“I have come as light into the world.” – Jesus in John 12:46

I am not a Christian. I was born and raised as a Christian, but became alienated from the church as a youth. This church, established in worship of Jesus, seemed hypocritical to me. I liked what I knew of Jesus. I liked his talk about forgiveness, peace, non-judgment, non-materialism, caring for the poor and the unfortunate. I just didn’t see much of this reflected in the church that carried his name, particularly those sects that emphasized sin, the crucifixion and resurrection; that believers were “washed in the blood of the Lamb”. I had difficulty with the idea that those with the “right” beliefs were destined for Heaven, while all non-believers were damned to Hell. I couldn’t even feel comfortable with the concept of Heaven and Hell as presented. None of this resonated with my instinct, my intuition, concerning God and the spiritual life. What I could identify with was the one instance of Jesus losing his temper, even getting violent, happening in a church against the “hypocrites” he found there.

In my lifetime, I have sadly watched a dramatic increase in dogmatic sin-based Christian theology. On the other hand, I have also seen a growing Christian theology of openness and acceptance, a searching for spiritual harmony and realization through a reexamination of original Christian teachings, sometimes in a reexamination of the Gospels in the original Aramaic language. I have seen a searching for a theology and practice much closer to the spirit of the teachings of Jesus, teachings not in conflict with other world religions, but actually harmonious. I am appreciative and hopeful for this development. Still, my own journey has taken me away from belonging to any church or religion since my personal breakaway many years ago.

I have, however, found a deep and abiding spirituality, first activated through exposure to the mystical teachings of Jewish theologian, Abraham Heschel, that belongs to no single religion, but which resonates with spiritual and mystical teachings from cultures around the world. Trained as a psychologist, I have gravitated to the most specifically psychological of religious traditions, Buddhism, as a particularly valuable source of guidance in understanding the human mind and the human instinct towards spirituality. I have found that the ancient Asian traditions of Hinduism, Taoism and Buddhism bring forward with the most clarity a path for human salvation from the disaster of human conduct directed by the ego, the belief in separateness and form as the limit of our mortal experience. Still, I am not a Hindu, Taoist or Buddhist. I am a spiritual human being. All religions are creations and extensions of the human ego, expressed at a social/cultural level, and spirituality is specifically, that which is not the human ego.

The mystic/psychologist, Carl Jung, once gave as his definition of God, “simply a word for the non-ego.” I like that. He was saying that God is all that is, but human ego extracts itself from all that is. Of course human ego is, so then, even human ego is of God. But human ego is an abstract representation of self that does not know it is God. So it is separate in its own experience from God and must create religions to bridge the gap. Unfortunately, religions, being creations of the human ego, macro-egos, if you will, just like nations, tend to widen the gap.

Spirituality is the knowing that there is no gap. Spirituality is the knowing that this individual being experienced as self is an individuated aspect of the universal Being. This knowledge is the heart of Asian religion. I believe it is the heart of all religions, even those of the West, but the politics of Western religion banished this knowledge, losing it to all but the rare mystics always to be found on the fringes of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Only in the stillness of meditation, the deep looking within to the quiet recesses of consciousness, where the Soul whispers its truths, can this knowledge be found. This is why the institutional Western churches teach only prayer, which is the talking to God. Mystics know that meditation is the listening for God within the quiet stillness of consciousness and in finding God in direct contact with Nature. No separation.

Jesus was a mystic who knew no separation from God. This is what Jesus was teaching. The “Son of God” was a child of God that knew the illusion of form and separateness. He was God individuated into human form, just like everyone, except he knew it, and the civilized (that is ego-dominant) human condition is to not retain this knowing. He was an avatar, an awakened human, a Buddha. He knew that who we are at the depth of our being, is that which is before form, the consciousness of all that is, individuated into human form. He was “a light into this world,” bringing light into the darkness of a human world that has forgotten the truth of who we are. His name in Aramaic is Yeshua, which translates as “one who reveals or restores the original state”. This is identical to the “original mind” of Buddhism, the consciousness that reveals the truth of who we are.

“Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow.” “Judge not that you may not be judged. For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged.” “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” “Do not lay up for yourself treasures on earth… for where your treasure is, there will be your heart also.” “Therefore, I tell you, do not be anxious about your life.” “Enter by the narrow gate.” “Whoever exalts himself will be humbled and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.” “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! Because you shut the kingdom of heaven against men; for you neither enter yourselves, nor allow those who would enter to go.” “Forgive them for they know not what they are doing.”

Quite similar words were passed down in the context of their own cultural traditions by Buddha, Lao Tzu, Krishna, Moses, Muhammad, Zoroaster and Bahá u’lláh. All these avatars were lights coming into the world, those who walked the earth in form, but knew the truth of who they and we are, from that which is beyond form. A new understanding of Jesus and the spirituality of all avatars is greatly needed. The Earth will be healed for humanity and all God’s creatures when we learn to walk in light, to carry the light, the wisdom that these great teachers discovered within the deepest level of their being and so, likewise resides in every human. This dark world needs it. A meaningful Christmas, Hanukkah and Winter Solstice to all.

“The Ecozoic (era) is the period when human conduct will be guided by the ideal of an integral earth community, a period when humans will be present upon the Earth in a mutually enhancing manner.” – Thomas Berry

American society, and human society generally, faces a critical time. We have lived and created our cultures and societies since the dawn of civilizations from an egocentric perspective, that is, human consciousness has constellated, like planets circling a sun, around the perspective that me, my family, my group, my country, my species is important over all that is “other.” All of our social, cultural and economic systems have developed from this perspective. This abstracted “me” as an entity separate and struggling for significance and preeminence in the universe is what is psychologically known as ego.

From a psychological perspective, this post-hunter-gatherer period could be called the beginnings of the Egocentric era of human evolution. It has lasted ten thousand years. Ever since small bands of humans stepped out of the forests and a wholly symbiotic relationship with nature, and began to cultivate crops and to develop increasingly refined tools for manipulating nature, humanity’s unique evolutionary trait for abstracted consciousness has also ever-increasingly separated human identity from nature. What follows, are eras noted by humanity abstracting individual and social/cultural experience further out of nature, increasingly identifying with technology that manipulates nature to enhance human power.

We have, heretofore, mostly believed this to be a good thing. It is more and more, however, being noted as a disaster, first for the planet and its non-human occupants, and finally, as the sword of Damocles that hangs over humanity’s head, it’s supporting thread about to break. And so it is. An evolutionary crisis is at hand. The species, Homo Sapiens, the term itself, in the Latin meaning “wise or intelligent man,” has unwisely, unintelligently come into existential disharmony with the planet that is its home. We cannot project our species into the future following this course another one hundred years, let alone ten thousand, without seeing a severe diminishment of the quality of life on this planet. As in every evolutionary crisis for a species, either an evolutionary leap is made, or devolution, possibly extinction results.

There is, however, hope for humankind. The evolutionary trait of humanity is consciousness, and as the great paleontologist/theologian, Teilhard de Chardin noted, the evolution of consciousness is an ever-expanding convergent process. This means that the sense of “I” incorporates that which had been previously exiled to “other.” In the track of human history, we have greatly overcome tribalism, hereditary aristocracy, ethnicism, religious intolerance, sexism and other forms of division to have an ever-expanding and increasingly stable sense of inclusion within the human family. Glaring remaining exceptions give validity to the rule. de Chardin noted that the ultimate evolutionary perspective will arrive when the experience of “I” as entirely separate from “other,” not only between human groups, but humanity and all that exists, is overcome completely.

For this to occur, one “ism,” for which there is barely a glimmer of realization, must be acknowledged. It is species-ism, humanity’s failure to recognize the rights and needs of all on this planet, including the planet, which is not human. It is a form of collective egocentricism. For humanity to have a humane long future, a leap of consciousness is required that will first, enfold all humanity, and then, the ecosystem of humanity, within one reverential system. There is required a new consciousness that synthesizes the Nature reverence of primitive humans with the technological and democratic advancement of modern human civilization, creating a highly sophisticated world culture that applies its inventiveness not to the domination of Nature, and of other human, non-human groups and the planet, but to the harmonious support of all: “when humans will be present upon the Earth in a mutually enhancing manner.”

Ironically, there is an existing and ancient vein of human philosophy that is capable of exactly this vision. It is the Hindu/Buddhist/ Taoist traditions of Asia that emerged just as complex civilizations were being born. They are a bridge to a time when humanity still identified with Nature as its source and context. The “awakening” that is the meaning of the Sanskrit root of the words, Buddhism and Buddha, is exactly the awakening into the trans-egoic consciousness, the rediscovery of “original nature” within every person, that is required to take humanity and its home planet with all its occupants forward into the future. It is the core of these philosophies to grasp the interconnectedness and inter-Beingness of all who share this ecosystem. As Eckhart Tolle writes in A New Earth, “Awakened doing is the outer aspect of the next stage in the evolution of consciousness on our planet.”

Meditation and mindfulness are the irreplaceable practices that lead to this consciousness of “awakened doing.” To meditate on our present economic, political, social and psychological crises leads to the inescapable recognition of this truth. To meditate on our individual consciousness is to inescapably realize that we must “awaken” into an expanded, evolved awareness-and-doing to transcend our individual anxious, competitive egocentric tendencies. And to meditate is to discover the irrefutable path that leads to this awakening. These insights are what Buddha described as the result of his meditation in the famous “Four Noble Truths,” the doctrine core of Buddhism.

There is hope for humankind, and it has been ensconced in the background of human history for thousands of years locked away within the protective shell of these ancient religions waiting until it was needed. It is now needed. It is time to crack the anachronistic religious husks and claim the inner fruit. Humanity is of Nature. Nature is the home and source of humanity. Humanity’s “original nature,” as Buddhism refers to it, must awaken. The rebirth and contemporization of this philosophy and its meditative practices will result in what Thomas Berry refers to in The Great Work, as the next phase of human evolution, the Ecozoic era, as the ancient and modern reconcile and synthesize into a new flowering.

I often speak about the crisis for individuals brought about by the egocentric psychological paradigm of modern times, but the psychology of individuals is really only an extension of the psychology of the society.

We are looking at the micro-dimensional and the macro-dimensional constellations of consciousness. Individual consciousness is conditioned by societal consciousness, and societal consciousness is then the aggregate of individual consciousnesses. Politics is analogous to the problem-solving psychological processes of an individual brought to the collective dimension.

Humanity is approaching an evolutionary crisis. An evolutionary crisis occurs for a species when its environment can no longer sustain the species in its existing form. Then, the form of the species either undergoes some radical evolution or it ceases to flourish, possibly becoming extinct. Humanity now faces such a crisis. The dominant evolutionary trait of humanity is consciousness, not, as in other species, some physical characteristic. It is the psychology of humanity that shapes its form, and its relationship to all other form. The presently dominant psychology, the egocentric consciousness of individuals and societies seeking to accumulate as much significance, wealth and power for themselves as they can, has run out of room.

The planet is no longer able to sustain the insatiable, voracious appetite of human beings and their institutions. We teeter on the brink of devastating consequences. The collective, that is, the political, consciousness we bring to recognizing and addressing this crisis will determine the quality, possibly even the fact, of future existence for humanity. Our profit-based economic system and its accompanying belligerently competitive social attitudes are unsuited to addressing the issues we face moving into the 21st Century.

We Americans must reassess our values. We must expand beyond our historic motivating vision of unbounded individual financial opportunity and personal dominance to one that enfolds every person in the basic dignities of peace, personal security, civil liberties and a sustainable economy. We are too many on too small a planet. Competition with its accompanying conflicts and inequities can no longer be the dominant social paradigm.

Meaningful work, secure homes, health-care, education, respect and caring within the bosom of a healthy, beautiful and sustaining environment for every person must become our template. This is necessary if we are to have a future that not only sustains, but also begins restoring dignity and sanity to the human experience, now sacrificed to the psychological insecurity inherent in our mass consumer economy and trash media.

Our economy must refocus into meaningful jobs that support this vision. Wealth must be shared in compassionate generosity, not concentrated in the hands of the most ambitious. The corporate/bureaucratic stranglehold on American life must be broken. It is totalitarian and predatory in nature. Small shop businesses where people have more individual choice, creativity and control must replace the dehumanizing cubicle hell of modern commerce. The law profession must be reclaimed from being a criminal-punishing craps-shoot and high-stakes-money-grabbing game to the search for real redemption and justice. Medical care must be recognized as a right, not a blackmail scheme provided to those able and willing to pay the high dollar ransom held against their health and fear of death.

