“We always think nirvana is something very different from our own life. But we must really understand that it is right here, right now… Do not be dualistic. Truly be one with your life as the subtle mind of nirvana. That is what subtle means.  Something is subtle not because it is hidden, nor because it is elusive, but because it is right here.” – Taizan Maezumi (1931 – 1995) – founder L.A. Zen Center, 1967.

When a person studies the non-duality consciousness traditions: Buddhism (particularly Zen), Taoism, Tibetan Dzogchen, Advaita Vedanta, Aboriginal cosmology, and the various mystical expressions of the major religions, there may arise in them an intellectual understanding that there is a radically different way from what they have known to experience spirituality and life.  This intellectual understanding, however, only leaves them realizing that what is being pointed to cannot be actualized through their intellectual understanding.  All these traditions are built around a radical experiential shift, a shift in feeling and in the way we literally see ourselves, others, and life.  These traditions and their teachings represent a kind of puzzle which cannot be solved through thinking, but rather, by doing something perceptually very different and by letting go of everything you think about who you are and what life is. 

So, there you are with these tantalizing ideas about a life which opens us into deeper and higher realms, but which seems unattainable.  It feels like, as they say in Maine, “you can’t get there from here.” You may be brought to realize there is a path into this other mode of experience, a mode which is sometimes called enlightenment, representing a realization and fulfillment which feels very near yet is beyond reach.  In a famous analogy from Zen, as we walk this path we experience a gate to this realm, and it seems to be locked, and we ordinary mortals cannot figure out how to unlock it. But since Zen insists that this realm is our own truest and deepest nature, it, in koan fashion, informs us there really is no lock or even gate.  It is called the “Gateless Gate.” To draw on the Christian mystical perspective, it is Heaven spread across the land for those with the eyes to see. But we can’t see heaven because our eyes are being deceived by our limited ideas about life, ourselves and others, eyes trained by our culture, even our religions, to be blind to the true spiritual realm.

The fundamental limiting perceptive mode which blocks the way is called duality, the sense of “me” in here, and “you” and “the world” out there, all separate objects jostling for their place in hierarchies, even for their survival.  To get through this gate, Zen advises that you must realize the world, me, and you are all, in actuality, co-arising as phenomena within the singularity that is Life, the Universe, and the Cosmos in this eternal moment.  Zen, attempting to bring the necessary shift in experience, will call upon us to attend to the “suchness” and “thusness” of the moment. It calls us to experience the moment with all the sincere attentiveness and open-mindedness we can muster.  It refers to the necessary mind-state as “Big Mind,” “Beginner’s mind,” or “Buddha-mind.” It is calling upon us to open our mind to the primal experience of awareness before the thinking, judging, labeling egoic dimension of mind slices Life into things, into bits of information examined for relevancy and importance to “me” – as defined by a complex matrix of psycho/social/cultural conditioners. That’s what the ego, or “little-mind,” the mind which thinks it knows what is going on, does.

Because of our cultural conditioning, we associate me and “my mind,” the little mind of ego, the dimension of mind which thinks and assumes it knows, as the limits of reality.  But the ego-mind cannot figure out this spiritual challenge, and if it fools itself that it has, it IS fooling itself. The ego-mind is the realm of thought and thought can only function with words, labels, and assumptions – assumptions such as “me” in here and “you” and everyone else and all the world, even God, as “out there” to be figured out.  This is the realm of duality.  What lies beyond the gateless gate is the non-duality of Life as the moment, the infinite unity manifesting the many phenomena, all interconnected and interdependent, mortally impermanent, yet always still eternally Life as it actually is. Some of these traditions call this mystical original unity God, other traditions call it Dharma, Tao, Spirit, or Brahman. Some call it Mystery, and some call it The Realm of Being.

From within dualistic mind, non-duality, the unity of all things, cannot be grasped as anything other than a philosophical proposition.  Yet, what Zen emphasizes is that non-duality is the ultimate nature of Reality; it is not a philosophical proposition. Zen tells us that non-duality must be intuitively realized as a felt sense to be relaxed into.  Thinking and words, even the wisest words can, at best, point us to what is to be experienced in non-duality.  Words cannot replace the experience. What the non-dual traditions emphasize is that non-duality cannot be experienced while locked in dualistic thinking.  Yet, non-duality, sometimes also addressed as “wisdom,” is the necessary perspective to truly understand and master duality because duality arises within non-duality. It is the very basis of existence.  Are you confused?  You must let go of your confusion and need to figure it out to pass through this gate. You must stop being the “you” that you are accustomed to. You must step back and out into a deeper level of awareness that penetrates into experiencing pure consciousness.

The greatest Zen koans are “who am I?” and “What is this?” Go ahead – try to peel these onions, and yes, use your intellect to take you deeper into the possibilities, but be ready to leave the intellect behind, for the intellect is the locked gate. Another Zen parable is of crossing a river to the other side (nirvana).  When crossing a body of water, we must use a boat or raft to cross the divide between here and there, but once there, we must leave the boat or raft (which are the written teachings and practices of the traditions) behind to explore this new reality, which is actual Reality, always and only, “Here.” “The other side” is a hallucination of the egoic mind. There is always only here. The teachings and practices are built on words and instructions, which are dualistic.  They are our rafts.  Yet our destination is beyond words and practices.  Just this! Just this moment arising in awareness through a human being. “Forget everything you know!” demands the teacher. Look!  Listen! Feel! Know! – Do not think it.  You cannot get to knowing through thinking. Insightful thought arises not out of thinking but rather through letting go, relaxing into the non-dual, silent, intuitive dimension of mind that is our origin. Duality cannot know non-duality while non-duality knows duality perfectly. This! Now!…………

If this wash of words has caused your mind to spin and stop – in that pause – that’s it! This is called koan, a device which uses words to take you beyond words to – silence.  Meditation, mindfulness, and silent contemplation are the methods of exploration of the other shore.  In silence, we realize a deeper intelligence than thought, and the realization is that we are not the content of the mind, but that which precedes and can examine the content – the thoughts, emotions and sensations.  We are The Presence that can know itself as this energy which gives rise to you and me and everything.  We are Universal Energy individualized. We are non-duality (Oneness) manifesting in duality (as this thing we know as “me”).

In the ancient Vedic tradition of India this First Creative Force was described as “Brahman,” the consciousness of the Universe which manifests the physical world. What is manifested was called “Atman,” which includes we individual humans through which the consciousness of Brahman channels into the manifest realm to explore and understand in a complex manner the Universe unfolding in its miracle.  This miracle is marked by the inviolable principles of interconnectedness, interdependence, and impermanence of all forms. The guru advises that as you perceive all that comes and goes in the world of form, you must recognize that which does not come and go. This is the deepest you arising in the realm of Being, of Essence. This is awareness, the energy of consciousness channeled through a human being. All the mystical traditions in some fashion advise that who we are is the Universe (or God) experiencing itself through the channel of a human life, as too are all the forms of the world. Non-duality gives rise to duality and experiences duality as separate forms, still always, in their essence, the One. The problem in a culture that does not recognize non-duality is we have forgotten our true selves as non-dual awareness.  We have forgotten that we are duality AND non-duality simultaneously. To know this and live this is “the subtle mind of nirvana” or enlightenment. Where, when and how does this happen? Right here, right now, with awakened awareness. “If not here, where? If not now, when?” asks the master.

Nirvana is not, however, free of pain, Nirvana is being free of adding suffering on to pain.  As Buddha taught, life is birth, aging, old age, sickness, and death.  There is impermanence – people, cherished pets, possessions, circumstances, our mortal life, coming, having a duration, and going. There is plenty of pain.  Suffering happens by adding stories of how we do not want it to be this way. Suffering happens because we only see the lost or unwanted thingness of the event, not its Eternal context.  Seeing and knowing what does not come and go, that which holds everything together in a seamless unity of existence beyond the coming and going is “the subtle mind of nirvana.” Buddhism uses the imagery of the ocean to represent the total unity of all things. The ocean is deep and vast, yet what we experience from our human mortal view is its surface, covered with waves, waves of all sorts of dimensions depending on weather conditions.  In this analogy it is pointed out that waves are like all the forms of Life – of you and me – that have a beginning, a duration in form, shaped by the conditions that bring us forth, and then the wave (and we) decline and return to the ocean.  As a wave, separateness (and fear) is experienced. This is the duality of form. Yet the wave, and we, are never not the ocean.  This is non-duality. It is also noted that in every drop of ocean water, there the ocean exists.  This is true spirituality. This is non-dual awareness.  This is knowing, seeing, and feeling connectedness with every other drop and wave of the ocean of existence.  The consciousness of Brahman is in every manifestation of Atman, you and me, and everyone.  This is faith. This is the God archetype that is universal to humans, yet became perverted by the ego into cultures with religions of separateness and the sense of being fallen, separated, from the Eternal.  All the non-dual spiritual traditions know this to be error, to be “sin,” the missing of the mark of the reality of Existence, and they act as teachers and guides through the gate.  Their purpose is to take us back to who we truly are, spiritual Beings living mortal lives, never separated from the Eternal or any manifestation of this Life. There is only “We.” This then is “the peace that surpasseth understanding,” and the perspective that can bring peace, compassion, and wisdom into our lives and, thus, into the world.

“There is a river of thought-waves.  Everyone is being washed downstream. Everyone is clinging to these thoughts and being washed away… Just give rise to the single thought, “I want to be free.” … The entire population of the planet is moving downstream… I call this thought of freedom going against the stream and towards the source … This thought will take you to freedom. It is the most rare thought… Out of the entire population, only a handful give rise to this thought.” – W.W.L. Poonja (a.k.a. Sri Poonjaji or Papaji – Advaita Vedanta or neo-Advaita guru or master who lived and taught in India through the 20^th century. Papaji was guided to his enlightenment by Ramana Maharshi and became teacher to such popular contemporary spiritual teachers as Gangaji and Mooji.)

 Advaita Vedanta and its rather Zen-like off-shoot, Neo-Advaita, are non-dual schools of spiritual teaching which tell us, as does Buddhism, that enlightenment, or the realization of the unity of all, is our natural state. It describes the Universe beginning as consciousness prior to form with infinite creative capacity. This force is named Brahman and gives rise to the material universe which is animated and infused with the spirit of Brahman. This is the One Consciousness giving rise to the multiplicity of forms and as it flows through humans is named Atman, roughly the equivalent of “soul.” Brahman is, from a Western religion perspective, the equivalent of God, yet is formless, unknowable, not to be petitioned, for Creation is perfect as it is, manifesting an evolutionary dynamic shaped by the laws of karma, interconnectedness, interdependence, and impermanence. This is the core, the eternal essence, of all “things.” This is particularly relevant to humans, for humans, with their complex mental structure, create a sense of self, known as ego, which experiences separateness, and uses the creative power of consciousness (thought) to generate a false sense of self in a false world of human construction that gives rise to great imbalance and struggle. This is called “dukkha,” a kind of unnatural mental suffering. 

