Awakening | Tracy Cochran

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09
May 12

Being Here Together

“My guru told me ‘Be like Gandhi,’” Ram Dass told me during an interview that took place about a decade ago. “Gandhi said, ‘My life is my message.’” The words came haltingly, short phrases followed by long pauses. The former Dr. Richard Alpert, the once eloquent spiritual seeker and psychedelic rebel, sat in a wheelchair, hunting for words, often coming up with nothing except a soft “yea.” “Before the stroke it was words, words, words,” he told me. “After the stroke it was silence, silence, silence.”

My encounter with Ram Dass proved to be one of those quiet, tiny, yet inwardly momentous events that lead to real wisdom—to opening to reality. He spoke of before the stroke and after, and I received a lesson in the difference between having a concept (and a projection) about a person and what is actually meeting in silence. There is the thought and the reality, there is being alone and being together, in which there is a meeting and exchange of presence and awareness, of worlds of experience.

Ram Dass and I sat together near a window of a room in a hotel that was then called “the New York Marriott Financial Center,” a grand edifice of glass and steel that was a short and impressive stroll from the World Trade Center. The hotel itself turned out to be a lesson in before and after. About a year and a half after our meeting, much of that glass would be shattered, and when the hotel finally re-opened years later it was renamed the “New York Marriot Downtown.” Those were different times. The day I visited Ram Dass, there was a big bustling conference going on. There were signs in the lobby saying something about “Asset-backed Commercial Paper.”

“Acid-backed paper?” said Ram Dass, when I described the scene. “What are we waiting for? Let’s go!” He laughed, banging his hand on the arm of his wheelchair. Just for a moment, if I squinted my eyes, he looked a little bit like the psychedelic crusader who had ingested at least three hundred bits of acid-backed paper over the years, before he went off to India to find a guru and learn to meditate. He and the classic story of his journey Be Here Now had been iconic to me when I was young—proof that there was another way. The formerly ambitious young assistant professor of psychology at Harvard took psilocybin mushrooms with Timothy Leary and glimpsed an abiding awareness, a witnessing “I.” And from that time he sought not just know things but to “Know.” And now here we were.

The formerly irrepressible, unstoppably eloquent Ram Dass sat and waited patiently for words to float up to the surface (or not) and this inspired patience in me. There was nothing else to be done but just hang out and be. We sat together and watched ferries and tugboats criss-cross New York Harbor. The famous seeker was there to attend a conference on dying organized by Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman, and I was there to interview him about his latest book. But I couldn’t do my job the way it is usually done. I couldn’t press on, trying to pry something new and original out of him. I had to let go of my questions and just sit back and wait. I remember relishing the way the tugboats rode low in the choppy grey water. And I realized that being him felt like being with any old person.

Concepts hide as much as they help reveal. Once I thought of Ram Dass as a glamorous psychedelic outlaw (and I tried ridiculously to come across as an outlaw myself. It was a protective stance, quills to protect the tender belly of my being). But what I was really seeking was an outlier, a figure less or more than the usual sum. But that day I realized that we all contain outlier particles or numbers and life activates them. I realized that we don’t have to go to great extremes because life will bring us extremes, and the awareness that “Knows” may find us anywhere because it is already in us, waiting patiently.

Ram Dass told me a little about the stroke that hit one evening in 1997, as he lay in bed wondering how to improve a book he was writing about the wisdom potential of aging. Over the months and years of his rehabilitation, wisdom came: “We think life is like one of these buildings, big and solid,” said, gesturing at the hotel around us and out the window towards the towers. “But age is like an earthquake. Everything goes.”

Twelve years later, those mighty skyscrapers are gone or vastly altered, and Ram Dass himself is still here. But the real irony was this. I shared with this famous seeker, this disciple of the Indian guru Neem Karoli Baba, some wisdom from my mother who suffered a stroke and recovered her vocabulary and other faculties, well beyond predictions: “You tell Ram Dass not to listen to anybody tell him what he can’t do. Tell him to just keep going because nobody knows what can happen.”

