Obstacles Are the Path

“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 the World

“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 5th 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. 

DOGMA vs. DHARMA

“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.

Universal Consciousness

“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.

Crossing Over Into Silence

“It is difficult to receive and accept oneness because human speculation doesn’t catch it. But if you practice with full devotion, finally you will come to the final goal—silence. When you touch the core of existence and see the fundamental truth, there is nothing to say; you are just present in silence. This silence really makes your life alive. Then, even though you don’t say anything, your silence has lots of words, demonstrating the truth in a physical and mental way, which can be seen by others. This is Buddha’s teaching appearing through the form of a person who sees into the pure and clear depth of human existence.” ― Dainin Katagiri (Each Moment Is the Universe)

Dainin Katagiri (1928 – 1990) has always been the teacher who could take me the most directly to silence with his words, demonstrating the true paradoxical nature of Zen.  Katagiri titled his first two books Returning to Silence followed by You Have to Say Something.  He was a profound teacher with a great sense of humor.  Both his profoundness and his humor arose from his dwelling in the space of silence where all things connect, giving rise to words and actions, which reflect the truth of “the pure and clear depth of human existence.”  The third and fourth books of his teachings were Each Moment is the Universe and The Light That Shines Through Infinity, the titles pointing us to the truth of existence beneath and beyond the noise and distraction of the man-made world that so confuses us.

There is a Zen parable which tells us the realization of Zen is like discovering there is a pure land of our true nature where the point of Buddhism, the cessation of mental suffering, is realized.  This land, however, is like a shore which lies across a river, and we must cross this river to arrive at this other shore, and to do this, we need a raft.  The teaching goes on to say that having arrived at the other shore, we must leave the raft behind if we are to explore and come to know this new land.  To carry the raft would only encumber the exploration.

In this parable, we are beginning this journey from our usual confusing world of conventional and hectic striving for happiness and avoidance of unhappiness.  This is the shore of the life we have been living.  We have heard of a philosophy called Zen coming from the far reaches of Asia that promises to take us beyond confusion and unhappiness to a quite different kind of way of experiencing life, a way which offers real peace, that is deeply spiritual without being a religion in the usual sense.  In this parable this is called “the other shore.”  And so, we decide to read about Zen and to take up its essential practice, meditation.  This is the beginning of building our raft.

Our own confused and conflicted mind is like the river – the width, current, and turbulence of the river, unique to each person, and it is this confused and noisy mind we must cross to get to the other shore, the shore of peace and clarity.  What we do not know when we begin is that this other shore is silence, the dimension of consciousness which lies beneath our confused and noisy mind.  If we read the great teachers, like Katagiri, we have heard this, but we are unable to know it, perhaps even to believe it, for all we know is life inside our active mind.  So, in hope and on faith we begin to build our raft studying the teachings of Zen and most importantly engaging the practice of zazen – Zen style meditation. 

The word “Zen” means “sitting” and so we must stop our running around, physically, and mentally, to “sit.” We must sit right here, right now, in the middle of our life, in the middle of the Universe, to contemplate who we are and what being human really is, just as did The Siddhartha Gotama, 2600 years ago.  As he sat, entering deeper and deeper into silence and stillness, into the infinite mystery which is a moment, he became “Buddha,” the word in the Sanskrit language that means “Awakened One.”  Our goal, as was Siddhartha’s, is to wake up out of the trance of conditioned mind, what we have been told we are and what life is, to discover what lies beneath these stories of being a confused and anxious human in a world with too much cruelty, conflict, and contradiction, to find within us a completely sane, peaceful, and wise human being. 

So, we set aside twenty or forty or sixty minutes to stop running around in our life and we sit. We engage and inquire into our unruly mind.  We find insight.  We find peace.  We may find this moment in awareness is our true self.  Then we go back to our lives, perhaps a little calmer and with some new perspective. Eventually, we learn to “meditate” in any situation, for “sitting” is really a relationship to mind, but, in starting out, and thereafter in deepening our exploration, we sit in the Zen manner called Zazen, quiet and erect, eyes half or fully closed.  We focus our attention at first on our breathing to corral the wayward mind.  Then we enter into an inquiring relationship with the activity of the mind.  Who is this anxious, conniving, striving, wanting, sometimes happy, sometimes miserable, sometimes angry or despairing, often bored or lonely, insecure person generating these thoughts?  And who is it that sees this mental activity and has perspective on it, that sees yet is not caught in the thoughts?  Who am I?  What am I? 

The teachings tell me I am Buddha, as is everyone.  How can this be?  We sit in this manner because, as the teachers tell us, this is the optimal way to meet ourselves, and this meeting of ourselves is the real purpose of Zen.  If you want to meet the Buddha within you, it helps to sit like the Buddha, erect, fully relaxed yet brightly alert, ready to meet your true self, your Buddha-self, here and now. So, we sit like Buddha, and eventually, ah, yes, we begin to see and feel Buddha.

“Who are you?” is the greatest of Zen questions or “koans.”  We sit and we meet ourselves in the form of our unruly mind and undisciplined body resisting the instruction to just sit and be quiet.  Yet, we meet silence and stillness as well.  We meet the silent mind which looks compassionately upon the noisy mind, and we realize there are two types of mind to this human life.  There is this noisy mind we have been believing is who we are, and there is this silent mind, a realm of intelligent dynamic stillness which sees and envelops the noisy mind in its peace, wisdom, and compassion. 

This mind, this “buddha-mind” says nothing.  It just looks on in silence, yet it speaks without words, without thoughts.  It is the realm of wisdom, of knowing.  We begin to realize we are our own raft, and each time we sit, we begin, with the first conscious breath, to build the raft again and venture out onto the river, into the current of our thinking mind and self-centered ego.  We begin to realize we are both the river and the raft.  We will also come to know that we are the other shore, the shore of peace, wisdom, compassion, and insight. The raft of Zen is taking us to our true self where we discover we are everything, all the noise and the silence, the self-centered foolishness of everyone and the wise and compassionate Buddha that is the Universe having a human experience. We begin to “receive and accept oneness.”

Buddhism emphasizes that Buddha resides within all beings, not just humans, but all beings – the birds, the fish, the deer, and bear, the squirrel, the mosquito, and amoeba, the world of plants included, even the rocks, and mountains, rivers, and wind.  In fact, we begin to realize in our silent knowing that all the Universe is in the silence and the noise we find within ourselves.  We begin to realize in the silence which envelops everything, including ourselves, there is one great silent Being that generates all beings, all the everything that makes all the sounds of the world. 

“Buddha” realizes “dharma,” which means the natural and true way of the Universe, and all beings are naturally and only their natural selves – except humans.  Humans have this evolutionary capacity other creatures of nature do not have, and it is a noisy, self-seeking, very creative mind that imagines itself outside of dharma.  We imagine and think about all kinds of things, mostly about what is desirable to us and what is frightening to us, what will make us “more” and what we fear will make us “less.”  Birds and bears and daffodils do not do this.  They all abide within silent minds doing their bird or bear or daffodil life without thinking about it.  Humans think about these things and confuse and frighten themselves.  This too, of course, is what is naturally human, but when we do not also know our silence, we do not know our true and complete selves or the true and complete world around us, and we feel lost and incomplete.  Buddhism calls this “dukkha,” – suffering.

Zen is “returning to silence,” to know ourselves, to know ourselves and the world in its completeness, and with this knowing, we end our suffering. This is the other shore.  And when we arrive through study and meditation practice, after we have crossed over into silence, we must leave the raft of practice formality behind to explore this new land of natural wonder, of sound and movement, all experienced within its ground of underlying silence and connectedness. We “have to say something.” We, of course, return naturally to zazen, and to contemplation, for it is the natural raft of stillness and silence which IS the other shore, and we know and can feel it as our true self, but now, Zen becomes everyday life, magnificent, mysterious, and powerful.  This is how we become ourselves – natural and wondrous human beings.  Katagiri describes this dynamic presence thusly: “Silence is not just being silent.  You are silent, but simultaneously there are many words, many explanations, and many representations there.  Dynamic actions, both physical and mental are there.  In other words, silence is something deep and also very active.  In Japanese, the word for this silence is mokuraiMoku means “silence” and “rai” means “thunder.”  So, silence is quiet, but there is an enormous voice like thunder there.” (Each Moment is the Universe).

Be Still and Know

“Moving water distorts the reflection.  Only in water that is still can a true reflection be seen.”                     – Zhuangzi (Chuang Tsu) – (4th Cent. BCE)                                           

We live in a time of tumult.  Hyperstimulation and agitation are everywhere and as a result, as we internalize the hyperstimulation and agitation of the world around us, it is likewise in us.  There is no stillness.  Yet without stillness, we cannot see clearly.  Whether we are talking about the individual or groups or our society, as long as we are living in turbulence, there is no wisdom, no ability to see things as they truly are.  Our society and our politics are upside down; materialism, sensationalism, and anxieties dominate our consciousness; lies are told promiscuously and being lived as if they were truth; commotion swirls the waters of our consciousness as we drink the murky waters.  It is time for us to put down the cellphones, step away from the computer screens, turn off the TVs, and to stop, to breathe, to let quiet come over us to consider where we are and what we are doing.

The title of this column comes from the Bible, that edited says: “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore, we will not fear, though the earth should change, though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam, though the mountains tremble with its tumult… The nations are in an uproar; the kingdoms totter… Be still and know that I am God!”  – Psalm 46

To properly understand this passage, we have to ask the question – What is “God?”  The best answer I know is – What is not God?  But we do not know that we are all God, meaning the miracle of Creation unfolding, the Universe happening as human beings.  We do not know that our neighbor is God.  We do not know that the birds and the wind and the rain and the sunshine are God.  We do not know that all people and animals and plants and the earth and the air and the waters are God.  We do not know that the sunlight dappling among the leaves is God. We do not know that the stars and all the planets and all the Cosmos are God.  We do not know God because we cannot be still, and if we do not know God all around us, then we cannot see clearly that Life is not for profanity – it is for sacred realization.

And so, we do not know ourselves, nor do we know how to treat each other, or the animals, or the vegetation, or the soil, or the water, or the air of this world.  We do not know because we cannot be still long enough to see, to hear, to feel Life in its sacred Beingness flowing within us and through us and through all that is.  Call this God, or call it Tao, as did Zhuangzi.  Call it Life, call it the Universe, call it Creation; we do not know this unless we are still, and until we know God/Tao/Life/Creation/the Universe, we do not know ourselves, and we do not know how to bring ourselves or our world to sanity, for sanity dwells within the realization of the sacredness of our lives and of all Life.

