2015 - 2016

This is probably the final installment of these Notes from our pilgrimage to Standing Rock. We expect to leave the day after tomorrow — it’s been both an inspiring journey and an ordeal for our old bodies. I want to thank all of you who have written notes of encouragement and gratitude to us — your words give us strength! May we all learn to keep it sacred, keep it prayerful, keep it joyful!

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Pilgrimage to Standing Rock (3)

N O V E M B E R    2 0 1 6

Yesterday Rabia and I took the provisions we brought — sacks of rice, potatoes, carrots, nuts, and dried fruit — to the Lakota camp near us. They cook for 600 people every day. We said we wanted to give them this food in the name of our late Lakota friend Kiefer Foote (Spotted Eagle). Many years ago Keifer traveled with us to Southeast Asia to share with indigenous leaders of Thailand what Native Americans have learned about cultural survival.

Later in the afternoon I went back to the Lakota camp and scrubbed nine enormous cooking pots stuck with grease and burned food. Squatting there in the dust scrubbing those pots, my hands blackened, I felt I had found my rightful place in this historic camp. I won’t be arrested, I won’t make strategy with the elders, I won’t join the inner prayer circles. But when a native woman walked past me as I was working — when she smiled down at me and said, “Thank you!” — I knew I was where I was supposed to be.

The camp here at Standing Rock has expanded dramatically since we arrived. People keep coming; our van used to have no one camped near it, but now we are surrounded by tents and trucks. This morning as I walked through camp I saw a large group gathered, so I went to see what was happening. It was an orientation meeting for new arrivals (we had missed that because of the interfaith gathering we were part of). The young white women who led the meeting were impressive — articulate, sensitive, and strong. They stressed three guidelines for everyone:

1. Be of use. Everywhere there are things to do: wood to chop, donations to sort, winter housing to be built, food to be prepared.

2. Keep the indigenous center. We are guests here. Be aware that we of the white culture lead with our heads; we come in with our ideas, we want to fix everything. When you find yourselves doing that, Step back, pause, and listen. Observe what’s happening. They went on to describe many ways to respect indigenous customs, leadership, and ceremonies.

3. We are creating a new lineage. We are creating a new lineage. This is how they expressed the feeling that we all have here, that the seeds of a new world are being planted — not just here, but in places and hearts around the planet.

At noon today a large band of “horse people” galloped in, including Chief Arvol Looking Horse in a fine feather headdress. He was followed by about thirty young Hopi men who had run and walked all the way from New Mexico. A huge crowd of us — maybe 1500 or more — gathered around them to listen to what they had to say and to the chants and drumming of a circle of men and women. The air split with the piercing sounds of eagle bone whistles and the ululating cries of the women.

The words and prayers spoken here touched every heart. Here are a few of them:

“Remember that this is a prayerful and peaceful gathering. Remember that you do not have to be angry to be brave. In our history we sometimes fought each other, but now all the nations are coming together. We are not protesters; we are protectors. We come together to protect our land and our ways, and to protect our sacred water for all our children and grandchildren.

“And you who are not indigenous, we love each and every one of you. You have left behind your families, your communities, your obligations, to support us. You are welcome here. You are our relatives. You will not forget what you see and experience here, and you will take that back to your people. Our encampment here is not just about Standing Rock. There are many Standing Rocks. In your communities and regions there are many pipelines. We must learn a new way to live on Grandmother Earth. We come in prayer and respect to learn that new way, together.”

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Pilgrimage to Standing Rock (2)

N O V E M B E R    2 0 1 6

We've been encamped at Standing Rock for three nights now. The wash water was frozen solid this morning, but the sun is high now and our bodies are warm at last.

Brown autumn grasses cover the soft hills here where the little Cannon Ball River wanders down to the Missouri River: the sacred water. That’s the heart mantra of the encampment: Water is Sacred. Water is Life.

A vast smoky camp is spread out around us — tents, teepees, cooking fires, flags from all the Indian nations: Dakota, Lakota, Cheyenne, Navajo, Nez Pierce, Kiowa, Cree — hundreds of beautiful names of the proud people beaten down but not beaten by the new way of life that has come to this land. Their endurance too is sacred.

The call for religious leaders to come support them — they expected perhaps a hundred might come — resulted in over five hundred Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, and leaders from many other traditions arriving yesterday for the action scheduled for today. We came from all over the country. Last night we met in a gymnasium in the nearby Sioux town of Cannon Ball, prayed and sang and listened to each other testify.

This morning we gathered early around the central council fire. A copy of the Doctrine of Discovery was burned — the early church doctrine used to justify the taking of the continent. Then our colorful procession, joined by hundreds of others from the camp, proceeded up the road to the police barricade. Helicopters and drones circled above us. It had been agreed by all not to cross the police lines, but to simply bear witness there to the cry to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline from crossing the river and endangering the water that is life. Again we sang and prayed and listened to testimony. It was a beautiful moment where once again truth was spoken to power.

Kaio, a pastor from Samoa I befriended last night, took the mic and gave one of the most powerful statements. He ended with the words: “Stand for the sacred. Keep the sacred.”

