Back to Lascaux

In the current “Love” issue of Parabola, I interview David Rome, a senior fellow at the Garrison Institute who once served as the personal secretary of the great Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche for nine years.   Rome even took down the poetry that Trungpa spontaneously dictated and worked with him to edit it and see it published.  This proved to be a perfect preparation for Rome’s later work with a meditative technique called “focusing,” which aims to guide people back to the “felt sense.”  Rome describes the felt sense as the usually subtle experience of being in a body in a particular situation–it is knowing about your life in a bodily way.  (Sometimes it isn’t so subtle, when a chill goes up your spine).   This state of bodily presence that exists before experience gets filtered into words and defined emotions  is where poetry and other forms of art come from–the stuff that isn’t mere contrivance and imitation.   It is also the wellspring of symbols, myths, and the religious impulse.

In the past few weeks, since I’ve seen the movie Avatar, I’ve been reflecting on how mindfulness meditation and even childhood fantasy games (I was a jungle girl) can be like traveling back in time–not just in our individual lives, to a time of innocence, but back to a time when there was no hard and fast separation between art and religion.  Eugene Gendlin, the University of Chicago philosopher and psychologist who developed focusing  once said that the felt body is “part of a gigantic system of here and other places, now and other times, you and other people, in fact the whole universe.  This sense of being bodily alive in a vast system is the body as it is felt from the inside.”

It can feel this way to sit down on a cushion and meditate.  Returning to the sensation of being present can open us up again to the primordial mystery of life–and so can good poetry and art.   It leads us beyond what is present to the sublime.   In the old days, in days of the great cave paintings in Lascaux, there was no separation between religious and the artistic impulse.  These days, however, good, repectable art isn’t supposed to have anything to do with the spiritual.  Yet sometimes the twin impulses can’t be denied.  In an article about the painter Agnes Martin,  Joanna Weber writes:  “In 1764, Kant wrote  ‘The sublime moves, the beautiful charms.  The sublime must be simple; the beautiful can be adorned and ornamental.’”  Martin’s work is  simple and sublime.  In her own description: “a work of art is successful when there is a hint of perfection present–at the slightest hint…the work is alive.  The life of the work depends on the observer, according to his own awareness of perfection and inspiration.”

I find in my own life that this felt sense is usually completely drowned out by thought–or else I’m not aware of it until there is a big explosion of anger or fear.   Yet I know there is something in me besides ego and mindless habit, something that yearns to be part of something bigger than my own piddling interests and subjectivity.   How to make a practice of this?    Drop everything the mind happens to be grasping.  Sink down under all the layers of care and views and languages, be with the prehistoric one who knows what is right here right now.

Sitting with the Na’Vi

In response to my last post about the film Avatar, someone commented that the film reminded him of the feeling of community with others and with all life that he had growing up in the country.   Recently, I realized that it is just this sense of communing with life that comes rushing back vividly when I sit with others.   Sometimes when I sit alone in my room with the windows open, bird song or the smell of snow or spring or even a car on the road,  can bring me back to my senses but mostly when I sit with others.  I remember that primordial longing to be part of life the way the Na’vi were portrayed as being part of life–each of them able to braid themselves into the whole of life and into individual aspects they loved.

Shortly after I saw Avatar at a suburban mall, I had the  strangely complementary (braided?) experience of listening to Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi discourse on Sutta (or Sutra) #18, “The Honeyball,”  from the Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha, at Chuang Yen Monastery.  This sutta (so named because the truth it describes is as sweet and nourishing as a honey ball, which I believe is a yummy Indian dessert which is still served) describes “papanca,” the proliferation of thoughts and projections.  What we perceive, we think about, which is natural enough–and so is the tendency to delight in what we think.  And then comes craving, the yearning to be this or that, the projection of all kinds of views and opinions.   This is the way it is for most of us most of the time, isn’t it?  We walk around dreaming and talking to ourselves.  With both of these experiences fresh in mind, I sat down to meditate with a group of friends in Manhattan.  As the layers of thought and projection fell away and I returned to the sensation of being present in a room among others,  it struck me that what was happening was something akin to time traveling.   Supported by the energy of the group,  I was travelling back behind the thoughts and feelings and the distorted perceptions that proliferate from hurt feelings and thoughts–back to the primal perception of being here now.

