“The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.” “If it is not right, do not do it; if it is not true, do not say it.” – Marcus Aurelius

We live in precarious times.  It feels like the end of empire times, and I am increasingly struck by parallels to another such time, when the Roman Empire was in its final days.  Stable politics is threatened by voters becoming addicted to sensationalism and manipulated through our modern age’s “games of the coliseum” – internet and cable tv.  Truly devilish politics is taking place with authoritarian personalities seeking to destabilize American democracy in a blatant power grab while democrats seem unable to effectively answer. It’s all Faustian.  The planet’s ecological structure is destabilizing, sort of like having barbarians at the gates, and as it does, so too will human economic and social order while our society quibbles over ridiculous and superficial issues. 

The metaphor of Nero fiddling while Rome burned seems very applicable to our collective leadership, but particularly to the right-wing socio-political-religious movement that has erupted in this country.  Those who step forward urging temperance, responsibility, and compassion, advising that we look cooperatively to the very real problems that plague us rather than the emotional straw-dogs that dominate our politics are ignored if not ridiculed and attacked.  It feels like maliciousness and stupidity has occupied the forum at a time when sincerity, truth-telling, mutuality, and wisdom are what is required to move us beyond this morass into a new age for humanity.  As Marcus Aurelius, Stoic philosopher, and emperor of Rome from 161 – 180 AD, advised, it’s time to break free of the madness and to step forward insisting on saying what is true and doing what is right.  The times we live in are so precarious that it feels like we need to invent a whole new way for humans to be on the planet if we are to evolve as is necessary and not devolve into chaos, a dark age, in the coming century. 

For insight into how to live through such times I find myself looking to Marcus Aurelius living through his time when the most powerful political, economic, cultural, and military power in the world was unraveling.  Political forces that did not respect the wisdom and democratic traditions of the Greco-Roman culture had taken control for no other purpose than power and ego-aggrandizement and wielded that power with terrible selfishness and cruelty.  Ceasar had been assassinated 100 years earlier and politics had devolved into power-seeking narcissists manipulating the public, referred to as the “mob.” Roman culture had become shallow and decadent.  The gladiatorial games and other sensationalist entertainment from colosseums all over the empire were the key to gaining the attention, loyalty, and to swaying the mob.  

In the midst of this civil and moral decay, Marcus Aurelius took a very Buddhist middle way, the path of stoicism, honor, and wisdom.  He was unable to change the catastrophic course of the Empire’s collapse, but he found a vision of sanity for himself and for those who would listen amidst the swirling world of egoic excess all around them.   As the momentum for the fall of the empire was implacable, Aurelius’s politics and policies made no real difference, but he outlined what could be and what an individual who sees the madness can do to hold their balance through such times.

In the times we are currently living through it feels like we need such a path, one marked by stoicism, honor, and wisdom.  Although there are many individuals today walking the path of wisdom and compassion, our general American society and our world society show very little of these virtues in their values or behavior, certainly not in their economies or politics.  Modern culture follows the path of blatant, manipulative disinformation, egocentricism, competitiveness, self-indulgence, overwhelming materialism, greed, and sensationalism.  In contrast, the Stoics valued the virtues of truth, goodness, honesty, simplicity, courage, compassion, self-knowledge, and self-mastery, realizing that a well-lived life and a well-managed society required these virtues to be integrated into everyday and public life.  Such virtues are sorely neglected today, but they ought not be, and living by these values might well be called The Wisdom Way, the way that if followed could turn looming human tragedy into a human rebirth.

The Wisdom Way is about a profoundly realistic, rational, and compassionate approach to life, realizing moderation, dignity, respect, and a caring and appreciative state of mind as essential for a balanced life where emotions do not overrun us, and our interactions are always measured by their constructiveness rather than who wins some ego game.  The Wisdom Way also recognizes the importance of a deep spiritual life.  It is, as the ancient Stoics realized, in recognizing there is a supremely intelligent order to the Universe, known to them as logos, which forms a web of interconnection through Life and through us, all in perfect harmony and balance.  It is the antidote to humanity’s sickness of egoic confusion in defining oneself through separateness that causes so much personal and political instability and conflict, leading to valuing materialism, consumption, and competition over Nature, conservation, and cooperation. 

This Stoic perspective on spirituality is very similar to the non-dual perspective of the interconnecting net of Life that undergirds Eastern wisdom traditions like Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism.  Life becomes ongoing ceremony where one is always in recognition of the spiritual dimension of everyone and everything in connection.  From our society’s egoic perspective, we need religions and ceremonies to remind us of a spiritual dimension, yet, lost in our egocentricity and ego insecurity, we hardly ever touch the truly spiritual dimension, only saying prayers of petition, declaring identification with some religious sect and its hypocritical moralizing, performing ceremonial acts which are interpreted as necessary for the spiritual dimension to be favorable to our egoic desires.  Most religious identification, rather than pointing us toward transcendence of our cruel and selfish ways, seems to reinforce them. 

The truly wise and spiritual person lives in subtle ceremony all the time, constantly touching and revering the realm of the divine manifesting through everyone and everything, silently in blessing and gratitude.  Deity is not seen in some Godhead, but rather in Life itself, in everyone and everything.   As we live in a disintegrating civilization, it seems imperative that we bring a perspective of binding unity based in endless compassion into the new human society we must build.  The framers of our American Constitution were right in separating religion from politics, yet what is consistently missed is that the framing is filled with spirituality, calling for universal inalienable rights endowed by the Creator and calling us to more perfect union.  The right to the pursuit of happiness only needs to be reinterpreted out of materialism, competition, and consumerism into the right to basic security for all, extending even beyond the human into the Natural world, the source of all that supports and sustains us, not only materially, but spiritually as well.  For too many, the American ethos tragically has tended toward the notion of freedom as the freedom to exploit, and I do not believe this was in the minds of key founders, Stoics and Deists among them, truly spiritual and idealistic persons.

We can, and we must, reinvent human society, as it is built now on human egocentric foolishness that threatens to capsize everything.  We are stumbling along, valuing what is of really very little value – gaudy excess, power, riches, and luxury – having lost the soul of what it is to be alive and to be truly free.  Our lives have lost reverence, and what is life if it is not experienced with reverence?  All the wisdom traditions that have existed on the fringe of human power-mad civilizations from the beginning, have, as did the ancient Stoics, called on humanity to value moderation, balance, compassion, the basic and the good, to forgo greed and opulence, to stay close to our origin in Nature, living in reverence and awe of the miracle that is Life.  Does it not seem time to heed this wisdom?

For our individual and collective lives to make sense, we must make this return that is really the truest going forward.  We must look to the laws of Nature – balance, harmony, infinite diversity within unity, a reawakened sense of the sacred. We need not turn away from the best of our technology, our science that points us into the heart and secrets of Nature while creating safety and basic convenience.  We only need to redirect it into sustaining and deepening our connection and understanding with the natural world. We need to recognize the great new frontier it has opened before us that realizes consciousness as the underpinning of all existence.  Our science and technology need to be rededicated into celebration and support of the brilliance of the natural world, and make it the heart of the human world.  We are designed by the Universe to be exquisite instruments of subtle and complex consciousness, but heretofore we have squandered this gift in vain celebration of our own cleverness.  From out of the past, wisdom traditions from Buddhism to Stoicism call upon us to “wake up!” And how do we do this?  Marcus Aurelius shares with us in answer to this question this 2000-year-old wisdom: “The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it.”  Can you see the necessity of embracing necessary change, in rededicating and rebuilding our lives, individually and collectively to a new way of thinking, to making a new human civilization based in the values of wisdom and not ego’s values of competition, wealth and power?  It’s not really even a choice.  We must.  And the good news is that we can.

Within the fourth noble truth is found the guide to the end of suffering: the noble eightfold path. The eight parts of the path to liberation are grouped into three essential elements of Buddhist practice—moral conduct, mental discipline, and wisdom. The Buddha taught the eightfold path in virtually all his discourses, and his directions are as clear and practical to his followers today as they were when he first gave them. – Walpola Sri Rahula

Buddhism is a religion that concerns itself primarily with guiding people into spiritual and mental health, not with God or Heaven, souls, or afterlife.  It arises out of the Hindu tradition that holds as a given that God, soul, and afterlife are all contained within the unity that is the Universe, and there is a rich mythology of gods and magic and reincarnation that both Hinduism and Buddhism share, but Buddhism gives very little attention to such things.  Rather, what Buddhism holds as important is understanding humanity’s place and experience within and as an expression of the Universe, with, as Buddhists like to say, “what is,” and teaches that if we get this straight the rest takes care of itself.  Above all else, Buddhism strives for simplicity and practicality.  The Dalai Lama is known to answer the question as to the nature of his religion with one word: “kindness,” much the equivalent of Jesus saying it all comes down to love.

Rather than theology, Buddhism focuses primarily on human psychology and human ethics, for it is in these arenas that humanity’s problems arise.  It seeks ever-deepening insight into the why and how of the way we fall out of alignment with the Universe, with what is, with what Buddhism calls Dharma, and how we can find our way back.  The fountainhead of Buddhism, Siddhartha Gotama, a prince from a kingdom in northern India some 2600 years ago, set as his task to understand the nature of and the remedy for this malalignment, which Buddhism calls dukkha, the Pali language word that translates as human emotional pain or suffering, dissatisfaction, confusion, delusion.  He concerned himself with what it is about humans that causes them to make such a mess of their lives and their world, experiencing and expressing life in such confusing, destructive, painful, and out-of-balance ways like no other creature in Nature.  His interest was in understanding and correcting this human conundrum.  He is reported to have said, “I teach the nature of suffering and its remedy, nothing else.”  Not the usual topics of interest for a religion.

The myth of Siddhartha becoming the Buddha (Awakened or Enlightened One) has Siddhartha exploring all the philosophical, metaphysical, and religious teachings and practices of his day looking for the answers he sought, without success.  In both frustration and determination, legend has him sitting beneath a tree to meditate on his questions, vowing not to rise until he had figured out the dilemma of human life.  He sat and he meditated, it is generally taught, for 49 days during which he experienced the rising and passing of desire, fear, and self-doubt, the mind-states that seem to bedevil humans most, yet because he held to the composure and steadiness of his meditation, he was able to realize these states of mind as delusions created by the uniquely powerful human mind-realm of ego.  He further realized that the awareness witnessing these mind-states did not suffer, but could watch them come and go with equanimity.  He found the truth of who he was as being awareness, pure consciousness, and he realized further that this core of the human experience is not subject to confusion, but rather, is the seat of human wisdom, insight, and compassion, linking us to our origin as Universal consciousness manifested individually. 

With this epiphany, he became The Buddha.  (This is a very important legend, for it forms a template for a Buddhist’s practice, learning to hold well-centered, peaceful, inquiring awareness steadfastly, as ego’s desires, fears, and self-doubts pull at us.)  Finally, in a state of perfect peace and composure, filled with insight into the human condition, Siddhartha rose and gave his first teaching to five of his fellow seekers with whom he had lived the ascetic’s path.  He began by sharing his realization known as the Middle Way, that the way of life most conducive to happiness was neither through asceticism, the denial of the physical and emotional needs of a natural person, or through materialism, seeking to find well-being through possessions, status, hedonism, and emotional indulgences, but rather to hold to balance and moderation.  Then he gave them the centerpiece of Buddhism called The Four Noble Truths. 

He taught first that the human condition is unique in that it generates states of unhappiness, emotional suffering, and dissatisfaction (dukkha) that no other creature experiences.  He secondly shared his observation that this suffering arises through humans attaching to or clinging to a false sense of self, their ego, which lives through ITS attachments, desires, and aversions.  He pointed out how humans seek meaning and happiness through ego-inflating ideas, pursuits, affiliations, and possessions which are meant to fill this hole in their sense of well-being but ultimately fail to do so.  He thirdly then gave the good news: that he had figured out that this suffering was not necessarily the way things had to be, that there was a way out of this unnatural state.  He taught that because this sense of self is false, its ideas concerning how to fulfill itself are then likewise false.  This leads to the fourth teaching, which said humans need to cultivate and realize their core sense of self, their “original mind” of awareness, through meditation and mindfulness, releasing attachment to identity through the ego.  He emphasized that within us is a pure mind that knows the right way to live so as not to create and experience so much suffering, that it just needs cultivating. 

Being a very practical person, Buddha then outlined eight areas of life that a person could focus on getting right so as to live a happier, saner, more spiritual life, and this teaching was called the Noble Eightfold Path.  The Buddha instructed that a person, in order to live a noble and peaceful life, must cultivate what was called Right Understanding, Right Thought, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness, and Right Concentration, grouping these intothree broader categories of wisdom, (thought and understanding), moral conduct (speech, action, and livelihood), and mental discipline (effort, mindfulness, and concentration).  Here, it is very important to understand that the “right” in these teachings is not a dictate from the authority of The Buddha, but rather realizations passed on by him as to how a person comes into alignment with themself and the world, with what will work to relieve our unhappiness and confusion.  Impressively for a religion, Buddhism teaches that it is up to each of us to come to our own conclusions, confident that with “right,” that is, dedicated and skillful, practice and application of the Buddha’s teaching, the same conclusion will be reached – that it works.

Right Understanding means understanding things the way they really are.  Of course, to do this we must be willing to suspend what we THINK we know about the way things are, realizing that mostly we live inside ideas ABOUT life coming from our families, cultures, societies, and reference groups.  The way we understand things as 21^st century Americans is dramatically different from the way 15^th century Native Americans understood things, and this is true from each culture and historical time to other cultures and historical times.  And the same is true for all our psychological, social, and political ideas.  Right to me is never 100% the same as right for you, and sometimes the overlap of “right” between people may be very little.  We have to be willing to come back to some baseline we all share, and for Buddhism, that baseline is our capacity for awareness without pre-judgment, our clear perception into purely the what-is, as best we can manage.  We must look deeply in order to see clearly.

Right Thought means realizing that the fundamental human error is that we think about almost everything using our own self and beliefs as the centerpiece and frame of reference.  We cling to our self-centeredness and build our world out of it.  Inflated and grandiose, or deflated, anxious, and depressed – either way, we make life about us.  Right Thought realizes the powerful analytical capabilities of the human mind, advising us to approach each issue of life as “the thing in itself” with as little self-referencing and pre-conception as possible, using precise perception and logic.  This means letting go of opinions, and of selfishness, and of the egoic delusion of our separateness.  It reorients how we think toward acknowledging and exploring the undeniable truth of the interconnectedness and interdependence of all things.  This leads us to compassion, which concludes in the necessity for kindness, caring, and responsibility as the ways that bring happiness into the world, including for ourselves.  It is really quite logical.

Right Speech, Action, and Livelihood then naturally arise out of Right Understanding and Right Thought, and comprise the ethical aspects of this teaching.  As we learn to bring ever-refined levels of presence, thought and understanding to our experience of existence, the interconnectedness, the unity, the interdependence of all aspects of life within the harmonious whole that is this world becomes increasingly evident.  This leads one inevitably to the conclusion that we must strive to live in, as Buddhism terms it, ahimsa, and metta, nonviolence and loving-kindness.  Truthful, kind, and responsible speech, non-violent, honest, respectful, helpful, and skillful action, and honorable and honest livelihood are essential ingredients of an enlightened person’s life, and of an enlightened society.  Our eyes are opened to the careless harm we bring from our egocentrism, and the paradox becomes evident that the way we bring happiness into the world for others and how we find our own true happiness is the same.  There is no real peace for one who brings violence to others or for a society based in doing violence either in the human or natural realms.  More logic. Right Effort, Meditation, and Mindfulness acknowledge that if we are to overcome the “wrong” conditioning of our egocentric upbringing and culture, we’re going to have to work at it.  This path recognizes that without the development of a mind that knows itself, knows its multidimensionality with subtlety, clarity, and depth, that has the steadiness, insight, and perceptive capacities to focus into our own mind and the world-as-it-is, we have very little chance, no matter how much we agree with and desire these qualities, of achieving them.  We must “awaken” our core perceptive, wise, and compassionate mind, the mind behind the discursive, judgmental, chaotic, and selfish mind of ego, to bring it forward as our true self.  We must realize and actualize our true self as awareness.  Achieving this, the egoic mind of thoughts and emotions can then be employed skillfully and with the “right” attitudes and understandings to live a life in which we neither create nor fall victim to unnecessary suffering.

“Identification with your mind (ego) creates an opaque screen of concepts, labels, images, words, judgments, and definitions that blocks all true relationship… Thinking has become a disease.  Disease happens when things get out of balance…. Note: the mind is a superb instrument if used rightly.  Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive.” – Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

Ever since Eckhart Tolle wrote his ground-breaking book on healing the human condition, just about the same time that interest in Buddhist and non-dual spirituality/psychology began growing in our culture, there has been an idea among some who are seeking to grasp these elusive but immeasurably valuable concepts, that ego is a bad thing, even that it is to be gotten rid of.  In and of itself, of course ego cannot be a bad thing and certainly cannot be eradicated.  Any conscious creature has an ego.  It is the necessary mental faculty of the more advanced nervous system organisms for interacting with their environment and fulfilling needs, while expressing individuality. 

The squirrels in our yards demonstrate individuality, and have rudimentary egos, but squirrels interacting and gathering nuts is a distinctly different level of egoic action from human beings creating economies, governments, religions, technologies, universities, and works of art – or worrying about what others think of us, what we think of ourselves, or whether we are we good enough.  Ego in a human is the realm of thought and emotion, of language and mathematics, of tools and invention, of complex social interaction and creativity. Ego is also the seat of human neurosis.

Speaking metaphorically, the ego creates a kind of shell or filter around our inner-core of conscious Beingness, or True-Self, as Buddhism terms it.  This core is, if you will, the light, the energy, of what Eastern philosophy believes is the individualized manifestation of the great Universal Consciousness.  It is, as Buddhism puts it, our “original mind,” clear and wise and compassionate, and this core mind of Being knows its connection with the Source of Life and all Life.  This is why it knows harmony and connection as our and THE underlying nature of all things and the true experience of spirituality.  Ego knows none of this.  In place of true spirituality, ego creates religions for worship of egoic constructs of the divine, one person’s different from another’s, the differences separating them, sometimes even making them hate each other.

 A neurotic personality, then, is one in which the minor and major traumas of experience have thickened and shaped the contours of a person’s egoic shell in particularly distorted ways so as to filter consciousness energy in a manner which distorts experience coming in and expression going out.  This is where the problem with ego begins. The result is the shaping of a personality manifesting a reality distorted by anxious, depressive, paranoid, narcissistic, or histrionic, etc. styles of perception and expression.  

We can see that ego, in modern humans, is typically very much out of balance within the totality of a person’s mind when its fear-based ideas and emotions begin to take up much of the person’s attention through their life.  And what is it afraid of? Simply stated, not being enough. It is filled with, as Buddhism calls them, “delusional” egocentric ideas about who we are and what the world is.  These delusional ideas drive us more-or-less insane and can become more-or-less destructive, depending on the degree to which distorted ego-experience has come to dominate.  

Humans have such a problem as mental illness because our society, our economies, governments, religions, technologies, universities, and creative endeavors have come to be principally in the service of that which created them, human ego, and are made of ego’s delusional ideas.  Contemporary life largely functions as virtual realities spun out by competing persons, institutions, and pursuits that are quite anti-human and anti-life, self-perpetuating for their own power and glory.  Getting caught in this unending world of top-dog-underdog, zero-sum gaming, can and does drive us humans quite crazy without our even realizing it, thinking all this is “normal.”  Only the extreme examples of insecurity caused by egos out of balance get acknowledged and then called neurosis or mental illness.

The functions of ego – thought and emotion – become badly out of control as ego assumes supremacy in our minds, taking over our sense of self and reality, creating mental imbalance, for ego really is not up to the task.  Ego, when it takes over a personality, is riddled with insecurity, in a sense, knowing itself to be a sham, yet unwilling to admit it. Importantly, these dysfunctional ego states happen even more crudely and dangerously in whole cultures or societies, creating macro-egos.  A feedback loop is established of unhealthy individual egos creating unhealthy macro-ego societies and social institutions, creating more unhealthy individual egos, making even more unhealthy macro-ego societies, and so the madness escalates.

To understand ego, it MUST be understood that ego is a faculty.  It is in a sense a “thing,” much like our hands are faculties and thus things, and when a person experiences their identity through ego they experience themselves as a thing, an object, and all the world about them as objects.  The more intensely an individual perceives and operates from this distorted view of life as competing separate objects, the more imbalanced such a person becomes, and this misperception is at the very core of the tragedy of human experience.  We are no longer experiencing ourselves or the world as alive and interconnected; rather, we experience ourselves as not enough and the world as not enough and the neurotic distortions of anxiety, depression, anger, insecurity, greed, and alienation take over our lives.

So, as we approach the question of how to cure neurosis, we have to look, as Buddhism does, to energizing and strengthening that which is the essence of mental health, the healthy consciousness core of a person, sometimes called witnessing awareness.  Then, this clear and mindful energy of awareness can soften, smooth, and clarify the ego-shell, wisely and compassionately seeing its distortions, both regarding ourselves and the world.  Then, through the miracle of this mindful examination, the ego begins to heal, allowing the ego to function more naturally as is Creation’s intention, a faculty of mind with extraordinary creative capabilities.

Ego then can release its claim as our identity and is restored to its appropriate place and function as the intermediary human mental faculty between awareness and the world, a kind of filter and creative capacity.  It is no longer directed by its own distorted intention to make more of itself based in its trauma and fear of not being enough, but rather as a skillful and faithful servant of awareness.  This brings perception and expression that is closer to the true nature of reality and is thus, less neurotic. These faculties of hands and egos can then be in service of higher truths than the malign intents of a traumatized and delusional ego. 

Our salvation and sanity lies in recognizing and energizing our core consciousness, this True Self, what some might call Spirit, as the very essence of who we are, bringing it forth in healing and balanced relationship with our ego.  Now, no longer so blocked and distorted by a dysfunctional, frightened, and traumatized ego, our core Self, or Spirit, can radiate from our center of Being.  We can connect with the underlying nature of Spirit in all that is around us, even penetrating the distorted egos of our fellow humans to see and connect with them at the level of their true core and Spirit.  We are now no longer lost in our false sense of separateness, but rather restored to our sense of connection with all that is.  We are restored to our natural spiritual and mental health.  We are no longer afraid we are not enough or that the world is not enough for we now know we are an individual expressing and experiencing the One that is All. As the best way to defend against pathogens in the physical world is to strengthen the body’s immune system, so too, awareness is our psychological immune system warding off neurotic distortion, allowing us to experience the difficulties of life not as traumas but as challenges to our deeper Nature, which when met, strengthen us.   Our “spiritual” practice then is to engage the moment and the activity of the moment as if our full whole-hearted presence as awareness and our sincerity of action is the key to spiritual and mental health, for it is.  Our healthy spirit and primal intelligence can then be in creative and healthy relationship with our ego and the world, manifesting what in the East is called an enlightened being, which is, in truth, simply and naturally, a mentally and spiritually healthy human being.