We can call it Zen, and over and over again the stories of Zen tell variations of a scenario in which an earnest student with a head full of ideas about Zen and enlightenment queries a master as to the entryway to Zen and is told to listen, or to look into some subtle aspect of the moment.  This requires them to stop and focus attentively into the here-and-now of the moment; it requires them to be still.  It requires them to ponder how can the sound of a stream or the wind or a thrown pebble cracking against tiles, or a flower or a pile of manure be the entryway to Zen and enlightenment?  But they will be unable to really SEE or HEAR as long as their mind continues to spin, seeking the answers to their questions.  To truly know Life requires them finally to stop all pondering to BE their looking and their listening, and only when not only the body but the mind comes to stillness, will they begin to KNOW, for in that absolute stillness they stop seeking and they find.  Right here. Right now.

 In the stillness we discover that we are the stillness.  We are the silent intelligence which is consciousness prior to the ego that is always seeking something, even when the something is truth and enlightenment, let alone the stimulation and excitement that seem to be our world’s goal.  In the stillness we discover ourselves as That which is Eternal.  We discover that we are, in the words of Eckhart Tolle, “the space of the moment arising in awareness.”  We discover “I am God” – meaning I am That which cannot be divided or separated.  I am one with All, for All is everywhere and is me.  This is what we find when we allow ourselves to be truly still.

In the stillness, there is no time, and all space is this space; the atoms of this body and of all forms are the original atoms formed in the Beginning.  The consciousness that witnesses is the One Consciousness which brought forth All. We can begin to rest contentedly in knowing – I Am.  The earth will change.  The mountains will shake, and the waters will roar and foam.  All commotion comes and goes.  All excitement is fleeting.  Attitudes and beliefs are shadows on the wall flitting by.  In I Am our home is Eternity, and in Eternity all movement flows like currents in the ocean, and the ocean is the stillness that rolls quietly and forever.  Know your Beingness and realize the Beingness of all people and all that is, and you will begin to know the truth of everything.

What is the sound of one hand clapping?  It is The One Hand that brings forth all hands.  It is the thunder clapping and the crickets and the birds and the wind and the water falling over stones. It is a dog barking or a cat mewing.  It is our own breath and the rhythm of our hearts.  It is salutations and goodbyes and conversation between.  It is exclamations of joy and lamentations of grief.  It is the shout of anger and whispers of comfort.  It is an old song hummed softly or sung happily.  It is music that touches your soul.  It is the laughter, guffaws, and hushed tones of camaraderie.  It is the baby’s coo and cries and first words.  It is children playing.  It is the sounds of home and community and work.  It is our last breath.

The tumult and confusion of the world are passing shadows on the backdrop of Eternity, yet, every moment is a frame of Eternity, sacred and perfect just as it is.  Stillness is the mystic’s realm, and from the stillness comes a time-honored lesson about how to speak and how to conduct our lives.  It tells us that before we speak, before we act, we must let our intention pass through the three gates of truth, necessity, and kindness. Be still, breathe into it, and know.  Let wisdom arising from stillness begin to guide you.  You will know if you stop, become still, and ask before proceeding:  Is this true?  Is this necessary? Is it kind? You will know if you come to stillness to realize Wonder at the Miracle that is this Life, this moment.

Remake your world and begin remaking the world we all share by learning to step out of the tumult, the confusion, the falseness, to stop, to realize your life is happening, as all Life is happening, this moment in its reality, truth, and miracle. It only takes an eyelash’s blink, a conscious breath, to reframe into this moment where Eternity unfolds, to become still in your heart and mind, and know.

Practical Spirituality

“The Tao that can be named is not the Tao.”

Taoism and Zen arose out of ancient Chinese culture, not as religions, but as philosophies of life, yet they both pointed toward true spiritual realization, with Zen being the offspring of Buddhism comingling with Taoism.  Both eschewed the rigid identifications and claims of divinely transmitted rules and teachings of religion.  Yet, over time, human ego being what it is, these philosophies have taken on many of the trappings of religion, though still far less-so than in the West.  Still, beyond any trappings or rituals, the one thing primarily taught in Zen, Taoism and similar Eastern spiritual, often called non-dual, traditions is to pay attention to Life in ways which are profound, subtle and deep, their purpose being to guide us into the living reality of the mystery of Life and to explore a human being’s role within this Great Unfolding.  The great Zen teacher, Ikkyu, when asked to impart words on the secret to Zen, simply said, “Attention.” Asked to elaborate, he repeated, “Attention, Attention.”  Asked again, the student still being unsure of the meaning of his answer, Ikkyu emphatically said, “Attention, Attention, Attention.” 

Attention.  To bring focused awareness into the unfolding of Life, moment to moment.  This is at the heart of the true spiritual journey, and it is the path of the mystic of any religious/cultural tradition, including Christian, Jewish and Muslim.  Each, in the language of their religion and culture, is speaking the same message, only with different words, telling us to pay attention into the present moment with sufficient depth, subtlety, presence, and spaciousness to see miracles unfolding as, around, and through us every moment.  Mystics tell us to realize that beyond the illusion of our separateness we are Divine consciousness, not some person looking, and in that trans-egoic perspective, to experience God, or the Divine Source, everywhere.  Mystics are all pointing to everyday life as it unfolds, not only in its obvious material manifestation but in its subtleties which go deeper than the material, pointing to the Source of all manifesting through all.  This requires exquisite levels of attention, a sort of attention that is not narrow, tense, and contracted, but rather soft, relaxed, outside of time, and without boundary.  It requires realizing that we are awareness, the energy of Universal consciousness focused through a human being examining and experiencing Creation unfolding through and all about us. 

True spirituality then is in the human inclination to connect and find meaning, and the greater, wider, and more inclusive the circle in this inclination, the greater and deeper the spiritual experience and expression of a person.  For many, who profess no religious affiliation, they will refer to Nature or doing good as their religion and this is indeed getting close to true spiritual inclination, for they are describing the experience of connection which occurs for them in Nature or in acts of kindness and generosity where the boundary of their self opens and connects in a manner that is uncommon.  This unboundaried sense is not uncommon, however, in young children, and its progressive loss can be seen as children get older and more “sophisticated.”  This is why spiritual masters, such as Jesus, advised, “Be like the little children,” and Zen challenges us to “Show your original face,” meaning your consciousness prior to being socialized into a spiritually closed and limited adult.

Whereas religions are often about creating separation and boundary from all that is not within the religion’s teachings and community, true spiritual teaching and experience dissolve such false boundaries.  A Zen master, when asked about the nature of ultimate reality, may just stoop down and pick up a stone, or simply point at the questioner, leaving them in puzzlement.  Their puzzlement can, however, be resolved if they simply follow Ikkyu’s instruction and bring the very deepest attention possible to the stone or their own existence. Nothing exists separate from everything else, and deep examination will always reveal this truth.  God, Ultimate Reality, is everywhere – where else could it be?  This is the mystic’s, the spiritual master’s, secret knowledge and experience.

A very important difference between these Eastern philosophical/spiritual traditions and Western religions is that in the Middle East and in the West, true mystics were and are shunted off to the periphery, perhaps even persecuted as heretics, whereas in the Eastern religious traditions, mystics are held as the authority and teachers of what is essential.  The most profound of these Eastern traditions, including Zen and Taoism, are often referred to as non-dual philosophies, meaning that their fundamental teaching is always focused upon the inviolable unity and interconnectedness of Life.  This places them in a category of human ontological questing quite different from religions which are dualistic, that often teach, in some manner, the “fall” of humanity, the separation of humanity from Ultimate Grace, regainable only through fidelity and orthodoxy to the religion’s teachings.

As many Zen masters have declared, Zen is everyday life; in other words, the realization of ultimate truth and origin is in every manifestation and every function of Life.  In all the non-dual traditions, God is everywhere, now.  In the words of 13th century Zen master Dogen: “If you are unable to find the truth right where you are, where else do you expect to find it?”  This is what makes true spiritual practice absolutely practical, for it is always and only a search for the truth of every moment and situation.

What is the truth of morality and ethics?  What is the truth of right conduct?  What is the truth of governance?  What is the truth of pleasure and pain?  What is the truth of the functioning of the human mind? What is the truth of the nature of existence?  What is the truth of washing the dishes or sweeping the floor or going to your job or to school?  What makes life situations miserable or joyous?  Who are you?  What is your purpose?  What is the purpose of any human life, of any lifeform?  How ought any task be performed?  The answer to all these and any question is right here and now – if you know how to look deeply enough, and when you look deeply enough it is realized that we already have and know everything needed to answer these questions and live an optimal human life, for we ARE Life, or the Universe, or God, having a human experience.

This is the secret of the spiritual masters, all their teachings pointing to our getting out of our own way, or more specifically, getting the human ego out of the way of our knowing how to be human, naturally.  It’s all maddenly simple – it is about clearing from our lives the endless complicating and personalizing and categorizing and separating and manipulating and chasing after what we want and turning away from what we don’t want while getting caught in the agendas of other people and society.  This is what the human ego does when it is mistaken for who we are, as our society and religions teach us.  The mystic, the spiritual experience, stands outside all this, and it is maddening and challenging in its simplicity because the ego resists this simplicity, needing things, including spirituality and religion, to be complicated, creating what Zen calls the Gateless Gate, the seemingly impassable barrier that is really only an illusion created by our mind.

Ego will latch on to spirituality, claiming it for itself, teaching it as something pursued outside our daily lives, as rituals creating sometimes peaceful, and sometimes ecstatic, experiences identified with designated “spiritual” masters, retreats or types of experience.  Very nice, but what good does this do us in our everyday life?  This is why Zen teaches that Ultimate Reality is in everyday life, right where we are – IF we are truly where we are – rather than caught in the swirl of some egoic matrix of ideas and beliefs and behavior patterns more focused on the past and future than this present moment right where we are.  It is this stone lying at our feet, the earth beneath us, the sky above us, “the Kingdom of Heaven spread across the land for those with the eyes to see,” the plants and animals and people about us.  In the language of Eastern Vedantic traditions, “Thou art That.” What could be more uncomplicated or practical?  Yet it is so challenging to conceive, to experience, to live, for those raised within dualistic cultures with dualistic religious instruction.  How do we break free of the prison of being “in here” – this body and mind and circumstances we know as “me” – while all else is out there, including God?  “Attention!” commands the Zen master or the guru.  Right here, right now – pay attention as you have never paid attention and Life will reveal its secrets, So simple, yet so challenging, for we live caught in a world of the mind that is distracted confused, and unsatisfied.  This is what Buddhism called “dukkha,” the unnatural suffering humans do to themselves, each other, and the world when they don’t know how to pay attention, when they don’t know who they are.  True spirituality is knowing and living who you are.  What could be more practical?  It is going to the store or to work or relaxing at home or doing chores or at play knowing and being who we truly are, all done with a most uncommon presence and skill for we have learned to get out of our own way.  Very practical.