Recently, a critic wrote that the Na’vi woman warrior Neyfiri doesn’t deserve an Oscar because as fine a creation as she may be, there are nuances in real live acting that are lost.   In the same way, of course,  my childhood fantasy of being a jungle warrior princess, isn’t real life.  But I wonder if there isn’t a connection between that longing to go back in time to a purer state, to be among the Na’Vi or fight for Middle Earth, and the desire to return to our original state, to the immediate felt sense of being alive.

Back to the Jungle

Much has been written about how the film Avatar was made–how it took five years and thousands of people and $300 million.  Much has been written about how enchanting it looks.  Vatican Radio said “really never before have such surprising images been seen.”   L’Osservatore Romanos, the newspaper of the Holy See, commented:  “So much stupefying, enchanting technology, but few genuine emotions…” Others beside these Vatican sources commented on the pantheism of the story–a faith that equates God with nature–taking issue with the suggestion that communion with “Eywa,” the “All Mother” of Creation, the humming hub of energy that is the sum of everything thing, is the highest divinity.

But I have been thinking about how the film follows such a deep groove in the culture and maybe even in most individual’s brains, certainly mine.  Gurdjieff told his students that the aim of his work was not to add anything new but to recover something had been lost.  Gurdjieff meant wholeness,  unity– in a much more subtle, inward way than what James Cameron is dazzling the world with.   But the visually mind-blowing Avatar can take a person back, as they say.  It made me remember how it felt to be a child. The  protagonist of the film, a 22nd century ex-Marine named Jake Scully, is sent on a mission to a moon called Pandora.   His consciousness is slipped into the nine-foot-tall blue alien body,or avatar, so he can spy on the Na’Vi,  the beautiful, lithe, blue natives of Pandora who look like a re-imagined indigo version of the first aboriginal people.    Jake is meant to help his corporate and military masters get rid of the Na’Vi, who are living on top of a rich deposit of “Unobtainium,” an invaluable mineral back on ruined Earth.  But Jake (whose original body was paralyzed from the waist down thanks to war)  falls in love with a Na’Vi princess and learns a new way to be.

Biologists have written articles in The New York Times about the way Avatar captures “the naked, heart-stopping wonder of really seeing the living world.”    Watching it made me remember imaginary games I played in childhood that involved climbing trees and (in winter) jumping from couches to chairs in the living room, pretending I bounding gazelle-like through a vast, impossibly beautiful jungle, my black panther consort padding by my side.   Watching the swooping, gorgeous scenes of Cameron’s movie, it all came rushing back, the yearning and exuberant certainty I felt at five or six-years-old  that I could be far more capable and graceful and alive than my mother and the container of my life allowed me to be.    Somehow I new there had to be more to me that what was called on in school each day.   There was a capacity to be quicker, wilder…anyway, I practiced pretending that I could listen and even feel the intelligence of the whole of the jungle.

My days as a girl in tune with the jungle came crashing down the day my mother intentionally bleached the navy blue shorts I would not stop wearing winter or summer when I was pretending to be a kind of girl Mowgli.   It was a horrible, clarifying moment for me, seeing those shorts all mottled purple and white.  It was like tearing back the curtain on the Wizard of Oz.   I went from having a connection to the whole of Nature to being an ordinary kid shivering in a laundry room on a January day.

Many, many decades later, however, I sat down on a sitting cushion with other friends who are interested in coming to a greater unity. These days, the unity I wish for is an inner unity and the divinity I aspire to know is greater than Nature.   As I quieted down and sought to come to a greater awareness,  I realized that remembering who we really does mean forgetting the small creature we usually take ourselves to be.    It means going back, back behind all the proliferating thoughts and biases, returning to consciousness…and that primordial mystery.

