Buddha | Tracy Cochran

Uncategorized — 4 Comments
13
May 12

Let it Be

When I find myself in times of trouble, Mother Mary comes to me
Speaking words of wisdom, let it be
And in my hour of darkness she is standing right in front of me
Speaking words of wisdom, let it be
–Paul McCartney

McCartney was singing of his own mother, who died when he was young. That a sense of her presence comes to him in his hour of darkness is very poignant. And yet what she tells him to do is profound and universal. For thousands of years, people have sought the same wisdom from Mother Mary. There is a deeper awareness in us that Knows what we need in times of trouble. In our hour of darkness, we know what to seek. It isn’t stern and fatherly counsel. It is a mother’s caring and nonjudgmental awareness. And I agree with McCartney that this is the kind of intelligence that everyone in the world, however far apart in culture, beliefs, economic status, most needs right now.

After meditation one evening, a friend (who happens to be English and sounds a little like McCartney) once said that he prefers the phrase “let it be” to “let it go” because letting go can feel like too much doing–inviting the ego to take over, ending the sense of being with life that can appear in the quiet of meditation. Let it be conveys what I’ve heard described as a “movement of availability.” Letting be is that very quiet movement of allowing life to be what it is. If we are to awaken, we must welcome in all the orphans of our being and consciousness. If there is to be an answer to the mystery of our lives, if there is to be healing to the heartbreak, it is in this movement of quiet, attentive letting be.

The Buddha urged his followers to adopt the attitude of a mother caring for her only child. Jesus urged people to be like children, to make themselves available to the embrace of his love. I once heard the Zen master Thich Nhat Hahn say that understanding is acceptance, and acceptance is love. Acceptance is not passivity or weakness, not giving up—it is just the opposite. It is the courageous movement of allowing what is to be what it is—understanding that what will be will be, that children and all manner of things inside and outside will unfold in a lawful way. It is embracing that unfolding with love. It is mercy.

And when the broken hearted people living in the world agree
There will be an answer, let it be…..

The greatest wisdom is letting be. Letting be is a movement of availability, of acceptance—and ultimately of love. How can we achieve such an extraordinary capacity—to love consciously? I suspect it is not what we think. It is not straining beyond ourselves—it is just the opposite. It is going down, practicing love and acceptance on animals—including the animal of the body. The wise Buddhist teacher Ajahn Chah urged people to be humble—to be like earth worms, digging down into the earth of themselves. When I sit sometimes, I reflect that this body I have been given links me to the distant past. I marvel that this body came to me from a great chain of humanity—reaching back to our common mothers. In meditation, this body is revealed to be a vast cave of wonders, like Lascaux. Who knows what wonders might be discovered if I can shine the light of attention? I have heard and read that we contain worlds, universes. I might glimpse this and hear this. If I can let it be.

May all beings know the love of a mother. Happy Mother’s Day.

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 / 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.

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

Christmas in October

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

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

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

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

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

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

Taking Halloween Seriously

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

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

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

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

His Holiness the 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.

Awareness / Presence / Radical Acceptance — 8 Comments
16
Oct 11

Jane Eyre Sutta #2

What does it take to fully awaken, to open up and receive life– to really see and hear and life beyond the usual limitations imposed by our fearful little “I”? What if all we want is to be able to concentrate a bit better on the task in front of us, to be able to listen more deeply and be a little bit less numb?

Strange as it might seem, there is a clue given in the famous Victorian novel Jayne Eyre. I’m thinking of the scene where young Jayne talks with saintly Helen Burns, her only friend in Lowood, the low and miserable institution for orphans where she has been abandoned by her family to be abused and starved. Helen has been unfairly punished and humiliated by a horrible teacher, yet she rises above the insult: “Life appears to me to be too short to be spent nursing animosity, or registering wrongs. We are, and must be one and all, burdened with faults in this world: but the time will soon come when, I trust, we shall put them off in putting off our corruptible bodies; when debasement and sin will fall from us with this cumbrous frame of flesh, and only the spark of the spirit will remain—the impalpable principle of life and thought, pure as when it left the Creator to inspire the creature; whence it came it will return….”

No doctrine of sin or karma for Helen Burns. She admits that she “holds another creed, which no one ever taught me….” Close to death from consumption, the girl understandably wants to make eternity “a mighty home—not a terror and an abyss.” She can clearly distinguish between the criminal and the crime and “revenge never worries my heart…injustice never crushes me too low; I live in calm, looking to the end.”

