Awake in This Life

Fascinating piece on the Utah and BYU rivalry from today’s New York Times:

As B.Y.U. players navigate the narrow alley onto the field, Utah fans on both sides hurl down insults that are as personal as they are profane. It feels less like an entrance than a perp walk.

Of course, some of those fans are themselves Mormon. They just happen to root for Utah.

“They know there are two things that are really personal — one is religion, two is family,” said Olsen, a former defensive tackle who finished his college career in 2000 and is now a sports talk radio host here. “So they’d throw out something like, ‘How many wives did you have to ask before you could play in this game?’ It’s all the typical stereotypes about Mormons. To hear that — and it would be the same for Catholics, Buddhists, Jews — it feels like they’re attacking God.”

Isn’t tribal-centric behavior interesting? Ah, rivalries: mind created orientations that so easily lead to internal violence.

One of the things I’ve enjoyed over the years is how there often seems to be more civility than cruelty in my own Cal v. Stanford experience. Yet I still find that there are those on both sides that generate amazing identification with their sense of belonging.

What’s not to belong to? Better yet, we all are members of all sides at the deepest levels of the Dharma.

Over at the Washington Post’s, On Faith section, John Mark Reynolds makes the point that humility supports our spiritual evolution. He also suggests that we have little control over God’s plan for us:

The events that impact a nation are ultimately in God’s hands. Because God loves human beings, He does not always give us what “we deserve.” No nation, and this includes our beloved United States of America, would long survive that test

That does not mean that God’s will is easy to understand. God’s actions are difficult to read in history, because His world is complicated. The blessings earnestly prayed for in one nation may bring harm to another people. God balances great complexity in making this the best possible world for free human beings.

This is all well and good, but to assume that God is somehow separate from us puts us squarely in the dualism that hinders real humility. How arrogant for any of us, in other words, to assume that we are in anyway separate from the Infinite. The shattering realization that all of us are dynamic expressions of the inseparability of Spirit, or God, or the Infinite is precisely what offers us glimpses of an authentic humility; one that includes everyone and everything, eternally.

Interesting writing by Brian D. McLaren over at the Washington Post’s “On Faith” section:

A lot of people say that the deeper you go, the more all religions are the same. Based on my study and experience, that statement strikes me as potentially quite misleading.

This goes along with what I mentioned in yesterday’s post about Buddhism losing traction in the East. What’s the best way to get people back into the temple? Maybe a little messianic mythology and claims of reincarnated Buddhas could inspire clinging and attract droves of faithful.

Who knows? Most importantly, who is it that cares? Get to the root of that question and one can’t help but see that we are all Buddhas.

Barbara O’Brien at About.com writes a blog titled, Japanese Buddhism: Going Out of Business? Based on my travels over the last decade, I’d have to say that I agree with her observations. I’d also say that the idea that we should return to the fundamental approaches of the past will only make Buddhism more irrelevant to 21st Century citizens of the world.

Some suggest Japanese Buddhism needs to re-embrace the Vinaya-pitaka, the rules for monks given by the historical Buddha that are still, for the most part, observed in the rest of Asia. Celibacy is high on the list of rules. Others call for Japanese Buddhism to diversify — branch out into teaching the dharma and providing social services other than funerals. However it’s done, Japanese Buddhism seems in dire need of a revival.

So what should the revival look like? It will be interesting, whatever happens. But the East would do well to steal a few pages out of the West’s playbook on this one.  If Buddhism is to survive, it must do a Western thing and become a dynamic, living expression of relevance. When the stillness of the East, meets this dynamism of the West, we’ll have something far more accessible to people. Done correctly, the core of the teaching might avoid becoming diluted thus avoiding a New Buddhist circus of “feel good” evangelism.

Bill Maher speaks of his newly released film, Religulous:

I don’t use the word “atheist” about myself, because I think it mirrors the certitude I’m so opposed to in religion. What I say in the film is that I don’t know. I don’t know what happens when you die, and all the religious people who claim they do know are being ridiculous. I know that they don’t know any more than I do. They do not have special powers that I don’t possess. When they speak about the afterlife with such certainty and so many specifics, it just makes me laugh.