The Western religions teach that we are “fallen,” experiencing separateness from God, that we are hopelessly sinful and can only have salvation through God’s grace. The Advaita and other non-dual traditions, including the mystical traditions of the Western religions, reject this separateness as illusion caused by ego. Both Buddhism and Advaita tell us we are searching for what we already are, chasing after illusions of spiritual salvation and realization in complex dualistic theologies and rituals, when what we seek is our own perfect essence – Atman, Soul, or True Self, which we cannot not already be. As is taught by the mystics of all non-dual traditions, our “salvation is in rediscovering this essence, yet even in our searching we are confused by our dualistic egoic minds, searching for what we think we do not have.  The “freedom” that Papaji is calling us to is to be free of the bondage of the illusion of separateness – from each other, from the manifest world, and, most importantly, from our Source, from Brahman, from God. Ultimate meditation is in realizing our true Self – Atman manifesting within the Unity of Brahman.

In the Vedantic traditions, there are two Sanskrit sayings which are meant to remind us of this Truth. They are, “Namaste” – “The Divine within me recognizes the Divine in you,” and “Tat Tvam Asi” – “Thou art That,” with “That” representing the Divine Creative Principle, or God, which also applies to all that is manifesting in the world.  In other words, God is everywhere, and God is our True Self, and this is so for every person and every form and aspect of this world. Everywhere we look and every person we encounter, when seen through enlightened eyes, is God manifesting. To break free of the river of thought is to break free of the illusion of separateness and to realize in the silence of our original energy of consciousness that we are never separate from Source and all that is.  This is the true spiritual experience and perspective. You know this because you have experienced it – you probably just did not realize it when it happened because your social and religious culture does not recognize it. There on a mountain top or gazing over the ocean, playing with a child or a dog, working in your garden or wood shop, painting or dancing, whenever you are truly experiencing love of a person or experience, when there is no thinking about what you are doing and you are 100% present, connected completely, feeling love or joy (which are pretty much the same thing), there you are.

The creative gift of humanity, the egoic capacity for thought, has taken an inappropriate place in the evolutionary development of humanity.  It has confused this “river of thought-waves” ABOUT being a person for who we are, our “self,” and as the voice of truth.  Thoughts have taken the center stage of our lives, individual thoughts creating “my world” and collective thoughts that create societies and cultures. Since these thoughts are not truth but rather constructs which can be any foolishness or cleverness, the difference between my thoughts and your thoughts, our social/cultural thoughts and your social/cultural thoughts create division, disagreement, and even conflict between me and others and among identity groups. The most damaging existential thought ever created was “others,” and the conflict this creates both within us and in our lives is the source of all the unnecessary suffering humanity experiences and inflicts.

When Papaji calls us to the thought, “I want to be free,” he is calling us to let go of all concepts, all thoughts about life and who we are, to stand in the vastness of existence as a free consciousness.  This is the purpose of true meditation. It is to see that our greatest affirmation is to be presence, the presence of the energy of consciousness, the primal energy of the Universe, of Brahman individualized as Atman.  He is calling us to discover ourselves as Atman, prior to becoming Bill or Jane, words that call forth a stream of thoughts ABOUT being a person in the world of our society and culture, all macro-egos, telling stories, passing them off as if they were absolute truth.  Of course, they are not. We Americans (a thought story) cannot even agree on the story of being an American in the 21^st century, which, of course, is very different from the thought stories of being an American in the 19^th century.  Yet, everyone acts as if their thought stories are true, and that other’s thought stories, if they disagree with my thought stories, are wrong. The absurdity of it ought to humble us.  It ought to bring us to silence.  Silence is freedom.  It is the beginning of true inquiry and true observation. So, the advice of the guru is to “stop.” Stop telling yourself the stories, stop believing the stories. Go back to the beginning, look into The Silence for Atman, look to discover what it means to be consciousness materializing into the world.  As the great Zen Master, Dainin Katagiri, would say, “Just stand up in the Universe,” to “be the Moment arising” in/as “wholehearted presence.” “Your existence is not just in the small scale of the world – it is vast”

In free consciousness we realize we are on a planet with a complex ecosystem belonging to a species with advanced cognitive abilities which are just complex enough to create great confusion, and the species has not yet figured out how to use these cognitive abilities to live in harmony within its ecosystem. Rather, the species uses these cognitive abilities to compete and acquire and to consume in unbalanced ways, living in conflict with each other and with all life-forms sharing this planet. We are even in conflict within ourselves, in great confusion about the stories our cognitive abilities tell us, stories full of contradiction and foolish self-centeredness and self-importance. We are mentally ill on an epidemic, mass scale, for we do not know who we are or how to live harmoniously.

Papaji asked whether we want to be free of this mental illness, and if so, then you must want to be free, and you must ask the primary question, “Who am I?” Papaji’s next questions were “Who is asking the question?” and “Who is this ‘I’?” Hopefully such questions stop you, the intellect having no satisfactory answers to such questions, and if it does, they are just more of the story-spin of our egoic conditioning. These questions must be entered through the silence of original mind to discover the vast intelligence of this not-thinking mind which connects us to great truths. This Silence is the mind of Atman, That which looks and listens with primal curiosity, the Universe exploring and experiencing itself. And of course, it DOES know who you are. You are everything and everything is you. Namaste, Tat Tvam Asi. And a great peace and loving compassion arises. In such a moment, you are free of doubt and conflict.  You are home. 

Then….. the thoughts of me and my world return and it as if a great dimensional contraction takes place and we are back, lost in our story, our anxiety and ambition, our doubt and false certainty returning.  Getting lost and returning is our practice. If you truly want to be free, you must become diligent at noticing being lost in thought-stories and stopping to return to silent presence. You must again search out the silent witness that sees the stream of thought stories and does not attach to them, just lets them pass through the witnessing consciousness of awareness, rediscovering “I am That.”

“The purpose of Zen is for a human to be as naturally human as a tree is naturally a tree.”- Alan Watts

A tree has no difficulty achieving its nature as a tree.  Depending on the nurturing conditions of a tree, its access to sunlight, water, and nutrients, it will be larger, more fully shaped and symmetrical, and bright and healthy in its leaves, fruit and flowers. Yet even a tree growing in poor environmental conditions will be itself, a natural tree, though perhaps stunted, misshapen, and barren in its physical manifestation, while in its essence still maximizing its being a tree. It fully expresses its tree-ness within whatever conditions it finds itself. This is so for all plants and animals except humans.

Humans raised within civilization have little to no idea what it is to be natural, rather taking on the conditioned beliefs ABOUT being human which the culture and society around them shapes in them.  As civilization is an artificial construct, imbalanced in many ways, even though the society may provide what it defines as fostering full health and prosperity, civilized humans can still be withered in their mind and soul.  Civilization, while for the most fortunate, may give the optimum in physical safety and security, generally does not provide a security of mind or soul, and for many, the task of managing not only physical security but psychological safety is quite challenging. One may be a perfect physical specimen and possess high IQ and wealth yet be quite disconnected from the inner security of knowing one’s own deepest nature as arising out of the balance and harmony of nature. This is why civilized humans become mentally ill, and to not know what it is to be naturally human is a pretty good explanation for how mental illness has become widespread in civilized life. 

From this definition, the degree to which a person may be mentally ill correlates to the degree of distance they are from their natural self.  Humans raised within aboriginal nature-based cultures are generally naturally, harmoniously human, without neuroses and character disorders, because the environment which gives rise to them is the balance and harmony of Nature.  When Native Americans first experienced Europeans, it was very clear to the Native Americans that these humans were quite insane in that they had no sense of their origin in or respect for the natural world.  Europeans were murderous, rapacious, deceitful, judgmental, emotionally unbalanced, violent, and unnaturally tense in ways that were clearly insane to the natives.  As Buddhism teaches, the degree of disconnection from nature and one’s natural self will arise from the degree of unnaturalness of the conditioning factors shaping a person.  This separation of the sense-of-self from one’s original and natural humanness leaves a person in a state of confusion about life, manifesting an array of mental illness symptoms, causing a kind of suffering that is quite unnatural, which Buddhism called dukkha.

In our culture, we diagnose a person as mentally ill when symptoms such as depression, anxiety, obsessiveness, anger, disorganized thinking, delusions, hallucinations, addictions, etc. interfere significantly with life functioning. It would be hard to argue, however, that even “healthy” individuals do not experience and suffer from sub-clinical levels of some of these symptoms.  One is considered mentally healthy in our society if they do not display symptomology to a level which causes them and/or others blatant distress.  This level of psychological dysfunction is what our mental health professions address, yet we are not really addressing mental health, but rather, mental illness.  We simply do not know what it is to be fully mentally and spiritually healthy human beings.

We are cut off from the base of our existence by several thousand years of ever-complexifying civilization, with the consequence that we individually and collectively are functioning far below what might be called optimal human mental health.  Buddhism directly addresses this problem by reminding us that we are originally healthy humans who have been misled into conceiving of ourselves and the world falsely. We are in a kind of hypnotic trance of artificiality which has us quite confused and conflicted. The word, “buddha” means awakened person, and the purpose of Buddhism (the teaching and practices of awakening) is to awaken us to our original and natural humanness, emphasizing that, of course, we are already buddhas, just buried under misleading, confusing, even traumatizing social, cultural, and psychological conditioning.

The Buddha has been called “The Great Physician” for his diagnosis and treatment recommendations for this illness.  He proposed the assumption that every human, at birth, is a natural and psychologically healthy, yet unformed being.  If the family and society that raise this child instill a strong sense of their original worth and connection with other humans and the natural world, this will develop an emotionally healthy human.  If, on the other hand, the conditioning influences on a child emphasize competition, the need to prove oneself worthy through meeting what are often contradictory and impossible expectations, this will harm the development of a natural self. If the child is quite cut off from a nurturing community and nature, experiencing varying degrees of trauma caused by insecure egos seeking to strengthen themselves at the child’s expense, this will warp the sense of self.  If the child is not taught the interconnectedness and interdependence of all beings as is the way of Nature, this objectifies the child, other humans, and the natural world.  All this creates a false sense of self which is without balance and the qualities of wisdom and compassion. This false and insecure self is the human ego misshaped. 

The ego is the psychological faculty for interacting with other humans and the world to meet the physical and psychological needs of being human, and the human ego is a masterpiece of evolutionary development, as are our opposable-thumbed hands, biocular and bipedal sight and stance allowing for a complexity and creativity in our functioning possessed by no other creature.  The human ego is NOT, however, designed to be either our identity or the template for human society, yet this is what civilization at this stage of human social evolution has done. We know not who or what we naturally are. Rather, we live inside a running mental commentary about who we think we and others are and what the world is, all created, not by direct experience and deep inquiry, but rather by what we are led to believe by the complex matrix of socializing and conditioning factors which create the stories of “me” and “the world.” It’s all very confusing, shallow, and unstable with dangerous individual and collective implications. This genius ego now goes about constructing a life chasing after security in ways which only add to the collective malaise and do nothing to provide the actual emotional and spiritual security we lack.

