One evening this week,  I visited a loft in downtown Manhattan for an event called “Turning Back the Tide: the Sacred Dimension of Compassionate Action.”  It was the inaugural event of Buddhist Global Relief, an organization founded by Bhikkhu Bodhi.  It was beautiful hearing Ven. Bodhi express what he has called “a distinctly Buddhist sense of conscience in relation to the unspeakable tragedy of global hunger and poverty.”   While “conscience” doesn’t have a precise counterpart in the Pali language or in classical Buddhism, according to the scholar monk it is one of the driving forces in the Buddha’s own life and teaching.  “Emerging from the deep intuition of human unity and the wider unity of all sentient life, it impels us to make a conscious commitment to actively work to alleviate the suffering of others.”  Conscience is that sacred kind of intelligence that allows us to go beyond the narrow sphere of ego and habit, to experience of suffering of others as our own, to experience our interconnection with the whole of life, and be moved to action.

Copies of Parabola were donated to the event.  It was extraordinary watching  this particular crowd, including Chinese Zen nuns, Burmese and Sri Lankan monks, aid workers from CARE and other organizations, Buddhists, Christians and undeclared, patrons and guests file out with this particular issue, including not just Ven. Bodhi’s insights but excerpts from the long awaited book drawn from the notebooks of  Jeanne de Salzmann, in itself an expression of conscience.  Out went this wisdom and these images.  As I watched, I thought of lines Venerable Bodhi wrote about conscience moving in two directions at once, uplifting us and drawing us down into the world, to look closely at ourselves.  I glimpsed for a moment how we need one another, and how life is a glorious, moving interconnect One.

Is there a Truth greater than any particular tradition or way? Is it possible that a kind of guide rope was/is given to us that isn’t invented by us, that precedes human beings?  I once asked this of John Daido Loori, the founder abbot of Zen Mountain Monastery.   Tall and imposing in black robes, a tall rugged American Zen master, he answered in a surprisingly gentle and personal way.   He told me about sitting with his mother as she lay dying.   He was reciting the Heart Sutra, that extraordinary incantation of the Truth in us that goes beyond all human constructions.  But he saw that his mother, who had dementia, was very agitated so he began saying the Lord’s Prayer and she calmed down.   As he eased into the Lord’s Prayer in Italian, her native language, he saw her relax completely into sleep, into death.  I pictured her letting the deeply remembered rhythms of the prayer carry forward out of this world.   Daido Loori told me he realized that as much as he loved the Heart Sutra, the Christian prayer was doing exactly what prayer is really meant to do, which is help us prepare for death….help us go beyond this form.    This was told to me in the midst of a Buddhist conference at The World Trade Center and within a couple of months those huge forms were gone…now Loori is gone…for now, the trace those words that day left in me is that there is indeed a rhythm, a pattern, a force of compassion beyond words reaching out to us.  Madame de Salzmann  saw this Truth behind human forms.   I once heard that many decades ago she visited a venerated Zen monastery in Japan.  The abbot studied her and announced “She sees.”

In the lastest issue of Parabola, The Future, the Brooklyn born scholar monk Venerable Bhikkhu Bodhi describes taking a walk on the campus of the University of Wisconsin one morning many years ago and seeing a Buddhist monk for the first time in his life:  “I was struck with wonder and amazement at the sight of this serene, self-composed man, who radiated a lightness, inner contentment, and dignity I had never seen in any Westerner.”   Many years and many large and small decisions later, Venerable Bodhi encountered that monk again and he was now a monk himself. “The workings of karma are indeed strange and unfathomable!”  he writes.

Usually I go around full of thoughts and cares, trying to control life.  But sometimes, when conditions are just right (like when it’s clear that circumstances are beyond my control), I can glimpse for myself that there is a rhythm to life and that we if could only learn to be quiet and attentive enough we could follow it, be with it, contribute our small lives to a larger Truth.

