For Unto Us a Child is Born

 

Twelve years ago last Tuesday, Keaton Izzy was born.  It seems like her Incarnation into this dimension was only yesterday -- AND that she has been here forever.  As miraculous today as she was then, she is a on-going reminder of the sacred nature of life on earth.  As Christmas Day 2025 approaches, I thought that I would again share the post I wrote the week of her birth. 
One Love,
Lance 

December 19, 2013

"Each human being is a multiplicity of miracles.  Eyes that see thousands of colors, shapes, and forms; ears that hear a bee flying or a thunderclap; a brain that ponders a speck of dust as easily as the entire cosmos; a heart that beats in rhythm with the heartbeat of all beings."

-- Thich Nhat Hanh 

"Every child born is a living Buddha.  Some of them only get to be a living Buddha for a moment, because nobody believes it."

 -- Stephan Gaskin 

Spiritual Midwifery by Ina May Gaskin

Originally scheduled for a Christmas Day arrival, Keaton Izzy made her debut appearance on planet Earth in the wee hours of Monday morning.  Nine days "early," she arrived in plenty of time to avoid a head to head competition with Baby Jesus.  

 
Sporting all ten fingers and toes, sparkling with Buddhanature, her birth -- like all births -- is another obvious affirmation of the Miraculous.  As she peered from one face to another, following the sound of our voices, I could feel her Presence as pure, unadulterated Life Force.  She was Love Incarnate. 

Enraptured, my heart opened to the Sacred Mystery as I held her in my arms.  Then, at a certain point, a profound sadness emerged.  

As a child, the Christmas season always brought with it a certain sadness.  Something seemed more than slightly askew.  The idea that the holidays were a special time of mirth and merriment didn't jive with the reality of my life.  Often separated from one -- or both -- of my parents, living in poverty, all those tidings of comfort and joy didn't land well for me.  As the years rolled by, I imagined it was just the chaos and uncertainty of my own childhood that left me feeling sad.  I thought I was just "out of the loop."  

As the years have rolled by,  I have thought that less and less.  Even when the conditions of my life had improved, what I saw in the world around me, the scurry and stress of Christmas shopping, the drunken revelers, the television news full of the violence and warfare, made "peace on earth" and "goodwill toward men"seem like ancient and empty promises. 

Yet, in my heart of hearts, something still whispers to me.   

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Visible to the Naked Eye

“If the doors of perception were cleansed 

every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. 

For man has closed himself up, 

till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.”
― William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 

“Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don't even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child 

 -- our own two eyes. All is a miracle.”

 
― Thich Nhat Hanh

 

If the truth be told, I guess I've always been a freakin' Geek.  As a youngster, I was curious about everything!  

 

I spent hours and hours observing the weather, stars, clouds, rocks, fossils, trees, bumblebees, ants, frogs, birds, squirrels, whatever.

It all fascinated me.
 

In school, when I wasn't parked in the corner (or the hallway) for not being able to sit still and keep my mouth shut, I loved learning just for the sake of learning.  Although this meant that I had my nose in a book a lot of the time, I also was quite "hands on."  I loved to do natural science.  I explored. I collected. I identified. I classified.  

 

I also loved to explore man-made things.  After a few missteps, I quickly learned to choose my battles wisely.  I promised I would only take apart certain "approved" items to see what made them tick.  Sometimes, I was even able to "fix them" and/or successfully put them back together. 

 

One morning, I found a broken box camera in the alley.  I immediately took it home and disassembled it.  I soon noticed that everything appeared to be upside down when I peered through one of the lenses.   

 

WTF?  

 

Moments later, I discovered the world righted itself and things were bigger when I lined up two of the lenses I had removed. Within a half an hour, I had made a simple telescope. That night, I charted the position of the bright star that appeared outside my bedroom window.  The next day my teacher told me that this particular orb was actually the planet Jupiter! He then showed me a drawing of the entire solar system! I went home, an aspiring astronomer.  I gazed at the moon through my telescope, and kept track of Jupiter's change in position each night in my notebook-- until a new project appeared to capture my attention.  

 

Yet, although I was rewarded with acknowledgment and a few gold stars for such things, I soon learned that another arena of curiosity and exploration wasn't going to be welcomed at all.  I had many experiences that brimmed with a sense of mystery and magic.  Yet, these early perceptions of the spiritual dimension of life were consistently ignored, avoided, -- or squashed.  The adults in my life didn't seem to have a clue.

That should come as no surprise.  

 

Like most of you who may be reading this, I grew up in a culture immersed for centuries in a civilization steeped in scientific materialism.  In a society supercharged by a capitalist economy laced with white supremacy, and a distorted and limited form of Christianity, the spiritual dimension of life is generally distrusted, feared, or dismissed as superstition.  It was presented as either a scary movie realm of ghosts and demons -- or a "heavenly realm" that can only be experienced after death.  To make matters worse, this heaven was said to be an exclusive, "members only" destination.  It was only available to those who believe in a set of certain specific things about the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth.  

 

If, like the vast majority of human beings throughout the history of our species, a person believed differently, they were promised an eternity of extreme, torturous, cruelty and suffering.  As a young child, this version of a God who Jesus called a loving father, and the Bible proclaimed was Love itself, made no sense to me.  

 

I'd already glimpsed something much more amazing and affirming.

