May All Beings Be Free

Happy Independence Day!   This is how mine is going to go.  A small group of us is going to one of the colonial manors around here where a canon will be fired and the Declaration of Independence read.  We will mill around among people in colonial dress.  My 19-year-old daughter is likely to provide a lively counter-point to all patriotism by expressing her passionate wish to be an ex-patriot.  Eventually we will come home hot and tired and swim in our lake and I will perform what I have come to think of as a little version of the ancient Indian fire sacrifice.    I will fill my fire bowl with wood and after the coals turn white I will roast chicken sausages and corn and other cook-out Americana as a way to appease the gods of domesticity.  I sometimes fill the role of mother and householder in an almost sacrificial way.  Not that this is a bad thing.

I just returned from a week-long retreat where I spent a great deal of time contemplating what it might mean to live so there is no separation between going outwards into activity, manifesting as we usually are, and moving inwards to the experience of oneness, of pure being, that can appear in stillness.   How can we experience a state of being one with everything in the midst of life.   By mid week, I began to experiment with living as if I was about to die.   I did whatever I did, walking, talking, eating, without striving.  I abandoned all hope of escape from the bare truth of what I was.  I forgot I ever had a head full of ideas and a heart full of aspirations about how I could be better.  I went around just being and bearing witness to it.

It gave me an inkling of what it is like not just to be–but to wholeheartedly volunteer to be.  It helped me understand (at least for a second or two) that we are needed, not just on the meditation cushion, but in all our quirky particularity.  We are meant to play a role in this wholeness.  Last year, I interviewed Robert Kennedy, a wonderful Jesuit priest who is also a Zen Roshi.  He reminded me that od is not a gift-giver, separate from ourselves.  Everything is given to each of us.  Creation plays itself out in our lives ,  as we experience it.  Everything is poured out.  Everything is a gift.  If we can be open to receive it that way.

I have a hunch that being receptive has to do with agreeing to fill the role your  in (really hold those BBQ tongs like you mean it!)  What do you think?

May all beings be free and at ease here.

 

“Small Things With Great Love…” Mother Theresa

A few months ago, I attended a monthly dinner held by a group of New Yorkers who love to get together and talk about myth and enduring truths at an Italian restaurant in the West Village of Manhattan.   At the end of the evening, a man pressed a book in my hand called One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way by Robert Maurer, Ph.D.   It looked like the kind of business oriented self-help books I ran screaming from when I was a book reviewer for PW.  Indeed it is,  but this one has a fascinating twist.   After France fell to Nazi Germany in 1940, the U.S. government created training programs called Training Within Industries (TWI) for corporations who needed to gear up for the war.  One of these programs was the brainchild of a statistician and quality control man named Dr. W. Edwards Deming (could there be a less  Zen-sounding background?).  Deming advised a fluid attitude of “continuous improvement.”     Instead of pressing for  radical and costly  innovations, he urged a war-time mentality, an all-hands-on-deck, everyone-grab-a-musket kind of attitude.  Suggestion boxes were placed on factory floors so that line workers could relate their observations and suggest small changes that could speed up production.   As paltry and timid as such an approach sounded,  it worked really, really well.    After the war, General McArthur  brought the Management Training Program (MTP) to a shattered Japan.  It  was built on Deming’s tenants about focusing on tiny changes that flowed from observations made in the present  moment.   This approach helped revolutionize Japanese business.   The Japanese called it the properly Zen-y sounding  “Kaizen.”

Does it work?  When I was practicing yoga yesterday, I happened to observe that if I energized certain muscles more, my back relaxed.   No big deal, barely worth mentioning.  Except that I noticed that when I made that tiny change, something subtle shifted in me.   I had the impression of  coming out of the fog of thought and opening myself  to the play of forces in the real world.   I had the feeling that if being here–liberated from separation from reality–is where the real magic happens.

“To God there is nothing small,” said Mother Theresa.

Do you have an example of a small observation that led to a small change that ultimately led to a big difference in your life?

