Awake in This Life

Digital Dharma offers suggestions on how we can maintain a meditative awareness during our driving experiences.

Remember to keep your eyes open.

I must admit that I was surprised when I saw this story glide across my computer screen this morning. Certainly there were individuals of the cloth that might have been picked that could have reflected a deeper sense of post-fundamentalist spirituality than Rick Warren. Wouldn’t another choice allow for an introduction into a more integral approach to faith? Or am I putting too many expectations on Obama?

Michael Tomasky, over at the UK’s Guardian says:

Some folks on the left are, in my view, suspicious types, always on the lookout for signs of apostasy and ready to scream “Sellout!” the minute Obama (or any mainstream liberal pol) does some small thing they don’t like.

I agree with this. Then again, such is the nature of attachment. What’s most interesting is that I wonder how picking Warren really helps America evolve.

… Warren’s endorsement by Obama, which this very high-profile invitation in essence is, really is a slap in the face to some of his core constituencies, as Sarah Posner argues in this fine Nation piece.

The Huffington Post’s Steven Waldman sums up his defense of Obama’s pick of Rick Warren by saying:

For Obama, picking Warren for the inauguration is a smart move. George W. Bush chose Franklin Graham, a hard-right evangelical to do his prayer. Instead of retaliating by choosing a liberal preacher, Obama opted for spiritual bipartisanship. The move helps to depoliticize prayer — which, of course, is very politically shrewd.

Politically shrewd? I don’t really see how picking Warren is politically shrewd except in the most superficial ways.

Deepak suggests that George keeps “Throwing Shoes at Us”:

Mr. Bush continues to throw shoes at us. His “So what?” attitude toward the disaster he created is the first shoe, the second is his blind assertion that the war in Iraq is close to victory. Informed Middle East experts, the very sort he ignored at the outset of his military adventures, point to a fragile peace that could be shattered at any moment.

Fair enough. I agree. But isn’t there a deeper nuance that leads us to what we might call an “appropriate response?”

A shoe for a shoe and the whole world gets calluses.

Sir Paul has made his attachments known:

McCartney wrote to The Dalai Lama to highlight that meat eaters create suffering for animals, and that this fact contradicted a basic tenant of Buddhism that its followers should “not cause suffering to any sentient beings”.

And then:

When the Dalai Lama explained that he had been told by doctors to eat meat for health reasons, this wasn’t enough for the passionate superstar.

Just wondering if he has ever taken antibiotics, or is that wrong too?

(Bows, DigitalDharma)

In this 200th podcast of InfiniteSmile.org (Wow!), Michael discusses how our willingness to not get anything, even as we give, shows us the Path to Awakening.
Click here to listen.

In a letter to God, guardian.co.uk’s Mark Vernon wants to uncover the depth of true Silence. The kind that Thomas Aquinas uncovered on 6th December 1273 when he uttered his final “Ite missa est” (the mass is ended) and then left the altar for good.

He [Aquinas] told his friend Reginald that he would not write another word. Moreover, all the words that he had written up to that point, now seemed like as much straw to him.You know what he meant. We can’t quite be sure. However, my best guess is this. Straw was a metaphor for “basic stuff”

Perhaps it is from this silence, about which Mr. Vernon asks, that the Infinite “speaks” to us most profoundly; where we are no longer concerned with being good Christians, or Buddhists, but instead become actual Christs and actual Buddhas.

Maybe Ludwig von Wittgenstein sums it up best:

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

Simply shutting up while being still offers us this most simple, and yet most profound of insights. But it takes practice. Realization of the Eternal shows us what is immediately and always prior to the flow of time, but glimpsing this isn’t an endpoint. It’s a beginning. At each and every moment.

I woke this morning to read David Brooks, once again, making a point about Buddhist attentiveness. Today he takes on the thesis of Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, Outliers:

‘Great people aren’t so great. Their own greatness is not the salient fact about them. It’s the kind of fortunate mix of opportunities they’ve been given.’ - Malcolm Gladwell

Brooks goes after him a bit here, adding:

Most successful people also have a phenomenal ability to consciously focus their attention. We know from experiments with subjects as diverse as obsessive-compulsive disorder sufferers and Buddhist monks that people who can self-consciously focus attention have the power to rewire their brains.