His words revealed to me a simple secret about sacredness: our keeping of it. When the water, the land, the air, or the generations to come are no longer sacred to us, we will have lost what matters most, and we will have lost our own sacredness.

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Pilgrimage to Standing Rock (1)

N O V E M B E R    2 0 1 6

A pilgrimage is often thought of as a journey to a sacred destination, to a Mecca or a Jerusalem, an Arunachala or a Lhasa. The journey my wife, Rabia, and I have just begun feels like a pilgrimage to us, though there is no holy edifice or memorial at the end of it. Instead there is a frontline of conflict: Standing Rock, where a few thousand Native Americans from tribes around the country, along with folks sympathetic to their cause, are standing in the way of the construction of an oil pipeline cutting through their ancestral lands and endangering the water source of the Standing Rock Sioux and potentially millions of people down the Missouri River.

We had been considering going to Standing Rock for the past month, but there were dozens of reasons not to — commitments, work, distance, health, our age, the cold winds that sweep across North Dakota, and we were not sure we would be welcome. After all, white people like us had stolen the land and betrayed every treaty made with the native people of this continent.

But then we heard Chief Arvol Looking Horse, 19th Generation Keeper of the Sacred White Buffalo Calf Pipe Bundle, call for religious leaders from all traditions to come join the people standing in prayerful protest against the pipeline. “If you can find it in your heart,” he said, “come support them, stand side-by-side with them because they are standing in prayer.”

So we canceled our appointments, packed our van with camping supplies and food to give away, and headed north this morning at dawn. We expect to arrive at Standing Rock late tomorrow, November 1.

Instead of my usual “Notes from the Open Path” for this month, I hope to send you several short updates as our pilgrimage continues (assuming I can send text out to be formatted like this.)

I’m not sure what we’ll find at Standing Rock, and whether my feeling that this is a pilgrimage toward something sacred is any more than a spiritual projection. I hope you’ll accompany me in the days ahead and see what can be discovered about the sacred, and conflict, and the meaning of this confrontation between men with uniforms, guns, and humvees and people saying, “Stop. Enough.”

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Move Your Feet

S E P T E M B E R    2 0 1 6

Sometimes our usual understanding of things can get us stuck. We might hold a belief or desire about how things should be, but others disagree and block what we long for. We might feel at a dead-end in our work or marriage, or we might be caring for an aging, grumpy parent and feel trapped in the role, or perhaps be suffering from an illness or physical condition that limits us and makes us feel that life has lost its promise. In circumstances like these, the logic of our complaints can feel utterly convincing. The more we obsess about the constraining situation we are in, the more our beliefs about it seem to be proved.

Once when I was learning how to rock climb in Thailand I found myself stuck about a hundred feet above the ground, clutching onto a vertical rock face. I couldn’t move. There were no other handholds I could reach, and my fingers and arms were burning with the pain of trying to hang on. I was desperate, frightened of falling; even though I knew the rope clipped to my belt would catch my fall, I also knew if I lost my grip I’d plunge a dozen feet or so before that same rope would slam me back against the sharp karst rock of the cliff.

My heart was pounding, my face pressed against the karst. Michel, my French friend and instructor, saw my desperation and shouted up at me, “Move your feet!” Where? I couldn’t see or feel any place to move them. He shouted again, “Move your feet!” I felt around with my right foot for a new foothold, but quickly drew back. Impossible!

But then I found that I could shift my right foot just a few inches along the ledge I was on. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to allow my left foot to move slightly, which gave me room to shift my whole body a few inches. Now I could extend my right arm further, and I caught a new hold. From this position I could swing my foot up far enough to catch a small crevice where the toe of my shoe could grip. And so I climbed out of there.

Since then, “Move your feet!” has become a joking reminder in my family when things feel stuck. It points to how a little shift can change one’s whole perspective. “Move your feet” when you don’t think you can, when you don’t think there’s any way out of your conclusions about yourself, your life, or the state of the world. “Move your feet” when you judge or blame others. “Move you feet” when you’re afraid or lonely.

The hard part is letting go of your belief that your view is absolutely true. That’s the castle of the ego and its walls are dense and protective. To walk out of the castle is scary, since you don’t know what may happen. It takes trust — but in what can we trust? On the cliff I had Michel’s voice to guide and reassure me, but when you’re holding on to the storyline of a grudge, or anxiety, or depression, or loneliness, how can you let that go?

I would say, when all else fails, pretend. If you don’t feel you have enough trust to step into the unknown, pretend you do. You will find that a more heartfelt trust soon comes to you. For example, if you’re lonely or depressed, you might take the step of doing something for someone else (as I’ve said elsewhere — When you are in need, give.) Taking that step is hard because you have to trust there’s something beyond your way of seeing things. Just pretend there is. Do it. Tell someone you love them. Bake a pie for somebody. Or simply do something nice for yourself — have a massage, wade in a creek, climb a tree. Break the spell! Move your feet!