Careers in the arts, education, culture, small farming and human services must be valued and supported. Universal life-long education that focuses not only on technology and work, but also on the arts, culture and mindful living is necessary to advance not only human technology, but also the human soul. Decentralization into villages and towns within the vast city/state structures of modern life is necessary to revitalize social continuity and human scale community.

Politics is consciousness. It always has been. The end of hereditary aristocracy, the struggles against slavery, racism, sexism, and worker exploitation are all examples of a new, more expansive consciousness transforming the political landscape. We must expand our consciousness to enfold the entire planet in a vision of kinship and compassion, of peace, sustainability, aesthetics and universal responsibility for even “the least among us”. This includes, not only the human poor, but also the animals, the plants and the Earth itself.

Politics is the problem-solving process of a society, not a bad TV show as the corporate media has largely succeeded in making it. We need leaders who call us to a higher consciousness, not who manipulate our vanity and basest emotions. Slanderous accusations and distortions, dogmatic moral and nationalistic positions, straw-dog enemies, and calls to “Fight!” and “Keep your money!” rev the emotions, but they also divide and diminish us. What we need, if we are to evolve into a better future, is a coming together to a nobler consciousness that calls us to care for and share life’s blessings, not only within the nation, but also with the world.

A politics that appeals to our lowest consciousness will bring the lowest results. There has been too much of this in recent years. War, a stumbling economy, domestic divisiveness and low world standing are the proof. We have become a population that functions more as a greedy rabble than a society. Any semblance of high culture, ethics and true spirituality is but a fading memory. Psychopathology and crime are rampant.

A higher consciousness is humanity’s and this nation’s only hope. Much is at stake. The regressive side of history, or even the sidelines, is no place to be in this moment of humanity’s growing evolutionary crisis. Demand more from the politicians, the business-world, the educators and the media. Demand more of yourself. Push through the trash politics and become conscious of what is really at stake. Humanity is devolving at present. A better future that contains the fulfillment of human potential is possible, but only if we reengage our basic evolutionary trait and become conscious. Only if we reclaim our society and our individual lives in the vision of that potential.

Political choices are at hand. I hope America can evolve beyond the politics of small self-interest, division, fear, lies and slander that have controlled recent elections to select candidates who offer the possibility of not only a change in policies, but an expanded consciousness of America’s place in a shrinking world.

Have you ever heard it said to a very distraught person, “you need to come to your senses”? Taken literally, this may seem a strange bit of advice, but like many common phrases, there is deep wisdom hidden in this riddle-like expression.

Indeed, this particular suggestion is just about the best advice any person can give to another under any circumstance, but especially in times of distress.

The creator of Gestalt Therapy, Fritz Perls, used to incorporate this exhortation as a centerpiece of his psychotherapeutic technique. He would instruct his patients to, “Get out of your head and come to your senses!” and he meant this literally.

To say it another way, to be free of the endless commenting, reviewing, anticipating, and sometimes chaos in the mind, try shifting the focus of awareness from thoughts and emotions into immediate sensory experience. Pay attention to what you hear and see and sense in your body. Pay special attention to the sensations of breathing. Do this for fifteen to thirty seconds. If you succeed in focusing completely into your senses, you will experience a calm and a clarity that can only be described as total sanity. This is also the beginning place for meditation.

Meditation means concentration, or attending to. Our problem typically is that what we are attending to is the thought and emotion dimension of mind, nearly unaware of a vast field of consciousness that is not thought and emotion. Formal meditation is learning to quiet the mind through shifting concentrated awareness from the mind’s chattering activity onto the non-discursive/non-reactive experience of mind.

In the form of meditation that I practice and teach, called Vipassana (Insight) meditation, the focus of concentration is awareness itself looking into the phenomenon of mind, including awareness of the senses. Particular attention is paid to the sensory experience of breathing as a path to a peaceful field of non-discursive mind that brings a profound presence, clarity and subtlety of awareness to our internal and environmental experience.

What is the source of our anxiety, anger, despair and obsessions? What is the source of our unhappiness? We tend to blame it on the events and people around us that are upsetting to us. But, in fact, it is what the mind says to us about the events and people around us that is the real source of our mental pain. For some, their minds absolutely torture them, talking non-stop about very distressing content.

For most of us, we don’t necessarily feel like we are going crazy, but we are vulnerable to stress from the unceasing activity of the mind, and distress from our minds talking about unpleasant events and possibilities that then sets off ensuing emotional reactivity. We have little insight that the events in the world are just the stimuli that trigger our minds interpreting and commenting in reactive patterns that are deeply conditioned into us.

The contemporary prophet of human evolution, and author of the books The Power of Now and A New Earth, Eckhart Tolle, has identified the culprit for humanity’s individual and collective distress, the same as has Eastern philosophy, with the human ego and it’s thinking and resonant emotions. It nags and nags, trying to find ways to make sense of our experience in a way that gives us some illusion of control. It tells us that we must be right and that we must be significant (even if it is as significantly afflicted). It plots to get what it wants and to avoid what it doesn’t want.

The ego talks to us constantly trying to interpret our experience consistent with our conditioned interpretation of the world and our place in it. All the misunderstanding we have about the world, others and ourselves is brought about by what our insecure egoic mind is saying to us.

Tolle points out what Perls noticed and what Buddhism has taught for several thousand years. They all teach that we are only truly sane when we are grounded in the reality of the present moment and not lost in the chaotic time traveling and projected judgments of the egoic mind. They also teach that our senses provide a portal to a wise, intuitive dimension of mind that exists in every person, while the ego and its distorted perceptions exist in a fictional timeline story of “me”.

That’s what caused Fritz Perls to say that “neurotic thinking is anachronistic thinking, it is out of place in time.” When depressed, we usually are thinking about past events that thwarted ego’s desires and projecting more of the same into the future. When anxious, we are reliving past fears and caught in dread and uncertainty about what has not yet taken place. Often when we are upset, our minds are shuttling between past and future, and we are lost in a mounting blur of regret, anger and anxiety, playing and replaying in our minds scenarios fraught with drama, fears of diminishment, harm and defeat.

I have found that there is a phenomenon of awareness that is similar to the law in physics that says no two objects can occupy the same space. By focusing awareness totally into the here-and-now of the senses, the talking mind shuts up, and to whatever degree (percentage, if you will) the energy of mind can shift from thinking to sensing, there is a proportional quieting of the mind’s emotional talking.

So, when you are feeling overwhelmed, distressed, even a little crazy, remember Perls’ exhortation to “get out of your head, and come to your senses!” Look, listen, feel the world around you. Experience the calming effect of your own breath and the subtle sensory orientation of your body.

As you practice this sensory-focused awareness, becoming more skillful in it, you will discover that your life is becoming calmer, clearer and saner. You will be opening the door to a deep well of wisdom and security that exists within the quiet recesses of every person. You will find yourself living pleasantly and effectively in the now, not crazily in the then and when.

“You is the Universe looking at itself from billions of points of view.” – Alan Watts

“No self, no suffering.” – D.T. Suzuki

Selflessness is a very mistaken idea in our culture, generally taken to be a quality of relationship that places others before and above ourselves. Placing others before ourselves can be admirable in many (but not all) circumstances, placing others above ourselves, as with placing ourselves above others, however, is a sad error.

This is particularly true when it takes the form of a fixed sense of our self, a way of being that can lead to imbalanced and unhealthy relationships and an inability to honor and celebrate our own existence and the existence of others and all life.

In Buddhism, selflessness is the essential point. It is a positioning of our experience within the universe with a clear vision that what we experience as our “self”, our personality, our ego, is not the truth and essence of who we are. It is an understanding that this “self” is just a structure of programmed thoughts, a matrix of ideas conditioned into us by family, culture, society, personal experience and education. This conditioning is the source of all our confusion about who we are in relationship to others, to society, to nature, to life, to our essential self. Hence, the Buddhist instruction, “no self, no suffering.” It is the grasping onto this illusion of a psychological self as who we are that is the essential teaching of Buddhism concerning the source of human suffering. This is the “awakening” that the very word Buddhism (Budh in Sanskrit means “awaken”) is instructing us toward.

There is a world of difference between the American notion of selflessness that legitimizes a hierarchy among people and life, and the Buddhist perspective that bows to all, including, very importantly, this person we experience as myself. Others, neither above nor below, nobody special (in an egoic sense) in self or other. Rather, the eyes of God shining through in all, the specialness of sacredness in me, you, all. “The Universe looking at itself from billions of points of view.” This is the meaning of the ubiquitous yoga greeting, Namaste.

In the Shambala tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, “selflessness” is the third, the liberating, of the Four Noble Truths that leads to the alleviation of suffering. As human beings we invest our sense of self in impermanent qualities of life (this is the first truth): our appearance, capabilities, ethnicity, family origins, health, wealth, relationships, positions, affiliations, possessions, status, etc. Because of this investment of our basic well being, as all impermanent aspects of life change and eventually disappear, we suffer (second truth). Through not investing our sense of self in this impermanence (selflessness), there is a way to be free of this suffering (third truth), which leads to peace (fourth truth).

The great 20th Century Zen teacher, D.T. Suzuki described Zen as the “art of seeing into the nature of one’s being.” He added that to see clearly the “selflessness” at the core of one’s being, “points the way from bondage to freedom.” Zen repeatedly asks, “Who are you?” And for every answer that can be given from a conventional perspective, it can be pointed out that our memories, our stories, our thoughts, our emotions, our behavior patterns, our positions in the world, our possessions are all ephemeral and changing.

So what is the answer to the great koan, “Who are you?” Can you think of a better answer than Alan Watts gives us, “You is the Universe looking at itself from billions of points of view”? Can you grasp the liberation of this perspective? Unlike what some might protest, it is certainly not immoral. It is perhaps amoral, in that no morality is needed when we grasp, as the Beatles sang, “I am you and you are me and we are all together.” Neither above nor below. There is nobody here. There is nobody there. There is only the Universe unfolding. Get your self out of the way. Then all is meeting all, eye to eye. Hello. No room for exploitation, defensiveness, anxiety, cruelty or trauma to enter, neither to the conventional psychological self nor others.

In Zen, there is a concept utterly foreign to the American mind. This concept is an ideal, a goal of Zen practice, and it is, paradoxical for an ambition, to be “nobody.” In Japanese, this concept is communicated with the word, ”mushin,” or, in Chinese, “Mu,” which translates as “no-mind.” No-mind means to be without ego, to stand in the world as a phenomenon no more important than a bird or a flower, yet equally, no less important than the galaxies themselves.

The way of the no-mind person is the way of living as “nobody.” Not a nobody, for this implies you ought to be somebody special, but are not. To be nobody is a conscious and positive stance in the world, not a lack or failure of stance. It is about living as a being of and within Nature, not outside it. It is in understanding that to live from ego, as if the structures of ego are who you are, is the “fall from grace,” the “original sin,” the loss of your true harmonious self. To be nobody is to live from the natural and spontaneous source of your own being, using your intelligence and faculties to be skillfully in rather than above or attempting to control life.

With no-mind, blossoms invite the butterfly;
With no-mind, the butterfly visits the blossoms.
When the flower blooms, the butterfly comes;
When the butterfly comes, the flower blooms.
I do not “know” others,
Others do not “know” me.
Not-knowing each other we naturally follow the Way.
18th Century Japanese poet, Ryokan

The “Way” that is being referred to is the ancient Chinese Taoist Way, the Way that Lao Tzu, described in the Tao Te Ching as the “origin of heaven-and-earth, it is nameless.” It is the way beyond intellectualization, categorization and judgment. It is the way of Nature, not of the egoic human mind. The “not-knowing” that Ryokan is referring to, is not having preconceived ideas about others and about life, rather, allowing each encounter to be fresh, completely and naturally what it is.

Without a preconceived identity and without preconceived ideas about life, self and others, I am, in this sense, nobody experiencing with no-mind. Anxiety, anger, depression, arrogance, selfishness make no sense to a person who is nobody. The joy of living in Creation, harmonious within and without, is the natural abode of nobody.

