Now for Something Completely Different

This moment, the one you are experiencing right now, is a perfect one.

To say this does not mean that this moment is a pleasurable or enjoyable one for you, necessarily. That's what we usually mean when we say things are "perfect"——that we really, really like the way things are right now. But to equate perfection with desirability is an egocentric viewpoint, not one that has big picture validity. In fact, this very moment, in its perfection, might offering me pain, or unhappiness, or some other form of discomfort. The perfection of the moment has nothing whatsoever to do with me liking the quality of that moment.

This moment is a perfect one because it is the only possible outcome resulting from the events leading up to it. The "effect" of this moment has been governed with the unavoidable logic of the "causes" preceding. If I happen to be unhappy with the moment, that doesn't spoil it's perfection, because the nature of this moment, including my feelings about it, is the logical result of things like memory, my previous life experiences, my attitude, my outlook, the current mixture of hormones and enzymes and neurotransmitters in my brain, my current physical condition, etc, etc.

In other words, dropping dead of a heart attack is a perfect result, if viewed as the logical consequence of heredity factors, poor eating habits, a dissolute living style, or a sudden contact with high voltage power lines. A truly horrific world would be the one where you don't die when a giant grand piano crashes onto your head from an overhead pulley. We need for the world to follow logical physical principles, and so it does. So how else could any moment be anything but perfect?

Viewing the world in this way——seeing each moment is a perfect one-- isn't to then suggest that we're supposed to "accept" whatever happens to us and not take action to change it. After all, perfection is also present in our resistance to the circumstances of the moment, in our choice to move in another direction.

At the same time, there's still a profound peace to be had from recognizing the perfection of the moment, even when it's unpleasant, because it then frees you from disagreeing and wrangling with the reality of it. A lot of grief we bring on ourselves isn't so much the actual pain, as our disagreement and refusal to acknowledge its truth and reality.

An interesting change begins to happen at the very instant you acknowledge the perfection of any moment. Things become exactly as they are, and immediately there is a burden that lifts from your shoulders——the burden of constantly trying to improve and perfect things. You find yourself entering into experience very directly, since there is really nothing to accomplish in a perfect moment. You just live it with a full embrace. The past is irrelevant ( it doesn 't even exist, really), and the future is interesting only because the current moment feeds it. Each moment is what it is, and the very next moment becomes an utterly logical and perfect result of the previous one. The power of our actions becomes blindingly evident, and you begin to feel a precision and economy and powerfulness in how you make choices. What you do in response to this situation is, in itself perfect, and it will lead to the inevitable (perfect) experience of the next moment. There is nothing to change, really, and nothing to regret. Only experience.

Normally, this method of seeing things comes to us in tiny little flashes, with considerably more time spent lamenting the past or worrying about the future. It is possible, though, to find yourself recognizing and embracing the inherent perfection of this moment, then the next moment, then the next moment, so that there's really nothing else but this moment, perpetually. Strangely, it's a form of immortality. String a thousand of these moments together, and it becomes a 15-second experience that can change everything and rewire your circuits in a major way.

*****

This kind of approach to phenomenology may seem pretty esoteric and exotic, but in reality you can find it in the mystical traditions of almost every major world religion. In Christianity, for example, you will find such a practice inherent in "The Cloud of Unknowing," a seminal work of Western Christian theology.

I began to learn about it through the study of Dzogchen, a branch of Tibetan Buddhist practice, that is also known as "The Great Perfection." Depending on your leanings, you could look to either source for more information on this way of viewing the world.

Space Exploration

This morning on the bus ride into downtown, a young man took the seat next to me. He was munching on a large, chocolate covered sweet-roll with one hand; in the other hand he was thumbing through a novel. Not just any novel, but a graphic comic-book novel with bright, violent colors. In his ears were audio earbuds, through which MP3 music was audible, even to my failing hearing. At one point, the young man even took a phone call, removing only one of the earbuds to talk, while continuing to eat and to read his comic book at the same time.

It was a voracious orgy of sense fulfillment, and I both admired the young man's ability to juggle so much data, and was worried for his mental well-being.

His was an extreme example, but in this young man I recognized a pretty common human urge. As a modern culture, if not as a species, we seem to be intent on filling up all available emptiness and space with sensory stuff. I cannot even use a public restroom these days without also reading advertising placed at eye level on the wall above the urinal.

Because we are so intent on filling up every empty moment, every blank space, with excitement and sensory input, we might logically conclude that humans have some inherent nervousness and fear regarding openness and space. We're told that a large percentage of Americans are now so uncomfortable with silence that they use television and radio as sleep aids. If modern humans don't hear the voice of God, it may well be because they've chosen to distract themselves with Muzak instead.

This speaks, I think, to a certain existential uneasiness we have about our own identity. It's the information flowing through our senses that gives us an illusion of concrete solidness, and we force-feed ourselves all this experience, all these sights, all these sounds, all these tastes, to reassure ourselves that we do actually exist. Our deepest fear, I think—the one underlying all the other forms of nervousness—is that we don't truly exist. If we keep the forms flowing fast enough, we can fool ourselves into thinking otherwise.

And so one of the very biggest moments in a spiritual practice comes when we finally run up against the inherent spaciousness of existence. This seems to be a necessary stage no matter what spiritual tradition you practice. Some Christian practices place a supreme value on "surrendering to God," which is a metaphor for recognizing the relative insubstantiality of our "selves". In the various eastern traditions I have studied, there comes a point when the practice inevitably discovers a certain kind of emptiness or hollowness that is quite jarring and disconcerting.

For example, ever one I know who has had a serious meditation practice speaks of coming to a time when the quiet, relaxed seeing-of-things-as-they-are reveals that things we once viewed as solid and concrete are in fact extremely fluid and ever-changing. It's certainly not all that hard to recognize that emotions, thoughts, beliefs, feelings don't have any material substance, and it's not all that long that you begin to recognize that even the things you regarded as physically solid, such as mountains and boulders, exist solidly only within a split second of time. Nothing is genuinely real in terms of permanent solidness; everything is in motion, at all times.

Lots of meditators will acknowledge that this is a point where they're forced to work through a time of despair or even depression. After all, we turned to spiritual pursuits in the first place in order to transcend the temporal, to discover something eternal. What we discover, instead, is that nothing eternal exists, whatsover. Form is the most fleeting of all things, and we begin to feel that we are being devoured, evaporated by this spaciousness we didn't really want to see. The very first intimations of this can be extraordinarily shocking. The rug gets pulled out from under you entirely, in a way that can feel quite devastating. Lots of people even talk about a physical feeling of vertigo, a sense that they are falling, when they glimpse the true spaciousness of things.

But then, if you begin to experiment at resting in the spaciousness, the fluidity, you begin to sense that it is within this spaciousness that genuine awareness, genuine freedom exists. You are falling, yes, but there really is no ground that is going to shatter you when you hit. You begin to have moments when you begin to appreciate the ocean, because you are no longer fighting waves. When spaciousness and fluidity are the matrix, all things become possible.

Ever so gradually, you learn that the antidote to pain isn't to grasp for the shore of a particular island, but to swim freely among all the islands.

Suffering is largely the process of trying to make things solid, when their inherent nature is spaciousness.

For Now, Anyway

A recent change in my work life is greatly cutting into my available time for blogging, and also for checking up on your blogs, which is a far more serious crime. My job now involves direct supervision of 20 people, many of them remarkably immature personalities, and it is very rare that I'm able to put together more than 20 minutes to focus on a single task in between interruptions. Sometimes, days go by before I can get back to cyberworld and check up on what my friends are doing.