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The Joy of Pausing

A U G U S T    2 0 1 6

The American clown, Wavy Gravy, once famously said, “I come from the land of one thing after another.” And so do we all! From getting out of bed in the morning to lying down tired at night, each routine and little task is followed by the next. Even when we take a break, those moments are quickly filled with distractions — chatting, thinking, reading, or watching a screen. One thing after another.

We can’t avoid this — it’s how the melody of life is played. This moment flows into the next, the current never stops. The problem for us comes when we feel pressured by the sense that too many things are demanding to be done next. That pressure is amplified when we worry about negative events we imagine could happen in the future. Then we feel compressed and tense, as if there isn’t enough room for us in our own life. We lose our quiet center; we lose the sense that we are present and whole.

In my own life I’ve found that pausing helps when I lose my quiet center. By “pausing” I don’t mean simply stopping what I’m doing and sitting quietly somewhere, although that’s always a good tonic. Pausing, as I experience it, can be done right in the middle of the river, and it can be as brief as a single breath. The length of a pause is not as important as its depth.

There are many styles of pausing — here are a few that work for me:

Pausing self-talk: Much of the pressure we feel in our life comes from the dominance of our mind stream, our self-talk. It’s important to notice that self-talk has two partners: the one who’s talking and the one who’s listening. We explain things to ourselves as if there were two of us. To create a pause in the middle of self-talk, simply say to yourself, “Stop talking for ten seconds.” You might be amazed to find how well it works! It may not last very long, but ten seconds is quite possible. In that pause, relax, take a breath, do nothing.

Pausing opinions: Opinions are points of view. They’re less noticeable than self-talk since they supply the background flavors to our mind stream. Often we don’t even code that we are pressured by our opinions; we simply assume they’re the truth of what’s happening. One way to notice our points of view is to recognize we’re making judgments: “I have no time for myself;” “Nobody else is helping;” “It’s always like this;” “My life is a mess.” Once you spot that you’re making a judgment, invite yourself to pause for a moment from its conclusion, from its certainty about being true. You don’t have to argue with yourself about it, just allow for ten or fifteen seconds that it might not be true. In that pause, relax.

Pausing before you snap back: When we feel pressured by events, or people’s demands on us, or when we feel misunderstood, it’s easy to get irritable. Notice how irritability feels in your body, and when you feel that rise, pause before you say a word that will hurt, since it’s like an arrow you can’t call back.

Pausing when you wake: Pausing for a minute when you first open your eyes in the morning is a good and easy habit to cultivate. It’s an intimate moment before anything is asked of you, a good time to feel thankful for your life, and to bless everyone and everything you can think of.

Pausing by asking: A humble question creates a pause. What’s happening now? What am I doing? What am I feeling? The question doesn’t presume an answer. It even lifts up its voice at the end — what’s happening now? — and the mind sails off without a clue. There, for a moment, the mind is suspended in a healing pause.

Pausing in your heart. Typically we experience the center of our awareness as residing in our head, behind our eyes. For a minute or two, allow your awareness to drop down to the middle of your chest, to your heart center. Your heart is a wordless place, but it is caring and warm. Rest there. It may help to briefly recall images of people or aspects of life you care deeply about. Let yourself care from your heart and be grateful for what makes your life worth living.

Pausing in Nature’s presence: We spend most of our time immersed in the culture and built environment of the human world, and feel we have little contact with free nature. Pausing in Nature’s presence can remind us of our first belonging. Look at the sky; breathe in its spaciousness. Sit with your back against a tree and sense the life of its roots below and its branches above. Watch water flowing. Give yourself small moments where you feel how your animal nature is undivided from the living world. Pause there.

Pausing in timeless awareness: The Indian sage Nisargadatta once advised a student who asked for guidance, “Go back! Go back!” Go back to the place where you begin, right now, the place of spacious awareness that hosts all the phenomena you experience. It is a simple move, although nothing really moves. Just open up to the clearing you already are and pause there for a moment or two. When you do that your whole life is refreshed.

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I Only Want to Say

J U L Y    2 0 1 6

Now that I am old my thoughts no longer hold the certainty they had, instead they open like a river delta does, spreading to the sea, slow calm channels where grasses bow and water birds float and dive and make their homes. The torrent of my beliefs has eased, thank God, and I no longer need to convince anyone of anything. You and they will find your way.

I only want to say how good it is and how good you are, as you try to make things better, how good it is that this is the way it is, and that we are not alone and never were, the same water flowing to the sea and lifting us to the clouds. It is beautiful that we have been made like this, out of mud and air, made so finely that our eyes can shine with the dearest love.

There is nothing to be afraid of.

This may be the best, the most important job we have: to assure one another that each of us is loveable, and that mercy softens every fall. Death, after all, is a fine homecoming.

As I age and slow I wonder if my life has any meaning left. It does! Meaning beyond the need for meaning, this one that drenches me with thankfulness. I am not at war with a meaningless void. There is no need for meaning, here where we glisten like raindrops in the sunlight, each drop a prism.

Something unspeakably good is shining here, some generosity so quiet and nonchalant it leaves no trace of itself yet appears as you and me and every moment created and left behind, nothing ever personal yet everything always intimate.