“Give yourself permission to be yourself, and don’t be frightened by the unknown,” wrote John Daido Loori in The Zen of Creativity.    The photographer, Zen master, and founder of Zen Mountain Monastery, who died on October 9,  wrote in that book that he first had a glimpse of the spontaneity and naturalness that can shine out of the supposedly ordinary world during a workshop with the great photographer Minor White.  Zen training and the founding of the monastery followed but for Loori spiritual practice and and creative expression always went together.  The real aim of artistic expression is pointing the way to truth, Loori once told me during an interview years ago.  True originality can arise only from having a real contact with our origins, with the ground of our being–and this is also the aim of Zen practice.   Drawing closer to the source, helping it flow outward through us, isn’t this the aim of  all authentic spiritual ways and all authentic creative expressions?   This double impulse has been present in human beings since Lascaux (which I wrote about a couple of blogs ago).   Jeanne de Salzmann (whose upcoming book I’ve also been writing about) also taught about the need to cultivate an awareness of our origins, our source, before our energy flows outward into all the branching tributaries of thought and habit.   What a difficult and remote attainment that seems to me!  It seems about as likely to happen to me in the near future as climbing Everest.   It feels like it would only a superhuman (or a possibly pre-Atlantian cave artist from Lascaux)  could live and express themselves from that awareness of Wholeness.  Yet, both Loori and de Salzmann taught that the way up the mountain is to see completely what is here and now, the inattention, the dispersion.

One day years ago, I sat at a picnic table in the sun at Zen Mountain Monastery in the Catskill Mountains, interviewing  Loori Roshi (for PW) about Zen and creativity and about what it might mean be our true selves in the midst of life:  “The whole point of Buddhist practice has to do with being the world, ” he said.  “You work your way up the mountain until you reach a peak where the view is boundless and limitless.  But it doesn’t end there in Zen.  You keep going, and going straight ahead when you’re on the peak of a mountain can only mean one thing, going back downhill back into the world.  The aim of Zen is to take everything that has been realized and actualize in everything we do.”

I asked him if this actualization that he spoke of wasn’t close to a definition of art because what I took from his book was that the deeper the awareness, the closer to the source, the more true and powerful a creative expression will be–no matter what the form of expression, movement or words.

He said yes, but that “Zen arts are really about teaching people to wake up. “  Still, he allowed that in the last stages of the book, when he found himself on deadline and “just breaking out and writing and what came out was very Buddhist….”  And his non Buddhist editor and publisher and others especially liked those chapters which struck him as very Buddhist.  So maybe it was the breaking out, the naturalness and spontaneity shining out.  Maybe John Daido Loori was being himself without fearing the unknown in those late chapters.  What a great way to spend  a life.

In the front of the truth of impermanence,  it is clear that paying attention to life really matters.  It also strikes me that the best possible way of living might have to do with breathing in and breathing out, drawing inward to the source, then exhaling, expressing  that source through the channel of our one, brief and precious life.

A few months before his death, G.I. Gurdjieff  drove with a group of students from Paris to a recently opened series of interconnected caves in Lascaux in southwestern France.    His student J.G. Bennett told him about extraordinary Paleolithic paintings that had been discovered by accident in 1940, by four teenagers and a dog.    In spite of being in much pain, Gurdjieff was determined to see them.   As the great teacher stood in looking up at the great stag with many antlers and the other extraordinary figures of bisons, horses, cows, and at least one Sphinx or unicorn-like imaginary figure–figures layered on top of one another as if by succeeding generations– he is reported by Bennett to have looked as if he completely belonged there.

Curious, that impression of belonging–not just of being present and having presence which Gurdjieff reportedly always had everywhere, but belonging?  Gurdjieff reportedly said that the depiction of an imaginary looking creature was the emblem of a brotherhood that appeared seven or eight thousand years ago, and that the stag with many antlers was a way of depicting attainments in consciousness and being.   Gurdjieff strongly disagreed with Bennett’s claim that the art was possibly 20,000 to 18,000 years old (a Metropolitan Museum essay dates them at possibly 15,000 B.C.E.).    Gurdjieff believed the paintings were made by humans who had inherited an ancient knowledge about our inner human possibilities that had existed long before their own “prehistoric” time–that the artists were the survivors or inheritors of an advanced civilization that had been lost.    That impression that Gurdjieff seemed to belong in the caves–it was a profound recognition.   He had dedicated his life to the search for the aim and significance of life on earth and human life in particular–beyond mere survival.  After much search, he believed he picked up the thread of ancient knowledge that he formulated and reformulated for contemporary beings.   In the stone chambers of Lascaux, he found evidence of the lineage of that knowledge, evidence that there were fellow humans who had tried to live as he had tried to live, who bore witness to the vibrancy and sacredness in life.