Modern education is very much oriented around external things, material things. So in the West there’s not much concept of training our mind… All ignorance is based on appearances. In order to reduce ignorance, we must investigate deeper reality… The Indian tradition, particularly the knowledge tradition, [offers] a lot of explanation about the mind and destructive emotions. So now a number of scientists are paying attention to Buddhist philosophy and Buddhist psychology. I hope we will take modern science and ancient Indian psychology and combine the two. I think we can serve humanity more effectively and more usefully that way.  And we can do it without religion. This is just knowledge about psychology, about emotions. It’s simply how to create peace of mind and a happy life, and ultimately, how to create a peaceful world, a happy world. India’s tradition is secular. We can teach the secular way in schools.” – Dalai Lama

I taught meditation, mindfulness, and Buddhist psychology in a university setting, and unfailingly, with each semester, a number of students would voice two things.  First, somewhere near the end of the term, several would tell me that they had been in counseling and/or on medication for attention-deficit disorder or for depression, or anxiety since they were, sometimes, in grade school, and they would tell me that the perspective and practices they had learned in this course had helped them more.  The second thing that some students would invariably ask was, “Why wasn’t this taught to us when we WERE in grade school?” – To which I could only answer that it would seem that our society wants education that is designed for children to find their way occupationally into our society, and that reflection on the nature of self and society and the training of the mind in stability and self-examination, all of which meditation and mindfulness develop, is not seen as useful or necessary.  Rather that our society’s values require function-trained workers, hyper-stimulation, and anxiety-driven ambition to maximize productivity and profit.

I also pointed out to my students that our society doesn’t really have a mental health profession so much as a mental illness profession and that Western psychology is only beginning to recognize the immense value of meditation and mindfulness for managing psychological maladies.  Mental health in Western medicine is generally understood as a relative lack of mental illness symptoms while the clinical practice of psychology and psychiatry focuses on minimizing the disabling effects of mental illness – a pretty low bar for defining mental health.  To a Buddhist, mental health means enlightenment or being “awakened,” which could be looked at as truly knowing oneself and the nature of life down to the deepest level, a sort of ultra-sanity.  It was this perspective and the experience of learning how to steady and calm their minds while being constructively reflective that the students seemed to appreciate.  They felt saner for having taken the class.

Students would also sometimes comment that meditation wasn’t what they had thought it was at all, that they thought meditation was about entering into some thoughtless state of perfect bliss.  While this can be true at advanced levels of practice as the essential unity of all things is experienced, at the level they were being taught, meditation was more about learning their inherent capacity to sit peacefully and enquiringly WITH their thoughts and emotions.  Like fish being taught about the existence of water, they were being taught about that which we all live within – basic awareness – yet our society and our education fail to give notice to at all.  They were being taught that a meditation in which they were unable to achieve a fully peaceful, quiet mind can sometimes be the most productive and useful meditation because of the important insights that can be achieved and the practice gained at quieting an unruly and troubled mind.  I directed them to notice that while they might not be able to achieve perfect peacefulness, they were able to achieve some greater measure of peace, that they had the capacity to calm and center themselves even while experiencing turmoil.  They were being taught that meditation is for calming, centering, observing, and learning about the mind, not suppressing it.  They also learned that sitting meditation was not all there is to this practice, that the sitting meditation is training and preparation for bringing a peaceful, non-reactive, inquiring, and insightful mind into their active lives through the practice known as mindfulness.  They were learning about real mental health, real sanity.

I shared with my students my belief that perhaps the greatest of Western psychologists, Carl Jung, uniquely DID give us a practical and applicable definition of mental health in noting that the human mind functions in four ways – it thinks, feels emotion, generates sensory experience, and has intuitive insight, and its energy moves both outwardly in extraversion and inwardly in introversion, and that mental health, what he called individuation, was accomplished in the relative balancing of these four mental functions and two directions.  I suggested to the students that they had lots of training in thinking – that’s what schools do – and that our society also places a great deal of importance on feeling and expressing our emotions, and that these are the mental functions that western psychology focuses upon, making sure they don’t get completely out of control. What they had next-to-no experience with, however, was systematic recognition and development of their sensation and intuition capacities.  This, just by our cultural conditioning, makes us very lopsided in our mental development and prone to psychological instability.

As Americans, they had also been encouraged to be extraverted, to express themselves, and to believe that quietness, introversion, was often viewed negatively and called shyness – which can then sometimes turn into awkwardness as the introverted child experiences that their reluctance, even cluelessness, as to how to engage in boisterous self-expression – is viewed as a problem.  This then can sometimes result in the child internalizing this sense of not belonging and being “odd,” and can lead to alienation, even depression, anxiety, and anger problems.  I shared with them that introversion is not a problem, merely a way of processing awareness, and a very valuable way indeed, leading to the capacity for insight unavailable to the strongly extraverted person.  I could see the notably introverted students taking particular notice of this, warming up to the course even more.

What is not being taught in our schools is that proper management of our thoughts and emotions requires the application of the fourth function, intuition, the silent intelligence of awareness, the mental function that also gives rise to insight, creativity, and spiritual experience, and that like introversion, the whole notion of intuition is generally discouraged as suspect in our society.  Also neglected in our education is HOW to achieve the quiet presence necessary to access the intuitive dimension through directing awareness into sensation – into what is being seen, heard, and felt physically at increasingly subtle levels.  What is not being taught and valued is the skill of quiet, focused self-inquiry necessary for us to recognize the dimension of awareness and the insights that arise within it.  These are skills of mind that are taught through meditation and mindfulness, learned when we are instructed in sitting quietly, relaxed, yet alert, focusing into the subtle sensations of our own breathing and the body sitting, noticing that as we focus into these subtle sensations, a profound sense of presence and of being the intelligent watcher of the sensations, thoughts and emotions occurs.  Our educational system teaches none of this.

With these skills we can thus gradually begin to sense our true identity exists in the silent witnessing awareness of our thoughts, emotions, and sensations rather than our being the thoughts, emotions, and sensations as our culture implies to us.  We begin to have the insight that we are awareness that has a human mind and body, and that thoughts and emotions are faculties, not our identity any more than is our body.  We can begin to realize that silent awareness is the source of insight, intelligence and creativity that can then be brought into the world through our thoughts (words), emotions and actions.  What is not being taught is even the existence of the intuitive dimension of mind that is the source of mental health and skill with mind and actions in the world.  What is not being taught is how to train the mind, along with the body, so as to be a healthy and complete human being.

I have, at times, with this column, veered from topics specific to what might be generally considered the theory and practice of a contemporary Zen life into social commentary, into the terrible mess human society finds itself.  I also did so with my classes because there is nothing that is not the theory and practice of Zen.  Zen is life, all aspects and dimensions of life.  Zen is an expression of a branch of Buddhism known as Mahayana Buddhism, sometimes referred to as the Path of the Bodhisattva, sometimes called Engaged Buddhism, for this is Buddhism meant to fully engage the realities of life.  In this tradition, a bodhisattva is someone dedicated to both their own awakening AND the awakening, or freedom from unnecessary emotional suffering, of all beings – for in a very real sense we ARE one being – the species of human being.  Not evangelical or proselytizing, the Mahayana tradition simply makes available to those who are ready the insights and skills necessary to manage a human life in a completely sane manner while fully engaged with human society.  It is dedicated to the development and evolution of human society through the development and evolution of the individuals who comprise the society.  The idealism and yearning for positive social action in my students resonated strongly with this philosophy.

Buddhist philosophy/psychology teaches that humans have become mentally unstable, creating destructive societies, because we have lost touch with our own nature, the kind of harmony that all non-human beings experience simply being themselves, manifesting their own true nature.  Buddhism recognizes that there is a problem for humans due to a capacity that other creatures lack in sufficient strength to dominate their experience as it does in humans, this being the abstracting mind and a highly developed cerebral cortex generating complex thinking and emotion.  Buddhism recognizes, as did Carl Jung, that the thinking and emotion functions comprise the experience and expression of ego, the sense of a separate self, and sees that humans have not properly integrated this capacity with their own deeper nature, experienced through sensation and intuition. Buddhism recognizes that ego-dominated experience leaves us feeling disconnected and out of balance, prone to dissatisfaction and confusion, and that this imbalance is what causes human existence to be so problematic.  We become dominated by unruly, unwise, uncompassionate thoughts and emotions built around the ego’s cravings, leading to harmful individual and collective actions and social policies. And here we come back to Carl Jung’s formulation for human mental health.  Humans, in their primordial stage of evolution functioned mostly through sensation and intuition, living in direct contact with and finding their identity in nature, not particularly developed in complex thinking or emotional expression.  Conversely, in the civilized phase of human evolution, the sensation and intuition functions have become sorely neglected as the human ego has taken over, thinking, and emoting us into ever more complex personal and social lives until it’s all quite crazy.  Buddhism’s answer, like Jung’s, is to reawaken the sensate and intuitive dimensions, along with skill in introversion, balancing our thinking, emotive, and extraverting capacities, thus fulfilling our true and balanced human nature.  This is what meditation and mindfulness can accomplish and this is how humanity’s mature evolution can be realized, and thus, individual, and collective sanity.  My students liked all this and expressed their gratitude, voicing regret at its lack in their education.  As the Dalai Lama pointed out, while the source of this philosophy, psychology, and practices may be Buddhism, this is not a religious issue, it is a secular necessity, and my students agreed.

We sat together the forest and I

Merging into silence

Until only the forest remained. – Li Po  (8^th century Chinese poet)

Come to a beautiful spot in nature.  You can journey to a special isolated and beautiful spot or, if you are as fortunate as I am, there is a place at or near your home that fulfills the essential characteristics.  Let it be somewhere that nature is bountiful and playful, yet mysterious and deep.  Let it be a day of blue sky and white clouds, perhaps with a gentle breeze.  Let it be a place where you can have solitude or at least relative solitude with only an occasional passer-by.  Let it be a place with trees where the breeze is caressing and playing the leaves and branches of the trees as if they are harps. Let it be a place where there are birds singing, maybe crows cawing, maybe squirrels scampering through the trees.  Flowers, ferns, moss or interesting stones, fallen branches or logs will enhance the magic of the place.  Perhaps it will be a place with a brook flowing and singing, or a waterfall, a small waterfall that does not overwhelm the other sounds, but rather is an instrument in the orchestra.  – Or – This “forest” may be looking out from your porch or deck, or a place in your yard.  It might even be inside, in a room looking out a window, or even in a room with plants and pictures, or whatever.  What is important is that this “forest” be a place of solitude and comfort to you.

Sit. Feel your own breathing and body sensations. Bring your full attention into this moment sitting in your “forest.”   Look with soft and loving eyes.  Listen with keen and appreciative ears.  Feel with your whole being.  Feel with your soul.  Breathe so deeply into this moment that you realize that breath is Life, and you share in Life with all that is breathing around you.  You breathe in oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide, as does every creature.  The plants and trees around you breathe in carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen.  We breathe together making Life.   This air about us is the medium for Life; it connects us in Life.  We are within the perfect balance and harmony that is the Universe at a dimension larger than our personal likes and dislikes, good fortune and misfortune.  This is refuge.  This is home.

Eckhart Tolle answers the great Zen question, “Who are we?” by replying, “the space of the moment arising in awareness.”  Allan Watts answers the same question, “The Universe peering into itself from billions of points of view.” And elsewhere you may encounter, “the Universe having a human experience.”  We are the “forest.”  We are consciousness entering into an intersection of space and time through the biological technology that is a human-being. 

We are an organism evolved by the Universe over 14 billion years to have eyes and ears and senses and a nervous system and the most complex organization of matter in the known Universe that is the human brain generating an experience in consciousness called mind.  We actually have the remarkable ability to sit and open our field of personal consciousness to be this moment, sharing with all that likewise is arising in the space of this moment.  Where?  in Eternity, of course – and – right where we are sitting, where Eternity is entering into the particular. 

Our biology with its sense organs creates perceptions that create the experience of mind, that creates the idea of a separate self, yet we are never not the arising moment and all it contains.  How could we not be?  How could we not be this experience shared with all that co-arises with us?  Yet because we have never been culturally affirmed to be this inclusive consciousness, this perspective eludes us.  Our culture only affirms the idea of our being a separate self with all its worries and insecurities.  We have lost touch with what is primary, with what is real beneath what we believe to be real.  All around us, within and through us is the “space of the moment,” the energy of consciousness, which like the air, connects and brings forth the space of Life “arising in awareness” shared with all that is likewise arising.

Ancients and mystics of all generations have known that a doorway into the mystical, into a deeper level of what is real, is through the senses, through directing finely focused attention into both the particulars and the vastness of the moment.  An ancient Zen story tells of a very eager but over-intellectualizing student asking the Zen teacher to advise as to how to enter into Zen.  The old sage directed the student to the very distant sound of a stream, saying, “Listen, listen.”  At first the student had a difficult time being sufficiently still and quiet, but with a little breath consciousness and centering, was able at last to hear the faintest sound of a stream. The teacher then assured, “You can enter into Zen from there.”  And when Zen Master Ikkyu was asked, “What is Zen?” He answered, “Attention.”  When asked to elaborate, he reiterated, “Attention, Attention, Attention.” 

What is Zen?  Zen is Life.  What are we?  We are usually distracted blurs off in our neurotic minds forgetting that we too are Life.  This is why we need Zen.  The path of Zen is to get us out of our neurotic minds and back into Life, and for this, we need to bring our attention fully into Life.  We need to bring our full attention, utilizing our senses, into the moment.  We need to realize the immediacy and the vastness, the multidimensionality and the boundarylessness of “Here and Now.”  This moment.  Attention!  Not anxious and darting attention, but a courageous and curious attention, the attention of a mystic looking into the deepest secrets of Life. Stillness looking into stillness, yet the stillness is flowing with secrets and meaning.  As Li Po so poignantly expressed, it is to merge into silence with the forest until only the forest remains.  This means entering through the gateway of the physical senses into another neglected sense, the sense of intuition, the silent under-field of intelligent and all-connecting consciousness that is what is called to when the Zen master points us to our original mind.  This is what it is to enter into Zen. 

Yet we do not live isolated in a natural forest.  We have responsibilities and relationships.   We live in houses with yards in communities in towns, maybe in a city.  We live surrounded by artificial structures and people hurrying about fulfilling their roles within a society.  A modern Zen addresses this as the forest and the mountain stream.  An ancient Zen sage when asked “What is Zen?” replied, “Everyday life.” Only now everyday life is not 8^th century China or 10^th century Japan, it is 21^st century America.  Zen is still Zen.

Now let us return to our idyllic setting and query as to why this setting facilitated an experience we might call transcendental in that it transcended our usual way of experiencing ourself in the world.  Whereas in our day-to-day life the boundary of “me” and “other” is pretty well fixed and strong, when in that magical setting, the boundaries softened considerably, perhaps as in Li Po’s poem, dissolving completely.  How did that happen?  Was it the trees that made it happen, or the breeze, or the brook, or the birds?  Upon consideration we have to realize that no, these elements could not have been the source of the transcendent experience, only the stimulus.  We are our own source in infinite connection with Nature and all Existence.  How could we not be?  The forest in its overwhelming beauty only allowed our egoic mind to relax enough for us to let down the barrier of our conditioned way of living through thinking.  And there we were, our senses wide open, the forest that contained a human being along with the trees, the ferns, the birds, the moss and fallen logs.

To live a contemporary Zen, we show up in the world, the world as-it-is, now not an idyllic mountain forest, but the forest of our lives, living, feeling, seeing, listening into the particulars and the vastness, the multidimensionality and the boundarylessness, our senses wide open and receptive. We don’t think about it.  Not yet.  We let the silence, the stillness of “attention,” open us into an understanding deeper than thought.  We allow the space for “knowing” to arise out of not-knowing, just as Li Po knew the forest.  We are Life experiencing and knowing Life.  After a measure of sitting in the knowing, now we can think.  We can think deep and clear, searching for words that approximate what we know and strategies for actualizing what we know.  And now we can act.  We can act as Nature acts.  Alan Watts said that to live in Zen is to be as unaffectedly human as a tree is unaffectedly a tree.  To live everyday life as a very identifiable “me” while simultaneously being the mysterious Zen “nobody,” remaining merged in the silence with “the forest,” is to live Zen.

This is the mystical realm of Zen, and the doorway is through the senses and the senses are right where we are, not wandering off to other places and times as does the mind.  Here – right where we are – in the particular and the vastness.  What is the particular?  It is looking deeper and deeper into the detail and seeing how all the detail fits together into something larger that fits into something larger and something still larger.  Deeper and larger, realizing “here” is just a point in the unfolding of the Everything, down into the subatomic and out into the Cosmos.  Here we sit.  When we truly can see ourselves and all “things” as they actually are, both in our/ itself and in our/its endless relationships, we have arrived at the doorway of Zen. And where is that?  Where else could it be other than Here.  Here is where we and all the secrets of the Universe come together.  Where else could it be? Ah…… This is Zen.   

“Being must be felt. It can’t be thought.” “In today’s rush we all think too much, seek too much, want too much and forget about the joy of just Being.”  –  “You must “Become conscious of being conscious.” ― Eckhart Tolle

The Zen Master exhorts, “This!”  and we are puzzled.  “Sensei, What is ‘This?’”  “This!” Is the reply, arms arcing open.   “The breeze caressing the trees.  The fresh shades of green to the growth of Spring.  The scent of pollen in the air.  This.  Look around you.  Listen.  Feel.  This.  ‘This’ is you and me standing here looking at each other striving to understand one another.  It is the sky, the Earth, Life, this little flower.  It is this breath, this look in my eye.  This.”

And then you realize there is only “This” – as vast as the universe and as focused as a drop splashing into a puddle or a leaf on a tree.  “This” is the wispy branches the leaves dance upon.  It is the wind, the tree, and the tree against the sky. It is the sky.  It is the entirety of the scene of the moment and it is focusing upon the smallest detail.  It is me and it is you and it is the next person our journey passes.  All this, and everything, is the “This!” the sensei is calling us to.

The morning owl hoots.
There’s a chill
moving to warmth.
Birds are chirping.
The tree branches are stirred in the breeze
as a squirrel scampers about.
I raise coffee to my lips,
its aroma announcing its approach,
my hands holding its warmth.
The sun is low among
light clouds in the sky.
The breeze stirs again,
My face is cooled
yet warmed in the sun’s growing light
as Eternity shimmers,
holding us all.

The question is, are you paying attention to all of “This” or are you too caught in your wandering mind?  For too many, far too often, our sense of life is lived looking through and past Life, looking superficially while our mind is occupied with thinking about ourselves and the stories running in our mind over other concerns, all played out in time.  We are mentally in the past and future.  We do not SEE the World we move through.   Nor do we truly see the fellow Beings of the World we encounter on our journey.  We do not journey with Life.  We move through Life. We are an object passing other objects, getting……. somewhere.  But where we get is never enduringly satisfying or fulfilling because we are looking with the eyes of ego.  We are an object interacting with objects.  We seem always to be looking past or through what really matters, this moment in Life – This!

We are caught in the mental realm of the ego, a mental construct of a person, and the eyes of ego are the eyes of desire, of aversion and self-doubt.  Everything is measured in its desirability or aversion to this ego-self, caught in its sense of separateness and insecurity.  And there is never enough of it or me.  We doubt ourselves and we doubt the World – and it takes great arrogance and self-absorption to doubt the World – yet ego is exactly that arrogant and self-absorbed.  Buddhists call this dukkha; it is suffering and dissatisfaction. 

Redirect your eyes.  Come back to “This” that has been greatly overlooked.  Look deeply and sincerely.  Look with eyes of wonder, look to see the Life within the focus of our gaze, look with your deepest Being and you will see Beingness and connection and Life everywhere.  Don’t look out AT Life.  Look from within Life, as Life.  This is who we are.  What else could we or any expression of Life be?  The result of such seeing will be numinous, it will be wonder and amazement, and the felt sense will be of the deepest gratitude.  Life is.  There is no abstraction to Life.  It is Here and it is Now.  And it is Always.  It is everything.  It is infinite individuality and it is infinite connectedness and unity.  It cannot exclude you or me for we are within Life.  We are manifestations of Life, and Life manifests as infinite diversity through infinite connectedness in the unity of Existence.  I am.  We are.  Life is.  This!

Yet we do not see.  We are too busy and distracted, caught mentally in some story we are telling ourselves about who we are and what the world is, all coming out of the past and projected into the future.  This is the mind of ego creating a filter, a screen of projected ideas about the World through which we see the World, and the World becomes just flat and thin and superficial.  We are only looking for the elements of the World that fit into our story of desire and aversion.  The depth, the beauty, the luminescence, the connectedness, the wonder, the miracle is not seen.  It is all lost, dimmed and blurred by the spinning thoughts about the narrative that fills our consciousness.

Eckhart Tolle tells us we must “Die to the past every moment.”  He tells us to “…Feel the power of this moment and the fullness of Being. Feel your presence.”  He is telling us to let go of any absolute assumptions.  Yes, the present will TEND to be an extension of that which is past, and the future will TEND to be reenactments of what we think and do now – yet – in this present moment, possibilities that we are missing exist.  In fact, Infinity exists.  The World exists always in its vastness and in its beautiful suchness and thusness, yet unless we come into the moment with the eyes of Being, with the level of absolute non-thought presence Tolle is calling us to, we will only see Life through our own shallow story.  We will be unable to …Feel the power of this moment and the fullness of Being.

We can read teachings such as Tolle’s and Buddhism and think, this sounds good, but “How?”  How do we actualize this Nirvana they are pointing to?  Tolle tells us, “Rather than being your thoughts and emotions, be the awareness behind them.” – And here, we may find our mind saying – “What?!”  We have nothing in our education or psychologies that makes sense of this statement.  Yet we know there is truth here. 

If you can notice mental activity, you must realize there is a dimension of consciousness that is noticing.  You can also notice how when the mind is thinking something, we sometimes experience a silent sense telling us whether the thought is worthwhile or not – a sense that is not a thought. Yet it seems to be more intelligent, more insightful than the dimension of mind thinking the thoughts.  This is the dimension of Being.  It is the silent intelligence behind the thoughts, an intelligence that directs our hands to delicate tasks, that causes our heart to beat and our lungs to breathe.  It is all our organs and the mystery of a thousand systems and processes that is our body functioning with miraculous precision.  The body works thusly – with no thought – a silent sentience directing and harmonizing it all.  Yet we never consider this precision or realize that the mind, when left to its natural state, must likewise be this perfect, for mind and body are one, as are me, you, everyone and the World.  All “This” is profoundly connected and in harmony.  Life is not shallow and neither are we.  Life is deep, multi-layered, and luminescent and so are we, but we must come out from behind the ego filter that dulls everything as it seeks only the fulfillment of its agenda.