This is nothing at all like Jane, who will go on to live a long and eventful life. Jane tells Helen that she has no problem accepting her own natural inclination to strike back or at least resent those who hurt her. Helen assures her that this will change, “as yet you are a little untaught girl.” But Jane begs to differ: “But I feel this, Helen: I must dislike those who, whatever I do to please them, persist in disliking me; I must resist those who punish me unjustly. It is as natural as that I should love those who show me affection, or submit to punishment when I feel it deserved.”

Helen reminds Jane that Christians and civilizations do not hold this view (although she herself is a heretic). She sounds like Buddha (and MLK for that matter) when she cautions Jane: “It is not violence that best overcomes hate—nor vengeance that most certainly heals injury. She tells Jane to read the New Testament and learn how Jesus spoke and acted, loving his enemies, blessing and doing good to those who hated and cursed him. This is the ultimate example of how to live a nonviolent, transformative, selfless way of life.

Yet we ordinary humans must be someone before we can be no one. We must make constant efforts to know and accept ourselves in all our parts, not just our best thoughts. An attitude that is allowable for an angelic and rather one-dimensional character on the brink of very early death, is for the rest of us “spiritual bypass.” To open to life, we must open to our inner untaught little child. We must sense and feel what we are in our body and feelings, not just our thoughts–not acting on every angry impulse but seeing what we are without judgment.

“There is an essential energy that is the basis of all that exists,” writes Madame de Salzmann, Gurdjieff’s closest pupil. “I do not feel it because my attention is occupied by everything contained in my memory—thoughts, images, desires, disappointments, physical impressions. I do not know what I really am. It seems that I am nothing. Yet sometimes something tells me to look, to listen, to seek seriously and truly.” Usually when we try (at least when I do) we see that we listen poorly. We seem to have the attention of a fly, and we are constantly judging what we see. Madame de Salzmann stresses how pervasive judgment, and how it separates us from what we see. How can we escape? The proximity of death is one way.

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life,” said Steve Jobs at a commencement address delivered at Stanford University in 2005. “Because almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason to follow your heart.”

Living with nothing to lose, going for broke, gambling, taking that one leap over the chasm to freedom or out the prison window—all these things point toward a state of intense concentration. The key is not thinking—or not thinking from our usual ordinary egocentric place.

As we usually are, we are thinking all the time, constantly creating images and applying them to what we see. But this is not deep seeing. It is merely looking (as the artist Jane Rosen describes it in the “Seeing” issue). Looking is labeling. It comes from a place of separation from what we see. It comes from the surface of our mind. There is judgment involved.

And yet there are special conditions and times when the attention is not dominated by the thinking, not not cut off from the sensations of the body, from the feelings. There are times when we are not hypnotized by thoughts about my desires, attachments, times when we realize that the attention—and that we ourselves–are capable of more and meant for more.

This realization usually brings a great stillness. Suddenly we see without naming, without separating. Yet in order to maintain this open, undistracted attention we must accept our true nature, excluding nothing, rejecting nothing, judging nothing, observing ourselves and life without comment.

Sometimes, we don’t make the usual distinctions. Sometimes the separation between the life inside and the life outside falls away. We see the way artists do. We see that seeing itself is a creative act. Our deepest wish is to go on seeing, receiving life, being part of it. Years ago, a friend of mine had reason to believe she was dying. The funny thing about it, she told, was that she lost all interest in herself. She grew interested in life. Suddenly, everything seemed miraculous, the way the sun hit the wall, the doctors’ white coats, the doctors, everything.

It turns out there are more terrifying things than dying—and worse things than being a spirited, untaught little bad girl like Jane Eyre. There is the possibility of passing your life hypnotized by thought, never touching your true passions and feelings—and consequently never opening the whole package you have been given. You are gifted with multiple ways to be attentive, to connect with life. Discover and explore them all. Pull yourself together. To concentrate comes from a word that means to come from the center. “Sati” or mindfulness means to re-member, to become a whole. Live a whole life.

“Your time is limited. Don’t waste it living someone else’s life,” said Steve Jobs. Come down out of the attic of your mind and inhabit this life.

Uncategorized — 2 Comments
06
Oct 11

A New Old Flame

Welcome to my new blog address! I’ve heard Buddhist teachers explain rebirth by asking them to picture a candle being lit from a dying flame. Something carries on, but what? It isn’t one small flame hopping from one wick to the next. Trungpa told people it was their neurosis, their unwholesome tendencies that carried on. Doesn’t that send a shiver? Back at my old address, we were talking about negative conceit, about the tendency to hang back and judge self and others harshly, the tendency to meet life with a negative expectation–imagine that charming set of attitudes, automatic behaviors, unexamined beliefs carrying forward, leading the way into the unknown?