I have always taken heart from our ancestors capacity to survive.  Years ago, as I’ve written in this blog, I sent a sample of my matrilineal DNA to the National Geographic “Genographic Project.”   I don’t think I’ll ever get over the amazement that a small scrape of cells from inside my cheek could produce a genetic map that stretched around the world and ultimately back to a single woman who lived about 150,000 years ago, our common genetic mother, in East Africa.    At moments when I have had to face fear and difficulty, when I had to go “off road” into uncharted territory, I would think of my mother and my Danish grandmother and women stretching back in time who have had to brave loss and danger, who have had to flee earthquakes and deluges and head off into the unknown.  Survival itself often seems miraculous to me.  I have often taken comfort in the thought that being a good human being has always meant the same thing in all times and places, and that creativity and spirituality  have been in evidence since the caves at Lascaux (that last bit I picked up that thought from a book by Karen Armstrong).

After encountering the writing of  Madame de Salzmann, which fulfills and advances Gurdjieff’s own work,  it dawns on me as if for the first time that there has always been more to life than survival–at least for some of the “family.”    I was never one of those who got a charge out of  thinking about secret brotherhoods or lost Atlantis or any of that.   As I write this, however, I feel a quiet…not certainty but a definite sense of possibility.  Having read the excerpts from Madame de Salzmann’s upcoming book, it strikes me that it just might really be the case that something extraordinary is possible for humans, that a “way” has always existed and that it is waiting for us.

G.I. Gurdjieff once told some of his early students in Russia to consider the origin of things.  Where did this cup, this coffee, this food on my plate come from?  How did all these things that touch me come to be made?   Years later in America, Martin Luther King Jr. offered a similar example in a speech, saying that people and things from all over the world contribute to our daily survival.   Even more recently, and possibly influenced by the other two men, the Zen master Thich Nhat Hahn created a prayer before eating that encouraged people to recognize all the suffering that goes into growing, harvesting, and transporting the food to winds up on our plates.    This practice of looking into things can lead to a greater awareness of our interdependent state and to feelings of compassion.

When I first came upon it about thirty years ago,  Gurdjieff’s suggestion that we look into the origin of things–including the practices and beliefs of our ancestors–acted on me like a kind of slow-motion depth charge.   It blew open my mind to the mystery behind seemingly solid and straightforward things, like our bodies.  A few years ago, after I sent a sample of my DNA to National Geographic’s Genographic Project, I received a map that helped me picture what the Gurdjieff  exercise helped me begin to feel:  None of us really “own” our human bodies.  They are living legacies from distant common ancestors who arose in Africa and fanned out all over the globe.  They are living records of interconnection, and of search.

Now,  a gift has come to Parabola that reminds me–and will remind many other people who read it–that there is another dimension to the mystery of our lives.   In the next issue The Future (which will be arriving in mailboxes, at Barnes and Noble, and other outlets on November 1) there will be an excerpt from The Reality of Being by Jeanne de Salzmann, the foremost pupil of G.I. Gurdjieff.    These writings on the Fourth Way , which will be published as a book in May 2010, do more than instruct.  They embody and convey what it is like to wake up to and live from our full potential as human beings.   Even if one is far from being able to understand, let alone practice,  what the writings point towards, Madame de Salzmann’s words have a special quality.  They make a person feel that it might really be true, what Gurdjieff taught.  There might really be a lineage of wisdom that is far more ancient than Jesus or Socrates or Buddha–and it might be alive and waiting to lead us to the mystery of our relationship to the divine, to what is hidden in us and beyond.

