Seeing

In the Chapter Room

“The solitary life, being silent, clears away the smoke-screen of words that man has laid down between his mind and things,” writes Thomas Merton in Thoughts in Solitude. “In solitude we remain face to face with the naked being of things. And yet we find that the nakedness of reality which we have feared, is neither a matter of terror nor for shame. It is clothed in the friendly communion of silence, and this silence is related to love. The world our words have attempted to classify, to control and even to despise (because they could not contain it) comes close to us, for silence teaches us to know reality by respecting it where words have defiled it.”

When you are thinking of bicycles, you see bicycles everywhere. Contemplating Parabola’s latest theme, “Alone and Together,” I find fresh evidence of the interplay between solitude and community everywhere. I visited The Cloisters with my daughter Alex and her boyfriend Anthony. Set on a hilltop with sweeping views of the Hudson River, The Cloisters is not just a museum of medieval art, it actually is a medieval cloister transported here from France.

Merton writes of it in The Seven Storey Mountain, the iconic memoir of his spiritual journey. Merton opens the book by saying that he was born in the shadow of some French mountains. “There were many ruined monasteries in those mountains,” he writes “My mind goes back with great reverence to the thought of those clean, ancient stone cloisters, those low and mighty rounded arches hewn and set in place by monks who have perhaps prayed me where I now am…”

And many momentous years later, after he lost his father and mother, after he went to private school and Cambridge University, and then on to Columbia University in New York, Merton encountered one of those ancient cloisters again…in the upper reaches of Manhattan. Can you imagine? He found himself at Columbia, in what I’ve heard called upstate Manhattan. Under his friendliness and activity, he was lonely and searching. And as he began to turn towards the contemplative path, as he began to turn towards the inner path—he found a monastery from the innermost layers of memory—literally relocated in time and place. Can you imagine the proverbial mountain coming for you?

“One of [the cloisters], stone by stone, followed me across the Atlantic a score of years later, and got itself set up within convenient reach of me when I most needed to see what a cloister looked like, and what kind of place a man might live in, to live according to his rational nature, and not like a stray dog. St. Michel-de-Cuxa is all fixed up in a special and considerably tidy little museum in an uptown park in New York, overlooking the Hudson River, in such a way that you don’t recall what kind of city you are in. It is called The Cloisters. Synthetic as it is, it still preserves enough of its own reality to be a reproach to everything else around it, except the trees and the Palisades (the lofty steep cliffs along the Hudson).”

I sat in the cool depths of the Chapter House. With Alex’s firm encouragement (understandably, she and Anthony wanted to drift through the garden and among the treasures without Mom on their heels), I sat for a long while in a twelfth-century enclosure where monks gathered for daily readings of the Rule of St. Bendict, the rules of their order—the most famous of which is about welcoming guests as if they were a manifesting divine. I felt welcomed, and more. The stones communicated something to me on a “preverbal”—possibly even a “post-verbal” level.

“True communication on the deepest level is more than a simple sharing of ideas, of conceptual knowledge, or formulated truth,” writes Merton in a talk he once planned. “The kind of communication that is necessary on this level must also be ‘communion’ beyond the level of words….”

For a little while, sitting in the Chapter Room, I experienced The Cloisters not as a tourist but as a pilgrim. I felt a presence or vibration in the stones around me. It felt like I was being helped by the efforts of others in the past who tried to cultivate an awareness beyond ordinary words and knowledge—who tried to open to what is new, to welcome whomever and whatever arrives as a manifestation of the divine.

Eventually, Alex and Anthony arrived. I described my sense that the stones communicated something. Alex is used to this sort statement from me. But Anthony, who studies theoretical physics and math in graduate school at Princeton, looked doubtful. No matter. I know that he understands that nothing is solid and separate in his own way. I know that we are made up of energies that too quick and subtle to perceive.

Except, I find that we can sense this great mystery with these very bodies, hearts, and minds. Sometimes when we are very still, there can be a subtle movement of availability and we can receive something extraordinary that is being offered, radiated. Sitting at The Cloisters the other day, I glimpsed that reality—a finer level reality—is not something chilly and abstract. It really does come “clothed in the friendly communion of silence.”