I’ve written and spoken at length about this over some time. Again and again I’ve argued that I’m pretty certain that certitude leads to war. Or in spiritual terms, that attachment generates suffering. The problem is that Maher’s certitude makes him sound like a fundamentalist in rationalist’s clothing:

People can tell you, “Oh yes, when you get to Paradise there are 72 virgins, not 70, not 75.” Or they say, “Jesus will be there sitting at the right hand of the Father, wearing a white robe with red piping. There will be three angels playing trumpets.” Well, how do you know this? It’s just so preposterous. So, yes, I would like to say to the atheists and agnostics, the people who I call rationalists, let’s stop ceding the moral high ground to the people who believe in the talking snake. Let’s have our voices heard and be in the debate. Let’s stand up and say we’re not ready to let the country be given over to the Sarah Palins of the world.

To be fair, I agree with much of what he is saying, and, let it be known that have not seen the film yet so feel free to discount my premature commentary. Our baby daughter came down with a slight bug so my wife and I have been home-bound, which has forced us to watch a selection of Tivoed mediocrity instead of getting to the theater. That said, reviews and Maher’s own comments seem to center around his clinging to his version of what is false. We call this “fundamentalism.”

More to come.

Deepak Chopra compares Sarah Palin to the shadow of Barak Obama in a recent commentary:

Palin’s pluck has been admired, and her forthrightness, but her real appeal goes deeper.

She is the reverse of Barack Obama, in essence his shadow, deriding his idealism and turning negativity into a cause for pride. In psychological terms the shadow is that part of the psyche that hides out of sight, countering our aspirations, virtue, and vision with qualities we are ashamed to face: anger, fear, revenge, violence, selfishness, and suspicion of “the other.” For millions of Americans, Obama triggers those feelings, but they don’t want to express them. He is calling for us to reach for our higher selves, and frankly, that stirs up hidden reactions of an unsavory kind.

His essay is worth a read since doing so reminds us of how sticky politics can be for any of us. Then again, anyone on the Path can let the attachments, both gross and trivial, point them in the direction of Awakening. Watching our clinging, in other words, offers us disidentification from whatever our attachments might be.

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.

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.

It is important to remember that the events of insight are neither the measure nor the point of meditation. Rather than the flashiness of the Zen awakening experience called satori, our Path to Enlightenment is only about incorporating disciplined and conscious stillness in our day-to-day life. It’s a simple recipe for each of us: stop grasping, and engage the relaxation of our individual consciousness into the expansiveness of Universal Awareness—and, in doing so, move into our Big House.

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Fundamentalism arises when any religious organization, or any person, attaches so intensely to some version of truth that it must be defended. In this space, the ego continually seeks security by playing out its drama of “attack and defend.” This drama offers all sorts of teachers and practitioners an opportunity to commit to various forms of separation where an attitude of “we’re right and they’re wrong” not only rules, but begets more attachment. This space can sow seeds of terrible violence all in the name of the collective egoic version of what it deems sacred.

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Religions have the potential of offering us a much closer relationship with our spiritual nature, yet, more often than not, the doctrines used in most traditions act to reinforce separation between believers and non-believers. This doctrinal wedge is also exactly what separates any seeker from Spirit. Attaching to any sense of separation significantly diminishes our chances at living an Ultimate Life. Put simply, separation nourishes fear, and fear nourishes grasping, and grasping gives birth to fundamentalism. And fundamentalism, in all of its forms, offers every fearful ego a place, albeit a temporary one, to hide. For any of us who feel strongly about our spiritual practices or the practices of others, we should be careful not to get caught by the fires of fundamentalist passion, since, by definition, fundamentalism is merely grasping by another name. Instead, we should try to witness our experience of fear as it happens, and then participate in its intensification and its waning from a position of open curiosity and peace. Simply noticing our attachments to the things that we are afraid of losing helps us, and our various wisdom traditions, to evolve. If we continue to allow ourselves and our respective faiths to be governed by fear, we will continue to act as pawns in unnecessary spiritual wars, and religion will only continue to exacerbate personal and collective suffering.

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One of the most common ways that we feel resistance is anger. Anger is an intense and specific form of resistance to something that is presenting itself in a given moment. Hatred, on the other hand, is an even more deeply attached, and therefore intense, form of anger that is directed very specifically at something or someone. The root of both anger and hatred, as well as other resistance patterns such as anxiety and indifference, is fear. We will be dealing with the subject of fear much more extensively in the next chapter, but for now it is important to see that fear arises whenever the ego senses that it will be forced to do something it doesn’t want to do. There is nothing more threatening to the limited ego than the unlimited Infinite. As we’ve discussed, ego sees Infinity as always chaotic and unmanageable, something that it just can’t handle. So as the ego recognizes the actual and potential chaos in any situation, fear arises. Fear then can turn quickly into a resistance pattern. The more intense the fear, the greater will be the ego’s attachment to resistance.