 

An Ancient Way Out of Fear and Insecurity

Here is a bit from The Wisdom of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras: A New Translation and Guide by Ravi Ravindra, which I am reviewing for Parabola.    These ancient sutras, which were collected by Patanjali more than two thousand years ago from what was already a long-standing tradition, offer a way out the dark little tunnel of thought and emotion that most of us blunder along in most of the time into the light and spacious  that comes with a realization of our interconnection with the whole of life.  The eight limbs of yoga are:  yama (self-restraint), niyama (right observance), asana( right alignment or posture), pranayama (regulation of breath), dharana (concentration), dhyana (meditation), and samadhi (free attention).   Patanjali’s ashtanga or eight-limbed yoga, was not just a rigorous physical exercise routine.  It was a deep and subtle practice,  aimed at clearing away all the obstructions and tensions, all the grasping, lying, fighting, and contracting in fear, all the wounded animal behavior,  that stood in the way of a direct and defenseless connection with reality.

Patanjli goes on to explain that the yamas or limbs, the work of  non-violation of others and the planet, of non-grasping,  of coming into proper alignment in the world, inhabiting your space with dignity and grace, it’s always the same for all humans and in all times and places, regardless of birth, time, and circumstance.   We live in scary, uncertain times.   It is revelatory to me lately to realize that the source of true confidence isn’t to be found in outer circumstances but in ourselves.  But it turns out it has nothing to do with the strength or our defenses or the numbers on the bank statement,  it has to do with our capacity to just be open to what is, without picking and choosing conditions, without any buffers at all.  As businessman Michael Carroll recently wrote in Tricycle:  “Trying to make our lives secure by amassing all the goodies and avoiding all the difficulties turns out to be an aggressive game devoid of courage.”

Learning to let go and open up as Patanjali (and other sages) advise us to do turns out to be the sanest investment of our time and energy right now.  It is a way to connect with the reality of our interconnection–a way to confidence, dignity, and joy.    What’s your way?

 

The Tip of the Ice Berg

A few weeks ago, I spoke with Ravi Ravindra about his new translation and guide to the Yoga Sutras.  Among other things, we spoke of what it means to be born to one path and to follow another–and/or  to follow more than one spiritual path.   Ravindra quoted Kipling to sum up how clarifying and reinvigorating it can be for a practitioner of one way to learn about another:  “What do they know of England who only England know?”

What does it mean to follow a particular path in an interconnected world?  Many of us (at least among Parabola readers and the readers of this blog) combine practices–we go to the Gurdjieff Foundation and to church or temple and/or a zendo.  We may be Zen Christians, like the Jesuit priest and Roshi Robert Kennedy, whom I interviewed in the Silence issue.   A little while ago, a friend of mine who is an editor at Tricycle:  The Buddhist Review asked me to think about  “Single-Practice Buddhism.”  This is a scholarly term for Zen, Nichiren, and Pure Land Buddhism, practices which arose during a turbulent period in medieval Japan and suggest that the whole of the dharma can be summed up and known through a practice like meditation or chanting.   My learned Buddhist friend observed that many Westerners like Buddhist meditation (or chanting) without the religion that went along with it.  Indeed, many people in the West who take to meditation have had quite enough religion thank you very much.

A few weeks ago, I went to interview Rabbi Steinsalz for our upcoming Future issue (after The Path).  I brought along a good friend who bravely told the great rabbi that she found growing up Orthodox in Brooklyn restricting when she was a girl.  To make a long, interesting Talmudic answer short, he compared her to a wild rose–that the laws and ways she had bridled under were meant to make her a special kind of creature, to cultivate roses in a way that ordinary life could not.   Deciding not to tackle the patriarchal tinge to these comments, I rushed right in and asked him why I didn’t get to be a special kind of creature (I am not Jewish).   The learned rabbi urged me to look deeply into my own heritage.  “What is your background, your name for example?”  My name is Scottish, but I’m also Danish, Dutch, English, Protestant, I told him.  But I like to meditate.   Sometimes a duck is born into a family of chickens, he said.  But don’t reject what you have been given.  He talked about visiting a Protestant Church that was completely bare, white walls, no cross even.   It dawned on me that maybe my single-practice of meditation was the tip of an unexplored iceberg.

Do you think it is important to know all your influences?