The purpose of Buddhism in its teachings and practices is to take us back out of this confusion and into a direct experience of being naturally human. It seeks to erase the confusion of our story of “me” by returning us to our foundational experience as human consciousness that can examine the felt sense of our confusion and the felt sense of clarity and insight which arises naturally with original human consciousness.  Buddhism delineates there are two minds in every person, their original, or big, or buddha (awakened) mind and the false ego-mind, little, confused, compulsively spinning stories ABOUT being a person. This examination, central to Buddha’s prescription, is meditation, meant to achieve, to reawaken our BEING a balanced, insightful and compassionate human who does not suffer, not just manage the symptoms of being an unbalanced, unnatural human.

This is not to say this erases pain.  Consciousness teacher Eckhart Tolle, who brilliantly created a philosophy of healthy human living by contemporizing Buddhist teaching, tells us that “pain is not suffering, pain plus story is suffering.”  Pain plus stories which subjectify the issue of pain and amplify the natural pain into what is intolerable, what ought not be happening to me, create our suffering.  Pain is.  You can see this in animals.  They become sick and injured, they experience hardship, loss of habitat, yet they do not complain. They do not subjectively, psychologically suffer.  They live within the what-is of whatever is happening.  Buddhism teaches this is the characteristic of a psychologically and spiritually healthy human.  It also teaches this is not some capacity for us to acquire, but rather to liberate, to rediscover buried under our egoic story which needs certain conditions in order to be psychologically OK, lest we suffer.

Buddhism teaches that there is a bright sense of well-being, even joy, which is the natural state of being human.  Anthropologists discover such beings in aboriginal people untainted by civilization.  Buddhism’s purpose is to awaken this level of naturalness and health in humans living within their contemporary society. This is why I find Buddhism, despite being categorized as a religion, to be a remarkably sophisticated and effective psychology. Buddhism emphasizes that there is a completely sane human within each of us, and it calls this completely sane human, buddha, a human who is awake to their full potential.  It calls us to awaken to our true and natural self, the buddha we already are, out of the hypnotic trance of the artificial and imbalanced being our social and psychological conditioning has tricked us into believing we are.  Buddhism’s teachings and practices guide us to discover within us this awake, sane, wise, compassionate, resourceful, natural human being who can live within human society without being driven insane by it. I see this as the next level of human evolution where we bring ego’s brilliance and creativity at understanding and interacting with the world back into a level of naturalness which is sane and sustainable. We must wake up to who we naturally are, discovering we are already buddha with this remarkable faculty called ego by design – before ego-constructed society, having invented planet-destroying technologies, kills all that is natural.  Buddhism has provided the blueprint for how we find our way back to what we already are – awake, compassionate, and wise beings who possess this remarkable faculty, the human ego, that having destroyed Eden, can reclaim and restore it.

“Zen in its essence is the art of seeing into the nature of one’s being, and it points the way from bondage to freedom.” – D.T. Suzuki

All mystical spiritual traditions, in some form or fashion, have as their intention to bring a person to stopping.  Whether it is a Zen koan or the variety of forms of meditation and contemplation, whether it is chanting, ecstatic dance, rituals, yoga, chi practice, satsang with a guru, vision quest, or ingesting a psychedelic substance, their purpose is to bring an interruption of our living inside our IDEA of ourself in the world to open us into direct experience of our BEING in the world experiencing its vast possibilities. These practices aim to stop our mind’s running commentary that thinks our limited ego-centered life as the limits of possibility.  Ultimately, they aim to awaken our felt sense as a being inseparable from the true and natural world, and thus, complete in ourself. This makes us beyond identification in egoic ideas, what Zen refers to as being “nobody.”  We realize ourselves as, in a sense, the Universe happening through a human vessel capable of seeing this ultimate Source happening through everyone and everything.  These traditions, in some fashion or other, will always be directing us to the discovery of our “True Self,” the “I Am” beneath the insecure ego-self.

In the Western religious traditions where prayer is central, for the mystic, prayer is quite different from what happens in community churches, temples, and mosques. Prayer takes on much the same purpose as meditation has in the Eastern traditions.  It is surrender of the ego, not obeisance to an all-powerful deity. It is a surrender of separateness.  It is letting go of the ego that praises and petitions God as outside us.  Prayer is the soul touching its source, realizing in the profound silence which is our natural Beingness, that our own and the universe’s center are one. It is here, in this centering silence, that we co-abide with what is named and experienced as God.

We naturally seek this peace, this oneness, in activity which causes transcendence of the ego and preoccupation with our insecure selves.  We hike to beautiful places, we seek oceans, lakes, rivers and streams.  We garden and work with wood and clay, we make and listen to music, create and appreciate art, we exercise our athletic impulses, we fall in love and explore eros – even the high stimulation entertainment of our society has as its purpose to forget ourselves in moments of intense sensory experience which override and stop our compulsive thinking.  And there we are.  We are, in those moments, outside our self-preoccupation, and these are the clearest, sanest moments of our lives, all marked by the stopping of the egoic stream of thought manufacturing the idea, the story, of an insecure person, “me,” in time.  This is what consciousness guru Eckhart Tolle calls “The Power of Now.”

The mystics, however, knew that for lasting personal transformation we ought not seek this “peace that surpasseth understanding” in that which is outside ourselves, for this does not resolve our fundamental problem.  All activity which temporarily causes us to drop our self-absorption is a fleeting visitation to peace, when what is true is that this peace arises within us naturally when we are not transfixed by and mistakenly looking to our neurotic ego as the source of who we are. So, the question is: Who are you?  All the mystery traditions tell us this is the most important of all questions.  And they give us a clue by adding, “you must look to That which looks.” Any idea you may have, any identifier you may assign, is not who you are.  In no-thought, the original thought can be heard – “I am.”  This is Beingness.  Here we are.  We are Beings in Beingness living a human life.  All the figuring, all the doing, all the acquiring leads only to the realization of the transitoriness of all that we may manufacture or do or acquire.  In the fleeting world of all that comes and goes, we must stop all the doing and striving to search out what does not come and go. There we find our true Selves.

Eckhart Tolle tells us, “We are the space of the moment arising in awareness.”  This moment arising in awareness is not anything we do or hold or own or acquire.  All activity and perceived phenomenon happen IN the space of awareness.  Our problem is that we get caught in the forms of the fleeting activity and phenomenon, mesmerized by the idea of “me,” when all along we are that “space of awareness” through which it all arises, exists for a time, and then passes.  Awareness is not an activity, not a thought, not an acquisition. It is our essence. 

All the neurosis, addiction, narcissism, striving, and thinking which overwhelm our peace of mind and seem to control our lives are our attempts to manage our insecure ego, yet none of it works. It only takes us deeper into what Buddhism calls “dukkha,” psychological and spiritual “suffering,” a sense of unmanageability, insufficiency, and unsatisfactoriness to life, caused by all the unstable conditioning sources creating our egoic identity, telling us who we are. It’s an unmanageable tangle of contradictions which never point us to our core self, the I Am – complete and whole.  We don’t know, as the mystics understood intuitively, that arising out of the silence of awareness itself, we are expressions of Creation never separated from our source.

So, we must stop being the neurotic, the addict, the narcissist. Stop being the striver.  Stop being what we think to be “me.”  All these states of mind reflect our inability to be our True Self, which is peace, wholeness, completeness in the moment.  The wisdom traditions tell us that truly skillful doing arises out of non-doing, as skillful action arises from non-action and skillful thinking arises from non-thinking.  We, as humans, are meant to do, to think, to create, to interact socially, but when we seek our meaning and purpose through doing, thinking, creating, and interacting socially, we are lost in motion, the motion of seeking meaning, purpose, and standing in these actions of the ego – all of which are really just a stream of thoughts ABOUT being a person.  It is not BEING a natural person who does basic life activity, who does creative and social actions from the wisdom, the peace, the stillness which is their core, the center of their Being.

To fully live this action of being a human skillfully and masterfully therefore requires that we stop living from the insecurity of the ego, this original artificial intelligence which we are now doubling down upon with technology-generated artificial intelligence.  This is so the wrong direction for humanity.  Technological AI doing the bidding of the human egoic AI leads us only deeper and deeper into losing our true selves in faster and faster thinking and scheming and imitating being human, into a society which is hectic and artificial, demanding always more to satisfy the yearning to be enough, a yearning which cannot be filled in this way.

Yet, we are in a society, and technology and commerce are not to be abandoned.  Our problem is that our society and technology and we are out of balance because we are out of touch with our core Beingness.  But we do not have to be lost. The wisdom traditions know the necessary balancing action to bring individuals and society back to sanity in recognizing and guiding us to connection with our core Being.  Since we have been lost in the egoic world of compulsive thinking and doing, always in motion, running against time, the corrective action is to stop this meaningless and compulsive doing and chasing after – it is to practice stopping to recognize Beingness in ourselves, others, and everywhere. Then, we can proceed with doing in a balanced and wise manner.

An entire realm of peaceful presence abides beneath the noisy ego.  It is sensory and intuitive.  It is silent intelligence.  It is The Eternal prior to the temporal.  It is where spirit abides. It is our True-Self.  Only by redirecting awareness out of the insecure egoic dimension of thought and emotion and into silent sensory and intuitive presence can we access this dimension of our natural Being, so the stopping is really a shifting.  It is nearly impossible to stop the egoic mind from holding center space in our consciousness by commanding it to stop, this is just more ego.  We must shift from the eogiic dimension into the dimension of Being. This is done through the senses and through silent present-moment awareness where the space of the moment comes alive.  In this numinous presence, we can feel and experience how the world is alive and conscious, infinitely connected. This is how ego relinquishes being the center of attention naturally.  This is what all the meditative and mystical traditions teach and foster to bring us home to our True-Selves.

What you experience when the beauty of a mountain waterfall or an exquisite piece of music or art catches your attention so completely that the mind stops is what we seek to develop in every moment of our everyday lives.  This is the goal of Zen – what the great Zen chronicler and practitioner, D.T. Suzuki described as “the art of seeing into the nature of one’s being,” which results in freedom from bondage in unsatisfying problematic thought and behavior. You must stop to experience the moment through your senses – through the sensations of your breathing, the sounds and sights of the present moment explored with wonder, appreciation and subtlety. This silent presence opens us into the intuitive realm where it all becomes connected.  Zen directs us to realize the nature of our own Being first, and let it then be the context for all the thinking and doing that living a modern life requires, only now, balanced and effective.  Instead of awareness being unnoticed in the background, we achieve a sense of fullness and completeness that occurs naturally when the silent intuitively intelligent realm of awareness becomes the foreground of our experience within which wise and effective thinking and action can occur while living our everyday lives. The human mind was evolved by the Universe to be an exquisite instrument of the Universe understanding and interacting creatively and spiritually with itself.  We just don’t know how to use it effectively because we don’t know how to stop being run by the insecure ego. We lack the balance of the whole mind. But the good news is that for thousands of years, the mystery traditions have been telling us how to achieve this balance.  It’s time we bring this wisdom out of antiquity and into the present, bringing ourselves and our society back into balance, into wholeness, wisdom, compassion, and true spiritual connection guiding how we think, do, and live. The action that accomplishes this is stopping.  Just stop. Get quiet. Feel your breathing and relax your body.  Realize your True-Self in intelligent silent awareness, here-and-now. You’ll be amazed how much clearer your thinking and doing then becomes.