Avatar

It has always intrigued me that the computer world applies words traditionally meant to point towards sacred realities– “icon” and “avatar”–in  weird but apt ways.   An icon, for example, is a small image that can be clicked on to become a gateway to a much larger reality–a two-dimensional technological version of the way an Byzantine icon can lead an Orthodox Christian who contemplates it to an appreciation of the  greater reality it represents.   Similarly, an avatar is a picture vehicle or a cartoon personification for a real person while a traditional avatar was a Hindu deity incarnated in human form–the way Lord Krishna appeared to Arjuna on the battlefield.     Who first thought of using these terms?   What computer geek (s) with a love of comparative religion chose those words instead of the cute common word  “cookie” or the made-up word  “google”?  It seems to suggest that at least some of the time, computing and software design attracts people who have  some of the same questions and hopes that animate spiritual search–i.e. the exchange of energy.  Certainly, this is true of technologist and gift economy entrepreneur Nipun Mehta, whom Parabola interviewed last year.

James Cameron’s film “Avatar” is a gorgeous digitally animated and live action fantasy exploration of what it could be like to be human and inhabit a greater reality.  Regardless of how they may judge the story Cameron tells,  almost everyone  who has seen the film has been bowled over by the way Cameron (working with a crew of thousands) has reimagined nature.  In the New Yorker, David Denby writes:  “As Cameron surges through the picture plane, brushing past tree branches, coursing alongside foaming-mouthed creatures, we may be overcome by an uncanny sense of emerging, becoming, transcending–a sustained mood of elation produced by vaulting into space.”  Set on Pandora, an Eden-like planet, and among the tribal clan, the Na’vi, who sense and worship the connections among all living beings.    As Denby describes them:  “In their easy command of nature, they are meant to evoke aboriginal people everywhere.  They have spiritual powers and, despite their elementary weapons–bows and arrows–real powers, too.  From each one’s head emerges a long braid ending in tendrils that are alive with nerves.  When the Na’vi plug their braids into similar neural cords that that hang from the heads of crested, horselike animals and giant birds, they achieve zahelu“….the Na’vi can merge with the animals  and govern their behavior with their own thoughts (in some other reports I’ve read, this is the way the Na’vi merge with one another as well).   In the film, a shadowy mega corporation grow tall blue avatars by incorporating a few peoples’ DNA–among them Jake, a paralyzed ex-marine.  When Jake slips into his avatar body he can suddenly run and jump againg–even before he goes flying on a kind of huge, colorful pterodactyl–we feel the soaring joy of movement.

Another writer calls Avatar “a long apologia for pantheism–a faith that equates God with Nature, and calls humanity into religious communion with the natural world.”   That columnist claims that “pantheism has been Hollywood’s religioun of choice for a generation now…It’s the metaphysics woven through Disney cartoons like The Lion King and Pocahontas.  dogma of George Lucas’s Jedi, whose mystical Force ’surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together.’”

Hmmmmm.  So many interesting questions bubble up.   I remember so vividly experiencing meditation for the first time–that experience of coming down out of my thoughts and reconnecting with sensory awareness–and with feelings and thoughts before they hardened into ideas.  That was like slipping into an avatar and visiting a gorgeous new world, a connected world.  But now, decades on, I can also see how easy it is to take that realm for Reality…when perhaps there is a higher heaven?   How crucial it is to get out of the cage of the ego and rediscover the body…yet there is even more….

Being Free And Being Yourself In the New Year

Happy New Year!  May you be happy and peaceful.  May all of  your good intentions and highest wishes come to fruition.  “The ‘Causes of Existence’ mean not only the physical causes known to science, but the metaphysical causes, the chief of which is the desire to exist,” writes H. P. Blavatsky, the founder of the Theosophical Society.   “This desire for a sentient life shows itself in everything, from an atom to a sun….According to esoteric teaching, the real cause of that supposed desire, and of all existence, remains forever hidden….”