Ram Dass listened closely. He knew she knew something real. My mother never tripped or went to India. She never lost her Nebraska accent, just added a layer of Northern New York, so that his name came out like Dodge Ram (and Dass like Ass). But she understood the impermanent nature of life because she had lived through it. She was a mother (and a daughter) and she knew that forces like love and compassion are stronger and more enduring than buildings. She had lived through enough to be an outlier–she had faced death and the loss that comes with age. Without ever putting it into words, she understood that reality is always different our thoughts and words about it, and that nobody can nail it down. She probably would have agreed with Ram Dass that about the best we can do is accompany each other in this mystery, give each other the gift of our presence and attention. I think she would have agreed with Ram Dass who said: “We’re all just walking each other home.”

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.

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 / 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.

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15
Dec 11

The Sun Over the House

Light plays a starring role in this dark season. In the Christian tradition, light literally takes the form of a star. This image of a star shining over a little barn, guiding shepherds and wise men to the divine child sleeping within has become a kind of resonating question or koan for me, thanks to an outspoken child of my own.

Many years ago, feeling that our Christmas in Brooklyn was missing something, I had the inspired idea of driving my daughter, husband, and mother-in-law up Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, to see the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center and attend mass across the street at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The cathedral seemed to be full to the great doors with European tourists. The beautiful strains of Italian filled the air. It was the very epicenter of Christmas in New York, and we managed seats close to the great alter. A row of solemn-faced priests flanked the front of the church, ready to serve communion to the vast throng of faithful. My tiny elderly mother-in-law, who was born and spent her childhood in the passionately Catholic island country of Malta, had gone to high school on a scholarship at St. Patrick’s and she sat with hands folded, looked radiant. Not so my 8 or 9-year-old daughter. She writhed unhappily in her seat. She grimaced at the huge tortured crucifix hanging above us.

“Has anyone looked at this man?” she asked in a loud voice. “He doesn’t look very happy, and we’re supposed to follow this…” Before she could continue this loud line of questioning in front of her grandmother, the priests, the international Catholic throng, coward Tracy pulled her out of the pew, grabbed her by the arm and kind of perp walked her over to an almost life-sized manger set up in a corner of the great cathedral. Feeling as if I had to do something to instill a sense of occasion if nothing else (she had already told me she preferred nature to religion and would rather spend Christmas in Africa with the animals), I told her the story of the nativity.

“A star was over the manger?” she asked. “This was the sign that he was the son of God?” I nodded but I felt a little thrill, as if I knew that this idyllic Christmas exchange was unfolding a little too smoothly and falsely. “A star in a sun, Mommy,” she said in a resonating voice. “This is like saying the sun is over my house, I must be divine. Isn’t that a little, I don’t know, selfish?”

For years now, this non-rational question occasionally wells up inside: “The sun is over my house, does this mean I’m divine?” It has come to point towards that moment of calm and patient abiding—a moment of opening inside to truly see the beauty and mystery of the world and the miracle of life and of being part of it here and now. It is a vibrating question that changes form and emphasis and doesn’t end in a simple yes: the light is divine and life is miraculous and how can I find that sleeping child within?

In a few days it will be the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah, Chanukah, or the Festival of Lights. The name is derived from a Hebrew word which means “to dedicate.” During Hanukkah, the Jewish people commemorate the re-dedication of the Temple in Jerusalem and the “Miracle of The Oil”. After the Temple had been won by the Maccabees from Antiochus IV Epiphanes, only a day’s worth of consecrated olive oil was left to to fuel the eternal flame. Miraculously, it remained burning for eight days, which was just enough time to make more of the oil.

