Awake in This Life

The Guardian’s John Pitcher offers some expat insight on Indonesian religious tolerance:

Where a church is used for the initial wedding ceremony Muslim family members sit with Christians or, if they feel uncomfortable, they sit outside near the door and join in that way; all, regardless of formal religious faith are Javanese and what binds them is something much more powerful than any monotheist belief. It is what brings us all together for Selamatans (ceremonies), especially those for births and for the marking of the stages of different aspects of the life of a child, the mystic protection of an adult, or the building of a house. When the person leading the prayer section of a selamatan is a Christian the Muslims sit quietly and respectfully as the prayers are said. The other way round and the Christians do the same.

Thanks to Digita Dharma for remnding us of Thomas Merton’s contribution to the integration of wisdom beyond wisdom, regardless of tradition. Forty years after his premature death many of us still owe him so much for clarifying the Path.

Merton saw Buddhism not as a substitute for Christianity, but an enriching “way”. Out of the centre of the Catholic Christian tradition, he was able, as one scholar put it, to “engage in dialogue with other restless Catholics, Christians and people of other faiths or no formal faith”…

And I love this:

The biggest human temptation, said Thomas Merton, is to settle for too little.

Cheers.

James Shaheen writes in today’s Tricycle editor’s blog about molecular-biologist cum Tibetan monk, Matthiew Ricard and how he is:

… widely admired for his many talents, among them photography. But Ricard’s life seems best defined by his humanitarian work and devotion to the dharma.

How true. He goes on to point out that through his Shechen monastery in Nepal, he:

has launched two new websites, one devoted to Shechen’s humanitarian projects, along with portfolios of Ricard’s exquisite work, and the other to Shechen’s cultural and spiritual activities and publications.

(Bows, James)

In today’s MormonTimes, we learn of two BYU students who consider themselves Zen Mormons.

“They have things to teach us,” [Zach] Elison said. “Everything I love about Buddhism I find in my own religion, they just emphasize it differently.”

[Brandon] Habermeyer and Elison, both philosophy majors studying at Brigham Young University, got a tip from a world-religions professor at school about the retreat.

They spent two weeks in July under the towering Redwoods of Santa Cruz, Calif., learning and practicing some of the teachings of Buddhism.

Clearly the picture from the retreat suggests that this wasn’t from the Zen tradition, but this is an encouraging sign of integral thinking, especially as it relates to spirituality. Go Millenials!

(Bows to Barbara O’Brien for the heads up on this one)

David Marshall writes an intelligent response to one of my recent posts that I thought I’d share.

To my assertion that the Source of all agency might be a more accurate, albeit partial, representation of what we often call God, he says:

I think this is debatable if I am understanding you correctly.

Of course he’s right on this one. My opinions, especially according to my wife, are entirely debatable.

Some people see an “evolutionary impulse” or creative impulse that emanates from the Source and that they are really two sides of the same coin and that one can’t be called God and not the other. This impulse is neither the witness nor is it the personal will. Rather it is an impersonal, some would say “divine” will.

Fair enough. But the impulse is not any more or less of the Universe, or God, or Spirit, or whatever we may choose to call it. For that matter, it may not be “the witness” but it can be witnessed especially when we open to its divinity and consciously allow its impersonal nature guide our personal will.

Traditionally, people have said that the deep state is God. The “witness” is God or pure subjectivity is God. I think there can be a bias toward state training there, a bias toward Nirvana that is perhaps a little outdated. I am not saying that this is what you are saying, just that when people say that Nirvana or “pure subjectivity” is God but the evolutionary impulse is not is a little outdated.

Couldn’t agree more. Our concept of Nirvana and its meaning is outdated insofar as it’s ultimately a beginning not an end and this notion is supported when we come to recognize that all states are God. There is “no thing” on the other side of God. Both subjectivity as well as objectivity, pure or not, are equal expressions of the Infinite. The same is true for Source and agency, evolutionary impulse and egoic contraction.

David wraps things up by saying:

So I think we could say, from one perspective, that the personal will or ego is not God, but that the evolutionary impulse or creative impulse, arising out of emptiness, is God, though of course God language can be quite misleading.

This dualism is one of the many traps that can confuse and snare us as we navigate the Path. I talk about this toward the end of my recent book. The perceived separation of Spirit from its natural impulse to manifest is at the root of our suffering. Realizing this fallacy we Awaken into and out of a spaciousness that supports our ability to integrate the impersonal impulse of divine Selfhood into our daily lives.

Then we go make dinner.

Over at Salon, Steve Paulson writes about biologist Stuart Kauffman’s new approach to God in his recent book, “Reinventing the Sacred”.

