Awake in This Life

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.

In Karen Armstrong’s recent post, Calling All Religions to Compassion, she rightly brings up some key points of integration for traditions:

Compassion is indeed central to every one of the major world religions — but sometimes you would never know it. Increasingly religion is associated with violence and intolerance; it seems preoccupied with dogma, belief, getting to heaven, or enforcing correct sexual behavior. There are magnificent exceptions, of course, but it is rare to hear religious leaders speaking of the primary importance of compassion. People don’t even seem to know what it means.

What’s fascinating are the responses from people.

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.

Life after death, or life after life, depending on how one looks at it, is one of the more fascinating aspects of spiritual practice since we’re not really sure what happens when we die. There are plenty of scriptural teachings to suggest that reincarnation exists. Maybe it does. Certainly, this would make things easier on each of us since we get to live all of this over again and again until we get it right. But aside from faith, scripture, and suggestion, there is little if any authentic empirical evidence to suggest that reincarnation actually happens. There are undoubtedly cases suggestive of reincarnation, but in our conventional world, we just don’t have the tools to determine if reincarnation awaits each of us or not. But does it really matter?

(more…)

A big part of living a conscious life means that we are living fully at every moment, aware and accepting of the fact that at any moment we might die. At this point of experience, everything simultaneously becomes a gift and a mystery. But there is a common spiritual confusion with this carpe diem attitude. Some practitioners feel that conscious living means that we should “go for it, because nothing matters.” The fearlessness that comes with the go-for-it attitude can be helpful along the Path, but any fixation that “nothing matters” is dangerous unless the mindset is met with a clear sense of ethics and responsibility. This is why an enlightened recognition must be also met with a purposeful relationship to an ethical code. The Precepts arose out of Zen and other Buddhist practices for this very reason. The Old Testament offers us the Ten Commandments, which provide similar guidance, and other traditions do the same. Allowing a deep intimacy with these rules, rather than attaching to them, prepares us for embodying the equanimity that comes with an Awakened perspective.

(more…)

Our fixed sense of a self, which we spend so much effort and energy maintaining, is only a creation of our minds. Again, this small self, or ego, is just as a dream—a phantom generated by our minds in order to stabilize the chaos of Infinity. Hearing this is disturbing to the ego since it sees itself as primary to the experience of being a self. To be seen as unimportant means the ego is pushed to the side and is therefore out of work. No matter what it adds to its résumé after Awakening, it will never be rehired at the same salary. To stretch this metaphor further: rather than taking a lateral professional move after this realization, the ego is forced from the boardroom into the mailroom. This relocation means that the ego can still be useful, but it isn’t able to use us anymore.

(more…)

Die before you die and you shall never die.

—Sufi saying

Now when the bardo of dying dawns upon me

I will abandon all grasping, yearning and attachment,

Enter the undistracted into clear awareness of the teaching,

And eject my consciousness into the space of the unborn Awareness.

As I leave this compound body of flesh and blood,

I will know it to be a transitory illusion.

—Padma Sambhava

Loss is essentially the end of an attachment. The loss of a relationship to anything, while it may not be permanent, is the same thing: the end, or death, of an attachment. This may be a relationship to another person, to an opinion, to time, to your own body, to the world, to Enlightenment, or to any number of other things. Our relationship to these things will change whether the ego wants them to or not, and our acceptance of the constancy of change can be absolutely terrifying. This situation is an amazingly rich source of pain since ego fears the loss, or death, of its control over our circumstances more than anything else.

(more…)

Another important realization as we climb occurs when we see that meditation won’t necessarily keep us happy. Meditation, done correctly, merely affords us direct and continual exposure to the deep silence underneath whatever is happening right now. Exposure to deep silence reminds us that all things are temporary, including anything we think might make us happy in a permanent way. Any object that the mind seeks in order to gain happiness, such as a new car, a new job, a new relationship, a new religion, or anything else, might put the mind in a state of happiness for a while, but neither our mood nor the thing that fueled the mood will last forever. At some point there will be decay, boredom, exhaustion, or pain, and when this happens the mind snaps like a rubber band back to its position prior to acquiring the thing it thought would make it happy.

(more…)

The purpose of a deep stillness practice is not to seek a lowering of our blood pressure, or to get a break from the kids, or to escape our situation. Meditation might, in fact, lower our blood pressure, ease the tension we might feel with our kids, and help us deal with our pain in more constructive ways, but an authentic stillness practice does not allow us to take refuge from life. Rather, it puts us right in the middle of our situation and removes whatever protection we’ve traditionally clung to in order to defend our selves from its impact. Truly facing our lives scares a lot of people away from meditation when they realize that stillness practice, at this level, isn’t about dwelling in states of perpetual bliss. These experiences of unutterable peace and wonder often show up when we meditate, and they are signposts directing us toward the Infinite. Bliss experiences can also help us become temporarily more tolerant of life. We can then experience a greater coolness as our circumstances get hot, and we often find it a little easier to offer open kindness to people we meet. This process of slowing into an ever-deepening relaxation can’t help but be good for all aspects of our being.

(more…)

What we are looking for… is what is looking.

—Wei Wu Wei

The more you know the less you understand.

—Tao Te Ching

The small self is always seeking outside itself for stability. Once it finds something that it feels will protect it for a while, it will attach to it. But the small self won’t rest for very long since it must continually seek outside itself for new attachments in order to replace those that are no longer useful. Even if the small self finds something that it believes will offer it permanent salvation, it will only stop seeking briefly before it either finds flaws in its acquisition or it finds something it thinks will better suit its needs.

(more…)