In the modern world, where we are over-burdened with the weight of our own insecure identity, with the need to be significant, to be “somebody,” to contemplate the meaning of nobody can be a valuable reference point. It reminds us that we have fallen into a terrible hubris, into an arrogance that places us quite outside and at opposition with Nature, and what Buddhists would call our own original nature. We have become quite caught in our egoic self-centeredness, our ambitions, opinions and judgments, afraid of being a nobody, a most uncomfortable place to live.

After all, what is it that we get so upset about? Usually it is about not having things go the way we want them to, or feeling injured, slighted, insulted or discounted in some way. Being upset is usually about the egoic self wanting more control and importance than it has. This can be true over real injury, certainly, or, as is often the case, in just not being sufficiently noticed or getting our way the way we want it. The modern spiritual teacher, Eckhart Tolle, describes our emotional distress as the result of being resistant to what is. What a simple and clear teaching. So too then, when we don’t find our identity in ego, we can face many threats and losses, real and imagined, even death, and remain calm and accepting.

It is important to realize; this is not about being passive. Activity and creativity are in our nature and to be active and creative in the expression of life are appropriate and harmonious. In the service of ego, however, action is seldom harmonious. Certainly, there are times to resist cruelty and stupidity, but it does not have to be from a place of fear or violent emotion. It is just the necessary thing to do. In the parlance of Zen it is then ‘”non-doing”. Certainly there are times to use effort for the betterment of our person, others and human society. Our choice is whether the effort is ego directed, or from the place of just doing what needs to be done. Non-doing follows our prime instinctual imperative, to become more conscious, more alive, more balanced with others, society and Nature within and around us.

As we assert ourselves, face a challenging task, respond to injury or disappointment, whether it is slight or great, we can let go of our ego, be nobody, and in so doing, become more in harmony with life as it is, and with our own life as it is meant to be. We can engage a moment that could have been one of struggle and suffering for others and ourselves, and instead, turn it into a moment of mastery. We can be masterfully active and creative just because it is in our nature to be so, noting that to nobody, mastery is no big deal. No big deal, but oh, how splendid. Like the stars in the night sky or the butterfly visiting the blossom, exactly how and where they are supposed to be.

As you are aware of your thoughts and emotions, you must ask yourself – “Who is it that is aware?” – Zen Koan

Thoughts arise. The human mind is a thought-producing machine. Emotions happen. The human body is a resonance chamber for the energy of thoughts. A thought arises in the dimension of mind, and in the physical dimension of the body, a resonant emotion is experienced. A happy thought creates a happy feeling – expansive, light, energized. An unhappy thought creates an unhappy feeling – contracted, heavy, energy dissipating.

Try it for yourself. Close your eyes. Think of something or someone that is very challenging, even threatening to you. Hold that thought for about five seconds. Pay attention to the feeling state that accompanies the holding of the thought.

Now, think of something or someone that is supportive, pleasing to you. Hold that thought for about five seconds. Pay attention to the feeling state of that thought.

Now, bring all your attention to experiencing the gentle flow of your breathing. Do not accentuate or change the breath. Also listen carefully to the sounds of the world around you. (turn off any TV or talk radio – very soft music helps this exercise – or best of all, go outside and listen to the birds and the wind in the trees) Do this for about 15 – 30 seconds. Now, open your eyes and feel what you feel.

If you are paying very close attention, you will notice that with the threatening thought there is a contraction of the energy of the body and mind into a state of tension. With the pleasant thought there is an opening of the energy, the body and mind relaxes. But with the bringing of your awareness into the experience of your breath and listening to the subtle soft sounds of the world around you, the feeling state becomes expansive, open, relaxed, clear, even happier than the happy thought. This is the experience of no-thought. You are touching the ground of your deepest level of Being.

Every thought is a contraction of the energy of the mind from its original and clear state of awareness into a limited form. With the creation of thought, you are experiencing the creation of egoic separateness and the loss of oneness with undifferentiated Life itself. The more fear-based the thought (a threatening, challenging thought form), the more the mind and the resonant body-emotion contracts into its experience of separateness.

But who is it that is aware of these various mind-body experiences? Ah! That’s the secret that we have not been attending to. We are accustomed to experiencing that we are the thoughts and emotions. We say, “I am happy” or “I am sad” or “I am angry”. But is this true? Zen teaches us that, no, we are not these thoughts and emotions. We have these thoughts and emotions. They are properties of being human, just as we have hands and we have feet. Who we are, is the awareness that experiences these phenomenon of the mind and body. As I instructed you to create a happy thought, then an unhappy thought, how could these thoughts and emotions be you if you could voluntarily create them? So then, how can they be you when they are involuntarily created? No. Who you are is the awareness that witnesses the activity of the mind and the body, but is actually unaffected by this activity.

Do you see the empowerment and liberation in this? This is the secret of meditation. In meditation, as you quiet the talking and emotionally reactive mind (in Buddhism, called “little mind”), you begin to be aware that you are aware. And as you continue to meditate, you begin to be aware that you are awareness (“big mind”). This is the ground of your Being.

Oh, how everything begins to change then. Thoughts and emotions come and go. We begin to realize that they are conditioned patterns of our cultural, societal, family and personal experience. They are programmed reactions to situations. They are certainly not who we are. We can begin to let them come and go without investing our sense of self in them. Defensiveness, reactivity, the need to identify with them begins to dissolve. We begin to realize we can shape and refine them. They are tools, like our hands, that we can train to be increasingly effective in dealing with the situations of life. This is why Buddhism teaches that meditation is “liberation” leading to an “awakening” out of living in “small mind” into the wisdom and effectiveness of a much larger, more adaptable and compassionate mind, the mind of awareness itself. And this is the answer to the question of who it is that is aware. It is YOU, the deepest, truest, sanest you.

“We see a human tide bearing us upward with all the force of a contracting star; not spreading like a tide, as we might suppose, but one that is rising: the ineluctable growth on our horizon of a true state of ‘ultra-humanity’.” – Teilhard de Chardin

What a muddle humanity is in. A simple honest look tells us that the Earth’s human population is presently estimated to be 6.6 billion and growing exponentially, estimated to top 9 billion by 2050, increasing by over a third in forty years. Earth’s non-human populations are dwindling alarmingly. The Earth’s resources, likewise, are dwindling alarmingly. Humanity has been compared to a cancer spreading across the organism Earth, dooming its host, and likewise, itself. Like mythic lemmings headed for a cliff, the surging herd of humanity swarms blindly toward its demise. This tide is spreading such that this promontory in the universe, our home planet, will no longer be able to contain its multitudes and begin spilling us off.

But, we are not lemmings, nor cancer. We have intelligence. This is what the mid-20th Century theologian and paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin understood. We have a complex consciousness that is not limited to a linear destiny such as lemmings that multiply endlessly and then swarm over a cliff in their migration simply because the momentum of their numbers cannot stop when the edge is encountered. Humanity is capable of leaps of quantum understanding.

Humanity and all those species that we co-inhabit this planet with are at the edge. All the habits of humanity lead us toward demise. Greed, competitiveness, national, religious, racial, regional, class and political identification keep us pitted against each other. The deep-rooted orientation toward objectification of the experience of life keeps us insecure, anxious, combative and insatiable in our quest for personal and group significance and dominance. Humanity seems blind to the limitations of the model for psychological and social identity we embrace. We stumble forward hoping all will be well if we just keep doing more of the same. More for me and mine. More for me and mine. It is “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Except that it signifies something huge, increasing individual psychological insecurity and a collective social and economic structure headed for catastrophe.

Is that it? Is that the sad end to the story of humanity and this most beautiful of planets, choked to death by increasingly competitive overpopulation, destruction of the environment and exhaustion of resources? Are we lemmings doomed to topple over the precipice by the ever-increasing pressures of those pushing forward unable to see the precipice until they are tumbling off?

It does not have to be. What is this “ineluctable growth on our horizon of a true state of ‘ultra-humanity’” that de Chardin is writing about? It is the fully bringing into play that which makes humans unique: self-aware consciousness. It is the fulfillment of the Universe’s destiny through this dangerous and seemingly oh-so-out-of-place creature called humanity. It is the realization of what de Chardin called “the Omega point”, the ultimate awakening of humanity out of its long slumber of small self-absorption into full consciousness, seeing its place in the Universe, experiencing its consciousness as one with the Universe. While de Chardin takes this to dimensions beyond corporality and fulfills Christian theology, it can be more modestly and practically seen as humanity “awakening” in a more Buddhist sense and becoming an enlightened species creating an enlightened society in harmony on our home, this Earth, in this galaxy, in this universe.

How will this happen? It will happen one individual at a time experiencing themselves at their personal end with a too limited model of consciousness and liberating themselves. It will be you and me personally expanding beyond the small mindedness that has imprisoned individuals in anxiety-filled lives, and created a fearful, combative, materialistic society that drives us all into varying levels of craziness and pushes the entire planet toward suicidal insanity.

This process of awakening is what I call the Omega journey in honor of de Chardin’s vision. It is individuals in realization that the models of consciousness we have inherited are the cause of our individual and collective insecurity shaking off our slumber to actually become conscious in our lives. It is one individual at a time realizing the potential of true human consciousness, shared by a growing multitude, until a new form of human society emerges, experiencing harmony within its individuals, with each other and the planet. Are you ready to take your place on the horizon, on the edge of this human evolutionary leap that rises upward, not plummets down? “Ultra-humanity” awaits. Please know; this is not New-Age drivel. This is the only destiny that leads to a quality survival for humanity and the achievement of our true “being-ness”. Do you understand? Are you ready?

“The (Chinese) term ‘hsin’… is used in a way.. synonymous with the Tao. Hsin means the totality of our psychic functioning…. To both Taoism and Zen, the center of the mind’s activity is not in the conscious thinking process, not in the ego.” – Alan Watts – The Way of Zen

In Buddhism, the concept of bringing your whole-mind to life experience is very important and little understood. As Watts points out, in Zen, the point is not to find mind and our sense of self in thinking (the ego), but in the integrated totality of our being-in-the-world.

We in the West, identifying mind with the thought structures of the ego, approach life in a manner that is really quite superficial and programmed. We pay just enough attention to notice a situation falling into some recognizable mental set we have dealt with before and go into a stimulus-response thought-emotion-behavior pattern.

We bring only enough of our mind to the situation to engage our thoughts which then activate our emotions and behavior. We play out these pre-set patterns over and over again as we go through our lives. These patterns constitute our personality, our habitual interactive manner. They might be effective and they might not be. We mistakenly confuse these patterns for who we are, and they are often significantly neurotic, that is, not exactly appropriate, healthy and helpful. From a Buddhist perspective, we are asleep, if not insane. Buddhism seeks to awaken a much deeper, totally sane mind.

Upon occasion, we are caused, by the context, novelty or importance of the situation, to bring full attention to what we are doing or experiencing and respond with all the faculties of our mind. In such moments, we become nuanced, artful, creative, appropriate and skillful in ways that are exceptional. Such moments would be our most psychologically healthy, in which we flow effortlessly with the moment.

They are moments in which we accidentally fulfill the requirements for “hsin”. Importantly, Buddhism teaches us that such moments are reflective of our true, enlightened self, our true mind, and do not have to be accidents, but rather can be cultivated. Meditation, and its life-interactive correlate, mindfulness, are exercises in the development of this capacity leading to an integrated, skillful, intelligent, compassionate, wise and spontaneous sense of self-in-the-world.

For a Westerner, it can be helpful to find understanding in what is meant by whole-mind from a Jungian perspective. Swiss psychologist Carl Jung (d. 1961) noted that the mind has four “functions”: thinking, feeling (emotions), sensation and intuition. He further noted that a psychologically balanced and healthy person operates with relatively equal distribution and facility in all four functions. He also noted two directions of mental energy: introversion – the taking into and consideration of experience in the mind, and extraversion – the projection of the contents of the mind into the world. Here too, he described a healthy person as equally and fully capable in both directions.

He finally notes that it is within the transcendent function of awareness or consciousness, as the integrating phenomenon, that these psychic functions harmonize. It is this harmonization that leads to the experience of “hsin” in which the sense of self becomes the experience of mind and the moment integrated. Whole-mind is the “totality of psychic functioning” non-dualistically linked with the moment.