“The point of spiritual practice is not to try to escape your life, but to face it exactly and completely.” – Dainin Katagiri (20^th century Zen Master)

Increasingly, many are concerned that we in The United States are about to enter extremely challenging times, and it would seem we are not psychologically or spiritually well-prepared for the possible coming multiple levels of crisis on our horizon.  The mainstream of America, since the end of the Second World War, has mostly escaped the truth of world history, which shows that throughout time it is more common than not for people to live in unstable and unsafe circumstances.  So, it is important to see that many, if not most, Americans have been living in a period of prosperity and social stability uncommon in human history and have the possibly unrealistic expectation that such stability and prosperity will continue indefinitely.  History would suggest this is unlikely.  The laws of karma, given what we have done with this peace and prosperity, would also suggest that this is unlikely.  We, as a society, have in this time made great strides in bringing into the social fold those who had been excluded, yet now are experiencing a backlash from those who see their privilege threatened. The great issue and threat of the 21^st century, climate change, has been quite inadequately addressed and totally dismissed by many.  Democracy and rule of law are threatened as never before in this country by forces who seek autocracy.  These forces seem as a gathering storm on our horizon.

As we sit at the first quarter mark of the 21^st century there are concerning strains and cracks appearing in our social order and new challenges that ought to give us pause to consider what the next quarter century may look like as we struggle to create a new stable narrative for the last half of the 21^st century. We see political, economic, cultural, and ecological challenges erupting and we seem quite possibly entering an unstable period of social/political/cultural/economic/ecological dynamics that could become very unstable, possibly dangerous.  The question then becomes – how does a person keep their personal balance and sense of values whole and healthy when the society around them becomes unbalanced, without coherent and positive values? What is a person who seeks to live an enlightened life while living in turbulent, challenging, even dangerous, times to do? 

An enlightened perspective is that we are human beings who live within the geographical boundaries of this nation and share a sense of the idealism that has been identified as American, yet are realistic that there is a counter narrative to this nation that is its shadow side.  Out of this shadow has emerged slavery, Native genocide, racism, sexism, narrow-minded religion, homophobia, exploitive capitalism, materialistic, hedonistic, narcissistic, arrogant, vindictive character traits and ecological mayhem.  After all, we are human with all the human weaknesses.  But it is our founding ideals that were meant to keep us aiming toward “more perfect union,” toward “justice,” “domestic tranquility,” and the promotion of “the general welfare,” securing “the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” At our best, our virtuous ideals hold sway; at our worst, the shadow takes over.  A strengthened spirituality that allows us to face our circumstances “exactly and completely” is beneficial in sorting through our feelings about this country and our place within it when faced with the assertion of this shadow and its consequences.

It may be helpful to look to Buddhism and Zen for their insight which tell us a person can learn to live in a manner that does not look to one’s society for their sense of identity, balance, and well-being while still dedicated to its betterment, as well as to that of all humanity and life on this planet.  It is very important to consider the world that Buddhism and Zen were born into.  The story of The Buddha is of a privileged prince of India who lived a sheltered life, but who upon venturing beyond his palace discovered a very different world – one of poverty, illness, cruelty and exploitation.  He saw human suffering as he had not known existed and dedicated himself to understanding its cause and what could be done to heal it.  Centuries later, Zen was born within the cruelty and violence that was feudal China and Japan.  The issue of alleviating suffering for the Buddha and the Zen masters was not about improving the general conditions of people’s lives.  That was simply not going to happen. The suffering that was addressed was the natural psychological response people have to misery and oppression, the anger and despair, the emotional suffering that such circumstances elicit.

Initially, Buddhism was practiced as a monastic religion, monks withdrawing to live away from society, beyond the common misery.  Yet, eventually, the development of compassion and wisdom, which is the core fruit of Buddhist teachings and practice, gave rise to the concept of the bodhisattva, an enlightened person who did not withdraw from society, but lived as a free and awakened consciousness, not identified with the society, yet dedicated to addressing the misery caused by unenlightened thinking.  Bodhisattvas stayed in society to help people break free of the psycho/spiritual cause of their suffering, while preaching the need for enlightened society.  They were healers and reformers.

When life typically meant dealing with despotic governments, petty judgmental communities, plagues, draughts, floods, famines, poverty, war, rampant childhood mortality, and incurable illnesses, the issue was how to live free from the emotional suffering these conditions brought.  Buddhism addressed this conundrum by freeing a person from identity in the clinging ego that needs beneficial circumstance to experience peace and well-being.  Its focus was not on accumulating material cushion from want, struggle and privation, but rather to develop perspective, inner calm, character, virtue, compassion, and wisdom as immunity to the stressors and calamities of life.  The Zen perspective is to see life in a much bigger picture than immediate circumstances and in identification with the fads and customary thinking of society.

To build this strength requires the development of perspective and understanding of the insecure egoic mind which is achieved through meditation and mindfulness, the stopping of the insecure narrative of the egoic mind to discover the deeper realm of expansive clear awareness beneath it.  The levels of this practice increase in perspective, insight, and clarity until ultimately the sense of oneness with, and peace in, any and all circumstances is realized. Then, whether coping with personal difficulty and tragedy or social instability and danger, one’s balance and sense of well-being is maintained along with the energy and perspective to be of guidance and aid to others.

The mid-20th century seminal figure of Existential Psychology, Viktor Frankl, inspired by ancient Greek and Roman Stoicism, a philosophy quite similar to Zen, realized from within a Nazi concentration camp that “Everything can be taken from a person but one thing…  to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.”  Choosing to focus into his own capacity for courage and human decency, reassured by the balance and beauty of nature, he endured the brutality of those who would take everything away and founded a profound psychotherapy. This is what is to be a bodhisattva, a hero of circumstance, one who lays the groundwork for the resurrection of decency, compassion, wisdom, and courage in times and circumstances where all that is cruel and ignorant in humanity take over, and this can be any level from between two people, to a family, to a peer group, to a community, to an institution, to a nation.

Perhaps the age of American exceptionalism is over, meaning the unbroken period of peace, prosperity and stability, the dedication to expanding democratic opportunity and liberal free thinking that has been true of this country since the end of the Second World War.  Hopefully not.  What it is time for, however, what has never gone out of need, is the time for exceptional Americans, people who see the need for compassion, inclusion, visionary science and arts, who will take America into the latter half of the 21^st Century with reinvigorated democracy and dynamism – into a new age of political, economic, spiritual and ecological harmony.  It is important to see ourselves as human beings in America, citizens of the world first, yet with an allegiance to the founding ideals of this nation, who have the inner reserves and faith to endure challenging times with faith, resilience and courage, our ideals intact. 

We are in American society, but do not have to share the mindset of the culture that has fallen into regressive celebration of the ugly aspects of American character yet declare themselves “great.” We can see ourselves as evolving human beings who wish to lend our efforts to the evolution of our society, never giving up our choice to respond positively to our circumstance, growing in courage, resilience, and inner harmony, holding faith in democracy, decency, kindness and compassion as social policy.  We can choose to be aspiring bodhisattvas holding to love of beauty, kindness, and nature, along with belief in the inextinguishable reservoir of human virtue to carry us through dark times.  We are on a great journey of social evolution towards planetary harmony, and we are Americans. We are also citizens of the world.  Let us be in this society, undiscouraged by what seems a regression into social cruelty and ignorance, this assault on democracy and push towards autocracy. We can face our circumstance exactly and completely, determined to be modern bodhisattvas shaping human society ever so gradually toward enlightenment.  We can stand with all those throughout history and today who have faced troubled, unstable, even dangerous times with nobility and preservation of their humanity.  In Buddhism, this is called “sangha,” the community which seeks enlightenment. We can be carried by the faith that history does, as the modern bodhisattva Martin Luther King, Jr. noted, bend toward justice, just ever so slowly and fitfully.  Hold your center and faith and look to those who have done so throughout history as reassurance, as your sangha. Exceptional historical challenges bring forth exceptional human responses. This is our true greatness.

“If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.” – Dalai Lama

Once when asked to explain his religious beliefs, the Dalai Lama simply replied, “My religion is kindness.”

I have always found this to be a brilliant answer, both for its simplicity and its depth. We live in a time when many proclaim their religion as the centerpiece of their lives, yet among many of the most vocal and vehement, we can find no kindness, no mercy or compassion in their preaching and actions. And so, is it not important to ask what is the proper understanding of religion?  Ought it not be what we live “religiously?”  And is it not true that the fountainheads for the great religions all taught love, compassion, forgiveness and tolerance?  That there have been many religious movements that grew up in their names that practice much the opposite is among the great shames of humanity. 

Buddhism, at least as it has transferred into the West, seems to remain very dedicated to the original spiritual and ethical teachings of The Buddha, and If one claims to be a Buddhist, the ongoing meditation, the basic religious instruction, remains how to alleviate suffering wherever one finds it, and that would include in ourselves. To act with kindness seems then to be an excellent instruction towards that fulfillment, something to live religiously. Yet do we really have a sense of the depth of this instruction?

What is it to be kind? Certainly, it is to be gentle and helpful, to care for the well-being of all, doing what we can to support and protect those who need our support and protection.  Buddhism, in its call to look deeply into the causes of suffering and to offer remedy leaves no room for moralistic or sectarian persecution or self-aggrandizement at the expense of others.  “Be kind,” says the living patriarch of Tibetan Buddhism.  There is no room for equivocation.  Kindness – all-inclusive kindness.  Love – all-inclusive love. Tolerance – all-inclusive tolerance. Forgiveness – all-inclusive forgiveness. Mercy – all-inclusive mercy. Truthfulness and honesty – all-inclusive truthfulness and honesty.  Compassion – all-inclusive compassion. These are the spiritual and ethical underpinnings of any true religion and are what the Dalai Lama sums up in his call to kindness.  Can a person authentically call themself religious if these virtues are not the cornerstone of their life, what they live by religiously and look to foster in their society? Unfortunately, it often seems that many of those who make the biggest issue of identifying as religious are not bringing these seeds of kindness into the world – rather, just the reverse.

The Dalai Lama’s call to kindness is based in the important Buddhist instruction called The Four Noble Truths which expounds on the existence of unnatural human suffering caused by attachment to ego for identity.  Ego grasps after identity in specialness and chases after happiness in such forms as materialism, status, competition, relationships, religious and political affiliation, judgment, and exciting stimulation and entertainment.  Ego does not know how to be kind, not really.  Kindness comes from what is authentic, the heart of a human being.  The remedy offered in the Noble Truths teaching begins with “right view,” developing understanding of the fundamental nature of existence based in interconnection, interdependence, and impermanence leading to a healthy sense of selflessness and care for all and the need for cultivating wisdom and compassion. This selflessness is not the kind of martyr-complex so many raised in “religious” cultures suffer from, it is a joyous weightlessness which realizes, as The Dalai Lama taught, our own happiness can be fostered through the practice of compassion which brings happiness to others. Is it not your experience that you feel best when acting kindly, generously, compassionately expecting nothing in return?