And yet there is always hope. In any given moment there is the possibility of stopping and seeing ourselves and really accepting the truth of the way we are. Rather than tightly identifying with the behavior or attitude and therfore preemptively judging it or covering it up, we might try non-identifying, approaching it as if it was the behavior of a friend, investigating it with an attitude of friendly but impersonal interest: “I wonder why he or she lunges out of their seat and heads to the fridge when the subject of money comes up?” At any given moment, another life can spring up in the guttering hopes of the old.

In those openings when there is a bit of free attention and we are interested in our lives in a new way, help appears, and from surprising sources. One of the things I love most about working as an editor at Parabola and seeking to help it become a true community, is that it is beginning to offer material in the spirit of bringing evidence, not just offering guidance from above. Hopefully, there is and will be something in each issue that reminds a reader that there can be these free moments, this other order of insights, this other life, no matter what is going on around us.

Back at my old address, I touched on the meaning of Harry Potter and spirited young Jane Eyre . Consider this rich evidence of the open or selfless nature of self: Joyce Carol Oates observes that much of the power of Jane Eyre comes from the fluid, flame-like nature of her character. The novel “is about a character stimulated into growth–truly remarkable growth–by place….Just as these carefully rendered places differ greatly from one another, so Jane differs greatly in them; one has the sense of a soul in ceaseless evolution….Bronte’s sense of human personality is that it is pliant, fluid, and living, in immediate (and often defiant) response to its surroundings; not that it is stable and determined. Jane Eyre is no portrait of a lady but the story of a young woman in ‘heroic’ mode….” And what she seeks, according to Oates, is not any stereotypic male prize (since some commentors have objected to “hero” in the past) but “a power of vision that might overpass the limits of her sequestered life, pastoral as it is.”

Call it synchronicity. When you are thinkig of bicycles, you see bicycles. But I think there may be more to it. When you are searching for a way of to be free–to be more alive while we are alive- reality can take on a magical quality. Help comes. As the Buddha himself discovered, the path rises up to meet us. The trick is finding our way following one little flame at a time.

Uncategorized — 8 Comments
03
Oct 11

Harry and Jane

We are hard at work, pulling together a new issue on the many paths people take to find truth, and the articles in this particularly lively issue range from sacred music to the spiritual home that is Harry Potter.

Lately, I find myself pondering the similarity between Harry Potter and Jane Eyre. Jane, as some of us may remember (and as I am rediscovering) was an orphan who is grudgingly taken in by a resentful and nasty aunt. Little Jane is as viciously bullied by a fat spoiled cousin John as Harry was by Dudley, and is as wretchedly excluded and unloved by the whole family—she listens to Christmas parties while shut up in a little cupboard with only a doll to love. By her own admission (told many years past childhood), Jane isn’t as sweet or as loveable a child as little Harry. She is completely opposed to her adoptive family, “incapable of serving their interest, or adding to their pleasure; a noxious thing, cherishing the germs of indignation at their treatment….”

She doesn’t receive an invitation by owl that affirms what she knows in her heart to be true, that she is indeed very different than those around her. She is not whisked away to Hogwarts but to a wretched school called Lowood. And yet she finds in the depth of her misery, a spirit and a self awareness and self-acceptance that work a kind of magic. Banished to boarding school, abused beyond all endurance, she at last confronts her aunt as children never did in the Victorian age, calling her bad and hard-hearted.

“Ere I had finished this reply, my soul began to expand, to exult with the strangest sense of freedom, of triumph, I ever felt. It seemed as if an invisible bond had burst, and that I had struggled out into unhoped-for liberty.” Even though Jane later feels that this act of vengeance was like a sweet but poisonous wine, it is as necessary to her future development as Harry’s rollicking escape from his tormentors with its dash of sweet revenge.
As Jane’s nurse Bessie tells her, at least some of the scolding that comes to her is “because you’re such a queer, frightened, shy little thing. You should be bolder.” If you cringe and dread people, if you hide yourself “they’ll dislike you.” Jane and Harry both have to learn to affirm and express themselves.