Evolutionary Spirituality

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

In this time of growing reactionary fundamentalist religion, the words “evolution” and “spirituality” seldom are heard in combination and may well evoke an emphatic rebuke, yet within ancient traditions of spiritual practice, while the word “evolution” may not be employed, it is precisely this modern concept which is at the heart of what was taught.  The problem with fundamentalist religion is that it is a static thing, holding tradition – historical writings, teachings, practices, rules, and rituals – to be sacrosanct, not to be questioned or to evolve.  But Life is not static.  It is wild and free and always changing.  Life is always evolving, meaning that it is constantly moving towards higher and more complex organizations of form and consciousness.  In the human community this means a consciousness which can hold in its sense of self, ever more complex, abstract, diverse, and expansive ideas and identifications. 

Consciousness evolution happens in individuals, in groups, and in the species.  As the brilliant twentieth-century French Catholic mystic theologian and paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin noted, it is an ascent, and it cannot be stopped, no matter how hard some may attempt to – it is inevitable destiny.  Evolution is Life expressing itself in ever more complex organizations of diversity within unity, and this puts any dogmatic religion or political movement which attempts to hold to outdated ideas and identity as inviolable is at odds with Life.  On the other hand, spirituality IS Life.  It is the celebration of Life, every bit as open and free and evolving as Life, and I capitalize the word “Life” to emphasize that the Sacred Source which religions call God by many names and expressions IS Life.  God is not outside of Life.  For all true spiritual traditions, God is IN Life. Mystics of all religious orientations have always understood this and taught that dogma which attempts to crystalize some idea of God is the real heresy.

Teilhard de Chardin lived and taught a true spirituality which was a completely undogmatic, yet disciplined, submersion into Life and its mysteries.  As a scientist, he looked at Life and saw within it evolution, and he understood evolution to encompass not only the forms of the world, but also of the Sacred Source, of God before form, and on through God’s expression as form in the atoms and stars and planets and into the galaxies.  He saw it in the emergence of conscious lifeforms, of lifeforms in conscious interaction, in emerging sentience, into Life’s ability to examine itself, to know itself, and imagine beyond itself.   He could see in his very disciplined study of evolution that it is a continuing integration of the myriad and ever-more complex manifestations of conscious Life and states of consciousness into harmonious unities.

And what is consciousness?  Mystics have always understood it as the primal intelligence of the Universe expressing itself and knowing itself through Creation.  De Chardin could see that consciousness permeated all material forms, and that as the forms of Creation complexified in the process called evolution, so did the consciousness within the forms, ever complexifying up and into humans.  His was a completely thorough understanding of matter, consciousness, and Spirit evolving in the dynamic integrated processes of Life.  As applied to the human species, he saw that its successful physical, mental, and social evolution is reliant upon ascending into a very complex sense of evolving spiritual consciousness which could guide human development.  He saw this process moving toward an integrated world consciousness which held all expressions of humanity, along with the Natural World, in a harmonious unity, and so too with all the Universe.

Ancient, Nature-based cultures understood the need to honor the spirit/consciousness which pervaded all Life, and they did so within their primitive technological development, maintaining a balanced and enduring relationship with Nature for millennia.  They understood that humans represented a quantum leap in the world’s unfolding yet saw this advance as a gift and a responsibility, not, as modern humans have, as a privilege without responsibility.  There is a Native American creation myth which I love which tells us that the world was created when Spirit became the world, and this is very important in that it is not the dualistic vision Western religions teach of God making the world.  God making the world means that there is a separation between creator and creation, and gives the impression, like a potter making a pot, that the product is fixed in its mold and purpose.  So it is with religionists who insist that a dynamic world process such as evolution is heretical. 

The Native American myth goes on to say, that though Spirit became the world, meaning that Spirit was IN the world, the world was unable to know itself as Spirit, and so, “one more creature was needed that walked in both worlds, and Spirit became human beings.”  This myth recognizes that humans have the necessary mental development, possessing intuition of Divine origin and destiny, to bring forth consciousness into creative and unifying process with the physical world.  To tragic consequence, such an intimate sense of Divinity behind and within the world’s unfolding has been absent in human civilization’s unfolding.  Spiritual mystics, such as once comprised entire indigenous cultures, have been banished to the fringe, and so have had little influence on the conduct or design of modern societies.  This is the obstacle to manifesting human fulfillment which must be overcome, embracing further evolution into fully ego-transcended consciousness.

Conservative religionists, currently again in the ascendency in their cultural and political influence, stand firmly against such evolution, and this is a catastrophe.  Religionists pursue, worship, and think they own the Divine and despite the emphasis on the IDEA of God as an object of worship and dispenser of moral judgment, there is very little sense of visceral unifying presence of the Divine in the day-to-day lives or social/political/economic conduct of modern humans.  In a manner of speaking, this makes our society essentially atheistic, worshipping the material over the spiritual.  To a spiritual mystic, God is not an idea or a giver of moralistic rules and certainly not the sole property of some group of “believers.”  Spiritual mystics live IN and through, feeling owned by the Divine, experiencing the Divine manifesting everywhere.

As religions are the vessel of a culture’s spiritual experience, humans as civilization builders need true spiritual religion, lest they fall into egoistic, materialistic decadence, as has our own society.  Those who resist the notion of an evolving universe through which the Divine is seeking to know and express itself were referred to by de Chardin as “immobilists,” those dedicated to a view of existence in which nothing is supposed to change despite all evidence that Life is nothing but change.  De Chardin went on to point out that it is not only in progressively more complex life-forms that evolution occurs, but that it is occurring through human consciousness, which continues to expand in ever-increasing complexity, inexorably shown through the capacity to integrate new concepts and identifications into a coherent sense of self, overcoming ignorance, prejudice, and superstition.  This has been shown as the species progressed beyond tribalism, nationalism, and regionalism, toward internationalism, out of monarchies and feudalism into democracies struggling against backsliding into authoritarianism.  Humanity continues to evolve out of racism, sexism, and is even beginning to break free of anthropocentricism, glimmerings of seeing all life as worthy of our empathy and compassion.  Even in the realm of religion, we see those who believe in and function within a growing interdenominational consciousness, leaving behind sectarianism.  Most importantly, it is shown in the advance of science and information into ever-increasing capacities for global communication, a world-wide network of dynamic thought, what de Chardian termed “The Noosphere.”

We must recognize human evolution as necessary if we are to meet the environmental, social, psychological, and political challenges created by our present level of consciousness.  To believe and act as if humanity in its present manifestation represents the end-product of the evolutionary dynamic is self-fulfilling suicide.  While it is true that civilization and invention have been the evolutionary mark of post-indigenous humanity and there is no turning back into the simple harmony of indigenous forest-life, what now becomes necessary is an evolutionary synthesis of this human inventiveness with trans-egoic spiritual consciousness.  As our ego-centricism and inventions have taken us out of Nature and harmony with Creation, our successful continuance as a species requires bringing together the Spirit/Nature-centric consciousness of indigenous people which holds Life as an unbreakable interconnected web with the celebration of individuality and inventiveness of modern human technological society into harmonious embrace and protection of Nature and all Life. A new cosmology is being born out of the evolutionary synthesis of science and spirituality which brings with it a new myth, a myth of the evolution of spirit-consciousness-matter through humanity which can embrace its true harmonious place within Creation.  As de Chardin put it: “There is neither spirit nor matter in the world; the stuff of the universe is spirit-matter. No other substance but this could produce the human molecule.”  I believe it is clear – only in recognition of the wisdom of de Chardin and others who share a similar vision and through turning toward dynamic evolutionary spirituality can humanity successfully navigate away from the precipice of self-inflicted disaster which now looms.  We must enter into our third major evolutionary period, synthesizing our capacity for invention with the wisdom and spiritual instinct of the ancients.  We possess the canon of wisdom from ancient cultures and non-dual spiritual traditions which can take us beyond the current egocentric stage of evolution toward rediscovery of our own true nature in Nature. We must now generate the will to save ourselves and our beautiful planet-home by embracing the challenge of evolving our culture and our spirituality into a dynamic religious expression of scientific and spiritual harmony which excludes no person or any aspect of Nature. We must experience and express ourselves as children of the Cosmos finding our way home.

The Vertical Axis of Being

In Asian philosophical/spiritual traditions, in indigenous nature-based cultures, and even within the mystical origins of Western religions, there is emphasized the sense of our existing within an energy dynamic of the spiritual realm above us and the Nature/earthly realm beneath us with our mind-dominated personal existence unfolding between these primal realms.  We exist in what ancient Chinese Taoist culture called “The Middle Kingdom,” and to be enlightened, that is, awake and aware to the fundamental nature of our own deepest level of Being, requires that we have integrated ongoing consciousness of our Earthly connectedness and the transpersonal spiritual with our personal mind. The symbol of the cross, beyond its association with the crucifixion of Jesus and adoption as the universal symbol of Christianity, represents in many cultures the connection, the intersection, of humanity with the divine.  The horizontal line or axis of the cross represents the realm of the personal and secular while the vertical axis represents our connection with the primal earthly beneath us and the transpersonal, eternal, cosmic and sacred spiritual realm of existence above and all around us. 

The brilliant Hindu philosopher, Sri Aurobindo, saw that behind the evolution of the Universe, of all life, was God, or Supreme Consciousness, manifesting THROUGH the forms in the world.  He saw that the manifesting Universe progressed in complexity and degree of consciousness from matter to mind to spirit with consciousness present in all, yet ascendingly expressed.  In matter, consciousness at the subatomic level is extremely subtle as its repository appears inert.  In biological life, consciousness begins to be interactive with the environment, evolving in complexity from the simplest single cell life to the highly complex neuron-permeated brains and bodies of humans, with minds capable of abstraction and complex thought and emotion, of intuiting beyond material form to sense the perfect and unclouded intelligence of our origin in Universal Consciousness, Spirit, or God.  This represents the vertical axis of existence, and along with Aurobindo, many spiritual teachers and traditions see that humanity’s confusion and difficulty are the result of being disproportionally limited in focus and expression to the middle horizontal axis of the personal mental realm where if identity is invested, connection with the primal natural and spiritual realms becomes lost. 

To be certain, mental development is humanity’s special evolutionary expression with civilization being the collective projection of the mental realm upon both the natural and the spiritual world, and in our over-developed egoic, anthropocentric sense of evolutionary specialness, we have become quite lost in creating artificial realities and in our obsession with the artificially material and spiritual. We have become imbalanced, seeking to control the world rather than living harmoniously, and this has us in conflict with the Natural World, with each other, and without Spiritual guidance.  Yet we do have guidance, for mystical traditions tell us that to find our way to individual and collective harmony, we must learn to reintegrate the mental realm with the ground of Nature and with true Spiritual experience and insight, bringing our mind into its proper perspective and function.  We need to heed our twin universal yearnings for connection with Nature and with true Spiritual realization for they point us to the destiny the Universe intends for humanity where our material and mental inventiveness can be dedicated to Universal harmony of a far more complex organization in unity than is our current level of evolutionary development.