“A ’sentient life’ is impossible without sensation, and sensation is impossible without consciousness–the capacity to relate self and other,” writes Richard Smoley in The Dice Game of Shiva.  “So the root of all existence is the primordial distinction between self and other.”    Even hydrogen and oxygen atoms are conscious in this sense know how to “recognize” each other  so they can bond and become water.  When did this “selfing” all begin?  Smoley quotes the creation hymn of the Rig Veda, the oldest book in the world: “‘Whence this creation has arisen–perhaps it formed itself, or perhaps it did not–the one who looks down on it, in the highest heaven, only he knows–or perhaps he does not know.”

The drive to be, to affirm or define ourselves in relation to the world around us–there is no getting to the beginning or the end of it.     At this dark, cold, still time of year,  this time of resolutions and affirming new beginnings,  the yearning to get down to the serious business of being the “real” self, clearing away all the distractions and obstacles that stand in the way really stands out.   It suffuses many inspiring and useful blogs like “Zen Habits.”  Yet there is always another yearning that is harder to articulate, to return to the source, to be free of the isolation of the ego and connected with the whole of life.

Even as a little girl I can recall yearning to reveal the “real” me (at five years old I pictured her as a cross between a cartoon superhero and Mowgli from Disney’s version of Jungle Book, strong yet connected to nature).   It’s harder to remember exactly when I noticed the opposite wish–to go beyond myself.  It appeared first as wondering, looking up at the night sky and wondering when it all began and what was it for.

It would be really lovely to be able to divide a life into “selfing” and “unselfing.”   In a way this is the truth, since I no longer daydream about flying into my classroom like super girl or demonstrating my power to communicate with animals to the amazement of my friends.  These days,  the dominant wish has to do with wishing to be connected with others and with the whole of life.    But in reality the experience is mixed–on the very deepest level there is affirming, denying, reconciling.   There is no escaping life as long as we are alive.

For humans, it is even more complicated.  In the words of Madame de Salzmann:  “We participate in life with both a divine nature and an animal nature.  Man is double; he is not one.   And as such, he is only a promise of man until he can live with both natures present in himself and not withdraw into one of the other….A conscious man is he who is always vigilant, always watchful, who remembers himself in both directions and has his two natures always confronted.”

What can this mean?

Holidays/ Holy Days

“Cooking has many functions, and only one of them is about feeding people,” writes British food writer Nigella Lawson.   Lawson’s wonderfully forgiving recipe for coq au vin was simmering on Christmas Eve.  I wanted to fill the house with a delicious and comforting smell for all kinds of reasons–including one Lawson herself provides in her cookbook Feast:  “When we go into a kitchen, indeed when we even just think about going into a kitchen, we are both creating and responding to an idea we hold about ourselves, about what kind of person we wish to be.”     The kind of person I wished to be on Christmas Eve was solid, enduring.   I wasn’t just wishing to create a Christmas-y atmosphere for my home-from-college daughter who passionately loves Christmas–I was trying to whip up a loving, cozy atmosphere that would protect me and everyone I cared about from the impermanence of life.  The serious nature of life–the way that people and times we have loved disappear and never return becomes terribly clear to me this time of year.

Julia Child once said that dining with family and friends is one of “life’s primal and most innocent delights, one that is both soul-satisfying and eternal.”   The older I get, the more I tackle the holidays like Scrooge on Christmas morning–as if cooking and candlelight and glasses raised in a toast can save me from the kind of vision that Gabriel Conroy had at the end of James Joyce’s story “The Dead:”  “His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead.   His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling. “

On Christmas morning, I found my daughter in the kitchen making pancakes, dressed in a skirt and jewelry and looking she thought (and I did, too) “a little like the wife in MadMen”  (minus the cigarette, thankfully).   Her retro outfit reminded me a little of very early memories of my mother, whom I especially miss at Christmas since she loved it so much.  I wondered if she had done what I do–making merry for her children’s sake.  “One by one they were all becoming shades,” reflected Gabriel Conroy. “Better to pass boldly into that other world in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.”   Surely my mother who had lost her own mother my the time I was five must have known the truth of impermanence, yet she was always like a child herself at Christmas, overflowing with excitement and generosity, reminding us that life was full of  unforeseeable possibilities and magic.

In 2010, may we all open to life’s unexpected gifts and highest possbilities.

