right?   Talk about a finger pointing towards the moon—towards a way of reflecting on our life as we live it.

Among the blessings things have arisen that don’t immediately inspire gratitude:  hard times for many and for the planet, uncertainty and injustice seem to prevail.   And yet in the midst of this pain, new–ancient–possibilities are being entertained.

There is a growing understanding that security in this economy (any economy in any time) comes from connecting with others rather than isolating.  Here is a radically ancient idea to ponder:  instead of focusing so much on building wealth, we focus on our families and communities—and on building trust.  According to many studies—and according to our own intuition—it turns out that happiness in this rocky time has less to do with amassing a great big pile of cash than in acts of generosity—of opening up and sharing what we have to give in every sense.

As Sitting Bull is quoted as saying in the “Giving and Receiving” issue of Parabola(and I’m paraphrasing) real wealth is not what you save but what you give.  As Scrooge learned and as the Beatles sang: “In in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.”

A few weeks ago, I interviewed the enlightened Manhattan developer Jonathan Rose (he might blush to here himself described that way, but at least I used a small “e.”)  He told me that in some countries (and in some of his projects in New York), there is a shift away from a focus on private dwellings and more focus on public spaces and private meeting spaces.  This is a new ancient idea, gathering in the marketplace, the porch, the pub.

Some of us are beginning to learn what is truly precious.  Beyond securing what we truly need, our time is more valuable than making ever more money.   Ask Scrooge.  But how can we increase our time?   We can learn to pay attention to our lives.  Mediate. And at the beginning and end of every day, we can reflect on the possible consequences of what will happen before, during, and after engaging in a particular act, string of words, thoughts.

Last Saturday, at Chuang Yen Monastery in upstate Carmel, New York, Venerable Bhikkhu Bodhi spoke to a small group of us about the Buddha’s advice to his son Rahula when he was seven years old.  The Buddha spoke of the importance of telling the truth.  Naturally, this inspired a great deal of talk about the lies we hear on a daily basis from our elected officials—and our own intentional or self-deluding lies.   Yet the ancient import stuck with me: the intention to tell the truth and live the truth builds trust.

The Buddha told his little son he could learn to do this by practicing reflection—what will be the consequence before, during, and after doing, saying, thinking this or that?  He also told the little boy he could confess wrong-doing  (since most of us are not living in a monastery or are under the gaze of a wise teacher, we can confess to yourself, our inner wise teacher).   We can reflect on a mistake we made in the past, reflecting on what we learned from it, resolving not to repeat it.

This seemingly simple sutta struck a chord with me.  I realized that I am at a point where seemingly old ideas seem new.  And I realized that if a little boy could practice reflection, so can I.  And I am realizing that reflecting like this on the quality and consequences of acts and thoughts, like meditation, is a way to gain time—it deepens and enriches the time we have.  I mean, it gives even the small details of our lives a different quality and consequence.   Try reflecting.  I find it opens the door to gratitude, to the hidden blessing in things and more:  It deepens and increases time.

 

Awakening / Awareness / Climate Change / Extreme Weather / Global Warming / Grace / Happiness / October Snowstorm / Presence / Radical Acceptance / Seeing / Tracy Cochran / Waking Up — 8 Comments
14
Nov 11

A Life With Heart

What does it mean to live fully?  To live a life with heart? The lesson from the power outage is still with me.  Even as I go about living my ordinary, electrically illuminated, computer active life, I find myself remembering there can be a deeper quality to life.  In the darkness and stillness, my sleep had a different quality, and so did my dreams.  As I mentioned in this space before, I have embarked on a book project I am tentatively calling “How Jane Eyre Can Change Your Life,” so I read Jane Eyre by firelight and candlelight, noting with a new awareness the role that fires and candlelight played in this masterpiece.   I went to sleep at night full of the insight that much of human life was—and still is, in much of the world—a struggle to survive in the most elemental sense —to build fires and have fresh, clean water and good food.   And this elemental  physical quest to get all the right elements in the right relation resonates with our quest for inner harmony—for expression, love, and connection in this world.

One night, buried under nine blankets and still cold, I dreamed I was wandering through a dark, northern place searching for shelter and food.  This is possibly the influence of Jane Eyre, although it had a very ancient, Nordic feel about it—I was marching through snow afraid of a wolf-like creature that dragged off children, a creature which could change shape and become a raven or even a black insect that devoured from within (Creepy!).  I woke up realizing that our bodies and minds carry the memory of being tiny, vulnerable things surrounded by unknown forces.   And the unknown had teeth.  A Christian missionary once asked some Viking thanes how they saw life.  They told him (I paraphrase) that we are like birds that fly out of the darkness into the light and warmth of the meade hall.  After a brief time we fly out into the unknown again.   If we really knew that life is brief and our future uncertain, dependent on mysterious forces, how would we live?

I came out of my brief time in the dark and the cold realizing (along with so many others) that we really do need to shift to a different kind of economy, a sustainable economy.   And this includes our inner economy.   We need to learn to use all we are given—even the seemingly painful stuff.  From my time reading by firelight, I began to appreciate that Jane Eyre can be read as quest to love and find love and more: she had to use her own light.  As Jane is about to be shipped off to boarding school, her nurse Bessie calls her “a little roving, solitary thing” ….and tells her, “You should be bolder.”

“I don’t think I shall ever be afraid of you again, Bessie, because I have got used to you; and I shall soon have another set of people to dread.”

“If you dread, they’ll dislike you.”

In the course of this story Jane Eyre learns to go beyond bursts to rebellion and vengeance—to claim her own inner fire and use it meet the unknown (and not to give it away, but it is full of scary things).   Before Rochester professes love for her, she expresses love—and not just for Rochester but for her own life, for what she is in essence.

“ Do you think because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless?  You think wrong! –I have as much soul as you—and full as much heart!  And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you.  I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh: it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God’s feet, equal—as we are!”

I wish to remember what I learned during the power outage about what it means to live a different, sustainable life, a life with heart.

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