Awake in This Life

I admit that I was transfixed by the Olympics last night. It was amazing to watch Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt do the impossible.

But I Tivo’d Rick Warren’s interview with Obama and McCain last night and upon my early morning review, and then listening to the Sunday Morning TV Gab, I came away with an interesting mix of feelings.

First of all, I’m interested in how many Americans are truly interested in the depth of a candidates religious convictions and what this might or might not imply.

Further, what does it say about a person running for office if they cling to the ideas that support a mythic god?

Then, to what extent, and in what capacity, should those of us who don’t cling to a mythic god care about what the candidates said last night?

Michael Paulson of the Boston Globe writes well about the event, as does Andrew Sullivan.

So often we can get caught by our preferences; especially those surrounding tradition. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing since our preferences are what lead us into a practice in the first place. But what I’ve noticed in myself, my teachers, and my students is that satori is such a necessary and yet partial pointer. While Emptiness might express itself identically, it’s interpretation is entirely bound by all sorts of other things like culture, history, gender, and identity.

I talk about this in Chapter 7:

For example, getting to the mountaintop and taking in the view most certainly does not resolve everything about us into a timeless state of perfection. Confusion and harm can result if this perspective simply reasserts the small self sense of “I’m Awake, but those people don’t have a clue.” Living from this place is a life still divided, and a life divided is a life of delusion. In order for any view from the summit to support a life of unity, our practice must align itself with a purposeful integrity.

And this alignment is crucial if there is to be any traction for realization.

A recent Holons piece covers Diane Musho Hamilton’s take:

Consider this: just about anyone is capable of having an experience of mystical union with the world around them, prompting them to say the following six deceptively simple words: “I am one with the world.”  But these same six words can carry acutely divergent meanings from person to person—after all, who is the “I” that is making the statement, and which world are you feeling at one with?  The fundamentalist world as strictly written and interpreted by the book and believers of the “one true faith”?  The physical world of atoms, molecules, and squishy machinery of biology?  The planet itself, as a single interconnected “web of life” threading us all together?  There is not a single, pre-given world “out there” that we can experience spiritual communion with, but a succession of worldviews that can only be perceived by the stages of consciousness capable of enacting them.

To be sure, it continues:

Enlightenment is not a static experience—though the empty side of the street may ultimately remain unchanged, the nondual union of form and emptiness is an endlessly moving target, as the manifest world perpetually twists, billows, and slides across the effortless lens of eternity, with new and novel perspectives being born every moment.

Hear a segment from a deeper discussion that Hamilton Sensei has with Ken Wilber.

I’ve enjoyed the controversy surrounding the Ken Wilber camp over the past few years. Some people worship Wilber, others can neither tolerate his personality nor his work. Situations like this breed attachment and attachment always leads to interesting situations.

As far as I’m concerned, Wilber has had a significant impact on both the pedagogy and curricular content of what I do as a teacher. And while, like the rest of us, he has had his difficulties, I don’t feel it’s my place to offer any judgement about the man. I do think, however, that thoughtfully considering some aspects of the debate surrounding him will serve practitioners well.

Here are two points of interest:

First, a video critique offered by Frank Visser (thanks ~C4Chaos), then a follow-up by Sean Esbjorn-Hargens.

While I happened upon this discussion late, I liked it very much. Both men are intelligent, passionate and polite.

In their exchange Harris, author of The End of Faith, establishes a definition:

I think that faith is, in principle, in conflict with reason (and, therefore, that religion is necessarily in conflict with science), while you do not.

Sullivan, author of The Conservative Soul, goes with this:

Agreed. As the Pope said last year, I believe that God is truth and truth is, by definition, reasonable. Science cannot disprove true faith; because true faith rests on the truth; and science cannot be in ultimate conflict with the truth.

Of course, it continues on.

Despite their eloquence, however, I’d have to say that they miss the holiest (if I may) of all points. The problem is not that either one of them is necessarily right or wrong, it’s that they are both looking at the reality that both faith, and faith-in-God, point to as something outside of this very experience. It seems that Harris clings to the notion that God is a lie that exists out there in the minds of those people. Sullivan clings to the idea that God is the name and form of omnipotent truth. Either way, both cling to a version of their personal truth and are thus establishing the very boundary of separation that will keep the mind in control of the search. This is what Buddhist teaching suggests will build the inertia of attachment. And attachment causes fundamentalism to arise no matter whose “truth” it is that one seeks to defend.

There is much more as both Harris and Sullivan carry on. Enjoy.

