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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.”

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.

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 14th 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.

 

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28
Dec 09

Holidays/ Holy Days

“Cooking has many functions, and only one of them is about feeding people,” writes British food writer Nigella Lawson.   Lawson’s wonderfully forgiving recipe for coq au vin was simmering on Christmas Eve.  I wanted to fill the house with a delicious and comforting smell for all kinds of reasons–including one Lawson herself provides in her cookbook Feast:  “When we go into a kitchen, indeed when we even just think about going into a kitchen, we are both creating and responding to an idea we hold about ourselves, about what kind of person we wish to be.”     The kind of person I wished to be on Christmas Eve was solid, enduring.   I wasn’t just wishing to create a Christmas-y atmosphere for my home-from-college daughter who passionately loves Christmas–I was trying to whip up a loving, cozy atmosphere that would protect me and everyone I cared about from the impermanence of life.  The serious nature of life–the way that people and times we have loved disappear and never return becomes terribly clear to me this time of year.

Julia Child once said that dining with family and friends is one of “life’s primal and most innocent delights, one that is both soul-satisfying and eternal.”   The older I get, the more I tackle the holidays like Scrooge on Christmas morning–as if cooking and candlelight and glasses raised in a toast can save me from the kind of vision that Gabriel Conroy had at the end of James Joyce’s story “The Dead:”  “His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead.   His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling. ”

On Christmas morning, I found my daughter in the kitchen making pancakes, dressed in a skirt and jewelry and looking she thought (and I did, too) “a little like the wife in MadMen”  (minus the cigarette, thankfully).   Her retro outfit reminded me a little of very early memories of my mother, whom I especially miss at Christmas since she loved it so much.  I wondered if she had done what I do–making merry for her children’s sake.  “One by one they were all becoming shades,” reflected Gabriel Conroy. “Better to pass boldly into that other world in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.”   Surely my mother who had lost her own mother my the time I was five must have known the truth of impermanence, yet she was always like a child herself at Christmas, overflowing with excitement and generosity, reminding us that life was full of  unforeseeable possibilities and magic.

In 2010, may we all open to life’s unexpected gifts and highest possbilities.