Aurobindo, along with the Christian evolutionary theologian, Teilhard de Chardin, saw as humanity’s challenge the task of grasping and manifesting as its destiny the realization of our sense of self arising out of the spiritual origin of material existence, relating to mind as an intermediary faculty for experiencing, expressing, and creating, rather than as the centerpiece of our sense of self.  They saw this identification with mind and its personalized ego unintegrated with our natural, earthly commonality within Nature and with the Spiritual, Eternal, and Universal as the source of individual and collective human confusion, conflict, suffering, and destructiveness.  They understood that as long as humanity functioned in violation of this evolutionary dynamic, unable to find our proper place within this Great Unfolding, humanity was lost in an immature, self-absorbed, and self-aggrandizing expression of our true Nature, stumbling along in needless suffering and conflict.  And finally, they saw that to function as healthy and whole individuals, collectives, and species we must integrate our mental inventiveness with awareness of our origin in the Earthly here-and-now of Nature, grounded and reverent in this primary level of Beingness, while guided, inspired, and comforted by our highest nature in Spirit. 

In many cultures, including Aurobindo’s yogic tradition, this integrated experience happens not from focusing our sense of self in the head-mind separating Life into manipulatable bits, but in the heart-mind of awareness which connects and has no actual boundary, a focal point balanced between the Earth below and Heaven above, experiencing the Kingdom of Heaven, as Jesus taught, all about us.  Thusly we can then project our integrated physical, mental, and spiritual capacities through the energy of awareness into the Earthly realm in a manner which Native Americans referred to as walking in a sacred manner and as what Chinese Taoists referred to simply as The Way, and Buddhists name as Dharma.

These insights point us toward realizing the unity of all things and the necessity for mind with its egocentric point of view to overcome its tendency to separate life into objects, into this and that, into my valued subjective point of view and all else as devalued objects.  We see that humanity is confused and conflicted because we live within a false hierarchy of values, obsessed with trying to figure out what is desirable and what is undesirable to “me,” leaving all which is not within this personal hierarchy as irrelevant and of no interest.  We tear up our lives, our social organization, and the natural world chasing after our desires and in fear of that which we see as undesirable from the personalized egoic perspective. 

Failing to see and honor the unity of all existence, to experiencing the Middle Kingdom as the infallible manifestation of the infallible Origin, we bring unnecessary conflict to our lives, to those around us, and to the collective human and Natural World.  Without a sense of groundedness and of our spiritual origin and destiny, Life, and all life around us, loses its inherent value, and unhappiness whips at us, driving us to more and more unhealthy and destructive thoughts, emotions, and actions.  Instead of bringing our special capacities to the service of harmony with all Life, we seek specialness and power for ourselves and our identity groups.  Buddhism calls this “dukkha” – the sense of Life as unsatisfactory which drives us to experiencing and causing unnecessary suffering.

To live mentally, socially, and spiritually healthy lives, the Wisdom traditions of all cultures teach that it is imperative to develop the sense of our vertical axis which on one pole grounds us in the deep rich organic lushness, harmony, and immediacy of Nature and the earth, in the specific here-and-now, and on the other, inspires our daily ordinary lives,  Spiritual connection bringing polarity into union.  This means that to develop as mentally healthy beings we must also develop a sense of ourselves as spiritual beings, not to be confused with being religious, that is, affiliated with some set of religious doctrines.  Religion as such, as Aurobindo noted, is then only the mental realm reaching for the spiritual while staying fully embedded within the divisiveness of the ego-mind.  Any religion which serves as a personal and limited group identity and does not point us beyond the divisiveness of dogmatic sectarianism is therefore seen as a false religion. 

A true religion, as the word implies, is a living set of teachings which point us to the Ineffable Unity beyond all limiting identifications, to the Universe-of-All, religiously applied and practiced.  This is what the word “Yoga” implies, not limited to some set of physical exercises to relax and limber us, as is so often the case in the West, but “to yoke” or “unite” the body, mind, and spirit in the realization of our own integrated unity within a Universe of integrated unity comprised of infinite diversity.  Meditation and yoga are meant as expressions and experiences of this unity, pulling us out of our neurotic mental time-traveling instantly into this moment where our lives actually unfold.  This sense of presence and integrated connectedness is then not to be left on the yoga mat or meditation cushion, but as the necessary focusing and revelatory perspective carried with us everywhere as we walk and live our ordinary lives, the skill which brings true sanity. 

As integration was its vision, Aurobindo named his philosophy and practices Integral Yoga, its purpose to evolve us beyond being lost in the mental realm, alienated from Nature and with only the vaguest yearnings for the Spiritual, often confusing this yearning with religions which are still merely expressions of the mental realm, personalized, dogmatic, and divisive.  He pointed us toward the realization of our unifying spiritual existence capable of integrating our three dimensions of matter, mind, and spirit into one unified felt sacred experience with every form of Nature and living being within our everyday world likewise experienced as an expression of the Sacred and Eternal Source. Grounded in material Nature while connected and inspired by the spiritual, we can then live in felt awareness of the vertical axis of our Being, this moment, here-and-now, our body, mind, and spirit balanced and true.  Then, as both Aurobindo and de Chardin saw, each individual who has so evolved will naturally serve as a guide and torchbearer for our species in its evolution into its truer and healthier expression, more integrated, in less conflict with Creation. This is the Way that true religion not based in dogma and separateness points, to a life and destiny which is affirming, sane and spiritual, connecting and integrating us, to a faith that can guide us through the world of apparent separateness always in awareness of the underlying unity of all that is, ourselves included.

The Beauty of Contentment

Shunryu Suzuki – If you truly see things as they are, then you will see things as they should be… but when we attain the transcendental mind, we go beyond things as they are and as they should be.  In the emptiness of our original mind they are one, and there we find perfect composure.

Contentment is not a very highly valued state in American culture.  We chase after happiness.  There is an implication in our materialistic, go-get-‘em society that to be contented equates to apathy, when nothing could be further from the truth.  Happiness is a pursuit of the ego, of getting what I want from life, what gives me pleasure.  Contentment, on the other hand, is a state-of-being that arises from the soul, from the very core of our Being, and it really is the highest kind of yearning – a yearning to transcend all ego-yearning, leading to complete peace of mind. 

Complete peace of mind only arises from deeply experiencing the everythingness of Life and how it all fits together without contradiction.  Contradiction is a tension of the mind, seeing things as in opposition to each other and being unable to reconcile them, seeing Life as a field of competing objects.  Wisdom and deep seeing into things-as-they-really-are resolves all contradiction into paradox, where there is no tension.  Seeing things-as-they-really-are allows us to realize that beneath surface difference and dysfunction there is only the unity of Life happening through this particular expression upon which we are focused.  Life is Life, a trickster that shows up in many forms, yet always the One Life.  When we look deeply enough, seeing the connections in things-as-they-are, we can see what needs adjusting at the conflicted level of appearance to bring about harmony, the underlying balance reasserting itself.  Then we can step away and the result is contentment.  Seeing into things-as-they-really-are is the essence of what Buddhism means by being “awakened.”

When Zen Master Suzuki speaks of “the emptiness of our original mind” he is speaking of the pure mind of intelligent awareness that precedes any thoughts we may have about the way things are that may actually limit us in our understanding.  Once we have a thought in our mind about something it becomes for us that thought, while its reality is most likely far more complex than can be contained in the thought.  Suzuki is speaking of the silent perception that looks at what is occurring in a manner he also describes as “beginner’s mind,” the mind that sees as if for the first time, able to, with total openness, ask the primary question, “what is this?”, seeking understanding that takes us in dimension after dimension into the implications of “this.” 

You see, in Zen the simple word “this” is not simple at all.  It implies realizing we are in the presence of a phenomenon of the Universe that elementally arose with the beginning of the Universe and is interrelated and interconnected with all else in the Universe.  When we focus upon any one thing, we are encountering just one manifestation of a completely interconnected Universe that is intelligent and evolving in its complexity, yet always still a unity. 

“This” is best comprehended when we perceive whatever we focus upon with the silent intuitive intelligence that precedes thought, for intuition is the mind of connection, and the connections are endless. A thought, however, makes “this” into a thing in our minds that stops its connections. It now has a definition and limitation.  Very importantly, when understanding how we mentally process our experience, Buddhism sees thoughts as objects in the mind, limited representations of the limitless reality that is the Universe, the One Life.  As mystical spiritual traditions all agree, the “sin” that is the missing of the mark of the true mystical Reality of Life begins with this egoic misperception.  Objects are created in the mind that can then be manipulated for the purposes of the ego, and all needless harm emanates from this misperception.

So, “seeing things as they truly are” opens us to “see things as they should be,” how phenomena interrelate within the great cosmic unfolding.  We see what nurtures and what destroys, what causes flourishing and what causes decay and death, and we see the necessity for it all in a great balance.  We see, as is said in the Bible, “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to throw away; a time to tear, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace.” –Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

Zen’s Original Mind is and is not personal for it is the mind of the Universe peering through our human form.  From a Buddhist perspective, we are not only our individual selves, but apertures for the primal consciousness of the Universe to experience its manifestation into the world.  So when we are seeing with “empty” mind, we are what Zen calls, “nobody.”  When a Zen Master such as Suzuki sits in meditation, he is a human peering back into the Universe.  He is one who no longer is the solitary, single one. He becomes all.  He is the consciousness that is “empty” of his personal self, able to examine his personal self, others, and the particulars of the world with impersonal wisdom and compassion.  AND, he remains one, a single human being, feeling each and every one of the passions and attitudes that comes with being human.  So, as Suzuki was known to say, “If you think your body and mind are two, that is wrong; if you think that they are one, that is also wrong. Our body and mind are both two and one.”  We are the paradox of consciousness becoming a human form in which all of Reality is contained, the Yin and the Yang, the beautiful and the catastrophic.  Seeming conflict and contradiction are resolved harmoniously, and the resulting felt-sense of understanding and peace is contentment.

Contentment is the fulfillment of the yearning for peace and for composure with all that Life has to offer, including the very challenging, and we can do this when we are “awakened” because we see that our limited ideas are just that – they are limited.  We can feel our existence tied with all that is coming into being and going out of being.  We can see that all existence consists of forms passing within a formless and eternal unity, a perfect dynamic of balance that requires death for there to be life, difficulty to give meaning to ease, and challenges to hone our capacities as a human being.  It is what allows us to face the most difficult of circumstances with faith that we can weather any storm, and so, we have no fear of the storm. Zen teaches us in a famous saying, that “Obstacles do not block the path; obstacles ARE the path,” and the path is the EVERYTHING that is Life.  We are here to be masters of Life-as-it-is, using the word “master,” not as one who dominates, but one who, as a master sailor works WITH the wind and the sea and a master carpenter works WITH the grain and the knots of wood, we work WITH the everythingness of Life, seeing within EACH and ALL of the particulars their value in the great dance of balance.