So life has become a bit more dense lately, but strangely, it hasn't particularly affected my level of happiness. What I'm aware of is a kind of controlled frenzy, but within it there never seems to be a lack of space or perspective. I feel a bit like a conductor orchestrating a large group of rowdy musicians. It's noisy, but all the notes are still defined by the space and silence surrounding them.

I'd like to think this hints at a certain spiritual maturity has been reached, but this could well be wishful thinking on my part, ego puffing itself up. I am aware, though, that in recent days I feel a good deal of comfort and trust in my instincts to respond appropriately to circumstances, even very difficult ones.

A phrase from a favorite teacher keeps popping up for me. "...(true practice) is realizing that space contains matter, that matter makes no demands on space and that space makes no demands on matter. Spirituality is a panoramic situation in which you can come and go freely and your relationship with the world is open. It is the ultimate non-violence."

For this moment, anyway, I get it.

This Is.....

If my early morning mediation session is especially relaxed, my awareness of mind sometimes takes a shift, so that there is a more leisurely awareness of each phenomenon of mind as it arises. This is in sharp contract to the waterfall cacophany of thoughts and feelings that normally tumble one upon another at breakneck speed in my awareness.

An air vibration behind me enters awareness, and I can physically feel the oscillation of tiny membranes in my head.

This is hearing.

My feeling regarding this sensation is utterly neutral. It is neither pleasant nor unpleasant, but it does interest me, and my mind begins to form a rudimentary constellation around the sense object.

This is feeling. This is interest.

Instantly, and inextricably linked to the hearing and feeling, myriad associations move toward the new constellation. Memories join the bare object of hearing, and this leads to the recognition and name of this sound as "plane taking off from airport."

This is perception.

Perception continues, the constellation builds. From the sound I know the direction the plane is heading, and memory of maps tells me the likely destination is Detroit, or New York, or Boston. Mental images of these cities arise, and now there is a new sense object for the mind to constellate around. New feelings: Detroit--unpleasant. Boston--pleasant.

The perception doesn't fade until well after the initial sound object, the noise of the plane, has faded.

A skin sensation arises, along the back side of my body.

This is touching.

This time, an immediate feeling of pleasantness joins the constellation.

This is feeling: pleasant.

Perception arrives in the form of memory and language and naming.

This is perception; this is warmth.

In response to pleasant feeing, an energy of attraction arises. I want more warmth.

This is desire.

A new skin sensation arises, this one along the front of my body. This, too, is touch, but this time the constellation is a little different.

This is feeling. This is unpleasantness.

Perception tells me that this is "cold." An almost magnetic energy of repulsion, aversion now joins in.

This is aversion.

A subtle energetic shift takes place. I am aware of an intention to capture warmth, to escape cold.

This is intention.

Another energy is present, though, one that intends to study rather than react.

This is restraint.

I am now aware of two constellations around touch sensations: one dominated by pleasantness and warmth, the other by cold and aversion. Close examination, though, indicates that they do not occupy the same space; they aren't experienced at the same time, but oscillate back and forth so rapidly that there is the illusion of simutaneousness.

In truth, there is only one "this is" at a time.

The present constellations seem to grow tired of their existence all by themselves, and quietly die and fade away. Others various constellations replace them: Itching. Story-telling. Planning. Muscle aching. A fantasy. Smelling bacon.

None of them need to be avoided; none need to be captured.

Gradually during the course of the meditation, I become absorbed in the sheer knowing, the "this is" of every phenomenon that arises. For this time, anyway, I have no investment in things being different, and am nothing more than a student of what's arising.

This is delight. This is peace.

Occasionally, this fascination with the bare "this is" of experience follows me off the meditation cushion and informs the entire day. This is more common on leisurely weekend days, especially when bad weather enforces an indoor indolence, but even a work day may sometimes be treated with a steady fascination with things just as they are, whatever they are.

More and more these days, the fabric of a spiritual life seems to be just this simple.

"This is."

No Expert, Me.

Sometimes in these pages I am asked to speak as an authority on Buddhism. While I'm flattered at this, I also feel compelled to say quite honestly that I should not be regarded as any kind of expert. I am not a formal teacher of Buddhism, nor am I a veteran of lengthy meditation retreats that have given me the keys to the Absolute.

My practice is that of an amateur in every sense, and while it's true that I've avidly studied these subjects for a long time, it would be a mistake for anyone to see me as anything but a serious beginner.

While there are many various spiritual traditions that interest me, Buddhism has always held a special appeal for me. Partly this is because there is an intellectualism to Buddhist study that appeals to my need for cerebral exercise, and partly it's because Buddhism has a clean coolness and clarity that I find to be an enormous relief and antidote to the fiery emotional winds that once dominated my life.

But if pushed to really define why I see myself as a Buddhist, the reason can be summed up by one single experience.

About 15 years ago, one Saturday morning saw me shopping at a local indoor retail center in Minneapolis, a relatively avant guarde section of town known as Uptown. In one of the upstairs galleries at the shopping center, I came upon a pair of Tibetan Buddhist monks working on an elaborate geometric mural painted with colorful sands, known as a mandala. The exhibit was sponsored by some American-Tibet exchange program, and the room was sparsely decorated with a simple Tibetan alter with some small shrine objects, but it was extremely simple by most standards.

Mandala artwork is a well-known craft in Tibet. These large sand "paintings" are created on the floor, by artisans who sit cross-legged on the floor, applying the dyed sands to outlined patterns with tools that most closely resemble those pastry bags that bakers use to apply fancy frostings to wedding cakes. Sometimes the designs are purely geomentric; sometimes they resemble landscapes or other natural scenes. The artist sits cross legged, hold the nozzle of the bag where he or she wants the sand to fall, then gently taps on the metal tip so a fine layer of sand drifts down and covers the wood base. A variety of nozzles are used, depending on the relative coarseness or fineness of the design.

In can take days, weeks, or even months for a mandala to be completed, depending on its complexity. Ultimately, this is an exercise in understanding the temporary nature of existence, since the artwork is never preserved, but is soon cast to the winds or allowed to wash away in a river.

On this particular morning, the two young monks were nearing completion on the mandala; a small flyer announced that in a week, the mandala would carefully be carried down to the shores of Lake Calhoun and allowed to wash away. A number of observers came and went during the hour or so that I sat and watched the monks. Once, a man paused to ask me a question, a fact that puzzled me until I realized that the khaki trousers and Minnesota maroon sweatshirt I was wearing was very close to the saffron and gold robes the monks were wearing. I had by mistaken for some kind of tour guide or sponsor for the exhibit.

The work was painstaking, with the monks hunched over in a position that would have been agonizing for you or me. They were about three hours into a four-hour work session. Eventually, they'd be relieved by helpers.

Then a young family with two small children came into the gallery to watch, and something in me know that problems were brewing. The mandala could not have been any more delicate, and the boys were about 4 and 6 years of age. No genius was required to see what was coming.

The moment of disaster was both entirely innocent and quite dramatic. One of the young boys, as they sat off to the side to watch the monk, kicked off his boot---which sailed across the floor and smeared colored sands to all four corners of the compass, effectively ruining the portrait. Days worth of work were instantly ruined.

Now, I know that Buddhist monks were supposed to be patient and kind, but nothing prepared me for the response of these two young monks, perhaps 20, 25 years old. I would have supposed that even these fellows would have to wrestle with anguish and possibly impatience at seeing their work ruined. In my mind's eyes, I imagined that they'd struggle with a bit of anger, probably successfully fighting it back, then grinning and bearing it.

