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.

To be grateful is to be open to the mystery

We could say we are all searching for something. We sometimes receive a glimpse of a something which seems to be very much like the something we are looking for, but this something initally doesn’t act in a way we have been led to believe the something we are searching for would behave. This something seems to be always available, yet we cannot grasp it.
 
Perhaps this something flows like fluids and electrolytes between the extracellular and intracellular compartments in cells by passive diffusion. Could it be that this something, like water, flows from an area of high concentration to an area of less concentration?
 
The fullness of awareness, of presence, of joy flows into us to the degree we become empty.
 
T.S. Elliot put it this way:
 
 
In order to possess what you do not possess,
    you must go by way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
     you must go by the way in which you are not.
 
 
Aren’t there moments when seemingly out of the blue we get a glimpse of the ground of our being?
 
Perhaps the experience, however fleeting, leave us somehow knowing intuitively that we are both at home here and now and yet somehow on the way to this here and now.
 
This is not about either or but rather and.
 
Could this be the starting point and the end of the spiritual journey?
 
Again, T. S. Elliot:
 
 
….the end precedes the beginning,
and the end and the beginning we always there
Before the beginning  and after the end.
And all is always now….
 
 
We seem to have two aspects of the experience of the something we are searching for–it’s here and it isn’t.
 
It’s here when we are open and empty to it, as if simply flows in like water from a place of greater concentration to a quiet heart.
 
But while there it can’t be grasped.
 
This is where the experience of the Christian mystics is so illuminating–they speak in all the world’s languages of God’s immanence (being closer to me than I am to myself) and Her transcendence—(beyond the beyond, beyond time, space, birth, death).
 
Let’s hear what the the Rinzai Master Hakuin said about this in 18th century Japan:
 
 
Living beings originally are Buddha.
 
            It is the same with water and ice.
 
There is no ice separate from water;
 
Outside of living beings, no Buddha.
 
Because living beings are unconscious of the intimate,
 
            They seek it far away. Alas how pitiful!
 
It is like the examples of someone sitting in the middle of water
 
            But crying out in thirst; and,
 
While still being the son of a millionaire’s family,
 
As a strange good-for-nothing he loses his way in the countryside living in poverty.
 
The causes and conditions of the revolving wheel of the six appearances
 
            Are but one’s own road through the darkness of ignorance;
 
The several perfections such as charity, morality, and such;
 
            Chanting Buddha’s name, confession and repentance, austerities, and the like;
 
The many good deeds and various virtuous pilgrimages;
 
All these are coming from within it.

the church of what’s happening now

Our son Kupai started Kindergarten last week. When I woke him up for school the other day I asked him how he had slept. He said that it was really frustrating that after we read him his story and kiss him goodnight he thinks about the events of the day. He explained that he thinks of some apparently very meaningful things to say about his life “but there’s no one to tell” about these insights, as he is all alone with the lights off in his bedroom.  

When I heard him relate this complaint, the thought of Ryokan, the 18th century Japanese hermit monk flashed into my mind. (After all these years of meditation I have come to accept that I do indeed have a monkey mind, and there’s no changing this). There is one poem of his I vaguely remembered as my son mentioned this grievance. Later that day I looked through his poems and found the poem that had partially come into my mind:  

Light sleep, the bane of old age:

Dozing off, evening dreams, waking again.

The fire in the hearth flickers; all night a steady rain

Pours off the banana tree.

Now is the time I wish to share my feelings –

But there is no one.  

I am struck by the juxtaposition of the pre-sleep ruminations of a five year old boy and those of an elderly hermit Buddhist monk two hundred years before. Both deal with insights, isolation, the need to be with, to connect, the loneliness of awareness, and the awareness of loneliness.  

Over the years, I’ve come to realize that my true home is my life as it is, not as I want it to be, or as it used to be, or as it should be according to some spiritual notion, but as it is.
 
I find I need to remind myself of this simple fact daily!  

Sometimes it is messy, badly in need of repairs, or unpleasant, but whatever it is, it’s my home nonetheless; I can only live this life, even if I don’t particularly like it right now.  