The irony is that while chasing after happiness will not lead to contentment, achieving contentment opens us to experiencing happiness not only in the ego-satisfying ways that we usually associate happiness, but in the small and subtle aspects of life as well – in the wind rustling the leaves, in the song of a bird, in a smile and in a small act of kindness, in being mindful in Life’s small and great occurrences and activities, seeing and expressing miracle everywhere. Through contentment we can live in ready availability to gratitude for the great and the ordinary aspects of life, and this leads to joy, the emotion that far outshines happiness.  To live in contentment with the Everything even allows us to experience happiness and peace through life’s difficult times, for contentment contains every expression of Life without contradiction.  We can be happy even while we are simultaneously sad, for contentment is a state of deep presence which never denies the reasons for sadness, while also maintaining full presence for all the reasons for happiness.  Consciousness guru, Ram Dass, called this living in the “thickness” of life, where the reasons for happiness and sadness are recognized as simultaneous in Life’s great unfolding.  He goes on to say that when we can hold the happy and the sad without contradiction, there is the feeling of “it is enough, and when enough is enough, this is enlightenment.”  This is the beauty of contentment.

Living in Spirit

What you perceive as a dense physical structure called the body, which is subject to disease, old age, and death, is not ultimately real – is not you.  It is a misperception of your essential reality that is beyond birth and death, and is due to the limitations of your mind… The body that you can see and touch is only a thin illusory veil.  Underneath it lies the invisible inner body, the doorway into Being, into Life unmanifested.  Through the inner body, you are inseparably connected to this manifested One Life – birthless, deathless, eternally present.  Through the inner body, you are forever with God… The key (to awakening) is to be in a state of permanent connectedness with the inner body – to feel it at all times.  – Eckhart Tolle (The Power of Now)

Who, what are we?  The great question Zen continually asks is: “Who are you?”  According to Tolle, we are Life unmanifested continually manifesting.  Let’s pause right here for a moment.  This is quite a statement even before we get into Tolle’s elaboration.  Tolle uses the capitalization of the word “Life” to point to That which is much deeper than what we usually describe as “life,” the comings and goings, circumstances, and activities of the usual and everyday. Similarly, I capitalize “That” to point beyond the common and everyday into the Eternal, capitalizing “Eternal,” and so on, until Tolle uses the word “God.”  This is what spirituality really is, isn’t it, the questions that dance around us concerning “who, what am I?” “What is this life?” and “What is God?”  We want to know and to feel some sense of connection of our mortal self with the Immortal, with Creation. 

In Eastern religions, and in all mystical traditions, self, life, and God are all One, and so there is no confusion.  However, our Western religions, as usually practiced, lost the sense of this infinite connection long, long ago – the sense of the Divine living through and all around us.  This is not to say this sense of God living through us and through all the world was not there in the beginnings and in the mystical practice of Western religions.  This is what Jesus meant when he declared the Father and the Son are One.  His teachings were meant to awaken the sense of the Holy Spirit living through us and everything. The plain truth, however, is that Christianity became much too politicized a social institution almost from the beginning to retain its mystical origin in any truly felt sense for the common persons who identified as Christian.  It might be an important insight for Christians who refer to Jesus as “Savior” and as “the Light coming into the world,” to see “Savior” as meaning much the same as Siddhartha Gautama being named “Buddha” – which means “the awakened one.” Jesus, too, intended to awaken people, and in their awakening be saved from their suffering.  Both were mystics and teachers whose message was to bring the light of spiritual connection back into the ossified religions of their time. 

Similarly, both Judaism and Islam have clear pronunciations in their origins and through their mystics that, just as Asia’s Taoism states that “the Tao that can be named is not the Tao,” Moses inquiring “who are you?” of the burning bush, was answered, “That which cannot be named.”  And who/what was it that answered Moses?  All mystical traditions will say it was God, the Spirit, that moves through us and through all.  It was That which whispers to us from within at a level deeper than the rational mind that requires names and our usual sense of “me-in-the-world.”  To be truly spiritual, to live in Spirit, is to know the “One Life – birthless, deathless, eternally present.”  What moved through that bush, through Moses, through Jesus, and moves through you and me, through every speck and particle of this world is the dimension of what Tolle is calling “Being,” “Life unmanifested.” It is Spirit.  It is God.  It is Mystery.

It is the unfortunate fact about religions that as they become social institutions they lose the sense of the Divine happening through us and through all Creation, and the religions of the West became institutions of their societies nearly from their beginnings, and as such, instruments of political and social power.  God had to be made human-like, but all-powerful, the Creator, the judge, the rewarder, and punisher.  The language of religion was made to reflect the feudal order with aristocracy and priesthood as intermediaries above the common person, petitioning saints and angels and God above them, conflating both divine and temporal authority as “Lord.”  Religion became belief in and obedience to dogma and faith imposed by clergy.  That’s not how it was intended.  The politically incorrect Gospel of Thomas has Jesus pronouncing that the Kingdom of Heaven is spread across the land for those with the eyes to see, implying that The Holy Spirit is not confined to any temple or church, its authority invested in kings and clergy, but is what moves through us and through all that is.  It is free, everywhere, here and now. 

Christians talk about Soul and Spirit – yet always the question remains whether it is it FELT and KNOWN.  It is certainly not when it is as some hysteria, talking in tongues, shouting Halleluiah! and certainly not in singing solemn hymns or bowing heads in prayer while petitioning an anthropomorphic God. All this is carryover of the European medieval culture that shaped Christianity as it is known and practiced today in the churches that are centerpieces of community life, of the social education of our culture.  It is echoes of when the church ruled over people’s lives like a despot, this theological authoritarianism even continuing today in fundamentalist religious sects.  It is important to remember it was those Pharisees of old Israel, powerful and wealthy religious authoritarians who stood in judgment, hand-in-hand with repressive political leaders, commanding what people were to believe and do that triggered Jesus’s anger.  His purpose was to bring a religion of Spirit while teaching that, just as he experienced himself, all were children, that is, extensions and manifestations of God, with the authority of Truth permeating our very Being.

None of this is to disparage those many churches, temples, and mosques, or their parishioners, who make a community and practice of worship based in ethical living and quiet gathering to allow some deeper inner stirring of connection with The Divine to awaken in them.  They play an important part in civil society and bring some measure of comfort and solace.  It’s just that the mystics from within these traditions would all advise that if we seek a true and deep spiritual connection that carries with us everywhere, that quiets and clears the drama and noise from our everyday life as well as from our mind, we must seek this place within…. and then extend it without… until within and without become one.  We must find and live this peace everywhere – even in the most challenging of circumstances, for it is only this felt sense, this living sense of ethics and spiritual connection, that will carry us through even the most challenging of circumstances.

Tolle is challenging – can you feel this?  Can you have faith that is based in your own knowing and experience of the Spirit within and everywhere around?  This is a kind of faith that few people in our contemporary world have. Tolle tells us that our problem is in “a misperception of your essential reality that is beyond birth and death, and is due to the limitations of your mind.”  Tolle is pointing to the Infinite which can be experienced and accessed THROUGH the finite you, which includes your mind, meaning the ego-mind, the sense of “me,” a personality with opinions and beliefs, quirks of thought and emotion and behavior. This is the dimension of mind that THINKS about the Eternal, may yearn for it, but cannot feel it.  The spiritual paradox is: the mind which cannot understand the Eternal still is of it.

The feeling state of spirituality happens from a deeper dimension than ego-mind.  It happens from what Tolle refers to as the dimension of Being (what is perfectly helpful to refer to as Soul, in a sense, the mind of Spirit) which transcends our separateness and mortality.  And this spirit-mind does not happen out of the brain in our head; rather, it pervades our entire being, our body, mind, and all that is.  Our bodies and our minds, for one who is “awake,” are experienced as faculties of Spirit to connect with and know itself incarnated as all the world.  Many a mystic has answered the question of “who are we?” by saying we are God, Spirit, or the Universe happening through a human being.  We and the world were not created by God, rather we and the world ARE Creation, God, happening everywhere.  This can be felt, and so, known, “if you have the eyes to see,” and the ears to hear, and the intuitive sense to feel the energy of Being, of Spirit, everywhere, connecting everything, giving this world the dynamism of mortal life arising out of the immortal.

So, Tolle tells us: The body that you can see and touch is only a thin illusory veil.  Underneath it lies the invisible inner body, the doorway into Being, into Life unmanifested.  Through the inner body, you are inseparably connected to this manifested One Life – birthless, deathless, eternally present.  Through the inner body, you are forever with God.”  Tolle is telling us to look within for the light of Spirit that opens our lives into peace, compassion, and wisdom.  And Tolle is telling us that we can feel and experience this truth, through our inner energy body which is “life unmanifested” becoming a manifested life.  In the East, this Spirit energy is well known, referred to in various languages as what the Chinese call “chi.”  It is what inspired George Lucas to build his Star Wars galaxy around the idea of the underlying energy of all things called “The Force,” described by Obi Wan Kenobi as “an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together.”  In the Star Wars galaxy, the dark and light sides of The Force battle each other, yet there is a spiritual implication that this battle will find resolution and harmony in union.  So too, for our galaxy. This is a good way to describe every human’s relationship with spirituality.  We seek to bring the light of Spirit into the darkness of our material existence, and this is what Tolle is pointing us toward, as do all true spiritual traditions.  We search for a pure human experience that has us in harmony with ourselves, with others, and with all the world, and Tolle tells us it can be achieved by “being in a state of permanent connectedness with the inner body – to feel it at all times” –  not just within ourselves, for it flows through not only us, but through all things.  It is an underlying dynamic field of intelligence that beats our hearts and brings forth the great diversity of life and creates the perfect balance and flow that is nature and all the Universe.  In the Vedic tradition of ancient India, this knowing is referred to as “Tat Tvam Asi” –  “Thou art That.”  True spiritual practice is the awakening of the knowing, feeling and living, that we and everyone and everything are always also Spirit.  God is happening through us – look within and all around and know this.

Looking and Seeing

“The true purpose of Zen is to see things as they are.” – “Wherever you are, you are one with the clouds and one with the sun and the stars you see. You are one with everything.”– Shunryū Suzuki (20th century Zen master)

In all mystical spiritual traditions there is a great emphasis made about the difference between “looking” and “seeing.”  Here we are in our lives, and we use our sense of sight constantly, but a valid question to ask is: are we merely looking or are we seeing?  Right now, you are reading this article using your visual sense.  You are looking at these words and they are registering some meaning in your mind that may be inspiring to you or may be interesting or may be boring or may be nonsensical from your point of view.  It is certainly my hope that you will be able to see what I am attempting to communicate, that is, to understand at a level deeper than merely comprehending the literal meaning of the words.  It is my hope that you will do more than look at this writing.  It is always my hope that readers will see deeper than my use of words, articulate or clumsy as they may be, to see what the words are, to use a phrase common in Zen, pointing toward, to realize very important truths concerning the human condition and potential which the words are pointing toward.  To look only at the words and let your mind react in its usual way to the words does not necessarily get you to what I am attempting to point to as I write.  I’m inviting you to look deeply to see what I am pointing toward with these words, to see the space of meaning around and behind the words.