That's about the best I'd have hoped for for myself, on my very best day. But even though I was watching with utmost intensity, I saw not the least flicker of dismay in either of these young monks at seeing their hard work demolished in a moment. Instead, one of the monks simply asked for the boy's name, then lettered his name in finely scripted colored sands on the floor of the gallery using his bag of slendidly colored sands. The boy was at first startled at not being scolded in any way, then lit up like a Christmas tree when he saw his name emerge on the floor.

I watched the monks for another hour, long after the family left. When I finally stood up to leave, one of the monks stood, and bowed to me with a smile as I left. I wasn't asked for any contribution, wasn't handed flowers, didn't receive any literature asking me to join the club.

As I looked back through the storefront glass, the monks were already back at work, in intent and joyful concentration on a task they well knew was entirely ephemeral.

That day, I knew that I'd very much like to be like those monks. If not in this lifetime, then perhaps in another.

Thoughts on Emptiness

The Buddhist practice as it has evolved for me more closely resembles a practical science than it does a religious practice. Meditation is nothing more than a technique for becoming familiar with the activities of our mind and studying it. Everything else——all the highly touted spiritual goodies— simply flow from that common-sense observation.

What I invariably notice is that very precise, close observation of almost any subject always has the effect of eliminating the subject's solidity. Study a piece of marble and you begin to see the veins of ocean sediments, even the individual grains of sand—not a big solid chunk stone. Meditation, like any form of observation, introduces space into any object. And in the case of mind-study, it introduces space into thoughts, emotions, concepts——all the stuff that we sometimes treat as though they have material concreteness.

Some years ago, after I'd already studied meditation for a few years, there came a quiet little breakthrough. On the cushion one day, I was looking at some very old, very ingrained hostility toward a family member that had arisen in me. It was a very common thing for me in those days. I was looking at this hostility very closely, studying all its nuances—when the thought suddenly came to me:

"This is only a feeling. It has no weight, no physical body, no substance of any kind. This feeling is present only in this moment, and only in my mind. It can't be photographed or recorded in any way. It is not real, but only an odd mental activity."

The "solid thing" was a story I had been telling myself. Over and over.

And instantly, the decades-old resentment I'd been nursing was seen as a rather bad plot in a soap opera. It wasn't real in any truly identifiable way, other than as a weird little constellation of enzymes and hormones and brain chemicals that had strangely come together for a moment. And I felt, for perhaps the first time, that my emotions didn't own me, nor I them, but that they were just phenomena with their own cycle of life.

That day didn't mark an absolute turning point. I still have times when I'm gripped by worries and irritations and fears—times when I treat them as though they're my possessions. But with increasing regularity, as I get more astute at studying these mind activities, I see them as little more than stories that my mind habitually tells itself. Deep seeing reveals this to be true about virtually everything —everything—that troubles me: it always turns out to be nothing more than a temporary construction of mind. Not real in any kind of demonstrable way, less concrete than water vapour.

This, I've come to realize, is one way of looking at the Buddhist concept of emptiness. When you look at anything closely, you realize that it has no permanent, concrete substance at all, but is merely a snapshot of energy in time. All things arise, all things pass away, and the illusion of stability and permanent realness is just a story we tell ourselves.

Even a chunk of marble is really just a collection of recently bonded sand particles on its way to becoming sand again sometime in the future.

Initially, I found myself a little saddened by this recognition, because something in me really wanted some things to be permanent. Gradually, though, I'm recognizing that it's the clinging to permanence that causes much of the sadness and pain. Turn loose, go with the emptiness, and illusion begins to fall away and a pretty delicious freedom begins to cook.

Mobid (Mortal) Thoughts, part II

I have a hunch that the quality and complexity,and maybe even the value of life, may be judged on the nature of volition and mobility present in the creature we're studying.

To judge an object as "alive" there must be something that we can call will, and also the capability of willful and deliberate movement. The sophistication of a life form can be judged based on the complexity of that volition to motion.

To certain followers of paganism, the earth itself is regarding as living, and on some level this might be true. A rock, for example, when enlivened with the energy of gravity or tectonic upheaval, has a "will" to move. This is a pretty rudimentary will, though, which is why most people would regard a rock as an non-living object.

A touch more sophistication, though, and we enter the world of plants, creations which show some basic volition as their leaves reach and grope for sunlight, as their roots stretch for water and soil. And plants have the capability of motion. Sunflowers reach east in the morning, west in the evening. Seeds travel on the wind. In my own garden, a single cranesbill geranium has moved itself a full eight feet from where I planted it ten years ago. Some form of will and volition is clearly present here.

A plant becomes an animal, I suspect, when its volition and mobility become faster and more sophisticated. Animals can run or fight or migrate, a capacity that raises them about the world of plants.

In more sophisticated animals, including humans, the capacity for motion becomes ever more refined, until it becomes evident through abstract creation, in art, or in the extremely subtle motion of thought and imagination. If we were to define what it means to be human, we might suggest that it depends on the capacity for symbolic thought—the most subtle of motion.

As I watch the process of life and death in humans, in animals, in plants, even in rocks, it occurs to me that the process of death is largely a matter of gradually relinquishing these various forms of volition and motion.

In some older people, for example, it is physical motion that is first surrendered or taken away through illness. Life most certainly continues, though, and in pretty fine fashion, so long as there is motion and volition of thought, of imagination. This may well explain why older people often find themselves with an increasing instinct to spirituality and imagination, since these things offer an outlet for the instincts to volition and movement. I know some people confined to wheelchairs who are far freer than world-class athletes, so nimble are their minds and imaginations.

Other older people, more tragically to me, find the subtle volition of thought to be the first element surrendered, while volition of the physical body takes longer to decline. A human whose mind badly fails is often regarded, quite logically, as vegetative. Not human, not even animal like, but plant like.

All this may be the reason why I find myself taking more sheer pleasure from the act of movement, in all its forms, as I grow older. Imagination now strikes me as the richest, most wonderful of all forms of movement. And I also treasure each and every act of physical movement in the world, arthritic ankles notwithstanding. I started wearing a pedometer on my belt recently. In the first four days of this week, I've walked 23.84 miles, mostly because I find it such a precious delight to walk the early morning streets until a pending morning meeting forces me to finally hop onto the commuter bus. At lunch, I make a point of walking to the farthest restaurant or park bench that is reasonable within an honest lunch hour.

I won't always have the capacity for motion now available to me, so I'm relishing it. With any luck, dreaming will be the last to go.

Morbid (Mortal) Thoughts, part 1

Philosophically, I'm pretty well adjusted to the truth of human mortality.

What I mean is that, on the intellectual plane, I really don't see much reason to worry about death. It doesn't really scare me much, and the reason for this isn't because of some kind of mental parlour game I play with myself. For example, I don't somehow imagine that I'm going to heaven, and thus have nothing to fear from death. Nor do I have a concrete intimation of reincarnation, which might help me avoid the fear of death. I don't insist that such a possibility doesn't exist; but I don't have any evidence that it does, either. It would be cheating to console myself with such mythology.

No, I know full well that the person I am now will come to an end one day, completely, and when the subject comes up for discussion, I don't really feel too much angst over it. Others my age sometimes talk about feeling younger, more alive, than they ever have before. Frankly, I"m pretty sure this is nothing more than a mind game they're playing with themselves. If you have any degree of self awareness whatsoever, you can't help but witness the truth of our decline.

In point of fact, life can be a somewhat tumultuous, messy affair, and there are times when I actually quietly look forward to the end of all the tumult, an end to the constant sensory barrage that is life. I think that death may represent a well deserved rest.

Then again, I do have a pretty strong intimation that awareness is an energy inherent in the world itself, and while I'm pretty much willing to relinquish my petty human awareness one day, I'm also reassured by a strong sense that awareness as a universal force will simply gobble up my miniscule personality for recycling.