Further, The Noble Truths teaches us to practice kindness in our intentions, our speech, our actions, our livelihood, and in all our efforts. It then advises us to develop our mind through meditation, which fosters mindfulness, concentration, mental stability, wisdom, and the awakening of our deepest sense of Being. It allows us to know the essence of ourselves that is free of the need for external validation or conditions for our well-being.  It is quite a realization to discover that these “religious” practices which focus into bringing kindness to others are what can bring the happiness we chase after yet find so elusive and are thus kindnesses to ourselves.

Buddhism teaches that looking outside ourselves to fulfill our sense of well-being and happiness can never bring us what we are truly looking for – the sense of fulfillment which can be called peace and joy in being alive. Likewise, all our attempts to satisfy ego’s need to be significant to others and to live up to expectations imposed through our family and societal influences (which we then often internalize as our own) leave us unable to find ease in life.  Kindness is in allowing ourselves to be liberated from these judgmental attitudes.  It is written that Jesus instructed, “judge not, lest ye be judged,” and I have long seen this as an instruction not only against hypocrisy, but that to engage in the mind of judgment towards others ensnares us in vulnerability to the judgment of others and to those judgments we have internalized upon ourselves.

What I have found to be true is that a life based in religious dedication to kindness can lead to unshakable satisfaction with being alive. On the other hand, ego-pursuits when accomplished, while temporarily generating a kind of shallow happiness, lead always to returned dissatisfaction, for what is really sought cannot be found there.  Our society, built around the “pursuit of happiness,” has us anxiously looking to something or someone to quell this thirst only to have our attention pulled to the next object of “happiness.”  So – kindness is living in such a manner as to free us of this unease. Importantly, there is a paradoxical effect to this kind of unselfish generosity of virtuous action in that it is the surest way to find peace and happiness for ourselves.  This is not about the kind of sense of religious obligation to care for others at the expense of oneself that fosters an attitude of resentment.  The generosity of kindness is joyful, emanating from a soul that knows itself and how to nourish itself through the celebration of goodness that envelops others.

The instruction to kindness must begin with ourselves, and we cannot be kind to ourselves if we do not know ourselves, so Buddhism’s instruction to meditation is the practice of coming to know our true selves, finding within ourselves an immeasurable well of stability, goodness, wisdom, and compassion that is our true self. In the practice of meditation, we realize we are the intelligent, compassionate, wise mind of awareness prior to ego, and we can engage in a therapeutic relationship to our egoic mind that calms and corrects our fears and mistaken insecurities. Our acts of kindness then arise from this inexhaustible well, and our own happiness is the result of that unshakable goodness radiating generously into the world, enveloping ourselves along with others.

This teaching, this emphasis on ethical, emotional goodness for our religious commitment, is not limited to Buddhism.  When Jesus was asked what the most important commandment is, his instruction was concise and directive – to love.  Likewise, all the major world religions are permeated with instructions to kindness, love, mercy, charity, forgiveness, truthfulness, and honesty, yet we find so many throughout history and today who act in the name of their religion lacking these virtues.  On the contrary, great cruelty and harm have been perpetrated throughout history and continue today in the name of religion.  Therefore, we are left to ask, can we, in fact, be considered truly religious if we ignore the central ethical teachings of our religion to focus on narrow interpretations of morality as excuse to persecute those we see to be “other” than acceptable to our particular sectarian interpretation of a religious life?  Is this persecution not a violation of the call to be virtuous and kind, loving and tolerant in our conduct toward others that all the original religious sources call us to? How much better our society would be if instead of parading and legislating moralistic religiosity we were truly religious, if we religiously sought to embody and bring into public policy the teachings of Jesus, of Buddha, of the many great original religious sources who encapsulated their religion in instructions to love, to kindness, to mercy, honesty, modesty, charity, and tolerance, to wonder at and protect the natural world. Nor does one need to identify with a religion to know and live these truths. These virtues are also honored by those who hold to a philosophy called secular humanism, believers in shedding religious identifications to embody the essence of the great religious teachers as the core of what it is to be human.  We need human mercy, compassion, and kindness. As both Buddha and Jesus instructed and lived, there is no room for hatred or persecution in a life religiously dedicated to kindness.  The Dalai Lama truly understands and lives his religion.  It would be a great step forward for humanity if all who call themselves religious would also.

 “If you are unable to find the truth right where you are, where else do you expect to find it?” – Dogen (13th century Founder of Soto Zen)

20^th century consciousness teacher Eckhart Tolle tells us “The word enlightenment conjures up the idea of some superhuman accomplishment, and the ego likes to keep it that way, but it is simply your natural state of felt oneness with Being.” When Tolle or another consciousness teacher uses the word Being with the “b” capitalized they are attempting to point to the state of the ultimate origin and nature of all things, which, of course, includes human beings. Yet, our modern mind breaks everything into hierarchies of value – amongst people, and then in Nature, all broken up into their thingness and value.  Yet, here we are, right in the absolute nature of all things, except that the human mind causes us to stray from this absolute off into virtual realities, fantasies ABOUT our ideas ABOUT the nature of things.  People are full of ideas, and they contradict one another all over the place. No wonder we are confused; no wonder life keeps being difficult and illusive, leaving us constantly, to some degree, dissatisfied.  Buddhism calls this dukkha, a kind of unnatural suffering unique in Nature to humans.  Enlightenment within these Eastern systems is the cure, it’s, as the Buddhists refer to it, “awakening” into our simple, yet infinitely mysterious and wondrous, natural existence here-and-now.

Enlightenment is Truth – again with the capitalization – and we would be right to ask, “truth according to whom?”  Well, it is truth as the Universe manifests it.  And you would be right to question whether we can know what that is absolutely. No, we cannot, but what Zen tells us is that we can know the truth of this immediate moment as it is arising and passing, and we can, when we become exquisitely, deeply present, realize the truth that is our infinite origin.  Buddhism insists that everything we need, and insight into The Absolute, is already within us, for we are an expression of that Absolute.  Enlightenment is enlightening. Enlightenment is bringing the light of applied open awareness into this moment unfolding. It is realizing we ARE the awareness within which this moment unfolds and all within it are expressions of and channels for the Universe expressing itself as this moment in awareness. Here we are.  There is no absolute separation into this and that, into me and you, into the “ten thousand things,” as ancient Eastern philosophies call this fragmentation of Life into objects we call this and that. We are all the one This.  It is the light of consciousness channeled into manifestation through us.

The Chinese cousin to Zen, Taoism, names this ultimate truth Tao, or “The Way,” this term being synonymous with Buddhism’s Dharma, teachings into Ultimate Reality.  And the principle book describing the philosophy of Tao is titled The Tao Te Ching, written about 2500 years ago, purportedly by the sage Lao Tzu, and it begins, “The Tao that can be named is not the Tao.” So, it contradicts itself right out the gate.  Truth is elusive – yet – as Dogen said, it is happening right where we are.  How could it not be?  Truth is everywhere.  Truth is the Universe unfolding in its absoluteness here and now and enlightenment is being present for this unfolding, realizing we ARE the unfolding in connection with all that co-arises and passes with what we experience as “me.” It sounds so complex, yet it is the simplest of all things, for it is who/what we and everything are.  We are here to simply live “this.” For a bird or a squirrel, “this” is no task at all, but for a human being, it is the endeavor of a lifetime (lifetimes) should one feel compelled to pursue it.

Enlightenment for a modern human is very difficult because to be enlightened is to be where and when you are where and when you are, to be present in the deepest possible way, no past, no future, “just this,” as the Zen Master says. Our problem is that we moderns are all over the place, time and space and dimension traveling in our minds, filled with judgments about good and bad.  Enlightenment is here and now without judgement yet experienced with deep discernment.  Judgement is our projecting our ideas about things and situations upon them, and we have so many judgments, cutting up the world into our likes and dislikes, our identifications and our alienations.  Discernment is deeply seeing into the nature and rhythm and subtlety of things and situations. “What is this?” asks the student.  “This is this,” answers the teacher.  How deeply can you see into this?  There are no valuations, for it is all the sacred unfolding in ten thousand variations.  This is Zen.  Seeing deeply is Zen.  Seeing deeply that the many are One, that there is only the unfolding, moving inextricably toward deep understanding of inherent perfection in everything is enlightenment.

“Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.” “You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.”  – Alan Watts (20^th century spiritual philosopher)

I understand this may seem all very esoteric, yet it is opening us to realize how enlightenment can function in our day-to-day lives. Amidst all the ugliness and divisiveness, the prejudice and harm done by those caught in what Buddhism calls egoic delusion, amidst the blows to our well-being that life can deliver, small and great, the sicknesses and losses, the disappointments and frustrations, the aggravations and grievances, enlightenment awaits for us to make our path the path of whatever may arise, beautiful or challenging – to be one with our life, with Life.

Enlightenment is the realization that the world is passing phenomenon, what we judge to be good and bad, yet, there is, beneath all the comings and goings, the light of Being, that which does not pass, untouchable and only good.  It is our essence, it is the essence of all things, it is the One Essence.  To see this, to live this in this moment, is enlightenment, for enlightenment is this moment of absolute reality. When the unshakeable goodness of existence is clear, even in the midst of the confusion and harm done by human ego declaring itself above all else, this is enlightenment. We are here to be awake in as many moments as we are capable of, and if, like a Jesus or a Buddha or a Dalai Lama, or the innumerable saints of human existence, we can string together enough of these moments, to others it appears as an enlightened being, but it is just a human being knowing who they are and living this knowledge the majority of their moments.

20^th century Japanese Zen master Takashina Rosen explained, “The real Buddhism… rests in the everyday, in the ordinary, without anything abnormal about it. The ordinary person suffers because they cannot be at rest in ordinariness… From the viewpoint of enlightenment, truth is normal.  It is not something special.  The willow is green, the flower red, the fire hot, and the wind ever moving… The truth is not outside daily life…  but, the unenlightened person has not realized their self.  Because they lack self-realization, their ideas are at the mercy of every fluctuating fashion, and they are swayed by every rumor.  Their object in life never goes beyond pleasure. But the disciple who earnestly seeks truth steps outside that routine and realizes the self; then the immortal truth arises in what is mortal.  This is the real life.  Finally they reach the ultimate goal of Zen, to adapt freely to the world… The willow is green and the flower red… When each is at peace in their own part, they can contribute to the glory of life. We call it ordinary life, and it is, but this is also the Truth unchanged throughout the ages… There is no better or worse because there is no inequality.  Where there is no inequality, the heart is tranquil and the world radiates the light of peace.”

A human being is a human being, not a race or nationality or political party or sexual orientation or socio/economic class.  Animals and plants are beings of another order, yet still beings.  The soil and rocks, the waters, the sky, this planet are still other orders of beings.  To be enlightened is to see all as the Great Being manifesting in the myriad beings, all deserving of honoring and treatment with care and respect. We, ourselves, are expressions of this Great Beingness, and any diminishment you may have had imposed upon you is a violation of Dharma, of Tao, and is to be disregarded as ignorance, the great defiler and obscurer of the One True Nature, the One True Being. Do not allow this defilement to become how you defile yourself, nor ought you project it onto others.  Enlightenment is freedom from ignorance.  It is seeing and experiencing how Sacred Life unfolds as you and as all.

