Radical Acceptance

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 / Presence / Radical Acceptance / Seeing — 16 Comments
29
Jan 12

Meryl Streep Sutra

On Saturday, I raced from a Buddhist monastery to see Meryl Streep in her landmark portrayal of the former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. How could I have guessed that these wildly disparate activities would go so well together?  I presented the scholar monk Bhikkhu Bodhi with copies of Parabola’s gorgeous new “Burning World” issue, which opens with a fresh translation of the Buddha’s Fire Sermon and a contemporary commentary by Ven. Bodhi.  I also stayed to hear his weekly lecture on the earliest Buddhist teachings.  This particular Saturday, he spoke about the traditional teachings on renunciation or letting go.

What does this have to do with Meryl Streep in The Iron Lady?  Far more than I planned. In the Fire Sermon, the Buddha taught that all is impermanent, that all will be consumed by the fire of aging, sickness, and death. Streep portrays the prime minister out of power and in old age, suffering the early stages of dementia.  She is beyond brilliant. Indeed, her portrayal has been compared to the greatest portrayals of King Lear.  God is in the details, and Streep seems to empty herself completely. Her eyes, hands, face, body are filled with the experience of this once iron leader in decline.

Still, the Fire Sermon describes the unnecessary burning of greed, hatred, and aversion.  Not surprisingly for a monk, Ven. Bodhi describes the attitudes and actions necessary to put out the fires consuming our world in ways that would definitely be described in modern terms as liberal. Margaret Thatcher, on the other hand, is a conservative icon more than two decades after leaving office.  Despite the flaws in the story and no matter what your political leaning happens to be (Streep herself is liberal), this great perfomanence reminds viewers what leadership can be—flowing from inner conviction, not outer calculation. Streep portrays Thatcher as courageous and unshakable—a woman who learned to speak and move and in all ways manifest authority in a man’s world, and a very dangerous and imbalanced world.

It was a performance that has everything to do with an ancient Buddhist sutta about renunciation or letting go.  It shows how the very greatest acts originate in emptying, in relinquishing our own ideas and identifications.  After her recent Golden Globe win, Streep was asked by a reporter if she had a principle or something else that guided her when she took a role. Streep said:  “I’ve never gotten to the bottom of me, all the conundrums and contradictions….”  She allowed that she gravitated towards characters that helped her explore different aspects of her own character.  In other words, she doesn’t come from a fixed sense of who she was or who a character is supposed to be; she is open to the unknown.  As for Thatcher herself, although I disagree with her politics I came away from the film understanding something new about the power of commitment.

There is a kind of commitment does not consist in clinging to a fixed beliefs or ideas (which Lady Thatcher undoubtedly did in later years).  This special kind of commitment consists in  being willing to open to be part of something greater than our own thoughts, our own story.  “Must make vacuum,” Gurdjieff urged his students, only then can reality enter.  This requires an ability to be still, to sink below the din of thought.  As I’ve been sharing in this space, we can’t find freedom by straining towards it seeking to transcend ourselves.  We must see and accept what we are, the endless dance of the ego to identify with everything so that it can go on being.  Yet at moments, conditions conspire to help us let go of all that, so that life can rush in and remind us that we are each in fact part of a greater whole.

After a meeting of Parabola editors in Manhattan recently, a fellow Parabola editor and I slowly made our way uptown through heavy traffic, talking about those times when it seems as if the universe is with you.  Getting around in New York offers many wonderful teachings on this.  Sometime the subway is there waiting for you with doors wide open just when you need it, and you sometimes you stand and wait.  Sometimes you hit all green lights all the way up Park Avenue, and sometimes when you are late ad there is someplace you urgently have to be, traffic grinds to a halt.  Even when you remember that you too are part of the traffic, you can feel like life is against you.  You can decide that a golden few get to have great destinies—Meryl Streep, Margaret Thatcher, Gurdjieff, that certain someone who always has wonderful things happen to them—while the rest of us muddle along, Muggles among the magical.