Come into the moment with eyes and ears and senses open and without commentary.  See.  Hear.  Feel.  This will bring the mind to silence.  Then – look deeper, listen more keenly, feel more subtly.  “This!”  Breathe consciously the breath of Life and look into Life with the eyes of Life.  “This.”  And it can then be any ”this” that comes alive, shimmering in Eternity.  “This” is the proverbial “mustard seed” and the drop of water realizing that is the ocean.

Tolle tells us in answer to the great Zen question, “Who are we?” that we are “The space of the moment arising in awareness.”  Again – “What!” – we think we have no point of reference, no experience here, yet of course we do.  Like fish swimming in water and not noticing water because it is the constant of their lives, we fail to notice we exist in a field of consciousness within which all our experience occurs.  The things filling our experience can be noisy and prone to conflict and problems, but that which is experiencing it all is silent and dynamically still, like the vast and deep water of the ocean.  The really true miracle is when any experience is looked at with the eyes of Being.  Then we can see a dynamic stillness at the heart of the thing, a profound silence even emanating from the greatest cacophony.  

“There!”  “This!”  Enter into the silent awareness with silent awareness.  We must “become conscious of being conscious.”  We must become conscious of BEING consciousness.  When we see with the eyes of Being we are going deeper, and it is deeper into Now, this eternal moment within which all form passes.  Here we will find the “original face,” the uncontaminated consciousness the Zen master calls us to.  This is the realm of Being where the luminescent and the shimmering reality of Eternity surrounds our everyday life, where we find that we live within a flowing stillness of purity.  Penetrating deeply into “This!” the ordinary is seen in its sacred Truth, where an ordinary flower and the next person you meet becomes the face of God.  Ordinary life is experienced as Life Eternal.  “THIS!” Tolle shares, “Stillness is also inner peace, and that stillness and peace are the essence of your Being.  It is inner stillness that will save and transform the world.”  Yes, beneath the cacophony and confusion there is stillness, peace, wisdom, compassion, and essence.  Yes, here is the realm of Being, but to see it we must learn to look deeply and lovingly.  We must learn to look with the eyes of our Being.  Then, having seen Paradise right in the world we live day-to-day, we must learn to walk this land, to master this, the most important journey we will ever make.  Why?  Because in order for it to save and transform the world, it will first have to save and transform us, and it will.

Friar Richard Rohr – “Those who will lead into the future will have some hard-won wisdom. We might call them the “holy fools.”… They are persons who are happily, but not naïvely, innocent of everything the rest of us take for granted…  they are not protecting the past by control (conservatives) or reacting against the past by fixing (liberals)… According to the pattern, the wise fools are always formed in the testing ground of exile when the customary and familiar are taken away and they must go deeper and much higher for wisdom. As a result, they no longer fit or belong among their own. Yet paradoxically, they alone can point the way to the “promised land” or the “new Jerusalem.” Conventional wisdom is inadequate, even if widely held by good people.”  –  from What the Mystics Know: Seven Pathways to Your Deeper Self 

Here we are, God willing, ready to come out the other side of the covid-19 crisis.  We have all been “shut-down” to some significant level for the past year and if people and politicians can manage enough wisdom and patience to hold to safety protocols for another few months, we can get beyond this.  An important question, however, that does not seem to be being asked, is what are we going to be as a nation and people when we come out of this tunnel?  Folks say they are ready for “normal” to resume. I don’t think that’s going to happen. I don’t think it ought to happen. I don’t think it can happen. 

Here we are in the year 2021.  That’s 21 years into the 21st century.  I find it interesting that historically, by now, there ought to be some pretty radical rethinking of our society.  Consider how dramatically different the world looked in 1921 from what it was in 1890.  The First World War, the Spanish Flu pandemic, the labor movement, the women’s right-to vote, surrealist art, the birth of relativity and quantum physics, and the invention of psychology were among the culture-shattering events that took place during those thirty years.  The way people thought of themselves, society, norms, and what is possible had changed dramatically in those years.  One hundred years earlier, consider how different the world looked in 1821 from what it was in 1790.  The age of political revolution, following the tectonic-shift event of the American Revolution in the decade before, toppled kings and set forth democracy and rationalism as the underpinning of the Western political world while another revolution, the industrial revolution, was reinventing economics and even the way people regarded themselves and each other as economic classes.  Bold rethinking concerning individuality and society took place. 

Yet here we are in 2021; it seems, pretty well anchored in 20^th century consciousness.  Yes, the digital and automation revolutions are reshaping and disrupting the economy and social cohesiveness, and white, heterosexual, male dominance of the society is being challenged.  Another huge challenge – climate change driven by human activity – is raising its profile from the theoretical into actuality.  We are also right in the middle of perhaps the most serious challenge to our democratic political norms in our history and cannot yet see how this will play out.  The explosion of information sources through the internet and cable television are challenging the assumptions of freedom of speech, and a new word, “disinformation,” the new-speak for old fashioned propaganda, conspiracy, and paranoid fantasy has crept into our politics and society.   

Democracy and truth-telling having won the most recent election, but the Republican Party flirts ever more openly with fascism and seems to have set its sights on grabbing political control through fear and loathing politics and disenfranchisement of those not their supporters.  And, of course, the covid-19 pandemic that has shut down our social and economic worlds is still with us, its end possibly slipping away as these forces of ideology over truth seem intent on undermining not only democracy but science.  Half-a-million deaths are seemingly an inadequate cost and warning to dissuade truth-deniers from their insistence that the economy that rewards the wealthy, their perverse understanding of freedom as license, and the preservation of the various discriminations and ignorances that still beset our society are what must be preserved regardless of cost. 

Certainly the circumstances for a radical rethinking, a reinvention, of society are playing out.  It might be argued that William Butler Yeats’s apocalyptic poem, “The Second Coming” written in 1919, seems to have a ring of applicability to our current situation.  This passage from the poem seems particularly applicable: 

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

 The same alarm and apprehension as Yeats expressed as the twentieth century unfolded seems quite appropriate to our current historic time.  We cannot continue on the path we are on.  New thinking at the level of those who shape decisions and policy is imperative, yet scarcely found.  This is why the words that begin this column, from a spiritual source rather than a political analyst, caught my attention.  The “Holy Fool” that Franciscan Friar Rohr describes seems needed and is much like what Zen Buddhism calls us to as “beginner’s mind,” the mind that comes fresh into the moment and circumstance without preconceived ideas, that has no investment in protecting or reacting against the past, its only interest being the truth and needs of the moment.  Such a mind, such minds, seem called for in this time.   

I have asserted in previous columns, and I assert again here, that nothing less than aiming our sights at utopia can spare us from falling into dystopia.  We must begin to open the way into a new world, new out of necessity, for the old one is clearly done – and the question is what will this new world be?  Yeats’s world in 1919 was clearly not done with dystopia.  Fascist takeovers of much of Europe and Asia (and this includes Stalin’s and Mao’s perversion of socialism in Russia and China into authoritarian nightmares) were unfolding, preparing to sacrifice more tens of millions to megalomaniacal dogmatism and ignorance.  The question is, can we escape a similar descent, for the course we are presently on seems to be taking us dangerously close to the borderlands of corrupt autocracy, collapsing ecosystems, and cultural dystopia. 

Does it not seem that we must dedicate ourselves to creating what in the Judeo-Christian vocabulary that Friar Rohr employed, can be called “the promised land,” “The New Jerusalem?”  (Being careful that, conventionally, this term has been misappropriated by those who would bring only apocalypse.)  Rather, I suggest we look to what in the Book of Isaiah, describes New Jerusalem as a place free from terror and full of righteousness.   

Free from terror.  Free not only from violent political terror by desperate and often evil people, but free from the cultural and psychological terror of even “good people” who demand that the old order be maintained because they haven’t the vision, compassion, courage, or audacity to reinvent themselves or society in a manner that can address the current challenge.  This new world requires that it must be a place of “righteousness,” here, the word pointing us only to rightness, to that which is virtuous, not its conventional use as punishing judgmentalism.   We must look to the Holy fools, the innocents who for years have been pointing to the “Emperor” of conventional wisdom declaring as we emerged into the twenty-first century that the fine clothes of commercialism and materialism leave us spiritually naked, beset by greed, narcissism, dishonesty, cruelty, many lingering forms of discrimination, and of alienation from the natural world separating us from our essence and true security.  These “fools” see that what is “normal” is naked of true righteousness – of rightness, of honesty, of goodness, of wisdom, of compassion, and of sustainability. 

For years these Holy fools have been marginalized, exiled, often quite alienated from conventional society – bohemians and spiritual seekers, much as it was in the early twentieth century with the rise of existentialism in philosophy and psychology, abstractionism in art, cultural libertarianism, utopian socialism, and a search for the mystery behind religious dogma in such explorations as Theosophy.  Today these same trends are re-expressing themselves particularly in those who turn to unconventional spiritual exploration in non-dual traditions from the East and even, as Rohr represents, a new wave of Christian, Jewish, and Islamic mysticism.  It can be found in those who explore deep ecology’s path for healing our rent with our natural world. Consciousness, connection, and intuitive creativity are the inspiration for this reinvention, the source and essence of who we are and what must guide us.   

We must call ourselves to fresh thinking, to a reinvention of our society, to be free of the terrors of poverty, hunger, ignorance, medical and financial insecurity, discrimination, extreme economic disparity, democratic and human rights erosion, and environmental collapse.  We are being called to imagine a righteous world built on the rightness of truth, science, compassion, democracy, individuality within common purpose, to respect, justice, dignity, and humanity’s endless connectedness, not only within itself but with all life and this planet that sustains us.  In other words, we are called to utopia, and we all know that only a fool could think that utopia is possible.  Yet it is increasingly clear that the comfortable middle, the continuation of the way things have been is impossible.  We see a fork in the road and because of humanity’s destabilizing of all that is natural and honest in the world, we seem at a moment of extreme peril.  

Here, at this fork in the road stand conservatives and liberals arguing, possibly ready to go to civil war, over how to preserve what was when we need to invent what can and needs to be.  An epochal moment is at hand when humanity must make a monumental shift in consciousness from dualistic separateness, competition and exploitation into a wholistic awareness of diversity within connection as the basis for life and society.  Instead of looking forward with apprehension in the manner that Yeats, a bohemian of his time, ended his poem, “what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” we need to look to the bohemians and spiritualists of our time, those who “no longer fit or belong among their own,”  who “formed in the testing ground of exile when the customary and familiar are taken away… go deeper and much higher for wisdom.”  We must have the vision and courage to reinvent ourselves individually and then collectively.   We must look to those who value connection rather than separation, who practice compassion instead of competition, who find the highest calling in brilliant creativity while preserving and cherishing what is righteously good about what has been.  Let us look to such fools to reinvent us, to “point the way to the “promised land”… the “new Jerusalem.”                                                         www.billwalz.com 
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Friar Richard Rohr – “Those who will lead into the future will have some hard-won wisdom. We might call them the “holy fools.”… They are persons who are happily, but not naïvely, innocent of everything the rest of us take for granted…  they are not protecting the past by control (conservatives) or reacting against the past by fixing (liberals)… According to the pattern, the wise fools are always formed in the testing ground of exile when the customary and familiar are taken away and they must go deeper and much higher for wisdom. As a result, they no longer fit or belong among their own. Yet paradoxically, they alone can point the way to the “promised land” or the “new Jerusalem.” Conventional wisdom is inadequate, even if widely held by good people.”  –  from What the Mystics Know: Seven Pathways to Your Deeper Self

Here we are, God willing, ready to come out the other side of the covid-19 crisis.  We have all been “shut-down” to some significant level for the past year and if people and politicians can manage enough wisdom and patience to hold to safety protocols for another few months, we can get beyond this.  An important question, however, that does not seem to be being asked, is what are we going to be as a nation and people when we come out of this tunnel?  Folks say they are ready for “normal” to resume. I don’t think that’s going to happen. I don’t think it ought to happen. I don’t think it can happen.

Here we are in the year 2021.  That’s 21 years into the 21st century.  I find it interesting that historically, by now, there ought to be some pretty radical rethinking of our society.  Consider how dramatically different the world looked in 1921 from what it was in 1890.  The First World War, the Spanish Flu pandemic, the labor movement, the women’s right-to vote, surrealist art, the birth of relativity and quantum physics, and the invention of psychology were among the culture-shattering events that took place during those thirty years.  The way people thought of themselves, society, norms, and what is possible had changed dramatically in those years.  One hundred years earlier, consider how different the world looked in 1821 from what it was in 1790.  The age of political revolution, following the tectonic-shift event of the American Revolution in the decade before, toppled kings and set forth democracy and rationalism as the underpinning of the Western political world while another revolution, the industrial revolution, was reinventing economics and even the way people regarded themselves and each other as economic classes.  Bold rethinking concerning individuality and society took place.

Yet here we are in 2021; it seems, pretty well anchored in 20^th century consciousness.  Yes, the digital and automation revolutions are reshaping and disrupting the economy and social cohesiveness, and white, heterosexual, male dominance of the society is being challenged.  Another huge challenge – climate change driven by human activity – is raising its profile from the theoretical into actuality.  We are also right in the middle of perhaps the most serious challenge to our democratic political norms in our history and cannot yet see how this will play out.  The explosion of information sources through the internet and cable television are challenging the assumptions of freedom of speech, and a new word, “disinformation,” the new-speak for old fashioned propaganda, conspiracy, and paranoid fantasy has crept into our politics and society.  

Democracy and truth-telling having won the most recent election, but the Republican Party flirts ever more openly with fascism and seems to have set its sights on grabbing political control through fear and loathing politics and disenfranchisement of those not their supporters.  And, of course, the covid-19 pandemic that has shut down our social and economic worlds is still with us, its end possibly slipping away as these forces of ideology over truth seem intent on undermining not only democracy but science.  Half-a-million deaths are seemingly an inadequate cost and warning to dissuade truth-deniers from their insistence that the economy that rewards the wealthy, their perverse understanding of freedom as license, and the preservation of the various discriminations and ignorances that still beset our society are what must be preserved regardless of cost.

Certainly the circumstances for a radical rethinking, a reinvention, of society are playing out.  It might be argued that William Butler Yeats’s apocalyptic poem, “The Second Coming” written in 1919, seems to have a ring of applicability to our current situation.  This passage from the poem seems particularly applicable:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

The same alarm and apprehension as Yeats expressed as the twentieth century unfolded seems quite appropriate to our current historic time.  We cannot continue on the path we are on.  New thinking at the level of those who shape decisions and policy is imperative, yet scarcely found.  This is why the words that begin this column, from a spiritual source rather than a political analyst, caught my attention.  The “Holy Fool” that Franciscan Friar Rohr describes seems needed and is much like what Zen Buddhism calls us to as “beginner’s mind,” the mind that comes fresh into the moment and circumstance without preconceived ideas, that has no investment in protecting or reacting against the past, its only interest being the truth and needs of the moment.  Such a mind, such minds, seem called for in this time. 

I have asserted in previous columns, and I assert again here, that nothing less than aiming our sights at utopia can spare us from falling into dystopia.  We must begin to open the way into a new world, new out of necessity, for the old one is clearly done – and the question is what will this new world be?  Yeats’s world in 1919 was clearly not done with dystopia.  Fascist takeovers of much of Europe and Asia (and this includes Stalin’s and Mao’s perversion of socialism in Russia and China into authoritarian nightmares) were unfolding, preparing to sacrifice more tens of millions to megalomaniacal dogmatism and ignorance.  The question is, can we escape a similar descent, for the course we are presently on seems to be taking us dangerously close to the borderlands of corrupt autocracy, collapsing ecosystems, and cultural dystopia.

Does it not seem that we must dedicate ourselves to creating what in the Judeo-Christian vocabulary that Friar Rohr employed, can be called “the promised land,” “The New Jerusalem?”  (Being careful that, conventionally, this term has been misappropriated by those who would bring only apocalypse.)  Rather, I suggest we look to what in the Book of Isaiah, describes New Jerusalem as a place free from terror and full of righteousness. 

Free from terror.  Free not only from violent political terror by desperate and often evil people, but free from the cultural and psychological terror of even “good people” who demand that the old order be maintained because they haven’t the vision, compassion, courage, or audacity to reinvent themselves or society in a manner that can address the current challenge.  This new world requires that it must be a place of “righteousness,” here, the word pointing us only to rightness, to that which is virtuous, not its conventional use as punishing judgmentalism.   We must look to the Holy fools, the innocents who for years have been pointing to the “Emperor” of conventional wisdom declaring as we emerged into the twenty-first century that the fine clothes of commercialism and materialism leave us spiritually naked, beset by greed, narcissism, dishonesty, cruelty, many lingering forms of discrimination, and of alienation from the natural world separating us from our essence and true security.  These “fools” see that what is “normal” is naked of true righteousness – of rightness, of honesty, of goodness, of wisdom, of compassion, and of sustainability.

For years these Holy fools have been marginalized, exiled, often quite alienated from conventional society – bohemians and spiritual seekers, much as it was in the early twentieth century with the rise of existentialism in philosophy and psychology, abstractionism in art, cultural libertarianism, utopian socialism, and a search for the mystery behind religious dogma in such explorations as Theosophy.  Today these same trends are re-expressing themselves particularly in those who turn to unconventional spiritual exploration in non-dual traditions from the East and even, as Rohr represents, a new wave of Christian, Jewish, and Islamic mysticism.  It can be found in those who explore deep ecology’s path for healing our rent with our natural world. Consciousness, connection, and intuitive creativity are the inspiration for this reinvention, the source and essence of who we are and what must guide us. 

We must call ourselves to fresh thinking, to a reinvention of our society, to be free of the terrors of poverty, hunger, ignorance, medical and financial insecurity, discrimination, extreme economic disparity, democratic and human rights erosion, and environmental collapse.  We are being called to imagine a righteous world built on the rightness of truth, science, compassion, democracy, individuality within common purpose, to respect, justice, dignity, and humanity’s endless connectedness, not only within itself but with all life and this planet that sustains us.  In other words, we are called to utopia, and we all know that only a fool could think that utopia is possible.  Yet it is increasingly clear that the comfortable middle, the continuation of the way things have been is impossible.  We see a fork in the road and because of humanity’s destabilizing of all that is natural and honest in the world, we seem at a moment of extreme peril.

Here, at this fork in the road stand conservatives and liberals arguing, possibly ready to go to civil war, over how to preserve what was when we need to invent what can and needs to be.  An epochal moment is at hand when humanity must make a monumental shift in consciousness from dualistic separateness, competition and exploitation into a wholistic awareness of diversity within connection as the basis for life and society.  Instead of looking forward with apprehension in the manner that Yeats, a bohemian of his time, ended his poem, “what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” we need to look to the bohemians and spiritualists of our time, those who “no longer fit or belong among their own,”  who “formed in the testing ground of exile when the customary and familiar are taken away… go deeper and much higher for wisdom.”  We must have the vision and courage to reinvent ourselves individually and then collectively.   We must look to those who value connection rather than separation, who practice compassion instead of competition, who find the highest calling in brilliant creativity while preserving and cherishing what is righteously good about what has been.  Let us look to such fools to reinvent us, to “point the way to the “promised land”… the “new Jerusalem.”

There is a Zen story about a bandit who is terrorizing a village, stealing, smashing, hurting and killing the villagers.  In this story a little Zen monk, half the size of the bandit, steps into his path and, without evident anger or fear, tells the bandit he must stop what he is doing, that he must stop harming the villagers.  A bit taken aback, the bandit recovers himself and bellows, “Little man, you don’t seem to realize who I am.  I could cut off your head and not blink an eye!”  To which the monk replied with a fierce calmness, “Oh sir, it seems you are the one who does not realize who I am.  I am the one whose head you could cut off and I would not blink an eye.  I will not stand by while you harm these people.  You will cease this instant!”  Now the bandit was completely taken aback, his entire idea of courage and strength was toppled, and the villagers, witness to this display of selfless courage, stopped running away and began to step forward, standing with the monk.  As the legend goes, the bandit was so stunned and disoriented by these happenings that he was stopped in his tracks, defeated.  He was, in fact, so shaken by this display of true courage and strength that he forswore banditry and became a dedicated student of the little Zen monk.

Now we can look at this story strictly on its face value and marvel at the strength, courage and faith of the monk, and how this is inspirational for us to find the courage to face up to sources of harm in our world.  We can also see it as an allegory for the transformation of human society, the forces of egoic violence and awakened consciousness engaged in confrontation for the fate of humanity.  This struggle is as old as human civilization, the forces of enlightenment, compassion, science, humanism and democracy challenged with daunting odds in the face of cruelty and selfishness, with bigotry and dogmatism, with anti-democratic authoritarianism.  What is heartening is that, just as in our monk and bandit story, in the story of human history, eventually the more enlightened view, the view that is based in truth, courage, inclusion and compassion, moves in the manner that a great and courageous “monk” of a more modern era, Martin Luther King, articulated as: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

In actuality, this little story is both pertinent to the personal and the collective human experience – for we live in both the personal and the collective worlds of human evolution.  The collective is driven by the personal and the personal is shaped by the collective – and each is evolving through courageous dedication to truth, compassion, and inclusion by the few who come to inspire the many.  While often the boisterous, selfish, closed-minded, and callous seem to consume all the attention and seem to hold the power, there will always be that small but steady, confident and courageous voice of compassion somewhere holding the line.  And this voice, if it can speak clearly and unwaveringly for peace, wisdom, inclusion, justice and expanding democracy, will eventually prevail.  We know this to be true because it is exactly this balance and expanding harmony that is the way of the Universe, is the Universe, and it is the way of human history, when viewed in its entirety.  Like a trickle of water on rock, over time, this unassuming yet persistent voice for justice wears down the hardened heart of cruelty in individuals and society.  And sometimes, after a long period of having seemingly little effect, there will be voices that begin to be heard, and the call to rally and stand will grow.  And in such moments, everything changes and evolved individuals can move the collective to stand together against the callousness, selfishness and cruelty.  And so, human society evolves.

We are not faced with bandits and bloodshed, but we are faced with dishonesty and manipulation by those in pursuit of power, whether it is personal power or political power.  We are faced with communities that fall under the spell of the “bandits” of manipulation, of those who promise “greatness” or “righteousness” for those who will follow blindly.  And for a while, there will always be those who do follow, and the collective weight of those mesmerized by the false promises is a weight that crushes and robs as surely as any bandit.  Sometimes these bandits wear the mask of the politician, sometimes of the religious leader, sometimes of the commercial dazzler, sometimes it’s just the narcissistic individual manipulating their way through life, yet they can always be known by their greed, power-lust, and lack of true empathy and compassion.  Though they will make empty declarations of caring for those they exploit, their only caring is for themselves.