To bring the whole-mind into the world begins with the senses, with a heightened, focused and subtle experience of the world we experience as outside brought to our internal world through introversion. We then must hold the experience in a spacious awareness, without thought, allowing intuition, the wisdom-bearing mysterious ego-transcendent connection to the unconscious inherent in every person, to guide us in bringing the experience into mental form through thought and resonant emotion. In this transcendent state, outside and inside dissolve. There is only the moment in awareness.

With all four of these mental capacities present and interacting, we can bring our experience of the moment into wiser, intelligent, feeling, skillful understanding and action. We can extravert this whole-mind into the world. This would be called mindfulness. Likewise, the whole-mind can be brought to the field of mind itself. This would be meditation. This cultivation of “hsin” is “The Way” that Taoism and Zen refer to that brings liberation from the clumsiness and craziness of ego, restoring our natural true self-in-the-world with whole-mind. We enter “the gateless gate” of Zen previously barred by ego. We can, “Break through the impassable barrier and get to know the opening beyond.” (Fo-hsing T’ai)

“No matter what gets in the way or which way the wind does blow… I’ll just sit here and watch the river flow.” – Bob Dylan

The Taoist roots of Zen Buddhism place great emphasis on what is called “non-doing”. Now non-doing is not to be confused with doing nothing. It is not passivity. It is about not doing whatever comes first into your mind in favor of allowing the moment to inform you about what it needs before you act, and then to act from the place that Buddhists call the “whole mind”. This gives rise to what is termed, “skillful action”.

A very great lesson to be learned is that most of the time, what is needed of us is nothing. Most of the time, the moment only needs us to continue taking in the moment. When the moment needs us, it will let us know, and from our whole mind, the mind that blends and balances our senses and thoughts with our feelings and deeper intuition, we will know what needs doing and how to do it. But beware of that first impulse. It comes from our conditioned mind, the mind of ego, and gets us into a great deal of awkwardness, even pain, trapped in swirling back currents.

When sitting by the river, just sit and watch the river flow. How many of us can actually do this? Most of us don’t ever sit by a river at all. We drive past it. A few may, if it’s a beautiful day, and there is a nice path, and they don’t have “more important things to do”, walk along its banks. At some point, we may sit (if the weather is right and there is a handy place to sit) but soon, our mind is racing to many places other than the river, and we will get up and continue on our way having given no consideration to the secrets of the river. Zen instructs us to go to the river, sit, and watch and listen to it flow. There is much to be learned.

We learn that the river exists out there, and it exists in here, in our minds. Like when objects appear floating in the river, so too, the objects in our minds, our thoughts, appear and pass before our gaze and then float on. We mistake this passing flotsam for who we are. In any given moment, whatever floats through the river of our minds, we experience, “this is me”. Not so. Not any more than the passing objects in the river are the river.

The river is forever changing and forever the same. So too our minds. Watch the currents and the eddies. See where the river is shallow and fast and where it is deep and still. The mind is much like that. Listen to the river. It laughs and sighs, weeps and celebrates; it contains all the sound in the world in its gentle rivulets and rushing torrents. It begins in the rain and snow, touching the earth high in the mountains, becoming little trickles, moving relentlessly, growing in breadth and depth, to its returning to the sea, and then to vapor to begin the journey again. In a single drop is its own beginning, its journey, end, and new beginning. So too, we begin and end, journeying along the way appearing in many stages, to return to our Source and begin again. In the deepest pool of our mind we know this truth, but we so easily lose track of it in the rapids of our life, rushing along, crashing through the rocks, the obstacles that d44irect and channel our journey.

Sitting on the banks, watching the river flow, we can know our own mind, our own life, our own beginning and destiny, a drop of consciousness in the great sea of consciousness. We do not mistake what is floating past in the river for the river. Why then do we mistake what is floating past in our mind for our mind or for who we are? Sit. Take some time to watch the river flow, and then you’ll know. You’ll come to know your whole mind and who you are and what needs doing and what needs non-doing. You’ll come to know your source and your destiny. You’ll learn how to maneuver your journey skillfully. Just from watching the river flow, “no matter what gets in the way or which way the wind does blow.”

Last month I explored Alan Watts’ statement that “everything is as it can be” from the perspective of individuals and their personal growth. I said that everyone is as they can be from within identification with their psychological conditioning. This month, I want to expand on these amazingly profound six words as they can be applied to social and political conditions in the world, and how they can be related to our ability to paradoxically live in personal peace within things as they are, and to dedicate ourselves toward improving the “what is” of conditions in the social and political dimensions.

Eckhart Tolle advises us “our suffering is in our resistance to what is.” The “what is” of life contains the entire spectrum of possibility from the sublimely beautiful to the unfathomably hideous, from the birth of a child, to The Holocaust, from the bloom of flowers in spring, to the wasteland of a nuclear explosion or catastrophic global climate change. Many rightfully ask whether it is not necessary to resist “what is” if it is patently destructive, anti-life and human dignity?

The answer is in the manner of resistance we bring. Tolle is not advising us to passivity. He is advising us to wise seeing of things for what they are, and not resisting the understanding that “everything is as it can be.” To oppose a wrong, we must first see the wrong as the natural outcome of the way things are. To change what is wrong and destructive, we must work with the “what is” of the conditions that created it. First, we must be willing to see it for what it is, to not be apathetic, not turn a blind eye. Having seen it, we must not shrink from it as if it cannot be, or that it is too frightening to us. Nor can we fight a wrong from the place of hatred. Hatred created it. In the end, from the place of hatred, we will replicate much of what we fought to displace. Action emanating from love, compassion and courage are the non-resistance that is the only true counterweight to evil, hatred and apathy.

“Everything is as it can be” is an amazing insight into the unfolding evolutionary dynamic of society. Human society is a collective consciousness that, exactly like an individual consciousness, is in a process of evolution, of moving from a narrow, self-absorbed, frightened and limited sense of self into more expansive, inclusive and resourceful awareness. In example: along the path of human history, absolutist monarchies, slavery, religious wars, sexism and racism have been accepted political consciousnesses. Humanity, individually and collectively has, or is in process of, evolving beyond such consciousnesses. The “what is” of humanity has evolved into a new “can be.”

Today, economic, political and national competition and conflicts are accepted political consciousnesses along with unfettered exploitation of the Earth’s resources. Such thinking, however, is beginning to be questioned and challenged by an increasing number of individuals who are evolving in their consciousness. These visionaries see the necessity for a social awareness that enfolds all peoples, all species, even the ecosystem of the planet itself as the necessary identity for humanity if we are to survive and prosper into the future. A growing mass of such evolving individuals is necessary to achieve an evolving, healthy human society that moves what “can be” to entirely new dimensions of “what is.”

It is a very difficult lesson to absorb that without the recognition of the “what is” of the limited consciousness that leads to destructive social patterns; there can be no evolving to what can be. The starkest example of this is that it took the insanity of The Holocaust for the majority of humanity to say, “never again” to genocidal racism. It took the shocking devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki for a growing realization to take root that unlimited war can never be waged again. It will, sadly, probably take the shock of dramatic consequences to human-created climate change to force a new evolution of human consciousness in relationship to the planet and our place upon it.

The horror of “what is” is sometimes necessary to wake us up to what can be, to what must be, if we are to evolve successfully as a species. No, to realize that “suffering is caused by resistance to what is” is not a call to passivity. It is a call to come out of denial into consciousness. It seeks to awaken us to the need for action that moves us beyond the “is-ness” of a destructive unconsciousness. Paradoxically, this evolved consciousness can bring us personal peace while we engage the forces of history and social conflict.

Sometimes, force is needed to constrain violence, but only peace will bring peace. Ultimately, violence only perpetuates violence. Only identification with the totality of life on this planet will save humanity from the consequences of our identification with separateness, consumption and competition moving us toward Armageddon. Do not resist facing this “what is”. It got this way because it is how everything has been. We must evolve our vision as individuals and then as a species into a new “can be” if the next stage of human history is a consciousness capable of a peaceful, beautiful, sustaining future. To resist this will surely bring suffering .

As you are aware of your thoughts and emotions, you must ask yourself – “Who is it that is aware?” – Zen Koan

The phrase, “Everything is as it can be” is from the philosopher/theologian, Alan Watts, who wrote and spoke about Eastern philosophy so eloquently through the 50’s and 60’s, introducing Americans to Asian wisdom. At the beginning of a new year, as we think about “resolutions” for improving ourselves, it is wise to also consider that everyone is also as they can be. Including you. This is an important realization. It allows us to see ourselves realistically and compassionately so that we might not seek to change so much as to grow, that is, evolve our self.

Change, as in going from one state to another, does not realistically happen in a person. Growth and evolution do. In fact, evolution can be so powerful that it can appear as dramatic change. Evolution begins with a compassionate understanding that you are exactly as you can be by the factors of your conditioning and that we can grow beyond our conditioning. When you understand this, you then have a handle on how to expand your life in a manner that creates real change, something “resolutions” cannot do.

A great Zen koan instructs us, “As you are aware of your thoughts and emotions, you must ask yourself, ‘Who is it that is aware?’” The awareness is you, your true self, as Zen says, your original self. That’s the truth in the world of enlightenment. But here in the world of society, families and insecure interpersonal interactions, what Buddhism calls “Samsara”, the world of the illusion of confusing our conditioning for who we are, we act out our conditioning exactly and only as we can be from within that conditioning.

But, who you are is consciousness. You are not your thoughts or emotions or behaviors. That’s just the stuff conditioned into you that you believe is you, and that society reinforces by all of us judging and identifying each other by our programmed thoughts, emotions and behaviors. We can even get pretty defensive about our thoughts, emotions and behaviors, but guess what? They aren’t even ours. They are from our mother, our father, our society, media, personal experience, etc. They are what we have learned, and they represent a certain level of consciousness that is the only thing we can be from within the prison of our conditioning, but we are not our conditioning unless we continue in the belief that we are

So, you’ve got some addictive behaviors? Some interpersonal hang-ups and insecurities? Tendencies to be impulsive, compulsive, anxious, angry or depressed? If you would like to “change” some undesirable traits in the coming year, it’s important to realize, these traits are exactly and only what can be from within the prison of your conditioning, but break out of the conditioning prison, and true growth, evolution can begin to occur.

The pioneering psychologist Fritz Perls used to say, “The contours of your neurosis are exactly the same as the contours of your awareness.” You are exactly the same dimensions of thought, emotion and behavior as you are aware of the possibilities for thought, emotion and behavior that you are conditioned to. Expand your awareness for what is possible, and the limited neurotic addictions, hang-ups, insecurities, impulsive, compulsive, anxious, angry, depressed features of your false conditioned personality will begin to resolve themselves. You will begin to evolve.

Wake up! If you are what you can be and the circumstances of your life are what they can be, expand what can be. Evolve. Change is nearly impossible from within the limits of believing your conditioning to be who you are, but if you have the courage to let go of your defensive identity and live as curious, compassionate, resourceful, expanding, evolving awareness, the possibilities are nearly miraculous. All you’ve got to lose is your neurotic self. Then you will begin to see what can be.

Existence is. Then, there are human concepts about existence. The dilemma of being human is that we cannot live in existence without conceptualizing existence. The great evolutionary uniqueness of humans is our ability to abstract our experience out of its undifferentiated totality. This is our special talent. It makes us human. It is also our curse, and the curse upon all of Nature.

Nature is. It is a harmony and a perfection of balance and unity. Nature, undisturbed by human imposition, is the Biblical “Eden”. To be quiet and present in Nature, relatively undisturbed by humans, is to experience something powerful resonating within us that touches the ground of our fundamental Being, our own deepest nature, even the foundation of our spirituality.

But, our humanness, our compulsively abstracting, conceptualizing, dividing, talking mind, compels us to separate our experience into thoughts about who we are, what life is about and how we can better manipulate Nature for our own benefit, and Eden is lost. We cannot seem to coexist with Nature. This is the human dilemma. Our ability to abstract existence allows us to emerge from Nature, to create human society, culture, invention and technology, to escape being subject to the amoral laws of Nature where survival is tenuous. This certainly seems good, but we then have cut ourselves off from Nature, and, in the process, from our own deepest nature. Humanity has practiced indifferent exploitation of Nature for thousands of years, and has largely lost any primal connection to it. This is not good.