In the same way, you can look up from reading these words and look about you, viewing the area in which you are as you read this.  The question from a Zen perspective is, are you SEEING what you are looking at?  There is, most likely, a lamp.  There may be one or more plants.  There are probably pictures.  There, through the window, may well be trees, and the sky, along with whatever else appears in the space you are viewing this moment.  Is it all so familiar as to make no particular impression upon you?  It may be that because you are being directed to look, you may look with a bit more care, and there may be some sense of identification with and appreciation for what you are viewing.  If so, you are beginning to see.  A Zen master might well then say: “Look deeper.”  Really SEE the lamp, the pictures, the plants.  Looking through the window, really SEE the trees, the sky, and whatever else may be there.  This instruction urges you to stop looking with your usual mind to see with your heart.  See with your soul.

Vietnamese Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh would famously hold up a book and ask: “What is this?”  To answer, “A book” would draw the instruction to look deeper.  Eventually, he would say, “Do you not see a tree?” and there would be recognition, “Oh yes.”  Then he would say something along the lines of: “Do you not see the earth, and the sun, and the rain that made the tree possible? Do you not see those who labored to fell the tree and mill the tree and rend it into pulp and process the pulp into paper? Do you not see the author who through this book is sharing their insights and views?  Do you not see the editor, the publisher, the printer, and the bookseller?  Do you not see the many who have read this book? Do you not see all the many, many processes and interrelationships that go into this book?”  He was pointing to the fact that the entire universe in its infinite interrelationships go into a book – and into every other phenomenon, when we go deeper than looking, to see.  Continuing, it could be asked if you can see this book someday falling apart, its binding broken and its pages yellowing, sent off to be recycled or to the trash heap where it will decompose into earth which may be the bed of soil for a seed to fall into, and with sun and rain become a tree again?

Few people really see the world.  Rather, mostly people look at the world in a utilitarian fashion that tells us where we are, what’s going on, and what not to bump into while setting up the mind to like or dislike or be indifferent to what is registering in vision.  We are looking and listening and feeling as is needed to negotiate our way through the schedule of our day in the manner we are accustomed to.  We are generally reinforcing ideas we already have about what we encounter.  Whether we really understand what is registering with our senses, whether we appreciate the uniqueness and purpose of what is registering, whether we relate deeply, seeing the many dimensions and relationships necessary for anything to exist, the fleeting impermanence of all things, and the infinite universe that brings forth all things – all this requires more than looking.  To experience the miracles around us all the time requires seeing.

Seeing is engaging the senses to connect with life all around and within us.  When seeing, we are not only receptively looking, we are also engaging the pathway of sight to project our sense of self through consciousness to connect with whatever is the focus of our sight – to be the clouds or the stars.  The same is true with sound and scent and taste and body sensations as well as our intuitive and proprioceptive senses.  To see is to enter into both the material and the mystical existence of all things.  It is the ability to see a thing in its many levels of organization, from the microscopic sub-atomic up into the many relationships which exist around and in support of this thing, continuing up to the macroscopic view of all things, including ourselves, as expressions of the Universe.  To see is to recognize the mystery of life, the energy of life which moves through all things, connecting all things.  To see is to recognize the sacred in all things.  For the mystic, from any religious tradition or no religious tradition at all, there is a sense of God or the Universe happening THROUGH all things, including ourselves and everyone and everything we encounter.  In Sanskrit, this is expressed as Tat Tvam Asi – Thou art That – the experience of identification with everything – when we truly see.

It could be said that Buddhism is a training program in seeing.  As the word “awakening” is associated with Buddhism, to experience Buddhism is to realize it is about waking up to see that which we have been too shallow to see so that we might feel truly alive as we stumble along engrossed in our own small dramas and judgments about life, just looking, just glancing at life.  Buddhism calls this not feeling fully alive dukkha, a word which translates roughly as suffering or dissatisfaction.  And it is true, as Buddhism teaches, that we suffer because we are ignorant, and we are ignorant because we do not see, and when we do not see we do not truly understand the World or ourselves or our place within and as an expression of the World.  Then our life has a kind of an emptiness we experience as anxiety, as depression, anger, and boredom.  We try to fill this hole with more drama and possessions, but it does not satisfy.

The Jewish mystic Abraham Heschel taught that to “sin” was to “miss the mark” of being truly alive, using the original meaning of the word “sin,” and that the root of this sinning was our being in “denial of the sublime wonder of life.”  He was saying that when we only look at life, seeing only what we expect, only what we are used to, we are missing the sublime wonder, the sacred miracle, that is life.  To use another of his favorite phrasings, life must be seen with the eyes of “radical amazement” lest we live from a shallowness that leads to the callousness and self-centeredness out of which all our “sins,” our transgressions, arise.  Heschel is telling us to wake up and SEE.

So much of the pain and the suffering of the world is caused by people not seeing.  We are looking all the time – looking for happiness, looking out for trouble, looking for what we like and dislike.  In all this looking we are failing to see that our happiness is dependent on honoring life-as-it-is in its totality, in seeing that my happiness is linked to your happiness, my security to your security, encompassing everyone and everything.  We are ruining our planet chasing after our specialness and comfort, indulging our greed and violence, not seeing that we exist within a miracle built on the harmony of all life that even includes insects, rainstorms, cold in the winter, the smart and the simple, the safe and the dangerous, the gaudily beautiful and the simply plain, those who are like us and those who are different.  Can we see how precious this life is and how precious every element is within it?  It is as Heschel taught, the root of sin, of our defiling ourselves, each other, and nature, arises from our failure to see the sublime wonder that is everywhere.  Jesus said the kingdom of Heaven is spread across the land for those with the eyes to SEE.  Yes, we ARE one with the clouds and the sun and the stars, and with each other, and all life, and the seeing of this is what Heaven means. 13th century Zen Master Dogen, the founder of Soto Zen, wrote: “Before I had studied Zen for thirty years, I saw mountains as mountains, and waters as waters. When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came to the point where I saw that mountains are not mountains, and waters are not waters. But now that I have got its very substance I am at rest. For it’s just that I see mountains once again as mountains, and waters once again as waters.”  Do you understand what he is saying?  Before opening ourselves to the art of seeing, we see what we are accustomed to seeing, what everyone sees. It is all quite ordinary.  Then, when entering into the mystic arts, one can get lost in the dimensions beyond the usual, seeing what everyone else does not see and come to feel above the ordinary world.  When fully matured, however, when “awakened,” we see both the spiritual and the ordinary and know them to be the same.  And mountains are mountains, and waters are waters, and animals are animals, and trees are trees, and people are people, and the Earth is the Earth, AND they are also sublimely wonderful mysteries never to be used or abused, never taken for granted, ignored, or looked over.  Do you see?  I ask you not to just agree or disagree intellectually with what I am saying.  Please stop your ordinary way of looking to go deeper and deeper and deeper – until you see.

Meditation on Living in Tao

Do not move from the posture you are in.  Scan your body with awareness to see if your energies are in balance.  Feel the imbalances. 

Close your eyes – experience the mental posture you are in.  Feel your body and mind out of balance – caught in some egoic posture, contracted into the mental image you habitually carry of yourself.  Take note – This is who you act like but is not your True Self.

Experience your body/mind circle of consciousness like a Yin-Yang circle – but it is probably not centered and balanced.  The Yin-Yang is not static – it is like a kaleidoscope of the Yin-Yang in motion – what does yours look like?  Is it centered, silent, balanced or chaotic and imbalanced?

Hold your dynamic Yin-Yang circle kaleidoscope image in awareness while you bring your body into line – Sit like Buddha, like Lao Tzu, aligning between Heaven and Earth.  Note any changes in your Yin-Yang Circle as the meditation proceeds.

Bring awareness to your breathing – note whether it is easy and deep, natural – and bring your breathing into a natural rhythm, easy and deep without exaggeration, just naturally full.

With each exhalation, allow a release of physical tensions, deeper and deeper into relaxed, yet alert presence as you feel the sensations of your body sitting and breathing.  With each inhalation, greater calm clarity of awareness is accessed.

Bring awareness to your dynamic Yin-Yang circle as you sit and breath in relaxed, alert, balance.

Realize yourself at the center of the Yin-Yang circle, sitting like Lao Tzu, breathing mystically, realizing the Universe coming into the realm of form through you.

With your breathing and your intention, bring the dynamic Yin-Yang circle into the perfect harmony and balance that is the classic Yin-Yang image, only dynamic – spinning slowly, morphing changes in the configuration of the Yin and the Yang – visualize images of your life within it – superimposed upon the symbol of Yin and Yang – experience where there is imbalance and swirl it all into balance.

Remember the little bit of Yin within Yang and Yang within Yin.  Feel the harmonizing of opposites within yourself.  Feminine and masculine, light and dark, spiritual and material, wisdom and knowledge, compassionate empathy and realistic acceptance, social inclination and the hermit. Sit at the center, the Universe streaming through you, out of the Yin-Yang circle, see a new image of yourself spinning into existence, one of balance, grace, wisdom, and effectiveness.  Stillness giving rise to action, anchored in the energy of Earth, inspired by the energy of Heaven, a natural human being living in Tao.  Sit for a while with this image becoming clearer and stronger.

Here We Are

“Here we are.”  All of Zen, Taoism and any true mystical spiritual tradition comes down to what consciousness teacher Eckhart Tolle chose as the title his first book: “The Power of Now.”  Here we are – in the here-and-now, in what can be seen, heard, touched, felt, and in such directness, understood.  We cannot be any where or when else.  Can you really get this, feel this, know this? This truth really experienced begins to free us from psychological pain and from spiritual confusion.  It begins to open the power of our originally clear and sane mind.

Yet typically, we do not live this way, for where we are is mostly in our confused and anxious minds, in a kind of virtual reality.  We are living in our schedules, speculations, fantasies, discomforts, regrets, victories, fears, and desires.  Our here-and-now is distracted by constant wanderings into there-and-then and what-if.  In all creation, only humans have the capacity to live as if not in the absolute immediacy of the real here-and-now, and what seems to be true is that with the advance of human civilization, the ability to live fully in the absolute here-and-now continually decreases. 

Pre-civilized humans lived almost entirely in the absolute here-and-now, in their physical senses and silent intuitive capacity.  They were in touch with nature and felt a mystical unfolding and interconnection with all life, and very interestingly there is no evidence of neurotic mental illness among such humans as they can be encountered in the few remaining remote uncivilized corners of the Earth – in Africa, South America, Southeast Asia, and Pacific Oceana.  On the other hand, it can be fairly emphatically stated that modern humans have a very tenuous connection with the present moment, living instead mostly in their minds, in stories of their past and desires and fears for the future, the present moment only a transit point between.  And mental illness is rampant.   

