Once Upon a Time

“The Buddha’s principal message that day was
that holding on to anything blocks wisdom.
Any conclusion that we draw must be let go." 

---Pema Chodron

"We have to be open. And we have to be ready to release our knowledge in order to come to a higher understanding of reality."

-- Thich Nhat Hanh

The irony is exquisite.  

I'm sitting here at the laptop poised to sprinkle some thoughts across the screen in an effort to capture the essence of the thought that thoughts can't really capture the Essence. 

To be honest, after choosing the two quotes for this post, my next thought was, "Ah, I'll just leave it at that, choose a graphic, and hit 'send.'"

 

But, that seemed like a cheap shot, a bit too cutesy.  When I was in residence at Zen Mountain Monestery, Roshi Daido Loori would just roll his eyes at such stuff, claiming it had "the stink of Zen."

I have, after all, been committed to publishing a weekly post here in cyberspace for the past seven and half years.  Although for quite some time now I've been going back through a couple of hundred previously written posts and polishing them up,  this weekly commitment is part of what Uchiyama Roshi called a "life of vow." 

It seems to me that a set of commitments and the actions produced is all that I really have to bring to the plate.  The rest is in the hands of the Cosmic Pitcher.  All I can really do is commit to showing up, stepping up to the plate, and taking my best swing if it appears to be in the strike zone -- or let it go by if it ain't.  (Egads, I'm thinking in baseball metaphors, again.  It must be spring.)

And here's the Pitch.....
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A Love Affair

“When you open yourself to the continually changing, impermanent, dynamic nature of your own being and of reality, you increase your capacity to love and care about other people and your capacity to not be afraid. 
You're able to keep your eyes open, your heart open, and your mind open.

 ― Pema Chödrön, 

Practicing Peace in Times of War

“When we are mindful, deeply in touch with the present moment, our understanding of what is going on deepens, and we begin to be 

filled with acceptance, joy, peace and love.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh  

As I've mentioned before, here and elsewhere, I think the Hippies actually had it right.  It IS all about Peace, Love, and Freedom.

Although most of us were too young and crazy to pull it off at the time, many of us had been to the mountain top to be touched by the One Love.  

During that era's Collective Kensho,

we saw the Real Deal. 

But seeing that-- and even believing that -- isn't enough.

The task of freeing ourselves to BE a peaceful and loving human being became the Mission -- and we quickly learned that this is no mean feat.  It takes deep commitment, effort, discipline, courage, persistence --  and patience.  Lots and lots of patience.

It takes Practice.

In the Buddhist, Hindu, and Taoist worlds the term "Love" isn't generally used to refer to the Ultimate State of Being. They approach the Ineffable with different concepts and understandings. I think that is actually helpful to us Westerners.  We are pretty sloppy with the word "love". 

In English, what we call "love" has a wide range of meaning.  Love can be the warm glow that emerges from the ethereal domain of unconditional, unselfish agape -- or it can be the fiery emotion that erupts from the nether realms of green eyed monsters and wrathful, jealous gods.  It's pretty clear that "I love you so much that I'll kill anyone who looks at you, and then you,"  isn't what Jesus and Buddha had in mind when they taught about Love, right?  

 

So, what is Love?

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When You Wish Upon a Star

"The real meditation practice is how we live our lives from moment to moment." 

-- Jon Kabat-Zinn

"What you are looking for is already in you…

You already are everything you are seeking."

-- Thich Nhat Hanh 

Sometimes, it seems like a previous lifetime.  

 
Almost twenty years ago, I sat on the front porch of an A-frame perched on a ridge at Zen Mountain Monastery gazing at a star-filled Catskill Mountain sky.  At that point, I knew it wasn't working out.  I was going to leave. 

I had absolutely no idea what my next move would be.

For decades, I had thought, "once the kids are grown, I can finally DO IT!" At long last,  I would leave the chaos of contemporary life and head for the hills.  There I'd find the Teacher and a sangha -- and really get spiritual. 

Now, after only six months of residency, I knew I was done.

So much for that idea.  Now what? 

Clueless...

Although I had, again, experienced a number of deep "openings" in the cauldron of Roshi John Daido Loori's version of Zen Training, I discovered that the rigid, hard-driving, and unabashedly hierarchical nature of the Roshi's "Eight Gates of Zen Training" didn't ring true for me.  A longtime peace activist, I deeply valued egalitarianism and the shared power experienced in consensus democracy.  I knew that a monastic life wasn't going to be that.  Yet, I thought that I was ready to "get with the program."