While I agree with both Gladwell’s not-so-controversial point that chaos has an important role in all of this, and with Brooks’ assertion that rewiring the brain is helpful in allowing us to respond appropriately to life, we need to recognize that both are critical steps in the process. And yet, neither point alone gets us fully into the open field of an Awakening. Combining the impersonal nature of interdependance with deep personal intentionality, on the other hand, gets the soil ready for the bloom of Enlightenment.

David Ian Miller writes for the San Francisco Chronicle that

Even atheists can have what I would describe as deeply spiritual lives. [This] realization came by way of my interview this week with Mike Lee, a name familiar to Mac geeks around the world.

Mike Lee,

describes himself on his blog as the “world’s toughest programmer.” That toughness was born out of surviving an abusive childhood, which was followed by a mostly unsuccessful search for meaning in the Christian, Buddhist and Shinto faiths. Lee, who grew up in Hawaii and now lives in Cupertino, eventually became a committed atheist. Still, he continues to cultivate the values that were important to his samurai ancestors, believing that “a life lived according to the virtues of rectitude, courage, benevolence, respect, honesty, honor and loyalty should please any reasonable deity.”

Over at the elephant journal, Henry Schliff offers an interesting post looking at pop culture’s treatment of crazy wisdom:

Deconstruct the Joker, take away his violence and you have al-Khidr or any crazy mystic in comic style, the wrench thrower, the coyote, you can even keep the violence and he is Bhairava (sans-matted hair). The Joker character is another incarnation of Tyler Durden brought out of the split-psyche of humanity, the side ruled by chaos and destruction, a veritable force of nature whose only impetus is to derail the constructive impulse. I would say the Joker could almost be a budding Milarepa cutting away the constructs of religion to attain the heart of knowledge, except he falls short accepting the tried/true societal conditioning of evil, wreaking mayhem with violence and destruction, the expected norm of evil and fear.

The following point perfectly illustrates the danger that lurks within and without any teaching that readily reveals itself through a teacher like the Joker:

In the final analysis, this character inspires awe, fear, and confusion because he exhibits disinterest towards the trite and over simplistic concepts of good and evil we so often cling to and scoffs at attempted heroisms defined by chivalry and martyrdom. He embodies incorruptible chaos without logic, law, or code.

While great teaching helps us push through the boundaries of time and mind, if it isn’t met with some type of ethical code that supports “nonharming”, crazy wisdom can easily bring out the shadow elements in any of us; a shadow, by the way, that thinks it is Divine Light.

Fabrizio Costantini for the New York Times offers us a fascinating glimpse at a possible solution to our current financial crisis.

The Sunday service at Greater Grace Temple began with the Clark Sisters song “I’m Looking for a Miracle” and included a reading of this verse from the Book of Romans: “I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.”

An interesting approach.

Bishop Charles H. Ellis III, who shared the sanctuary’s wide altar with three gleaming sport utility vehicles, closed his sermon by leading the choir and congregants in a boisterous rendition of the gospel singer Myrna Summers’s “We’re Gonna Make It” as hundreds of worshipers who work in the automotive industry — union assemblers, executives, car salesmen — gathered six deep around the altar to have their foreheads anointed with consecrated oil.

Matt Duss, over at The Guardian has some policy analysis worthy of attention. What happens when a developmental orientation focused on a fundamentalist approach inspires foreign policy? What happens when this thinking becomes contagious through the (ahem… viral) delivery system of our current media?

Speaking about Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hannity declared “we need to take him out”. Then he asked Warren whether he was “advocating something dark, evil or something righteous?” Amazingly, Warren affirmed Hannity’s wrath, saying that stopping evil “is the legitimate role of government. The Bible says that God puts government on earth to punish evildoers”.