Here is another poem, this one is by another Japanese Zen teacher, Gesshu Soko:  

Breathing in, breathing out,

Moving forward, moving back,

Living, dying, coming, going –

Like two arrows meeting in flight,

In the midst of nothingness

There is a road that goes directly

to my true home. 

Gesshu Soko wrote this poem shortly before he died. It speaks to me more about life than about death. I hear him saying that our true home is right in the middle of what’s happening now, whether it be living or dying, moving forward or moving back, coming or going.  

When we are fully with with things as they are, we meet the circumstances of our lives like two arrows shot from different directions coming together point-to-point in mid-air. Breathing in or breathing out, we live our lives as they are, not as we want them to be or they were.  

This moment, now, is our true home. The road that goes directly to our true home is the road that leads to this moment. That road doesn’t go anywhere. It doubles back on itself and leads to this moment, as it is.    

Walking the road of this moment is challenging. It is a lifelong practice. It can be a breeze when we are on easy street and difficult when we don’t like where it leads, the now that is pain or regret.  

Because our life as it is is our true home, we can never really step outside of it (death is another issue, and who really knows what happens then?) 

Although Buddhism promises an “end to suffering,” the way to this end leads through it, not around it. There are no shortcuts. And I feel we never really experience and end to suffering once and for all. Maybe some people do. But it is not helpful for me to have that as some goal, as any thought of a goal takes out of now into some “then.” There is always only now.  

I like to think sometimes of the character Flip Wilson, the great comedian who died in 1998, created back in the early 1970’s: Reverend Leroy, a minister of the Church of What’s Happening Now! 
It’s always only what’s happening now. I am a very happy parishioner in this church.  

Earlier we read Gesshu Soko write:

Breathing in, breathing out,

Moving forward, moving back,

Living, dying, coming, going – 

This about covers our life. Like two arrows meeting point-to-point in mid-flight, we need to meet our lives totally and fully in each moment, again and again. This is our true home. We must live here, for it is only there that we are fully alive, in the church of what’s happening now.

Let’s let Geraldine, one of Flip’s great characters on his show, have the last line:

“What you see is what you get!”

from dread to delight-faith in the present moment

As we approach the end of another year, perhaps we have become more aware of the passage of time. This awareness may pop up in the midst of rushing around, going to the post office, shopping, and then it’s buried. I get stopped in my tracks when I sit down to meditate, and remember, after some initial struggles, the wonder of the present moment. At these stilled moments, the so-called passage of timer is not vaguely dreadful, rather, it is a delight like no other.

I’d like to share some passages from reading I have been doing from the works of Thomas Merton. The idea of taking time to experience, to savor, to let life fully come to itself in us, was a key idea in Thomas Merton’s reflections on spiritual practice.

“If we really want prayer, we’ll have to give it time. We must slow down to a human tempo and we’ll begin to have time to listen. And as soon as we listen to what’s going on, things will begin to take shape by themselves. But for this we have to experience time in a new way. “

“The reason why we don’t take time is a feeling that we have to keep moving. This is a real sickness. Today time is commodity, and for each one of us time is mortgaged. We experience time as unlimited indebtedness. We are sharecroppers of time. We are threatened by a chain reaction: overwork–over stimulation–overcompensation–overkill. “

“We must approach the whole idea of time in a new way. We are free to love. And you must get free from all imaginary claims. We live in the fullness of time. Every moment is God’s own good time, his kairos. The whole thing boils down to giving ourselves in prayer a chance to realize that we have what we seek. We don’t have to rush after it. It is there all the time, and if we give it time it will make itself known to us.”

The present moment delights us. It is the only opportunity for grace and mystery. In the words of Mary Margaret Funk, O.S.B.,

“When we’re on this path we prefer to be hidden and ordinary since anonymity helps us replace self with faith. There is freedom and low stress here as we learn only to do what is inspired by the impulse of grace: no more, no less. All ambitions are ruled off the agenda.”

so simple

This whole thing is so simple. It’s our mind’s deeply entrenched habit to want to make this more complicated than it really is. And we get little help from many Buddhist scriptural and other tradition-bound sources–if anything, studying, reading or listening may leave us with nothing more than a headache.

Meditation is simple resting: resting in observation and in direct experience. What happens when we observe? Our mind shifts from thinking to simple awareness. When thinking takes center stage, our attention is sucked into a stream of thoughts and associations.