In my last post,  I wrote of my visit to a faux New Amsterdam which was briefly set up in downtown Manhattan.   Since then, a few friends have asked me why I care about connecting with distant ancestors.  Why not just be the contemporary American that I am?   I think this periodic yearning to know what it was  like to farm  just hand tools and otherwise brave the unknown is rooted in this primal yearning to know a greater kind of awareness, an intelligence that isn’t confined to words and concepts but extends to the hands, the eyes and ears, the human being as a whole confronting the essential forces of life.    When I was a child, the ancestors I most wondered about and wanted to connect with were the Vikings.   Although both my mother’s parents are from Denmark, she knew very little about her earliest forebears except that they were “big and blond and wild.”   It was the wildness, the reputation for ferocity in battle that fascinated me.  Not surprisingly, I didn’t think of the Viking reputation for marauding and raping and pillaging as others do but of the brave warriors in Beowulf, men (and I added women) so hearty they went around in skimpy fur outfits in the dead of winter, who crossed the Atlantic Ocean in open boats, who faced down evil monsters like Grendal and lived to unlock their “word hoards” and tell long, lyrical stories about it in the mead hall.  To be a Viking in my child’s mind was like being an Indian.  It meant being mindful and quick and resourceful in the way people learn to be when they live in a natural world full of powerful and dangerous forces.   It meant having a mind that included the body, that included great nature.  I made no distinction aside from geography between American Indians and ancient Indians from India.  When I grew up and went to college and learned of an Aryan migration that swept down into India from the north,  I pictured Vikings on horseback, riding like brave Sioux warriors into Mother India where they dismounted and perfected yoga and meditation.  But wisdom and insight that came pouring out in those beautiful forms and in the Rig Veda had to do with their wild openness to life, with that fact that their wild brave warrior minds never split off from Nature, from the awareness that the whole of life is connected in a great interconnected Whole.   And from time to time, even though I’m a long way from youg, up wells the powerful desire  to know that mind in my life time.

“Is this the Dutch Village?” my friend Liz asked the big New York City cop standing by a turning windmill in Bowling Green Park in Manhattan.  “This is New Amsterdam,” said the cop with deadpan irony.   We had come all the way down from Northern Westchester in the rain and gloom,  so that I could walk through what The New York Times said would be a colonial village with “12 traditional houses, a windmill and a greenhouse.”   It was to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s voyage up the river of the same name on behalf of Dutch commerce.  I knew perfectly well it would be hokey.  I knew there would be wooden shoes and cheese.   Still, I pictured being able to walk through humble little cottages, seeing past all the hokiness to gain the tiniest inkling of what life must have been like for my early Dutch settler ancestors on a rainy day in New Amsterdam.  I knew I was really reaching for an ancestral mind state.  But it was mortifying, strangely personally embarrassing to take Metro North down to this row of Ye Olde Dutch facades on little kiosks selling french fries, gouda, herring burgers, tulips, and yup, wooden shoes.  “Your early ancestors really knew how to shop,” said my friend.   She asked me if I wanted to go to the Museum of the American Indian, which is housed in the old customs house right across from the “village” but I had to get out of there.  We walked down to the ferry docks and looked at the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island before heading uptown and taking refuge from the rain in Les Halles (We’re both big fans of Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations).  We had a decadent late afternoon brunch that was worth the insomnia that came with it.

Especially as I lay awake thinking,  I happened to think of that Indian Museum overlooking “New Amsterdam.”    I had been lying there observing how shallow most thinking is–just random associations, mental spam.  But the image of that museum overlooking that feverish little “village” of consumption and travel promotion, it jogged a deeper memory–of Carl Jung’s encounter with an elder named Mountain Lake in the Taos Pueblo in 1925.   I quote from Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections:

“See,” Ochwiay Biano said, “how cruel the whites look.  Their lips are thin, their noses sharp, their faces furrowed and distorted by folds.  Their eyes have a staring expression; they are always seeking something.  What are they seeking?  The whites always want something…We do not know what they want…We think they are mad.”

I asked him why he thought the whites were all mad. (This is Jung doing the asking)

“They say that they think with their heads,” he replied.

“Why of course.  What do you think with?”  I asked him in surprise.

“We think here,” he said, indicating his heart.

I lay there in the dark with indigestion, registering how hollow it is to try to lay claim to something with just the head.   How much bolder it is to be fully present and receptive in the body, to really be open and attentive and and not just thinking we are.   Then respond from the heart.  Just imagine if more of the early settlers had done that…before they got on with the getting and spending.

Eight years ago this morning,  I was riding a Metro North train down to Manhattan when a conductor ran through the train with the terrible and surreal news that the World Trade Center towers had collapsed and that the Pentagon had been hit.  I knew about the two planes going in when I boarded the train but in a distant echo of the way so many other New Yorkers acted that day,  my instinct was to head towards the trouble.   When I heard the terrible news, I spontaneously began to say a Buddhist metta prayer for all the people I pictured falling to their deaths:  May you be free from suffering….May you be at ease.  I  wasn”t in denial.  It was one of those rare moments in life where the heart steps in and takes over for the head and all the distracting thoughts, fears, and sense of separation between myself and others came down.   It was as if my heart was with them, as if they were the same as I was.     My yoga teacher called for a moment of silence this morning, standing in mountain posture with our hands in prayer position.  I hadn’t even registered what it day it was.   At the end of the class, as we lay on our mats in silence, she asked us to consider the word “service” and the question (or questions) “How or what should we serve?”    This reverberated.  Up welled that experience on the train and that memory of how my heart opened and the walls of separation came down for instant.   I felt that I was part of a larger body–wishing that all beings be free and at peace, not just little me.  I think that knowing how and what to serve is best begun that way, letting the heart open to what is happening right here and right now.   More and more,  I find myself thinking about  service.   As Ram Dass once said, “What else do you have to do with your life?”