Nature is a unity and harmony. To the human mind, however, it is all these squiggly, wiggly, hard-to-control lines of form, and the human mind rebels at this. It wants to control, safeguard and develop existence for its own benefit. Since humans have the capacity for abstraction, they can identify the separate entities about them and categorize them by their value or threat to human existence. Since they have the capacity for abstraction, they can take the separate entities about them, use or dispose of them, and create new combinations that increase their value to human existence. This sounds like it is good, but as abstracting consciousnesses, we have lost the realization that humans have abstracted the foundation of their own existence right out of connection to the basis of that existence.

To create an example of this, let us look to the squiggly wiggly entities humans call fish and squirrels and deer and other creatures that enhanced primitive human existence as food, and that humanity learned to capture using the abstracting of fibers from plants into patterns of straight lines called nets and snares. Humanity has also learned that the entities of earth and plants can be combined into another kind of net called fields for farming after all the entities in the net that are not the earth and the desired plants are taken away. It has also learned that nets called shelters and villages and cities can be made to live in once all the entities that are not conducive to the shelters, villages and cities are taken away. It has also learned to take the materials of the Earth and abstract them into nets called technology. All this to enhance human existence. Good. Right?

What gets lost in the making and casting of nets onto existence so as to enhance humans is the realization of the consequence of all that is getting lost. What gets lost is Nature in all its squiggly wiggly lines, and all its connectedness. What gets lost is our own fundamental Beingness that emerges from and is of Nature. We forget the Nature that is who we are, and that Nature is where we came from. We have snared ourselves.

We have made and cast so many nets, that we have entangled all of Nature, our home and source, in separating nets, and tragically, are strangling the life out of Nature. So very sadly, we, likewise, have become entangled in the nets ourselves, so that we cannot even realize existence as harmony and balance and oneness at all, and are strangling the Life out of our own existence, our own Being, our spirit. Eden has been lost, and so are we. The truth is that we cannot exist separated indefinitely from our source without becoming hopelessly lost, and thus, doomed. It is time to remember what the old prophets used to intone: “Repent, before doom is upon us.”

There is, of course, no going back to Nature before the technology/nets. There is however the remembering of who we truly are, and beginning to weave nets the purpose of which is not the control and domination of Nature, but the harmonious reunion with Nature around us and within us. We must evolve further as a species to reintegrate our abstracting intelligence with the ground of our own Being, our own deepest nature, to find a new balance of humans in Nature. We must remember that we emerge from Nature and are Nature as surely as the fish and the squirrel and the deer. Repenting means coming home. It means to think (abstract) less and meditate (connect) more, so as to rediscover Nature within us, and our connectedness to Nature around us, with the squiggly wiggly lines of Creation, of Eden, “before doom is upon us.”

Every moment, the hero asks, not what can I get for myself, but what does this moment need from me?

I have been listening to Beethoven’s 3rd Symphony, The Eroica. It was written in celebration of the fulfillment of myth, of the journey of the hero. In Beethoven’s beginning 19th Century, the Ages of Reason and Enlightenment had just vanquished the dark myth of a world of decadent hereditary royalty and aristocratic political and social privilege built on the suffering of the common citizen. The Romantic Age of birthing democracy was beginning and Beethoven wrote the sound track.

The Eroica was originally written in dedication to Napoleon, who before he crowned himself emperor, Beethoven and millions of others believed was the hero who would spread the ideals of The Revolution, “liberté, fraternité, égalité”, across the European continent. Napoleon failed Beethoven; he was not a hero, just another face of power hungry ego. But the heroic ideal of The Eroica remained true in hundreds, thousands of less exalted figures than Napoleon, heroes of the democratic revolutions who lived, fought, sacrificed, triumphed, were sometimes defeated and triumphed again, to change the world. Among them was Beethoven.

The hero. Beethoven, who struggled with his growing deafness, with the isolating madness of his unequaled musical genius, who only knew he had to speak for God, because God spoke to him, embodied the hero. The Eroica speaks of the humble beginning, the answer to the call, the courage, the determination, the dark night of the soul, the closeness of defeat, the eventual victory, the hope for normalcy at the end of the hero’s quest, and the final realization that there can be no returning to the simple pleasure of the company of fellow humans. A bridge has been crossed. An awakening has occurred. The hero is alone. A bodhisattva has been born.

Where are our heroes? In this beginning 21st Century, the darkness of a corrupt age of the barons of finance, capitalism and intellectual egotism is playing itself to its decadent historic conclusion. The unconsciousness of the materialist phase of the human egoic age has taken us into a stagnation and crisis as certain as the stagnation and crisis the royal aristocratic phase had suffered upon humanity in the years surrounding 1800. Beethoven cried out, “Where is our hero?” And he realized the hero was within him. Within him, what was asked of him, was music that would forever change music. And he struggled past the panic of his growing deafness and isolation to turn his inner ear to the voice of God. And he did what was needed of him.

The hero is within each of us. Some will hear the call. Some will make history following the hero’s journey, asking not what can I get for myself, but what is needed from me? This quiet stirring is in each of us. History forces us to listen for it. History is now calling. Who will listen, even if, or perhaps because, their ability to participate in the mundane conversations of their fellow humans has been taken from them. Beethoven’s physical deafness was only a poignant actualization of the soul’s ear turning from the din of the insistent voices of the past, that dominate and deafen the present, to hear a call into the future, that insists instead to the hero, “Follow me toward truth, do what is needed.”

A new age is needed, one that recognizes the simple truth of the necessity of humanity evolving beyond the shadow always thrown by ego. This new age will see the expansion of human consciousness out of competitive separateness into the inevitability of what that ancient, yet prescient, philosophy Buddhism refers to as “interbeing”, the realization of the interconnectedness and interdependence of all life. Who will be the ones to make this new age? Where are our heroes? They are here. They are our revolutionary musicians, artists, spiritual masters, ecologists and peacemakers. They are those who refuse to accept poverty and despair anywhere as acceptable, those who call for an entirely new level of “liberté, fraternité, égalité”, that enfolds the entire planet. They are those who know all humanity is kin, not only with each other but with all life, and the planet itself. These will be the heroes of this new age. Are you ready to join them?

“The Medicine Wheel Circle is the Universe. It is change, life, death, birth, learning. This Great Circle is the lodge of our bodies, our minds, and our hearts. It is the cycle of all things that exist. The Circle is our Way of Touching, and of experiencing Harmony with everything around us.”
– From Seven Arrows by Hyemeyohsts Storm

Central to the worldview of Native-Americans is the The Medicine Wheel, a symbolic representation of life as a great circle, a hoop, a wheel. Unlike the linear and fragmented universe of European culture, the Native American world is a unity, Spirit manifesting into the myriad but all connected aspects of life. Each of these aspects – the humans, the animals, the trees, the earth, the rocks, the air, the wind, the water – all differing faces of Spirit. So too, each human is a different face of the One Face. This is how the Medicine Wheel mythology becomes an important psychology, an instrument for human healing, much like the mandala of Buddhism.

In the mythology of The Medicine Wheel, each human has a place on the rim of the Great Wheel, a face looking in, representing a unique perspective on Life. Each of the quadrants or directions of the Wheel represents a generalized archetypal perspective reflective of the major qualities of the human mind, very similar to how the psychologist Carl Jung ascertained the four functions of the mind to be thinking, feeling (emotion), sensation and intuition. Differing Native traditions have slightly different ways of representing these qualities, but in the Cheyenne tradition of Hyemeyohsts Storm, they are represented as Illumination (seeing with perspective, thinking about) in the East, Innocence (seeing close up, direct contact) in the South, Introspection (looking within, feeling about) in the West and Wisdom (holding in Spirit or intuition) in the North.

Like Jung who noted that people have major, minor and undeveloped relationships to the mental functions, the Native-American tradition notes that people have differing combinations of the Medicine Wheel attributes in their perspective. And like Jung who noted that a person can only be truly healthy and whole (individuated) by developing relatively equal facility in all four functions, the Native-American tradition says that a person becomes whole only by traveling the four directions and coming to know the Wheel in its wholeness. It teaches that only by coming to recognize and being at peace with these differing, but complementary, dimensions can we move beyond narrow-mindedness and inner turmoil to be healthy, whole and wise.

Each person has a unique place on the Wheel’s rim representative of their predisposition to emphasize or diminish these directional characteristics in their personality. As we approach the experiences of life, the Wheel imagery reminds us that the hub of the Wheel can stand in representation of our life experiences. As people seek to understand an experience, they see it from their unique place on the Wheel, each person seeing from a different angle than another, seeing with the vision of their particular predispositions for illumination, innocence, introspection and wisdom.

In Western culture, we approach life in a linear fashion. There are no circles. When I experience a particular event, I declare it to have such and so a meaning. Another person experiences the same event and declares it to have a different meaning. In the West, we then have the conditions for conflict. Who is right? In order for me to be right, you must be wrong. We cannot differ and both be right. We must resolve this conflict, this contradiction. This unfortunately leads to the condition of, “might makes right”, either intellectually, emotionally or physically. To win, someone else must lose. This is a world perspective that certainly is productive and powerful, but there is no wisdom here.

Likewise when an individual experiences an event, the differing aspects within themselves come into conflict. Which is right? My feeling or my intellect? What I experience directly or the “knowledge” I have been taught? When these differing visions are experienced as in conflict there is disorientation and suffering.

Native-American culture approaches differing views as exactly that, differing views that are natural to differing view-points, places on the Great Wheel. They are not to be fought about; they are to be learned from. If I see this event in such and so a way, and you see it differently, and we live honoring The Medicine Wheel, we don’t shout, “you’re wrong!” we say “Ah-ho,” “tell me more. What does this look like from your place on the Wheel so I may know more of its wholeness.” So too with our personal experience. Wisdom tells us to consult the vision of innocence, illumination and introspection in order to know a thing in its wholeness, its truth.

Like the Persian story of the blind men examining an elephant, when we only hold to our own limited experience, our experience is incomplete and inaccurate. When we only hold our own perspective to be important and right, and fight to eliminate all other perspectives, we become blind and foolish like the blind men of Persian legend. When we seek to know from each other (and the more the better), we can begin to see the whole of a situation or experience with some accuracy and fullness. We begin to see from the center, as if it were a mirror, looking at all the differing perspectives and seeing that each holds a piece of the truth. We begin to approach the understanding of Truth to be found in the totality of perspectives; we honor and uphold The Circle of Life. This is the lesson of The Medicine Wheel.

Whether as an individual seeking to become more whole in themselves, or humanity as a group wrestling with the great issues of peace and ecological sustainability, The Medicine Wheel Way leads to peace and wisdom, while the way of limited personal (or national) interest fighting for dominance leads to strife and conflict. European civilization has conquered the world, only to be confronted with the personal inner and global outer consequences of a worldview that conquers and possesses but does not know how to understand and coexist. The world has become too small for this dangerous, shortsighted way of living. But deep inside our collective consciousness there is a memory of looking within the Circle of Life to find our way. It can be our salvation.

It is time to return to the Circle. It is time to journey the Great Wheel to heal and to find our way to its center, to find in our individual faces the reflection of the one Great Face, before the insanity of separateness, of right and wrong, might-makes-right, wounds us all individually and collectively beyond redemption, and wounds the Great Mother Earth so she cannot bear her children, the people, any longer. The great Cheyenne, Sioux, Arapaho and other Native-American Nations may be gone, but their Old Way, the Way of the Medicine Wheel, is needed in this modern world before it is too late. This wisdom still lives in our hearts. May it return, the wisdom of Nature, of the One Spirit, a reflection of our own true human nature, to bring us home into the Circle of Life – for as long as there are Human Beings, and the whispers of the Great Spirit, The One, are carried on the Winds. Ah-ho.

“The Tao that can be named is not the Tao.”
“God said to Moses, ‘I am who I am(YHWH).’”

Humanity, Get over yourself. The God debate is human civilization’s lingering binge with dualism. Does God exist or not? The atheist and the Evangelical debate. And of the competing versions of God and His law, whose idea of God is correct? Theologians and philosophers wrangle endlessly in this foolishness, when the question they ought to be debating is whether an anthropomorphic deity exists and does an anthropocentric logic rule the Universe? Answer? No to both!

