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

A Life With Heart

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

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

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

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

“If you dread, they’ll dislike you.”

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

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

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

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20
Oct 11

The Swinging Door

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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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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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?