Awake in This Life

I just came across an interesting link from The International Buddhist Society of Pennsylvania called “Dharma for Kids”. Interesting because my wife and I, along with several other parents in our sangha, have started to actively ask questions about how we offer the Dharma to our little ones. Do we have to reinvent, ahem, the wheel or is there really good curriculum out there? Who’s uncovered a way to best offer an integral approach to Truth for a young audience?

We’d love your comments and suggestions on this. Bows.

Norman Fischer’s Nothing Holy: A Zen Primer is worth the read. It’s brief, informative, and points its readers toward what is both essential and revealing about the crash of the Zen wave in America.

(Bows to Shambhala Sun Space)

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.

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.

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.

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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