I often think of myself as compost—raw material that is currently serving as nutriment for my kids and perhaps my friends.

And when I look around at the world, I see no real indication that anything dies forever. Individuals die, sure, but they are always recycled in some form. This recycling is a reassurance and relief to me, and frankly I think it is a very fine thing that we don't go on forever. On my death bed, simply thinking about my kids will be pretty good reassurance.

That's my position intellectually, and I can argue it pretty damned persuasively.

Viscerally, though, deep in my gut, it's another matter entirely.

On that level, present a long way south of the brain, I'm not in the least bit happy about growing older, and like almost everybody, I have a strong wish to put it off as long as possible.

In a 20-year blink of an eye, I've gone from a young man to a solidly middle-aged man. In another 20 years, certain to pass even more rapidly, I'll be an old man by every possible definition.

I don't like this. Not even a little bit.

Arthritis has plagued almost every member of my family, and while it's come to me later than most, feet and ankles that could once walk for many, many hours without complaint, now feel the pain after a few hours of walking. My hands are thus far largely free of arthritis; but it has appeared in my left elbow, which becomes tender to the touch after a couple hours of gardening.

Yep. I'm in the process of decay, and I hate it.

(to be continued)

The Human Wound

I’ve come to believe that the quality distinguishing humans from other creatures is our awareness of a wound, a sore spot, a tenderness that is the source of both all our pain and ultimately our joy. Other living creatures, though subject to the same natural pains and laws of physics, remain blessedly unaware of the nature of the wound, and hence do not suffer in quite the same way as do conscious humans. The dawning awareness of this woundedness, this tender spot, is the real life phenomenon that sees its symbol in the idea of our fall from grace, our expulsion from the garden, our entrapment in samsara.

How we respond to our woundedness governs the quality of our lives, in the end. It determines if we remain trapped in dreariness, or find at-one-ment.

The traditional path of a life is to structure things so that we cover up the wound, hide it from others and even ourselves. In anger and fear, we try to plate over our mortal wound with thick layers of costuming and personality, trying to keep others from seeing it and trying to forget about it ourselves. We go to war to protect the wound. We build civilizations around the effort to hide the wound. Our technologies evolve as efforts to defeat the wound. We dress in fancy clothes and dwell in palaces to keep attention away from the wound. Though this is the common way to live, it is not a very pleasant one. It is a happy occasion to wake up from this condition.

Fortunately, the wound is inherent in us, and cannot be avoided forever. Clear seeing will eventually show you the truth of this. Knowing it and accepting it is a sign of our evolution, our consciousness. To hide from the wound is to live a life of non-truth. To do this is ultimately an evil life, for virtually all evil acts are strategies to hide from the wound or to push it onto others that we might forget it.

We are lucky that we can’t hide forever from the truth, and a genuine glimpse of our own mortal woundedness is what offers us the opportunity to change, to awaken. To awaken and feel the wound after a long period of hiding is something you should celebrate. Some day, you may well come to realize that the moments of greatest trauma were also your moments of greatest awakening.

Sometimes through luck, sometimes with help, you may find that there is another way to respond to the knowledge of our wound. We do not have to hide, we do no need to defend. We can acknowledge the wound, accept it, live gladly with it even. We can tenderly care for their own wound, and treat the tender spots of others with compassion and empathy. We can respond to it with good nature, with irony and humour and understanding. This is the path of the artists who live to articulate the experience of our human woundedness; the mystics who lived and died with compassion for the wounded; the saints who care for the universal wound. It’s also a trait found in every good soul you’ve known.

Perhaps you have known people who live this way, or maybe you have discovered it for yourself: It is when we are confronted with the indisputable and unavoidable truth of our woundedness that a conscious, free life begins.

The happiest people I’ve ever known are those most aware of the tender wound in themselves and others. They ache with others, and for others.

Prophet in the Brothel of Iniquity

I lately find myself fascinated by the surging anti-religious mood in this country. It is both heartening and worrisome to me at the same time. I applaud the modern atheist assault on religious hypocrisy, especially in fundamentalist sects of all stripes. Religion has caused a great deal more problems than it has solved, it seems to me, so it's high time to set it in its place. But at the same time, I also worry about the atheists' denial of any kind of symbolic, spiritual life.

A number of the folks I've linked to in my list to the right are atheists, but the site I'd most recommend is Sacred Slut in the Temple of Reason. I recommend it not only because her site features one of the best layouts and great writing, but because its a blog that serves as a clearing house for lots of extremely reasonable voices in this community. It's also a site where I can occasionally play devil's advocate and actually get reasonable arguments rather than shouts.

Deep in Sacred's archives there is a post (read it here) in which she describes her "deconversion"--her move from a religious perspective to a secular, atheistic one. The story is that she came to a point where she began to shine the light of practical sense and reason on her beliefs, and found them wanting. Her investigation was a courageous one, and I admire her for it.

Except for one thing, Sacred's story is a lot like my own. Though my religious upbringing was different (I was raised a Lutheran), I too came to a point where I realized that the tenets of my religion were nonsense, and that I'd need to find truth elsewhere.

Sacred and I came to different conclusions, however. As she describes in her early post, Sacred came to the conclusion that there is no spirit, no reality separate from the body. Her conclusion was that everything commonly called mind or spirit or soul is in fact a manifestation of body, and that there is no supernatural reality separate from the physical.

But while I agree in the falseness of the religious premise, a similar investigation caused me to reach different conclusions from Sacred's.

The premise of the modern atheist is that all spiritual endeavor is inherently false. The belief is that what passes for mind or spirit in fact emanates from the physical. Our sensation of soul, in other words, is nothing more than a highly refined manifestation of matter.

My own investigations, on the other hand, continually point to another equally likely explanation: that the physical emanates from the energetic. What we know as "spiritual" in the end, simply refers to the realities we can't immediately see or grasp. The energy rather than the matter.

It's likely that neither Sacred nor myself is right or wrong. In the end, as Einstein showed, matter and energy are exactly the same thing.

And taking both meditation and daily vitamins is probably a better prescription for happiness than either one alone.

I Hope, You'll Understand

A few days ago, an article I wrote here provoked more commentary—and intelligent commentary, at that—than anything I've written in the last year. And not only in blog-land, where the subject even found its way onto other blogs. In real life, too, discussions about the value and meaning of hope in human happiness found their way into lots of face-to-face discussions.

The premise of that article was this: I challenged the idea that hope is forever and always a prime human virtue. I suggested, in fact, that it can even be the driving force behind unhappiness.

It's easy to see why this was a controversial post. We have all been raised to believe that hope, along with faith and love and charity, is one of the very principle virtues by which people should live. It's in the Bible, after all. To say you're "hopeless" is thought to be represent the ultimate in discouragement and depression.

So at the risk of reigniting the firestorm, I'd like to address the subject again, and explain a little more about where my thoughts came from.

As tradition has it, we believe that hope is the force that brings positive change about. This is the standard logic, and it goes something like this: 1. We find ourselves in an unpleasant or painful situation. 2. This leads to hope—which we can define as a "visualization, or conception of a future situation which we will find more pleasant than the present one." 3. The energy of hope fuels action toward the hoped-for goal. 4. Upon achieving the desired goal, happiness is ours.

When we are happy, we generally assume it is because our hopes have been fulfilled.

But when I looked closely at myself, I began to see that this was not always the case for me. Sometimes, sure, it did work exactly that way. Confronted with a painful infection, visualizing, then seeking medical help, indeed led to a reduction of pain and more contentment.