The Universe is, and The God of the Universe is vastly greater than human reasoning can conceptualize and express. God can only be apprehended as a vast unknowable. God, as ancient mystical texts seem to imply, and modern science indicates, seems to be more of a unified field of energy that precedes the physical universe, is the physical universe, and is also the consciousness that experiences the universe.

Humanity keeps getting lost in an anthropomorphic idea of a creator of the stuff of the Universe – which they categorize and accumulate – while paying no attention to the mystery of the consciousness that is the source from which all the stuff manifests. We all have a deep knowing of this mystery, but it is so buried under the “stuff” that we lose almost all connection with this knowing. This leaves a void in us, and we make up religions with names for God and special knowledge of God’s rules and wishes to fill that void. Even mystic traditions, when claiming special knowledge, fall into the trap. But the void cannot be filled in this way, and a deep archetypal urge in humanity continues to seek to express the knowing of this mystery. Ten thousand faces, ten thousand names. The wisest knew. This – which cannot be named. Yet, it is important that somehow we find a way to express this knowing that God is.

God is. And when we are in the midst of the experience, we realize that we can only in truth experience God as, to borrow from a Jewish theologian, Abraham Heschel, “sublime wonder.” Heschel stated, in a lecture I heard many years ago, that “the denial of the sublime wonder of life is the origin of sin, the origin of the attitude that leads to sin.” That statement was, to me, satori’s thunderclap. Sin is acting from an arrogance that assumes knowing and owning what is unknowable and unownable. Sin is separateness. This sin, this separateness, is also the source of all mental suffering.

Try this on: The first sin is the naming of God. “You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.” That’s the first commandment to Moses from the un-nameable YHWH. It’s given after YHWH tells Moses not to make any graven images. Sin is in the arrogance that leads to separation. Sublime wonder is union. To make God in the image of man, and claim to own God’s truth, is the graven image, and naming the nameless for our own vanity is the beginning of sin. It is the denial of the sublime wonder of that which cannot be named. To attempt to name, is to drag by force, for vain needs, the unmanifested consciousness that manifests into manifestation on human terms. We neglect that the terms for this manifesting consciousness are already set. It is Nature. To arrogantly set this aside to insist on human terms called anthropomorphic religions is the fall from Eden, from oneness.

This life we live. It is. “Everything is”, as consciousness icon, Alan Watts, wonderfully said, “as it can be”. From unmanifested consciousness this life manifests. It is. It is the mystery. It is Life. It is as it can be in a mystery of evolving manifestation. When referenced theologically, it is God. Our purpose in this journey of manifestation is to bring our individualized consciousness into sublime wonder, into harmony and union with the Natural Universe, with God, with what is. It ought not to be pretending that we can name and impose rules that we make up and claim to be from the Divine. The result of that folly has been all the destruction humanity has wrought on each other and the world. It has been the denial of wonder that leads to all human manipulation and destruction.

Lao Tzu understood. “The Tao that can be named is not the Tao.” It is human folly. Yet, the Tao even contains human folly, and will continue should human folly destroy humanity and its planet home. Perhaps, however, humanity can touch and own its deep knowing of the sacred mystery, and with that knowing begin the era of sublime wonder, of humanity’s coming home and new beginning. We are universal consciousness individualized, seeking our way home. When we rediscover ourselves as embedded in Nature, we will also rediscover our oneness with the mystery of Deity that we have given a thousand names to. And then the void will be filled.

“Evolution is an ascent toward consciousness.”
– Tielhard de Chardin

When asked, I say I don’t do psychotherapy any more. I do evolution. Ever since I decided ten years ago to expand beyond the practice of psychology, I have searched to find a way to describe the new paradigm for personal growth and healing that I believe in and practice. For a long time, I used the term “Zen Therapy”. This is a good term since Zen Buddhism is a major source for my conceptualization and approach, but it doesn’t quite capture the full vision that inspires me.

Zen calls on us to reclaim our “original nature”, and while I believe our original nature is the fundamental guide to healing our hopelessly befuddled personal identities in the modern age, the concept doesn’t include and integrate the forward reach of humanity’s irreversible symbiosis with technology, an essential factor in humanity’s evolution. Zen is generally taught within the context of an earlier time and different culture than modern Western society, and so, “Zen” seems to miss the mark I am aiming at. For all the respect I have for Buddhism and Zen, the image of its transmission in the West continuing to imitate its cultural origins in Asia, always seems to me to neglect the true intent of Zen, which is to be beyond culture in our consciousness, fully awake and responsive to the circumstances of life wherever, whenever, whatever, exactly as it is.

My first academic training was as a cultural anthropologist, and I have always been strongly influenced by its instruction. It was as an undergraduate student in anthropology that I was introduced to the writings of the legendary French Jesuit priest/paleontologist, Tielhard de Chardin, and the idea that the study of the evolution of humanity is not only a look back in time, but also forward. Oh yes. Another of our egocentric traits is to assume we represent the culmination of evolution (or are exempt from evolution entirely).

Chardin was interested in the future of humanity as can be projected by understanding the evolutionary traits of its past. Consciousness, he concluded, is humanity’s evolutionary trait, and “convergence”, meaning an ever-expanding sense of unity, is its direction. He envisioned a time when humanity would recognize its essential unity, not only within itself, but also with all of Creation. He called this realization the “Omega Point,” Omega, meaning culmination. For what can lie beyond consciousness that realizes its fundamental universal unity? As a theologian, he saw this realization as humanity’s reconciliation with God, as the coming home. And so it is, and will be.

I have always been deeply inspired by Chardin’s vision. As a cultural theorist, I find it liberating to examine and analyze the currents in human cultures and societies using this visionary lens. As an instructor of personal growth and healing, I can use this macroscopic realization as a way to look at individuals as processes of evolution. Expanding convergent consciousness is not only the evolutionary trait of humanity; it is the necessary experience for healing individuals. As our sense of self expands to enfold others and the mystery of Life itself, our neuroses resolve themselves.

We are each evolving, and it is this process of converging individuals evolving that will manifest in species evolution. It thus occurred to me to name the process I bring to individuals and to my social writings, in honor of Chardin, “The Omega Journey.” Evolution as a healing paradigm, “an ascent toward consciousness.”

For a person to heal from the wounds of life in this fractious society of competing egos, it is not enough to understand or ameliorate the wounds. Buddhism is correct. True healing comes with realization of the illusion of finding our identity in the fractious ego. We are not the distressed contents of our minds. We are the consciousness that is aware of, and has the capacity to transform the contents.

Reconciling our chaotic frightening separateness in a process of expanding convergent consciousness is the healing journey. And so, as we heal individually, let us also enlist our individual lives in the service of humanity’s destiny, pioneers journeying toward Chardin’s Omega Point. Let us bring humanity’s genius for technology finally into harmony with Nature, rather than attempting to master it for our own shortsighted exploitive purposes. Along the way, this journey that evolves individuals into a new level of harmony with their own nature, also enlightens their relationship with Nature. I invite all who are ready, to embark upon the Omega Journey, the journey of consciousness, the journey of evolution as healing, for individuals and for all humanity.

In Buddhism there is a very important teaching named “The Three Refuges”, also called “The Three Gems” because of the great treasure contained in this teaching. This teaching is not, however, referring to refuge as being something gone to for the purpose of escape. Rather, it is how we can live in the midst of ordinary life, with the conflicts, sorrows, fears and losses that are within life, from a place of equanimity and balance.

The Gem teaching instructs us to seek refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha.” Let me translate. At their simplest level, these words translate as such: “Buddha” is understood as in reference to Buddhism’s fountainhead, Siddartha Gautama. “Dharma” is the teachings and practices of Buddhism. “Sangha” is the Buddhist community. Nothing about Buddhism, however, ought to be taken at the simplest level. A deeper translation explains.

“Buddha” translates literally as “The Awakened One”. Buddhism is about awakening. To take refuge in the Buddha is to look to one’s own awakening, as Siddhartha awakened out of his own social/cultural conditioning, of experiencing himself and the world from within the limited egoic, or “little”, mind of personal thoughts and reactive emotions. Buddhism’s great insight is that the mind of ego is the source of human suffering. This is, in fact, the first teaching of Buddhism.

From this understanding then, the Dharma is the path that leads to awakening, liberation, or healing, from the sufferings of the ego. And Sangha is the community of awakened and awakening beings, those who have, and are, liberating themselves from finding their identity and their relationship to life from within the self absorbed and suffering ego. This path has been traveled successfully by others. You are not alone.

The living Vietnamese Zen saint, Thich Nhat Hanh, gives us a koan that can lead to deeper understanding and a path for living The Three Gems. He points the way by sharing the wisdom, “This moment is a perfect moment. This moment is my refuge.” This moment. Not any other moment. Not some future moment. This moment.

To be fully in this moment is to be free of the egoic mind, for the ego exists only within the storyline of me in time. To the ego, I am my past as held together by my compulsive revisiting it in judgmental thoughts, and I will be my future as compulsively structured and anticipated in judgmental thoughts. To the ego, the present exists clouded by compulsive judgmental thoughts evaluating my standing in and satisfaction with the world. When there is peace, it is fleeting. If this moment is satisfactory, our great fear is that the next moment will not be.

Awaken. You are not your thoughts. The enlightened you is not your story. Life and your experience of life is terribly diminished from within this prison of thoughts, compulsively everywhere except where life, your life, is unfolding. Here in the present moment. The bird sings in the tree. The clouds pass through the sky. Your family and friends need your presence, your full presence, and so do you. This moment, not looking out on life from within your thought prison, but in the realization that your consciousness, free of thoughts about life, is life itself.

Even should this moment be a moment containing sickness, loss, threat to the story of you, to the timeline of you, this moment still contains the bird in the tree, the clouds in the sky, your family and friends. Should this moment even contain the impending ending of your story, as mortal illness threatens your life, this moment also contains eternity, for in truth, in awakening, this moment and eternity are the same. The bird, the clouds, your family and friends, life is in your consciousness, and there is plenty of proof that consciousness is not limited to space, time or even materialization. This moment. Only this moment. Do not lose this gem, this refuge, being unconscious, being asleep. Do not be lost in the thoughts of the ego, frightened that neither you nor life are enough. Awaken! Life is. You are. Life is you. Now. Perfect.

“As you are aware of your thoughts and emotions, you must ask yourself, who is it that is aware?”

This Zen teaching, this koan, opens the Universe. Who is it that is aware?

The psychologist, Richard Alpert, turned guru, Ram Dass, talks about the difference between the western psychological tradition and the Hindu/Buddhist model of mind more or less in the following way: We experience our lives as if confined to a prison cell made up of the concepts that are conditioned into us by society, culture, family and personal experience. There does not appear to be any way out. Some of us have orderly,comfortable cells, and some of us have filthy, cluttered cells of personal torture. We call these states of relative order, being mentally well or ill. Western psychology acts like a kind of maid that comes in and tidies up the place,giving it better order and cleanliness. We remain, however, locked inside the cell, which tends to re-clutter itself. This is the psychology of the ego, what Buddhism calls the little mind. Hindu/Buddhist psychology, through the vehicles of meditation and the dharmic teachings, is the door out of the cell,into the world of expansive potentiality, into what Buddhism calls big mind.

Two dimensions of mind. Little mind and big mind. Not the conscious and unconscious dimensions of Western psychology, but the dimension of the ego and, to borrow the term Eckhart Tolle applies, the dimension of Being. Other terms used are the relative and the ultimate, the secular and the sacred. To use the language of Gestalt Psychology, they are the dimensions of figure and ground.They are the experience of form and the vast energetic potentiality out of which form emerges.

From this perspective, to be what Western culture calls conscious is really to be unconscious. It is to be unaware of the limitless potentiality of life.It is to be limited to living in the world of forms created by the conditions and conditioning of the egoic mind. We are physiologically awake, but psychologically and spiritually asleep.