On beliefnet.com today Deepak Chopra blogs:

In any system of organized religion, belief trumps first-hand experience. Such an experience, when it is truly spiritual, brings a sense of universality, far beyond our concepts of race and creed.

Interesting echo of the section from p. 72 in AiTL, titled Anger and Dogma.

Over at the Huffington Post, Steve Posner wrote a great piece last week on the convergence, and divergence, of politics and faith:

Churches are among my favorite places to meditate. Even in the middle of a bustling city, whether it be morning or evening, in the American midwest or northern Italy or southern Spain, I can always find a quiet place inside a church where I may sit comfortably and freely meditate in silence. I have never once been asked about my religion by any priest or minister, or asked whether the meditation I was practicing used the mantras of India or the prayers of the Vatican

Whether I am praying, meditating, or reading the Bible, the Vedas, the Koran, or the scriptures of any other religion, it does not matter to any of the priests or ministers. All they expect from me is that I respect the church’s quiet space. Such is the national consciousness of the West, one which allows us to seek self-realization in the manner and place of our own choosing. This is why Obama’s spirituality is patriotic.

This proves it… meditation would be good for Judge Judy.

An earthquake rocked L.A. yesterday, fortunately causing little damage. It managed to scare the usually unflappable Judge Judy, but a group of monks meditating at a Thai temple were unfazed.

Aloha from Kauai.

I’m sitting here doing a little reading on the net while my wife and daughter sleep away an eventful day of helicopter riding and playing at the beach. We also walked into a shop that specialized in Buddhist paraphernalia. Everything you might need to get your practice off on a traditional footing. I commented to my wife how far away I felt from all the stuff. Just give me a cushion. And yet it was so beautiful. Then my baby daughter pulled a fan off the shelf that had the Heart Sutra inscribed on it. One side Japanese, one side English. I put it back in its place. My daughter protested. My wife laughed and I had a bit of a flashback to my morning routine as a monk. 

All the chanting seemed like such a goofy thing to do, and yet I was always thrilled at the last line of the Heart Sutra: gate, gate, paragate, parasamgate, Bodhi Svaha!

Loosely translated this means: gone, gone, gone beyond, gone way beyond, may Enlightenment be so! 

Indeed. May it be so for each of us. And may each of us also see that the Witness isn’t the end of it all. In fact, Ken Wilber suggests in a recent post on Integral Naked that Dainin Katagiri Roshi told him:

… the Witness is the last stand of the ego.

This point couldn’t be more important to those who’ve been on the cushion a while. The Witness, or what I’ve called the Eighth Sense, and Wilber cites as the Hindu term turiya, is fundamental in any process of Awakening. But it isn’t the final stop. In fact, the Witness can recognize itself as an ever-so-slight contraction of our personal realm of consciousness since even in the experience of seasoned practitioners, the Witness can still flirt with the edges of egoic grasping. 

I write about this in Awake in This Life:

More than a feeling, a sense, or an intuition, the Ninth Sense is the fundamental quality of the entire Mountain of Spirit as well as its climbers. It is the exact Awareness in which all experience, including the Witness, arises and falls. It is the essential, impersonal, quality of feelings, sensations, and intuition, just like light is the essential, impersonal, quality of any image we might see projected on a movie screen.

I go on further:

Whatever name we choose to point to this awakened spaciousness that is infinitely inside and outside of all things, it is never anything other than the awakened totality, the Deep Singularity, of everything all the time. It is always available to us in each breath, at each tragedy, at each of our kids’ successes and failures, at each of our lonely moments, in darkness, and in the inextinguishable, blinding light of the expansive and clear Truth of Being.

The Ninth Sense is Spirit, and it expresses itself in everything and in every way as everything and every way.

This Ninth Sense, or what the Hindu tradition calls turiyatita is shows itself as that which is beyond turiya, beyond the Witness. At the realization of the Ninth Sense the Witness and all that is witnessed begin to merge. Put simply, the Ninth Sense is beyond the experiences of our five gross bodily senses (taste, touch, sight, smell, and sound), as well as our two subtle mental senses (thoughts, and time), as well as our causal experiences of simple witnessing awareness. 

Wilber suggests that the recognition of the Ninth Sense shows up like this:

… rather than having an experience, all you’ll sense is a vast sense of freedom.  Freedom from objects, freedom from experiences, freedom from time.  Whatever it is that you experience, that is precisely what you are not. 

And in this freedom, you push, but without pushing; you rest, but without resting; you cleave, but without cleaving.  There is the sense of consciousness, but without an object,  of emptiness—though empty of that, too.  The way is neti, neti: not this, not that.  You will never reach a moment of time that is it.  For it is something that is always already there. 

May it be so.