 

Scheherazade and Eddie

A few days into every silent meditation retreat I start feeling like Scheherazade of the Thousand and One Nights.   Married to Persian King Shahryan,  Scheherazade told a captivating tale to the king each night because her life literally depended on it.  Scarred by the infidelity of his first wife, the king had developed the bitter habit of having his brides executed after a single wedding night so none would live to betray him.  Dire necessity is the mother of invention.  Scheherazade learned to leave each tale she told dangling so that murderous husband would let her live the next day to hear how it came out.

On a silent retreat, a person can’t help but notice that the mind is perpetually telling stories about who we am–endlessly updating them with every fresh blip of experience, every insight.   The process is clearly mechanical–ideas keep arising in the brain the way the heart keeps pumping blood.  Being in silence day after day among others,  we also see how we cling to our thoughts, our stories about ourselves, as if our very existence depended on them.  Otherwise…we would just be…no one….just, well, someone sitting here…or drinking tea…or helping wash the dishes…or a floor sweeper…just whatever we happen to be doing here and now.   (A friend recently wrote in his own blog that Thomas Szasz observed in The Second Sin that the law of survival isn’t kill or be killed, it is define or be defined. )

Yet, after four or five days of desperately carrying around all this endlessly updated interior chatter meant to save me from dissolving into the nowness of it all, I find myself just dropping it.  Just like that.  My attention drops down from my head to my heart and I discover a different voice, a different brain.  I begin to be able to actually embrace the present moment, to become aware of how I feel.  Not my opinions.  Not my emotional reactions.  But how it feels to be here, right now.

Years ago I interviewed Mitch Albom about his first novel, The Five People You Meet in Heaven.  Literary people didn’t like the book (and it really wasn’t in any sense an artfully written book).  But it stayed in my mind because it attempted to show that everybody matters,  even Eddie, a rough maintainance man at an amusement park.   Albom attempted to show people that living a life that has meaning doesn’t have anything to do with great achievements as we ususally think of them–even spiritual achievement.   It has to do with those moments when we’re all here, connected to life, when, in the case of Eddie who rushes in to save a little girl, we have a passion to serve life.  Interviewing this “popular” novelist, I began to wonder if certain deeper stories might  not be innate in human beings, a kind of  hidden legacy of wisdom we discover when we stop the noise that keeps us bound up in isolation.  When we are quiet, we discover a capacity to know our interconnection with life, our yearning to serve.

 

Be Like Water!

A while ago,  I wrote that Zen master Dogen taught that  the practice of zazen is like a circle.  Each time we take our seat in meditation we are taking our place in a circle with all others who practice and have practiced, including the ancients and the Buddhas.   A person wrote in back that the aborigines called us moderns the “line people” because in our progess madness we have forgotten that life is a circle–and to the aborigines that we are not just linked with other humans but with everything alive, including presumably the living waters.  As I mentally prepare for the “Parabola Live” event that will be happening tomorrow evening at the Orchard House Cafe (from 7-9 pm, at 58th and First Avenue in Manhattan),  I can’t help thinking that we will all be sitting in a cafe that is just about on the banks of the East River.   We will be breathing in air that contains water from that river…and from the Hudson River…and from the Atlantic Ocean.  Indeed, we will be breathing in air that includes water and other elements that existed in Neolithic times in China, when the first Taoists studied the way the Yellow River flowed.  Nothing remains the same yet none of the elements that make up this world disappear completely.   The ancient Chinese Taoistsread the river like a book.  They made notes about it in the straight and wavy lines of  “Water Script.”   This became the straight and broken lines of the hexagrams that make up the I Ching:  The Book of Changes.  Everything changes.  Yet, amazingly, we breathe the same air made up of the same elements that have been here since the world began.  We live in a circle with the ancients, with the animals, with all life.

Taoism teaches people to be like water, without ego,  intention, fixed characteristics.   It teaches people to be like water and not avoid “the low places,” humbling experiences, pain.  When I was just out of college and struggling to be a grown up in Big City, I was cut to the quick to learn that a friend compared me to water behind my back.   The point was that I lacked a distinctive persona, that I flowed into situations, assuming the shape of whatever container I happened to be in.   At the time,  I longed to be more dramatic, more memorable, less, well, wishy washy.  Now I wish to be able to be like water which…to come full circle to Dogen Zen terms is not dependent on mind, nor body, nor karma, is dependent only on its own nature…is liberated.    Amazing what the ancients have seen in water.  May we connect with it and draw strength from it.

