Do you pay regular visits to yourself?

  

“We meet at this appointed time.

You’ve read where it says that

Lovers pray constantly.

Once a day, once a week, five times an hour,

Is not enough. Fish like we

Need the ocean around us.

Do camel-bells say, Let’s meet again

Thursday night?

Ridiculous. They jingle

Together continuously,

Talking while the camel walks.

Do you pay regular visits to yourself?

Don’t argue or answer rationally.

And dying, reply.”

 

From The Illumined Rumi, p. 122

 

All traditions claim they have the answers. But those answers must somehow come from within. Answers that come from books or someone else don’t satisfy, they are empty answers. They are somebody else’s answer. 

 

So we die to ourselves, our small selves, as Rumi suggests, and are reborn, in a sense, in present moment awareness. 

 

H.M.L. Poonja is said to have remarked to one of his students: “You visited the travel agent, bought the ticket, packed your bags, now why do you keep getting out of your seat to push the plane? Buckle up and enjoy the ride.”

 

So much of this work is about undoing.  Not pushing the river. We enjoy the ride of the present moment.

 

It’s about releasing resistance to experiencing what is. Subtle agendas so easily creep in to our practice. We release them, too.

 

All we can take care of is this present moment. We simply surrender (and die) to what is. 

 

Meditation is a path of coming home to who we are right now, not getting some mystical or altered states or changing into some fabulous new person.

 

Joy, freedom, truth, beauty is always right here. We relax back into inhabiting what we are, being who we already are.

 

At first we need to establish a regular practice, we pay regular visits to ourselves, as Rumi instructs. Later, we pray constantly, as Rumi suggests, by releasing into the present moment no matter what that’s like.

 

What keeps us trapped are the deeply seated habits of manipulating and resisting our present moment experience.

 

Our lives are like a cocoon in which we try really hard to stay comfortable and cozy and safe. Yet it’s stale in the cocoon. We recognize at some level that we have an ache in our heart that we are holding back somehow, we are not living up to what we are spiritually capable of, by reinforcing this cocoon of the small, fearful self. 

 

Many of us deeply sense this pervasive sense of lack. 

 

This sense of lack is perpetuated by our identification with thought. I can’t remember now who made this remark, but it’s on target: thinking is the ego’s foot soldiers. 

 

We identify with thinking as belonging to us. 

 

At best, thinking is an approximate symbolic representation of reality. The problem is that we often let thinking take the place of reality. 

 

In meditation we clearly see how thought diverts our attention into the past or the future. When we mature in the practice we learn to rest in the present moment, in the heart of reality. 

 

That’s why the core instruction in our practice is to simply recognize thinking as thinking and return to the moment to moment experience of body sensations or sound. Sounds and body sensations are unfolding in the heart of reality. 

 

We just rest backwards into what is. What we seek is what we are. 

 

This essential backward step, as they say in zen, is described beautifully by the poet David Whyte in his poem Tilocho Lake: 

 

“In this high place

it is as simple as this,

leave everything you know behind.

Step toward the cold surface,

say the old prayer of rough love

and open both arms.

 

Those who come with empty hands

will stare into the lake astonished,

there, in the cold light

reflecting pure snow,

 

the true shape of your own face.” 

 

David Whyte, from Where Many Rivers Meet

Twenty minutes more or less

 

 ”My fiftieth year had come and gone,
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop,
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table-top.
While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and could bless.”

W. B. Yeats (1865-1939), in part IV of his poem “Vacillation” from The Winding Stair and Other Poems, (1933)

This poem for me speaks of being surprised by rapture, when the soul is at ease perhaps, or not, of moments where for no apparent reason, we find ourselves relishing the sweet taste of pure, causeless joy.

The poet is sitting in a crowded London shop, could it like sitting in a coffee shop in our day, alone with our thoughts, thinking of the passage of time. His fiftieth year had come and gone. He was reading a book, it seems, and now he has left the pages to allow his mind to wander, to look around, and to take in the sights of the crowded shop. The open book and the empty cup no longer have much pull, as they rest on the marble table-top.

Then his body of a sudden blazed. His mind is no longer wandering, no longer seemingly melancholic. And his happiness in that moment was so great that religious tones now appear-he felt in his bones that he was blessed and could bless.

Twenty minutes more or less, to me sounds timeless, and a bit playful.

We could read into this all sorts of things, and it doesn’t matter, really, what actually happened. What matters for me is the evocative quality. Of feeling our aliveness break through the slumber of our humdrum days. We sense this in so-called special moments, of noticing a child’s first tooth, or a sunset, a birth or a death.

Meditation turns special moments on their head. For twenty minute so we explore how it is we succumb to the tranquilization of the trivial, the numbness of the mundane. It turns out we don’t need special moments to do this. All moments are seen as special.

For twenty minutes or so we enter the timeless, we take our seat in eternity.

The poet speaks of his body being ablaze. It’s interesting he doesn’t mention his mind. At the beginning of this excerpt he is self-centered, melancholic. For twenty minutes his body comes alive.

