Pay Attention!

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.

A Wild Time at The Happiest Place On Earth

I’m just back from a week in Florida.  In addition to visiting family and enjoying the beach and the storm-tossed sea,  I revisited Disney’s Animal Kingdom, which nearly killed me last year (as chronicled in the blog entry  “The Happiest Place on Earth.”)    This year, thanks to technical difficulties, I didn’t have to face down my fear of the Everest ride (“Of course you can do it,” said another in our party.  “They strap you in and in about three minutes it’s done.”  His point, I guess, is that it is an all but involuntary procedure, not really a test of any finer, inner quality.)  This year,  there was just the comparatively gentle safari ride (where I saw a silver back gorilla who embodied what it means to be still and alert, nothing but his eyes moved as he sat and took in supposedly higher life forms that moved about restlessly in the oppressive August heat)–the white water rapids ride–the dinosaur ride–all rides that Alex and I have come to experience as memories (“Remember, the first time you did this ride you closed you eyes the whole time).  During the trip,  I happened to be reading Surprised by Joy by C.S. Lewis at Alex’s urging, because she was much impressed with it last year in college.   I kept thinking about the differences and similarities between Lewis’s definition of Joy which is infused with a sense of memory, of nostalgia, of an overwhelming longing for something that overtakes him each time with “the same surprise and the same sense of incalculable importance.  It was something quite different from ordinary life and even from ordinary pleasure;  something…’in another dimension.’”   Lewis contrasts Joy, which is “that of an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction” with mere Happiness–and he never link it with Disney Happiness.  Still, there is something in the way Alex was embracing the place in every detail including (especially) the nostalgia the place provoked–there was something about the way she kept remembering the experiences that she was having again that reminded me of  Lewis’s Joy:  It has to do with remembering!  Remembering the joy that surprised him on a certain walk (for Alex, a certain ride) brought an experience of the same kind:  “But then what I had felt on the walk had also been desire, and only possession in so far as that kind of desire is itself desirable, is the fullest possession we can know on earth; or rather, because the very nature of Joy makes nonsense of our common distinction between having and wanting. There to have is to want and to want is to have.  Thus, the very moment when I longed to be so stabbed again, was itself again such a stabbing….”

Maybe this is a weird quote to include in a blog.   Still, thinking of Alex’s full tilt embrace of the nostalgia of the Disney experience–and registering of my own painful sense of time passing, that I was remembering being with her and with the rest of my family even as I was with them –it dawns on me that what he is trying to capture is true!  And this act of remembering is crucial in the process of being fully human.

And I know perfectly well that Lewis was writing about a longing for alignment with something from another level,  something holy, not a longing for the “Kali River Rapids Ride”…Not a longing to get in line or to  “Have a Wild Time” (as they say when you buy a ticket) one more time.  But there was something pure of heart in what was happening.  And as Lewis himself says, “all things in their way, reflect heavenly truth.”

Mastering the Art of Life

What a thrill it is to see Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child, Simone Beck, and Louisette Bertholle at the top of the Amazon bestseller list, and for weeks now!   Of course this has something to do with the appeal of Meryl Streep’s extraordinary performance in Julie & Julia.  It is also possibly evidence that in uncertain times,  people take refuge in timeless activities like cooking–or the fantasy of creating wonderful dinner parties (I took to reading cookbooks on Metro North to Manhattan in the dark months after 9/11).  But it also confirms something I discovered after reviewing hundreds of books and interviewing bestselling authors for Publishers Weekly.  To paraphrase the great mystic G.I. Gurdjieff,  people who have a real passion for a craft and do it really well also have something to teach the rest of us about deeper truths in life.   While I never had the pleasure of meeting Julia Child, I did meet and talk with a few chefs, including Patrick O’Connell, who turned a former gas station in the rolling Virginia countryside into what is thought to be one of the most sumptious and original restaurants in the world, the Inn at Little Washington.  I met O’Connell one long-ago night at Restaurant Daniel on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.  Chef proprietor Daniel Boulud himself was honoring O’Connell by preparing recipes from Patrick O’Connell’s Refined American Cuisine and I got to taste how deeply savory, how, well, resonant and even moving seemingly simple snacks like pizza with wild mushrooms can be.