A Veda Merry Christmas!

Yesterday morning, yearning to get out before the big snow storm hit, and wanting buck the tide of  Christmas-shopping crowds, I drove up the Taconic to Chuang Yen monastery in Carmel, New York, where Venerable Bhikkhu Bodhi’s is teaching classes in some of the sutras (or “suttas” in Pali) in his translation of the Majjhima Nikaya, or Middle Length Discourse of the Buddha.   First, the assembled group of us meditated for half an hour, most of us in winter coats and shawls since the monastery is as cold as a castle on warm days and yesterday was freezing.  At the end of the meditation, we bowed, including several full bows, head touching floor.  There is something about the forehead touching the stone floor of a monastery that can remind a person that another way of relating to reality is possible.   As a Westerner who was raised Methodist (you weren’t supposed to wear your spiritual heart on your sleeve), bowing used in this style used to seem a little wild to me.  But now I love it because it reminds me that there is an inner posture as well in which the egocentric thinking isn’t on top.   Lately, it seems to me that what Madame de Salzmann calls “voluntary passivity,” has to do with surrender my allegiance to the  false self–with seeing that the momentum of what I take to be myself is largely driven by what the Buddhists call the “three poisons”  of craving or grasping, aversion or ill will, or delusion or ignorance.  Sometimes I can see and feel that what I usually take myself to be is largely made of tension and pain.    What a relief to let go, even just for that second the head touches the floor.  No self, no problem.  Just life and the wish to take a place in life, to serve somehow.

Venerable Bodhi is a great scholar in addition to being a warm-hearted human being (he is just back from Copenhagen, where he was part of a group of religious leaders speaking out for taking better care for the earth).   He parsed what it meant in the early days of Buddhism to have unwavering confidence in the Buddha, the dharma, the sangha.  “Noble ones,” in the time of the Buddha were those who had done their own inner work, who could look back and reflect and gain inspiration and unwavering confidence (lin her upcoming book, Madame de Salzmann talks about faith coming from conviction based similarly on real attainments).   The Pali word “dharmaveda”  indicates that unshakable confidence and Ven. Bodhi explained that “veda” which was so important in India at the time of the Buddha (and long before) means  “both to know and to feel.”  He said that he settled for “inspiration” in his translation although it didn’t really cover it.  Veda means to know and to feel at the same time–it is knowledge accompanied by elevated feeling or an inspired or exhilerated feeling accompanied by real knowing.   Such inspired or exhilerated knowing leads to the kind of rapture or gladness that leads to tranquility, to the mind settling down and becoming concentrated and clear, resting on the only solid ground in this shifting world which is the Truth.  I once heard Madame de Salzmann (a true Noble One) say that Ouspensky never understood that the Truth is in movement,  like the stars and the planets.   The Truth also encompasses impermanence and all the other laws that determine our lives.

Wishing you much “veda” ….a Veda Merry Christmas!

Reality is the Goal

“It is only when we get beyond fantasy, beyond wishing and dreaming, that the real conversion takes place and we awake re-born….for reality is the goal, deny it how we will,” wrote Henry Miller (and thank you to Josh Baran who posted it on Facebook so it could circulate in the world anew).  “When the individual is wholly creative, one with destiny, the god-feeling is so intense everything beats with divine rhythmn. “

In the documentary “My Architect,” a Yale professor describes the architect as artist, as someone who had the feeling and capacity to wish to serve what we call god without sparing himself (my paraphrase).   When I  watched this scene last year I wondered why I had never before thought of Madame de Salzmann as an artist–she was a musical prodigy as a girl.   Why had I never thought of Gurdjieff as artist?   Not just the Movements but all the forms he brought were created.   It occurs to me that to make the kind of effort that Madame de Salzmann describes in The Reality of Being it is necessary to live experimentally, like an artist, willing to abandon fantasy and allegiance to the false self to risk a greater wholeness.   Miller sounds strikingly like de Salzmann when he speaks  of “the moment of supreme individuation, when the identity of all things is sensed.”  In such a moment “the umbilical cord is cut–there is neither longing for the womb or for the beyond.  The sure feeling of eternality.  Beyond this there is no evolution, only a perpetual movement from creation to creation.”