But not always. Not even most of the time. Sometimes, all that really came for me was the faintest of rest periods before another round of hoping began. And then I began to see instances where the equation ran something like this:

1. I find myself with a hope, a desire, for something different. 2. This leads to dissatisfaction in the present circumstance, unhappiness. 3. I surrender hope (in the first instances, this was done somewhat experimentally). 4. I found that the here-now became much more immediate, more energizing. 5. I was considerably happier.

In other words, it was not an effort to change outer circumstances that brought about happiness. As often as not, it was the subtle inner adjustment that was far more necessary and effective.

This explained, in part, a most interesting phenomenon—the fact that happiness often seems to be largely independent of outer circumstances. On a day where I've arisen on the wrong side of the bed, there is nothing whatsoever uniquely awful about my circumstances, yet I might be mildly depressed and unhappy all day. But on other days, quite a lot of unpleasantness can occur, yet it doesn't really affect my general cheerfulness for life.

Or perhaps you, too, know a few people who will treat a simple rain shower as a personal insult to their happiness. And maybe you know other people able to live with cancer even while being exceedingly happy.

So what this all implies to me is that happiness isn't always about the outer circumstances.

Often, it's about the inner perception.

Those of you with strong beliefs in the traditional value of hope have a very legitimate comeback to this thesis. You might argue, for example, that if you simply tolerate every circumstance that happens to you, you will just wind up staying in situations that are demeaning, degrading, or even dangerous.

But it really hasn't worked out that way for me, and I'm certainly not recommending that we tolerate situations that are intolerable. That's stupidity. Faced with unpleasant circumstances, I always respond and react to them. But I'm not aware that hope is really present at all. In fact, taking action all by itself seems to eliminate the physical sensation of hoping. Responding to pain and suffering, it seems, doesn't require hope; it just requires practical sense and the surrender of inaction.

And it's been interesting to note that even the staunchest defenders of hope have told me that at those times when they are utterly happy and content, they're not hoping for anything at all. They are just thrilling to the moment.

Did they get there because their hoping has been successful? Or by turning loose of hope for a moment or two?

I have to tell you, with all honesty, that I'm happier when I'm not hoping.

A Mild Rant

I find myself in an odd position, culturally, with a foot in two very opposite worlds. Or maybe it's actually three different worlds that I don't fit into.

I read lots of blogs representing lots of different view points, engage lots of people in friendly discussions over coffee, but I've lately been a little disturbed by some of the hostility and apparent arrogance I encounter.

I'm curious about the religious literalists, though I don't understand this position very well. This group includes the creationist crowd, and virtually all fundamentalists, whether they be Christian or Muslim or Jewish or Buddhist. What I most wonder about is how a person can live happily when a literal doctrine collides with common sense and evidence. I'm genuinely interested in how this works. I occasionally have tried to intelligently discuss these things on blogs hosted by Christians of this type, and I'm shocked by the hostile reaction There are some Christians who are meaner than any Ku Klux Klanner you'll ever see. I asked one blogger how he personally reconciled a hatred of gay people with the Christian injunction to love his neighbors... and was told that I was going to burn in hell most painfully for asking such a question.

But this doesn't mean that I fall neatly into the atheist club, because at the same time I reject religious literalism, I very strongly do believe in spiritual pursuit, and am frankly put off by the folks who act like science has all the answers. This crowd, to my way of thinking, has just substituted another false idol to the Jehovah they rail against. My instincts and my personal experience is that it's not a purely scientific approach, but a more symbolic and artistic life that leads to happiness. Such a suggestion, though, causes the apologists for science to be just as hostile and insulting as the fundamental Christians. I've been accused of ignorance by people who've never read Thomas Kuhn on scientific revolution. While I admire much of what Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins say, a great many of their followers seem to have no forward agenda at all, and are simply interested in fighting religion. And living your life purely to fight is not for me.

Then there are the new age group, with astral travel and angel collections and crystal therapy.
For some reason, this group seems to be the friendliest and least judgmental, but it is just a little too undisciplined for me to want join their club. A 30 year old once tried to explain why Tantra was THE answer, and how I was a pure fool for not seeing it. Tantra, he kindly explained to me, was developed in San Francisco in the 1960s. His source of information was not the ancient Hindu or Buddhist root texts that lay out the basis for Tantric study, but some web sites he had seen sponsoring tantric retreats in New Mexico. A month later, he had turned to relexology.

So having no natural membership in any of these clubs, I choose to study all these various traditions, and to compose a spiritual practice based on a synthesis of the symbolic truths I find underlying all of them. My heroes, in this regard, are people like Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, for whom religious mythologies and civilized culture represented extremely real psychological truths about human nature.

Jung once suggested that humans would eventually evolve to a stage where the pursuit of science, religion, psychology and art would be exactly the same endeavor. Yeah, man. I can get behind that. Jung, for example, thought we should openly accept the belief in UFO visitors...as an interesting manifestation of group delusion.

So my shelves include The Bible, the Quran, the Bhaghavad Gita, the Origin of Species, Id and Ego, The End of Faith, and many other books that are all equally valuable works of art. They all represent humans trying to understand what evolution is aiming toward, what we should strive for. What a great thing that we're all looking for virtually the same thing. It's through the hearing many different interpretations that I think we get closest to the truth.

But for those of you who think that one of these books is somehow more valuable and true than all the others...

I fear you won't be very interested in this particular club. And sometimes I fear that it's a club with only one member.

It is Hopeless

Sometimes, deep looking causes me to wonder about certain cultural assumptions we make. In recent years, one wide-spread assumption in particular seems to have a dubious benefit, at best. I'll apologize in advance, because I know to question this assumption will possibly upset some people.

I no longer think that "hope" is a particularly strong virtue.

In fact, I think a case can be made that "hopelessness" is, in fact, of stronger spiritual merit.

Now, I think that hope plays a perfectly fine role in helping people get through truly dreadful times, since it effectively tells us that nothing remains the same forever, and that this terrible moment will inevitably change into something else in the next moment.

But as I look around, it appears to me that there are many people who turn hope into a way of life. And when you look closely, it becomes evident that hope fits into the same family of human experience as dissatisfaction and regret. Hope, in effect, is the future tense, with dissatisfaction the present tense, and regret the past tense.

All three mind states are the result of disagreement with what is. Regret is disagreement with what was in the past, dissatisfaction is disagreement with the present, and hope represents a strange sort of dissatisfaction with our expectations for the future. We would not hope at all, were it not for our fear that the future will look exactly like the present.

The essense of hope is a desirous wishing for conditions to be other than what they are, and I don't know how, exactly, we have turned this into a culturally sanctioned virtue. Could there be anything less conducive to happiness than to constantly wish for things to be different?

It takes only a very slight shift in perception to see that there is virtue in hopelessness, because to be without hope implies a full, embracing acceptance of the present condition of things. In this moment, if I am without hope, it is because I have fully embraced the present and am responding to it automatically, without desire or aversion.

Desire and aversion, otherwise known as hope and resentment, don't in and of themselves accomplish anything. They are simply unhappy mind states, and in fact they exist because we cling to stasis rather than going with the flow of the universe. The antitode, it seems to me, is to fully and entirely inhabit our experience, our moment. To act, instead of hope.

An example:

Once or twice a week, I bypass the bus and walk home from work, which gives me a rather vigorous two hour hike of almost 6 miles. On this walk, I pass through a somewhat shabby area of town near highway overpasses where trash is often strewn about. Over the course of several walks, this stretch of two or three blocks caused me to feel disheartened and saddened by the selfish behavior of the human race.

Then one day, ahead of me, a girl on a bicycle acted in the most perfect manner. Coming across loose newspapers, she simply reached down, picked up a single piece of trash and threw it away. She clearly wasn't at all unhappy about it. It was simply the thing to do. One piece of trash.