Duss nails it here:

… it’s alarming to hear Warren deploying his spiritual influence in support of the ultranationalist ravings of someone like Sean Hannity.I contacted Warren’s office for clarification about his statement, to find out where exactly the Bible says that “God puts government on earth to punish evildoers” like Ahmadinejad.

Could Pastor Warren be referring to Romans 13? Evidently so.

But Romans 13 concerns the power of civil government to punish criminals, and has nothing to do, as far as I know, with invading foreign countries or assassinating foreign leaders.In the years since the 9/11 attacks, Americans have been inundated with a steady stream of images and quotes from Osama bin Laden and other Islamic extremists offering religious justification for violence. Many have asked why more moderate Muslims haven’t publicly condemned the misuse of their faith to justify war and murder.

And perhaps the most elegant point of all.

Warren’s statement provides an opportunity, and a challenge, to American Christians to do the same.

Fundamentalism, in all its forms, inhibits our Way since it is merely an attached view that sees itself as absolute.

Now I’ll practice letting go of the subject of this post.

There is a great repost over at elephant journal, worth a read. Dr. Reggie Ray offers his take on negotiating life’s demands and the need for practice.

Many, many people tell me “I’m having a lot of problems doing this [meditation] practice because I am so busy. I’m really busy. I have a full life. It’s busy and I run from morning ‘til night.” People actually say that.

I concur with this. The number of practitioners who approach the Path from this space continues to amaze me.

He goes on:

Now think about that for a minute. What kind of life is that? Is that a life worth living? Some people feel it is. America is probably the most extreme example of a speed-driven culture—and this is not my particular personal discovery, but something that has been said to me by many people from other traditional cultures. The first time this was said to me was when I was 19 and I went to Japan. Western people are running from themselves and they use the busy-ness of their lives as an excuse to avoid having to actually live their own life. We are terrified of who we actually are, terrified of the inner space that is the basis of the human experience.

Enjoy this.
(Bows to The Worst Horse and Rev. Danny Fisher)

In this talk, the contributions and teachings of an Infinite Smile sangha member that died unexpectedly are discussed.

“Jerry’s life served all of us in this work because he was ready to meet this moment.”

Click here to listen

Over at Tricycle, Alexandra Kolyanides posts a wonderful bit on Faulkner’s advice to writers back when he won the Nobel Prize.

I was struck by how his words sounded like the Path.

The young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat

Are we willing to meet all the agony and the sweat in order to uncover what is always True?

He continues, sounding more and more like Dogen Zenji:

He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart

In the Genjo Koan we hear:

To study the Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things of the universe. To be enlightened by all things of the universe is to cast off the body and mind of the self as well as those of others. Even the traces of enlightenment are wiped out, and life with traceless enlightenment goes on forever and ever.

(Bows, Alexandra)

Andrew Cohen makes some interesting points in his blog entry today.

Whenever I contemplate the mystery of consciousness and how it evolves within and through us, I am always struck by the same thing: How easy it is to see a glorious future in those moments when we are spiritually awake, when our awareness is enlightened—and how difficult it is to see that glory when it is not.

This is a fascinating take on enlightened awareness; one that I can agree with in many respects. And yet I also find myself interested in the idea that enlightened awareness helps individuals to “see a glorious future”. This isn’t exactly the way I’ve watched things unfold in either my own practice over the years or in the practice of my students.

From an enlightened perspective, none of us sees either past or future as anything other than objects of mind. Nor does any of us see any kind of evaluation as either glorious, or horrible, or in between. Instead we see that as an enlightened awareness breaks through these various constructs of the mind, there is a Divine opportunity to disidentify with whatever we may have experienced in the past as well as what we might hope to experience in the future. An authentic awakening show us that Spirit intentionally meets itself through us in every single moment. Knowing this frees us from the bondage of time. But while we might recognize the Eternal we don’t stop here. We can’t. This meeting inspires us to freely offer a depth and a breadth of context as we contribute consciously to all activity.