Our story tells us to have the courage, to have the voice that stands up to selfishness, cruelty and injustice, that though we may seem to stand alone at first, the voice of justice and compassion will always find its way to the hearts of those who need to hear it.  It will be discovered that ordinary people who stand in truth, compassion and courage can be a beacon for all humanity of the vision of what can be.  Over and over in the evolution of human society, the bandits threaten to rob the people of their peace, dignity and security.  Yet, while the bandits may run free for a time enjoying impunity for their crimes, human history is not on the side of the oppressor, rather, it is on the side of the liberator.  We must be willing to lose everything without blinking an eye so as to preserve the integrity of our souls and keep the arc of the moral Universe bending toward justice. 

In the Buddhist tradition, this is known as the Path of the Bodhisattva – an enlightened person who could stand to the side, serene in their personal capacity for peace and perspective while the world unfolds in all its good and bad, justice and injustice, kindness and cruelty. Yet the enlightened know there cannot be true personal peace while there are still those who suffer.  We are at times called to come out of our personal safety and peace, by circumstances and by history, to be the ones who will not stand by while the cruel do harm to the innocent, nor blink an eye in the face of threats, or even the actuality of harm.  And do not be put off by the concept of “enlightened,” for enlightenment is not some exalted status.  Rather, Zen makes it clear, enlightenment is any ordinary person in any moment when self-centeredness dissolves into the expression and need of the moment.  As is sometimes noted, it is “nothing special,” even though it looks to be so  – it is just what is true and is needed, and it is what is represented by our humble little monk.

There are times when we are called to have faith that if we serve as instruments of the moment, of compassion in action, whether we personally get to see the results or not, the arc of history will bend, and humanity will increasingly cease to quake and run when confronted with the banditry of those who only serve themselves.  The spirit of the little monk is in us all, for it is our true nature.  And when this spirit and nature stand for, as, and in compassionate courage, the people will lose their fear and will stand with the “monk.”  And in such moments, even the “bandits” can be transformed.

“In the course of our lifetime, there is one person we must meet… who is this person?  It is the True Self.  As long as you don’t, it will not be possible to be truly satisfied in the depths of your heart.  You will never lose the sense that something is lacking.  Nor will you be able to clarify the way things are.  This is the objective of Life.”  – Sekkei Harada, Zen Master

Our accepted sense of ourselves in the world is that we are separate objects in a world of separate objects.  This is what our senses tell us and this is what our culture reinforces.  This is a misperception that both the wisdom of the ancients and modern quantum physics and cosmology inform us must be corrected if we are to realize who we truly are and to find our place and purpose in the Universe.  We are individualized expressions of a complete unity that is the Universe as is every life-form and as is every material form.  We are systems of perfect harmony and balance at many levels of organization from the sub-atomic to the molecular to the cellular to the collection of sub-organisms and organ systems coexisting within the complete organism that is a single human being and beyond, reaching into vast cosmic levels, yet at the psychological, familial, social/cultural, national, trans-national and ecological levels, we fail to experience and express this unity and harmony.  Something is happening at the psychological level that amounts to a disconnecting trauma that must be understood and corrected.  To experience ourselves only at the level of the boundary contained within the skin and as this separate and striving person in our minds is to be lost in the vastness and complexity and to be exiled from the experience of the harmony and balance.

Every animal has this experience of skin-boundary separateness, yet this does not throw the organism out of its sense of harmony with its environment, with its own or other species, or with itself, except for humans with their far more complex psychological sense of identity (ego).  This problematic experience of separateness in humans is essentially a psychological state of isolation, and if we are to identify what trauma is, it has to be as degrees of solidification of this sense of psychological separateness and vulnerability that generate the emotion of fear, and fear causes contraction deeper into the separateness and isolation.  And so, a feedback loop of injury and fear causes increasing psychological isolation from our true essence of Beingness in connection with all that is.  Our “True Self” is unable to make contact with others and the world, and this is what Buddhism points to as “suffering” and why we feel insufficient and life as unsatisfactory.

Trauma therefore can be understood as injury in the development and functioning of the psychological ego-structure that causes a sense of separation, as broken connection from our True Self and the True World, which in turn causes the ego-structure to contract and solidify around a story of the injury and isolation which in turn intensifies the experience of broken connection to others and to Life itself.  This, of course, leads to great dysfunction and harmful relationship with self and others.  It can be seen, in fact, as the root of mental illness, and here I designate mental illness as not only the extreme manifestations our culture allows as such, but the cultures themselves and what the cultures consider the “normal,” yet terribly dysfunctional way we conduct our lives and run our societies.  What is mental illness, after all, if not a delusional state of separateness from this sense of security and connection that is the true core of every human, amplified by the story of separateness and competition that has been the story of human cultures from the dawn of civilization?

This “traumatization” begins in the slow and persistent process of acculturation and socialization of an infant and small child using their fear of separation to essentially hypnotize into the child stories about who they are in the world based in their vulnerable separateness, a process that continues throughout a person’s life.  We come to believe and experience the world as a dangerous place in which we must become skillful combatants and manipulators and that those who cannot be skillful combatants and manipulators will be victims.  We thus begin sorting out into who will be socially dominant and effective and who will be insufficient and ineffective.  Injuries begin to pile up, and for some the injuries are of such amplitude that they qualify for the identity of “victim with PTSD” and this identity is in itself a great injury, causing an even deeper sense of isolation.  Yet who, in all this is not a victim, and who does not suffer the trauma of the terrifying sense of separateness and vulnerability against which we engage so many ineffective and often destructive tactics to ameliorate?

Very powerfully and paradoxically, while trauma separates us, it can then also be a powerful force for connecting groups of people who SHARE a sense and story of their own traumatization, and we can see what is currently being identified as “tribalism” as the grouping together of individuals into shared victim identity and this can be a very dangerous phenomenon.  An individual who identifies as a victim can be a very dangerous person precisely because they have no sense of their own validity and strength that comes from feeling connected and in balance with larger systems than themselves.  They therefore believe that if they are to assert themselves they must summon powerful emotion and engage all the ego’s defense mechanisms including projection, rationalization, denial, and displacement in order to have even minimal effect, thus their “defenses” translate into offensive and dangerous behavior.

This is why those who are the perpetrators of so much trauma to others have in some fashion inevitably been victims themselves of the trauma of ego-damaging insecurity.  No person who is secure in their sense of inner harmony and connection with others is going to be so dangerous.  This is equally true with collectives who live within their own perceived story of victimization – even including those groups who actually hold power, for they perceive at some level the illegitimacy of their dominance and they project threat from those they dominate.  It is a truth that nearly every human being carries a story of their trauma and so too, every collective carries some story of the need to solidify around and defend their separateness from those perceived as threats – and, of course, perception becomes reality.  Trauma begets more trauma and the insanity spins on.

So here humanity is, in the beginning of the 21^st century.  Individual mental illness is rampant, collectives within our American society and within the global community feel threatened by and hostile toward each other, our social institutions are dysfunctional, running on unquestioned momentum yet failing to support humanity while demanding that humanity support them.  Humanity’s broken connection with Nature is about to set loose a cataclysm of disaster upon the ecosystems that humanity and its fellow life-systems depend on and that support our societies, and we are set on a course of disaster that we do not seem able to alter.  Yet – we can.  For if the problem is broken connection, the solution has to be in reestablished connection, and for this we must look to the most precious of human capacities – empathy.

Empathy is the opening of the ego-boundary to encompass the subjective reality of another where there is no “me” separate from “you” or “it” – there is only this moment of Life in shared identification.  We all know what this moment is for we have all experienced it.  It usually happens quite by accident in the finding of commonality with another human – or even with an animal with which we invest common comfort such as our pets.  We see the sacred right to life and happiness, the right to not have suffering inflicted.  We feel what it would be to have that suffering inflicted, and so in that moment could not possibly bring harm.  Empathy is an opening of receptivity to the commonality of another in this terribly vulnerable experience that is Life, and from this resonance in the inner psychological field arises compassionate action so as to heal the rifts in the actual world.  And it is here in the recognition of our common fear-based functioning and the damage that it causes that we can find common cause and action, calling us to common compassion.  We must let down our guard to be actually present with each other in our common vulnerability to reassure each other we have nothing to fear when we have recognized our bonds of connection that need to be healed and strengthened.

Our task as evolving beings is to bring this capacity for empathy increasingly into our lives with every encounter – and with it, our capacity for compassion, the action that naturally arises from empathy.  We must come face-to face with the inauthentic egoic-self that has brought us to this historic and evolutionary crisis and restore it to its proper function and dimensionality as servant to us, rather than we as servant to it.  We must find our way to meeting our True Self – as individuals and as human collectives.  Can there be any doubt that in the vast Universe of harmony that humanity HAS to find and express itself as this same harmony?  Lost, however, in our unawareness, our unconsciousness, seeing only outer form, unaware of shared inner essence and interconnectedness, we spin on, caught in the inevitability of acting out the stories of our perceived threat from each other and from Nature, mechanistically acting out our own demise.  Humanity faces the very real possibility of social and economic collapse, possibly even serious mortal threat to entire populations in the coming century – unless we find the capacity to reinvent human society away from the violent competition that causes individual and collective traumatization, into social systems based in empathetic, compassionate and healing connection among human groups and with all of Nature.  We must find the courage and faith to reopen our ego-boundaries to allow the energy of Life to flow through us unimpeded as it does through every life-form, to open the false boundaries between human individuals, groups of humans, and humanity with Nature.   We must receive each other in empathic embrace, acknowledging the wounds we have inflicted upon each other, the trauma imposed and passed from generation to generation in individual defensiveness, in tribal hostility and suspicion, in violence of every imaginable magnitude from subtle interpersonal insult, to demeaning, threatening, exploiting and objectifying each other, to our institutions dehumanizing and exploiting us, to bitter tribal political and religious antipathy, to war, genocide and ecocide.  Compassion must mark the new era of human civilization.  Empathy must be employed universally to heal our trauma and set humanity on the course toward a new and flourishing era as expressions of True Self.  As Master Harada said “This is the objective of Life.”

When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be. –  Lao Tzu 5^THcentury BCE

Reality is not what we think it is.  We live inside our minds, believing the picture show happening there to be reality, and in one way of looking at reality, it is.  It’s our reality.  People of the same socio/economic/cultural orientation have a lot of overlap of their realities, yet even with siblings, there can be startling variation in what they believe concerning the history and experiences they have in common.  Imagine comparing our notion of reality with a person of another historic/cultural orientation entirely, say with a 5^th century BCE Chinese.  We would find the area of overlap to be much smaller than with a person of our contemporary orientation and the areas of difference to be much larger.  In a very real sense, we collectively think a 21^st century America into being while 5^th century BCE China was thought into being by the minds of those who lived that experience.  Individuals and historic periods have stories they tell and call these stories reality, when, other than relatively speaking, they are not.

The swirling thoughts and images which fill our consciousness are creating a virtual reality in our minds made of a soup of information (and much misinformation) about who we are and what the world is about.   From the moment of our birth, society and culture, in the shape of parents and all the social influences around us, begin creating this idea of a world for us that we accept as real and true when it is only real and true in an extremely limited way.  It is a very selective and limited representation of the everything that reality actually is.  In returning to what it would be like in 5^thcentury BCE China, one interesting variation of this scenario is the question:  if you were born into this world, into an entirely different historical and cultural period, would you still be you?  Could you be born into any other circumstance other than the one you WERE born into and be you?  It all depends on what you believe the real you to be.   Are you the perspectives and attitudes and beliefs you hold, or are you something much more fundamental? 

Could it be there is some essence of a person that transcends the mental illusions they hold about reality, an essence that is like the clay that society, culture and experience, both shared and individual, shape into a socio-historic person that has a particular take on reality, a reality that from other perspectives might be considered delusional madness?  I think we would have to say absolutely yes, for the total disorientation of a 21^st Century person and a 5^th Century BBCE Chinese person in the others’ world, which would at first feel like madness, would slowly give way to more and more shared reality constructed out of the new experiences.  Some essence of the person, a consciousness not shaped by conditioning, would, over time, cause our total disorientation to give way to adopting more and more of the contextual reality of the place and time we found ourselves.  We would still be the human being we are, with our own particular uniqueness, beneath any of the new conditions, circumstances or beliefs we held concerning reality.

From a Zen perspective, the real you, the essence of you, could be born into any circumstance and still be you, for you are not considered to be the social/cultural/personal psychological content that goes into the mind, but rather the consciousness that is the basis of mind itself.  This consciousness energy is then shaped and individualized into a unique expression and way of perceiving that is a person.  The uniqueness, however, precedes the conditioning. As Zen draws its reference for reality from Nature, it recognizes that for humans, just as with leaves and snowflakes, there is the commonality of the leaves, snowflakes or humans, yet each is unique, no two are exactly the same.  In Nature, the law of reality is a unity of Life replicating uniqueness within commonality through dimension after dimension.     

Born into this world a unique person, we experience our separateness, reinforced to greater or lesser degrees by how our culture emphasizes separateness, yet there is always some instinct, some insight, some intuition, that separateness is not a true and total picture of reality.  Despite our senses registering separateness, there is this deeper sense that pulls us to oneness and connectedness, to the Way of Nature, as ultimate reality.  This is why a contemporary can read the writings of the 5^th century BCE Chinese sage, Lao Tzu, the fountainhead of Taoism, and recognize truth as he beckons us to look to Nature to find the template for a wise and true life.

So, when the Zen master exhorts us to show our “original face,” what is being asked, and how is one to find this “face?”

We must realize that one level of reality is how the human brain processes the information of our senses which then, within our field of consciousness, constructs a “reality.”  This virtual reality matrix of our psycho-social-cultural conditioning is held together and in place through constant movement of the contents of mind, retelling the story of this virtual reality with every perception that leads to an interpretation of the perception consistent with the story.  We live inside a swirling and mostly opaque screen of thoughts and images holding together our virtual reality, and as long as this swirling movement is all we attend to we have no sense of the truths and reality that lies deeper. 

And so, one common reality for humans of every era and culture has been, when searching for deeper understanding into reality, to learn to slow down and even stop the swirling matrix so as to discover a vibrant, dynamic energy of stillness where the Universe enters into manifestation through an individual human life – there to glimpse the deeper principles of Reality, of the Universe itself. 

Lao Tzu’s Taoism and its philosophical offspring, Zen, are just such attempts to search for deeper and deeper levels of reality.  They recognize that the matrix of spinning ideas and images must be penetrated to see what is beneath them, to understand their place and purpose in the unfolding saga of what it means to be human.  And so their first task and teaching is to slow down, perhaps even stop, this spinning matrix to see what is beneath and prior to it.  Profoundly, the word “zen” translated into English means “sitting,” and the genius of Zen as a practice for penetrating into Ultimate Reality is that it realizes that if we just stop, if we just “sit,” if we quiet the swirling manifestations of our virtual-reality minds, there we find the Universe as-it-is.    Here, this moment, without projecting any of our conditioned virtual-reality upon it, we feel, we see, the illusion of our matrix for what it is. 

When the illusions of our conditioned reality as individuals or an entire society’s illusions, begin to fail us, this then becomes the time for stopping, for “sitting,” for waking up to look for deeper levels of reality.  It becomes time to check in with our deeper reality and truly see what works and what does not, to see what is needed to reconnect and establish flow with changing conditions – and we will always find that what will be required is more honesty, more inclusiveness, more compassion, more creativity, more courage, and more connection with what is natural and true.  We must change our reality.   We must evolve our reality to contain in harmony what it could not previously contain while we also let go of illusions, false concepts that had been accepted as true, but which our new, expanded view exposes as false.

The great 20^th century scientist, Albert Einstein, observed that problems cannot be solved with the same consciousness that created the problem.  He also shared that his great insights into the nature of the physical universe would come to him, not through thinking, but through silent contemplation, or even quieting the mind by taking a walk or swim.  Without being a Zenist, he was realizing Zen, for the art of Zen is in the cultivation of ever-increasing skill in penetrating through our swirling thought-show to experience deeper and deeper levels of truth into what-is.  We must stop so as to see and feel Reality.  Thinking and language then become the tools we use to express that which emerged from silence. We really do not have to go to 5^th century BCE China to realize that this reality we accept right now has not always been our reality.  After-all, how much of our own reality has changed through the course of our lifetime?  True Reality is always a fresh horizon awaiting our willingness to see it for what it is at subtler and deeper levels than we ever thought.   Sitting in the here-and-now with quiet mind opens the portal through which we can view the horizon ahead with fresh insight, to realize and create new realities, new consciousness, to solve the problems created by old realities that have outlived their purpose and are now creating rather than solving problems.  We must let go of what was to find what can be.

“No self, no suffering.” – Buddha

Buddha is said to have stated, “I teach suffering, its origin, cessation and the path to its transcendence. That’s all I teach,” but what this is also saying is that The Buddha taught entering into a deep examination into negative, problematic human emotions – what causes them, and the means to effectively managing them.   This is so important because no matter how “smart” we may be, there seems very little correlation between the kind of intelligence that makes a person an expert in some field of study, in the academic or professional worlds, and emotional stability.  There may even be, in many cases, an inverse relationship where with higher and more complex intelligence, there is little practical wisdom and little of what is sometimes called “emotional IQ.”

The Buddha taught that in all of Nature, humans, because of their evolved brains, are unique in their ability to create a virtual reality called culture and to develop techniques and tools for living in a complex and exploitive relationship with Nature.  This is a good thing from the standpoint of greatly freeing humans from the dangers and limitations of Nature while releasing us to be creative, making ever-more complex culture and tools.  But Buddha also realized there is a very big problem connected to this evolutionary human trait of complex brain function.  To borrow from a modern paradigm drawn from the very complex tool of cybernetics, humans live in very much what are virtual realities constructed of information manipulated by these complex brains, and this virtual reality generates a sense of a virtual-reality-sense-of-self that psychology calls ego that is quite disconnected from our true nature and from Nature itself with serious consequences for both us humans and for Nature. 

Buddhism teaches a model of mind that considers thoughts and emotions to be mind-objects or forms that exist within the formless energy of mind-consciousness that individuates into awareness, the faculty for directing consciousness energy with its inherent intelligence into the examination of experience.  In recognizing this multidimensional model of mind, Buddhism then gives us a methodology from which we can train in building skill at managing the contents of the mind by directing awareness into this examination.  The Buddha further taught that having realized this dimension of awareness that can examine the contents and activity of mind, the insight becomes natural that we then must not be the contents, the thoughts and emotions, as most people assume and our culture reinforces.  Rather, if awareness can examine the contents and activity of the mind, then who we fundamentally must be IS this awareness and not the contents and activity.  We are not egos that have awareness; rather, we are awareness that has an ego structure so as to engage the world.  This shifts our experience of mental activity from one that seems helpless in its management to one that is interactive and opens the way for skillful management.

While Western education focuses intensely on feeding the mind full of information and ideas along with methods of logic for putting these ideas together effectively for utilitarian application, it teaches nothing about managing these contents in a manner so as to maximize mental stability, serenity and wisdom.  The Buddhist model, on the other hand, emphasizes that we can manage mind through meditative techniques where mind examines mind, shining the light of awareness on the content of mind giving us perspective and insight, while developing awareness of awareness, allowing us to explore its potential for intuitive insight into the nature of existence.  We discover that as awareness, we are free of the contradictions and imbalance of the egoic mind, and we can deepen the exploration of life lived as awareness, the dimension that is the true source of intelligence, creativity, wisdom and insight.

To continue borrowing metaphor from the cybernetic world, as the saying goes: “Garbage in, garbage out” and any crazy thing can be programmed into these computer-brains of ours, much of it being completely contradictory and at odds with actual reality.  Most importantly, these reality-virtualizing brains generating a virtual-self experiences itself as unique and separate from all else in the world, and this virtual-self is acutely aware of its vulnerability and its mortality; living in a story of itself in time, the past defining us and the future challenging us.  This sense of limitation, vulnerability and dependency on the external world for stability and validation, and the too-often failure of the external world to provide consistency and validation, causes the contents of mind to be all too often marked by anxiety, frustration and unhappiness.

At the core of most negative emotional experience – of depression, anxiety, anger and loneliness – is an exaggerated sense of this virtual-self in personal isolation along with a time-focus in the past or future.  Most of the time, our focus of attention is on our “self” in our story-line in time that is too often distressing.   Even anger, which in a given moment seems to be present-moment activated, has a strong component of residual past distress and disappointment brought into the present situation and is often carried quite inappropriately into the future, the ego chewing on its grievance over and over.  The world, with the exception of whatever or whoever may be the focus of stimulating the emotion, has receded far into the background of our attention.  Even the stimulating event or person is being experienced principally in its distressing connection to self, not in its larger context which would give the experience more sense and proportion, and thus greater acceptability.  The world has to some inappropriate degree collapsed into the situation, thoughts and emotions orbiting our focus on our self.  

Buddhism recognizes this and teaches us to realize the antidote to such a perception is to expand the field of awareness to deliberately include what is NOT about our virtual-self and our distressing situation, thus preserving context and perspective.  It teaches us to give full awareness and attention to what is NOT our emotional quagmire, our self-imposed exile from Life.  Rather, Buddhism teaches that we must direct attention into the sublime everyday with such presence that the miracle and wonder, the interconnectedness of who and what we are with everything, begins to be increasingly apparent.  Here, we re-enter the flow of Life, and the emotions associated with our perceived isolation then fall into the background, realized as either illusory, or now, much more manageable.

Very importantly, when a human is in this flow of Life, there is very little of the preoccupation with the ego or virtual-self.  Awareness blends like a surfer riding a wave with the present moment.  These are the moments of our greatest adaptivity, balance and skill.  In a very real sense, the ego-self disappears, leaving behind what is a genuine and intelligent human organism that IS the moment in flowing consciousness.  There is no isolated “self” struggling with “out there.”  There is only the blending of self and the moment, of meeting the challenge.

With training in Buddhist meditation we begin to transfer our sense of self from the activity of the mind reacting to the world “out there” into the awareness that witnesses the activity of the mind.  We move our sense of who we are from the virtual-self to the authentic-self, a unity with what is happening.  Once this state of being as witnessing discerning awareness begins to actualize as our operational self, we increasingly can engage the world in a manner that Buddhism refers to as “mindful,” and we can begin to live more and more in a sane and adaptive manner.