I began to do the same. Coming across a cracked liquor bottle under the underpass, rather than fume about the selfish bastard who threw it from a car, I just picked it up and threw it away. It cost me no more time or effort, and my poor mind state was instantly relieved.

Responding automatically, intuitively, with simple logical action is perhaps all it takes to eliminate fear and resentment and longing and hope.

Early Morning Thought

One day in the garden called Eden, Adam and Eve decided that they were tired of all things being true, and that they would prefer to decide for themselves what things were true. To this day, they're still arguing about who exactly had this brilliant idea first, but for all intents and purposes, we can say that they decided it together.

At the moment they said to themselves "we have decided that these are the true and good things," all the other things became, by definition, false and evil.

And with that realization, Adam and Eve grumbled to themselves and left the garden. They weren't thrown out; they left of their own choice, because Paradise didn't match their expectation of a flawed world.

They left a symbolic world where all things were true, going instead to a mundane, literal world where it was necessary to choose truth on a case by case basis. This is what they wanted for themselves. They also were looking for the first Macy's store, needing clothes to cover their naughty bits. The literal world is much colder than paradise.

And that's pretty much where we've been ever since. We suffer because we reject symbolic reality, where one thing can mean many things; and insist on literal reality where one truth must exclude the others. I'd argue that the mantra of the suffering human condition can be summed up in these words: "This, not that."

From time to time, a few people have been able to look back over the river from Literal Land to Symbolic Eden. They are, by and large, the artists, poets and mystics, although they actually come from many vocations.

As I look at my bookshelf this morning, I see some evidence of these symbolic thinkers. One shelf up on the left is the Gnostic Gospel of St. Thomas, where Jesus is quoted as saying "heaven is right here in front of them, but they know it not."

The literalists, though, intent on their one reality, banished these words from the collection that went into the Bible, insisting that no, heaven had to be a tangible, real place that IS NOT HERE. Also: the flood REALLY HAPPENED. It didn't represent the symbolic truth of period catastrophe and re-creation.

A few books down is a collection of writings from Meister Eckhart von Hochheim, the 13th/14th century German Christian mystic. In one of those sermons, Eckhart says, in effect "forget that literal virgin birth stuff. What we should realize is that to experience God, the truth, we must empty ourselves and become virginal in terms of competing beliefs. We must all become virgins, if the infinite truth is to take root in us."


But the literalists of the day, insisting on their one truth, very nearly had Eckhart executed for the expression of these most logical symbolic truths. Nope, Mary WAS a virgin. And this IS Jesus' corpuscles you are swallowing. How dare you suggest symbolism.

On another of my bookshelves is a volume of collected works by William Blake, containing a poem where he says that holy joy becomes ours when we "see the world in a grain of sand, and eternity in an hour." Elsewhere he notes that "if the doors of perception where cleansed, we would see all things as they truly are——infinite." This is a perfect expression of symbolic life—living in a way where one thing means many things.

But the literalists, for whom an infinite universe is enormously threatening, have largely dismissed Blake as a diseased crackpot.

On the other shelf to the right of the window, there are all the books by Joseph Campbell. In The Masks of God Volume I, he makes the interesting observation that modern man has a more arid spiritual life than primitive peoples largely because we insist on literalness. The primitive tribesman doesn't really belief the spirit of his grandfather inhabits the tree standing outside the village; he doesn't really believe there are spirit voices in the sounds of water. But he finds that it makes him feel connected to the larger world, he finds the spirit of play nourishing to his soul, to enter into this playful "What if." The symbolic life is a more meaningful and rewarding life than a narrowly literal one.

Modern men, on the other hand, insist on that their beliefs must be more than beliefs, that they must be the one and only truth. No room for expansive symbolic truth, only the narrow literal pretense to truth. And their souls become spiritual deserts because of it.

When I scan my fellow modern men and women, I see something interesting. The happiest are those who have room for the symbolic life as well as the literal. I know a man once who recovered from serious mental illness—the kind that causes many to wind up carrying their belongings in a shopping cart. He acknowledges that he recovered when he found it possible to hold many realities at the same time. "I needed medical, scientific help, yes," he said. "But mine was also a psychological problem. And it was a religious problem. And a mystical problem.

"It wasn't one thing," he concluded. "It was—and is—all things."

That's What Friends Are For

Last week I got to hang out with a old friend that I haven't seen in more than a year. This friend, dear to me as a sister, has many of the same spiritual interests as do I, and so naturally this constitutes a lot of what we talk about.

Over coffee one morning, at one point she cocked her head and looked at me with a sort of bemused grin.

"What?" I said.

"Of all the people I know with some sort of serious spiritual practice," she said. "You might be the only one I know for whom the practice actually makes their life better, happier."

This statement both pleased me and saddened me. My friend almost certainly sees me as a little more serene and "together" than I actually am. I struggle mightily with insecurities and self doubts, though I have become kinder to myself in recent years. I catch myself behaving stupidly all the tim. But she is right in some ways: it is undeniably true that spirituality has made my life genuinely better, and this was the piece that pleased me--that the fact was obvious to others.

What saddened me was that the other half of the statement was also true. Lots and lot of people aren't really made better or happier by their spiritual practice at all, and this is truly a shame. And it suggests that something is wrong.

Quite a long time ago, I decided that the only legitimate goal of the spiritual instinct should be the pursuit of a genuine happiness and peace of mind, and it was perhaps this that my friend sensed in me. As we talked, though, we realized how many people we both knew for whom spirituality meant different things.

There are quite a lot of people, many of them participants in traditional church communities, whose traditions seem intent on convincing them of their loathsomeness, their shame. This was largely what the Lutherans wanted for me, all those years ago, and it was why I said no to that club. And in all the years since, I have rarely seen a Christian or Jewish worship service that didn't premise itself on the principle that humans are incorrigibly awful to start with. Nothing very happy in any of those places, at least that that I could see.

And we both knew people, many of them belonging to new age spiritual movements, who seemed to use spirituality to hide from their inherent unhappiness, changing directions frequently whenever the discipline of the month was no longer able to mask the truth. This kind of thing has been no more acceptable to me than the religions of damnation.

All this is largely why I tended toward the Buddhist philosophy a while back. Here, there was no deity, no real liturgy, only something that made common sense. For there is really only one prayer in all of Buddhism, and although the precise words vary, the idea expresses precisely what I believe:

"May all beings know happiness, and the causes of happiness."

I thought this expressed with brilliant simplicity what the spiritual instinct wants from our evolution, and thus that's the way I practice.

Spirituality for me, then, is actually rather scientific. The goal is to analyze the constituents of true happiness, to pursue behaviors that move us in that direction, and avoid behaviors that deter us from that goal. I have had moments that might rightly be called "mystical," but arriving there has always been a matter of following common sense and the logic of experience.

As we talked, I realized several things about the way I live (this is what good friends do for you: show you things about yourself).

First: I have gradually come to see that my times of unhappiness have largely been the result of attaching my identity to phenomenon that are inherently fleeting and impermanent. If I am not attached to one particular identity, I have nothing to defend and hence no loss to fear. And what sense is there in saying "That is me"? "That" changes in the very next moment, anyway, leaving "me" entirely in doubt.

Second: I learned that genuine, durable happiness had nothing to do with the pursuit of ecstatic excitement. It was not an easy lesson to learn, for I was something of an adrenaline junkie as a young man. Happiness for me, though, turned out to be equanimity and peace, not a pounding heart.

Third: Unhappiness always melts if I can introduce spaciousness into my experience. Suffering and unhappiness comes with the illusion that things are concrete. Space always brings happiness.