“You have to be someone before you can be no one,” this statement is repeated in Buddhist circles, and it is equally applicable in Christian, yoga, Gurdjieffian or any other kind of circle dedicated to inner development. It seems like the biggest paradox. If the goal of spiritual life is to be liberated from a sense of separation from life, why value separating, becoming individuals? Why not stay in the cupboard and skip straight to transcendence?
What is the value of affirming a self, identifying the life force as our own—of getting out there in the world and proclaiming ourselves and struggling and trying? We need to really be ourselves, to really live without holding back, or nothing can really be known. Transformation is not a thought. It is a drama that must be lived. Also–and I’m really interested in what you think of this–I’ve heard it said that holding back, being timid, not daring to step up and show ourselves and be responsible, is really a kind of negative conceit. What do you think?

Awakening / Awareness / Uncategorized — 13 Comments
23
Aug 11

Feeling the Earth Move

As I was writing this blog on my laptop—which happens to be about how oblivious we usually are to our interconnection—the sofa started to shake. “Earthquake,” I thought, suddenly really aware that I was in was on the earth and that it was trembling beneath me. I thought of the earth shaking in recognition of the Buddha’s awakening. It was as if the earth knew that Buddha was awake and fully perceiving its life.

“It is fairly obvious by now that life on earth forms a vast interconnected and interdependent network,” writes Christian Wertenbaker in the “Seeing” issue of Parabola. This really has become general knowledge. Most of us accept (however grudgingly) that we live inside an ecosystem—and that we ourselves are ecosystems: just as birds keep a hippopotamus clean, intestinal bacteria help us digest. We are used to hearing by now that the building blocks of life—carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and the rest—“were formed in the nuclear furnaces of stars and distributed by the explosions of supernovae, as part of vast cosmic cycles of stellar formation, growth, and death.”

We are deeply embedded in life and we are made to participate in life. Most of us get this, yet Wertenbaker reminds us that something more is possible. We are also capable of resonating with (and therefore discovering) the underlying mathematical forms or laws of reality. Wertenbaker draws on Gurdjieff who draws on a very ancient idea: By perceiving consciously instead of in our usual state of unawareness “we are, or can be, part of a great cosmic ecology of consciousness….” Just as our bodies are made of atoms, our inner life in the form of our conscious perceptions and reflection connects us to the Whole.

Many of us resonate with this. Yet many of us treat having an inner life as a solitary pursuit, something we keep to ourselves. Is that not strange? I wrote last time about being young and learning that it was best to be a kind of secret agent, to keep my innermost thoughts and perceptions to myself, to keep my vulnerability hidden under a cloak of cool (or at least an attempt at cool). None of this is unusual in this culture. Nor is the love I had of outlaws who were secretly pure and innocent—from the Kerouac to Count of Monte Cristo (who was intent on revenge for his wrongful imprisonment, but that’s another story). This is a pretty standard part of growing up. But it is also intensely ironic, because even these romantic figures (certainly Kerouac) were seeking a sense of interconnection and resonance with higher laws.

Solitary as the spiritual search might seem, there inevitably comes a moment when I find myself sitting with in a shadowy hall somewhere. Wrapped in shawls or yoga blankets, sitting still with backs straight on cushions, we look like the earliest humans, at least as I imagine them. Or maybe we just look like earliest humans in the sense of being like children again, facing life with our whole beings. At those times, I know that for all my shyness, all the defenses I have picked up over the years, I am still capable of real connection with the others, all of us coming so far to be together—and not just New York and California but through all kinds of difficulties. And all of that common effort made just to risk trying for greater awareness–for a consciousness that isn’t attached to memories and feelings and views, that isn’t separate from life by being attached to being a particular “someone” who needs to be defended.

“There is no way out; there is only healing,” a teacherwho really knows what she is talking about said to me. There is no escape from our situation. Everyone has their reasons, their wounds. There is nowhere to go but down into our common humanity. There usually comes a moment when I am sitting in a room full of fellow humans, all of us drawing our attention to the breathing (among the most basic and easy to track exchange with the outside world), when we can feel like we are descending into a vast subterranean cave full of forces and energies unknown to the ordinary thinking mind with its obsession on protecting and defending.

When I go on retreat (even if it is just a moment of turning inward during the day) I see that my own attention was weak, just a kind of dim, flickering light, but I am always certain that if I just keep following it, leaving the known world of my thinking for the unknown, I may come upon wonders. In such a moment, I begin to grasp something that the great spiritual traditions teach, that we and our ancestors all the way back to the beginning of humanity are one. They exist in us. We resonate with the same rhythms: the day and night, the heartbeat, the breathing. And some of us we have another possibility also, to resonate with the laws under reality, to be the eye that reflects the Whole.

Tracy Cochran stories on the way towards awakening

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