You have experienced enlightenment in rare moments of clarity, when for whatever reason, by sublime wonder, or life-shattering event, the shallow story of yourself in time stopped, and there you were, no separation between you and the circumstance.  American Zen teacher Charlotte Joko Beck described enlightenment as when there is no distance between you and your circumstance, when there is no resistance to what is.  Enlightenment is a practice – over and over, endeavoring to live an optimal human life. It is here.  It is now. We must get our ignorant opinions out of our own way to allow the light of Being which shines through us to become unobscured by all our egoic misperceptions.  Awaken!  The Universe is expressing itself through us and all around us.  See this and you become profoundly real and true in such a moment.  Take this lesson and apply it over and over and over until the absolute truth of it is permeating your everyday life. This is the road of enlightenment.  Seek the light of Truth. 

The 20^th century French existential philosopher, Albert Camus, while the shadow of fascism stained his Europe, once wrote, “In the midst of hate, I found there was, within me, an invincible love. In the midst of tears, I found there was, within me, an invincible smile. In the midst of chaos, I found there was, within me, an invincible calm. I realized, through it all, that… In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.” The light of Being and Truth is that invincible summer, clearing away prejudice, fear, and indifference.  This is enlightenment. Our society and most of us have a long way to go.  Yet, there is comfort in knowing enlightenment is the ultimate direction and destiny for us all.  We must do our best to walk it in our everyday life.  An individual, a group, a nation that moves toward the light is fulfilling the promise of invincible summer, while those who move against it into divisiveness, greed, prejudice, domination, and chaos move toward the darkness, and suffering is the cost. Each day, every day, seek to move toward the invincible summer, the perfect light beneath all form, and know you are doing your part in the Universe’s, the Dharma’s, God’s, if you will, intent and purpose. Then, no matter who casts the shadow of ignorance, or for how long, you can have faith that “invincible calm” can be yours while living your not so ordinary, ordinary life.

“Obstacles do not block the path; obstacles are the path.” – Zen proverb

When we are facing difficult times, it is important that one has faith.  In the Zen realm, this does not mean, however, to have faith in some exterior supreme power, for in Buddhism the supreme power of the Universe is known to work through us, not upon us. This means that we understand there is a Great Intelligence behind all things which allows us to be in harmony with whatever happens in our lives, delightful or terrible, and it is happening through us.  I do not say within us, for this would imply that we are separate from the flow of Life, and that sense of separation is exactly what overwhelms us.  In that state of confined consciousness, we are too small to truly appreciate or master the flow of Life, but when we know, when we can feel that we are one with this flow, this is true faith. We can have faith, because we have experienced our existence as one with the Universe, and there is a Great Intelligence that beats our hearts, breathes our lungs, and guides our minds when we quiet the cacophony of mental noise generated by the shallow, self-obsessed dimension of mind which is the ego. In the silence of focused awareness, it is discovered that awareness IS intelligence, is The Intelligence that created the stars, all life, and created you and me. We discover we are that awareness beneath the noise of our minds and can find peace.

In Buddhism, it is taught not to believe what you are given as religious instruction simply on the authority of the religious source, teacher or script, but to honor the wisdom of centuries of practice and discovery that is being shared through the instruction, and then, to apply the instruction in your own practice to discover the validity of the instruction for yourself. What is asked is, as 20th century Zen Master Dainin Katagiri would say, “wholeheartedness” in your search for truth, in your development of the necessary presence to realize truth when it appears.  There is a saying in Zen, that for one who truly wishes to realize truth, it must be approached with the singlemindedness of one “whose hair is on fire, searching for a pail of water.” All other matters must be suspended, our usual lives brought, to some degree, to a stop.  This does not necessarily mean literally – though it can.  It means we must stop running our old stories in our minds, our old orientation to ourselves in the world.  We must enter into this present moment deeply where Eternity and Truth unfold if we are to discover who we truly are.

Sometimes when I teach a class, the first thing I say will be, “How’re you doing?” to which the responses will be some variation of “good, doing good,” or “okay, doing okay.” To which I will respond, “Isn’t that remarkable with everything you have been through in your life.”  Then, as I go on with the class, I will say, “and in fact, you are probably a better person for the hard stuff you have faced.” This will then lead into a discussion about the truth of what I have just said.  People will realize that when marriages, relationships, jobs, states of health or security ended, as hard as these episodes in life were, they were necessary for us to evolve into clearer and wiser, perhaps more compassionate people. We realize that the worst things can often be the best things in the big picture.

What is always true is that when big challenges or obstacles confront us, this is an invitation to stop our life as we know it, since what is occurring is not in the script we have in our mind about what our life is supposed to be. In such a moment, a true teacher will ask, “according to who?” It is then that we might realize we are attempting to live within an impossible story in our minds about the “good life” which our society has foisted upon us, colored by a personal script about who we think we are and what is possible or expectable for us, created by our upbringing and personal experience.  This “me” we have in our mind is incessantly telling itself who we think we are, and what life is supposed to be for “me.” “Obstacles” are the wrench thrown into the machinery. Severe illness, relationship or occupational crises or endings, natural disaster, loss of loved ones, existential crisis where our sense of meaning in life is lost, political/social upheaval which disrupts clarity as to the future – these are some of the obstacles that may confront us and bring about a stopping. This stopping, however, does not have to be met with fear and trepidation.

We generally live our lives on momentum, inside a routine which carries us day to day, hour to hour, moment to moment along the well-worn path of our obligations, expectations, habits, and sources of distraction and pleasure, as well as our anxieties and upsets.  Our attention level is minimal, just paying enough attention to run our routines while our minds are filled with current agendas plus fantasies about what would make life more pleasurable or problematic, as well as with ruminations about the past. Most people are generally okay in their lives, meaning they are managing. Then, something arises that throws them completely, an “obstacle” on the path of their narrative. They are shocked.  They may have the sense to know this is a watershed, that from this moment, their story changes forever.  They are stopped.  Conventionally these obstacles are experienced as tragedies.  There is trauma, loss, grieving, anger, sorrow, fear, a sense of untetheredness. A fork in their path is in front of them.  One fork circles back around and puts them back on the same old path, their life then becomes, figuratively, running in circles.  Or – they take the path the great poet Robert Frost called “the one less traveled,” and open a new phase to their journey, one guided by what has been, but also open to what has never been experienced before, and they touch something heroic and stable within themselves, and grow as human beings.  They become okay with whatever traumatic event occurred and this new path is one they can walk with greater wisdom and skill. For some people, their lives are a struggle with being stopped perpetually, their obstacle being some chronic mental anguish which separates them from a life well lived, but the same principle applies. Being stopped is the invitation to commit to growing spiritually in order to heal psychologically.

Generally, people are lost in their narrative of being “me” in their mortal timeline separate in the Universe, struggling to get along amongst all the other separate beings in a competitive game of seeking their place in a hierarchical social structure which brings with it tremendous insecurity.  As we play out this narrative of “me” struggling with “them” and “that” out there, “obstacles,” events which stop us, which stop the narrative, will occur.  And there we are, naked and alone, so to speak, unsure of what the next moment and the ensuing moments will bring.  It is then, however, that something marvelous can happen. With our egoic mind shocked into silence, a gap opens where our silent mind, the mind of Being, says “just take the next step.” We are awake, we are present in a manner such as when we would be walking in a foreign land we’ve been told is both dangerous and wonderous. Here is where we either truly evolve or fall back. To be neurotic is to keep falling back. If you have the determination and courage to reach for sanity, you take that step.

And so we are left to ask: What is this “path” upon which obstacles are to be expected and that, in fact, brings clarity as to the nature of our personal path? As with all things Buddhist, it is about awakening into the truth of the nature of existence. It is the realization that the Universe is a unity, in a sense, a Great Being, a consciousness event which brings forth the multiplicity of physical forms through which the Universe is awakening to its own Being, and this includes through you and me. Many spiritual traditions, in some form, will identify our existence as the Universe or God or Spirit experiencing and expressing Itself through human form and that humanity has a special place in this unfolding as the one creature capable of knowing itself as God’s or Spirit’s or The Universe’s creation.  Orientalist Alan Watts expressed this as “we are the Universe peering into itself,” and what I have discovered in my own path of practice is that when through meditation we realize the silent dimension of Being within us, we can learn to peer back, experiencing that our personal dimension of Being is the Great Being expressing Itself through us.  We discover that our existence is multidimensional, that we exist as both mortal beings and That which is immortal unfolding in the Infinite Here-and-Now. This is what Buddhism calls awakening and opens life in ways unimaginable from the confines of our ego. This is how spiritual realization simultaneously becomes psychological liberation.

The Zen Master, Shunryu Suzuki, a compatriot of Katagiri, is famous for teaching, “Zen mind, beginner’s mind.” He offered that in those moments when the events of our lives have stopped us in our tracks – or we are chronically stopped by mental anguish of some sort – and we do not know which way to go, he tells us to rely upon “our ‘original mind’ which includes everything within itself.”  He tells us, “It is always rich and sufficient within itself… it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything.”  He also said, “Each one of us must find our own way, and when we do, that way will express the universal way… to discover something quite new and different moment after moment.”

So, whether we are talking about individuals or our society, which seems perhaps to be falling apart, we must reserve our fears of doom.  The wise course is to persevere, to just take the next step, to discover how to walk with better balance and grace, to walk with assurance, discovering the happiness which comes with this faith validated.  We are not alone; we are on a path traveled by all humanity towards greater sanity, spirituality, and harmony, overcoming obstacles as they appear. Our deepest nature invites us to celebrate the wonder of existence step-by-step on our and the Universe’s Path, obstacles turned into opportunities to realize unimagined potential lying obscured beneath our insecure mind.

“Karma in Buddhism means to act, to work, or to do.  Buddhism doesn’t separate mental and physical acts, so ‘to act’ includes both mental and physical action… karma is something like a continuous energy… It’s a huge storehouse of human acts that is your individual life, but also there is a certain potential power there that belongs not only to human life but to everything… Through spiritual practice you can deeply understand the presence of karma in human life. You see that you exist right in the middle of a huge world that is appearing and disappearing from moment to moment, and you realize that your life is interconnected with all beings.  Then you want to take good care of your interconnected life, and you begin to think deeply on how to use your consciousness, your will, and your determination to create good karma and to create opportunities for good karma to appear in the human world.” – Dainin Katagiri (Each Moment Is The Universe)

What vague understanding people may have of the concept of karma usually has something to do with thinking that if they do good, then good will come to them, and if they do bad, bad will come to them.  Well, sometimes this happens, but all too often, it seems that bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people, so it’s a little hard to take karma in this sense as anything other than a religious instruction to get people to behave themselves, much like in Christianity with the concepts of heaven and hell. 