A Little More about Meditation

If you have a meditation practice of any kind, at some point you may want to try a variation known as tonglen, sometimes known as "taking and sending" meditation. Although I believe it originated in Tibetan Buddhist practice, the exercise isn't a religious ritual of any kind, so I think it's not likely to trouble anyone, even Christians.

Tonglen, like most forms of meditation, is a breath-based practice, and its essence is very simple: On inhalations, you visualize that you are taking in the pain and suffering of other people; and on exhalations, you are giving away your goodness to the world—offering up any and all pleasant feeling and good will you can find within you.

When I first started the practice, I was surprised to find how much resistance I had to it. Though I imagined myself to be a more or less compassionate person, there was a silent resentment to the notion of giving away my goodness and breathing in the pain and suffering of others. I began to see how conditioned I was (perhaps how conditioned we all are) to defend ourselves against pain and suffering, and to collect and hold whatever kind of pleasantness we can find in life.

Tonglen offers a way to test out what it might be like to drop that habitual defensiveness and territoriality. The results are best experienced when the practice no longer seems symbolic, but when you adopt it quite literally. You genuinely do feel that you are giving away all that is good and pleasant within you, and that you are absorbing very real pain of others. On every outbreath, you take a leap of faith and offer every last ounce of happiness you have, with no expectation of return.

If you can take the leap and practice this way in a very literal fashion, a pretty stunning realization soon sets in. No matter how much goodness you give away, more reappears instantly to replace it. It isn't a limited resource at all, but one that flows freely if you simply unclog the pipes. Even at a moment of deep despair or depression, you can, on every exhalation, always find some goodness to be handing off to others. In fact, times of low spirit are the best time to practice tonglen. And rather than feeling depleted by the suffering of other people entering you, it begins to feel like a form of nourishment. The pain you inhale is the fuel that is transformed into the peace you breathe back out. It is like the carbon dioxide inhaled by plants that they may exhale oxygen.

Your assumptions pretty soon get turned entirely upside down, for you recognize that there was never any reason to defend yourself, nor any reason to hoard goodness in any way. Rather than living in a miserly way, counting pennies, you can freely walk, because the ground is pretty well covered in gold coins. Rather than living from a perspective of poverty and deficit, we start to feel free .

Like many such practices from my adopted tradition, tonglen isn't so much a moral practice as a practical one. This is one aspect that seems quite alien to people who come from a Christian/Muslim/Judaic tradition. Giving away goodness isn't a sacrifice we make in order to be deserving of goodness in return. We do it because the tangible evidence shows that softening the ego and reversing our habits makes us feel happier in a genuine way.

Unlike some Western traditions, which are based on a kind of economic model in which we must "buy" our happiness or salvation through good deeds, in this tradition we just follow the evidence. Living in openness just plain feels better, and that's the only reason we need. It's not a matter of living in a manner that pleases some higher power into rewarding us. We live this way because it works, here and now.

Alaya, part II

Since Sacred Slut and Glamourpuss asked for more information, I'll add just a bit to the somewhat overblown description of a Buddhist meditation exercise posted previously. First, though, I'd like to add that I have no desire to convert or convince anybody that my way in the world is somewhat right. I'm quite aware that it's not for everybody, and I offer these ideas simply because they work for me, for the benefit of anyone who might be interested in such things.

Sacred Slut asks "what's the point", and then argues that Buddhism's attempt to "erase consciousness" is counterproductive.

Speaking for myself, the answer is that the point of such practice is to experience a different kind of consciousness in which there is genuine freedom. We're not trying to erase consciousness at all, but to find it. The frantic mental activity that is called consciousness in common vernacular is, for us, a rather hollow phenomenon. For myself, the practice is actually quite scientific, since I do nothing except follow the evidence of my own experience.

I practice because I'm happier and freer for it. I did not find this freedom in traditional scientific pursuit, though I did indeed try mightily for a long while. Science didn't make me happy. This does.

Glamourpuss then concurred with Sacred, at least partially, saying that she felt more akin to the practice of trantra than Buddhism.

This is fine. In reality, true tantra arose out of Hindu and Buddhist traditions, and all Buddhists would have genuine admiration for disciples of tantra.

While tantra today is sometimes criticized for a hedonistic practice, in truth the goal of all tantric practice is the pursuit of enlightenment in a single lifetime, rather than in repeated rebirths. So rather than avoid earthly, sensual experience, these energies are welcomed and harnessed in the hopes that new consciousness will be opened. Tantra is a perfectly viable spiritual practice.

True tantra welcomes all the pleasures (and pains) of life, knowing that they are natural and exist for a purpose. These are extremely powerful energies, though, and practitioners are always cautioned to be diligent. The goal isn't pleasure for its own sake, but pleasure as an energy of awakening.

By the way, Sacred Slut and Glamourpuss are extremly talented writers. You'd be well advised to check out their work. They are bookmarked in the list to the left.

Rest in the Nature of Alaya

There is a Buddhist meditation exercise that is translated as “resting in the nature of alaya,” or sometimes as “resting in unborn awareness.” The practice is relatively simple, though it does require a relaxed kind of precision. The experience of alaya is quite powerful—so much so that upon glimpsing it a novice may well imagine that he’s very nearly all the way to enlightenment. In reality, though, this is an instruction given to beginners, and arriving at a recognition of alaya only indicates an entry to more serious, fruitful path.

In the Buddhist psychological system, there are many types of consciousness—some schools list eight. There are the various consciousnesses of the physical senses, for example—seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, smelling. Then there is the consciousness of recognizing thoughts as they occur. And there is the consciousness that fully experiences the “waterfall”—the cacophony of all the other consciousnesses bumping off one another in cause-and-effect fashion. This seventh consciousness might be called an awareness of karma.

Behind all this, though, is a state of consciousness known as alaya, which is a “store” or “ground” consciousness out of which all the others are thought to originate. This is a state which makes no distinctions or judgments, but simply knows things as they are. It is non-dual awareness which makes no particular distinction between subject and object.

As anyone engaged in serious practice comes to understand, a lot of the focus and concentration practice—carefully following the breath in mediation, for example—is aimed at nothing more than bringing us to the preliminary recognition of alaya. You can practice for many years, hone your ability to focus intently on the breath, only to finally realize that you’ve reach a starting point where all this focus can be surrendered in order get to the real business at hand.

I’d like to say that after 30 years of meditation practice I rest in alaya all the time. This isn’t even remotely true, unfortunately. There are many meditation sessions where my jumpy mind never relaxes enough to rest there, and even during a very good meditation session, I may feel like no more than a few minutes of an hour session has really put me in this territory.

But even a few minutes resting in alaya can flavor your outlook for days to come. I will sometimes enjoy a full week of a remarkably peaceful and harmonious outlook on life after a good meditation session.

I think that everybody needs to develop their own means of courting alaya, but for me the process is something like this:

Once a basic breathing meditation has calmed and slowed the mind enough that I can easily recognize the various activities arising and falling there, I begin to pay attention to each and every instance where the mind judges or catalogs or distinguishes between this and that. I allow each of these value judgments to dissolve without clinging to them in any way. Gradually, as I stop gripping onto judgments of good or bad, desirable or undesirable, a consciousness of an entirely different form arises. My sense, when this arrives, is that I’m seeing things more as they truly are.

At first glance, you may dismiss the feeling as one of inner laziness, since there is utterly nothing to do, nothing to accomplish in any fashion. You are simply experiencing, and there is no goal whatsoever. However, there is also a laser-sharp clarity to this consciousness that is entirely unique. There is nothing drowsy about this state, at all, so you’ll recognize that it’s something entirely different. Your attachment to language, even, begins to be surrendered.

Occasionally, similes occur to me that indicate what my experience of alaya is like.

