Archives

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.

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 — 12 Comments
28
Feb 10

Love as You Are Loved

I’ve been touched by the ardor and range of responses to my last post.  Somehow, a collective journey was made from a description of the joy that can come from sharing stories about our common humanity to an exchange about the reality of evil and God and the nature of love.   One person wrote that St. John taught that we love because we have first been loved by God.  The image of this–loving as a reminder of the ground of our existence–was particularly touching to me.  In the midst of my grief after my own mother’s death, I remember realizing that my own love for her was holding me, guiding me, even in her absence.   I have also recently discovered that the capacity to love and the desire to be loved in return may be a rich way to investigate and transform our experience–even about seemingly impossible propositions, like what happens to me when I die.

Although the Parabola editors didn’t plan it this way, it turns out the subject of “Love” leads naturally to  “Life After Death,” our next theme.  It turns out that love is not just an an emotion or feeling, or even a conviction.  It is also a special kind of action.   I’ve spent the last couple nights (during insomnia hours) reading The Life of the World to Come, an historical perspective on Christian hope about the life after death by religion professor and author Carol Zaleski (full disclosure: she is my sister-in-law).   She quotes many interesting people including Miguel de Unamuno, a great Spanish philosopher-poet who wrote that we must believe in this life in order to give this life meaning but also this:  “And we must needs believe in that other life, perhaps, in order that we may deserve it, in order that we may obtain it, for it may be that he neither deserves it nor will obtain it who does not passionately desire it above reason and, if need be, against reason.”

Love–and the desire to be loved–is a not just an emotion or a conviction or ideal.  It can be a transforming action.   Carol goes on to quote Cardinal Newman from one of his famous Oxford lectures.    He has just quoted a dying factory girl who has basically demanded that there be a benevolent God, that her life have  meaning beyond the noise and pain and misery she knew:  “A mutilated and defective evidence suffices for persuasion where the heart is alive.”

I know that Christian hope for life after death  flows from faith in the resurrection.  But it is interesting to pay attention to the action of the heart.  Love can reconcile us to what is beyond our knowledge and control.  Love can carry us,  hold us (and in the root sense of suffer as bearing) can suffer us.