Isn’t this what it must mean to serve God, to help His Endlessness, however you conceive it, to be one with Reality?

Being And Being Like Scrooge

Is it possible to develop greater being and not become a more loving and generous human being?   Some esoteric paths don’t concern themselves much with conventional morality.  According to Gurdjieff and Madame de Salzmann the Fourth Way is a demanding and exacting work.    “The level of being is determined by what enters into one’s Presence at a given moment, that is, the number of centers which participate and the conscious relation between them,”  writes Madame de Salzmann in an excerpt in the current Parabola, “The Future.”  Establishing a conscious relation between the different realms of the mind, body, and emotions (the different “centers”) is an extraordinary inner accomplishment, requiring who knows how much patience and diligence.   And yet…and yet…there is another way I understand the cultivation of a spiritual life and that has to do with the giving up and giving away.

The Buddhist writer John Tarrant writes that bodhisattva path, “in which we want everyone to share in the joy of understanding….comes from losing things more than from gaining things.  If you lose everything, you may also be lucky enough to lose who you thought you were,  along with any fear and despair that goes with that identity.   It might be that what we have to learn is to play in the world like someone who really did run away to join the circus when she thought about it as a child.  We are part of  something vast, and generosity is an effortless consequence of discovering that.”

In times of grief and loss, there can be moments of wild freedom, a loosening of the slip-not of identity, a sense of play in every sense of the word, of give.   When I’ve lost who I thought I was,  I’ve also noticed the arising of a desire to be generous and kind.   Since the Christmas season is upon us, I will go ahead and call it a Scrooge-like awakening–the realization that grave awaits us, that everything we usually cling to turns out to be impermanent, and that our real purpose and meaning is not fixed but fluid, relational.   All I truly want to be such a moment (“if I get out of this alive”) is useful as I can be, one more pair of hands on the bucket brigade in this burning world.

What does this ordinary kind of insight or wisdom have to do with the realization that a master like Madame de Salzmann achieved?  A great deal, actually.   At the end of her book, she speaks of love and about discovering a real “I” that knows that we are not independent, not alone.  Her work ultimately has to do with becoming available and with being useful in life.

Why not always include this attitude, this intention in our efforts?   Is it ever too early to learn to lose?

The Gift of Giving

Happy Thanksgiving!  I recently learned that when the Puritans landed in Massachusetts,  they discovered that the Indians had a strange feeling about the giving and receiving of gifts.   Having experienced nothing like it, they misunderstood it, ran it down.   In 1764,  when Thomas Hutchinson wrote his history of the colony, he explained that the already old expression “Indian gift” meant “a present for which an equivalent return is expected.”   Over the years, the term became broader and even more degraded–an “Indian giver” is someone who gives a gift only to ask for it back.    What the Indians understood ( I learned all this in The Gift by Lewis Hyde) is that gifts must keep moving!

Giving can be  a way of experiencing ourselves as a conduit for the finer energy that holds the world together.  Giving food, goods or service, sharing wisdom and insight, being kind to another, such acts can help us glimpse our interconnection with others and with the whole of life.  Everyone from Jesus to Buddha to Jeanne de Salzmann has indicated that this is our highest human identity.  In our current issue,  young aspiring  “generosity  entrepreneur” Nipun Mehta reminds us that true giving begins not when we think we have piled up enough surplus to give “but when we have nothing left to take. “  My new friends Nipun Mehta, Birju Pandya, and Paul Van Slambrouck, whom I met at the Parabola offices in New York a month or so ago, inspire me to believe that giving is the most enlightened act a person can engage in this life.  It is the antidote to fear, miserliness, greed, and lonely, miserable Scrooge-like isolation.

Four times a year, Parabola gives people a banquet of this kind of food for thought, themes and truths  that appear in all traditions and ways. Now Parabola needs your gifts if we are to keep on giving.  Please consider making a donation of money or time now so that we can keep on offering a banquet of food for thought four times a year.

Thank you!