Where does this world, this universe we experience, come from? What is God? What is the purpose of the idea, “God”, that is so critical and universal to the human experience? What is the place of the human species in this universe? Why is the Universe marked by harmony but the human experience marked by such disharmony? Why do humans go insane? What is sane? What is the nature of the human mind? Remarkably, we, in the scientifically advanced West, have no satisfactory answers to these questions. How then, can there be a valid psychology, study of the soul/mind, from such a society? No. We must look to other cultures.

Native American culture explains the unique awareness that human beings possess this way: Spirit manifested, and this Spirit manifesting is the world. But Spirit was unable to experience Creation,that is to say, to stand outside of Creation, thereby having the perspective that allows for subjective/objective experience. So Spirit manifested into an animal unique in its ability to stand outside of Nature, an animal uniquelybifurcatedin its consciousness. Human beings.

These creatures were Spirit manifested just as all the rest of Creation, but they experienced life from the perspective of separated individuality. Is that so different than the Adam and Eve parable in Genesis that leaves the descendants of the original human manifestation, “cursed above all cattle, and above all wild animals”? Human beings. Human. Self aware and separate, what Western psychology calls ego. Cursed. But also beings.Spirit manifested, what Buddhist psychology calls “original mind” or big mind,capable of awareness emerging from its origin in harmonious Nature/God.Consciousness peering into manifestation.

Western psychology seeks to bring order to the inherent cursed disorder of the ego. Buddhism seeks to return humans to contact with their original Beingness. Big mind is the awareness of God peering into the world of manifestation. Little mind is the confused identification with separateness and form that parades around as a person causing mischief and suffering.

How to find our way back to the Garden? How to live in both the relative and the ultimate, the secular and the sacred without contradiction? This is the journey of destiny for each and all human beings. This is the discovery of who it is that is aware.

“The Zen “genius”sleeps in every one of us and demands an awakening.” -D. T. Suzuki

Awaken! Awaken! Awaken! This is the message of Buddhism.Simple as can be, yet there is no greater challenge. Awakening is the karmic challenge of every human being. Awakening is the karmic challenge of all humanity.This moment is the gateway, the “gateless gate”. Can you walk through it?

The greatest secret, the conundrum that plagues the seeker of spirituality,sanity and wisdom, is the ancient instruction that tells us that we already know everything we need to know. We were born possessing the key that unlocks the lock. But then we lost it. More accurately, we were born knowing there is no lock, and that searching for a key is a fool’s journey. But the programming of socialization, of egoization, occurs, and demands the delusional belief that there must be a lock and there must be a key. So there is a lock,and there is a key, and we have lost it. We have lost the no-key to the no-lock.

So, we search. We search in the world of power. We search in the world of possessions. We search in the world of pleasure, and even the world of pain. We search in the world of diversion. We search in the world of knowledge.We search in the world of politics. We search in the world of religion. We look for the teacher/leader/messiah who will give us the answer.

There is a deep knowing that this world is mired in distress, and this collective distress is reflected in the confusion, emptiness and destructiveness people experience in their individual and collective lives. We are lost. We pretend, in the pursuit of our myriad addictions and affiliations,that we are not, yet we know intuitively that there must be a deeper meaning and order to life than we experience. Out of this yearning, philosophy,politics, religion, the pursuits of pleasure, wealth and power, the pursuit of meaningful relationships are born. We look for authorities outside ourselves to answer the questions, to give meaning and order, yet the authorities and the answers only seem to compound the problem.

Zen asks us, who is it that knows the world is in distress? Who is the genius that can see through all the constructions of culture and society to know there must be a better way? Where does this insight come from? Zen answers, the genius is you, the one who feels the distress, the one who experiences the disharmony deep in your gut.

Buried beneath the programming and conditioning of culture and society,encased within the constructed personalities that we believe to be who we are,is the genius who knows the answer. Zen calls this genius your original or true self.All of Zen teaching and practice is designed to penetrate our false conditioned identity that stumbles confused through the world, to reveal to us the wise,spontaneous, free being that is our true self, the genius within who tells us that something is wrong and knows how to make it right.

Zen teaches us that beneath the commotion and confusion, beneath the construct of thoughts and words, beneath the hypnotic hold of society and culture, beyond the illusion of separateness, is the gateless gate, the doorway of stillness,the no-key to the no-lock. The sleeping genius waits, longing to awaken into consciousness, into its destiny, to live in harmony. Look not outside yourself,but very deeply within yourself. Look into the stillness. The whispering genius is there.

“Your inner purpose is to awaken. It is as simple as that. You share that purpose with every other person on the planet – because that is the purpose of humanity.” – Eckhart Tolle

“As far as Buddha Nature is concerned, there is no difference between a sinner and a sage… One enlightened thought and one is a Buddha, one foolish thought and one is again an ordinary person.”
– Hui-neng (6th Zen Patriarch – 7th Century)

A most puzzling aspect of Buddhist philosophy is that there is nothing to achieve, for the idea of achievement implies adding something that was not there before. The heart of Buddhist philosophy is that our original nature is completely sane and at one with all of life, but that through the psychological conditioning of society and family, we lose touch with that nature. Siddhartha Gotama, 2500 years ago,awakened out of this conditioning and realized his true and original nature, that is, he realized enlightenment. Thenceforth, he was known as the Buddha, “the awakened one”.

“Birds chirp, dogs run, mountains are high, valleys low. It’s all perfect wisdom! The seasons change, the stars shine in the heavens;it’s perfect wisdom. Regardless of whether we realize it or not, we are always in the midst of The Way. Or, more strictly speaking, we are nothing but The Way itself.” – (Taizan Maezumi -20th Century Zen Master)

As we are nothing but The Way (the Tao, the uncorrupted nature of nature) itself, we are only separated from the Buddha within us, from awakening, by being unconscious. We are asleep to our true and original nature. We believe the false conditioning to be true. We believe it is who we are, and we live from within it, clinging to this false identity, rather than from our inherent Buddha Nature. Thus, we live in an “illusion” of life, full of strife and struggling. Buddhism teaches that all there is to do is to find our way back to The Way. There is nothing to add that achieves our enlightenment. There is only letting go of illusion. There is only waking up. All the struggles we experience in life are over our compulsion to enhance and defend a very personal sense we have of who we are. This is the ego. We create an identity of a very shaky somebody out of this precarious ego. This is a very big mistake. An insecure somebody lives in a world filled with problems. These problems tell a story. We start living as if we are that story, and keep authoring it over and over, with the same problems. Buddhism teaches the philosophy of being “nobody”. “Nobody”is not defined by the story of the ego. There is a dimension of mind that is before the thoughts that construct our experience of life.There is the dimension of awareness itself. Buddhism teaches that this awareness is who you are. It is impersonal, or more accurately,transpersonal. It is nobody. Buddhism teaches that Ego is a tool, much like a computer, not an identity. It is how the amazing human mind conceptualizes and works with the world. It is a useful tool, even a miracle when operated by an awakened person. It is a disaster as an identity. Ego identity is conditioned by society and family. It is always crazy. It is always fearful. It is always seeking to enhance and defend itself. This is normal, in the sense that nearly everyone does it, and, it’s completely crazy, because it causes all of our distress and problems for others and ourselves. “You must unlearn what you have learned,” says Master Yoda of a galaxy far, far away. You are nature and nurture. We have lost touch with our nature by getting lost in our nurture. Western psychology does not understand the mind. It only attends to the conditioning, the nurture, of the mind, not the nature of it. The conditioning is crazy. The nature is Buddha. One thought from our Buddha and we are enlightened. Immediately, the next thought is from our foolish ego. Sage and sinner all wrapped into one.Awakening is in learning to use the ego and not be it. Unlearn the limitations you were taught about yourself, others and the nature of existence. Find your original mind. Find Buddha.

“The contours of your neurosis are the same
as the contours of your awareness” – Gestalt Therapy maxim

In the ‘60’s and ‘70’s, a charismatic and dynamic form of psychotherapy called Gestalt Therapy was central to what was known as the human potential movement. “Gestalt” is a German word that does not translate easily into English, but means roughly, the configuration or meaningful whole of an entity. A more precise way of explaining the concept of Gestalt as relates to a person, is contained in the concept of the “figure-ground relationship”. This is the relationship of the perceptions and actions of a person to their full potential. The“ground” is a person’s full potential, while the “figure” emerges from the ground of full potential to be a person’s experience of themselves and the world, which for most of us is only a small fraction of our full potential. Gestalt therapy was conceived to explore and activate the potential that is repressed or dormant, to expand the contours of awareness, thus dissolving neurosis. The figurehead genius behind this therapy was German psychologist, Fritz Perls, who immigrated first to South Africa in1933, escaping Nazism, then to America in1951. In his own words: “from an obscure lower middle-class Jewish boy to mediocre psychoanalyst to the possible creator of a ‘new’ method of treatment and the exponent of a viable philosophy which could do something for mankind.” Perls dissented with Freud, disagreeing that healing the human mind was accomplished through analyzing the historic personality (ego) formation. Rather, he believed that healing occurred when a person was able to witness the limited and limiting contours of their personality in the present moment, exposing the distortions and lapses between their potential (ground) and their conditioned personality (figure). In the distortions and lapses was the unfulfilled Gestalt of the person. Bringing these distortions and lapses into awareness for full experience completed the Gestalt, and realized the “meaningful whole” of a person.

Perls realized that what wasat issue in determining a person’s sanity was the degree of consciousness that a person could bring into their experience of life. What Perls brought to psychotherapy was a method of actualizing the expansion of consciousness into a more complete personal Gestalt. His method was, reminiscent of Eastern meditation and mindfulness, a process that cultivated the capacity of a person to step outside of being trapped within the limited figure of their conditioned personality, into the ground of their witnessing self. Perls brought to western therapy a multidimensional model of mind much like that which Buddhist psychology is based in. Translating into the language of Buddhism, “figure” is the conditioned egoic “little mind”, and“ground” is the full potential of the “original mind”, “Buddha mind” or“big mind”. Another way of expressing this,is that figure is the ideas we carry around about who we are, others are, and the world is, while ground is the reality of full potentiality. The difference between this idea and reality is our “neurosis”.

Perls developed very powerful and dramatic methods and techniques for expanding the contours of awareness so that a person could make better contact with the full potential of life. Perls was, however,very Western, and a very powerful and dramatic ego, and true to his analytic training, his therapy focused on unshackling the ego from its neurotic constraints, creating an uninhibited, creative and assertive dynamism. While his insight was instinctively trans-egoic, his methods, following the contours of his own personality and training, led principally to the expansion of the contours of the ego,and thus, it might be said, failed to accomplish the full Gestalt of his insight,an integrated psyche of ego and the ground of original mind. A large ego, inevitably results in conflict with other egos. Just ask anyone whoever encountered Fritz Perls, or many of his ultra-assertive disciples. The contours of awareness of a fully healthy and realized being contains and also transcends an ego not noted for its size,but its minimalist balance, fearlessness and compassion. Buddha realized this over 2500 years ago. We in the West, are just beginning to catch on, and if we do, it just might really “do something for mankind”.

Have you ever considered that the two fundamental principles of the Universe are expansion and contraction? Physics has proved to us that everything is energy, and that the basic variable distinguishing the various manifestations of energy is density of form. The most basic difference between solids,liquids, gases and pure energy is density of form. The very radical principle of Buddhist psychology is that the same principle applies to mind.

Buddhism refers to the thoughts that occupy your mind as mental forms. They are the energy of the mind contracted into form-objects. These objects conform to the dimensions and parameters that society, culture, family and personal experience have programmed into us. It is not unlike a sculptor who only has the materials of their region and the images that their culture deems acceptable for sculpting. We only have the patterns for representing the possibilities of life that have been pre-programmed into us.

Now, just as the sculptor has wood, stone or metal to form a sculpture with,these forms in the mind have different properties. Different types of mind-forms have different densities that you can begin to distinguish, even affect, when you train through meditation then on-verbal perceiving dimension of mind. The amazing thing about humans is that we have the capacity to transform the dimensionality of the energy with which we sculpt our mental forms,the contents of the mind. Without the training of meditation, we are mostly unaware of this capacity other than as a faint intuition.