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 / Presence / Seeing / Tracy Cochran / Waking Up — 9 Comments
08
Mar 12

Being No Thing

“Love says ‘I am everything.’ Wisdom says ‘I am nothing.‘ Between the two, my life flows,” taught Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj. I am not a thing, and this is good news. And although I am limited I have a capacity to feel unlimited, to feel compassionate connection with everything. This is also good news. The bad news is that feeling like nothing in the ordinary sense of feeling like nobody is the usual gateway to letting go of a sense of specialness, of separateness from everything else. But that is a very wobbly, stressful state to maintain.

The Buddha called this state “dukkha,” which is usually translated as “suffering” but which is closer to “unreliable” or “stressful.” The root of the word means something akin to “dirty wheel,” referring to the gunky oil that builds up in the hub of a wheel making the turning wobbly. Dukkha has also been compared to the pain that comes from rubbing naked skin on a brick wall. It may not hurt much at first, but after a time it is a torment. This is the way things it goes, taught the Buddha. Things are not stable and reliable, not really solid. Nothing goes as smoothly as it does in our thoughts and dreams. Reality is rough. Head knowledge of this is not the same as living knowledge, human being knowledge. But life has a way of getting around our thinking and showing us our true nature. Here is one example of how the lesson of truth and possibilities of nothingness came to me:

The Metro North train pulled into a station, the doors slid open and a pretty young woman got on and sat down next to my then 11-year-old daughter Alex and me. As soon as we started rolling, she turned to us and asked if we would mind watching her lunch box while she went to the restroom. Alexandra looked at me for a clue about how to respond. After hesitating for a moment, I smiled back at the young woman and nodded yes. She seemed so nice, so open. After the young woman trotted up the aisle and through the heavy doors at the end of the car, Alex asked me in a whisper how I could know for sure if this person and her lunch box were safe?

We sat facing a shiny new poster with a picture of an ominous-looking black bag sitting unattended on a seat. It read” “If you see something, say something,” meaning that passengers should alert conductors to any suspicious objects or activities because they might be bombs or bombers. It was the winter after the attacks on 9/11, and fear and sadness and a terrible doubt seeped into everything like cold fog. Just after the attacks things had been different. There had been what one journalist called a “suspension of distraction.” Strangers made eye contact and held doors for one another. There was the feeling that we were all together in the midst was a mystery, and the best we could do was to be helpful and kind.

But things changed as the months passed. Yet I utterly fogged in by fear doubt.

Pundits in the media told us we were in the midst of a great war that sounded like The Lord of the Rings, in which merciless forces of darkness were out to extinguish the light of civilization. The major difference was that in our contemporary dark age the agents of evil might strike might they might look just like us. The most effective terrorists we were told might look like ordinary businessmen or mothers or students, like the young woman.

We had been hearing speculation that there might be bigger and more horrible attacks at any moment, and Grand Central Station and the trains going in were always included as possible targets. Periodically, State troopers patrolled the train cars with gas masks clipped to their gun belts. “I wonder about the etiquette of that, ” commented a commuter friend. I suggested they could hand out gas masks and have a collection box on the platform at the end of the ride, the way they collect 3D glasses in movie theaters.

I told Alex I thought we would have noticed if there was anything amiss. It would have been ticking or looked strangely heavy or something. But it looked like an ordinary insulated lunch bag. And the young woman was so pleasant and open, not nervous or fixated on a goal. But the technology of the terrorists could be subtle, Alex cautioned. It could look like an ordinary lunch box and be a bomb. And terrorists themselves could look perfectly nice and normal. We couldn’t trust our ordinary senses. We just didn’t know.

We were all fogged in by fear. I thought of the way that even single-celled organisms reflexively grasp at bits of food while contracting and scooting away from other cells. That’s what we were like then and for years to come, doubting our own senses and intuition, reflexively grasping or contracting to protect ourselves. What had become of that sense of openness and sharing, that recognition that we were all in this together?