[Kauffman] seeks to formulate a new scientific worldview and, in the process, reclaim God for nonbelievers. Kauffman argues that our modern scientific paradigm — reductionism — breaks down once we try to explain biology and human culture. And this has left us flailing in a sea of meaninglessness. So how do we steer clear of this empty void? By embracing the “ceaseless creativity” of nature itself, which in Kauffman’s view is the real meaning of God. It’s God without any supernatural tricks.

He goes on to poke holes in the reductionist, or flatland approach, as Ken Wilber has spent so many pages doing.

It’s comforting in that the entire universe is seen to be lawful; we can understand everything, from societies to quarks. Yet a number of physicists, including Nobel laureates Philip Anderson and Robert Laughlin, feel that reductionism is not adequate to understand the real world. In its place, they talk about “emergence.” I think they’re right.

Here’s where it gets a little sticky for me. With all due respect for Dr. Kauffman and his attempts to realign spirituality into something more relevant, I worry that he’s confusing the Universe’s creativity with creativity’s source. That source, or Source, literally has “no thing” to it, and yet it gives birth to “some thing” in every moment. The agentic value of all somethings isn’t deniable, nor is agency separate from the Source. But agency isn’t God. The Source of agency, on the other hand, gets us closer to the substrate of all things that spontaneously bridges Itself with and into all things as a divine and messy creativity… in each moment.

Bows to Andrew Sullivan for the heads up.

Sylvia Boorstein recounts a dinner she attended on the eve of the US presidential election over at  Shambhala Sun Space. My sense is that she expresses what many of us may have felt as the election process evolved.

“A man sitting across from me, the one person who had been silent during the political conversation, then said, “I think I am the only person at this table who voted differently from everyone else.” There was a momentary pause, very brief, and then a woman said, “I think it is very courageous of you to have told us that.”

She goes on:

“Well, I did vote differently,” the man continued. “I’ve been a banker all my life and I thought the Republican economic plan was the better plan.” He paused, and then said, “But I’m glad it turned out the way it did. I can see that this is an epochal moment for America and sends an important message to the world.”

In the next few minutes people remarked about how good it felt to have non-contentious discourse about differing views and the conversation moved on to other topics.

Truly listening and truly seeing another loosens the views that lead to certainty. Uncertainty can be so very instructive… although I’m not certain of this.

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 a a recent post over at Intent Blog, Deepak Chopra writes about taking a vow of non-violence in his thinking, speaking and his actions in front of an audience of 500 people at a plenary session of The Alliance for a New Humanity.

I told them if they were ready to take this vow, they should stand up.

People stood up, one by one at first, then in groups of twos and threes, and finally in tidal waves, until more than 450 people had stood up and taken the vow.

Following this, everybody agreed to have at least two people in their lives take the vow. The two in turn, would have two others join them in taking the vow. Our immediate goal now is to get 100 Million people across the world to take this vow. In the meantime, we will be setting up ways to measure and support the dramatic effects this tidal wave of shift in consciousness is going to create.

While I have tremendous respect for Dr. Chopra and the work he does, I think he is walking a dangerous line here. Based on his words, he’s conflating his “vow” with “attachment”. And to make matters potentially disastrous, he’s collectivizing the attachment by asking others to stand and publicly make the same vow with him. This tactic usually leads to deeper suffering since the purity of its intention can so easily mask an attachment to an outcome. Of course the goal is a good one. Yet in situations like this, well-meaning but confused practitioners begin to cling to their vows and then turn them in to instruments of what may very well end up looking like Spiritual McCarthyism.

There is a way around this trap. Instead of encouraging people to metaphorically sign a loyalty oath, Dr. Chopra and the rest of us who teach should encourage our students to become deeply intimate with the violence in each and every aspect of life. We should encourage all beings to look carefully at the impulses that lead to violence in our speech, our thoughts, and our actions. Doing so allows us to make vows for peace rather than making vows against violence. Making a vow against anything gives birth to both fundamentalism and war.

This election process has taken a toll on so many around the world. In our sangha, the choices have been at the forefront of several discussions and has ultimately proven itself to be a dharma door for many of Infinite Smile’s members.

It’s also a dharma door for me. Listening to Obama’s acceptance speech broke something wide open in me. I hadn’t realized how much I’d become hooked by the whole process; by the last eight years; by war and economic catastrophe. So often I can hide in my role as teacher, or on my cushion as a meditator. As Obama spoke, I simply held my daughter and wept.

But I worry about the egoic projection of “savior” onto this man we’ve elected. Doing so only distracts us from our journey along the Path. Successful navigation of the Path involves a committment and a practice of no longer clinging to the activity of the mind. The conscious expression of this non-clinging into our day-to-day lives is Awakening.