What does it take to make more oil? As an outsider, I think of the oil as conscious attention—that special quiet, dedicated attention that allows us to consecrate life one moment at a time, to make a temple of the body, heart, and mind, to let the light in. The other night, I was trying to do assume a (for me) difficult posture in a sacred dance class and the teacher said “notice how patience can make you quick, can help you arrive on time.” And I thought of the miracle of the oil. Patience can make the light of attention expand—can make time and life seem to expand. There is more to you and more to life than you could ever imagine. May you experience the miracle of light this holiday season. May the sun shine over your house. May it light your way to the sacred space or the divine child within.

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23
Nov 11

What I Know Now

“We can do no great things, only small things with great love,” Mother Teresa famously said. She and other wise beings also indicated that doing small things with attention and the aspiration to act as if we are part of a greater whole can be a source of strength—even grace. Being part of the community of Parabola has revealed much about this in the past year.

Early in November, I interviewed the green Manhattan developer Jonathan Rose for the upcoming “Burning World” issue of Parabola. At the time of the interview, I was heating by wood stove due to the power outage that followed the freak October snow storm here in the Northeastern U.S. Reminded of the way much of the world lives and have always lived, my heart and mind opened to the ideas he had to share with Parabola—among them that the quality of awareness and our actions change when we realize there is no “other.” There is no longer any air or water or planet or people “out there” that we can abuse because they are separate from us. We are truly and inextricably interconnected. I came away from the interview reflecting on how ancient and spiritual the innovative green thinking seems to be: we must pay attention to the smallest details, awhile keeping an open mind, understanding that there is much that can’t be known—and that we are all in this together.

Sometimes marvelous things we could never predict emerge this way. Last week, I was invited to Rockefeller Foundation in Manhattan, to hear a discussion of Infinite Vision. This book (to be reviewed and excerpted in “Burning World”) tells the thrilling story of how, in 1976, a retired Indian doctor with arthritic hands started an 11-bed eye hospital, vowing to eliminate needless blindness. What he lacked in resources, he made up for in the quality of his attention and the sincerity of his intention. Today, his hospital Aravind has treated over 29 million patients and performed over 3.6 million surgical and laser procedures, the vast majority for patients who are too poor to pay.

How did he do it? How can we bring a similar kind of service to the rest of the suffering world? Again and again, the authors of Infinite Vision, Pavi Mehta and Suchitra Shenoy, were asked versions of this question by U.N. workers and members of foundations. Again and again, they stressed the doctor’s attention on small acts and his spiritual aspiration and intention. The discussion in the room shifted to the need to find ways to articulate spiritual truth—that we are all part of a larger whole, that there is no “other”—in terms that everyone can understand.

I realized in that moment that Parabola serves a very important and practical function in this suffering world. I am full of gratitude for the people doing many small things with great attention and care to help Parabola. Please check out our on-line auction, which starts this coming Sunday, to see how Parabola has become a community– a collective way of sharing insights drawn from our time and from every culture and time about how to awaken to our oneness. I have come to see that awakening to oneness—to the realization that no one and no part of the world is “other” than us– is the foundation of every kind of change. For over 35 years, Parabola has helped illuminate this truth. Now this truth needs sharing as never before, and through many small acts on all of our parts it is happening. We really are all in this together. I am very grateful to you all. Happy Thanksgiving!

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21
Nov 11

The Art of Reflection

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Life With Heart

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

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

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

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

“If you dread, they’ll dislike you.”

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

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

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

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 14^th 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.

Uncategorized — 2 Comments
20
Oct 11

The Swinging Door

What does it take to find our path to a greater, richer life? What do we need to do to open up and let the magic in? It is entirely possible to spend most of our limited time not really inhabiting our own life, just a blur of thought and memory gliding over the surface of things like a ghost without really touching in. This is a horrible fate when you think about it. What is the way out? Lately, I’ve been the journeys of great child characters, of Harry Potter and Jane Eyre.