 We will continue to have negative emotional states, but now rather than being helpless in their grip, we know them for what they are and what they are not.  Most importantly, they are not who we are.  We know ourselves as awareness, and this awareness is trans-personal.  In a very real way we become what Zen refers to as “nobody,” not identified with the virtual-self.  And where there is no virtual-self, there is, as Buddha said, no suffering.  Yes, there will be pain.  Pain is a natural part of Life, but there will not be as much suffering over our experience of physical and emotional pain.  Nor will there be this self telling itself over and over of the unfairness of having to endure pain.  Pain translated into suffering will not blot out all the beauty and miracle of Life, but rather the painful takes its appropriate place in the dance of everything that is real Life, and we can manage the emotional pain with much greater skill and acceptance.

Humanity is at a crossroads.  What lies ahead is a choice to continue on the path we have trod for thousands of years through many formulations of political organization or to head in a radically new direction.  Why head in a radically new direction?  Because we must.  For if we stop and look with absolute honesty at the circumstance of human civilization we will probably be horrified, for we will be looking at the devastation of Eden and a future marked by escalating social chaos.  We will see a beautiful and bountiful home planet that has been terribly defiled, facing exhaustion and violent environmental change in the not distant future.  We will see a growing imbalance between the reality of Nature, which is marked by harmonious coexistence, and the actions of humanity, which seem to be marked by the impulse to dominate and exploit not only Nature, but also each other. 

Until recently, the vastness of Nature and the limits of human technology were such that the planet could contain humanity’s rapacious activity, but the equation is rapidly shifting.  Humanity is now, for the first time in its history, of a dimension in its sheer numbers and technology, capable of exhausting Nature’s capacity to support the web of myriad life-forms on this planet while also threatening the civilizations that depend on environmental stability.   Should this happen, while the planet will regenerate itself in geologic time, humanity faces disaster.

Should we stop to look honestly, we would see that there is something in the character of humanity that has placed us in an antagonistic relationship with our own environment while pitting us in continuous strife amongst our various nations, races, religions, classes, and ideologies.  Further, we see that there is something in the human character that can have the evidence and the consequence of this antagonism unfolding right in front of us yet fail to sufficiently come out of denial concerning the inevitable looming catastrophe to do what is necessary to change course and avert disaster.  We see human history for what it has been – the endless confrontation and competition among individuals and groups in which too often, not the wisest and noblest, but the strongest, cleverest and most aggressive dominate.  The phrase is “dog eat dog” – but it is not dogs that connive to break and dominate each other – it is humans.  With this, we also see the plague of psychological illness that results from a culture based in interpersonal competition that gives rise to emotional insecurity.

That’s the bad news.  If, however, we continue to look honestly, we see not just a single path marked by aggression, competition, excess consumption and domination.  We also see that another path intertwines and has always been present.  We also see a path marked by wisdom, honest intelligent curiosity, dedication to truth, compassion, inclusion, generosity, justness, courage, creativity, and the impulse to harmonious beauty.  It is a path with its own particular strength and has been a constant modifying force to the path of aggression and domination.   Human history has not been steered solely by the impulse to power, its abuses and iniquity, but also by these nobler impulses.  In other words, within the human character there exists paradoxically both the impulse to dominate and deny Nature and the impulse to reflect the same harmony and balance that is Nature.  These paths intertwine, yet it seems one path has, to date, dominated and set the overall direction for humanity’s journey, and so far, it has been the path of greed and willful ignorance that now leads us all toward the cliff of disaster.

These two paths have been identified for millennia, and even given names.  The first path is that of human ego, that capacity unique to humans within all of Nature to abstract its experience out of Nature.  It is the legendary fall from Eden, the source of original human sin.  It is the capacity to separate ourselves psychologically as individuals and as a species from the interconnected web of Nature, to deny its laws of balance, to use, consume and destroy only for the purposes of our own aggrandizement.  But there is also this second path that reflects the interconnectedness of Nature.  It is sometimes called wisdom, sometimes called spirituality, sometimes called love, and its laws of harmony and connection are deeply imbedded within us, for in truth we cannot be separated.  It is the source of all spiritual truth and psychological insight concerning humanity, and it is the source of political and economic justness.

We have to recognize that within us exists the capacity for our own salvation and we must dedicate ourselves anew to living in truth.  While we may have forgotten our interconnection to Nature, Nature has not forgotten us.  It has operated as the unconscious impulse to all that is good and has been the saving grace of humanity.  It has been the counterbalance to the arrogance, lust for significance, power, and the blind need for excessive consumption that has often erroneously been described as “human nature,” but is really aberrant to our deepest nature.  Perhaps silently, unconsciously, the path of wisdom has always guided us over the long road of human social evolution, for actually we have moved increasingly and inevitably in its direction intertwined with the dominant  path of power and domination.

Now, however, we must recognize that which has been unconscious and make it conscious.  Humanity’s identification with ego and its destructive impulses must be seen for what they are and overcome while we choose and open to a conscious flowering of our own interconnectedness.  We must realize that we cannot continue functioning in denial of truth or it will most surely bring about humanity’s downfall.  Buddhism refers to this denial and attachment to ego as dukkha – suffering  – while other religions refer to it as sin – and the suffering that awaits us should we fail to change paths is certain to be immense, even catastrophic.

While Buddhism addresses our circumstance eloquently, this concept of ego’s fatal allure is not entirely foreign to the West.  In our very beginning, the ancient Greeks, who valued balance, beauty, and wisdom above all, also had a term for this denial.  They called it hubris, described as the overweening arrogance of assuming human equality, even superiority to the Gods (Nature).  Hubris exalts the pursuit of glory, of power, of wealth and conquest and in the ancient world this egoic hubris was embodied in imperial Rome supplanting the Greeks as the definers of Western civilization.  And though Imperial Rome lasted five hundred years, hubris took it inevitably to its fall.

So now, several millennia later, it would seem we are perhaps headed for our fall, a fall like no other, and humanity must find within itself the wisdom and courage to change its path from this egoic hubris.   Available to us is the path of awakened consciousness, the knowing of our appropriate place within Nature and the Universe.  This too is not a new message.  It is the foundational teaching of Buddhism as it was for the Greeks.  It is the message of wisdom, and it has journeyed with humanity from the beginning of civilizations, mostly hushed and treated like a step-child.  But now, it must be given its place as the true pathfinder leading into the future.  To not do so surely will be even more catastrophic than it was for the Romans and Western Civilization that fell into the long historic period known as the Dark Ages, for while culture fell, the world of Nature was safe to nurture new civilization.  Now, it is Nature itself that is threatened.

Buddha knew, the wisest of Greeks knew, and the prophets and seers of all the ancient cultures knew that truth is heard, understood and manifested only when the human egoic mind is stilled, allowing the quieter subtler wisdom of humanity’s deepest nature to be heard in its whispers.  The path of wisdom is here for us.  It always has been, emerging out of our ancient past, the guiding hand of all of humanity’s noblest actions.  It is not the Greek Fates, but we who will decide.  Fear and domination cannot be the way; we must embrace each other and Nature as kin and source if we are to avoid a dystopian future.    Ego’s tricks are endless and its allure is very strong, but its call is a lie that has led us to this existential moment.  Even the slightest allegiance to truth tells us it is time to change paths.  We must go within once again into our inner nature to find the wisdom, will and strength to choose truth, to choose to love each other and all of Life, to live in balance and beauty.  We must reinvent human society and culture before chaos and massive disruption send us into a new dark age.  We must leave the path of greedy cleverness we have trod for so long and now choose the ancient path of humble yet noble truth, harmony, and wisdom.     

“Be a light unto yourself.” –  Buddha

Buddhism is very different from Christianity in that rather than the “light,” the good and perfect, being embodied in a demi-god-being bridging the realms of the Divine and the worldly while humanity exists in the profane world of “fallen,” Buddhism holds that what is true and good is in the nature of everyone, for that matter, in everything.  The Buddha is not meant to be the object of worship, simply the model of a fully realized human being.   As a very logic-based, rather than magic-based religion, Buddhism simply teaches that it is logically impossible that the perfect harmony that is the Universe is not at the very core of every manifestation of the Universe, including humans.   This, of course, presents a problem for us, as clearly there are destructive forces in the world which cause us to recoil.  There is the dance of life and death, the wolf killing the fawn, the virus bringing horrid illness and death; there is cancer and famine.  There are terribly destructive earthquakes, hurricanes and wildfires caused by lightning. There is pain and suffering.  We feel that this cannot be light; this cannot be harmony and good.

There is also a particular kind of human darkness and evil beyond the realm of Nature’s catastrophes.  There are Hitlers and Charles Mansons, the evils of hate, war and vicious criminality.  There is also all the everyday petty meanness, cruelty, dishonesty, and hurtfulness that people inflict upon each other, while society seems to be organized around the mundane heartlessness of corporations and bureaucracies.  It is right to ask: where is the perfect harmony, the good and perfect, the light in all this?

Buddhism teaches that while within us is the perfect harmony of the Universe, just as it is within every squirrel and bird, there is a problem in that in humans this core of harmony gets covered over with social/cultural/psychological conditioning telling us all kinds of crazy things about who we are and what the world is.  We do not experience ourselves within an infinitely connected, harmonious and balanced universe.  Rather, we experience ourselves alone and struggling, with but a few tenuous connections of family, friends and affiliations which all too often feel broken.  Buddhism calls this Dukkha – a unique kind of suffering experienced by humans caused by our misperception of ourselves in separateness and our clinging to an identity and value system based in this separateness.  This is a violation of what Buddhism calls Dharma, the Way of the Universe or Nature, with its infinite interconnection and interdependence.  Our light is obscured and our harmony upset, but Buddhism, and all true spiritual traditions, point out that while the light may be obscured, it is not, cannot be, extinguished, for, and here I move into mystical language, The Light is who we are. 

Life needs death, Creation needs destruction; they are inextricable.  This is Dharma.  The difference in Nature is that all death is in the service of Life; all destruction is the necessary making way for creation.  Hurricanes and forest fires caused by lightning are natural occurrences that cleanse and clear away so that new growth can occur.  An ecology needs predators to maintain balance so that the herbivores do not strip away vegetation causing imbalance that will lead to the reimposition of balance through death by starvation.  To the surprise of many, the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone Park has reestablished a balanced ecology where all species flourish more abundantly.  Life moves to balance.  Always.

But humans do not destroy and kill within the laws of harmony and balance; they clear-burn and clear-cut forests, forever destroying ecologies. They callously, thoughtlessly, industrially raise, slaughter and process animals who never experience a moment of freedom or comfort in their short lives.  They make war on each other and Nature.  They steal, swindle, lie, cheat, abuse, kill and destroy so as to make and take more for themselves, and this creates imbalance in The World – it creates dukkha.  Cynics, nihilists, and some atheists point to this enduring fact of human history as proof that there is no transcendent intelligence, no balance, no hope, no Light, yet, they typically neglect that it is NOT true that we are moving inexorably toward darkness.  To the contrary, history proves that we are moving toward The Light, and that The Light has always been with us and within us. 

The nihilist view neglects that for thousands of years humans lived in magnificent and rich cultures on the American, Australian and African continents in complete harmony with Nature.  It neglects that Western and Asian history has moved from tyrannical and violent monarchical class systems into ever growing democracies, being pulled by the light of reason and compassion to move their societies toward justice, fairness and compassion, no matter how much further is still needed.  The Light is in us and pulls and guides us as human collectives and as individuals, even while the darkness misleads and confuses us.  This is the dance of the human experience.  What seems undeniable is that the Universe has given us just a bit more Light, for otherwise, all would have been completely lost long ago.

As it is a commonality of all religions to call us to move to The Light in whichever way the religion depicts it, perhaps we can reframe the entire notion of religion to that which calls us to our basic “religious” task of uncovering this basic ground of goodness and bringing it into the world, whether we consider ourselves identified with an organized religion or not.  Perhaps we can make our religious task to be that Light unto ourselves that Buddha called us to when darkness and confusion surround us so that we can then bring this Light into the world.  Our journey into healing can be found it would seem, individually and collectively, not through adding on more complicated psychological, religious or spiritual jargon and practices, more political or economic complexity and cleverness that is all too often egoic deceit.  Rather, our journey is in turning inward towards our own silent knowing.  It is to find The Light within while also looking outward into the quiet simple truths in the infinite energy of Nature, harmonizing these inner and outer worlds until it is recognized there is no inner and outer.  It is to realize there is just the Universe and its Dharma of interconnection and balance, of compassion, kindness, and love, that manifests through the dance of creation and destruction in the service of Creation, what Native Americans called “The Great Giveaway.”  This is The Light that is in each of us and all of us.

We might recognize that we are all Light and dark, essential harmony AND egoic confusion, but we must have faith that The Light is our truth and is actually stronger than the dark, for this egoic kind of dark is an aberration, and is destined to disappear into lumination as individuals, societies, and eventually the species, find the wisdom to walk guided only by The Light.   Each of us is a unique expression of the Universe manifesting a unique person, dancing the dance of Light and dark.  Our sense of religious task can be to strengthen The Light and better manage the dark, for the dark does have an important purpose.  Just as death and destruction are natural in the dance of Creation, so too our own darkness can be an important element in our dance of creation, destroying and reorganizing, giving new life and perspective to our world-view and expression of ourselves.  This is how we evolve.  This is how we move to The Light.

What is important is that in this dance of light and dark, we must commit ourselves religiously to being guided by The Light.  We must realize that whenever we are seduced by the dark and it becomes our guide, we of course become lost, for we cannot see clearly in the dark, and so we become dark ourselves.  This, our histories as individuals and societies, have taught us.  Look to The Light that is you, to the you that is Dharma.  Know your darkness well and own it so that it does not own you.  Knowing darkness can lend itself to creativity and insight, yes, but for knowing and being who you truly are, you must move to your Light. 

Now if one is honest, they’d have to admit much of their life is spent in dissatisfaction.  We’re unhappy with this and we’re unhappy with that.  Along with undeniable moments of happiness and satisfaction there seems to be an underlying disgruntledness that percolates in us looking for reasons to push through, and it usually does not take much to push us into grumbling and complaining. 

It could be said that the teachings of Buddhism or any of the myriad “spiritual” teachings, whether religion-based or secular, like Eckhart Tolle, are mostly about the human problem of dissatisfaction.  Humans feel dissatisfied quite regularly, some practically live in this state, and this is a big problem, not only for the dissatisfied humans but for those they affect; and in fact, ultimately for all life on this planet.

All of Nature lives in a simple realm of sufficiency except humans.  For humans, finding sufficiency seems to be an impossible task.  An animal or a plant does or does not have what it needs to flourish in its basic nature, but for humans, there seems to be an endless challenge in finding sufficiency, perhaps because we have no idea of our basic nature.  Having been taught that to be sufficient, we have to be “the most we can be,” it seems we must have “more,”  and as for how to quantify this “more” or what is “enough,” seems quite beyond us.  This is then a kind of insanity.

Please understand I do not use the word “insanity” lightly.  Insanity is generally understood to mean having lost touch with reality, and if reality is anything, it has to be “enough.”  But since humans do not live in reality, but rather in artificial worlds made up in our minds, both as individuals and collectives, we know very little of reality or enough.  We have lost touch with our basic nature because we seem to have lost touch with the basic way of nature.  Buddhism makes a very big deal of this, for if reality is anything, it HAS to be nature, which HAS to be enough, for it is all there is.

Zen Buddhists like to use phrases, like “just this” or “thusness” or “suchness” to refer to reality and whatever particular “this” might be in front of us.  But what is “this?”  Zen calls “this” a koan, a riddle to be entered into with one’s whole mind – not just intellect, but senses, emotions, and particularly intuition, as well.  Ah yes, intuition – a koan in itself to a Westerner.  This is why Zen also recommends sitting with bright, relaxed attention in silence – discovering the silent mind of intuition beneath the cacophony of the sensory, emotional and intellectual noise chamber that is a human mind, chronically dissatisfied, always wanting more.

This finding the silent mind is very important in this quest for satisfaction for what more does silence need?  More silence?  No – silence does not actually exist in time, so what is more silence?  Really.  Sure there is more quantity of silence, but silence isn’t a quantity; it is a quality, a state of existence.  When silent, is not this moment as the silence all that exists?  To want more is to come out of silence and into some intellectual, emotional notion of wanting more of what cannot be more.  Silence is completeness, like our intuited notion of the Universe – a vast silent space within which all matter and sound happen.  The intuited Universe is vast – it is space, it is silence.  Zen knows.  This is “this.”  It is Thusness, Suchness.  Even in the petals of a flower, or the bee that follows its nature to the heart of the petals, or the winter wind that kills the flower and takes the bee into the hive to survive.  Thus is suchness.  It is Nature.  It is enough.

For a human then, what is “suchness?”  What is our basic nature?  Zen knows it cannot be separate from the Nature that is the Universe; otherwise, that would be crazy, not real.  So, as humans get further and further away from Nature, from what is real, we get crazier, and this is our dissatisfaction, and this brings us back to that very big problem not only for the dissatisfied human, but for the collective of dissatisfied humans that is society, and, of course, for Nature, which all these dissatisfied humans trample and use so thoughtlessly.  Buddhism calls this not only dissatisfaction, but suffering.

This phenomenon of crazy human dissatisfaction and all of the suffering it causes drove a human named Siddhartha Gautama to sit beneath a tree some 2500 years ago vowing not to get up until he’d figured out this dissatisfaction.  It could be said he was on a quest for satisfaction, on how to be human and be satisfied, and he did indeed figure it out in what is called his “awakening.”  It is called this because he figured out that humans live mostly in a dream-like state making up a world in our heads, which being an artificial reality, can never be enough, because real IS, has to be, enough, and these worlds in our minds are neither real nor enough, and so these artificial realities are what drive us crazy wanting “more” without ever knowing what this “more” might be.  So we abuse our lives and abuse each other and abuse nature in this quest for more.

Because his sitting resulted in this “awakening” Siddhartha became known as The Buddha – which means “Awakened,“ and the tree he sat beneath became known as the Bodhi tree – the tree of awakening.  The teachings that flowed from this awakening became known as Buddhism – the practice of awakening, and the practice of sitting in silence, listening into Nature, into our nature, into the Universe, while taming and quieting the unnatural human mind, became known as Buddhist meditation, or mind-training in awakening.

So, to train in getting beyond dissatisfaction, it is recommended to take one’s seat at the foot of the metaphorical Bodhi Tree.  Sit in meditation, in contemplation, in stillness with the intent to receive guidance from the Universe, from God if this is your frame of reference for the Ultimate.  For the Christian, Jewish, Muslim, pantheist, secular mystic or contemplative, the path beyond dissatisfaction likewise leads inward – to silence – and then – out into the Great Silence that is the Universe.  Here, we can discover the center of all things.  We discover that each of us is A center where the Universe enters the World through a human life, or a bird or a tree, even a mountain, river or stone.  

Here, we can learn to see how all the things of the World circle a center of consciousness that is what we really are, like on the rim of a great wheel, all passing and passing while That which watches at the center does not pass.  We watch love and hate, life and death, beauty and ugliness, peace and violence, generosity and greed, wisdom and ignorance, creation and destruction circling and circling. While here at the hub of the wheel, at the foot of our Bodhi Tree, we sit experiencing what it is to be enough.  We discover we are That which does not pass and are filled with the great thick thusness of all that does pass, now beyond dissatisfaction.  We discover we are free to do what we do and possess what we possess (because this is human nature) while holding to the Truth of Nature that instructs to not take from others more than is actually needed.  We discover enough is enough, and we will know satisfaction at last.  And when we all know satisfaction, we and the world will be safe, for we will know we and the World are the same.

“Like vanishing dew, a passing apparition or the sudden flash of lightning — already gone —
thus should one regard one’s self.”

The Japanese Zen monk and poet, Ikkyu, wrote these words nearly six centuries ago; his intent, generally considered to be the extolling of selflessness and focusing our minds upon the impermanence of all things, including ourselves.  Yet there is another, and perhaps even deeper, insight to be had in the recognition that just as these images represent manifestations of Nature, so too, we are manifestations of Nature, perhaps with more substance than dew, but still, just as the dew consists of atoms of hydrogen and oxygen combined to create water, we too are essentially a combination of atoms – all born billions of years ago in the furnace of a far-off star.  Just as the flash of lightening is a discharge of energy when atmospheric conditions are conducive, so too, we are energy discharged into the world because conditions are conducive for this combination of atoms to be breathed with life into the creation of a person – and in the vastness of the Universe, a single human life is no more than a passing apparition, a flash of lightning – and yet – an expression of the totality of the Universe, just as is the flash of lightning. 

It took the Universe over 14 billion years to create human life, an absolute miracle of an evolutionary process of increasing complexification occurring within a unified organism.  For instance, when we look at our own hand, we are looking at a miracle of evolution.  That our thumb sits in an opposed position to our fingers is a truly remarkable advancement in biological technology, allowing for a level of manual dexterity possessed only by creatures of the primate family that includes humans.  That we can consider the implications and importance of this opposable-thumbed hand is an even greater evolutionary triumph by the Universe, the sole domain of the species hominid, for the cerebral cortex of a human with its trillions of neurons and connecting pathways is the most complex organization of biological matter allowing for the most complex and advanced awareness and creative relationship with our world of any creature on Earth.  Yet, this complexity and dexterity of hand and mind seems to be working against the flourishing of life on our world.  Some have come to view humanity almost as a devolutionary and destructive force, like a highly advanced virus infecting the organism that is the planet, killing off the intricate web of life-forms necessary for the Earth to be healthy and support life.  The question is – is this so, or is this really only a phase in a larger process?  Could it be that this perfect and balanced Universe created an imperfect and unbalanced being, or is a larger view needed to make sense of this?

It cannot be denied that humanity and all life on this planet is suffering because modern civilization lives from a dysfunctional view of humanity’s place within the Universe.  The evolution of the human species has led to what amounts to a geologic force such as no other animal could possibly pose.  Humanity is now capable of altering the conditions on this planet so as to diminish the possibilities for the continuation of the flourishing of the vast diversity of life that co-inhabits this planet with humans.  Our civilization and way of life face an existential threat such as has never been seen before as we are confronted by twin catastrophic possibilities of a nuclear wasteland caused by war and environmental catastrophe caused by our consumer-materialism style of living and relationship (or non-relationship) with Nature.  Could humanity be but a passing apparition in the life of the Universe, the 350,000 years of Homo sapiens life on this planet being no more than a flash in the 14+ billion years life of the Universe? 

Yet, born in the stars, actually born with the Universe itself in a pinprick flash of unfathomably dense photonic energy that expanded into the totality of the Universe, first as hydrogen and helium atoms, and then into dense hydrogen/helium clouds that condensed into stars and then into the entire spectrum of atoms formed in the fire of these stars that then exploded into the vastness to form the material for planets and moons and comets and meteors and all forms, including life-forms on the planet Earth that then evolved into human beings.  In a very real sense, we could consider that our existence is as old as the Universe; that we have always been – for the totality of the Universe is present in the atoms and molecules and cells of these human bodies.