Observation, or awareness, is the releasing of thinking. Thought actually takes effort, but we don’t appreciate this until we relax in the releasing of thought. It’s not that we try not to think, that’s not what I mean by releasing thinking.

Trying not to think is crazy making tension. We relax into an open, spacious awareness of thinking as it happens, if it happens (and it usually does). This relaxed observation takes no effort at all. It’s like slipping into a calm lake, making not a single wave or splash. When we shift form compulsive thought to relaxed observation many folks notice a corresponding muscular relaxation.

There is nothing magic or special about this observation. No trick or special technique. As the Nike folks say, just just do it.

Some of the most eloquent words in this area that I have read come from Toni Packer. Toni is a former zen teacher — her life was immersed in rituals and ceremonies and koans. Then the discovery came that nothing is required. Toni now speaks of opening, of listening without resistance or effort to the newness of every moment.

“Sitting quietly, doing nothing, not knowing what is next and not concerned with what was or what may be next, a new mind is operating that is not connected with the conditioned past and yet perceives and understands the whole mechanism of conditioning. It is the unmasking of the self that is nothing but masks—images, memories of past experiences, fears, hopes, and the ceaseless demand to be something or become somebody. This new mind … is free of duality—there is no doer in it and nothing to be done.

The moment duality ceases, energy that has been tied up in conflict and division begins to function wholly, intelligently, caringly. The moment self-centeredness takes over the mind, energy is blocked and diverted in fearing and wanting; one is isolated in one’s pleasures, pain, and sorrow.

The moment this process is completely revealed in the light of impartial awareness, energy gathers and flows freely, undividedly, all-embracingly.

Awareness, insight, enlightenment, wholeness—whatever words one pay pick to label what cannot be caught in words—is not the effect of a cause. Activity does not destroy it and sitting does not create it. It isn’t a product of anything—no technique, method, environment, tradition, posture, activity, or nonactivity can create it. It is there, uncreated, freely functioning in wisdom and love, when self-centered conditioning is clearly revealed in all its grossness and subtleness and defused in the light of understanding.”

Toni Packer, The Work of This Moment, p.61

“Sentient beings are in essence buddhas
It is like water and ice. There is no ice without water,
There are no buddhas outside sentient beings.
What a shame, sentient beings seek afar,
Not knowing what is at hand. It is like wailing from thirst
In the midst of water.”

–Hakuin Ekaku, 1685-1768

chasing phantom treasure

We find ourselves very often chasing phantom treasure. We keep falling for it–the future is where we will find this treasure. No matter how often you seem to “get” it, a new it to get pops up. Why don’t we consider the radical possibility that treasure is looking for treasure?

If that is allowed as a possibility, then treasure can discover itself. No looking outward or impossibly forward in time.

That’s the point of this story: Ten folks set off on a pilgrimage in ancient India. The come to a great river, with a treacherous crossing. Once across the leader of this group decides to count everybody to make sure they all made it across safely. The man could only count nine people. He began searching for the tenth person. He split them up in different groups, six and three, five and four seven and two, and still could only come up with nine.

An old fisherman sitting on the banks mending his net pointer to the “seeker” and said to him “You are the tenth person. The seeker is the sought.”

At that point, as in all good spiritual stories, the seeker woke up to his true nature.

We imagine we will find what we are seeking outside ourselves, and go looking everywhere for this elusive and final satisfaction, all the while neglecting the seeker, our self. Rather than an Object to be sought, the goal of spiritual practice is a Subject to be experienced.

We are already what we are seeking. Seeking compounds the problem–creating phantom treasure, as seeking implies we do not already have what we are seeking.

The seeker and the sought belong to this illusion-making apparatus, evolutionarily designed for survival, that creates a “me” and everything else that is not me.

Allow for a moment the radical possibility that there is no gap between who we are and what we are seeking.

It’s all just timeless wonder and mystery. It’s absolutely delightful when you drop the impulse to squirm out of totality and simply be.

“From the beginning, all beings are Buddha; Like water and ice, without water no ice, Outside us, no Buddhas. How near the Truth, yet how far we seek?”
Hakuin Zenji (1686 1769)