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.