In this expandingly intricate dance of evolution of over 14+ billion years, the result of joining atoms in ever more elaborate combination has all led to this most complex of all things, the human brain.  And along with this complexification of matter, there has evolved through this human species increasingly complex systems of understanding of the nature of the Universe and humanity’s place within it from ancient mythic representations to modern scientific understandings.  We have evolved cosmologies from nature-based representations of Spirit manifesting Life, through pantheisms of human-like gods, through medieval notions of a human and Earth-centered Universe with God-the-creator in Heaven (which despite a vague sense of evolution and a solar system and galaxy based universe, largely remains the modern common person’s underlying experiential belief) to astronomical, quantum and field theoretical physics, which now see a vast integrated Universe in which the properties of consciousness can be found operating at the sub-atomic level everywhere.  Astonishingly, the mystery of consciousness is being found at the very foundational level of all matter, pervading the Universe, with immense implications for human relationship to the entire Universe.  In these new models, which intriguingly mirror ancient mythic cosmologies, the question becomes vivid – where do we actually begin as conscious beings and where do we end?  Is there actually a continuity of consciousness existence that transcends a physical life-span, for just as physical matter-energy cannot die, only recombine, could this be true for consciousness-energy as well?  The ancients answered, “Yes,” and we now, as modern science-based rational beings, have to give this possibility real consideration.

In shifting our focus from an anthropocentric view based on individual lives that come and go, to a view centered on the Universe itself in which we are a continuation of a billions-of-years process of increasing complexification of matter and consciousness in a Universe that seems to be intent on creative realization of itself, bridging the gulf of the manifested world of matter with the unmanifested world of consciousness, our current seemingly purposeless individual and collective lives take on a cosmic purpose.  To view each human life as an evolving organism within the evolving human species organism that is an integral expression of the evolving organism that is the planet Earth that is an integral expression of the evolving Universe, is to give new and vital perspective to this human expression. 

We have labored for centuries with the delusional cosmology that we humans, as we are, represent the final expression of Creation, whether Divine or Natural, and this view carries with it a karmic consequence of exactly the kind of cataclysmic destiny we are currently shaping.  But – what if we adopt a new cosmology based in our new sciences that sees and experiences our individual existences as enfolded within larger and larger macro-existences?  And what if we come to understand the human species as continually evolving, much like an individual human evolves through developmental stages of life, and we can identify that the current egocentric, materialistic human culture, deficient in empathy and compassion, stumbling self-indulgently through existence without much thought to the consequences of this behavior can be seen to be very similar to the way an early adolescent human behaves and views themselves in the world?  What if we could see that our true task as individuals and as a species is to evolve into our adult stage as responsible co-creators with the Universe?  As we look at our current circumstance and appropriately ask – Could humanity be a mistake? –  Could we not see that just as a world of only thirteen-year-olds would make no sense, the world we shape now with much the same egocentricity and callousness of a thirteen-year-old requires our collective growing up to begin to make sense?

Born in the stars, journeying for billions of years, matter and consciousness evolving with a destiny to reflect and manifest the perfect harmony that all the Universe expresses, can we not see our existence in this way and take responsibility for our place among the stars on this beautiful and unique planet where the Universe has brought together a collection of atoms in a most propitious environment for life to flourish?  Born in the stars, can we take our place among the stars as mature tenders of a beautiful and abundant expression of the Universe’s evolution? 

Yes, like dew, our individual lives pass like apparitions in the vast unfolding of the Universe – yet – in ways we are only beginning to comprehend, the matter and consciousness that combine to create this one human life has always been, and so, will also always be, journeying in co-creation with the Universe.  Perhaps, “Thus should one regard one’s self.” 

To study Buddhism is to study the self; to study the self is to forget the self.

To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. – Dogen(13^th century)

In recent years, there has been a growing understanding that the basic problem with humanity is egocentricism or egoism, the placing of the idea of “me” and “mine” as the centerpoint of what is principally to exclusively significant in a person’s life.  Egoism expresses itself in relationship with all that is not me and mine in a manner that ranges from appreciative consumption, to disregard, to exploitation, to outright hostility and wanton destruction.  It is an approach to life that says happiness is achieved by maximizing what me and mine can get out of life without serious consideration or concern for the cost to all else, and it also makes us blind to seeing the patterns of interconnections and interdependence that actually make life work.   Seeing egoism as a problem, however, is actually not new at all; it is at the heart of any true spiritual tradition, and Buddhism makes a very particular point of noting egoism as the source of human suffering, importantly not only for others, but for ourselves, and points out It is a very counterproductive strategy for life. 

In American culture, however, this notion of egoism as a problem is very new and very radical for we are a culture built on the celebration of the individual and the individual’s “pursuit of happiness,” a very egoistic notion (not that happiness is egoistic, but “pursuing” happiness creates an egoistic purpose to life that can become terribly distorted).  After all, we are a nation built not only on many noble ideals and great industry, but on genocide of the native inhabitants, enslavement of an imported racial population, despoiling the environment and the extermination of many native species in our pursuit of happiness.  Our economy is based in conspicuous consumption and exploitation of resources and labor, all to enhance status and wealth for those favorably positioned in this zero sum game.  We seem to be unable to address seriously a growing climate-change crisis caused in significant part by our great industry and appetite for consumption because of what seems to be an addiction to this egoism.   Egoism could well be considered the dark side of the American personality. 

Increasingly, however, there is growing understanding of the problems brought by this addiction and the counterproductivity of egoic consumerism as the way to sustainable well-being and happiness.  There is a dawning awareness that while a certain level of material security is important in keeping us out of unhappiness, increasing amounts of ego-feeding materialism seems to have the opposite effect, and ancient spiritual traditions that offer this warning are being found to have much to say about our modern psychological health and even continued societal viability.

Egoism blinds us to the realization that life really only has meaning and functions best in the experience of its interconnections, in appreciative loving and caring relationship, happiness best generated when we are free of self-centeredness, instead immersed in life with all its “myriad things,” including, of course, the people around us, focusing on their well-being and happiness.  All the terrible things that humans do that can elicit the question, “Why do people do such things?” can be answered with the word egoism,  the hopelessly small idea we have of a self that is always desperate to make more of itself, generally at the expense of the myriad things of the world including other people.   Experiencing self in ego leaves us alone and small in the world and ego keeps attempting to build itself up by using, abusing, consuming, and tearing everything and everyone that is not “me” or “mine” down.  Ego is, of course,  quite blind to all of this, defending its right to self-interest, and is also quite paranoid in that it projects its own predatory and competitive nature onto everyone else and onto Nature, and since it is really only an idea of a person, it is hopelessly inadequate at realizing fulfillment.

Zen, and all mystical spiritual traditions, instruct us that fulfillment can only be realized, as the word fulfillment  suggests, through full-filling, but not a full-filling through the material aspects of life, but  rather, the spiritual, and spiritual full-filling cannot happen when our minds are already filled with the story of the striving and anxious “me.”   The sense of full-filled can only happen when we are empty of the egoic story of the dissatisfied “me” and rather, our sense of self is in the world, the myriad things, the morning sun, the wind in the trees, this simple household chore, the happiness of the person in front of us.  To be happy is not in the using and consuming of the myriad things, but, as Dogen advises, by being actualized through them, that is, being filled by our sense of connection with the myriad things, self having been forgotten.

This having been said, it is important to understand that ego in itself is not the problem, nor is ego bad. This is a mistake often made by those on the spiritual path.  Ego certainly is not to be eradicated; it cannot be eradicated, for it is an essential capacity of any living organism.  It is a necessary element of an organism functioning in the world, identifying and meeting its needs, of being a manifested object interacting with manifested objects.  The squirrels and birds engaged in their squirrel and bird activities are fulfilling their needs as organisms and doing what is needed to fulfill their squirrel-ness and bird-ness.  This is squirrel and bird ego in action. 

With human-beings, however, to fulfill our human-beingness is quite more complicated, for our human-beingness is not only in meeting biological needs, but psychological needs as well.  To be writing these words and communicating to the reader is a very high-level function of the ego that creates these mind-objects called words and employs the invention of writing and word-processing with a computer, and fulfills the desire to communicate ideas to the reader who wants to experience these ideas.  We are fulfilling an essential need of human-ness, to explore concepts and grow conceptually.  This is all activity of ego that is healthy, necessary and good, even spiritual, for it is about connecting and valuing. 

Likewise, to have a sense of a spiritual journey and to make the choice to understand what that journey is and make the necessary commitments to engage and follow the spiritual path is human ego in its healthiest manifestation.  After-all, no other creature needs to create a spiritual life.  To pursue a spiritual path, however, motivated by the idea that it is attractive in its mysteriousness, and that its mystery makes me a “better” person, even a more interesting person to others, or because there may be intriguing rituals and philosophical ideas that somehow imbue me with some specialness, is a misapplication of ego.  This is egoism, not fundamentally different from wanting to be a physician because of the status and wealth the profession offers, not because of the pull to healing, an important manifestation of selfless service.    

No, the problem is not ego; it is egoism, the misplacement of this natural psychological function into our identity, and placing ego expression and gratification as the purpose of life when egoism actually deprives life of meaning for it stands as an impediment to experiencing the connections and wonder of life, that which actually gives life meaning.  Egoism sets humans upon a frantic and fruitless search for meaning in ever more egoic pursuits, seeking security through acquisitions, status, power and the diminishment of others, all in a fruitless attempt to acquire personal fulfillment.  These are all impossible strategies for it is like drinking sea water to quench our thirst; it only makes us thirstier and sickens us.  

Egoism is what is behind racism, classism, sexism, nationalism, and religious and political tribalism, people finding identity and meaning in identification with collective egos that can function very destructively in the world.  In its most malignant form, it is what drives criminality, sociopathy and psychopathy, the making more of “me” by victimizing others.  In its most mundane expression, it is in everyday conversational gossip or holding judgmental opinions of others which when examined closely, are about elevating ourself through the diminishment of others.  Egoism can even be expressed through the sincere study and practice of religion and religion’s rebellious cousin, spiritual practices, when such practices are about feeding into the need to be part of an exclusive community or for enhancing one’s aura of specialness.  It is even in the diminishment of everyday experience into restlessness and boredom, elevating our own importance above the commonplace and ordinary. 

In a very important way, egoism represents what is metaphorically expressed as “The Devil” in Western religious culture.  It is that which entices and seduces us into destructive behavior, in diminishing the sacredness of life, all life, in favor of the elevation of me and mine.  If the origin of sin is, as Jewish mystic Abraham Heschel describes, in “the denial of the sublime wonder of life,” it is egoism that whispers these denials, these diminishments in our ear.  To find happiness, to find true sanity and fulfillment, it is quite clear, we must follow Dogen’s advice and forget ourselves.  We must be actualized and filled wondrously by the myriad things, by Life in all its miraculous interconnections, complexity, perfection and balance.

“To be free from convention is not to spurn it but not to be deceived by it.” – Alan Watts

We all think we know what is going on.  We think we have some basic sense of what is true and not true concerning who and what we are, what our family and social interactions are about and what is true about our society and the world.  We would be shocked and offended if someone were to say that we were delusional about much of this, but it actually is quite true that a good deal of our view of “reality” amounts to a delusion of sorts.  It is a delusion built on convention, and convention is really a shared habit of interpreting the world and responding based on unseen forces of evolving culture and society going back through generations into the mist of unknowable origins.  It’s “the way things are” or “what is” at any given place and time, and interestingly, for being “what is,” it is always changing.

It is very important to realize that the world-view we believe in is profoundly different from that of a 10^th Century Arab, who similarly believed that their world-view was true, or for that matter, a 21^st Century Jihadi Arab, or perhaps, in very important ways, a fellow 21^st Century American who votes for a different political party.  Most importantly, OUR world view and sense of who we are, our “what is,” may be very different from what it was ten or twenty years ago.  How can this be?  We all live on the same planet, with the same senses and brain.  We are all of the same species.  A 10^th century squirrel and a 21^st century squirrel, no matter where they are on the planet, have a pretty universal squirrel “what is.” Yet, we humans from different places and times have very different notions of what is true and not true.  This is because humans have abstracting minds that generate what amounts to virtual realities, stories about who we are, and what is true and not true created by cultural, historical, social, and psychological perceptions, all quite subjective.

What IS true is that we humans mostly live inside these stories in our minds about what we want and what we fear and what we believe to be true – repeated over and over creating the effect for us that these stories ARE true and real – when they are not.  Within a relatively narrow range of political, cultural, religious and personal differences, white, financially secure Americans have a large overlay of agreed consensus-reality, such as America being the best country in the world with the best system of government, which is the same belief most citizens of other countries have about their country despite all the complaints they may have about the country’s actual functioning.  Most “mainstream” Americans similarly believe that the American capitalist consumer economic system is the best system despite mounting evidence that it does not lead to happiness or fairness, and is threatening the environmental sustainability of the planet.  That Native Americans, many people of color, those who are in poverty, or those who have studied these issues carefully might not agree with these stories doesn’t really seem valid to the “mainstream” American.  So if these stories of American exceptionalism may not be true, what IS real and true?  It might be helpful to remember the wisdom of the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates who said, “The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.”

Yet, it is important we seek to have as good a grasp on the possibility of truth and reality as we can.   Zen addresses this conundrum by seeking to guide us into the fine-honing of all our sensory and mental capacities through training in in-the-moment awareness.  It teaches that we are mistaken in believing we are the activity of our mind, all these thoughts and emotions, but rather that we are the energy of consciousness prior to any belief or opinion of this or that.  It teaches us to be vitally present, to be increasingly aware of being the witness of the moment, to bring non-judgmental questioning into the “thusness” or “what-is-ness” of the moment, including the stories our mind is telling us.  It encourages us to acknowledge the underlying mystery of existence while conceding that we must believe and do something, for the world must also be approached in a practical and functional manner.  For this, convention is useful.  It is just important not to mistake convention for truth.  It is A way, not THE way of any situation.

Buddhism tells us that which IS real is the unfolding moments of life at multi-dimensional levels from the microscopic to the cosmic and everything between, including humans with their stories.  It is a dance, an interplay of phenomena, energies, forces, Nature, history, institutions, persons and intra-psychic conditions and conditioning.   It is also the projection of our stories onto whatever and whoever is happening in front of us.  It is an acknowledgement that whatever our truth is in the personal, cultural, social and political spheres may be as true or untrue as any other, that what really matters is what actually works to minimize unnecessary suffering in the world.  It warns that our anticipations of the future are mostly unlikely, just as our memories of the past are mostly distorted projections of whatever is OUR story.  Even more importantly, Buddhism points out that we are seldom truly present for whatever and whoever is happening in front of us.  Rather, it cautions us, to notice that we are often only partially present for the what-is that unfolds around us, and instead are caught up in telling and projecting our mental stories.  We are missing Life as it happens.  In a very important way, this is simply insane.

To be truly sane, to be what Buddhism calls awakened, is to realize that these stories are a kind of virtual reality created by the mind, and instead of continuing to be pulled into and motivated by these stories, to get in touch with and respond to the realities of the what-is in the moment as it unfolds. This is mindfulness. To be mindful is to engage the moment as the observing awareness that can watch these stories arise within us and others, noting their shifting, morphing, unstable and impermanent nature, and how they pass, making way for another story that will arise, have a duration and then pass. To be mindful is to realize this witnessing awareness is completely stable and enduring, as is Nature, and so this awareness is OUR nature, and it has been the witness that is the true core of who we are for our entire life.  And it is entirely sane.  Action that arises from this mindful engagement will then be more likely true to the situation and beneficial.

To be mindful is to train in stabilizing awareness as our present-moment self, in penetrating with ever-increasing subtlety of awareness into the flow of the moment, to realize awareness as our true presence that can penetrate the “what is” of the moment in a balanced application of our senses, intelligence, emotions and intuition.  This has been the reality of every mystic in every culture throughout human history.  It is the perception that allowed Socrates to note the nature of wisdom over 2500 years ago, interestingly at approximately the same historic time that Lao Tzu was making such an observation in China and Buddha in India, perhaps because the civilization-myth-as-reality was fully replacing human identification with Nature about that time.

As long as we live out of the stories that pass nearly randomly and involuntarily through our field of consciousness, we will be unable to address effectively the real and true challenges or celebrate the real beauty of life. This is true for individuals and it is true for society. We are unable as a society to address effectively the challenges we face precisely because we are living out false and limiting stories concerning what-is, and instead we act out of the false narrative of stories that no longer apply. This is why our politics and governing is so dysfunctional.  To evolve is to become increasingly aware and adaptive to what-is, and never in human history has it been more imperative than it is now to let go of living out of stories of what was and come into the real challenges of what is. 

To have enlightened and effective societies we must first do the work of becoming effective and enlightened individuals. We must STOP LIVING INSIDE THE OLD STORIES. We have to be ready to face the very real possibility that the story of American society may be about to change dramatically in the coming years and it is imperative that those who want to shape that story in a more enlightened and compassionate way are unafraid and capable in the face of whatever new “what is” may come along.   We must be ready to break free into the “what-is” that unfolds moment to moment with a questioning and open mind.  There is no doubt that we can create beautiful lives individually and collectively, but only if they are built on the true shifting sands of what-is with humility, wonder, skill and faith that no matter the what-is we can find a path of action (or non-action) that will sustain and nourish us and lead our society in the path of enlightened evolution.

I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know…, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land” – Martin Luther King, Jr.

Many find it hard to make sense of modern day America and they feel that sincere efforts to influence the society toward greater inclusion, fairness, ecological consciousness, toward public policies based in idealism and effectiveness don’t seem to be bringing the result they feel they need to maintain optimism. As a result, they are losing hope and feel like disengaging.  Listening to the news can be enough to send a person into depression. It could be asked, is the American Dream of life and society always improving over? Possibly, yes, if you think in terms of immediate results as you imagine them to be. But that’s the point. It is a dream of things always making sense as we interpret sense and of effort producing desired results as we want them to be. To be honest this is very egoic and narcissistic, and it is very American.

Does the current situation make sense? Of course it does. It is exactly the result of America being a materialistic, bigoted, dogmatic, jingoistic, instant-gratification, stimulation-addicted consumer society that is a major contributor to humanity’s current path toward destroying the ecological balance of the planet.  Adding to the discouragement, there are many, if not most, in America who either disagree with this assessment or seem to have very little concern about it.  AND… at the same time, in counterbalance, there is a growing presence of progressive and evolved political and social thinking taking root for a more inclusive, sustainable, and fair society than would have seemed possible only a short time ago.  There is a strong historic strain of democracy, responsibility and fairness that runs through the consciousness of our society that sometimes quite surprisingly turns public thinking around in what seems like quantum leaps. 

Recent elections have placed more women and minorities into office than ever, serious legislation concerning climate change and greater economic fairness are challenging the establishment, and in Chicago, a gay, black woman was elected mayor while exceptional minority and progressive politicians are succeeding across America.  Two powerful states of political consciousness, one regressive and the other progressive, strain our political and social system.  Our situation is, of course, reflective of our past trajectory into this moment exactly to these results.  This is the meaning of the Buddhist notion of karma.  The present is exactly the summation of the past.  To stay realistically engaged requires knowing this and seeing our current circumstance in a broad historic context.

Will sincere effort to bring us to a course correction toward idealism and sane public policy that actually addresses the problems we face bring good result?  Of course it will – yet most likely not in the time-frame many wish for or in quite the way we hope, nor will it happen without our suffering consequences from harmful conditions long established and continuing.  There is no escaping karma.  The problems that not only America but humanity faces are the result of an entire epoch of human history and evolution that has been based in human egoism, materialism, narcissism, and rigidly dogmatic belief systems quite disconnected from reality.  The problems we face will not be corrected without shifts in consciousness that seem nearly impossible given the current preponderant mindset, yet this shift is happening. 

There can be no doubt we will evolve and progress toward an order of harmony and wisdom that presently seems impossible.  This will happen because it must, and evolutionary dynamics are just as inexorable as karma.  We will adapt because we are challenged by vast social, economic, and geo-climactic forces, by the growing dysfunction of our social, economic, political and cultural institutions. How we adapt will determine whether the near future is beautiful and sustainable or dystopian, as is depicted in so many of the currently popular movies and television shows, with a deeply diminished quality of life in American society and on this planet.  In either case, we are a resilient and creative species, and Nature is endlessly creative and resilient.  The evolutionary trajectory of humanity eventually will lead us to living in the wisdom of harmony, and it is this harmony that is the Promised Land.

This brings us to another ancient Buddhist principle called dharma, the principle of the way things work, the laws of the Universe.  Dharma tells us that only through evolving the collective consciousness of human society will the trajectory of human society and life on this planet begin to move in significantly healthier and saner directions.  It also tells us that the collective consciousness of human society is progressed only through individuals who progress in consciousness, increasingly understanding and living within the truth that all phenomena are interrelated and interconnected.  Dharma tells us that the Universe and humanity-as-an-expression-of-the-Universe are inexorably evolving into more complex unities capable of manifesting intelligent harmony, and so, for one who understands dharma, all that is necessary is to find and manifest intelligent harmony in themselves, both personally and in the public sphere.  Karma and history will move humanity in the necessary direction. 

In Buddhism, one who understands and lives by dharma for the benefit of all beings is called a bodhisattva, an awakened being.  A bodhisattva knows that an evolved and enlightened human society is inevitable, in a sense, a promise, and knows they will most likely not live to see it, yet they dedicate their existence to its accomplishment.  This is known as The Path of the Bodhisattva, and a bodhisattva realizes that Life makes perfect sense. Karmic forces (the state of consciousness and the ensuing actions) have created the results we presently live with and will shape all future results. And, very importantly, a bodhisattva knows that the ultimate sense and purpose of Life is to evolve and to be committed to the betterment of life for all beings – because it is what is needed by all beings, not because it is what they need. 

What we can have faith in is that if we do our part to evolve in compassion and wisdom, the collective of humanity is just that much more compassionate and wise, and others will find inspiration and courage to make their own journey and to take their own stand for what is right and good.  We can have faith that no matter how much cruelty and ignorance are manifesting presently, it is less so than was previously and will be even less so in the future.  Within the human community there is an inexorable increase in wisdom and compassion with each passing generation.  There are periods of regression, most certainly, and it could well be argued that we are presently in such a regressive phase, but the pain, confusion, and harm done by this regression is really only setting the stage for waking people up and propelling us into the next evolutionary progression.  This is happening not for our own satisfaction and sense of accomplishment, but because it is inevitable.  We can have faith and find solace in knowing our own development and evolution are for the betterment of all beings, that we are instruments of human evolution. There is no place for personal discouragement, for these forces are not operating on the scale of the personal. It is in the full knowledge that, as the modern bodhisattva Dr. Martin Luther King declared – “I may not get there with you. But… we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land!”