I am a believer that there are only two primary human emotions, and they are love and fear. These are the principles of union and separateness, with the commensurate properties of expansion and contraction. Love is the experience of oneness with another person, with nature, even with God, Spirit or the universe. In this experience, the energy of the mind expands so that a person’s identity likewise expands to encompass that which is being loved. Conversely,the experience of fear is a contraction of a person’s identity into ever more isolated aloneness, and so, the energy of the mind contracts into a smaller and smaller, lonelier and more vulnerable sense of self. All other emotions are variations of love and fear with corresponding variations of the dimensionality of the energy of the mind.

Affection, happiness, appreciation, kindliness, generosity are all variations of love, not quite as expansive and inclusive, but clearly sharing that expansive,inclusive quality. Anger, aversion, hatred,repulsion, greed are all emotions that are derivatives of the experience of fear, of separateness, difference, rejection. The sense of self that is the ego contracts behind a barrier of separateness to defend itself against perceived threats. The mind sculpts tight, dense, contracted forms of thought concerning the threatening “other” and the embattled“self”. Some emotions, like sadness, are ambivalent combinations of love and fear, vacillating between inclusion and separateness,identification and loss.

How do we know that this is true? Try it for yourself. Think of a person or situation that is very pleasant and personally supportive of you. Experience how the thought feels. Emotion is the body’s feeling response to thought. Then think of a person or situation that is threatening to you. Experience how that thought feels. See? To have a pleasant thought-form in mind causes your sense of self to expand to include the object of the thought resulting in an expansive experience of mind and body. To have a threatening thought-form in mind is to experience your mental energy contracting into the dense form of the fear/anger-thought and so too the body contracts into corresponding tension-emotions.

Buddhism teaches enlightenment. En- lighten -ment. The miracle of mindfulness is the alchemy of transformation of the forms of the mind from separateness-fear-based thoughts that leave you and your experience of life very heavy and dense to union-love-based thoughts (and no-thought) that bring to you a very light and expansive experience of life. You become the sculptor of your life-experience capable of transforming thoughts with the threatening dense hardness of steel into the lightness and healing capacity of,well, – light, the pure energy from which we come. The expansive unity of the Universe becomes the field in which we play. How light, how expansive your mind can be is the liberating and healing practice of a lifetime.

The column title is a Zen koan. A koan is a riddle that takes us to our deepest nature. Some koans can be understood at a rational level, others cannot. This koan is one that is rational, but takes us deeper. It takes us as deep as we are willing to go. Because it is rational, some will take it nowhere, and believe that they have understood it. They will not have. These words must be penetrated with your intuitive mind. Only intuition can take us beneath the surface constructions of the rational mind, and it is beneath these facades and constructions that we must journey to enter into Zen,to enter into our deepest nature.

Who are you? This is the question I have always believed to be at the heart of any true psychotherapy, but as always, the issue is how deep is the psychotherapist capable of, and how deep is the client willing to go? The question to those reading is,how deep are you willing to go?

No thought can take you there. Only meditation can. True meditation is the exploration of knowing who you are at the deepest level. In fact, if that question isn’t the silent mantra of your meditation, then you are just resting, relieving stress, sitting cross legged, watching your breathing,trying to catch your mind as it wanders. Yes,this is valuable. But this is not the yoga of meditation.

I have always been inspired by the late psychologist, Sydney Jourard, who believed that psychotherapy was an exploration in what it is to be authentic as a person. Note, that he wasn’t exploring what it meant to be in -authentic. Most psychotherapy is an exploration of the in-authenticity of a person, all the ways that a person is neurotic. It expends great energy pointing out the places where the inauthentic,neurotic personality creates distress and difficulty. And that’s all well and good. That information is helpful. What it doesn’t get to, however, is what it is to be truly authentic, what it is to be whole and healthy, the mind that is called enlightened.

Buddhism teaches that what is called the rational mind is the source of all that is in authentic and unhealthy in humans. The rational mind is the realm of the ego, the place of ideas, and ideas can be anything. Christianity, Islam, Judaism,Capitalism,Communism, what is good and what is bad, what is right and what is wrong are just ideas. They are tools for conceptualizing possibilities. People mistake them for truths. While some do point to eternal truths, most do not. They are mental constructs that create a matrix of experience that we call reality and that we believe tells us who we are and what life is. We live inside this matrix mistaking it for reality. Voila! A personality is born living inside a culture. For better, for worse, in sickness and in health. This is you. This is your world. Or is it? These are the questions that Zen asks. “Who are you?” “What is the world?”

It could be said that the difference between Western therapy and Eastern meditational healing is that Western therapy agrees that the matrix image, the story you tell, is you. To an Eastern teacher of meditation this story is “illusion” or, in psychological terms, “delusion.” Ram Dass (a.k.a., Richard Albert, Ph.D.psychologist, of Stanford and Harvard Universities) has said that the difference between Western therapy and meditation is that we live inside a cell constructed by the ideas of our egoic minds and therapy helps rearrange and tidy up the cell, but we remain trapped inside the cell of these mental constructions. He goes on to say,the wisdom found through deep meditation is the door out of the cell.

Do you know who you are? What an achievement if you do! Are you living and being what you know? This is the greatest challenge. This is Zen. This is the door out of the cell. Do you have the skills and will to find and use the key? For this, a skillful and true teacher is invaluable.

“If you want to know the realm of enlightenment, you should make your mind as clear as space; detach from subjective imaginings and from all grasping, making your mind unimpeded wherever it turns…Buddhahood is the realm of the sacred knowledge found in oneself… You do not need paraphernalia, practice, or realizations to attain it…do not see Buddha in one phenomenon, one event, one body, one land, one being – see Buddha everywhere.” –Chinese Zen Master Dahui – (app. 10th Century)

Zen is the simplest of spiritual practices. Chinese Master Ying-an said, “Zen living is a most direct shortcut, not requiring the exertion of the slightest bit.” So simple. So difficult.

But the human mind does not want simplicity. The human mind does not want to be “clear as space” or detached from grasping. The human mind wants complexity. It wants constant stimulation and speculation. It wants to grasp. It wants to be special. It wants to be grand. It wants sacred knowledge to be secret and hidden so that it can be sought in secret texts and initiations and owned exclusively by the specially initiated. The human mind does not want enlightenment. The human mind wants religion. The human mind wants to make Zen another religion. So much paraphernalia, so many practices, so much seeking of special realizations.

“Buddhahood is the realm of the sacred knowledge found in oneself.” You already have it. There is nowhere else to seek. So we are dumbfounded. If there is nowhere else to seek, what do we do? How can we already have it, when we are so confused and crazy?

Having “the sacred knowledge” in oneself and living from it are two very different things. To find the “sacred knowledge” we must awaken from the hypnotic hold of what we confuse to be our minds and discover our essential Beingness. What we call mind is just ego, the culturally conditioned aggregate of thoughts that the mind contains that create the illusion of the separate “me”, and makes the world a panoply of separate objects. We have an egoic mind, useful as a tool to manipulate worldly objects, but we are not our egoic mind, disastrous as an identity and guide to our own and the world’s true nature.

The realm of sacred knowledge is not found in the egoic mind. It is found in the Beingness of our original nature before the conditioned contents of the ego covers it over. This is the awakened Buddhamind. It is not found “in one phenomenon, one body, one land, one being”, but in all phenomenon, bodies, lands and beings. It is the natural world just as it is, just as you are. And are not. This paradox of Being and ego is the human condition, and unraveling this paradox is the realm of Zen.

Are you in harmony with the natural world just as it is? Do you experience the wholeness and balance of the world, or do you struggle and connive and grasp in futile attempts to make the world the way you want it to be? And does this struggling and conniving work? No. It makes us angry and anxious, depressed and stressed, and it is killing the natural world. Would you call anger, anxiety, depression, stress and planetcide sane? Of course not. But it is “normal” if normal is a statistical point of gathering. So “normal” is quite insane, and Humanity continues being angry, anxious, depressed, stressed and killing the natural world (and each other), saying it is normal “human nature”.

Zen teaches us this is not so. Just “make your mind clear as space.” Then you’ll see.

In his transformative book, The power of Now , Eckhart Tolle points out that we make the mistake of being so caught up in our “life situation,” our ambitions and frustrations over what we believe will lead to a happy life, that we miss being meaningfully present for life. We mistake our narcissistic drama,the story of me, for Life, and of course, it isn’t.

Our life situation draws from our past experiences, creating the story of me. We erroneously mistake it as the only resource we have for our identity. We then project this identity into the future, where our story will play out its fulfillment or failure. Our mental landscape is mostly taken up with this drama, out of place in time. We compulsively review past events assessing the quality of this story and our significance in relationship to others. We likewise compulsively attempt to anticipate future events and how they will affect our status. When we relate to the present moment, it is mostly in the form of judgments, seeking to ascertain whether the circumstances of the moment favor or disfavor “me”. Our mental landscape is nearly completely preoccupied with the status of “me,” and with “my life situation.”

Tolle describes this insecure existential time traveling as normal, but quite crazy. As a result, we seldom are grounded in the present, rarely available for the beauty, depth, mystery and meaning of Life just as it is. We are largely unable to experience Life directly, where we are not the protagonist in our own drama without all of Life being measured against our self-absorbed desires. We are seldom able to experience the ineffable beauty, connectedness and peacefulness that is available when we experience that we are actually but a thread in the great tapestry that is Life.

Life is……. I ought to stop right there, but that would be just too enigmatic. Life is….everything, all possibility, and much more than we can imagine as possible. Life is Creation unfolding. It is mystery, wonder, balance and intricacy. Life is infinity. Life is manifestation in all of its subtle, complex, majestic and sometimes,terrible forms. And it is happening right here,right now, nowhere else. It is certainly not what we have going on in our heads.

And so, where are we? As our culture and society train us to do, we are caught in our personal drama, making up this life situation that we call our lives; past, future and, only very shallowly, present. Our obsession with our life situation makes it impossible for us to be truly present for Life, its mystery, wonder and power, where our lives truly unfold, in the eternal present moment. We use our own personal agenda and significance as our reference point for the center of the Universe. Consequently, we miss so much of what is truly meaningful and important. We live unfulfilled and unskillful lives when measured against the full potential of what Life actually offers us.

We miss Life not only by being caught mentally in the story of our personal life situation, but in the gossip that makes up most social conversation, comparing stories of drama,finding status in diminishing the status of others, or identifying with the achievement of those we admire. We are a culture where people live their lives projecting their imaginary life situation onto everything we come in contact with, projecting, projecting,projecting. We even believe spirituality is in praying, that is talking to God, speaking of what our life situation wants and needs, neglecting the very important necessity of meditating to listen for god’s answer, for God’s words have always been to set aside vanity,materialism, conflict, ego and self-absorption.

Then there are the virtual-reality life situations of media and culture that we are so addicted to. Mostly, the only times we allow ourselves to be in a receiving mode, we are absorbed in the virtual-life situations that media projects at us, reinforcing the image that all there can be is an egoic contest for life drama. We compete with each other in our conversations to establish whose life has the most drama, and we talk titillatingly about the latest in entertainment, seeking to turn the volume up louder and louder, hoping that what we lack in the direct living of Life, we can make up with ever more dramatic and sensational life situations, to the point where we even become bored with our fictions and seek still higher levels of stimulation in“reality” entertainment, the most unreal of all.

As for how to describe Life,even the words that can be used to describe it, are only pale forms of mind. Life is not in concepts, words, or in all the inspiring phrases of poetry and spiritual teaching. Life is Life. It requires we open our minds to it. Literally. This is the mystic event. Open and expand consciousness beyond situational thinking, lost in its time travel. Open into the fullness of this moment. This is the direct experience that all of Zen is a preparation for. Not lost in mental forms, but present with mind expanded and open to experiencing …….Life. Look beyond looking and see. Listen beyond listening and hear. Feel beyond feeling and touch. Open the mind and dissolve into Life.

Does this mean that we ought to quit our jobs, our families, friends and activities, our life situation? Certainly not. Not unless, these circumstances are truly frustrating not only our contact with Life, but are not even a satisfying life situation. Zen teaches us that we live in both our life situation and Life simultaneously, in our egoic separateness and our universal oneness. To live fulfillingly requires that we be deeply connected to Life while in our life situation. One way to understand Zen is that it is about skillfully balancing our life situation with Life. It is the recognition that we exist in these two dimensions simultaneously, and our humanity and life quality is accomplished in how we balance them.