Yet there can be moments when a door swings open and the light pours in, revealing magic in the most ordinary life.  My fellow editor told me a marvelous true story about a woman who arrived somewhere late after encountering all kinds of obstacles, only to rush into a room just as the light was hitting at an angle just right to glint off her lost engagement ring. It occurred to her that the universe might have been trying to help her by putting all those obstacles in her path.  If the great law of accident came to her aid, the underlying truth is just as magical.  Let go and let life enter.

Remember what life feels like when you fall in love?  It can feel as if a veil is pulled aside, as if we were never really isolated and alone but part of something vast and wonderful and alive.  It can seem as if the universe was leading us towards this encounter.  We are grateful for everything, even the disappointments and hard times, because it led to this.  Years later, we remember the taste of waking up from our usual trance of anxious and embattled isolation to find we are part of a greater whole. How can we open more often?   We need to see and accept what is—our freedom lay in knowing the details as well as Streep knew how Thatcher walked or washed a tea cup.

“In order to be present, I must understand the working of my thinking mind, that it’s function is to situation and explain, but not to experience,” writes Madame de Salzmann. “Thought is made up of accumulated knowledge in the form of images and associations, and it seizes an experience only to make it fit into categories of the known.”  And yet we come to know the mind in loving detail, we can open to something beyond the world of our known thought.   I’ve come to think of it more and more as softening—a softening towards what we are that deepens into the quiet acceptance, the real letting go that comes when you know you won’t get to the bottom of things.

Decades ago when I was just out of college, I was caught up in the story of being small, lacking the talent or luck or whatever other quality it would take to enable me to ever do more than witness the greatness of others (in those days I thought witnessing was a small thing). I was working as an underling in the movie business.  I had a job that included sometimes greeting big producers who had come into the office for meetings and hearing not hello but “Diet Pepsi or Diet Coke.”  I was to get things and bring things. One day, into the office came Meryl Streep.  She smiled at me asked if she might come into my tiny office and sit down with her baby.  Yes, I said.  Her manner was very soft and present.  She looked at me and smiled. It was a memorable feeling in those surroundings, being treated as if I really existed beyond my limited functions. She admired a painting hanging on the wall behind my desk, asking me if it was by a certain someone, an art star.  I said no, but I thought this young artist was very influenced by the art star Streep mentioned.  Streep laughed and told me that she never worried about being influenced or borrowing or stealing from other artists.  She said something to the effect that everything she good had ever done (and by then she had done Sophie’s Choice and many other great roles) she had stolen.  I got what she meant immediately, that it all starts with imitation, with borrowing, stealing.  It all starts with something that has come before, an thought, an image, and then comes the work of opening to something real.

It took me many years to begin to understand about what it means to be open, to create a vacuum.  Soon on long ago day, Streep was ushered out to meet with some big lawyers and executives. Instantly her demeanor changed as she stepped forward to greet them.  I was left with an impression of fluidity, of changing to meet changing circumstances.  There was also an impression of generosity and kind of radiance.  She glowed.  Gurdjieff once said that the highest role we can aspire to is actor in a very special sense–to play a role consciously without becoming identified.  Streep was recently asked how she felt about being called possibly the greatest actor who ever lived.  She smiled and said she just doesn’t take in such statements the way she takes in other facts.  Of course this is a polite and politic thing to say (what a question!) But I have an indelible impression of the kindness and generosity she expressed towards an underling. I saw for myself she understands a few real facts about letting go, about not clinging to who you think you are, old limiting thoughts and feelings, about going beyond.

 

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 / Radical Acceptance / Seeing / Waking Up — 14 Comments
24
Dec 11

Merry Christmas 2011

Merry Christmas!  So much to do and here I am again, sitting on my sofa, sipping coffee and watching the sky grow light.  Already it seems brighter to me.  This is my very flawed and subjective view, of course.  Yet it does seem brighter.  This body and heart came to me from the most ancient times, and it knows that a great shift has taken place: the sun is returning.