So when I see comments from people like French intellectual and America-watcher, Bernard-Henri Levi, I worry a little:

“Junk politics and immorality have come to an end.”

Let’s hope. But let’s not get caught by our hope. What kind of attachment must be going on in the hearts and minds of people around the world? Getting hooked by our elation, just like getting hooked by our disappointment, douses the flames of insight. Meeting our elation, or our disappointment, with our full heart and mind, in each moment burns up what we no longer need.

In a recent blog post by Andrew Cohen, he rightly asserts a point so often misappropriated in alternative spiritual circles:

Consciousness doesn’t exist or work in mysterious ways outside of or away from the innermost depths of our individual and collective selves.

In other words, while consciousness is mysterious in the way it unfolds past the mind, it shouldn’t be conflated with pre-rational fairy tales. It’s all right here in front of us.

At the same time, all of us, especially teachers, can unwittingly set up structures that allow the mind to cling, thus blocking the natural expression of enlightenment. This is especially true when an adherence to sins of the past, or salvation in the future, colors spiritual teaching since it puts the ego into the driver’s seat of the process of awakening. Consider his final line:

The more we not only awaken to that fact but take responsibility for it, the more quickly this world will become the paradise that we all long for in our most inspired moments.

Here, here. But let us all co-create the future by loosening the grip we keep on the fairy tails of the past as well as those fairy tails of times yet to come. When teaching people to “become” without first teaching them to just “be” a massive impediment is created thus blocking an authentic approach to what the mind can only refer to as “paradise”.

If humor is totally absent from this practice, then what’s any of this worth?

—Question from a renegade Zen student

Okay… who took my robe?

—Question from the same Zen student some days later

After engaging in a spiritual practice with some degree of diligence, it is easy to lose sight of the humor that permeates the entire divine mess. Instead of recognizing the blessings of this life and the lightness that can come from seeing it as an endless gift, we can ossify and harden to the offerings of life. Finding the fluidity, or humor, of it all helps us meet the passage of life with an ever-deepening grace, and while this isn’t always easy, it is a sacred potential for all of us once we start on this Path.

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As we’ve discussed, no person can enlighten another. Some realized people have a gift for pointing out Truth, but you must realize it for yourself. Whenever we meet another with the fullness of our attention, this allows for one mind to see itself in two beings and for two minds to see themselves as one being. This is a Divine event of Truth. This is the Teaching. It’s the student, the teacher, and the teaching, as neither unified nor separate. Metaphorically, this is like a mother hen pecking on the outside of her egg meeting her chick’s peck from the inside. Once this happens an opening to an entirely new experience arises for everyone. When that part of any person who is enlightened meets itself in another, we awaken to the Big Self as the Big Self. It’s in all ways already here, so in an absolute sense, there are no teachers of Enlightenment. There aren’t any students to teach in this sense either. There is nothing that anyone can teach that we don’t already Know at our core. When we hear someone say something that resonates inside of us as an echo of Truth, it does so because we have been reminded of something that we’ve always Known since before time, body, and mind entered into your personal experience. So in addition to embodying trustworthiness, kindness, strength, clarity, and a good sense of humor, a good spiritual teacher is someone that can relentlessly remind you of what you already know to be True.

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For us to realize that Enlightenment itself is immediately prior to the temporal experience of all things that arise within our awareness is to awaken with all things. In other words, we can look at the spaciousness of the present moment that always exists, before mind gets into its processes of interpretation and evaluation, as the place of infinite availability and total potentiality that we keep discussing. Enlightenment is always here with us, even before any circumstances arise. This is what Shunryu Suzuki means when he says: “Even before we practice it, enlightenment is there.” In other words, Enlightenment is immediately prior to cognition, sensation, perception of any kind, birth, death, time itself. But, since enlightenment is never bound by time, it is also with us during and after every one of our experiences. All of our spiritual work, then, is to conflate, integrate, and then embody our contracted experience with this openness. To embody this work is to bring it fully home into this skin we inhabit.

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Coming down the Mountain of Spirit we find that the ego has lost its grip on everything, including its own ability to manage itself. Sometimes, it is helpful to recognize this realization as “ego fully seen.” In stories like The Emperor’s New Clothes and The Wizard of Oz, both the emperor and the wizard are exposed for what they are. The Nondual traditions all emphasize the value of this exposure. Zen, Dzogchen, Taoism, Sufiism, Advaita Vedanta, Kabbalah and contemplative Christian practices show us that Spirit, Emptiness, Brahman, God, Big Self, Ein Sof, or the All is the condition of any and all states in which we find ourselves. This means that no matter where or how we might find our experience of being a self, we are still continually expressing the fullness of Spirit. We are, in other words, no longer a dualistic expression of “in here” versus “out there,” a “me” versus a “you,” or an “us” versus a “them.” No matter what state we’re in, whether it be the bliss of meditation or the pain of watching a loved one suffer, Spirit is expressing itself, and its Peace is offered to us continually as the timeless, singular, nondual flow of everything all at once.

