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.

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)

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.

“Whenever you feel a judgment arise in your awareness, you are feeling the ego’s energetic pull,” the Zen teacher said to a group of us in the meditation hall.

It was late in the afternoon and I was tired, worried that I might fall asleep during this lady’s talk. I wasn’t bored with what she was saying, I just wanted a little sleep.

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My first day of kindergarten was interesting. I wasn’t yet five years old, and as my parents began to leave me in my new classroom, I noticed that my mother was crying. Why in the world would she do that? I wondered. As time progressed, so too did the depths of our dinner conversations, and since the school was parochial, I eagerly shared biblical stories with my parents that had been offered up in class. I remember being obsessed with the stories of Jonah inside the whale, Job’s really bad luck, Abraham nearly killing his son, and especially Cain beating down his brother Abel. This last story had real significance since I was always beating down my brother Mark, and I was worried that I might be punished by God if I wasn’t careful. How scary it all was, and yet for some reason I couldn’t get enough of it.

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Things derive their being and nature by mutual dependence and are nothing in themselves.

—Nagarjuna

Among the great things to be found among us, the Being of Nothingness is the greatest.

—Leonardo da Vinci

Descending the Mountain means that we are able to engage each moment in life from an unattached position of discriminating awareness rather than from a position of judgment. It can be helpful to think of discriminating awareness as simply the recognition of whatever presents itself to us without any positive or negative mental evaluation. Judgment, on the other hand, involves the ego’s assessment and appraisal. For example, as I began my meditation practice years ago, there were times when I would finish my morning meditation and then think, Wow, that was a great meditation. I hope I can do that again this afternoon. This egoic evaluation was metaphorically putting clouds in what otherwise would have been an open, blue-sky mind. In my contracted striving to recreate my personal judgment of what was great, I inhibited the expansion I’d tasted in the first place.

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As we come off the Mountain of Spirit, we recognize how little about us needs to be defended. This is because we have begun to build lives out of our realization of Emptiness. This Emptiness is the Source of everything. This Source, once again, is totally still and gives birth to all that moves. It is an eternal, unmoving Awareness that generates everything that evolves. It has no opinion about anything, no judgments, no beliefs, and no convictions. It is neither happy nor sad and is concerned with neither gain nor loss, neither praise nor blame, neither pleasure nor pain. These, after all, are personal concerns, and Emptiness has nothing to do with any of these things that we recognize as being personal. There is no I, you, we, or they associated with any part of Emptiness—and no mine, yours, ours, or theirs. Nor is there, oddly enough, anything missing from it. This Empty Source, this Spirit, is exactly beyond all form, and as such, it is beyond anything that can be confined.

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When we let an unattached intention of peace for self and others inform our actions, we naturally and effortlessly become helpful. On the other hand, letting our actions come from a place other than one of nonattachment is the work of ego. This activity will inevitably show up as some form of unconsciousness that feeds on both itself and on the unconscious activity of others. This kind of activity is the root of greed, hatred, and delusion. Despite what we perceive as our best intentions, any self-serving thought is a divided thought, split between a self and something else. Division that manifests as activity will enhance our contraction and generate tangled lives.

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To find, know, and possess the Divine existence, consciousness and nature and to live in it for the Divine is our true aim and the one perfection to which we must aspire.

—Aurobindo

The most important thing is to find out what the most important thing is.

—Shunryu Suzuki

What is it that truly drives us?

Uncovering the radically honest answer to this question and then committing our thoughts and actions to its realization means that we can live from wholesome intention. Of course, there can be confusion surrounding this type of inquiry, but if we allow our intentional questioning to penetrate deeply enough into our experience, we can uncover all that we will ever need to continue along the Path to Awakening. The important part is uncovering what we really want.

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Do not divert your love from visible things. But go on loving what is good, simple and ordinary; animals and things and flowers and keep the balance true.

—Rainer Maria Rilke

In the heaven which receives most of His light have I been; and have seen things which whoso descends from there has neither knowledge nor power to recount.

—Dante Alighieri

The map is not the territory.

—Alfred Korzybski

When we can truly see the incompleteness of our basic sense of separation from things, we have a chance to uncover the great unity offered through a life lived consciously. But in order to make our realization helpful and our practice relevant, we must learn to allow the splendor of the Big Self to dissolve the small self’s limitations. Doing so, we can become increasingly clear about how we must engage the world. But just because our perspective has shifted in major ways doesn’t mean that problems won’t arise.

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