What is the Promised Land? It is an evolved human society built on harmony and wisdom buttressed by respect and compassion for all life. When will we get there? When a sufficient number of humans have done the work of becoming selfless – that is, wise and compassionate, aware and awake, thinking far less about how to make more of themselves while focusing far more on the well-being of their fellow humans and all the life that shares this planet, our collective home.  How does this happen? Through individuals doing the work of their own evolution and refusing to become discouraged, by doing little personal acts of kindness and compassion daily while we seek to do what we can to influence politics and policy, holding to a much longer vision than needing today’s efforts to yield the desired results today. It is in having the wisdom to see that even perhaps in a particular political policy or candidacy defeat today, we have articulated and handled ourselves in a way so as to realize a more compassionate and wise result tomorrow or next year or in ten years or a hundred years.  We WILL get to the Promised Land.  It is inevitable. The time is now.  The time is always now.  The future is built on now.  Be a bodhisattva. Do what is necessary to become awake and set the ground for others to become awake. This is how life can make sense.  This is how The Promised Land will be realized – for future generations.  And… we may be very surprised at what progress we can see in our lifetime.  For a person who is today seventy years old, they have seen barriers in racial, gender, and sexual identity discrimination fall in ways that could never have been anticipated in the world they were born into in the late 1940’s.  More work in the struggle for human rights and economic fairness needs to be done, as well as work in recognizing animal rights and the right of the Earth to health and balance.  This is the work of the next seventy years and beyond, and great progress will be accomplished.  This we can have faith in because progress has shown itself as the true long course of human history before.  We are shaping the karma of future generations today by doing what we can to shape a more resilient, idealistic, compassionate, and wise America and world.  Do not be discouraged; just do the work because the work is needed.  The Promised Land is just over the horizon.         

Who we are is the Universe peering into itself from billions of points of view. – Alan Watts

Zen teaching emphasizes the most important of all koans: “Who/what am I?”  Of course we have an immediate answer that it is “me,” a human being, a mind and body with a history and identity; to which the master replies,  “Superficially yes, but you must go deeper, go deeper.  Who/what is this ‘me’?  Meditate on this.” 

When you meditate, what is happening?  Is not meditation the stepping back of the sense of self from entanglement in sensations, thoughts and emotions into looking at the sensations, thoughts and emotions that flow through the field of mind?  So who/what is looking?  It cannot be the sensations, thoughts and emotions because they are what is being looked at.  Perhaps it works to say the sensations, thoughts and emotions are the egoic “me,” a personality with unique traits, but at the most fundamental level, who/what is looking? 

A very powerful practice can be to close your eyes and try meditating on the view beyond your closed eyelids.  You must realize that the closing of the eyelids does not extinguish the faculty of vision, it simply keeps it from being entangled in the immediate environment.  In a sense we are looking into infinity.  This can be very liberating and enlightening.  So returning to the koan, who/what is looking into infinity?  Is it your mind of thoughts and emotions?  It is quite possible that while doing this meditation, thoughts have ceased entirely, so certainly it is not the mind of thought.  Typically those initiated into meditation will answer that it is awareness that looks, but what is this awareness?

We have stumbled upon the energy of consciousness, that which we never give any consideration to in our culture.  Like fish swimming in water that have no sense of water, it is very difficult for us to have a sense of consciousness since consciousness is the constant of our experience.  We focus attention on the varying and changing contents of consciousness but not on consciousness itself.  Of course without consciousness we would have no experience of anything, but what happens when we begin to be aware of awareness, of consciousness?  Going deeper, we must now ask what is this consciousness?

Ancient Vedic culture, the precursor to Hindu and Buddhist culture, described the origin of existence as a universal consciousness (Brahma) that brought forth the form of the world and all the forms in the world, including human, and these forms are pervaded with consciousness and the consciousness of a human being is a microcosmic extension (Atman) of that macrocosmic consciousness.  Modern quantum and field theory physics describes a universe that is a unified field of proto-energy out of which the energy of matter as sub-atomic particles spontaneously emerge and then engage in the great dance of merging and joining and complexifying that eventually leads to a human being with a brain that is the most complex organization of matter in the known universe.  Furthermore, experiments and theoretical extrapolation have us stunned by evidence that the behavior of these sub-atomic particles, even the way they manifest varyingly as particle energy or wave energy, demonstrates consciousness and the capacity for inter-particle communication.  It seems this ancient cosmology that expresses existence in poetic language may well be finding validation through modern science!

In our human-centered culture and religions, we limit assigning meaningful consciousness to humans while acknowledging limited consciousness in animals, but is this an accurate identification of the realm of consciousness?  Consciousness is defined in a google search as “The state of being awake and aware of one’s surroundings,” “The awareness or perception of something by a person,” and “The fact of awareness by the mind of itself and the world.  Consciousness emerges from the operations of the brain.”  Immediately we are struck by identification of consciousness in these conventional definitions with humans and with the brain.  But, does a tree not have consciousness that turns its leaves to the sun, that causes its roots to reach to nourishment and water sources, that has trees even communicating with and nurturing other trees, as recent studies are indicating?  Is there not a type of consciousness that beats the heart and moves the lungs and performs a thousand intricate and balanced functions in every animal organism?  What of indigenous peoples who believed and lived within a world in which mountains and rivers, even rocks or places on the ground manifested different qualities of consciousness and even spoke to them?  Was this just superstition or a more refined ability to sense and resonate with consciousness that pervades all things?  Vedic culture believed that rather than consciousness emanating from us, we emanate from consciousness.  We are not a body and mind that has consciousness, we are consciousness that has a body and mind.

What if the answer to who/what am I? is that we are a biological technology evolved over 14 billion years by the Universe to interact creatively with itself, and that these complex brains that have a neural network design tantalizingly similar to the extrapolated patterns of the network structure of dark matter and energy (which make up 96% of the Universe) are microscopic reflections of this macroscopic design that function as receivers and tuners for consciousness energy originating from and as the infinite vastness of the Universe entering into the finite?  What if what we are is a portal for consciousness energy between the dimensions of the infinite and the finite?  The intuited truth of this postulation is in the summation of ancient Vedic cosmology voiced by Alan Watts in the opening quote of this column and there is no question that Buddhism has clearly identified the essence of who we are as awareness, the field of consciousness energy though which flows all the content of mind.  All that is left to have a cosmology and ontology that reconnects the human experience to the Universal is the recognition that the energy of consciousness is not personal, but rather universal, and that awareness is the individual channeling of this energy that pervades the Universe.

We currently have no sense of ourselves within an unfolding evolving cosmos and this leaves us adrift and insecure in the vastness of the universe, and so too on our planet, in our societies, our families, even our own skin. Even when people do look at the stars, it is usually within a romantic sense centered on themselves. But what if when looking into the starlit sky we could see ourselves?  What if we could see in the stars the source of every atom that comprises our bodies and the world around us and to have a sense that our eyes are the eyes of the Universe looking into itself, infinity gazing into the finite as well as the finite gazing into the infinite?  Would we not be more likely to see our existence as a responsibility to serve as an instrument of the Universe realizing itself – given the gift of a planet that is paradise – and would this not lead us to behave not as destructive consumers but in ways that honor the sacred task we have of understanding, preserving and creating within a great intimate dance?

Cosmologist Brian Swimme offers and warns, “We need to put our energy into inventing new cultural forms for initiating ourselves into an ecstatic sense of involvement with the community of beings that is the very universe.  If we refuse to devote ourselves to this work, we’ll just have to make the necessary adjustments to deal with the river of misery flowing out of the perverse way of life yoking insatiable greed with drugs known as consumerism.  Cosmology when it is alive and healthy in a culture evokes in the human a deep zest for life, a zest that is satisfying and revivifying.”  We could at last feel at home and with purpose in the Universe, on this planet, in our societies, our families and in our own skins.

Zen is the simplest yet most challenging of practices – it is to train in experiencing the simultaneity of the day-to-day with the eternal, the finite with the infinite, to know we are always both here in the most immediate way and in the vastness of existence. “Be here now” is not just a catchy phrase – it is the essential koan directing us to experience how we exist as immediately as this place where our feet stand and our senses perceive AND we are that which can only be perceived with the intuitive sense – that sense which our culture ignores completely – as infinite, the vast Universe that is also the here and now. Breathe and be. We are this flesh and blood AND the dust of stars AND the infinite streaming energy of timeless and boundaryless consciousness. To walk the world in this knowing is Zen. It is to be complete and free of the insecurity of never being enough that has plagued humanity for millennia.  When we know we are a wave on the vast ocean of infinite consciousness energy, meaning we are also the ocean, it is more than enough.  Wherever we are, it is home.

Look, and it can’t be seen. Listen, and it can’t be heard. Reach, and it can’t be grasped. Above, it isn’t bright. Below, it isn’t dark. Seamless, unnamable, it returns to the realm of nothing. Form that includes all forms, image without an image, subtle, beyond all conception. Approach it and there is no beginning; follow it and there is no end. You can’t know it, but you can be it, at ease in your own life. Just realize where you come from: this is the essence of wisdom. – #14 – The Tao Te Ching (Mitchell)

We are a society and culture mesmerized by the objects of the world. We find value in and through objects like our possessions, and one of our strongest myths tells us that material wealth will lead to happiness and well-being when evidence proves this is not so.  Likewise, we look to belonging to identity groups like our nationality, religion, race, political and interest group affiliations as well as our social status to give placement and meaning to our life.  We accumulate things and affiliations, seeking to allay a haunting feeling of not being enough, and ultimately no matter how many things and affiliations we acquire, this feeling continues.  We need to fill our lives in order to feel OK, and there just doesn’t ever seem to be enough, and we are seldom unequivocally OK.

On a much subtler level, this is true with our relationship to mind itself. In Buddhism, thoughts, emotions and sensations are referred to as “mental forms” and we tend to define mind and our subjective sense of self through our thoughts and emotions.  We seek pleasurable sensory experiences to enhance desirable emotions, as if this gives life special meaning.  We look for ideas in the world that conform to, confirm and expand the ideas we already have so as to buttress our sense of self.  Unfortunately all this seeking and accumulating of ideas and emotions can also entangle us in the contradictions of the contents of our mind and this can make life most uncomfortable, if not at times crazy.  The mind can become like a rat’s nest of entangled ideas and emotions that plagues us.  When all is done, we find that none of the forms, material or mental, can give us lasting happiness, peace and well-being.

So, as “mental forms,” sensations, thoughts and emotions, are the stuff, the objects of the mind, just as material objects are the stuff of our lives, we tend to fixate on these mental objects and confuse them for the totality of mind when they are no more the totality of the mind then material objects are the totality of the world. In both cases, the space in which the objects occur is quite neglected, and this neglect causes us to miss the true value and meaning of existence. A world made only of objects is impossible, there must be space in which they occur, and too many objects in a limited space is rightly called cramped. A compulsive hoarder’s home is an assault on the senses and we usually feel uncomfortable in cramped and cluttered places.  In the opposite direction, we are drawn to the experience of open space, and it is why we climb to mountain tops and seek out places of vista, and why deserts have a mystical quality to them. So too, our cramped and cluttered minds are quite uncomfortable, particularly when it feels like the runaway contents of our minds are closing in on us and there is no escaping their suffocation.

We have no cultural tradition for recognizing the spacious mind as the real source of comfort, peace, and well-being, and despite all evidence of how crazy and dangerous so many of our thoughts and emotions are, we invest the realm of thought with intelligence and our emotions with much of our sense of self.  We neglect all our experience that shows us that it is the spacious silent mind that is the true source of intelligence and wisdom.  We fail to give proper notice to how it is that when we are caught in swirling circles of thought and emotion, we might take a walk or a shower or bath, or play with the dog, or wash the dishes, and out of the silence the insight that had been eluding us emerges.  But nothing in our culture validates this, so few give this insight the affirmation deserved. Even our psychologies, philosophies, and religions are filled with complicated ideas that seem to bring us no closer to peace and wisdom.

That real happiness and well-being most often occur when NOTHING is happening, as during the quiet space of the moment in an experience in nature, with a treasured person, or when just sitting alone, gets completely overlooked.  An equally valuable insight is that just as we seek open physical vistas for comfort and inspiration, so too it is wise to look to a spacious and quiet mind for happiness, insight, and well-being. Yet, since this is not an object in the mind – you cannot seek it, as many a frustrated seeker experiences – you can only allow it.  As many an intellectual or spiritual seeker experiences, they may fill their mind with many esoteric ideas and engage in many elaborate spiritual practices, but it brings them no closer to peace.

Just as space is the natural environment of a room before it is filled with objects, space is the natural quality of mind before it is filled with the objects of thoughts, emotions and sensations. This you can only relax into, breathe into, allow its natural presence. It is always there, for it is truly who we are, not the clutter with which that we compulsively fill it. This space of pure consciousness is what Buddhism refers to as “original mind” – mind before the clutter – and it is what all of Buddhism and its practices of meditation and mindfulness are meant to awaken.

Mystic traditions of all cultures, including Judaism and Christianity, recognize the contemplative and meditative mind, the quiet mind that is not seeking, but rather sitting in receptive reflection, as essential for higher levels of inspiration, understanding and spiritual realization.  Even higher levels of scientific inquiry as well as artistic inspiration depend on quiet, intuitive receptivity for breakthroughs.  Instead of focusing on the contracted mental energy of thoughts, this receptivity requires expanded openness of the energy of consciousness.  “It returns to the realm of nothing.”

An open outdoor vista is a good place to encourage and support this allowing, yet it is important to realize that your own true nature already IS the infinitely vast open vista of pure uncluttered consciousness. As this spacious consciousness is what makes experiences in the world meaningful, when space is experienced as a connecting energetic force rather than a source of separation, so too, it is this spacious consciousness energy prior to thoughts, sensations and emotions that is what creates the sense of connection within us.  When we train ourselves to abide in this quiet stillness, this openness, even amidst the clutter and noise of the world, this intuitive connection and sense of well-being remain.  In the mystical language of Taoism and Zen, rather than striving to be somebody looking for something, we become nobody abiding in the realm of nothing while everything swirls around us.  The open vista of original mind is felt as our source and stability. I encourage you into this allowing and finding of that which is not objects in the mind, but rather the vastness of Being, the space of consciousness prior to its energy contracting into objects of sensation, thought and emotion.  Just relax, breathe, allow, and expand into the space that is within and all around – and then – the objects that arise within and out of the space will be imbued with the beauty and wisdom of Reality. You will no longer experience yourself as a separate object looking to the accumulation of objects, whether material or mental, to validate you. You will know yourself as the consciousness energy that is the space, which can value what is natural and true without needing anything, and this is happiness, peace and well-being. There is no need to seek it, for you already are it.  Just learn to relax into it.

Love is not what we become but who we already are. – Stephen Levine

Pay special attention to what happens to the energy of the space that exists between you and a person or anything that you love as you are experiencing that love.  Does it not come alive and connect you with what or who is loved?

Perhaps this insight sounds completely nonsensical, but it is one of life’s most important discoveries and illuminates what Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh refers to as “The Miracle of Mindfulness.”  All of Buddhist teaching is aimed at getting us to notice and pay attention to that which we typically overlook but which when closely observed and deeply experienced,begins to reveal the most important secrets of Life, and there is no more vital hidden truth in our culture than that the space between objects is living energy.  So too are the objects – even those we conventionally think of as inert – and this energy resonates with the quality of the consciousness of the person experiencing the space and the objects within it.  We are energetic beings in an energetic universe with consciousness energy pervading this unity.

So what is love?  We might describe it as to hold dear, to feel passion, desire, affection, to take pleasure in something or someone.  We know it is a very strong emotion that arises when we are very attracted to and strongly like or identify with something or someone, but does any of this really explain what is happening and why it is happening?  We need to know what is happening and why because we tend to have a rather passive sense of love – it happens or not – if it’s there it’s there, if it’s not, it’s not.  We don’t have much of a sense of whether we have any active role in creating love, cultivating it and sustaining it and this is unfortunate, for the cultivation of love is quite possible and very necessary for love to bloom optimally.  It is very important to know that we can have a very active and creative relationship with love, and that this knowledge contributes greatly to living an awakened life.

So – what is love?  Simply stated, it is connection.  Is it not?  For what is experienced when love is present if it is not connection?  But then, what is this connection?  As with every aspect of the human realm, there are two fundamental dimensions, and here I am addressing the egoic realm and the very poorly understood spiritual, or realm-of-Being dimension, that which we struggle to find words to describe, for our culture lacks any agreed-upon vocabulary for this most precious of experiences.  As we are a strongly materialistic culture, if an experience is not anchored in the material we tend to overlook it, and for this conversation concerning love, we will be entering what we might call the purely subjective heart-realm, and there is nothing material about it.

At the level of ego, that experience of our own separate and insecure identity in the world seeking to be buttressed and comforted, love is of course connection, but the quality of the connection is limited.  It is the experience of the ego connecting and identifying with a person, object or experience and seeking its own validation and significance through this experience.  It is the “I love it!” in response to a personal validation, victory, enhancement or stimulation, even if the “it” is another person.  The experience maintains a strongly dualistic quality even as a unifying connection occurs.  I am here – experiencing and loving that which is there.   If we pay very close attention, however, we might realize that there occurs an extension of our sense-of-self boundary to include the object of the love, and for this to happen, the space of consciousness energy that is our essence must amplify and now include the object of the love.  Almost amoeba-like an extension of the boundary of ourself extends and includes that which was not previously included.  To love means to have the sense of self expand to include what is loved – and this is non-dualistic; two becomes one in intense connection. The space between becomes alive with consciousness and connecting energy where it was previously experienced as a separation.  What is extended is the essential core of ourself and here we make a discovery: this essential core is love.

As consciousness energy extends and encompasses the object of love, the experience begins to shift from the egoic into the heart-realm, and now there is a very important choice to be made.  We can either retain much of our sense of identity in our separateness, continually assessing whether the enhancement of self-experience is sufficient to maintain the connection or we can release into real union – our Self-that-is-love encompassing that which is the focus of our attention.  If we remain primarily the separate ego-self, attention will drift, searching for some new experience.  We likely will find some deficiency in the object/situation/person, and the consciousness energy will diminish or withdraw completely.  We will return to our sense of separate and restless sense of self, and the thing, situation, or person that was loved becomes separate and just ordinary again, as do we.  Or – and here we have the opportunity to fully manifest ourselves as loving beings – we can, recognizing that our greatest fulfillment occurs in the state of connected oneness, deliberately energize the connection and sustain and amplify the loving heart-realm that is our truest self in enfoldment.  This is conscious loving.  We commit to the decision and intent to BE love.  Here, we surrender our separateness and commit to union.

To live the mystical life, the awakened life, is to know and practice this truth of the power of love as consciousness energy to connect with all the elements of Life all around us always.  It is to love all that passes through our field of consciousness – the bird in the tree and the tree, the clouds passing overhead and the warmth of the sun, even the previously insignificant or repulsive; it is to recognize and love as self everything.  This is, of course, particularly powerful and important with people, and of most importance with those with whom we are in loving relationships.  The wisdom traditions teach us that ego separates and conscious heart-felt presence connects, and this does not have to be random and accidental.  It can be the centerpiece of one’s spiritual practice, which is simultaneously a commitment to sane and healthy living, including our most significant relationships.  We can live as loving presence.

For this to occur, we must awaken to the realization of self-as-consciousness-as-love.  We have to take the concept of consciousness as energy that connects us to heart-realm out of the theoretical and into living reality and this is the real purpose of our mindfulness practice.  To do this, it is most helpful to repeatedly, choicefully, anchor into the present moment through our senses – seeing, hearing, touching the object, circumstance, or person with the intention to love without distraction.  We must be really present, as the heart-realm can only be accessed from within the present moment, realizing the present moment is the only actual reality.  Only then can silent, intuitive consciousness fully energize and our nature-as-consciousness-that-is-love come fully alive.  Presence, full presence without mental commenting or distraction, with full focus of consciousness-energy on the loved one, is essential.  Then we can deliberately further energize the space of consciousness with our loving essence to envelope what or who we have focused our loving intention upon to create what consciousness teacher Stephen Levine called The Beloved, a union of what was two that becomes one.

Loving human relationships are complicated.  Often they are filled with as much wound and disappointment as with shared beauty and this can be an obstacle to opening and sustaining the connection of the heart-realm in living consciousness energy.  Ego wants to hold on to and feed these resentments.  This is why all spiritual traditions have emphasized forgiveness and gratitude, and why making a practice of releasing any resentment or negative feeling towards our loved ones and replacing it with reasons for gratitude when the relationship is challenging is essential.  This shift from mental focus on the ego’s accounting system where resentment is stored (for the ego is always keeping track of whether it is getting what it wants) into the heart-space where gratitude is realized will open us and allow our consciousness energy-field to enfold and embrace, to shift us from two to one, from “me” to Beloved.  The Beloved is within you and right in front of you and all around you awaiting your choice to open and embrace with living consciousness energy, to discover the Beloved IS you.  The paradox is that while it is the ego that is tracking whether it is happy or not, the ego has no idea how to generate happiness.  It is the heart-realm that is the true source of happiness, both the giving and receiving of happiness, and for it to be actualized, the separation caused by the ego must be bridged and self-as-love uniting with Life realized.  When we open our heart-realm, understanding that this is really consciousness-energy, love – that which is our original and true nature – embraces us as it embraces others.  The Beloved comes alive as truly do our relationships and the entirety of our life.

“Mindfulness is the miracle by which we master and restore ourselves… it is the miracle which can call back in a flash our dispersed mind and restore it to wholeness.” –  Thich Nhat Hanh

Let me offer you a koan, one of those mess-with-your-mind word puzzles of Zen.  “Here we are.”  In the spirit of koan, if you penetrate deeply into the meaning of these words enlightenment awaits you.  Rational mind can get you to a surface understanding, but the full miracle, the miracle by which we master and restore ourselves, lies beyond the capacity of the rational mind.  That’s where a koan is supposed to take you, to the magical realm of intuitive insight.

The rational mind hears these words and says, “OK,” we are here, where else could we be?  Well, of course where we are is where our mind is, and much of the time, our mind is not “here.”  It is in there and then, or when or what-if.  We are not fully here.  We are here sufficiently to get by, to not trip over our feet, to hold a conversation, to fulfill a basic task, but we are not here in a way that the word “master” used by Thich Nhat Hanh could apply.  We are not completely here, wholeheartedly here, in a manner that could be transformative, that could restore us to wholeness.  All of nature has no problem being completely “here,” but for humans in contemporary culture, this can be a very great challenge.