Days later,  I spoke to O’Connell by phone.   We actually spoke about Julia Child and the culinary revolution she began, a revolution that continues to evolve with the work of American chefs like Alice Waters and himself.  O’Connell made the point that American cuisine is now on a par with–if not eclipsing–French haute cuisine.  It started with Child’s openness to the experience of great food:  “When you experience the best, you realize that it is humanly possible to create it, ” O’Connell told me.

And how do we achieve that greatness?

“I think the discipline or approach you need to take to learn to cook is the same for anything you might want to pursue….You have to give everything you have.  I’ve given cooking demonstrations to young chefs where I’ve brought a broom.  I demonstrate how to use it.  The point is that when I learn how to become one with the broom, when I learn to engage completely in what I am doing, I will sweep the floor perfectly.  It is the same with cooking.  I have to learn to become one with the food, to engage with what is in front of me with my whole being.  “

O’Connell also spoke with me about the importance of finding your place in the universe, of connecting with life,  of coming home to our true nature.   He discovered what it was to have a sense of place in the countryside of Washington, Virginia.   Instead of the distracted state he felt he was in in the city, his priorities shifted to the basics of country life, the goodness of being warm and dry and fed:  “In the country, you realize you want to share what you have with other people, so you have a sense of connection with others.”

I asked him if he thought people can taste this heightened sense of connection and generosity in his food (people from all over the world  travel to the remote Inn at Little Washington):  “If you make it that way, it will be received that way.  People will receive it no matter how dense they are….If you have purity of intention, it gets through.  It reaches them all.”

I interviewed a few other chefs and food writers and I’ll get to that later.   For now, suffice it to say that based on the Amazon list the quality of passionate openness and engagement that Julia Child embodied is reaching people in a way that Julie Powell’s likable but gimmicky book just can’t.

Being Together

“We can be human only in fellowship, in community, in justice and peace.  We need each other to become truly free,”  Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.   This quote has special resonance because I’m still fresh from the experience of  spending Saturday evening at the Orchard House Cafe in Manhattan.  The event kicked off Parabola’s latest issue, The Path.  There were stories, songs, and a wonderful live performance (accompanied by hand drums) of an extraordinary poem by the French spiritual seeker Rene Daumal.  Roger Lipsey,  who read aloud some of Daumal’s letters, said Daumal’s words didn’t seem to want to stay on the page, that they seemed to be made to be spoken.   Listening to them, I understood although I’m hard pressed to say what I received.  There was a dimension, a world of micro (or nano?) impressions about his effort and aspiration that didn’t get reading his poetry on the page.  How good it was to be there listening with others!  All evening, even when I had to speak briefly and was nervous, I had impressions of being supported and liberated by being with others.    In my last blog post, I wrote about receiving an impression of  myself in a moment of being really hurt and angry, and how that pushed me out of the ordinary groove of thought and opened me up to a new impression.  Someone wrote an interesting response to that blog that touched on what it can be like to have the light of awareness illuminate some of ideas and feelings about the world that are submerged like old sunken ships in depths of ourselves.   At the Orchard House on Saturday, I realized that being with others (especially the kind who would travel there to hear a poem with the refrain “Remember”) can open us up to a truth that is higher and finer and quicker and more alive than anything any of us could climb up to on our own.

Being like Odysseus

The great stories about ancient heroes like Achilles and Odysseus reveal that it isn’t always in spite of our weaknesses, mistakes, and shortcomings but through them that something unknown can come into being.   Achilles pride is also the source of his strength (and his weakness is the source of his destiny);  Odysseus cleverness charted a long and perilous journey from the pits of misery and captivity to freedom and homecoming.   The hero with all his glaring flaws, through all his spectacular mishaps, was meant to fulfill what Mary Poppins creator and Parabola founding editor  P.L. Travers called “the essential mythical requirement: the reinstatement of the fallen world.”