Perhaps Andrew and I are saying similar things on this point:

In the early stages of our own spiritual development, we are dependent upon the experience of euphoric states to be able to see, feel, and know that these higher potentials really do exist. The bliss and ecstasy of those states temporarily breaks the deep and often unconscious shackles of postmodernity: nihilism, cynicism, narcissism, and materialism. It frees our awareness to expand in all directions, to embrace not only the outer limits but also the innermost core of our larger body, the entire Kosmos.

And these state experiences are a critical component to our climb up the Mountain of Spirit. My concern is that his words may imply that hungry egos can short-cut the process of Awakening in order to serve its own wants and desires for evolutionary emergence:

until those higher potentials have become a permanent attainment, our ability to see the future that we want to create will always depend upon the experience of spiritual intoxication.

But what will be doing the attaining beyond the spiritual intoxication? An ego by another name? What exactly keeps the primary structures of ego from reabsorbing what it can easily cling to as some better, more complete, more enlightened, more evolved version of itself?  A spiritually narcissistic Self 2.0 that bypasses the need to first see the view from the summit of the Mountain of Spirit and then embody the utterly devastating implications of that view defines the delusion from which we seek to free ourselves an others.

Seeing that glory will no longer be dependent upon the presence of a higher state—because we will already be there.

Maybe he’s right. Maybe not. Regardless, all of us on the Path will do well to help each other uncover the spacious mystery we call the Now. From here our task is to act consciously from the spaciousness of this moment, which in turn, helps all of us co-create a future that supports the continual unfolding of this process.

Update: I also posted this over at Integral Life where the comments took a really cool turn.

In the latest issue of Buddhadharma, a forum is hosted in which the future of Buddhism in America is discussed. An excerpt:

Forty or fifty years after the big influx of dharma to the West, we have a small but active and growing population of young practitioners. But what of the future, when the baby boomers are gone? What will become of the dharma with a relatively small number of young people waiting in the wings? To increase the numbers of young students, does the dharma need to become more relevant to younger people? If so, what will that look like?

Interesting conversation. Especially since it raised the hackles of arunlikhati at Dharma Folk.

While I can curse this article to no end, the Buddhadharma discussion finally opened my eyes to the way that white Buddhists see the Buddhist community. Dharma centers, sitting groups, meditation retreats, lay teachers, Free Tibet mailing lists and Buddhism-themed magazines are all part and parcel of white Buddhist culture. And white Buddhists want to preserve this. They want to build on this. But I can see that working with Asian Americans isn’t part of the plan.

Interesting points abound in this post, and I’m sure that fans of Integral Theory will notice the strong Green sentiments expressed.

I also enjoyed the post over at The Worst Horse:

The controversy is best boiled down to and centered around Dharma Folk’s contention that we can’t “discuss the future of the Buddhist community in America without talking about Asian Americans.” For my part, I think that’s true, but would like to reiterate that, indeed, the piece was intentionally conceived to talk about “dharma’s integration into the American culture,” (Winston’s phrasing) with an eye towards so-called “convert Buddhists.”

Fascinating. Egoic arguments over who deserves credit and blame; issues of race and identity. All of it interesting from the perspective of the ego. Not like the hurt feelings don’t matter, but until we can uncover the root of the pain, we’re just spinning the Karmic wheel of attachment, wondering why we’re suffering. If, on the other hand, an embodied realization that goes beyond this personal attachment is allowed to unfold any and every dialog has served to awaken all things.

TIME Magazine’s David van Biema gives us 2008’s Top 10 stories on religion.

For my money, this story is especially fascinating since it applies to our sangha in really specific ways.

A 35,000-person poll by the Pew Forum for Religion & Public Life found that 28% of U.S. adults have left their cradle faith for another one — 44% if you’re talking about denominations rather than faiths. The poll suggests great national piety coupled with remarkable disdain for the multi-generational doctrinal and ethnic ties that used to define American religion.

Over the past few years, more and more people have approached me and described their feelings of an increasing irrelevance in relation to their traditional faiths. They keep lamenting the fact that their choice is a stark one: either stick with a tradition that no longer seems relevant, or avoid tradition altogether. Either way they feel lost.

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.