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Space: The Final Frontier

 “When you begin to touch your heart or let your heart be touched, you begin to discover that it's bottomless, that it doesn't have any resolution, that this heart is huge, vast, and limitless. You begin to discover how much warmth and gentleness is there, as well as how much space.”
― Pema Chödrön

 

“Fundamentally​, there is just open space, the basic ground, what we really are. Our most fundamental state of mind, before the creation of ego, is such that there is basic openness, basic freedom, a spacious quality; and we have now and have always had this openness.​" 

-- Chogyam Trungpa

  

When I growing up, being called a "space cadet" was not a good thing.  Unless you were an astronaut-in-training at NASA (or, perhaps, a Trekkie), the term was a put-down.  The folks who didn't pay a lot of attention to the seemingly endless concerns and activities of high school and college life?  They just weren't "cool."

Although I didn't realize it at the time, some of these space cadets were actually marching, perhaps even dancing, to the beat of a different drummer.  In doing so, they had a leg up on the rest of us.

Why?

Our legs were fully engaged spinning the hamster wheel of an invisible, but very captivating, mind cage.  Scrambling to conform to the rat race of the "real world," we couldn't afford to just space out.

Compelled by our thoughts and feelings about doing it right, going for the gold, being all we can be, etc., many of us were continually trying to get with the program presented to us in a culture steeped in capitalism, scientific materialism, racism, and the other "ism's" that serve to oppress the human spirit. 

From the time we woke up until the time we fell asleep, we were being conditioned by the world around us to disregard the spiritual dimension of life.

Sadly, most of us internalized the values and norms the mainstream society long before we had the experience or the skills to realize what was happening.   We didn't see that our society's "conventional reality" was a house built on the ever-shifting sands of what the Buddhist call the eight worldly concerns.   

 Rather than taking the time to "consider the lilies" as Jesus had counseled and explore the spiritual dimension of our lives, we became increasingly fixated on the material and psychological "needs" presented to us by the mass culture.   Some of us, like me, deeply wounded in childhood, were racing to escape the anathema of being called a "loser."  So,  "taking no anxious thought about tomorrow" never crossed our minds.  Achieving, succeeding, and winning became everything. 

The space cadet seemed not to take such things that seriously.  It seemed that he or she could frequently let go, relax -- and journey elsewhere.  

Aboard the Starship Enterprise

These days, I will gladly accept the title of space cadet.  I've found that space, what some folks call "inner space," is the final frontier.  In fact, as we voyage in the present moment to the precise edge of this ever-unfolding frontier, we see that inner and outer space are merely concepts.  In the gracious spaciousness of Mindful Awareness, each duality appears as two sides of a single coin.  In the embrace of impermanence, that coin is flipping eternally though a boundless One Love.  In this realm, heads and tails may exist -- but there is no winning or losing. 

Once I got a taste of the boundless and infinitely forgiving space at the heart of reality, I knew that I was all in.  Although I've had some crash landings and have encountered a menagerie of space monsters over the years,  I'm grateful to have signed on for the voyage.  Most every morning, I choose to step off the hamster wheel -- and go into free fall.  I simply sit still for a swath of time.  

Some people call what I do meditation. 
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Love. Love. Love.

"The moment we give rise to the desire for all beings to be happy and at peace, the energy of love arises in our minds, and all our feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness is permeated by love: in fact, they become love."

-- Thich Nhat Hanh, Teachings on Love

"All you need is love."

-- The Beatles

We have it on good authority.

Buddha and Jesus, as well as many other sages and saints throughout the ages, seem to agree with the Hippies -- and the Beatles.  In the final analysis: All you need is Love.  

That seems simple enough.

So, what's the problem? Why are so many folks suffering and why does the world appear to be going to hell in the proverbial hand basket? 

First of all, what many folks have learned to believe is love, the terrain of much music and Hollywood Movies -- isn't love.  What is presented as love is a very human blend of desire, biological attraction, and attachment.  It's pretty clear that "I love you so much that I'll kill anyone who looks at you, then you, then myself." is not exactly what JC, Buddha and others had in mind, right?

The form of "love" that our culture promotes has a lot more to do with fulfilling one's own individual ego needs for sex, security, status, and self-esteem than the quality of consciousness that emerges from what American Buddhist Teacher Pema Chodron calls an Awakened Heart.  True Love is not the profound passionate grasping of deep attachment. True Love is much grander than that.  

True Love emerges, and is essentially inseparable from, Pure Being.  It is identical to the One Love that exists beyond the illusion of disconnection that characterizes the realm of relative reality.  Flowing from and returning to our Essential Oneness, True Love emerges as the compassion, joy, ease, and clarity that exists in our heart of hearts. 

Unlike the common contemporary understanding that views love as something we just fall into (and, so often, out of),  in the Buddhist tradition, love is seen as a aspect of consciousness.  Our connection to that love can be intentionally cultivated.  Although we may stumble into glimpses of Oneness through an intimate connection to "the other" in a romantic relationship -- especially in its initial honeymoon phase -- ultimately, True Love emerges from a fundamental choice to embrace Life itself, to let go of who we think we are and open our hearts and minds to the actual experience of the present moment.  

Although this can happen with the very next breath, the process of actually becoming a loving person generally doesn't just happen.  It is a Practice.  Erich Fromm characterized it as an art in his classic work, The Art of Loving.  Like any discipline, True Love takes commitment, a set of skills, effort, persistence -- and patience. 
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