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!

“At the beginning of the third millennium, the human race is in the process of forgetting what it means to be human,” writes Charles Upton in a vivid, chilling essay in the current “Future” issue of Parabola.  “We don’t know who or what we are; we don’t know what we are supposed to be doing here….Human life is no longer felt to be valuable in the face of eternity.”   According to Upton we and the whole universe are caught in a cycle that is sliding inexorably downwards  “from the pole of Essence, or Forma–the Hindu Purusha–towards the pole of Substance, or Materia–the Hindu Prakriti. “

Not to put a damper on your day but we may be more materialistic, denser, heavier, than people in earlier times (those cave artists?) –the very nature of space and time may have changed:  “In earlier ages, space dominates; the forms of things are more important, more real, than the changes they undergo; time is ‘relatively eternal.’  As the cycle moves on, however, time begins to take over, melting down space and the forms within it until everything is an accelerating flow of change.”

On it rolls, this compelling downer of an essay, insisting that we are headed towards maximum entropy.  Reading it, I want to be on the side of our better angels, battling the Anitchrist (which Upton defines as those forces of obscurity and denial which blind us to the true scale of our human potential).   Yes!  I definitely want to be on the side of Christ, the Messiah, al-Mahdi, Maitreya Buddha, the Kalki Avatara–the force of consciousness that wants the breakthrough of Eternity, of Space, into time.

But how?  I can sometimes experience Space in moments of deep quiet, in meditation.   But how can I experience spaciousness in the midst of ordinary life, which is so often spent rushing around captive to that panicky or grinding sense of forward-rushing time?   I’ve felt it at moments, when desire and striving fall away.  Still, there is this nagging sense that I need to understand more.

What does Jeanne de Salzmann mean when she says (again in the current issue) that 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 or the other.”

I feel this must be true.  Being conscious has to do being fully present body, heart, and mind.  It matters somehow in this great battle of Space and Time that I volunteer to fully inhabit my life. It means not turning away from the animal or getting so mired in my animal life that I forget the angel.   But what does it mean to remember ourselves in two directions, to have our two natures always confronted?

Pock! Pock! Pock! Pock!  The Japanese “woodenfish” drum makes a sharp, hollow  sound, like a huge, deliberate woodpecker in still air.    In Zen monasteries it is used to establish a tempo so that an assembly of people can chant in unison.   Last weekend, I heard it used to call a group to meditation, to meals, to readings and discussions. Although the woodenfish drum wasn’t used in a traditional Zen way, the spirit was the same.  Because fish do not have eyelids, their eyes are always open.  The woodenfish is a symbol of the unceasing effort to wake up, of  the awakening to our true manifestations that is possible only in community.

The first time I was drawn to practice in a group, I was in my early twenties and working in publishing in Manhattan.  I remember coming back to my apartment one evening, feeling  thoroughly fed up with what I was doing with my life. For whatever reason or combination of reasons, there was a sudden and piercing clarity that my whole identity revolved around seeking comfort and security, worthiness and powerfulness.

There followed a powerful interest like a parting in the clouds:  Who was I really, not measured in this small way, but as a human being in the cosmos?  This wasn’t a dreamy aimless kind of question.  There was a very pure impulse to investigate, a willingness and determination to find out I could find my way to a larger life.  I was haunted by the sense that my life could just melt away like a dream, that it was possible that I might never really know I had been alive in a profound way.

I knew I needed the help of a group and eventually I found one.  Many years later, I stopped being part of it when I realized I had lost that original questioning, when I couldn’t hear it any more through the din of ideas.  I left when I realized it had become business as usual for me, that the pure wonderment had given way to another ego identity.  Being part of something larger had become a new way to comfortable and secure, worthy and capable–a new way to cover up what a Zen teacher has called “the anxious quiver of being.”

Now I’m back in a group.  But now I know I have to bring something, an intention to see myself as am…it can be painful and scary at times but I begin to see that behind the curtain of separation,  there is a great stillness and an energy  we all share.

Today, because it is cold and gloomy and the wind blowing, I am attaching a link to a  story by Richard Whittaker, our West Coast editor.  It is a story about how far a man can go all by himself, without a group or a way to guide him. http://conversations.org/story.php?sid=141

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.