If we are not here, where are we?  Of course, we are here physically, but who we are is certainly not our physical body.  I don’t think many would argue that a severely psychotic person, or a person in a coma is not truly here.  Given sufficient consideration, I think most would probably agree that who we are is a matter of consciousness.  Even a person who is severely distracted is often queried, “Where were you just now?”  They may be admonished to get their “head into the game,” the “game” being the matter at hand, here.

Even as we go about our lives assuming that we are “here,” it is worthwhile to ask, just where, actually, is a very significant part of us?  Wouldn’t we have to admit we are very much in our head in the where, when, what-if, world of mind-spin?  Are we not dispersed and unfocused in very profound ways?  We live in a time when inability to hold focus and attend with stability has been given a diagnostic label – attention-deficit disorder – and while most people do not fit the criteria for the disorder, few would say they are free of the symptoms.  So, most of us most of the time are only here, really here, in a rather superficial sense.

So, we might say to ourselves, like a tyrannical grade school teacher conjured in a bad dream, “Concentrate!  Really focus into being here!”  Should you do this, you might notice that you become rather tense.  Yes, concentration is an important element of being here, but concentration alone doesn’t seem to have this miraculous quality that Thich Nhat Hanh is calling us to with “mindfulness.”  And while the ability to concentrate has benefits, it hardly would rise to something we could call a miracle.

What then is this mindfulness that Thich Nhat Hanh attributes with miraculous power?  Let us come back to his use of the world wholeness.  Even in a state of intense concentration, when we are focusing into some element of the present moment, the descriptors natural and whole, and the word restore don’t seem applicable.  We are tense and there is a strong feeling of being separate from what we are concentrating on.  There is the “I” concentrating and there is the object of the concentration.  There is a clear division.

You might try an experiment to understand the difference between concentration and mindfulness.  Go outside and look at a tree.  Concentrate on the tree.  Really, eye squinting, concentrate on the tree.  Truly, you are present, yet nothing “miraculous” is happening.  Now, while concentrating on the tree, also notice your breathing, and notice the tension in your face and your body, and as you breathe, soften the tension, and with each exhalation, relax a little bit more – while still holding a very alert attention on the tree.  Awareness of your breathing is very important for this exercise.  Let the breathing be natural, not forced or regulated.  Still looking at the tree, notice ever more deeply the sensations of your breathing and your body.

After a little while, with this relaxing conscious breathing, we are still looking at the tree, but not concentrating now in the tensely focused manner.  Everything is softer.  Perhaps you may begin to notice small detail and texture to the branches, leaves, shape, and trunk of the tree.  You may begin to see the tree in more nuanced relationship to the other trees and landscape around it.  Instead of a very narrow focus, your focus may begin to expand, still with the tree at the center of the field of focus, but more and more of the context in which the tree appears becomes apparent whereas in the state of intense concentration, the tree alone was your field of focus.  You could not, in a sense, see the branches or the forest for the tree.

You may begin to be aware of the space in which the tree appears and in which everything around the tree appears, and as you continue with this softened directed awareness of the tree and its surroundings, it may occur to you that you are also in this environment that centers on the tree.  Instead of experiencing the tree as “over there” and you being “here” looking at and concentrating on the tree, you may begin to experience that “here” is the tree and you and the bird flying overhead and the cloud in the sky and the grass beneath your feet, all held in a relaxed state of vibrant presence.  In a flash of a moment, a feeling of wholeness, connectedness, restoration of a sense of place and belonging in this world may come over you.

You might feel real love for this tree that was just another tree only a few moments ago and with it a deepened sense of love for life, all of life.  If someone came along with a chainsaw and said they were there to cut down this tree, you might find this to be quite upsetting, for you have felt connection with this tree, and with the environment of the tree.  If the person with the chainsaw said the tree was badly diseased and had to be cut down, you would be sad but understand.  If the chainsaw person said they just hated raking leaves so they were cutting down the tree, you might have a deep sense of how wrong it is for people to have such a callous and destructive attitude toward nature and its beauty.

The full beauty and vulnerability of life may arise as a deep knowing in you.  That life is this beauty, and that this beauty and life are transitory and therefore all the more worthy of your full presence and appreciation may arise within you, and the wrong that is the mindless trampling of this beauty by those who cannot see it, but can only see the mind-spin of their shallow likes and dislikes may become very clear to you.  That we ARE this life in kinship with the tree and the birds and the lakes and the rivers and the air that we breathe and all the animals and people of this world may arise within you.  And in this knowing and experiencing we may feel a kind of wholeness that reconnects us to a feeling we last had as a small child, and perhaps we feel restored and as master of our life and not mindlessly lost in the busyness and striving we had come to accept as normal, but always with great unease.

This is mindfulness.  This is the miracle of mindfulness.

“This moment, what is lacking?” is a classic koan.  Allowing that the moment is, in fact, the totality of all experience, the answer is, “nothing is lacking.”  The moment contains everything.  To borrow a phrase from Ram Dass, the moment is “thick.”  It contains not only what is occurring in the present, but also past and future.  It contains happiness.  It contains sadness.  It contains good. It contains evil.  It contains satisfaction.  It contains want.  It contains love.  It contains hatred.  It contains the physical.  It contains the mental.  It contains the spiritual.  It contains you and me and everyone and all life.  When does the moment begin; when does it end?  Where is it not the moment?  It is as immediate as the blink of your eye and as vast as the Universe.

We might find ourselves realizing that everything occurring everywhere and all that has ever occurred or will ever occur exists only in the vast moment that is the Universe, and that all that exists does so because of what precedes in the flow of the great Universal moment and all that will be is the result of seeds planted in this moment, and so their fruition is connected with this moment. We might realize that “here we are” is all and everything, when a moment ago, in that universe in our minds where we and the tree were very separate entities in a universe of nothing but separate entities, there was just a tree we were squinting at while we tried to wrestle all the there and then and what-if in our mind into some semblance of quietude.   And we might have the insight that all the where and when and what-if swirling in our minds and all our likes and dislikes are pretty petty in the great Everything that is Now, and we may begin to let go of some of that mind-spin to find we are capable of living from a much quieter, peaceful and compassionate place.  I ask you, wouldn’t you call that a miracle?

“The greatest sin is to be unconscious.” – Carl Jung

In its original meaning, from the ancient Greek and also in Hebrew, to “sin” is to miss the mark, the term drawn from the world of archery.  It also has as its meaning, “to be in error.”  It is pointing us to the realization of what the purpose of our human life is about – and to miss it is to be in profound error, leading to life-negating consequences.

The 20^th Century Jewish theologian and mystic Abraham Heschel spoke of the origin of sin to be “in denial of the sublime wonder of life.”  In other words, Heschel is saying that to fail to be conscious of our being in the midst of mystery, of Creation unfolding, and to fail to be deeply present, curious and reverent in approaching this mystery will surely cause us to miss the point of life and will have us behaving in ways that are in error – disrespectful, manipulative, exploitive and harmful.  These attitudes form the precondition for egregious behavior, in other words, sin.

From this “sinful” perspective, we will objectify ourselves, others, and all that is in the world, and our relationships consequently will be conflictual and utilitarian rather than respectful and sincere.  Careless and thoughtless harm generates from such an attitude.  The cause of any action that could be called “sinful,” therefore, is a state of mind that is deeply in error – one that entirely misses the mark of the purpose of our existence as to be in harmony with the miracle that is Creation.

The issue of consciousness becomes relevant here in that when we look deeply at a thing, event, or a circumstance we begin to see detail, subtleties and connections not noticed by superficial looking.  What might seem isolated and disconnected, upon deeper examination, may begin to reveal subtle connections, and the more deeply we are able to look, that is, the more consciousness we bring to the investigation, the more subtle and far-reaching the connections reveal themselves to be.  From Jung’s depth psychology perspective, and from a Buddhist perspective, to be conscious is to see the event taking place within contexts of infinite connections without which the thing cannot exist.

In illustration of this point, Vietnamese Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh is known to offer the observation that this paper you hold is more than just a paper.  It is also tree, soil, sun, rain, the labor and the creativity and effort of the writer, the editor, the printers, the paper millers, etc.; in fact, if you look deeply enough, you can see the entire universe and its evolutionary history happening in this interface of the paper and the person who reads it, who brings consciousness to the event of seeing.  We begin to experience mystery, that is, a knowing that is both particular and vast – ultimately beyond our ability to articulate other than perhaps as poetry and metaphor.  The deeply observational consciousness of modern science tells us this is true, and the deeply intuitive consciousness of the mystic has told us of this truth for thousands of years.

And so too, what happens when we look deeply at ourselves?  Just as when we look deeply at what occurs seemingly outside of us, when we look deeply at and inside ourselves, we begin to be conscious of infinite subtle levels of connection, process and mystery.  We begin to be conscious that this seeming separateness is an illusion.  We begin to experience that inside, outside, self and other are all happening within one thing, the greatest mystery of all, consciousness itself.  Now we are arriving at the definition of consciousness that Jung is addressing – consciousness examining mind happening in consciousness, where that which looks discovers it is looking at itself from across dimensions and is capable of great compassion and insight; even realizing the looking becomes like an act of prayer, a communication with the infinite petitioned by the finite.  Sublime wonder and a sense of sacredness begin to arise naturally.

Much of Jung’s work focused on archetypes, that is, symbols and signs that point to deep and universal human psychic experiences, and the entire archetypal concept of God and the reasons religions exist are because of this human capacity for intuiting that consciousness is not some faculty of our separateness, but rather the vehicle of discovering our connectedness with all that is.  To be unconscious in this context is to be held by the sway of the myth of our own separateness and the separateness of all that comprises life, and even to create sciences, psychologies and religions that emphasize this separateness.  It is from this objectifying perspective, as Heschel observed, that we seek to make more of ourselves, to allay our terror at not being enough, by diminishing and recklessly exploiting what is perceived as not us, and the result is “sin.”  The result is the missing of the mark, the great error of living in insatiable hunger to fill a hole in our sense of being, what the 17^th Century scientist/theologian Blaise Pascal described as “The God Shaped Hole.”

What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself.  –  Blaise Pascal, Pensées VII(425)

And we ask, what is this God that can fill this hole?  It certainly cannot be the conception of God that creates bloody lines of religious division throughout human history.  It has to be the realization of the unity of all things within which, and as an expression of, we exist.  It is the wonder that reveals itself when we look deeply enough and find, as mystics of all cultures have with their various meditative arts, that who we are is, as theologian/philosopher Alan Watts noted “the Universe peering into itself, from billions of points of view.”  We are consciousness that has a human life, body and mind so as to experience existence, and the natural result of this discovery is profound and sublime wonder.  Thus, finally, we reclaim our capacity to hit the mark, to be without error in our experience of this unity.

Only this wonder and discovery can fill the hole.  We slowly come to realize that who we are IS consciousness and that like the energy of matter, the energy of consciousness is a fact of the Universe, and that energy of either dimension shares the common property of indestructibility. The form, the vehicle of the energy is impermanent, yet the energy itself is indestructible. We have found and hit the mark.  This journey into consciousness, into sublime wonder, fills us and there is no longer a need for coercive morality policing a “sinful” nature for we no longer are in error as to who or what we are.  The fear that comes with being unconscious of this truth leaves us.  We are each other and we are the world and the Universe itself.  There is no abyss except in our mistaken state of unconsciousness, and there is nothing to fill for we already are everything.  We are the dust of stars and the consciousness of life itself journeying as a human being discovering we are, always have been and can never be anywhere but home in the vast Universe of here and now.   How sublimely wondrous!

Don’t Take Anything Personally – Nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you won’t be the victim of needless suffering. – From The Four Agreements don Miguel Ruiz

We take things so personally.  If someone likes us, we tend to like them and feel good about ourselves.  If someone dislikes us, we generally dislike them and can have our sense of well-being and personal peace disrupted.  If the world and the events around us are playing out in ways we favor, we are generally happy.  If the world and events around us are playing out in ways we do not favor, our happiness and well-being are typically affected negatively.  This can be in regard to something as clearly impersonal as the weather, yet we make it personal.  When it involves another person or groups of people, when it involves our personal desires and ambitions, we tend to take it very personally.

You might ask, “Shouldn’t we care what others think of us and shouldn’t we care if life is the way we want it to be?”  And the answer has to be yes and no.  Caring is one thing.  Personalizing is another.  To care means that we are taking circumstances and people seriously, and we care whether some sense of greater good is being served in how events are unfolding.  Personalizing means we are being a weathervane for every wind that blows, and there can be some very cruel winds in this world.

It is not uncommon for people to be having real difficulty with another person.  It may be that for whatever reason someone has targeted them and is behaving in a bullying and intimidating manner, or it may be that someone is being disrespectful to them, or ignoring them, or manipulating them.  There are so many ways that people behave that can be taken as assaults on our dignity, autonomy and value.  Likewise, the events of the world and the circumstances of our lives can turn distinctly to our disliking and personal disadvantage.

Should we care?  Yes.  We should care to understand what is happening and why, and we should care to do what we can if a situation can be addressed so as to bring about some greater understanding and we can address its effect in a way that minimizes harm and increases general benefit.  Should we personalize and find our own sense of well-being and balance dependent on people and events being the way we want them to be?  Of course not.  When we have our sense of balance, well-being and confidence dependent on events and persons outside of us, we have no real balance, well-being and confidence at all.

As for interpersonal difficulties, don Miguel Ruiz’s advice in the Four Agreements is very wise.  It resonates with a maxim from the Gestalt Therapy founder Fritz Perls who offered the observation, “Thou art projection.”  Human beings most often have a sense of themselves and the world that is not what is real and true, but rather is the amalgam of psychological, social and cultural conditioning creating a virtual reality of what they believe to be real, and they project this virtual reality onto others and the world.  In a very real sense, we are projection screens for others and they are projections screens for us.  Everyone is projecting their own assumptions and personal history and neurotic tendencies onto each other.  So it clearly cannot be wise to invest our sense of balance, security and well-being in this multi-plex of movies that is any gathering of people or set of circumstances.

I like to offer in illustration that we could take ten random people off the street and have them experience a person for a day, and then interview these ten people and we would get a breakdown of opinion that would roughly have three of them really liking the person, three of them not particularly liking the person and the other four pretty much indifferent.  Consider this when the next person out of ten is giving you a hard time and your whole sense of balance is being thrown by that person.

As for circumstances, it is important to pay attention to how everything can be going along just fine and then something “goes wrong” – and we become completely taken over by what we are judging to have gone wrong.  There are several lessons to be learned here.  The first is that we pay very little attention to what is going right – just like we give very little mental energy to the people who like us or have very little opinion of us.  That’s because these circumstances and people are not feeding into the insecurities of our ego.

A sad truth is that most people have really very insecure egos.  It’s kind of the state of affairs in our society.  It isn’t our fault and it doesn’t make us bad.  We are all shaped and conditioned by those psychological, social and cultural factors I mentioned earlier, and in our society, it is quite rare for a person to be raised in a manner that results in them being calmly confident and relatively free of depending on circumstances for their sense of well-being.  So, circumstances and other people’s behavior and opinions play a very great role in a person’s confidence and well-being, and in this matter, we tend to be a bit paranoid, that is, looking for the circumstances and people that shake our happiness and confidence.  And of course, we will find them, for life is everything and all kinds of people and all kinds of circumstances.  If we allowed all the things that go right and all the nice people who treat us quite well to register with the same importance we give to the problematic situations and people, we would not tend to get shaken so readily.

The second factor is this issue of what’s good and what’s bad for us.  There is a truth in psychological and spiritual teachings that difficult situations and people are really beneficial to us, for they give us the opportunity to see where our conditioning needs some attending, where our skill-set with life could use some development and improvement.  All of us can relate that there are times in our life that have been difficult and we would have absolutely preferred not to have gone through them, yet we can also look back and realize that often these times were ones when we learned a great deal about ourselves and about life.  They were times when, although difficult, we perhaps achieved some real growth, became more skillful, more discerning and more compassionate.  They were times when perhaps we became more discerning at the difference between compassion and codependence, perhaps more confident in our ability to handle the travails and setbacks of life, and learned better what to value and what not to, and which people to trust and which not to trust.  We may even have learned how to not trust someone compassionately, that is, to realize it is only their conditioning that has them behaving in this untrustworthy manner, so there is no need to dislike or hate them, that it is simply not wise to take them into our zone of trust, and certainly not wise to take their opinions and behavior personally.

There is a Zen saying that “obstacles do not block the path, obstacles are the path,” and it is that saying that applies here.  What is important is whether we will take these “difficult” times as opportunities, or whether we take them personally as set-backs and defeats, as confirmation that we are somehow defective, inadequate and not up to the challenges of life.

Life is perfect.  It is perfectly all things, and we are expressions of life, and so, we too are perfect, capable of facing all challenges if we hold our center knowing we are expressions of life.  If we face our challenges with curiosity and compassion rather than fear and projection, we can manage anything and anyone.  Another Zen saying says, “You may kill me, but you cannot defeat me.”  Not when I truly know who I am, and live in the unshakeable sense of “I am,” for that is what we are.  Not “I am this or that,” but rather simply and unshakably, “I am.”  Our spiritual and psychological journey is arriving in this unshakeable realization of who we are as a Being that is an expression of the Universe just like a bear or a bird that takes nothing personally and just lives the life it is given as skillfully as its faculties will allow.   Nothing is personal.  It’s just another thing to be understood and engaged in the great and sacred cosmic dance of life.

A reader contacted me with a question, and I decided a good column could come from answering it. Here’s the question: “Could you write about something that came up in a recent discussion? Someone said to me recently, ‘perception is reality.’ I said that it’s not and they were stunned. To me, perception depends on a person’s happiness or unhappiness; their optimism or pessimism. I’d like to hear what you think. Thanks.”

In answer to the question “is perception reality?” – I have to say, no and yes. Is perception reality in an absolute sense? From the standpoint of human senses and the intellect’s capacity to symbolize and understand experience, no, it cannot be. Absolute reality is the Universe-as-it-really-is, far beyond the capacities of human senses and intellect. The Universe is, as modern science is discovering, a single quantum field of energy manifesting matter/consciousness, but that is not what our sensory perception tells us. We can create only a representation of a very limited portion of reality and then create images and ideas about this incomplete information, and this information tells us we are separate and alone in the universe. Is this perception experienced and acted upon as reality? Most certainly, yes. And there lies the problem. We tend to act as if our subjective experience of separateness is reality, when it is only a perspective on reality.

From this perspective, it must first be recognized that human beings experience reality very differently from other species who have very different sense organs and brains. Then, amongst humans, perception will be strongly influenced by psychological and cultural factors. At this personal level, every individual lives in their own reality to a greater or lesser degree. Within a given cultural grouping, a person’s conformity to reality as a cultural norm is the basis of our measurement of mental health and illness at the most basic level. This variance of the subjective experience of reality is also the source of most human conflict. One person’s reality can be so different from another’s they will want to kill each other. Think of the current conflict between Islamic Jihadists and European-culture-based societies.

Then, at subtler levels, we come to just how one individual sees things versus another, right down to small tastes and preferences. So here, as the questioner noted, a person with a psychological predilection to happiness will experience a more positive “reality” than a person with a pessimistic and negative predilection. This is why we can predict how a predisposed anxious or angry or depressed person will perceive and react to the same event in very different ways, and how persons with differing styles of being-in-the-world will differ from each other in how they express themselves. We experience “reality” in vividly personal ways, so it is very important to realize that our perception is literally only a point of view.

An important question, however, remains: can humans intuit actual reality? In other words, beyond the limitations of senses and brain and culture and individual psychological bias, can a human have a sense of the Universe-as-it-is through its levels of organizations, from the microscopic to the macroscopic? From the perspective of Buddhist teaching, we have to say, “yes.”

We in this culture too often fail to acknowledge a deeper level of knowing than the intellect. This knowing arises from the silent intelligence of intuition and has no words for it transcends the realm of language. It is just a knowing, and is the source of both mystical and scientific insight into the true nature of the Universe. Intuition is capable of this because intuition is the consciousness that is both individual and universal. This non-duality is expressed within Oriental cosmologies when Buddhist masters instruct us to realize ourselves and the universe as one.

A very non-Buddhist source, astro-physicist and cosmologist, Mark Whittle, Ph.D., states a similar intuitive insight that is an example of what leads the cutting edge of science: “The Universe has, in a sense, made us in its own image… We’re descended from stars… and evolving within Nature has shaped our intuition in such a way that we can comprehend the cosmological story. In a sense, we’re children of Nature, at home in the Universe.”

The great challenge to those of us raised in a psychologically dualistic society, accustomed to mistaking technology for science and thinking for intelligence, is to grasp that the true scientists, such as Whittle, Einstein, or Tesla, are reaching into their intuitive knowing in order to understand what lies beyond the limits of accepted technology. They then use and shape technology to further the reach of our scientific understanding. Thinking comes after the intuitive insight, to organize and communicate their insights

In the psychological/mystical/spiritual dimension, this same opening of intuitive insight is necessary, and just as the theoretical scientist learns to trust their intuitional insights into the mystery of the Universe, we can, through training, examine the moments of our lives with the silent intelligence of awareness. We begin to experience, as the Japanese Zen tradition would say, the “Thusness” or “as-it-is-ness” of existence on the multiple levels of our existence. We can engage in what is known as the Zen practice of Shikantaza – a form of meditation that is the direct seeing and experiencing of the moment without preconceived judgment, not intellectualizing, but rather, being the truth of the moment realized in awareness.

Training in meditation, mindfulness and awareness is meant to expand our ability to experience more of the everything of existence, utilizing more of our perceptive and mental capacities in a non-judgmental manner to create a more accurate experience of reality-as-it-is. This is, of course, a continuum, and each of us is somewhere on this continuum between what Buddhism calls “egoic delusion,” living almost entirely out of the projected conditioning of our ego, and awakened awareness, experiencing Life-as-it-is, in both the conditioned world of form and the energetic absolute Universe where form and consciousness are like the particle and wave of quantum physics. Through our training and practice, we move on this continuum closer and closer to absolute reality

“The fundamental delusion of humanity is to suppose that I am here and you are out there.” – Yasutani Roshi

Through both scientific and mystical intuitive inquiry, we can come closer to the realization that we and the Universe are both matter-energy and consciousness-energy, all One. We can experience how any small movement of our sense of self-in-the-world (perception) from egoic delusion toward awakened awareness brings us closer to the living reality of existence, and with it, significant expansion of our capacity for well-being and security as the gap between perception and reality grows smaller. We begin by narrowing the compassion gap that separates us from understanding ourselves and our fellow humans. This reduces the conflicts we have within ourselves and with other people. We then have to narrow the gap that separates us from identification with our fellow creatures, with Nature and the Earth that is our home. Eventually, we awaken into the realization, what Zen calls the “felt sense,” that we and the Universe are one. This is what Zen calls realizing our original nature, where perception resonates much closer to actual reality.