Mountains slide into the sea, even oceans wave goodbye, and we are not what we seem. My mother died and poured herself into my emptiness. My father followed. I join them, even now.

So shall we walk together, you and I, and watch the evening sky turn into stars? Shall we talk together about what we think is happening? It doesn’t matter if what we say is true. God after all is too holy to know, and we can be content to say our hearts have no edge and leave it at that.

Look how we are made of the warmest light! It loves us without any words.

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The Tears of the Bank Robber

J U N E    2 0 1 6

I was standing in line at a bank when a man suddenly pulled a double-barreled shotgun from under his coat and shouted for everyone to get down on the floor. I jumped behind a wide stone column and held my breath, hoping he hadn’t seen me. But the man must have noticed my movement — he shouted at me to come out from behind the column. I was terrified.

This was a dream. I was twenty-six when it happened, and I had suffered nightmares like it since I was four years old. I’m telling the story because of something that happened in this particular dream that caused my nightmares to stop, and I’ve never had one again.

My nightmares always followed the same pattern: a murderous character would pursue me, and in utter panic I would try to escape. Sometimes the bad man was a cutthroat pirate, sometimes a vicious cowboy, sometimes an evil criminal; all of them were intent on killing me. When I was a teenager the nightmares became so strong that several times I climbed out of my bedroom window just as the villain in my dream burst into my room. I still remember crawling out onto the roof and huddling next to the chimney until the cold night air woke me up.

When the bank robber dream happened I was living in a Sufi community in England, gardening, milking cows, and learning to meditate and pray. The meditation practice was having a wholesome effect — little by little it was helping me slow down and take notice of what was happening before I reacted. So when the bank robber shouted for me to come out as I hid there frozen with fear, I suddenly realized this is a dream! I can’t tell you how relieved and happy that made me feel! I was still in the dream, the bank and the bank robber were still there, and he was still shouting that if I didn’t come out he’d blast me to hell, but now I knew it was a dream.

I stepped out from behind the column and faced him. I remember his wild face, and the look of the shotgun pointed at me. Everything slowed down then, as if a great peace had settled everywhere. I smiled, opened my arms, and walked toward him. He screamed, “Stop!” and aimed the gun at my face. I took another step and then, point blank, he fired both barrels.

There was a brilliant light; the bank and my body vanished. After a moment the scene reappeared, but now I was sitting on the floor of the bank with people standing around me in a circle wondering what had happened, and pointing at me. There, curled up in my arms, was the bank robber. He was weeping. I was rocking him back and forth, saying, “It’s okay now, everything’s all right, everything’s all right.”

After twenty years of running in my dreams from what I was sure would be my death, I stopped. Facing what terrified me brought an unexpected healing. This is essentially the same healing process (turning in to the direct experience of the painful) at the heart of many forms of trauma therapy, including EMDR, Peter Levine’s somatic therapy, and the “One Rule” we use in Open Path inquiry work.

My dream-healing experience was precipitated by the sudden, mysterious recognition that what I feared had no more reality than a dream. Curiously, the tables were turned — what I was afraid of became afraid of me. When I came out of hiding, when I opened my arms and stepped toward the bank robber, he was the one who was afraid. (Some years later when I was working with a Karen shaman in northern Thailand, a woman came to tell the shaman she was afraid to go into the jungle because the spirits and ghosts might attack her there. He smiled and said, “Human beings and ghosts have one thing in common: they’re both afraid of each other.”)

My bank robber was a ghost, a dream-ghost. The moment I realized I was dreaming not only did my fear dissolve, but I was flooded with a sense of kindness and ease. Longchenpa, the great 14th century Tibetan mystic, wrote an extraordinary text called Finding Comfort and Ease in Enchantment. In it he suggests a “dream yoga” to be applied not only to dreams during sleep but to every aspect of our waking experience:

The outer world, its mountains and valleys,
villages and towns, and its living beings,
compounds of earth, water, fire, air and space,
all forms, sounds, smells, tastes and sensations,
the five sensory objects,
and the internal world of body-mind
and its sensory consciousness,
all experience, should be attended to incessantly as dream.

(from "Maya Yoga" (trans. Keith Dowman)

Recognizing our everyday reality as dream is one way of expressing the nondual view: the realization that all phenomena, though they are clearly apparent, have no substantial existence; that is, they never actually come into being as independent entities. As it is said in the Prajnaparamita Sutra:

“…no personal self exists substantially or independently, just as no apparent structure of the universe exists substantially or independently. This principle of ontological transparency applies to every subjective or objective structure or process that can possibly be experienced by any consciousness.” (trans. Lex Hixon)

The words “no substantial existence,” "ontological transparency," and “dream” point to the same realization, a realization that is corroborated by quantum physics. However, this realization is not something that can be apprehended solely with our intellect. It takes a willing suspension of our belief in the substantial reality of all “apparent structures.” This doesn’t mean that all apparent structures are fraudulent. They are just as they appear, clear and precise, but they have no claim to be existent entities substantial in themselves. Longchenpa again:

The actuality of all experience is like a dream
and in its momentary groundless gleaming,
undeniably perceptible, it is uncrystallizing light-form…
a diaphanous form of emptiness.