When indigenous North American people encountered Europeans of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries – high-functioning, “normal” people – it was quite obvious to the natives that these people were crazy.  It was quite obvious that these conquering, questing people lived in their heads and not where their feet touched the ground, in the true natural reality of here-and-now, and that they were exceedingly dangerous. It was quite obvious that while stupefyingly powerful with inventions and weapons and writing and governments and intention to conquer rather than live with nature, that these humans were crazy.  They tore down a world that had existed in harmony for thousands of years to place upon the land a civilization that in a short few hundred years has brought the land and its own culture to the edge of collapse.  By the 20th century, these crazy murderous European/American people had completely destroyed the sane and balanced world of the native people and imposed a violent, unbalanced representation of their own unbalanced minds.  Do I go too far in calling our world violent and unbalanced?  I do not think so.

Today, many, many people, while being productive and loving and generally appreciative of life, are prone to anxiety, tension, anger, and depression, and engage in the subtle and blatant violence of competition and acquisition with each other and anyone and anything that crosses their path.  Most are in some form of constant state of argument with each other and even with themselves.  They seem obsessed with acquiring while showing very little appreciation for what they have.  Such people seem to be caught in the dimension of mind that thinks obsessively and shows a very unhealthy tendency to emotional excess with very little familiarity with the dimension of mind that is silent, peaceful, and wise.  Our culture teaches us to make most everything about ourselves, and it is not unfair to say that most folks seem quite unhappy even when professing to being happy.  Our unbalanced violence expresses itself every day in subtle ways, seeking to win, creating or being losers, while the news is filled with the out-of-control violence that debases our society.

Yet, it is very important to realize that despite all of us modern humans being so crazy, some more than others, there IS a completely sane person inside each of us.  Buddhism, among other mystical traditions, tells us there remains this basic human being within us who is much more like an indigenous person, and teaches us to be in harmony with the nature of the world and our own nature, knowing the two to be one.  We are still natives.  We are native to this planet and this universe.  We belong within a great unfolding of cosmic existence.  This planet within this universe is our home.  This is a simple truth, yet we show very little recognition of this knowing, a knowing that was the stabilizing touchstone of the lives of indigenous people and of mystics throughout the ages. 

We have lost our way.  We normal civilized people live predominantly inside the dimension of our minds known as ego that is, in effect, an artificial intelligence made up of thoughts, of social and psychological programming, that very much puts us at odds with our own and universal nature.  We have lost connection and identification with the dimension of mind that precedes the programming of our civilized conditioning, and it drives us crazy.  This original mind, as Buddhism calls it, knows itself as nature, the universe happening through a human-being just as the universe happens through all plants and animals and even mountains and rivers, rocks, and sky, and oceans. 

Buddhism teaches that when we can see and experience in ourselves this unconditioned purity of consciousness – its peacefulness, its clarity, wisdom, and sanity – and how it is blocked by the shell of our ego, we can make peace with ourselves and shift our sense of self from within this crazy ego into the clarity of awareness that is our original state of consciousness.  We can then begin to soften the hard shell of ego and bring ego into its proper role and dimension in the wholeness of our mind.  We can let go of our conditioning and of our ego as our identity, allowing awareness to shine forth increasingly as who we are.  Then and only then can we truly bring this same understanding and acceptance to others, allowing that they too are prisoners of conditioning.  

This is what Buddhism means by compassion.  Empathy can arise.  Tolerance can arise.  Gentleness can arise.  And so too, will appropriate boundaries arise – for you don’t let one who is acting crazy just run wild – boundaries are gently set and firmly held while the original person beneath the crazy is called forth with our love and acceptance.  While compassion is a profoundly emotional experience that leads to tenderness, empathy, and love, even to joy, it begins as a profoundly rational understanding that we are all the victims and prisoners of our social and psychological conditioning.  Here and now is where and when we are.  See this, feel this, know this, be this.  Here we are – both our crazy and our completely sane selves wrapped together.  We have been trained by an unbalanced culture to be crazy and dissatisfied, and we behave accordingly.  But it does not have to be so.  Have compassion for yourself so that you can truly begin to have compassion for others and for all of Creation.

The 9th century founder of the Rinzai school of Zen, Linji, famously queried: “This moment, what is lacking?” – and clearly, in the universe, there is nothing lacking, by the nature of the universe being everything.  It is perfect and complete as it is.  Buddhism calls this Dharma.  Taoism calls it Tao.  Both terms translate into English as “The Way.”  We live within The Way of the universe.  Here we are.  Can you breathe into this, allowing your silent mind to come forth in its knowing that we are an expression of the universe with the same clarity that was the basis of indigenous people’s way of life?  Here we are, complete, whole, and sane, just as is all in this universe.  Can you relax into this truth, letting your craziness become mere whispers in the field of your mind, no longer strong enough to catch and hold you – just passing stories of someone you no longer are.   Buddhism calls us to awaken and reconnect with this sane and natural mind through Dharma study, meditation, and mindfulness to reclaim our natural sanity and sense of kinship and interdependence with each other and all of life. With this realization our egoic mind can pull back from its insecure insistence on running our lives, untangle its crazy thoughts, better manage its emotions, and find its natural role and function as a mental faculty for engaging the world, now doing so skillfully, wisely, and compassionately.  It is in the balancing of our inventive, striving egoic-mind with our now strengthened, long-neglected, clear, natural, wise, and compassionate mind, the mind of awareness that exists completely in the here-and-now, that we can begin to build sane, balanced, and productive personal lives.  Then, together, we can build a new sane, balanced, and productive human society on this planet just as did the indigenous people who preceded us.  Only now, the technological inventiveness that is the hallmark of our civilization can be in the service of the balance of life rather than our unbalanced questing for power and dominance that has been and is, yes, driving us all quite crazy while destroying our world.

Silence, Stillness, Vastness, Peace

“When both body and mind are at peace, all things appear as they are: perfect, complete, lacking nothing.”                – Dogen (13th Century)                                                                                

Driven by the insecurity that comes with living in our contemporary world, we all seek one thing even if we do not know it and our hectic lifestyles do not reflect it: we seek peace.  Even in the most driven and ambitious of people, what they are really after is that moment of peace that comes after some achievement, the release of the chronic tension of living a modern life, because for a moment, what has been chased is achieved and there is felt release.  Ah…..  The smile comes on the face, a moment of the body relaxing, a thought of “Yes.”  Just for a moment – then, back into the fray, the sense of peace gone, as the seeking, for exactly what, we do not know – the next accomplishment, problem overcome, or desire fulfilled, returns.  It is the anxious routine of our lives.  

Everyone wants to feel peace within themselves, but nothing in our social conditioning affirms this – quite the opposite.  We are told to accomplish something with our lives, to be somebody, to take care of business, to do what a “good” or “successful” or “cool” or “devout” or “manly” or “womanly” or whatever person is supposed to do.  It drives us all quite crazy, but unless we’re driven crazy to a degree that causes big problems, we, and those around us, pay very little attention to how crazy we’ve become.  We push on. 

What if real peace were possible?  Not the peace of the grave, or the peace of the hermit who escapes the world, but a peace that pervaded the everyday and normal routine of our lives.  All the mystical spiritual traditions from around the world point to this peace, and they all say it is within everyone, but that it is buried under a mind in motion, a commotion of thoughts and emotions.  The mystical traditions tell us that there is a deeper being within us than our troubled, seeking minds; some call it the soul, the modern consciousness teacher Eckhart Tolle calls it Being, Eastern traditions call it the Self or original Self, Buddhism calls it the Buddha (awakened) self or mind.  This is the dimension of who we originally and fundamentally are, and it is characterized by peace, wisdom, and compassion.  It dwells within us in silence, in stillness, and in a sense of vastness within the totality of existence, all very different from how we live our contemporary lives. 

The Buddhist mystical tradition of Zen makes a great point of telling us that our true purpose is to return to our original or natural mind, the mind we were born with, the mind before we were conditioned by an anxious, materialistic society to be anxious materialistic people.  Recognizing that to be free of this anxiety seems impossible to the person imbedded within the hurry of everyday life, Zen recognizes the need for pointers, road signs that can get us on our way, and it points us towards silence, something most of us have no real notion of or much tolerance for, as the gateway to this Nirvana.  It tells us that to follow this path will be difficult, the pull back to the path of distraction and commotion is so very strong, but that with each step along the path the truth of the possibility of peace becomes increasingly evident. 

Silence is essential. We need silence, just as much as we need air, just as much as plants need light. If our minds are crowded with words and thoughts, there is no space for us.” – Thich Nhat Hanh 

This is the challenge to any person who has felt the dissatisfaction, what Buddhism calls dukkha, suffering, that comes with the soul whispering to us that there must be more than the hurry and the anxiety, anger, and depressions, small and large, that come with living our striving lives.  The challenge is, how do we find our way through the commotion of our mind and our circumstances to silence, to stillness, to vastness, to peace, for it is there we will find “the peace that surpasseth understanding” pointed to in the Bible. 

How do we enter into silence?  Where is silence?  You must come to realize that it is ever-present.  Beneath and between all the noise of the world and our minds is silence, but you must move away from the deafening noise and listen very carefully.  You must listen with your soul.  It is even present visually when you look with your soul, and it is present as a feeling state when you feel into your body and into the world with your soul.  Listening, seeing, feeling with the everyday mind does not get you there.  You must listen, see, and feel with your soul, where the Universe comes into being through us.  You must listen with the silent mind beneath the noisy mind of your little self, your ego-self, the “me” that sits inside this body thinking itself alone in the world, always striving to make the connections and accomplishments that will give fleeting moments of peace and happiness but is at a loss as how to live there with any constancy.  

We must learn how to deliberately access the silence and stillness that are readily available, but since we are focused on the noise both around us and in our heads, we do not recognize this.  Our ego-self lives in the noise and in the difficulties and victories, in the commotion, so silence is a precious gift that we thoughtlessly pollute.  Like air and water, silence, this most precious of resources, needed for the mind and its health every bit as much as air and water are needed by the body, is overlooked precisely because it is hidden beneath all the noise of life.  We do not realize its incalculable value to our mental and spiritual health because our egoistic, materialistic society does not recognize this.  Like the air and water and land that are everywhere and that we take for granted and so thoughtlessly contaminate, so too it is with the silence and stillness beneath and all around the noise and commotion.  We actually avoid noticing the silence; we are afraid of it.  We taint the occurrence of silence with our compulsive thinking.  If the world is not making noise, our mind is. 

We live in a noisy society.  We are noisy people, and it is very important to recognize this is not so with all people.  Mystics are not noisy.  Indigenous people were not noisy.  There is a story I remember hearing long ago of a Native American chief, sometime in the early 1800’s, going to Washington D.C. to negotiate a treaty with the American government.  In this story, upon returning from his time in Washington, he expressed fear that the city had been so noisy that he had been damaged, that he would never be able to “dream” again.  To a Native person, this is a disaster, for the dreaming referred to here is not of the sleep variety, but the ability to enter into the world beneath the obvious material, time-bound, linear structure of our physical senses and our egoic mind into what, in the context of Native Americans, would be called the Spirit World.  It is to walk in the silence, stillness, and vastness of what to them is the real world hidden beneath the world of appearances.  This is what Zen calls Ultimate Reality, the world we enter into through our intuitive sense, the sense of the silent mind.  It is the world of unity out of which the world of things, mental and physical, arises.  It is the place of wisdom and insight, of Knowing, of connection, and it is where our true Self abides, and it is where our truly spiritual and psychologically healthy self resides.  To lose this connection is the greatest of tragedies to an aboriginal person.  To civilized people, the whole concept is mumbo jumbo.  We don’t know how to be without noise. 