The revelation is that the same principles apply to the rest of us.  When you hit bottom, a new world can open up.   Friends of mine recently asked me to reflect on how a mistake, shortcoming, or misfortune has enriched my spiritual practice.  I’ve been carrying the question around for weeks wondering how in the world a person is to choose.  On the one hand, there has been no catastrophic and soul-defining mistake or misfortune–convicting the wrong man of a heinous crime and spending a life time atoning for (ala the book and movie Atonement) or contracting polio and conducting a war-time American presidency from a wheel- chair like FDR.  On the other hand, my ego is defined by mistakes, shortcomings, and misfortunes.   I’ve heard the ego defined as the “pain body.”  I’ve heard it defined as a web of habits, of physical, emotional, and mental addictions, all of them aimed at helping us keep our story about ourselves going, defending us from a pure, unfiltered encounter with reality.    The Buddhists speak of the “three poisons” at the root of much of human suffering — greed (or lust), anger (or hatred), and delusion.  Once in a blue moon,  I experience one of these poisons to such a raging, blinding degree that I surrender to the truth of it.   For once, I don’t justify or downplay or deny.  I just admit that I have been helpless to my anger, say, and that it has hurt me and hurt others.   In those moments, it seems clear that what I call spiritual practice has mostly been thinking.  Then, as if by magic, other possibilities open up:  patience for myself and others (and patience is an incredible healing balm against anger),  lovingkindness, connection with what really is.

Buddhist Drama

Plot is about the elements that make up a novel or story or film.  Structure is about timing.   To the ever-lasting gratitude of most of Hollywood, Aristotle analyzed what makes drama work and came up the three act structure.  Why does the Act I, Act II, Act III structure still work after all these years?   Many writers and teachers of writing suggest that it’s because it resonates with the way we live:  We wake up, we work, we go to sleep–we are born, we live, we die.    Humans are drawn to threes, in landscape design, in spiritual symbolism,  even in jokes (a Buddhist, a Christian, and a Jew walk into a bar, never just two).  Nature likes a triangle.   Readers and listeners just innately expect any story to have a beginning, a middle (one wag called it a muddle), and an end.  With apologies to Aristotle, this is how it goes:  The hero or lead is presented with a problem (Act I); he or she messes around with the problem (Act II); the problem is solved or not (Act III).  Western mythology and literature rests on the sturdiest of all shapes, the triangle.

Having just come from a wonderful class with Bhikkhu Bodhi at Chuang Yen Buddhist Monastery in Carmel, New York, however,  it occurs to me that the drama of our lives on the twelve factors or steps of Dependent Origination.   Basing his classes on In the Buddha’s Words, his anthology of discourses from the Pali Canon,  the brilliant and patient scholar-monk led a class that ranged from experienced to beginner (me) through the traditional Buddhist understanding of how we keep the wheel of our karma turning life after life.   Boiling it way down, the “dramatic structure” works something like this:  Ignorance leads to a stream of conditions, consciousness, karmic tendencies which carry us into this world and forward into the groove of our lives (Act I);  we perceive and conscious in a particular way, and inevitably feelings arise (Act II);  craving, clinging, and karma are created based on how we respond to our feelings.  Based on our particular cocktail of feelings and reactions we come to the end of one life and enter another (Act III).   Here, the dramatic high point, the cliff-hanger, the who-saw-that-coming surprise twist can come in the  “unconditioned” opening at the end of Act II.  When feeling arises,  we have a choice about how we respond.  The link in the chain that binds us to our habitual, unfree life can be broken right here.  No matter what we feel, we don’t have to crave or cling to anything.  No more swords or pens or wands.  Radical freedom.