In a little while, my day will kick into high gear: my daughter will be baking and I will be cooking and then we are going with friends to see the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center.  We will be making our own updated version of Christmas. And I am vowing to be especially mindful today, since yesterday’s last-minute shopping trip with the family triggered a brief but painful storm of raging ultra-sensitivity my daughter labels “crack baby.”  This is a kind of code that evolved from an observation made by a friend of mine who is a pediatrician.  As a young intern in a big New York City hospital, Amy noted that some babies seemed to invite holding and attention while others were so overwrought—and so in need of holding and care and attention– they pushed it away.  My friend observed something that most of us have noted in different ways:  love and peace and a spirit of generosity radiates and attracts more of the same.  Sadly, so does crabbiness and acting out or shutting down to protect our pain.

And yet, as Scrooge shows us, it is never too late to change.  As someone commented in reply to my last post, Scrooge had help seeing the impact of his deeds and his own death thanks to three apparitions and old Marley’s ghost.  He had really terrifying and convincing supernatural help:  “At this point the spirit raised a frightful cry, and shook his chain with such a dismal and appalling noise, that Scrooge held on tight to his chair, to save himself from falling in a swoon….”

Most of us don’t have such help.  Yet we still can catch ourselves at moments.  There is usually no clanking of chains and frightful sights, but we can feel ourselves contracting, slipping into the myriad inner and outer attitudes we have picked up over the years to protect ourselves…our own rusty old chains.  At moments—and I mean nanoseconds sometimes– we can stop before a reaction really takes over and allow the heart and mind to release and open.  In such a moment, we can rediscover in our own hearts and minds the spirit of this ancient holy time, which even before Christian times it was consecrated by giving gifts.  We can give the ultimate gift of our attention, acceptance, and love.  In any given moment, it is possible to embrace with our attention everything that is happening–the person or people before us, including ourselves, even when we are acting like crack babies.

We may not have the three Christmas ghosts, but we do have what the Buddhist wise men from the East call the three poisons of greed, aversion, and delusion.  Serously.  What if we received these spirits the way Scrooge received his three Christmas apparitions?  What if instead of trying to push these visitors away without various reactions, we treated them like messengers, really allowing ourselves to see what they have to reveal?  From long experience being befogged and whipsawed by these three visitors, I know that what hurts us can also be a deep of compassion and wisdom.  We worldly beings are a position to understand one another.  And, one moment at a time, we can change. Here is Scrooge on Christmas morning, encountering a man he had coldly rejected the day before for seeking money for the poor:

He [Scrooge] had not gone far, when, coming on toward him he beheld the portly gentleman who had walked into his counting house the day before, and said, ‘Scrooge and Marley’s, I believe?’  It sent a pang across his heart to think how the old gentleman would look upon him when they met, but he knew what path lay straight before him, and he took it.

“My dear sir,” said Scrooge, quickening his pace, and taking the old gentleman by both his hands, ‘how do you do?  I hope you succeeded yesterday.  It was kind of you.  A merry Christmas to you sir!”

“Mr. Scrooge?”

“Yes,’ said Scrooge.  “That is my name, and I fear it may not be pleasant to you.  Allow me to ask your pardon.  And will you have the goodness—‘Here Scrooge whispered in his ear.”

“Lord bless me!’ cried the gentleman, as if his breath were taken away.  “My dear Mr. Scrooge, are you serious?”

“If you please,” said Scrooge. “Not a farthing less.  A great may back payments are included in it, I assure you.  Will you do me that favor?”

“My dear sir,’ said the other, shaking hands with him.  “I don’t know what to say to such munifi—“

“Don’t say anything, please,” retorted Scrooge. “Come and see me.  Will you come and see me? ”

“I will!” cried the old gentleman.