Many people get very uneasy around silence.  Our entire society is an environment of hyper-stimulation, visual and auditory.  If the Native chief feared that his soul had been deafened by the noise of an early 19th century American city, imagine what his experience would be today.  Are our souls being deafened by noise, visual and auditory?  I think, tragically, yes.  Many people, identified only with the noise in the world and in their mind, have no sense of a deeper self, nor of a deeper reality to the world than the loud material, commercial, high-intensity, chaotic world around them and the neurotic cacophony of their minds.  Silence is quite foreign.  Their entire sense of self is in this noise and its internal mental equivalent of sensations, thoughts, and emotions.  We are dulled by the noise, requiring the intensity be turned up to hold our attention.  We are an attention-deficit-disordered society and a significant level of this deficit in individuals is considered normal, causing only extreme cases to be considered a psychological disorder.  We scan through life with only the highest level of stimulation catching and holding our interest. We are quite numb to the subtle and the quiet. 

A famous story in Zen has an ardent student walking through a mountain forest with their teacher.  The student is a fountain of questions, asking for clarification on the Buddhist sutras, on the philosophy, teachings, and practices of Zen.  He exclaims, “I am sorry, Teacher, I am trying, but I just cannot figure out how or where to enter into Zen!”  To this the master replies, “Do you hear that mountain stream?”………  This stops the student.  The mountain stream is a far distance from where they are, and with all his earnest walking, thinking, and talking, the student had not heard it.  So, he stops walking and listens, but he still cannot hear it, and tells the teacher so.  The teacher then instructs him, “listen more closely.”  Now, calling forth his Zen mindfulness training, the student becomes quite still, bringing relaxed alert awareness to his breathing and to his body as he reaches with his consciousness into the acoustical space of the moment.  Completely grounded into the moment, all preoccupation with himself and his questions suspended, he begins to hear not only the obvious sounds around him – the wind rustling the leaves and the call of an occasional bird – all heard with deeper clarity and depth, with a sense of resonance and connection, the sounds, paradoxically, both distinct and flowing into each other – he also begins to hear the silence within which these sounds are occurring.  He hears the space between and behind the sounds even as they flowed into a unity, and with this, more distant and fainter sounds begin to reach his consciousness.  And then…..  “Oh yes, now I hear the stream – so faint, so far away – but yes – I hear it now.”  He was listening with his soul.  Listening into silence.  And the teacher instructed him: “Enter into Zen from there.”

Evil in the World

“What is evil? Killing is evil, lying is evil, slandering is evil, abuse is evil, gossip is evil, envy is evil, hatred is evil, to cling to false doctrine is evil; all these things are evil. And what is the root of evil? Desire is the root of evil; illusion is the root of evil.”  – Gautama Buddha

“The healthy person does not torture others, generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.” – Carl Jung

As this is being written, great malevolent evil is unleashed in Ukraine.  The werewolf of madness runs amok. It is not the only incidence of great evil in the world right now, but it is the worst and with the terrible potential to spread into a planetary catastrophe.   This military onslaught with weapons of terrible destruction and individual actions of unspeakable cruelty are wantonly assaulting a people for the purpose of terror, done with intention, and it is its intentionality that separates this true malevolent evil from the ordinary evil of mere thoughtless violence. 

I see violence as a uniquely human phenomenon.  In Nature, there is the dynamic and balance of birth and death, creation and destruction.  It is the energy and circle of life giving way to sustain and create life.  I reserve the use of the idea of violence to humans, for there is a kind of destructive and harmful action generated by humans that does not occur elsewhere in Nature.  Humans become violent for purposes and deficiencies of their specifically human egos, and violence is about the imposition of some ego-agenda that results in injury in some way, including to ourselves.  This may be intended; it may be reflexive.  It may be physical; it may be psychological.  It is when physical or psychological violence is done with intention and callousness that it begins to be evil.   When it is done on a great scale and with truly malevolent intention and terrible, widespread harm, it is morphing into terrible great evil.

Evil is a particularly poisonous expression of the human ego’s insatiable need to compete, possess, dominate, control, use, and consume for its own aggrandizement.  In Ukraine this evil has exploded as the expression of Russian dictator Putin’s psychopathy against a neighboring state that at various times in history has shared nationhood with Russia.  Putin, like a violent shunned spouse, seems to believe that if he cannot own this former partner, he will see her dead, or at the very least, horribly punished and terrorized for the offense of her rejection.  This is evil, whether expressed through an international criminal despot against another nation or a single hateful individual against another.

This magnitude of evil is certainly not new.  One of Putin’s predecessors, Soviet dictator, Joseph Stalin, was responsible for the deaths of at least four million Ukrainians by starvation in response to their urge toward independence in the 1930’s.  Stalin likewise is held guilty of the deaths of upwards of twenty million Soviet citizens during his bloody, paranoid reign.  Adolph Hitler and Pol Pot stand among the mega-murderers of the 20th century in a litany of mass murderers and genocidalists throughout human history scarred with the slaughter of innocents for greed, for power, for religion, and for perverted ideas of glory.  Even we in the United States are not innocent, being guilty of the genocide of one race of people and the enslavement and subsequent prejudicial ill-treatment of another.  Evil on the mass scale haunts human history.  Genghis Khan’s hordes murdered of over 40 million people, roughly 10% of the world’s population at the time.  Rome enslaved and murdered tens of millions during its reign.  Putin is now joining history’s parade of monsters.

Yes, evil is in the world, from these vast scales down dimension through dimension of degree, into small scale, ubiquitous acts of violence – as local and individual as the spouse or child abuser living down the street, as subtle as a parent or teacher shaming a child or teaching bigotry.  Evil is with us and always has been.

And there is another level of evil, which is not conscious or deliberate, and it infects all of human society.  It can be found in the tendency to bigotry and the insatiable greed and callousness of modern commerce that is leading to global warming threatening to upend human civilization while bringing extinction to species after species.  It goes on unnoticed as the industrial farming and slaughter of animals in conditions of terrible cruelty and the poison runoff of our megafarms and industries.  It exists in an economy based in exploitation, of a wealthy class built upon the poverty of others, on deceit at the basis of marketing and politics.  Wherever egos are scheming to gain some advantage over others, some manipulative control, some profit, or some elevation of itself at the expense of others, this is violence, and it is evil.

Some level of violence and evil could be said to be behind a great deal of human expression and action.  It is certainly in shaming and in bigotry of any kind.  It is in stealing and cheating, lying, and manipulating.  It is in physical and psychological violence; it is in sexual assault, abuse, predation, and exploitation. Importantly, we are so acclimated to violence and evil that it is imperative that we look ever more closely at our interactions and commerce to see the everyday violence to which we have become desensitized.  Just where does that meat on our plate come from and what experience did a conscious being suffer for it to get there?  Where does the plastic we throw away go and to what consequence?  What do you think is the effect of a busy parent ignoring their child until the child does something the parent considers wrong and then punishing and belittling the child?  What consequence will there be to politicians inventing cultural wedge issues to gain power while the serious issues concerning how to build a fair and enduring society go ignored or even ridiculed?  There is subtle violence in just the everyday common put-downs, dismissals, judging, prejudices, and ego competition amongst people.  On and on, cruelty, insensitivity, exploitation.  You see? 

Our human society is filled with small and great evils.  History and literature are filled with the drama of evil….. And it is likewise filled with human goodness confronting and overcoming evil.  This interplay of good and evil could be said to be the hallmark of human social evolution.  As I said, a great deal of human expression can be viewed as motivated by violence and evil, but so much more of human motivation and expression is based in goodness, in the intention to do good, and herein is the driving dynamic of human social, intellectual and spiritual evolution and the promise of salvation.  As Jung said, torturers are but passing on their tortured selves.  To recognize this and work to bring about an end to torture, to violence, every place and in every way that we can brings about a lessening of the propensity to violence and evil, to torture, in the world.  Evil in the world is not a reason for despair.  Rather, it is a call for goodness to rise.

Buddhism teaches us that greed, anger, and ignorance are the origin of evil, and so, it teaches that generosity, tolerance, forgiveness, compassion, and the wisdom of karma are needed to counteract and displace evil with goodness.  Karma is the cosmic law telling us that everything happens because of conditions bringing forth what happens.  After WWI, the victorious Allies imposed draconian punishment upon a defeated Germany, further traumatizing a nation that had already been traumatized by the war.  Historians generally agree that the conditions for the rise of fascism, Hitler and WWII were contained in the terms of Germany’s surrender written into the Treaty of Versailles.  After WWII, the only great nation to escape horrible destruction was the United States, which through the wisdom and compassion of the Marshall Plan, rebuilt not only our allies, but Germany and Japan, welcoming them into the community of democracies.  The shift from despotic nationalistic militarism and racial intolerance that marked Germany and Japan before the war into the models for democracy and tolerance that they became is an example of wisdom and goodness transforming ignorance and evil.

The one country that shifted from ally to enemy immediately after WWII was Soviet Russia, and none of the benevolence of the Marshall plan was extended to it – rather, the Marshall Plan, along with the creation of NATO, had as one of its goals the isolation of Russia from the world community.  And so, the world moved into a new polarization of authoritarian communist nations in conflict with democratic capitalist nations.  The end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 was hailed as a great victory for democracy and the West, but virtually no attention was given as to how to bring Russia into the modern democratic world.  This huge nuclear armed country was largely left on its own to create a functioning capitalist democracy, and few countries exceed the experience of Russia and the Russian people as both victims and perpetrators of great evil.  Now, Buddhism warns that karma would indicate that if the conditioning of a people for despotism and cruelty is strong, and there is no history of functioning democracy, wise and compassionate new conditions would need to be fostered for democracy to take hold.  No such attention was given to Russia and in result Russia seems to have reverted to despotism, imperiling today not only its immediate neighbor, Ukraine, but possibly beyond.  Certainly, for the people of Russia, a new era of abusive despotism seems at hand.  The Western nations would do well to recognize the greed, anger, and ignorance of our own social, political, and economic systems which fail to see the world’s dangers and suffering for what and why they are.  Evil is in the world, and it will require deliberate application of intentional wisdom, generosity, and compassion to counter it if we are to successfully navigate through and beyond the threats our modern world presents.  Good and evil are in their ageless interplay, and when Buddhism calls upon us to awaken, it is goodness, compassion and wisdom that is being called upon to step up.  Not only Ukraine’s future is at stake, but so is Russia’s, ours, and all the world.