Stepping Onto a New Path

P.L. Travers, the creator of Mary Poppins and a founding editor of Parabola, once wrote that mythic heroes (and she stressed that potential heroes are everywhere) were not so much setting out on voyages of discovery but of rediscovery; “that the hero is seeking not for something new but for something old, a treasure that was lost and has to be found, his own self, his identity.”    In Joe Berlinger’s powerful documentary Crude, Pablo Fajardo, an attorney who was once a desperately poor manual laborer, stands up for 30,000 Ecuadorian rainforest settlers and indigenous people.   They call themselves los afectados, “the affected ones,”  and allege that they live in a “death zone” of pollution that is roughly the size of Rhode Island that was created when Texaco (which was acquired by Chevron in 2001) began drilling for oil in the Ecuadorian Amazon in the late 60s and 70s.   At some point in the midst of a hard, dangerous early life, Fajardo happened to attend a youth group run by a Spanish priest that instilled in him a sense of the underlying dignity of all human life–including poor and indigenous lives.  Although Crude does an admirable job of offering a balanced point of view, early viewers of Crude have compared Farjardo to David going up against Goliath.    He has David’s faith that he is on the side of truth.   No matter how much money Chevron has to spend, he says at one point.  You can’t put a price on clean water or food or the inherent value of human life and a healthy planet.

In 2005,  Joe Berlinger set out on his own journey of rediscovery as a filmmaker.  Berlinger visited the Ecuador and was shown an ecological disaster.  He saw and smelled the petrochemical sludge that for decades has been dumped into huge open pits or directly into the water and soil–a system designed by Texaco.  Berlinger, whose previous film, Metallica:  Some Kind of Monster, had a four million dollar budget, went into the Ecuadorian jungle with a skeleton crew and shot footage, not sure how he was going to finance it, not knowing how the story line or the film itself was going to turn out.

“I felt like the universe was tapping me on the shoulder,” Berlinger told me by phone.  “In many ways the legal case I was filming is an excuse to explore the plight of indigenous people who got no benefits from industrializtion, only heartache.”

When was the last time you felt that the universe was tapping you on the shoulder?   Can you recally feeling as if you were stepping onto a new path, heading into the unknown just because it felt like the right thing to do?

The Price of Free

A “Naked Lunch,” said William S. Burroughs is that “frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.”     Since I saw Robert Kenner’s  Food, Inc. last weekend (at the excellent Jacob Burns Film Center  last weekend), I’ve been reflecting on the way even well-intentioned people can look away from hard realities.  I always loved beginning each meal the way I learned to in various Buddhist retreats–by thanking the animals, plants, and people who sacrificed themselves for each meal.   I always loved Martin Luther King Jr.’s evocation of the way the whole globe participates in our morning (coffee from Brazil, etc.)  But Kenner opened my eyes to the way much of our food supply has come to be controlled by a handful of huge corporations who prize profit above any scrap of concern for the health and wellbeing of animals, plants, farmers, workers, consumers, or the planet as a whole.   I’ve come to see that it’s not enough to thank a fantasy Farmer Brown.  I’ve gone back to Gurdjieff’s advice to people new to his Work, that one should look into things so to speak (clearly, I am paraphrasing), to have a questing, searching attitude about the origins of things and how they have come to us.  Gurdjieff urged people to bring this attitude to all things, not just food.  And it is a tool for awakening.   Try it!  It wakes up the mind and the heart and the senses.

A parabola is bowl-shaped, like a lens or an antenna dish.  The magazine Parabola was designed to pick up radio signal from the deepest recesses of space (I can’t help picturing the Voyager space crafts).  It seeks to pick up evidence of the eternal truths that are central to all authentic traditions and ways, serving them to readers in a non-reductive way that might lead them to the center of themselves.   It isn’t meant to be academic.  It isn’t meant to be practical, a kind of handbook.  It was meant to be handled, carried, left on the night stand.    “Information wants to be free,” wrote Stewart Brand, creator of The Whole Earth Catalogue (which cost $5 in 1968), anticipating the free information on the internet.  You can’t put a price on truth, especially sacred truth, especially truth at the center of your Self.    Yet the form of Parabola–the tradition of search it represents–needs your support.

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?