Like Harry, Jane is an unwanted and unloved child, grudgingly taken in by an aunt who has no intention of helping her find her way in the world. When we meet her, she is tucked away behind curtains, imagining the world based on the pictures in a History of British Birds, and on scraps of fairy tales she hears from a maid, or later from the then-popular novel Pamela. In short, the world Jane lives in is very, very limited but she doesn’t feel limited. She feels intensely interested—and her awareness of herself having an interest that is a world beyond her grim immediate surroundings is part of the intensity and the interest. Don’t you remember that feeling? I remember being a little girl standing on the shore watching ships with international flags pass by on the St. Lawrence River. I remember learning the flags of different countries and feeling a thrill of connection I couldn’t describe. Even though I was small and stranded on the shore in Northern New York, there was something large in me—vast, even–something that could encompass a ship that came all the way from Sweden.

Bronte describes young Jane hiding behind velvet drapes, finding the pictures and stories profoundly interesting, even though her understanding and feelings are extremely undeveloped. There is something about that special way of being interested that is an important clue about what it takes to find a path–in a certain state there is no separation between the subject and the object of our attention. There is a state in which the objects of our attention are swinging door, inviting us into a deeper knowledge of our true nature, into a deeper way to be alive. Last Sunday in our local meditation group, we spoke of this in modern terms, as flow.

Most of us know those luscious moments when we move from the shore to the river, from surface of things to the depths, when we move merely looking and labeling to opening up and receiving—to becoming part of what we see. How do we get there? This was spoken of a great deal in the “Seeing” issue of Parabola. We’ve talked in this blog about those moments when you are so confounded that you give up–on a writing project or an artwork or on life. This moment of abandoning hope of thinking up a solution can feel like facing our true inner poverty—or even like going up into the attic and confronting crazy Mrs. Rochester. All our thoughts and images and memories are just mice running round and round in our brain, leading us nowhere.

I think of this as a koan moment, a moment of being stopped in our tracks. In “Seeing,” the artist Jane Rosen describes intentionally giving her students conflicting directions on drawing, so that “their minds are so busy trying to figure it out, that something more essential can come out and it goes I’ll try. “ Plain, honest, sincere, artistic, “tenacious of life,” Jane Eyre is a personification of that little impartial person Rosen describes who comes out to see and draw when the personality just won’t serve.

The journey of Jane Eyre (and Harry Potter, and all children—or the lucky ones) is a journey from isolation to being part of a much greater life.

What would it be like if we approached our lives with a spirit of investigation, if we were keenly interested in investigating the nature of our connection to life so that we could discover the role we are meant to play? Yes, I am proposing that the thought (or, better, attitude) experiment of living as if we are Harry Potter or Jane Eyre. I remember doing this sometimes when I was young, don’t you? Looking at life with an intense and happy interest, seeking the role I might be able to play.

Out walking one winter day, Jane Eyre (who has survived her horrible childhood to become an educated young woman) came upon the dark and brooding Mr. Rochester. His horse slips on the ice and he sprains his ankle, compelling him to ask her to help him back to his horse. Jane doesn’t yet know who Rochester is (the master of the estate where she works as a governess) much less the impact he will have on her life. Yet Jane feels that something has changed. “My help had been needed and claimed: I had given it: I was pleased to have done something; trivial, transitory though the deed was, it was yet an active thing, and I was weary of an existence all passive.”

In other words, having a greater life, a magical life doesn’t just depend on Mr. Rochester showing up. We have to being open—and being active inside. Growing up to live conventional worldly lives, we are used to living on the surface. We are oriented towards the outside, leaning forward to grasp what we need or to defend ourselves. Yet there are times when we are in a different relationship with life. Another way of life begins not when we decide we are strong enough and accomplished enough or rich enough to give but when we have nothing left to take. When all we want to do is receive life with empty hands. Then life can pour in.

At those moments, I begin to realize that what I may really be in my essence is not an isolated and inviolate little “I” at all, but part of something immense and essential. It may turn out that we really are connected to those British birds, those ships passing on the St. Lawrence, to all that we see. The secret is knowing that all those things that interest us are doors that swing inward, inviting our own deepest experience to be part of what we see.

Tracy Cochran stories on the way towards awakening

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