Recognizing the dream-like nature of everything we experience doesn’t diminish the vibrancy of life — just the opposite. It simply frees us from being obsessed by fears, since we see that we, too, are dream-like and ungraspable. Within the “dream” of relative reality, a dream that is constantly appearing in new forms, our bodies and senses of identity are as impermanent as everything else. Of course, we can’t help but become attached to body and identity and the forms we perceive. That attachment, as we know, results in the fear and suffering we are so familiar with.

So what are we, if not these changeable forms — this dream? The good news is that what we are is inseparable from the identityless pure presence that is the transparent ground of all being and becoming. We are the essence of “uncrystallizing light-form,” pure awareness appearing in all these infinite ways. Recognizing this, we wake up from the dream while still in the dream, and take the world in our arms, where its tears — and our own — are tears of homecoming.

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Love and Death

M A Y    2 0 1 6

Lying there, looking up at the doctor and your next of kin, you grow uncomfortable with their concerned faces. You close your eyes so they will think you need to rest. You hear them back out of the room and the soft click of the door. You can still hear them speaking out in the hall, most of the words indecipherable except for the doctor’s, who you distinctly hear say, “It won’t be long now.”

It sounds like a line from a movie you saw once — it won’t be long now — but this time it’s about you. Ah, so this is my death-bed. The words form again in your mind, “my death-bed,” and again, “my death-bed,” as if repeating them will make you believe it’s true. My time has come. A quiver of fear — or is it excitement? — flashes in your stomach, but it doesn’t last. You lie there without moving. It’s quiet in your room. You’re thankful they brought you home; the hospital with its noises and interruptions is not a good place to die.

You feel wide-awake, but as you cast your mind over the history of your life, letting images from different periods arise, you fall into a half-dream state and drift. Gradually you sense a presence close to you, although no one has come into the room. It’s not a presence you can identify, but it feels somehow familiar. Kind. Is it an angel? It’s asking you something. You strain to hear it, and then the words become clear.

“Have you loved well?” it asks. That’s all, nothing more.

You hear the question echoing down the corridors of your life, doors opening on moments you’re sure bear witness to your failure to love. You know this feeling, this old feeling of unworthiness, of having failed somehow. No, I haven’t loved well, certainly not well enough, good God all the times I was self-preoccupied instead of loving, impatient instead of gentle, oh God…

You feel the weight of judgment — your own, the angel’s, God’s — fall on you like shovelfuls of earth, darkening and compressing against you. You strain to breathe. But now in the darkness you sense something else — at first it’s faint, then unmistakable — it’s the smell of earth, the smell of soil in a garden where you once knelt, the dark, loamy, sweet smell of fertile soil breathing into you. How lovely it is!

Now chinks of light appear beneath you — it’s strange, there’s light beneath you and you feel yourself falling into it, but suddenly everything turns around and what felt like down a moment ago is now up, and you’re looking up into blue sky and as you breathe it feels like you’re breathing in the whole wide sky, clear and fresh. How lovely it is!

There are a few puffy white clouds balanced in the sky, precious against the blue. Two birds glide over the landscape. You hear leaves whispering in the trees. So beautiful!

Now you are walking. There’s the familiar stride of your body along the path, confident that it knows how to adjust each step around the small stones and the tilt of the ground. You remember this, how beautiful it is to walk, to feel yourself glide along past the trunks of trees, how lovely it is!

Suddenly it all becomes clear to you: the enormous gift your life has been, all the moments given you to love — the wonder of it! — to have received this chance to breathe this air, to walk in this body on the earth. Gratitude wells up in your heart: Oh yes, I have loved this!

Now you are no longer walking, now images as real as life are passing through you, images from your earliest memories, flashes of wonder in your child eyes, your mother picking you up, oh! riding your bike through leaves fluttering down around you, the images that come are as numerous as those falling leaves, tying your shoelace for the first time and looking up smiling, holding your first friend’s hand, kissing, that feeling of soft lips kissing yours, two hearts kissing, how I have loved this! And each tender, shy love I have taken in my arms, each one, each one loved, longed for, each one! Images of love pour through you in a great current of gratitude, alleluias of white birds flying up, images of stairways, carrying groceries, cooking dinner, children playing under the table, their laughter and nonsense talk, oh how I have loved this! And laying my head on my pillow so many times, its touch on my cheek, the open window in the morning billowing the curtain, the smell of coffee brewing, music from a neighbor’s radio, sunlight on the porch. I remember! The images continue, beyond telling, and your heart feels like it’s bursting with gladness. You feel yourself coming apart as if a child was blowing on a dandelion puff. You want to say something, one last shout to everyone everywhere, one last whisper in everyone’s ear as you come apart, you want to say, Love well! Love well!

When they come back into your room they see you lying there, a little smile on your lips, very still.

