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.”

Leila Hadley Luce

For weeks in mid February, I thought of my friend Leila Hadley Luce.   One day, for example, I was driving on the Taconic Parkway, noting that the sky was staying lighter longer andwhat a relief having such a long cold winter.   In rushed an impression of Leila.  I remembered sitting across the table from her on Fishers Island or in her living room in Manhattan.  I remembered the way she loved nature–luxuriated in it, exulted in it.  She loved daffodils, for example, she aimed to have “rivers of daffodils.”  But Leila didn’t just exult in  sensory richness,  she noticed things.  I once described to her the wild stillness I had seen in a big hawk I had come eye-to-eye with sitting in a tree in some woods where I live.  She told me a person have a very complete communication with an animal if he or she could meet its gaze with the same stillness.   Leila’s perceptions and descriptions could be shamanic, instructive–she once described me as  being like a “sea fan.”

This in not to suggest that Leila lived a small, contemplative life.  She passed up college to sail around the world on a schooner.  She had a string of famous and glamorous friends and lovers–S. J. Perelman encouraged her to write, a young and gorgeous Marlon Brando pursued her.  The last time I saw Leila, at lunch at her apartment this past November, she was so ill she could no longer leave her bedroom.   She insisted I drink champagne even though she couldn’t.  She gave me a beautiful deep blue raw silk shawl and encouraged me to stay and talk with her for hours, telling her about things I had seen and experienced, including what an ice boat was and how father had built one and sailed it wearing a buffalo robe coat.   It was a wonderful lunch and it made my heart twist to say goodbye because it really felt like goodbye.

As I drove on the Taconic, in rushed all these memories and a great warm feeling of love for Leila as a true and generous friend and a wonderful human being.  At the end of that very week, I was heartbroken to see Leila’s obituary in the Sunday New York Times.  I miss Leila Hadley Luce and I will never forget her….and I can’t help but wonder if I was sensing Leila’s radiance, her unique presence, as it left the world.   At the very least, it was a reminder that there is more to us than we know and more going on in this world than we know.

Children of the Earth

One Saturday in February,   back in 2002,  I flew out to Portland, Oregon,  to interview Jean M. Auel, the bestselling author of The Clan of the Cave Bear, about Ayla, a blond Cro Magnon girl who was orphaned by an earthquake and adopted by Neanderthals.  I agreed with most readers that Auel’s fifth novel, Shelters of Stone, the last in her Earth’s Children series, in which a willowy, beautiful, grown-up Ayla travels to an Ice Age version of the big city, was a big bloated disappointment compared to that first enthralling tale,  which was full of details about how Ice Age people cooked and hunted and carried water–full of the feeling of what it might been like to be human and all alone.  Still, I lept at the chance to leave my cubicle on lower Park Avene in Manhattan and jet to the great piney Northwest for the weekend.   I lept at the chance to talk about what it might have been like to be one of the earliest members of our common humanity.

In those days, I worked for Publishers Weekly, the trade magazine of the publishing industry.  I was just a tiny cog in what I’ve heard called the “Publicity Industrial Complex.”  In addition to writing anonymous book reviews, I would sometimes interview bestselling authors in their usually beautiful homes.  The face-t0-face interviews  themselves never lasted more than a couple of hours and the whole situation was situation was always carefully contrived.  I would work very hard to squeeze truth out the details of what an author was wearing or how he or she sat in this or that kind of chair and the quality of  the light or the view from the window where we sat.   Often, however, I’d leave these encounters feeling hollow….feeling as if I had been misguided.  This certainly happened when I went out to Portland to interview Jean Auel.  I realized that I had dreamed of moving to New York City and getting to do the kind of seemingly interesting work I did because I thought it was a way of drawing closer to the fire, to the magic, to the beating heart of reality.  Only to discover that I had been closer to the mythic dimension or reality back home in Watertown, New York.

Jean Auel lived in a  condo that overlooked the city and the snow-capped mountains beyond.  It reminded me of a sleek modern version of the cliff dwelling that Ayla came to live in and Auel told me she liked to sit at her desk and look out at the mountains and imagine what an advancing glacier might look like.  A bronze wolf (Ayla had a pet wolf) met me at the door.  Auel showed me a bone spear thrower and a cave lion skull and we talked for hours about the earliest humans and about the intelligence and ingenuity it took just to survive.  And years later, I remember that a fan had sent her a blond Barbie doll dressed in a fur bikini that looked a little like Daryl Hannah in the movie version of Clan of the Cave Bear. I left Portland think I had tofind a way to move from the shallows to the depths of life.   Little did I know then that I was carrying a map of one of the longest and strangest trips our common ancestors took coiled in my very own DNA.

To be continued….