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If a man wishes to be sure of the road he treads on, he must close his eyes and walk in the dark.

—St. John of the Cross

What is it like when force becomes the standard of conduct? The great attack the small, the strong plunder the weak, the many oppress the few, the cunning deceive the simple, the noble disdain the humble. The rich mock the poor, the young take from the old, and the states of the empire ruin each other.

—Ma Tzu

When we don’t want something that shows up in our lives, we typically do our best to resist it. This resistance can mean that we refuse to accept things that arise in our experience, or that we manipulate them, or that we fight against them, or that we even work to destroy any of the causes and conditions that might lead to anything we find undesirable. As we continue our climb, we begin to see that all of our resistance centers itself around a contracted, egoic intention of pushing away what is presenting itself and grasping at what is not presenting itself in order to either force or avoid a particular outcome. As with any form of grasping, this causes suffering.

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The body, mind, and soul are also seen as separate entities by the ego, even though they, like everything else, are actually aspects of the same Infinity. Body is our personally felt physical vessel of the infinity of Spirit in this world of form. Mind is our personally felt conceptual vessel of Spirit in this world of form. Soul is our personally felt sense of Spirit in this world of form. So body, mind, and soul are all actually personal attachments within the deeper context of a single, impersonal Spirit, in the same way that human faces are all essentially slight variations on a single, impersonal face. So a more complete picture might be to suggest that all things are simultaneously distinct and at the same time part of the deep singularity of the All.

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The more we become aware of ego’s activity, the less important its drama becomes. Climbing higher, we are reminded continually that the ego is rooted in self-concern rather than generosity. Seeing this for what it is allows for us to make increasingly selfless choices. In making deeply selfless decisions we take power from the ego, and then notice that the less power the ego has, the less that the drama being played out on the Stage of Mind matters. Rather than identifying with the actors on the Stage, we begin to notice that our essence is actually the audience of the charade. From here the Big Self, or the Witness, begins to unfold as an unattached awareness of our experience, and here we can then become more acutely aware of ego’s very subtle attempts at controlling what might otherwise be genuine spiritual realization.

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Unfortunately, none of us can truly give of ourselves as long as the ego is attached to any of our activity. This is because any activity sourced from the ego will always play itself out as a giving for the sake of getting something in return. The moment this happens, unity gives way to separation as a result of our craving for something other than what we already have. In other words, rather than giving freely from a place of deeply surrendered recognition that all things are a simple interconnected Oneness, ego turns the situation into a basic negotiation.

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Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol, morphine or idealism.

—Carl Jung

The newer people, of this modern age, are more eager to amass than to realize.

—Rabindranath Tagore

Our unconscious habits develop from our inability to experience and accept things for what they truly are. We might, for instance, make ourselves coffee when we wake up each morning, but if this activity is merely a habit, we are unplugged from the miracle of the whole experience. Do we notice the weather outside in the morning? How about what it feels like inside our home? Are we aware of the sounds at play around us? The sound of the coffee dripping into the pot? The songs of the birds outside our window? Are we aware of the silence between the sounds? Can we truly notice the smell of what we’re pouring into our cup? Can we openly consider how the whole experience came to us in this moment? Do we feel gratitude for those who picked the beans? Gratitude for the sun and the rain that allowed them to grow? Can we taste all of this as we sip our hot morning drink? Are we truly thankful for this brand new day, guaranteed to be filled with mystery and possibility? Maybe we are. Then again, maybe we aren’t. Maybe we’d rather slog down the coffee in order to stave off the deep urge to get back into bed.

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If a man owns land, the land owns him.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

One does not err by perceiving, one errs by clinging; but knowing clinging itself as mind, it frees itself.

—Zen saying

As our climb up the Mountain of Spirit progresses, some things begin to stand out. First of all, we recognize how our small self works to keep its distance from the broader sense of the Infinite that we call the Big Self so that it can maintain a sense of control. Secondly, the higher we climb, the more we learn that simply watching our small self in action helps us to become aware of its mechanisms of attachment. These mechanisms show themselves as craving and resistance, both of which are simply two faces of the same coin we call grasping.

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