Let’s not underestimate the power of our simple practice. We sit, we become aware of sounds, and then we settle the mind into the sensuous, lush undulations of body sensations. We shift from being a witness to our life to living our life moment by moment within the fold of our life. Within the beating, rising and falling heart of experience itself.

For twenty minute more or less we morph into reality itself, bare, bottomless, and beautiful beyond description.

We allow our body to live its life. And it responds by suddenly blazing into life.

The gateway to the blaze of bliss is simply the willingness to feel. To feel the body just as it is, moment by moment. We can call this willingness to feel openness.

This week I spoke a little about openness, with a little help from the dictionary. One definition of to open is to unclose so as to allow passage. Another is to unlock, to remove the covering. Two others which are particularly appropriate for us are to make known what is happening and to burst and discharge, as in an old wound.

Openness is not a goal; rather it’s a relationship to what is happening as its happening. And since what is happening is already happening, there isn’t much room here for accomplishments, effort or special feats.

I feel we could summarize the whole spiritual path with the acronym O.I. A. – openness, intimacy and acceptance. In the next two weeks I would like to explore with you the remaining two aspects of intimacy and acceptance.

Why I Meditate (After Allen Ginsberg) by Wes Nisker

“I meditate because I suffer. I suffer, therefore I am. I am, therefore I meditate.

I meditate because there are so many other things to do. 

I meditate because when I was younger it was all the rage. 

I meditate because Siddhartha Gautama, Bodhidharma, Marco Polo, the British Raj, Carl Jung, Alan Watts, Jack Kerouac, Alfred E Neuman, et al. 

I meditate because evolution gave me a big brain, but it didn’t come with an instruction manual. 

I meditate because I have all the information I need. 

I meditate because the largest colonies of living beings, the coral reefs, are dying. 

I meditate because I want to touch deep time, where the history of humanity can be seen as just an evolutionary adjustment period. 

I meditate because life is too short and sitting slows it down. 

I meditate because life is too long and I need an occasional break. 

I meditate because I want to experience the world as Rumi did, or Walt Whitman, or as Mary Oliver does. 

I meditate because now I know that enlightenment doesn’t exist, so I can relax.

I meditate because of the Dalai Lama’s laugh. 

I meditate because there are too many advertisements in my head, and I’m erasing all but the very best of them. 

I meditate because the physicists say there may be eleven dimensions to reality, and I want to get a peek into a few more of them. 

I meditate because I’ve discovered that my mind is a great toy and I like to play with it. 

I meditate because I want to remember that I’m perfectly human. 

Sometimes I meditate because my heart is breaking. 

Sometimes I meditate so that my heart will break. 

I meditate because a Vedanta master once told me that in Hindi my name, Nis-ker, means “non-doer.” 

I meditate because I’m growing old and want to become more comfortable with emptiness.”

This unrepeatble life

There was a Hassidic master of the late eighteenth century named Zusya of Anipoli.  He is portrayed in several Hassidic tales as humble and lighthearted. In one of the tales, told by Martin Buber in his Tales of the Hasidim (vol. 1, pg 251), Zusya was on his deathbed and those who were close with him came to be with him and to perhaps here his last words.  

Sometime during this process he is alleged to have said “When I get to the Heavenly Court they will not ask me “Why were you not one of the great masters like Moses?” They will ask me “Why were you not Zusya?” 

In what way are we not ourselves? 

We spend a lot of time lost in thought, and to even call it thought is often charitable. We also spend a considerable portion of life outside the body–not literately, of course.  

James Joyce, in one of his short stories in Dubliners, makes a mind-stopping observation about one of his characters: 

“Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body.” 

I think what is being asked here is what if we are not truly living the life we were given? And what does this mean?  

As the year comes to a close, I think it might be beneficial to look back and ask to what degree were we living a little ways off from our life? 

How often do we give in to fear and slinker away from the being true to our self, from being intimate? How often do we given in to cynicism? To analyzing our life in terms of calculating the odds of gaining advantage or of losing ground?  

We can talk the talk, but walking the path means to be truly human, to really live this precious, unrepeatable life.  Buddhism challenges us to choose forbearance, patience and understanding over self-interest and quick solutions. The path prompts us to shake loose those aspects of our self which aren’t genuine. We get to know them very well when we take our seat and make a commitment to be with our selves.  

“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience,” Pierre Teilhard de Chardin wrote.  

The Zen teacher Cheri Huber, in Trying to be Human, tweaked this phrase a little when she wrote “we are not human beings trying to be spiritual, but spiritual beings trying to be human.” 

What if the true human being is utterly ordinary? Yet extraordinary in her utter simplicity and clarity of being? That’s the challenge and the invitation of maturing Dharma practice.

At home in the house of the living

PAX

All that matters is to be at one with the living God
To be a creature in the house of the God of Life.

Like a cat asleep on a chair
at peace, in peace
and at one with the master of the house, with the
mistress
at home, at home in the house of the living,
sleeping on the hearth, and yawning before the fire.

Sleeping on the hearth of the living world,
yawning at home before the fire of life
feeling the presence of the living God
like a great reassurance
a deep calm in the heart
a presence
as of a master sitting at the board
in his own and greater being,
in the house of life.

– by D.H. Lawrence