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As man moves towards spiritual freedom, he moves also towards oneness.

—Aurobindo

Before a person studies Zen, mountains are mountains and waters are waters; after a first glimpse into the truth of Zen, mountains are no longer mountains and waters are not waters; after enlightenment, mountains are once again mountains and waters once again waters.

—Zen saying

Things are not as they appear, nor are they otherwise.

—The Lankavatara Sutra

From the enlightened perspective, “coming home” means that we begin to allow the expansive Ultimate Life to burst through the contraction of all of our circumstances. With each step and breath we bring back into the world the realization of fullness that exists beyond time and mind. But again, we don’t do it just to benefit ourselves. We do it for the benefit of all beings. If the Realization is authentic, we don’t have a choice about any of it. The inevitability of acting for the benefit of all beings occurs because we know that the subject and object dualism that we’d previously thought to be the whole story simply isn’t. In other words, the boundary that separates the me in here from the you out there loses its importance. Instead, the me in here offers itself only as all things, eternally and everywhere, in a spacious, fluid, forgiving, Awareness. Everyone we know and love, including ourselves, as well as everyone we might find difficult to tolerate, still exists and is recognizable, but our recognition that they are in no way separate from us begins to resonate and express itself in all that we do. When this Boundlessness brushes up against and then merges with our “boundaries,” compassionate activity works to serve everything and everyone.

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Those who see worldly life as an obstacle to Dharma see no Dharma in everyday actions; they have not yet discovered that there are no everyday actions outside of Dharma.

—Eihei Dogen

The purpose of Zen is the perfection of character.

—Yamada Roshi

When clarity and commitment create enough cracks in the walls of ego’s defenses, Spirit starts to shine through each of us as Enlightenment. Our practice becomes a simple, continual, and intentional study of our own small self, and through this work we begin to see how trivial the small self’s wants and needs actually are. Knowing this triviality first hand allows us to let go of our attachments to the entire system that our small self has established over time. In this Divine disaster, we begin to expand spiritually into an embodiment of being that is enlightened by all things. This confluence of the manifest with the Unmanifest, this merging of form and Emptiness, is our True Nature realizing itself through us as all things. And in this creative confluence of Spirit in the world, our Original Face wears an infinite smile.

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So why is it that so many seemingly enlightened masters get into so much trouble? If someone Awakens, we might imagine that he or she is beyond all of the bad stuff. Unfortunately, this isn’t true. I guess the answers to these and other questions about harmful choices made by teachers depend on what we mean by “enlightened.” On the one hand, if particular individuals no longer identify with anything other than the spaciousness of the present moment and they act from this space, then they might be considered enlightened by many people. After all, they can talk the talk and seduce the masses with the beautiful ways in which they reflect the sacred back toward everything and everyone. In order to accomplish this seduction, these “teachers” probably had an experience of a still and silent unity pointing out that there is no self, no body, no time, and no mind, but then they mistakenly chose to reconfigure this new perspective into some method of teaching reflective of a kind of personal attachment. Their insights into the nature of Emptiness may have been profound, but their integration of them into the world of form was only partial. This lack of integration is what gets the teachers, the teaching, and entire communities into trouble, and this problem always comes from a deluded view that sees itself as an embodiment of Truth.

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Choosing to become intimate with Awareness requires a constancy of both attention and intention. Neither the attention, nor the intention, is a fixed entity, and yet they can easily become attachments if we aren’t careful. On the other hand, if we don’t get hooked by them, they can be seen as manifestations of surrender supported by the ever-present Awareness of Spirit. This practice of being unhooked is exactly what keeps our vows from becoming rules that generate fundamentalist blindness. Allowing this free-flowing dance of ever-present Awareness to guide our choices radically diminishes the strength of ego’s grip on our responses to life.

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I’ve mentioned that I began my meditation practice asking teachers if there might be a shortcut to any of this work. The answers I got all came down to what I’ve so often repeated in these pages: simply practice a deep surrender into stillness and then let your activity consciously arise from this place. The thing in me that wanted the shortcut is the thing in all of us that wants to manage the experience of Awakening. No matter how great our teacher, how extensive our reading list, or how supportive our spiritual friends, no one can do any of this work for us. This means that we must orient all of our choices around the generous intention of letting go of everything, including whatever spiritual flavor we like the most. This takes courage, fortitude, and discipline.

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