On this Labor Day weekend, I am thinking about work and about what elevates some work to the level of the heroic, the mythic, the stuff of art, legend, and inspiration for us all.    Usually, my days are filled with work and information.  It’s not all unpleasant but there is an endless but unmemorable quality to the tasks that can leave me a particular feeling of sorrow at the end of the day, as if my life is vanishing like water into the sand, leaving no trace.  Do you know this feeling?  It usually comes with a kind of questioning or longing for life to make more of an impression, to penetrate more deeply, to make a mark.   For some time now, I’ve been thinking about how Buddhism and other spiritual traditions teach through stories–even though the aim of Buddhist practice is liberation from stories.   I’m realizing that there is something about the way certain kinds of stories unfold that satisfies that deep need that feels hardwired in to us humans to live a deeper life–to have life be a journey that leads straight out of ourselves to something greater.   The best kinds of stories have an unlikely hero, someone who is called out of a grinding, humdrum life to face adversity, to take on great risks or labors,  a story where an seemingly ordinary man (and all too rarely a woman) is called by circumstances to go beyond the rest of us, to be like Milarepa or David, going up against Goliath.

About 35 years ago, in the founding issue of Parabola,  P.L. Travers, the creator of Mary Poppins, wrote that the raw material of these mythic stories could be found in The New York Times.  It just took a certain kind of mind to see through the mere facts to the deeper truths. The New York Times and other news outlets are currently reporting that bribery accusations are being made against a judge overseeing the $27 billion dollar contamination lawsuit against Chevron in Equador. In the current issue of Parabola, I interviewed Joe Berlinger, the director of Crude, a powerful documentary about this on going legal battle, in which the remarkable 35-year-old lawyer Pablo Fajardo is representing some 30,000 rainforest dwellers and indigenous people against Chevron for being responsible for an alleged “death zone” of a land that was a fertile paradise even during the Ice Age.   Among other deeper truths that come through in this messy, seemingly endless case, is that every life–including Indian and poor peoples’ lives–matter.  Clean water, land, and food matters.  And it isn’t in spite of our hardships and hindrances but through them that something creative and deeply true can come into being. Plunging into the jungle and into the heart of this crucial case, Crude fulfills what Mary Poppins creator P.L. Travers called in that long ago essay, “the essential mythical requirement: the reinstatement of the fallen world.”

How to close the gap between what we think and what we feel?  How do we come to know our deepest aspirations and intentions in the midst of welter of large and small actions and reactions that fill an ordinary day?  A little while ago, I received a comment from someone (who was clearly familiar with the Gurdjieff ideas and work) suggesting that the difference between a feeling from another level and our ordinary egocentric emotions (as grandiose as those can be) is the questioning that can come in its wake…a questioning that wakes us up:  How can I be responsible?   Sometimes (certainly in my case) it gets framed as:  What have I been doing with my life?

A few days later, this same person quoted from Exchanges Within by the brilliant student of Gurdjieff, Lord John Pentland:  “Sensation is the relating element.  How do you feel what you think or think what you feel?  It is through sensation.”

How do we go about this?   Tear your nose away from that proverbial grindstone,  peel your eyes away from the screen,  pull your poor, worried addictive mind away from its current desire and pay attention to what is left in that wake, experience desire as desire, experience your life.  Attention can be magic. It can unlock the secrets of life.

To demonstrate, here is a wonderful passage from a story the great contemporary writer, Lorrie Moore: “O.K.,” I said.  “Sounds good.”  Sounds good.  It was the Midwestern girl’s reply to everything.  It appeared to clinch a deal, was somewhat the same as the more soldierly Good to go, except that it was promiseless–mere affirmative description.  It got you away, out the door.”

Attention can reveal the unexpected depths in seemingly ordinary things.