I wasn't. 

Though I respected many of the folks involved, and saw that the monastic life appeared to work for some, I now knew it wasn't for me.  I wasn't going to get off that easy.  I was going to have to get out there on the streets and work it out for myself -- again.

As I sat there, absolutely clueless, an image of the book Jonathan Livingston Seagull came to mind. Then, like that intrepid avian seeker of perfection, I thought, "Just hang onto the wind and trust!"  That very instant, a shooting star flashed across the night sky directly in front of my eyes.  As it disappeared into the tapestry of countless stars and fathomless blackness reaching overhead, I knew.

I wish it was always that easy.  
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Imagine That!

"So, with a boundless heart should one cherish all living beings;
Radiating kindness over the entire world, spreading upward to the skies
and downward to depths, outwards and unbounded."
--- from Karaniya Metta Sutta of the Pali Canon*

 

"Imagine all the people living life in peace."

--- John Lennon, Imagine 

Margo Adair 1950-2010

Good fortune had me stumble across a copy of Margo Adair's Working Inside Out: Tools for Change, in the sale section of a local store a few years ago.  I immediately grabbed it, plunked down a dollar, and put it in my pack. 

 

That night I dove into it for quite awhile before rolling over, turning off the lights, and meditating into sleep.  

Then, in the wee hours of the morning, I experienced a quite wonderful sequence of lucid dreams.  For the first time in quite awhile I was able to experience the thrill of consciously leaving my body and taking flight.  

 

Although Margo passed to the other side twelve years ago, hers is a Gift that keeps on giving. Thanks, Margo.

Outside the Box

 

Being a bookworm, I'm grateful to all those who were led to offer their insights and practices through books.  Just reading about altered states of consciousness, whether it be Presence in the here and now -- or a lucid out of body experience --  can sometimes set the stage for their emergence.  

 

Although, Mindfulness Practice has tended to focus my attention more consciously on my "in-body" experiences, the times that I've experienced lucid dreaming, "astral travel," and other OBE have been powerful events in my life.  They have allowed me to experience directly a magical and much more expansive realm of human possibility than the constraints of "conventional" consciousness.  

 

Let's face it, we've been conditioned to perceive our world in a society steeped in scientific materialism and capitalism for several hundred years.  Add to this mix the systematic oppression of patriarchy, racism, militarism, ageism, etc.,  and we've each developed perceptual filters that determine what we take to be true, what we believe to be "real." 

 

This, of course, mostly operates subconsciously.

 

With Practice, we not only can see reality as it is, we can develop the insight and skill to change ourselves from the inside out.  As well as produce less suffering in our own lives, this gives us more agency to consciously influence the world around us. 

 

Here, too, is where Margo Adair's Gift keeps giving.

Engaged Spirituality

 

In the mid-1980's Working Inside Out: Tools for Change brought Margo's brilliant synthesis of Spirituality and Activism to a wider public.  It made quite an impact on many of us who were -- and still are -- convinced that Mahatma Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the late Vietnamese Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh had it right.   

 

Even as a teenager, before I'd ever heard of the Bodhisattva Vow, my heart was inspired by the civil rights movement.  Confronting the racism at the heart of legal segregation just seemed like the right thing to do.  As time went this led to recognizing and working to overcome other forms of systemic oppression.  As I came of age, I realized that the quest for peace, equality, and social justice was a profound and challenging spiritual practice. 

 
Margo Adair, was a master theorist and practitioner in this tradition.  Terming her special craft "applied meditation," her life's work was dedicated to healing the wounds of racism, sexism, homophobia and environmental degradation.   Offering a rich collection of guided visualizations and group mediation practices, Adair's work dissolved the perceived differences between inner work and outer work.  Like others who emerged in the spiritual uprising of the era, her work was grounded in a non-dual perception of being.  It emerged and returned to a space beyond 

the perceived barrier that appears to separate the self and other, real and imagery, the momentary and the eternal. 

Although Mindfulness Practice focuses on bringing our attention more fully into the present moment, there are many meditative techniques in Buddhism and other spiritual traditions that  make use of mental visualizations.  With these practices, we use words and images to consciously bring to mind states of being and events that may or may not be here -- yet.  These techniques enhance our ability to influence the future.  This is the realm of prayer, affirmations, and visualization practices.

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