As with all things Buddhist, it is all far more subtle and far reaching than this simplistic representation.  The very beginning of Buddhism is the story of an individual, Siddhartha Gotama, a 5^th century B.C. prince of northern India, who had renounced his birthright to search for the answer to the puzzle of human emotional suffering. As there was no such thing as psychology or science to investigate his question, he engaged in his search the practices of his time.  So, rather than looking to such things as research groups and analysis, he looked within his own mind, reasoning that the answers to the collective problems of humanity originate within the minds of individuals.  If he could truly understand his own mind, perhaps he could uncover universal truths about all human minds.

In ancient cultures, these matters of mind and emotion were addressed as spiritual issues, the concept of spirituality being entirely different from religions of the West.  From ancient texts such as the Upanishads, written in poetic and mythic fashion, the human condition and humanity’s place and purpose within the cosmos had been explored by engaging the faculty of the human mind at its deepest level.  It was understood that at a level deeper than individual intellect, at the root of human consciousness, exists a silent dimension of universal intelligence, accessible when awareness is turned inward through the deepest levels of meditation. By turning the eye of awareness, which is usually distracted by outer stimulation and the antics of the shallower dimensions of mind inward, they practiced entering this domain of primal intelligence inherent in every human, and here, the most profound secrets of human existence can be explored and understood.

Siddhartha had become a master of the art of meditation and having vowed to find the answers he sought, he entered into the deepest level of trans-personal consciousness, a level so deep that an individual can explore the primal human archetypal drives and eventually merge consciousness with the Universe. In this state, he wrestled with the shallower individual dimension of his mind, his ego, facing its pull to be lost in desires, fears and self-doubt, and he realized the human condition at the deepest level possible.  He “awakened” into the secrets of human suffering and found the answers he sought as to what could be done to overcome it.  For this awakening, he became known as The Buddha, which is the word in his Pali language which means The Awakened One, and when he began to share his insights, his teachings became known as Buddhism, the study and practice of awakening.

Among the insights he realized was a deeper understanding into the ancient concept known as karma, the word meaning “action” in his ancient language. A simple explanation of karma is that If your intentions and actions are good, you don’t necessarily receive good; rather, you become good, you become goodness incarnate.  You experience the connections you have with others and the happiness that comes with looking after others’ happiness.  You, in a sense, become goodness by your sense of self expanding, not in an egoic manner, but in a spiritual one.  You see and feel the vastness of existence and the transitory nature of events and circumstances. Intuitively, the wholeness and completeness of Life, which contains everything, the pleasure and the pain, birth and death, beginnings and endings, gains and losses is revealed.  The pains and disappointments, the tragedies of life, cannot then break your goodness, your well-being.  In this sense, karma does not mean that if you build a life of doing good, good fortune comes to you, but that you are your own good fortune, transcendent of circumstances.  You have the insight and faith in processes deeper than your own material and personal circumstances that allow you to be in gratitude for the totality of existence itself, not specific circumstances. You become able to see that even that which is conventionally unfortunate contains valuable lessons and reassurances of one’s own capabilities, and thus contains good.

On the other hand, if your actions are selfish and destructive, you are likewise obsessed with gaining what you think is good for yourself and have little to no sense of your connection or responsibilities to others, and you will become small and afraid psychologically, and then, no matter how many riches or successes in the world are achieved, true happiness and well-being will never be yours. You will need to be successful and fortunate all of the time and when difficulty arises, as it will, you will not have the inner faith and resources to remain stable and positive. Thus, we see that karma is a spiritual state which manifests as the way we experience the world, which then will lead to further “actions” which are either beneficial to the greater good or harmful.  This builds good or negative karma that will manifest in ways often not as expected, but in ways that are necessary in the evolution of individuals and human society into deeper consciousness and positive action.

As Zen Master Katagiri noted, karma is not just about individuals, it is also the complex interweaving of individuals with ALL the forces and interrelationships in life. Actions take place with individuals at various levels of social organization, from families, through communities, through nations, through the human collective, all the way to the collective life and forces of this planet, which shape the experience of each individual and the levels of human society for good or ill.  We are even creating planetary karmic consequences of actions, which include attitudes of mind which then lead to physical actions and political policies, which lead to either suffering or flourishing on a planetary level.  We make political choices that are either based in wisdom and generous compassion or ignorant selfishness, in kindness or meanness, which create harmony or disharmony, foster respect or disrespect for the rights of all.  These choices and actions generate karmic results for years, even generations, to come. 

Since suffering is the topic of Buddhism, it is a study of how suffering is generated and what can be done about it. Karmic awareness is essential in this study guiding how we make decisions concerning our actions which will lead to the cessation of suffering as we are able, or to suffering’s increase. For human societies, it is very clear we need to do good, that is, act with compassion, kindness, and wisdom, if we are to have societies that minimize suffering and maximize well-being.  Individual material wealth and power are not good karmic priorities for a society. Politics that emphasize divisions, making winners and losers, included and excluded groups, which is hurtful and judgmental, rather than inclusive and compassionate, which makes decisions based in dogmatic and fanciful opinions over facts, delusional desires and fears over truth, will not, cannot, have good karmic results. And when collective karma has resulted in circumstances that are difficult and challenging, perhaps even threatening to liberty and life, then the rules of karma tell us it will do us no good to be dependent upon beneficial circumstances for our sense of meaning, purpose, and well-being, but rather to living a life of goodness and kindness, of compassion and wisdom for our own sake and the sake of those we touch.  Good karma grows not from circumstance, but rather from the inner faith and resources to endure and even thrive spiritually and psychologically the cruelty and stupidity of karmic actions which are bringing suffering.  Buddhism, and particularly Zen, arose in dangerous and unstable historical circumstances where individuals had next to no power or influence over the circumstances of their lives, but the awakened wisdom of The Buddha taught that our karma was our own responsibility. He taught that we have inherent within us the ability to gain the perspective which can guide us toward increasing stability and well-being, which can turn the negative into positive when we remember that goodness begets goodness and evil begets evil, while goodness CAN eventually transform evil.  Have faith – karma is at work.  It’s up to us to work with it, to guide it as best we can through our good intention and action. 

“Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many… Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find what agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.” – Buddha

Dogma is instruction to believe what one is told whether there is any personal experience of its truth, or whether it holds up to examination.  In fact, where dogma is concerned, the instruction is to reject anything which contradicts and challenges it, even our own experience or observation.  While dogma is usually associated with religion, particularly what could be called fundamentalist religion, dogma permeates many aspects of life.  It could be said that culture is an amalgam of dogmas, what anthropologists call totems and taboos, what is believed to be true and not true, what is valued and not valued, what is prized and what is rejected, what to do and what not to do. As a culture is based in basic agreements on certain principles and a set of beliefs which act, in a sense, as glue holding society together, a certain amount of dogma is necessary, such as after centuries of evidence, freedom is a better principle than tyranny, and organized and reasonably regulated freedom is better than anarchy.

A healthy society is built around a balance of core beliefs which have demonstrated over time to be beneficial to the general population, handed down as the principles of the society, with encouragement to question, examine, investigate, and propose new ways of thinking, doing, and being. On the other hand, societies built on rigid dogma, twentieth century communism and fascism, in example, chafe the natural human inclination to freedom, to question, to experiment and find out what is true from false, and such societies require escalating levels of violence to hold the dogma and compliance to it in place.  In comparison, the relative success of Western liberal democracies over the communist and fascist societies of the twentieth century can be credited to Western democracies’ openness to plurality and diversity, the valuing of human life over rigid dogma, and openness to question and evolve its principles. 

Our society today is caught in confusion caused by rapid change and is faced, as often happens in history, by demagogic leaders seeking to exploit this unease by offering visions of stability and “greatness” through surrendering democratic ideals to demagogic dogma. Dogma has strong appeal to the insecurity of human ego, which thrives on categorization, judgment, specialness, and defensive certainty, the ego being a bit paranoid even when “healthy,” and extremely dangerous when unhealthy.  Authoritarian leaders will tap into this insecurity, offering safety and specialness to those who will give their unquestioning loyalty to what amounts to a cult, whether religious or political, sometimes the two overlapping. The psychological repression, denial and rationalization necessary to hold together allegiance to rigid and emotionally, if not physically, violent dogma can then get very dangerous in its “us” vs “them” mentality – “them” being everyone who is not in the circle of identification and allegiance to the dogma. Democracy cannot flourish where dogma exerts its inflexible demand for unquestioning allegiance and willingness to twist truth to meet the dogma’s demands.

Dharma, on the other hand, the teachings, practices, and great insights of Buddhism, is not very dogmatic, as the quote from Buddha that begins this column illustrates.  Dharma teaching is always aimed at freeing us of the ego-identification that craves dogmatic thinking. Of the various classical Buddhist traditions, I always felt the most affinity with the old Chinese Ch’an masters, the precursors to Zen, who held to but one instruction as essential – to meditate, to look within for truths which are inherent in every person, revealing a silent primal intelligence that frees us of ego-identification and dogma.  As the Taoist and Ch’an sages taught and lived, life is like a river, and to live it gracefully and truthfully, learning its secrets, we must ride the current of the river – wherever it goes and however it expresses itself, realizing we ARE the river when we open to the intuitive intelligence beneath egoic mind.  This requires mindfulness, the meditative increasingly deep presence-with-the-moment-as-it-is, learning to pay exquisite attention to the way things actually are.  Strict dogma, religious or political, is like being on a raft tied to the bank of the river. It goes nowhere, seems reassuringly constant, yet eventually, the pull of the river will break the rope, pulling the raft into the river, likely to crash against the rocks of reality.

Buddhism intrigued me when I first began to explore it seriously as a philosophy and psychology because of its rejection of dogma, very importantly teaching to not blindly believe what you are told. Its teachings were offered as suggestions for our personal exploration, and then, if in that exploration, the truth of the teaching was experienced, then you can believe your own experience.  I learned that Buddhism, in its purest form, is an exploration of the human condition, a study of what it is to be human from the inside out.  In direct rebuke of dogma, a Zen koan teaches – “Do not confuse the finger that points towards the moon for the moon.” The finger pointing represents the teachings and practices that are in support and guidance toward enlightenment, the moon in this analogy being the awakening out of all dogma into what works in bringing increasing peace, wisdom, and compassion into our experience of life. It is not the teaching that is held sacred, but the realization by our own experience, guided by the teachings, of all life as sacred. 

Buddhism teaches that compassion arises naturally when we see the “suffering” caused by attaching our sense of self to the grasping delusions of the ego and offers in solution, through applied awareness, our experiencing infinite interconnectedness with all Life. The Dalai Lama sums up and personifies the result of this perspective simply as, “My religion is kindness.” Very little dogma there. Living kindness as religious instruction is like a koan, an unfolding exploration of its inspiration, expression and impact. You have to live it, not read or preach about it.  The destination is enlightenment – the ability to see and interact with all beings as expressions of the unity of life, realizing a deeper harmony.  It is to awaken out of living in dogmas of separateness and conflict into Reality.  We are the Tao, The Universe expressing itself through our lives and all of Life.  Knowing, feeling, living this is enlightenment, the moon the dharma finger points to.