In 1843, Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol. He recreated the spirit of Christmas, showing us what goodwill, compassion, and generosity looked like in the images and dress of the day.  The very phrase “Merry Christmas” came from the book (and we all know what being a “scrooge” means).

May we all rediscover the spirit of Christmas  and keep it in our own way.   God bless us, everyone.

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 / 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.

Awakening / Awareness / Extreme Weather / Grace / Happiness / October Snowstorm / Presence / Radical Acceptance / Seeing — 2 Comments
06
Nov 11

What Would Thoreau Do When the Power Goes Out?

“I did not read books the first summer; I hoed beans.  Nay, I often did more than this.  There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hands.  I love a broad margin to my life,” writes Thoreau, as quoted in beautiful “Many Paths One Truth” issue of Parabola.

Thoreau describes finding his own way to the luminous awakened mind, first bathing in Walden Pond in the morning, then sitting his sunny doorway, “rapt in a revery, admidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, undisturbed solitude and stillness….” Thoreau discovered that when he was still and observant, when he refrained from all striving seeking anything outside himself, those moments were bountiful in a way that our conventional busy life is not: “They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance.”

Day by day, finding his own way of meditating and being with his experience, Thoreau discovered that life unfolds naturally without any input from us.  He describes a luminous awakened mind state of mind that innately knows how to meet and mirror what is arising:  In this deeper, receptive state of mind, everything about the housework and chores that were part of his simple rustic life became interesting and fun: “It was a drama of many scenes and without end.  If we were always, indeed, getting our living, and regulating our lives according to the last and best mode we had learned, we should never be troubled with ennui. Follow your genius closely enough, and it will not fail to show you a fresh prospect every hour.”

I happened to think of this as I poked the fire in the woodstove, cold and miserable, desperately wishing the power would come back on so I could get on with my “real” life.  I suddenly wondered what Thoreau would have made of the experience, and that changed everything.  Especially during the days when trees and wires were down everywhere and we were advised not to drive, I realized that I could actually try not fighting the experience, letting go of fretting about what I was missing and following “the last and best mode” of mindful observation (the last resort for many of us).  It’s amazing how an attitude of attentive interest, a wish to investigate and learn, can allow experience to unfold.

I actually jotted down a list of things I wished to remember, and these are a few:  I noticed how darkness and stillness aids concentration—and that I didn’t feel cut off from life but closer, part of it; I noticed the power of illumination—even a small candle brings warmth as well as light; and as I wrote last time acts of kindness and cooperation also bring warmth.  I learned that the effort I most need to make is not grasping but letting go, being with life as it unfolds, receiving what is being offered instead of huddling there shivering and waiting for the lights to come back on.

I tried to get into the chores that faced me the way I thought Thoreau wood, and I did enjoy the drama of it all, and I found it absorbing, well, until the morning of the fifth day when I spent hours trying to get a fire started with damp wood.  But I realized that this is the way it goes.  As I walked around the yard, foraging for fallen limbs, I realized that this was a very different way to reflect on impermanence.   Somewhere along the way I heard or read that impermanence is most often allied with deterioration. Trees fall down in a storm, all conditioned things—including loved ones and ourselves—change and pass away. And we, living in the forest of desires, are entirely composed of the impermanent.  Last week (at least at my better moments) I saw how my  desire for things to be different blinded me to this deeper truth.  And when it occurred to me to stop fighting the experience—and let’s face it I couldn’t turn on the computer or the TV or be busy in the usual way, I had to live so deliberately!—I saw that my own mind and body states were continually changing, shifting from pleasant to unpleasant to neutral, continually arising and passing away.

Like Thoreau, I began to realize that the truth of life—and its real unfolding drama–is not to be found in a book—out and away somewhere.  It is right here and right now, wherever we are.  And when we give up doing and striving for a time to watch, we may find a field of brightness inside, a kind of natural solar powered attention, that can meet any condition that arises, illuminating from within.

 

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