A new stream of psychological research is exposing how it is that sights, sounds, or gestures can “prime” the unconscious, spurring us off in pursuit of goals that may or may not line up with the intentions of the conscious mind. Handing test subjects hop coffee warmed their opinion of a hypothetical person while iced coffee elicited chilly opinions. In what one scientist calls a “bottom-up” decision making process, ancient instinctive areas of the brain act on such subtle cues to make decisions about our survival without waiting for input from the much slower conscious mind. Being driven by fear is not life, I decided. I would make a stand.

I suggested to Alex that we could open the lunch box and have a look inside. She looked at me like I was crazy. Hadn’t I seen any movies or TV shows in my whole long life? If it was a bomb, opening it will make it explode. She told me she had a better idea. She snapped open her CD player, took out the stormy dramatic Fellowship of the Rings disk she’d been listening to, and clicked in a CD of upbeat pop music. She explained that she was creating a sound track to go along with a happy ending.

Believing that changing a soundtrack can change reality is magical thinking, I told her. She asked me if I had a better idea. I did not. At that moment, it seemed painfully clear that none of my ideas were good. What I took to be my life was actually a stream of shallow and repetitive thoughts, images, memories, all in the past and all of it driven by a primitive tendency to grasp and contract like an ameba, like pond scum. I felt like Dorothy, throwing back the curtain on the Wizard of Oz. The nice young woman came back and thanked us, and Alex turned to me and smiled.

The impressions of being nothing—of having no solid being—kept on coming. I walked through Grand Central Station on Christmas Eve. I watched heavily armed National Guard troops and police officers surround a deranged old homeless woman who had pushed her shopping cart into the terminal to take shelter from a freezing winter rain. She’d stood clutching a broken doll, looking bewildered as the officers poked through the possessions that were spread out on the ground around her. I noticed one young officer in particular. His stance was stern but he had a horrified, questioning look in his eyes, as if he were having one of those nightmares where you can’t move. Life is just like that, I thought, watching him. We are carried along passively by forces we do not understand. We need to face ourselves and try to understand.

Years later, some of our most distinguished journalists would write columns in our leading newspapers musing about why they had been so paralyzed during that period, confessing that what passed for investigative journalism too often had been reduced to gaining access to high-ranking officials and printing their quotes. When had they stopped digging for the truth? If our leading journalists were paralyzed, what could I expect of myself? In those days, I mostly wrote book reviews and interviewed famous authors for the weekly magazine. Sometimes I wrote for glossy monthly magazines. I worked hard to engage authors. I pounced any bit of live insight that might break out during these brief and contrived encounters. Still, I often saw the very same comments and anecdotes printed elsewhere or heard them repeated on National Public Radio.

I didn’t want to dig for more facts but for more awareness, I realized. Where was the questioning and generosity that we had all shared right after the attacks? I thought of a memory the Buddha just before his enlightenment, a memory which guided him. He remembered being a child, sitting alone under a tree, watching a plowing festival. He was withdrawn from the busy world of the adults, delighting in his solitude yet receptive to the impressions that came in. He was being nothing, and all children are very good at this. Yet, as the legend goes, he watched some insects struggling as their home in the earth was plowed up, and his heart went out to them. He was very limited yet he didn’t feel limited. He was nothing yet he felt everything.

A few days before the attacks in New York, I had interviewed neurologist and author Oliver Sacks in his office in the West Village. The very day of the attacks, I had boarded the train to New York, awash in anxiety and self-pity because I had a deadline and because I was tired of doing these interviews with celebrity authors for a living. After the lunch box incident, one story Sacks told me came back.

Sacks spent part of his boyhood in London during the Blitz. He would come out of his house in the morning and often find that something familiar had disappeared over night. A distant landmark would be gone, next the iron railings along the steps of his house, taken for the war effort. This daily loss (and during the same period he lost his brother to psychosis) made him resolve to be a keen observer of life, which is what is he became as a neurologist and writer. Suddenly what had just been an anecdote became a vital and practical bit information. It was like having a plastic fork and disparaging it as a plastic fork and suddenly needing one and realizing the true value of it, the function over the form.