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In One Form or Another

A P R I L    2 0 1 6

I once caught a very large fish. As it appeared from the depths of the sea off the west coast of Canada I saw it was longer than my arm, and I knew I couldn’t pull it into the kayak I was in — there wasn’t room in there for both of us. The sky was gray and close; the wind had picked up, blowing spray in my face; the rise and fall of the sea made my little boat unstable. I tied the line onto the kayak so the fish would stay close to the boat, its green body swimming next to me while I paddled to the shore of a small, uninhabited island. When I landed I pulled the fish up onto the pebbled beach. It thrashed and quivered, lay still, then thrashed again and again. I took my hunting knife from its sheath on my belt and plunged the blade just behind the fish’s head, severing its spine. At that moment I felt a surge of energy like an electric shock explode up my arm and into my body. Later that night my friends and I ate the fish, but in that moment, as the surge of energy entered my body, I felt I had absorbed its life force. It turned into me.

Yesterday I was making a soup. As I sliced the carrots I remembered that fish and its gift, and realized the carrots were doing the same thing. The carrots, like the fish in its sea, had led private lives in the dark earth somewhere, had been pulled out and now submitted themselves to my knife. There was no surge of electricity that I could feel as I chopped the carrots, but the gift was the same.

This world is constantly feeding us like that. Even this breath we are drawing in right now — the life-gift of plants — offers up its power to us, keeping the continuity of life happening. All of us are brimming with this accumulated life force given from countless sources — carrots and fish and air — plus vast gifts more intangible but no less vital, like the perseverance and ingenuity of our ancestors: hunter-gatherers, nomads, farmers, singers, builders, scientists, or the gifts of our mothers and fathers, and their mothers and fathers, and theirs, all the way back, the parents whose caring for their little ones ensured our coming into being. The life force we breathe and move with pours into us from all this like the current of a great luminous river.

We can feel this directly, and we can also feel how this luminous current doesn’t stop inside us — it keeps flowing. What we have taken in, gives. This is happening right now, it doesn’t stop. Whether we are aware of it or not, the light of aliveness pours forth from us just as it pours into us. The aliveness of our seeing, hearing, and touching, the aliveness of our warm hearts, all of it continues to illuminate the world around us just as we are illuminated by it.

Of course there are obstructions in this great current of aliveness. Meanness, abuse, selfishness, fear — none of us escape being wounded by these things, or wounding others. Our job is to learn to get out of the way, to let the luminous current flow through us and not obstruct it. This is not so easy, but we can do it.

One thing that helps is remembering to bow — to bow in acknowledgement and awe of this current of aliveness that creates and sustains our own aliveness. What a vast gift it is! The simple humbleness of our bow — not necessarily outwardly but inwardly — in recognition of the unimaginable offering of a universe that makes our existence in this moment possible… this is what helps us get out of the way. To be here, alive with this aliveness, and not to be in its way, is the best luck we could have.

Even in sickness or the decline that precedes our death, the current of life still flows in its full vitality, if we get out of its way. Then it is not so much a physical vitality as a luminous one. For within this current of livingness that we are made of is an unquenchable light. It is the invisible light of becoming — so close we can’t see it — that ignites the whole drama of fish and farmers, fathers and mothers. But now the metaphor of a “current” or a “river” comes to its limit, because this gift of aliveness is not limited by river banks — it is more like a shoreless ocean of light, or what Inayat Khan describes as “the all-pervading life in space.”

Light, life — these two words spiral around and into each other until we cannot distinguish the difference. Ultimately, and intimately, our livingness is light — we are made of light. And yet even that word — light — meets its limit, for this invisible light is not the opposite of darkness, nor is it located in one place and not in another. In the same way, “the all-pervading life in space” is not the opposite of death. Ultimately, and intimately, there is no death. The fish, the sea, the soup, the air, the ancestors, us — we are all radiances of this invisible and timeless light. Or as Jack Kerouac tells it: “We’ve been here forever, in one form or another.” Bowing down, we know what he means.

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God Is Not Something Already Made

M A R C H    2 0 1 6

It can be humbling — and liberating — to recognize the limited nature of how we think. Our monkey minds swing from thought to thought, busily assembling our points of view. But when we look closely, we see that each thought is made out of words, and each word signifies a concept, and andromedaeach concept — for example, the word and concept “God” — must remain static enough for us to “know” what is meant by it. If I tell you, “I believe in God,” we both think we know what I mean. What is signified by the word “God” seems to sit somewhere for us both, like an object in space we can refer to even if we can’t perceive it directly. By becoming an object in our sentences, God assumes the identity, in our minds and language, of something substantial in itself. It (He, She) exists for us as an independent entity, already made.

This objectifying tendency of our minds — of how we think — is a necessary result of language. Each word we use stands for something that is not a word, and that “standing” presses our minds into the molds of objectification. This process is usually very helpful, as it allows us to communicate quickly and to navigate a world that, if it were perceived solely in its primordial unity, would not provide sufficient distinctions for us to survive. We, subjects, over here, perceive and communicate about those objects, over there, and we make our way among them. It’s the powerful and helpful appearance of duality in what is, in its essential nature, a nondual reality.