While it is good that other religions also point toward reverence for life, toward kindness, love, forgiveness, and compassion with their teachings, there seems to have been serious misperception in the communication and hearing.  In substituting dogmatic moralizing for instruction in true self-realization of these virtues, these religions often fail to generate their application, sometimes quite the opposite.  Following Buddhism’s example, they might do well to teach less dogma and more dharma, less moralizing and more compassion and dedication to virtuous openness.

American democracy is a religion of sorts. As envisioned by its founders, strongly influenced by the ancient Greeks from the last time democracy had been attempted by a society, the founders, applying contemplative reason and logic, held life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, forged in a realm where all are considered equal, to be its dynamic evolving underlying principles.  They never intended the Constitution to be dogmatic, rather a living, questioning, seeking finger pointing the way, around this bend and over that hill, sometimes over a mountain or down a river, searching for how to emphasize individual liberty within “more perfect union.”  What is true is that the koan of democracy is still out there as the moon our Constitution points toward and it needs fearless dharma heroes, like the founders, people who looked to reason and contemplative honesty to lead us toward its fullest meaning and expression. 

Unfortunately, we seem plagued by lazy-minded dogmatists, opportunists spouting platitudes of freedom and liberty, ignoring the true meaning of these virtues, attempting to tie us perilously to the shore of their narrow beliefs, resisting the pull of the river of progress.  There have always been those who held dogmatic beliefs which could not accommodate what called to us from around the bend, and so they resist going there, perhaps denying that it even exists. They want to tie our country to the land of their dogma, worshipping strict self-serving interpretations of our foundational principles, protecting their privilege and bias with delusional insistence that what is untrue is true.  Their denial of the challenges of the present and the future lock us into dangerous regressionism, leaving us unable to face the very real challenges of our present historical time.  We cannot afford to be in the grip of dogmatic political and religious movements, trying to tie the raft of our nation to the bank of what they imagine is “great” with their frayed rope of manipulative untruths.  The world is changing. Around the bend looks very little like the terrain we have crossed in the past.  Global warming, AI, irresistible globalization, the breaking down of ethnic, racial and gender barriers, the challenge of addressing the abuse of the precious principle of freedom of speech by the wild west of unregulated internet and media spreading sensationalism, disinformation, conspiracies, and propaganda. There is a great need for us to be the UNITED States of America with the courage and openness of the founders to lead us around these bends.  Remember the analogy of the raft tied in the river?  Eventually the pull of the river breaks the rope of dogma and the raft crashes upon the rocks of reality. We need courageous dharma leaders who pursue the koan of democracy, who have the skills of presence and vision to steer us down the river of reality, to find our way to the calm waters of unity and peace, into the adventure that is the future. For this, the Buddhist dharma approach of honesty and fearless examination of what-is and needs-to-be might help – and Buddhists don’t care whether you’re Buddhist.  Dedication to honesty and compassion – to kindness – are enough.

“You don’t ‘have’ a life, you ‘are’ life. The One Life, the one consciousness that pervades the entire universe and takes temporary form to experience itself as a stone or blade of grass, as an animal, a person, a star or a galaxy.”  – Eckhart Tolle

Scientists, and thus our culture and our psychologies, cannot seem to grapple with the phenomenon of consciousness, its appearance and ubiquitousness in nature, because we have yet to shake off the anthropocentric view that only humans are truly conscious, and that consciousness arises from our brain.  In the general population there may be acknowledgement of consciousness in other animals, but then it usually remains isolated to what we consider higher level animals like our dogs, cats, or the apes – again, only through association to humans can we accept functioning self-aware consciousness.  Only recently has the possibility of consciousness just as complex as that of dogs been attributed to pigs and elephants, somewhat less so in cows, and then more generally to the mammal species, while complex, seemingly self-aware intelligence in some non-mammal species, such as in octopi or crows, is also being acknowledged.  As usual, we have humanity at the center of the universe and there is an outward spiral of relevance from there, always the reference point being association with human identity and interests.  We are an egocentric species living in an egocentric culture.  We are a dualistic culture, which means we understand things by disassembling them. 

We are quite blind to a very different perspective which has been held by mystical philosophies of every culture dating back thousands of years, which holds the Universe as THE organism of our cosmic reality and every star, planet, life-form, particle of sand, molecule, and atom is an appendage, an expression of, a cell, an organ in the body of the Universe.  This goes not only for matter, but for consciousness, for these perspectives hold that there is no material world without the world of consciousness pervading and generating it. In the ancient Vedic tradition of South Asia, the progenitor of Hinduism and Buddhism, it is viewed that the Universe is primarily unmanifested consciousness called “Brahman.”  This could equate to Western religions’ notion of God, except that there is no projection of human qualities or volition to shape or interfere in the affairs of humanity; there is simply pure creative infinitely intelligent potential that bursts forth as the physical world, which in its human manifestation is referred to as “Atman.”  The Way of Brahman is called Dharma, quite transcendent of human interests, for Brahman is manifesting an entire Universe.  Wisdom traditions tell us it is wise to align with Dharma, but humans want the Universe to bend to us. This is our fall from Grace.  

Atman roughly equates to the Western notion of soul, yet this does not quite correlate either, for the Western notion of soul has implications of the continuation of the ego or personality, whereas “Atman” is more understood to be the true and original Self which is pure consciousness, the “witness consciousness” of Brahman experiencing and interacting with itself.  Importantly, it is understood that every physical manifestation – every person, animal, plant, mineral formation – is Brahman manifested, Universal consciousness channeled through whatever cognitive capacity the entity possesses – humans more complex than other animals, animals more complex than vegetation, vegetation more complex than mineral, yet, at its essence, through the many, resides the One.  So, this perspective is called non-duality, the recognition that all the Universe is One, manifesting as many.

 So here we are, now thousands of years later, with our anthropomorphic notion of God, our personal, judgmental, lawgiving, divisive notions of God that have been the source of endless divisiveness, conflict and war, which have humanity separated from Nature in a callous relationship of exploitation.  Our science has been the butcher, carving up all of Nature, figuring out how the various cuts can serve humanity, failing to recognize divinity anywhere in our world, not even in humans.  Our theology has God in Heaven and humanity fallen, separate from God, and all the world is just the makings, the great hardware and grocery store for humanity to get our consumer goods.  And we are damn near at the breaking point with this planet-as-store-for-humanity ideology.  God is nowhere to be found. Dharma is ignored.

AND….. almost miraculously, our science, in its slicing everything down to its next level to better discover how to exploit the world, has found….. consciousness.  Science is beginning to recognize consciousness in plants – real cognition, storage of information, and communication kind of consciousness.  Any pre-European invasion Native American could have told you this.  And more.  They would tell you of the animals, the mountains, the rocks, the trees and plants, the rivers and the winds possessing wisdom and speaking to us.  They would also tell you that this phenomenon of consciousness is in all things because it is the consciousness of the Great Spirit.  And in their condescension, Europeans called these magic people superstitious heathens.  As Native Americans, Australian Aborigines, and mystics in every culture would tell you in their own cultural vernacular, we are not the source of consciousness; we are channels, receivers, processors, and broadcasters of consciousness energy originating from Spirit, God, the Cosmos permeating every atom of the material world.  This is also the discovery with which modern Western science is grappling.  Our reductionist bias has had us taking the physical world apart and studying it for four hundred years, and we finally took it apart down to the subatomic level, the quantum-world level, and we find… consciousness in particles interacting with each other, energy waves becoming particles under observation and particles popping out of and back into the quantum soup.  Consciousness beats our hearts and balances the genius biome universe in our guts as well as concentrating, focusing, and working in the very complex organization of matter which is the human brain.

The difference between Western religions’ idea that God created the world like a potter, and the Vedic, the aboriginal, and mystics’ sense that God is IN the world, is the game changer.  The challenge is for humanity to reframe its religious impulse from worshiping the idea of God standing outside of Nature and our everyday world into the sacred spiritual sense of the mystical non-dual traditions.  Science now has evidence corroborating that consciousness pervades not only ourselves but every animal, plant, and mineral of this world.  If we are ready to accept the obvious, that consciousness seems to be functioning not only in our brains but in every cell and organ of our bodies and at the subatomic level of matter, this opens us to a science-based spirituality which heals the human-Nature rift of the modern world.  Yet, science seems unable to cross this boundary to address the very real possibility that there is Universal Consciousness (and what else could we give the name God?).  It is simply too threatening to the existing dualistic, materialistic, egocentric, reductionistic basis of our culture.  With this realization, however, a new civilization can be born – not based in strife and exploitation – but rather in reverence for ALL.  This revelation opens the way for humanity to move forward in this Universe with a viable, beautiful future relating to all as sacred. It takes us out of the dead-end we are now facing.

When you go to a yoga class or a meditation class, there is a good chance you will encounter the greeting phrase “Namaste.” It is a Hindu word which translates as “God within me recognizes and salutes God within you.”  While most of today’s Westernized Hindus do not live this philosophy any more than Christians demonstrate Jesus’s core teachings of universal love, tolerance, acceptance, and non-materialism, a new and viable human civilization will need to be built on a religious foundation of Namaste, not so different from Jesus’s all-encompassing love, the recognition that “we are ALL God’s children,” even the animals, flowers, waters, earth, and air.

The Vedic tradition teaches consciousness, mysterious, infinitely intelligent and creative consciousness energy, in perfect harmony and balance, is our core Self.  To know our true Self, we must penetrate the noise of the egoic, personal mind to find the silent intelligence of infinite, dynamic stillness which flows through us – Its source, the Universe. This is the true purpose of meditation – to find not only our true Self-as-consciousness, but our kinship with all of Life.  How wonderful a realization!  How wonderful a home in the Cosmos, in Nature, in Infinity awaits us there!  Everywhere you look, you discover, as the Vedic teachings tell us, Tat Tvam Asi, I am That.  Life, Sacred intelligence is at work everywhere, unblemished by human ego.  In the Western traditions, this is Eden, and it can be reclaimed.  Western science does not need to be banished; it can be celebrated as the vehicle that took us from ignorance to wisdom at last, its purpose now not to exploit the world, but to protect and join the energies of consciousness and manifestation in harmonious unity.

But first – we must recognize the error, the horror, which is human egocentrism, the viewpoint of separateness and our compulsion to stratification of who and what does and does not count in our mindset of exploitation.  We must begin working our politics, our economics, our religion, and our science toward the true principles of the spiritual impulse that flows through humanity.  We must recognize and realize the intelligence, the Universal Mind of our Source, which tells us our purpose is to celebrate the sacredness of every person, every animal, every plant, and even mineral.  To do this, we must learn individually, and then collectively, to quiet down our restless, greedy, insecure, thinking, emoting minds to find our Source, to find intelligence that is vast and wise and compassionate and knows Dharma.  This is who we are. Then we will know what to do to heal ourselves, our societies and our planet.  This Earth, this Universe, is our real temple.  Let us come home to worship.  Instead of living in the delusion that we have the answers, let us begin living in the open question of the wonder that is human life, always open to include what we had not been able to include before.