Scrooge

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

Christmas in October

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

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

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

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

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

Awakening / Awareness / Magic / Presence / Scrooge / Seeing / Uncategorized / Waking Up — 5 Comments
28
Oct 11

Taking Halloween Seriously

“Many Paths One Truth” is out!  Compelling me to use exclamation points!   Not surprisingly, we who worked on the issue find it beautiful and fascinating, and we hope you do!  Seriously, please support us by buying a copy and letting us know what you think.

As we worked on the issue, this question came up again and again: How can a person find a good or right way?  Especially now, when so many teachings are available and in increasingly user-friendly forms.  Just the other day, Parabola publisher Jeff Zaleski and I interviewed an avowed reincarnated Tibetan Buddhist lama in his borrowed apartment on Central Park West, before he attended a premier of a movie about his life.  Next, we taxied down to the Parabola offices where we picked up the weekly bale of books and dvds from other lamas and teachers from other major traditions and paths and ways.   And now there are so many on-line options!  How can we possibly go beyond the endless stream of inspiring thoughts  and quotes and images (and Parabola in our various forms provides plenty of those)—to actually make contact with a way that will lead inward to our own deepest experience—and outward,  to the truth we share?

Carlos Castaneda writes: “The only question is:  Does this path have a heart?  If it does, then it is a good path.  If it doesn’t, then it is of no use.”   I’ve been mentioning certain famous literary kids in this space lately—kids who found their way by trusting their own hearts and capacity to know and to feel.   Kids can’t help but trust their hearts.  Over the years, we build up dense layers of thoughts, memories, and images that take us away from what is really happening in the moment.  A real path helps us cut through the fog, leading us back to the roots of perception and feeling, re-introducing us to our innate capacity to see clearly and feel and care about what we see.  When we were little kids, we could see very clearly that life has a magical quality.  We understood the power of an act of kindness or generosity; we felt different qualities of presence in different people and animals.

And contrary to what many adults think about children we thought about death a great deal.  Death had dark magic.   Ghost stories and contemplation of scary ways to die brought us intensely alive.  Death had a dark magnetism that called out our best energy and courage and spirit to move in the opposite direction.   Thinking about dying and/or being visited by beings from the underworld made us discover how intensely we wanted to be alive.

His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama:  “Awareness of death is the very bedrock of the path.  Until you have developed this awareness, all other practices are obstructed.”    Real paths are like the ghosts who came to Scrooge:  they show us who we once were and they remind us that we will die.

Top of Form

Bottom of Form

Halloween is coming and my thoughts are naturally turning to ghosts and haunting.  As I mentioned before, I co-lead a meditation group in a yoga studio called Yoga Shivaya, in Tarrytown, near Sleepy Hollow.  The are is now dominated by images of the Headless Horseman all dressed in black, scooping up poor Ichabod Crane and taking him on the ride of his life.  I can’t help thinking of him as an early American version of the young Buddha, being shown the basic facts of sickness, old age, and death—and the possible way out, the monk, who embodied conscious seeing.

Most people believe that Halloween derives from the ancient Celtic holiday of Samhain.  The ancient Celts believed that the border between this world and the Otherworld became thin on Samhain, allowing spirits (both harmless and harmful) to pass through. The family’s ancestors were honored and invited home while harmful spirits were warded off. It is believed that the need to ward off harmful spirits led to the wearing of costumes and masks. The point was to disguise oneself as a harmful spirit and thus avoid harm.  Samhain was also a time to take stock of food supplies and slaughter livestock for winter stores. Bonfires were lit. All other fires were doused and each home lit their hearth from the bonfire. The bones of slaughtered livestock were cast into its flames (such an ancient gesture of offering to the unknown). Sometimes two bonfires would be built side-by-side, and people and their livestock would walk between them as a cleansing ritual. Taking stock of what you have stored up.  Allow yourself to feel the weight of the tensions, the images of you are and what really matters to you that you carry around—allow yourself to really touch and see it without judgment or adding or turning away.  This is purification by fire.

A path with heart leads inward to the root of perception and feeling.  We purify our seeing and our way of relating to what is as we learn to not turn away from what we don’t wish to see, or what we think is not important or desirable.  It is seeing itself that is important, not what is seen. When we remember that we will die, we suddenly remember who we really are—and it turns out that we are not our bodies or positions or points of view, but a flowing state of inner being.  Staring at the Ghost of Christmas Future (and most of us have had this kind of scary shock in one guise or another) we realize that in our inmost essence we don’t have a particular outer shape at all: we are vessels for a common fire.  As Madame de Salzmann once taught:  “I begin to realize that what I am trying to approach is not only mine, not only in me, but immense and much more essential. In front of this, my tensions let go one after the other until the moment I feel, as a gift of unity, a collected Presence.”  Be like Scrooge waking up on Christmas morning and realizing it is not too late.  Follow a path with heart.

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

The Three Spirits

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

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

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

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

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

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