 

Fronting the Essential Facts

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life,” wrote Henry David Thoreau.   It rained on and off all day yesterday here, and  it’s supposed to rain for days to come.   The ground is soft and wet and I intend to get out and dig in it a little bit, turn over  soil, plant some seeds. I always get wayyyyyyy muddier than anyone else I know, even very small children, but I don’t care.  I’m not competing with anybody or any image of what a garden supposed to look like.   I dig in the soil from time to time because its a way  for me to live deliberately, to face the essential facts I often miss, like the miraculous effects that rain has on plants, especially in the spring.  If you garden, even like a clumsy perpetual beginner like me, it’s easy to understand why the archaic Greeks, say, made Zeus the weather god.   Digging in the soil you begin to see that what you are really doing is opening things up for the plants or the seeds.  You can’t make anything happen, in other words.  You can only clear the way for higher forces.

My daughter and my friend Liz (who wants to go to lunch and otherwise stay indoors today because it’s raining) don’t like to garden.  They don’t like to get dirty (and I admit, nobody has a knack for getting head-to-toe wet and muddy like I do….only if a person was blind and drunk and working without tools could they get dirtier….) My daughter Alex complains that everything seems to take forever.   But I like that gardening with hand tools goes at about the same pace that it has for thousands of years (or maybe a little faster.  Our ancestors would have starved if they gardened at my pace).   We inherit our bodies, including our hearts and minds, from ancestors who lived thousands of years before us.  We have in us the potential to receive the essential wisdom nature.  We have in us the same ability to sow and reap, to observe and participate.  In the current “Water” issue of Parabola,  there is an interview I conducted with the modern Taoist master Sat Hon who explains how in prehistoric times the earliest Taoists read the Yellow River like a book.   They sketched the way water flows as a way of conveying the way things go.  The straight and wavy lines of this ancient “Water Script” (there are some illustrations in the piece) later became the hexagrams of the I Ching:  The Book of Changes.

Isn’t life amazing?

 

Back

“To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to the violence of our times,” wrote the Trappist monk Thomas Merton.    For weeks now, I’ve been away from this blog and from my own writing, working on the upcoming issue and a couple of other projects–all of them ultimately aimed at helping people find the still place within– “where spiritual traditions meet.”   I was working on pulling together a collage of articles that will hopefully take people from the shallows of sound bites to the depths of the crucial topic of “Water.”    You might have any number of reactions to “Water” positive or negative but linking it to violence?  It’s not waterboarding.

But if I get so busy I lose contact with the sense of really being here, living my life, with the quality of inquiry that comes with it, well then I am taking part in a mechanical process that is ultimately destructive…if the passage of the days and years keep rolling along as they have been, it will certainly end in my death.   I don’t want to die haunted the way I often feel haunted at the end of a day where everything just happens and I am just more or less with it.   It’s almost a cliche these days, to talk of being mindful, of being present.  There’s a yearning in it like the yearning to be closer to nature, to come to our senses, to be still and know.   It’s hard to put into words, but it seems like something else is needed, at least in my case.  I need to shine the light of inquiry on the moment.  I need to ease into a sincere encounter with the big, echoing question “Who I am?” …or “What is this?” …or no matter what you’re involved with it can start to feel false and bad.

I’m really interested in those moments that bring a sense of scale and a sense of connection with everything else.

 

Neolithic Wisdom

History as the rigorous and systematic study most of us Westerners know and either love or loathe began in ancient Greece, with Herodotus and Thucydides.    Those early historians celebrated the great deeds of men (literally men) and their famous chronicles of war and triumph are touchstones in the tradition of Western Humanism.  In the past two centuries, the study of history has become even more rigorous and scientific.  Holy relics are subjected to carbon dating–our earliest beginnings are sought not just through anthropological evidence but through  population genetics, DNA testing.