If consciousness is a sandy beach, alaya is present when the waves have erased all ripples in the sand, all footprints, all sand castles. Normal consciousness tightly defends footprints in the sand; alaya consciousness relaxes into the plasticity of sand.

If consciousness is an ocean, reaching alaya consciousness is to drift down beneath the turbulence of surface waves and foam, and dwell in the peace of the ocean depths, out of which waves come and go freely. It is, however, a kind of water which doesn’t drown you, but feeds your lungs.

And sometimes, peculiarly, I see alaya as vast, felt-covered billiards table. And rather than being obsessed and attached to the action of pool balls careening about in cause-and-effect geometry, I find it possible to rest in the background without concern for temporary things.

It is important, though, to understand that resting in alaya is just a practice in pursuit of the goal. It is not the goal itself.

Reality on the 4F

Last night I left the office promptly at 5:00, and this combined with the fact that it was the first evening of daylight saving time meant that I commuted home in broad daylight for the first time in months. It's been a long, long lonely winter here in Minnesota, but now, even when the temps are a mere 20 degrees, the sun is beginning to burn away the glaciers heaped over the curbs and sidewalks. We've yet to have that glorious evening when the temperatures stay well above freezing all night long, but even so the crusty mounds of ice are now shrinking by the hour. Soon, they'll have vanished entirely from the visible city streets, and it will only be deep in the back alleys in the canyons between tall buildings where the ice will continue to live. Most years, a bit of ice lives back there until early June.

The 6:00 pm city this time of year looks much different in broad daylight. But although clearly Spring is coming, what I saw as I looked out the bus windows in detached reverie last night is not pure growth and renewal, but a strange sort of dance between the energies of creation and of decay.

Everywhere I look there is creation and decay existing side by side. New buildings are sprouting while other buildings are corroding away. On some of the existing buildings, new roofs or siding are coalescing, even as the old materials are sloughing away. In some of the buildings, businesses have decayed and died, while new businesses take shape and move in. This is true of all businesses. Even Microsoft will one day fade away, as did TWA and other monster corporations before it.

The sun itself is decaying beautiful ice formations, even as it is warming the flesh of trees and prompting them toward new buds. We pass by a beautiful brick building that is being gradually eaten by the new creation of thick vines that have sprouted up and are enveloping the structure with greenery that will gradually devour the mortar.

We pass by a small park on Bryant Avenue, and on the sidewalk a bright young mother pushing an infant in a stroller briskly passes by an ancient woman walking with a cane in tiny steps, her bowed head nearly hidden by a thick scarf tied beneath her chin. I am struck by the fact that these two women are closely related, that they depend on one another for the reality of who they are at this very moment.

The dance between decay and creation is so close, so intimate, that it is virtually sexual. The two energies could not possibly be separated.

There is nothing whatsoever qualitative about this truth. It simply is what it is, and for that reason is completely noble and elegant. All our judgments and preferences for creation over decay are human conceits alone, and have no bearing on the truth of the world. The fact that human beings often are pleased by newness and freshness and repulsed by decay is entirely irrelevant. The fact that we may be attracted to a fresh young baby and repulsed by the specter of aging and death says nothing about one being preferable to the other.

At most, this human preference is merely a manifestation of the universe's creative energy. The fact that we like newness is nothing more than the universe's creative energy channeling through us. The energy of decay also flows through us, since it may also be common for us to decry change, to prefer seasoned age over plastic newness. Perhaps even our occasionally self-destructive behavior is nothing more than a natural expression of the energy of decay.

The world takes on a different appearance in this frame of mind. There is a certain beauty in decay, as it is the natural forerunner to creative newness. A building facade ornamented with a vandal's colorful grafitti is not inherently much different than the same store front painted with the admonishment of a store owner to COME IN AND BUY. A pot-holed, cracked street isn't particularly ugly, but a promise that some day the earth will reclaim the tarmac and cover it over with meadows. An elderly gentleman, stooped with arthritis, causes me to imagine his possible grandchildren, who at this moment may be growing at the same rate this old fellow is fading.

There is no reason to pass judgment on this fact. It is what it is, and is hence beautiful and perfect.

Thoughts on a Cold Morning

It was a long, odd week, and I very much needed the three-hour walk in 5 degree temps this morning to clear my head of it all. Friend Stacey might say that it was a week where certain alignment of heavenly bodies led to spiritual discomfort for us all. I'm admittedly a bit skeptical of the horoscopic diagnosis, but I have to admit that everybody seemed at a higher pitch of prickly edginess than usual this week.

At work, I noticed that lots of people were elevating the smallest provocation to disastrous proportions, and this would have offered a fascinating subject for study, if it wasn't for the fact that they seemed to want me to solve each catastrophe.

But it did give me an opportunity to once again observe a very common little human trait. It was present in spades all week long, and yes, there were also times when I caught myself in exactly the same fallacy.

We all have a tendency to think that our perceptions--our thoughts and feelings about a given circumstance--are actually objective facts. It's not so.

"X, he hates me," one worker said to me matter-of-factly this week, speaking of another coworker during a one-on-one session.

"Really?" I said in surprise. "I didn't know that. When did he tell you?"

"He hasn't told me" my worker said. "But he hates me."

"Mmm," I said. "I am surprised. X tells me lots of things, but he hasn't mentioned this yet. Did you hear it from somebody else?"

"No," I was told. "But I know it."

" Did you see it in a memo he wrote?"

"No," came the reply, impatiently. "Can't you take my word for it? It's a fact. He hates me."

I decided to take just a small step. "Well, it appears that you FEEL that X hates you. That's the fact I'm seeing."

My worker looked at me blankly. "What the hell are you talking about?"

How would my worker take the next idea, I wondered. It was worth an experiment, even though I really should have known better. "Your thoughts, your feelings, are inner events," I said. ". They're only true in the world of your mind. They say nothing about the world out there."

I had gone too far, I saw immediately. Introspection isn't for everybody.

Once upon a time, there came a somewhat life-changing moment for me when I suddenly recognized that an enormous amount of emotional baggage I had been wrestling with for much of my life was quite simply NOT REAL. These things were nothing more than mind states, and had no connection to larger, concrete truth whatsoever. A few inches outside my skull, none of the anguish I had been feeling existed at all. This recognition was unbelievably freeing to me. I simply didn't have to lend a lot of weight to anything that had no objective reality. I didn't have to keep feeding energy to such nonsense.

What this implies, ultimately, is that the only world we really know is a world of mind, and so that's where the problem-solving efforts need to dwell. I one had a worker tell me that he had worked for 15 bosses over the years, each one of which who had deliberately intended to set him up for failure. The stunning nature of such a coincidence did not register with him. Somehow, he had stumbled upon descendants of Hitler in 15 consecutive jobs. For 20 years he had bounced from job to job, each time believing that his mildly paranoid feeling was based on a concrete truth "out there" rather than an inner condition.

My wife and I have a friend who has been in relationships four times to selfish men. Each time, she expects to cause changes to her partners; but she has yet to wonder why it is that she seeks out men so skilled at making her miserable. "Men are such shits," she says, "why won't they change?" as we silently change the pronoun. The strange twists of logic used by this friend are too numerous to mention.

These are dramatic examples, but I think on quieter levels we do the same thing almost every day. We react to thoughts and feelings as though they represent laws of physics, as though they are monuments of stone.

I can hear an argument building from some of my friends that are highly skilled in logic, so I'll address it right away.

I'm not trying to argue the case for solipsism--the belief that the mind is what literally creates the physical world. I think solipsism represents a terrible form of human arrogance. But I would argue that most of what causes us to suffer is a subjective, inner event, not a fact of the world.

When we're suffering, it makes no sense to try and change the world. What makes sense is to return home and heal.