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Awakening / Awareness / Happiness — No Comments
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.

 

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10
May 11

Fronting the Essentials

There was a blackout in these parts yesterday afternoon.  It was the best possible kind of blackout, happening on a warm and golden spring afternoon.  Also, I was alone.  I didn’t hurry and call the power company and get as much information as possible as my husband would do, along with any number of other good citizens.  I sat by the window and deliberately experienced not knowing how wide ranging it was and how long it was expected to last.  I just let the light stream in and drank in the silence that descended like an unbidden grace.   Suddenly, no white noise of electricity in the house or in the distance.  Suddenly cut off from the outside world (since my cell phone was turned off).   I thought of Henry David Thoreau:  “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

In the quiet, I realized, again, that I live with a perpetual white noise inside as well out.  There is a constant hum of thought, a stream of images, a vaporous, changeable  dream that doesn’t have any real force or connection to the here and now.  Like Thoreau, I have often felt that I was missing something essential.  In the footage confiscated from Bin Laden’s compound, there are home movies showing him watching himself on tv–a frail-looking man with a white beard watching a perfected, macho image of himself with a dyed black beard, delivering a speech.   It made me shiver to recognize something so familiar.  At a benefit in New York right weeks after the attacks, the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Gelek Rinpoche encouraged us to be brave enough “find the Bin Laden hiding in the caves of our own heart.”  Or, as it turned out, the comfortable suburbia of our own hearts.  In the  golden silence that fell yesterday, I glimpsed how I usually am, all my awareness attached to thoughts, images, desires that are separate from the rest of me and split off from the nourishing reality of the here and now, all of it in the service of a phantom self that is projected at the rest of the world.

Most human beings are not as full of hate, delusion, and desire for destruction as Bin Laden–and not as self-conscious with the image they project– but the monsters among us can show us a thing or two because the fault lines in them are so pronounced (I think Freud may have said this).  Most of us live most of the time at a remove from life, hiding out in a narrow bunker of the thinking mind, which isn’t really capable of immediate knowing, direct perception and insight.  It meets life by coming up with speeches and judgements based on memory, stale rehearsal, incapable of revealing something new.

With her unique French-into-English precision, Madame de Salzmann describes this bunker mentality:  “Always preoccupied, it holds back my attention in this space, isolated from the rest of me, from my body and feeling. With my attention continually projected from one thought to another, from one image to another in a flowing current, I am hypnotized by my mind….”

Yesterday, I felt for a little while how extraordinary it is to be  aware in the moment, to experience an attention that isn’t separating from life in the service of  a projected “someone”– even if it isn’t a grand and villaneous someone spouting hate on the tv.  How wonderful it felt to pad around the house with the light streaming in, feeling the difference between that narrow fixation on the computer screen or the tasks in mind and this free attention that was in my body and feelings as well as the mind.  And then, well, it became familiar and I went back to sleep.

“I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one,” he wrote in the conclusion of Walden, which he published in 1854. Thoreau found that he wasn’t there a week before he wore a track between the cabin and the pond.  In short anything can become habitual, and we find our way back into the deep grooves of our own habitual way of thinking and being.  What can we do?   It doesn’t work to be in the woods or on retreat forever.  And let’s face, I was happy the power came back on in time for me to make dinner.

What works is being willing to see ourselves–and with the kind of nonjudging awareness and compassion we usually reserve for children, dogs, loved ones.   There is a quiet, a collectedness, that comes just by seeing how lost in thought we usually are, how far away we live from our hearts and bodies and from the wild and precious life of the present moment.   Strange as it might seem, getting down to the essentials of life doesn’t come from the thought resolving to get collected or get out of town and back to basics.  It turns out that it come from an act of seeing, and the impressions that flow in and touch us in such a moment are fleeting.  This kind of seeing often comes in a moment of shock, a moment of not knowing and urgently needing to know.  When Thoreau moved to Walden, he was grieving the loss of his brother.  He was seeking something thought could not satisfy.

The impressions we receive in a moment of seeing are fleeting but they can fill us with a conviction that there is something really valuable to find–and that we really make something of our lives.  In the light this conviction, it turns out that thoughts and dreams and images have their place.  They help point the way.  Assessing the value of what he had accomplished, Thoreau added: “I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with success in uncommon hours.”