From the beginning of time, however, humans related to their past through a blend of myth, legend, and recollection of actual events.  This is certainly true of religious traditions.  I’ve recently learned that Taoism is sometimes called the “Huang-Lao Teaching,” after the “Yellow Emperor,” Huang Di, and the “Old Master,” Lao-tzu.   In all honesty,  I thought Taoism originated with Lao-tzu and his famous book of aphorisms about the Way, the Tao Te Ching, along with Chuang-tzu, both of whom lived and wrote in the 3rd or 4th Century.   Like many proto-hippie seekers, I read the Tao Te Ching as a teenager and young adult, believing that the truth that flowed through it had a different density than the facts and views I picked up in college.  The Tao was mystical.  The Tao was like water.  I had no trouble believing that the English translation I held in my hands (check out the superb Stephen Addis, Stanley Lombardo translation) represented a stream of secret watery mystical wisdom that stretched back to the dawn of Chinese culture–human culture.  I knew that the Mysterious Female and Mother Earth ran all through it and as a woman I was all for it.   It wasn’t every Eastern Way that told us that women just might “get it” a little more naturally than men.

But I don’t think I fully registered its prehistoric origins and the role of the feminine–expressed in the Tao Te Ching in symbols like water, darkness, the valley, the female, the babe–until now.   The Yellow Emperor–the co-founder of Taoism, if you will– is said to have lived in the mid-third millennium B.C.E.   He is said to have learned medicine and life extension from two male teachers, and to have learned sexology and magic from two female teachers.   All of these “sciences”–  and the prominent role of female teachers–are part of Taoism and Chinese culture. According to Taoist lore, Lao Tzu also had a female teacher.  There is no hard archeological evidence of the first Hsia Dynasty.  Scholars agree that Yellow Emperor, who is credited with introducing civilization to the Chinese people, was probably a local diety who came to be regarded as a historical figure through a process known as euhemerism.   Indeed, most scholars doubt the existence of Lao Tzu (although the Chou Dynasty he allegedly fled was materially, historically real, lasting from 1045-256 B.C.E.).

But the Taoist tradition extends back way before the prehistoric Yellow Emperor, Huang Di.  According to the Immortal Sisters, translated by Thomas Cleary,  there is a “legend of a certain female tribal leader of high antiquity who is said to have ‘patched the sky with five-colored stones’ at some remote time when the pristine completeness of human life and harmony with nature had been lost.  Using the traditional keys to Chinese symbolism, Cleary equates the sky with mind and the number five with the center–this prehistoric shamaness centered the minds of human beings at a time when who-knows-what knocked them out of balance and brought them to the brink of destruction.  Cleary suggests that the importance of the “five elements” and “five forces” in Chinese thought is a mythic link to the deep past.

How amazing it is to think that there are traditions that flow to us from our earliest common human origins–to think that there may be One Truth or One Way that was first articulated in Neolithic times, based on observations of nature…(in Taosim, particularly important was watching the Yellow River flow).  It is even more amazing to think that the secret wisdom of women has transcended and survived the harshest oppression.

Maybe it’s time to look back…for the future.

 

The Circle

If you read or watch the news, or even if you avoid such things, it’s impossible not to filled with sense that the nation and the world is facing an uncertain future.   It’s easy to understand why so many people of so many different faiths or no faith believe the planet is spinning unstoppably towards Apocalypse in 2012 (at the very latest).    Many years ago when I first started to meditate and otherwise seek the deeper meaning of my life, I asked a wise old man what I could trust to guide me,  since many of my beliefs had turned out to be nothing but blind biases–and since reality was clearly so much strange and subject to change.    “You can always trust your search,” he said.  “If you’re searching for truth, you’re moving in the right direction.”

Recently I read that the great Zen sage Dogen taught that the path of practice is really a circle.  He meant that practice and enlightenment are one.  He also meant that we sit down to practice–when we become still and open enough inside to realize that we dwell in mystery–we are linked with fellow seekers and great awakened ones past, present, and future.   It comforts me these days to picture myself as part of a great circle that stretches back to the dawn of humanity.  I can see our earliest ancestors walking in file out of Africa and fanning out around the globe–all of us of one heart and mind, seeking the higher ground of some indestructible truth.

What is my strategy for surviving the current crisis?  Basically to be useful and as kind as my flawed ego-ridden being allows.  To volunteer when asked.  I trust my ongoing search and the growing intuition that the goal of all our human searching here on fragile Earth is, in the words of E.M. Forster:  “Only connect.”