I told Alex about meeting Oliver Sacks, and about how he built a career around noticing what was missing. The Blitz was actually much harder than what happened in New York, Alex and I agreed. The bombs dropped in London for 76 consecutive nights. Over a million homes were damaged and destroyed, and 40,000 civilian lives lost in the U.K., half in London. Yet it didn’t break their spirit. And at least one kid learned that a life didn’t have to be based on things and places being solid never changing. A person could observe, digging below the surface for deeper truths. A person could be with change.

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 / 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.

Awareness / Presence / Seeing / Tracy Cochran / Waking Up — 14 Comments
11
Jan 12

Disenchantment

“Monks, all is burning,” the Buddha taught in his “Fire Sermon.” A fresh translation of this ancient teaching by scholar monk Bhikkhu Bodhi is the opening piece in Parabola’s upcoming “Burning World” issue, and for good reason. In little more than 300 words, he describes the root cause of the overwhelming global challenges we face today. The Buddha looked out over a thousand monks and serenely explained that through every sense door pour impressions that burn us “with the fire of greed, with the fire of hatred, with the fire of delusion.” He assured them that even if they worked to put out those daily brush fires of desire and aversion, there was a greater, more unstoppable fire advancing: of the impermanence of life, and the sorrow and despair that comes with death and with all that passes.

Did the Buddha offer a happy ending? Not in a Disney princess sense. I used to picture walking for days hoping for a magical formula. And yet what he offered actually does have a thread of connection with Sleeping Beauty. The Buddha told people that “disenchantment” was the key– disenchantment with all the objects of the senses and the mind, with everything we yearn for or fear or otherwise grant the power to make us happy or unhappy, to be satisfied or dissatisfied. Disenchantment leads to a dispassionate attitude and finally to liberation. I used to think of this solution as a kind of prison sentence, a state of radical restraint. I thought of the monks shorn of all pleasures and attachments, from chocolate to love, voluntary inmates living life at the lowest possible flame. Over the years, meditation has helped me see disenchantment in a radically different way.

Disenchantment means waking up to the true scale and possibilities of life. It does not mean growing numb and experiencing life as less than it is but developing an attention that is more quick and supple, able to go beyond our usual addictive one-way attachment to our thoughts and feelings and all the things “out there” that we long to make us happy. Waking up is revolutionary act in the sense that it radically reverses our usual addictive tendencies, returning the attention us to what is arising in the moment and to ourselves. As the focus of our attention shifts from “out there” to “right here, right now” our usual sense of separation and isolation tends to fall away.

“Meditation is the DNA of the kindness revolution,” says Pancho Ramos Stierle, who practices meditation and kindness in the midst of strife-torn, contemporary Oakland, California. According to Stierle and his friend Nipun Mehta, who writes about Stierle in the upcoming Burning World issue, we can transform the world starting right where we are. It can begin with the smallest of acts, picking up broken glass in the street or sitting down to meditate. Pictures of Pancho being arrested in Oakland as he was deeply meditating (for “disturbing the peace?”) went out over the internet, causing thousands upon thousands of people to pause and question. When we are awake, there is no such thing as a nobody as opposed to a celebrity, and no such thing as small act as opposed to a grand or important deed. As Gandhi knew, as Buddha and Jesus surely knew and demonstrated, seemingly small acts of care for our neighbor done with great consciousness can be vast, cosmic.

Of course we don’t all have cosmic consciousness, but we are all being invited to be a little disenchanted and see that we really can’t separate ourselves from an increasingly critical global situation. The search for wisdom cannot be separate from compassion. I’m not saying that we are all called to get arrested for meditating like Pancho or march to the sea like Gandhi. But we really must all raise the question of what it means to live a good life now.

“Everything that was external and away from us surrounds us now,” says Jonathan Rose, a Manhattan builder and green thought leader, also in this issue. “The economy is globalized. But climate change knows no boundary except the earth itself. The effects will reach every one of us.” How are we to change? The first thing that has to change is how we see ourselves. We need to become disenchanted, awakened from the trance of our addictions, aware that we are inextricably part of a larger whole.

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.

Tracy Cochran stories on the way towards awakening