Henri Bergson, the great 19th/20th century French philosopher, continuously probes this objectifying tendency of our minds to help us recognize and free ourselves from its limitations. The phrase God is not something already made is his. “Something already made” is what we assume an object to be. An object is — we think of it as existing now as it was a moment ago and as it will be a moment from now. In the case of the physical objects around us, we now know through quantum physics that that is not how things are. Everything, even the hardest, seemingly most immutable diamond, is a humming mystery of quarks and energy potentials in constant flux.

But we would like our God to have a different status. We say, “He is now as He was and as He will be.” But what are we referring to? What is this immutable quality of Godness? Is the idea of God’s immutability a relic of our minds’ objectifying tendencies? If so, is it possible for us to perceive or know Godness without objectifying “it”?

Bergson suggests we do have that capacity, although it is beyond the reach of our intellects. He calls this capacity, intuition. Our intellects, he says, can serve intuition, but only to a point — then we need different wings. Bergson, who began his career as a brilliant mathematician, uses many examples to help us take flight. In one of them he recounts the old Greek philosopher Zeno’s story of Achilles’ race with the tortoise, sometimes called “Zeno’s Paradox,” which you probably heard about in school. In the story, Achilles gives the tortoise a head start in the race, but after that he can never overtake the tortoise, because in order to do so he has to first cover half the distance between himself and the tortoise, and then half the remaining distance, and then half that, ad infinitum, so Achilles can never catch up. Zeno uses this story to “prove” that movement is an illusion, and philosophers and mathematicians have fussed with it ever since.

Bergson points out that a fundamental error is made in Zeno’s Paradox by transposing the notion of time, which is known by movement (in this case Achilles’ movement), onto space. Our rational intellects, and the limits of Newtonian physics, reduce movement and time into “things” that occupy successive “places” in space, making them measurable, like the little lines on our watches that mark minutes and seconds. Bergson contends that this is where we get confused. Movement and time are not fundamentally transferable onto spatial places, although it is convenient for us to do so for certain purposes. Instead, the nature of movement and time is flow, and as flow, movement and time are indivisible. We know that intuitively, though not rationally.

It’s only natural that we humans would treat the idea of God in this same way. In order to make God intelligible, our minds imagine God as something that exists in space, something unchangeable and “over there,” already made. This habit of mind serves religions in that people can more readily conceive God as an entity to whom we can pray and whose commandments we should obey. But it is just this habit that has trivialized the enormity and mystery of Godness, and turned many of us to the other extreme: rejecting the whole notion of Godness as an outmoded, superstitious concept. But when we do that, as is evident in much of contemporary secular society, we impoverish ourselves and risk losing the experience of the sacred in our lives.

We arrive now at the “payoff” of this philosophical inquiry, a payoff that has the potential to become wonderfully liberating, in an immediate, personal, non-abstract way. How so?

If God is not something already made, and if we accept that God is All, unbounded and omnipresent, then we, you and I, are not something already made either. Our moments, our thoughts, our most intimate experiences, are all alive with becoming. What we think is happening and what we believe to be true — even our most cherished beliefs, or our everyday opinions about the people in our lives, or our feelings about our own self-worth and our complaints about life — none of it is conclusive or inherently true. Nothing is already made. All is flow.

Reality, including this very moment for you and me and the whole Enormous Show everywhere, is inventing itself as it goes. It is alive and creative and free. Of course, each of those words, “alive,” “creative,” “free,” can get stuck in our objectifying minds as things we think we know, but we have the intuitive capacity to let them loose, to sense them beyond their word-forms in the undefined, spontaneously creative openness that we share with Godness itself. This is Bergson’s famous élan vital, the living impulse that makes this endless, beginningless moment shine so brightly with becoming.

One with it — how could we be otherwise? — we are actually deathless: ever becoming, ever living, ever creative, ever free!

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The Tree of Awe

F E B R U A R Y    2 0 1 6

Above the altar in the chapel at Nada Hermitage — a small Carmelite place of retreat in the Colorado desert — hangs a crucifix unlike any I have ever seen. It almost speaks. Jesus is clearly alive there, nailed to his cross of wood. His chest swells forth, almost grotesque, as if his heart is about to burst out of its confines. His face is turned, looking slightly away and up, with an expression of such surprise and awe that you imagine the sky has broken open with a supernal light that only he can see.

The symbology of this icon may be extreme, but for me it speaks exactly of our condition, each of us, here on earth. For who among us can escape tragedy, agony, loss, and heartbreak? Even those with seemingly delightful, easy lives must experience the death of loved ones, the poignancy of things passing, and witness the unhealable anguish suffered by our brothers and sisters throughout the world. It breaks our hearts. All of us live with broken hearts, whether from the great disappointment we feel for our species’ repeated descents into violence and meanness, or from smaller, but no less intense, disappointments we feel for not being loved the way we want, or for not being the person we hoped to be, or for not being understood, or for any of our countless dreams deferred. When we do experience sweet moments of love and intimacy, it doesn’t take long before things change and we get irritable or feel pressured and the sweetness is gone. That’s heartbreak too. We can’t avoid it, just like Jesus can’t avoid his cross.

Sufis speak of a timeless time when “we were what we were before we were,” a time of pure unity when there was no division between us and the Absolute. But then a line was drawn that allowed there to be lover and beloved. Loverness and belovedness searched for each other, seeking their unity, but even when they succeeded, the union could not last. “If there is pain,” wrote the 17th century Indian Sufi Kwaja Khurd, “it is this: This state [of unity] cannot be permanent, since it has been established that the self-disclosure of the Essence passes like a flash of lightning and does not remain. O the infinite pain, the endless agony!”

That, too, is our heartbreak, at least for those of us mystically inclined. Jesus’ body on that cross seems to want to fly free toward the light, but is nailed there, caught.

And yet there is something else alive for us in this polarity of heartbreak and joy, separation and unity — the vertical and horizontal axes of the cross. In a couplet written by Jelaluddin Rumi, the secret within the meeting of these two opposites is expressed:

You must have shadow and light source both.
Listen, and lay your head under the tree of awe.

The first line states the irrevocable nature of the cross we bear: we must have shadow and light both. There is no way out of it here on earth. And then the second line begins with two instructions: “listen” and “lay your head under.” We might think Rumi would use the word “see” rather than “listen,” since shadow and light are visual images, but the event of listening asks a greater surrender, an emptying out, a receiving. We lay our head under and stop trying to think our way through this. What is happening is so far beyond what we can know.

Lay your head under the tree of awe. Supernovas explode, lovers hold hands on garden paths, babies are born, bullets kill, Christ is crucified, birds glide in the light of dawn, our hearts break for all that is lost — there is no other response possible to the irreconcilable enormity of it all, but awe. The tree of awe isn’t something that is finished. Its branches grow infinitely into the farthest heavens and into the most loving and agonizing moments of our lives. Lying here, looking up at it, there is nothing more we can say, but at least we know we are in good company.

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Your Gift

J A N U A R Y    2 0 1 6

In a decade or two, maybe less, I will no longer exist. That may be true for you too, though you may have a bit longer. Our lives are like little flowers blossoming on the mountainside, appearing beautifully, and then they’re gone.

mountain rainbowYou may feel, as I do, that not only do you want to enjoy the time you have left, but that you also want to offer something back to this world that made you — this world you are a part of — so that your existence here will have been, in some small way, of benefit.

This feeling of wanting to give back can charge your life with meaning and blessing, but it can also be a curse. It can be a curse especially if you look around at your life and see only its limitations. If you feel you don’t have the options, position, energy or charisma to offer something of value to the world, then you can end up feeling useless and small.

But the truth is you are not small. None of us are. We may be like little flowers on the mountainside that will soon disappear, but that’s not the whole story. Even if it seems your life is limited in its outward scope and influence, there is something alive in you of much greater scope and influence.

You can directly sense what I mean by following a few simple steps: (1) pause; stop trying to solve any problem; (2) bring your attention to the center of your chest; (3) sense the living presence that is gathered there — in the middle of your chest — sense its livingness; (4) using your intuition, without applying any mental pressure, notice that the quality of that living presence in your chest is like an invisible light, a silent radiance.

That radiance is your gift. It may be unsteady or it may be strong, depending on the confidence of your love. In one way it represents the sum total of all the impressions you have received in your life and what you have done with them; it reveals if the pleasure you have experienced, and the suffering, has nurtured self-obsession, or compassion.

If you sense the invisible light in your chest is weak or unsteady, you can change that. It’s not easy, but you can do it. The most important thing is to realize that it’s possible to do, right in this moment. No matter what hardships you have endured, you can do it — nothing prevents you but your belief. The invisible radiance that emanates from you is one of the most powerful healing gifts you can offer to the world.

That may sound on the surface like a spiritual fantasy, but what I’m speaking of is as real and effective as any outward action you might take. I’m not saying that outward action is not important, of course it is, but this “light” that comes from you also has the power to change and heal. It enters the zeitgeist — the spirit of the times — directly and continuously. It touches those around you without your saying or doing anything. And if your options for “giving back” are limited by your situation or your health, the potency of your heart light is not. As Rumi said it: “Be the person who, when you enter the room, luck goes to the one who needs it most.”

A friend of mine, a psychotherapist, once told me about an extraordinary man he had known named Anthony (Tony) Sutich. Tony had been a pioneer, along with Abraham Maslow and others, in the development of humanistic psychology in the 1950’s and ‘60’s, and had been instrumental in creating the field of transpersonal psychology. He founded both the Journal of Humanistic Psychology and later, the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology. He was a mystic, a psychotherapist, a social activist, and had a profound effect on all who met him.

This was extraordinary because Tony had been hit by a bat during a baseball game when he was twelve, and was almost completely paralyzed for the rest of his life. My friend described to me what it was like to be in Tony’s presence. When he’d visit him, Tony would be lying propped up in bed, only able to tilt his head, speak through clenched teeth, and move one of his hands. Yet from him there radiated such love — my friend actually described it as light — that everyone present was transformed by it. They felt accepted, loved, and inspired.

Of course, Tony Sutich was a brilliant and exceptional man. But the radiance that came from him is something each of us has naturally. We can sense it in our heart, and nourish it in our being every moment, even now.