The first thing Stephen knew was that his wheelchair was skidding away behind him as he stood up — not stood up as much as leapt up, landing firmly on his feet, his arms flung out in the same motion, and he shouted — with his real voice, not the computer voice — “What?” so loud it startled him. He looked around disbelieving.

He was on a footpath in a meadow with summer wildflowers and small yellow butterflies flitting here and there. A stream sparkled in the sunlight in a valley not far below him, and on the far side were hills covered with forests and meadows. Stephen shook his head and closed his eyes tight and opened them again. It was all still there. He swung his arms, still incredulous that he could do it, and began to jump up and down, little jumps to test the ground and his legs.

He called out, “Hello?” several times but there was no answer, just a soft breeze on his face. There was also no sign of his wheelchair. He took a step, and then another. He turned in a circle. He couldn’t believe what was happening. Gathering his courage, he began to walk along the path, slowly at first, step by step across the meadow toward a stand of trees that made their way down to the stream. He was so delighted to be walking, to feel his legs carrying him, to be able to look this way and that. He began to trot, and then broke into a full run, his head thrown back, “Whee!”

As he came to the forest he slowed to a walk again. The dappled light from the trees calmed him. A carpet of pine needles spread soft under his feet; the air was fresh and scented. Up ahead on the path he saw a clearing in the forest with sunlight slanting in. As he came to the edge of the clearing he saw a small cottage with a porch and a path leading to it. He followed the path, stepped up onto the porch and knocked on the door.

“It’s open,” came a voice from within.

Stephen pushed open the door. What he saw astounded him. Instead of the small room he expected, the place was aglow with light, a pale blue light. There didn’t seem to be any walls or ceiling. He saw a woman seated on a bench, facing him. She gestured for him to come closer and to sit on the floor in front of her. He did so, folding his legs beneath him as if he had been doing that all his life.

The woman had an ethereal beauty about her, not only her face but in the way she sat there and in the soft folds of her gown. She looked at him kindly.

“Is this… heaven?” he asked, his voice breaking.

“No, Stephen,” she replied. Her voice was velvety. “No, Stephen, this is not heaven. You’ve been in heaven. This is the place of remembrance.”

“What do you mean?” he asked. “I don’t understand.”

“I know you don’t,” she replied. “There are many things you don’t understand. As brilliant as you are, you are still just a child who doesn’t know where he is. I know you have suffered and overcome great obstacles, but you have made a mistake, a mistake that you will have to correct.”

“What mistake?” he blurted out. “My theory on information retrieval from black holes? Was that wrong?”

“No, Stephen,” she said, “nothing like that.”

The woman stopped speaking. She looked at him then with a steady gaze that felt to him like a fierce wind. He had never felt anything like that gaze — it went right through him. It blew away all of his thoughts, all of his equations, all of his theories of everything. In their place he sensed something more beautiful than he had ever known, although if he were asked he could not have said what it was. But suddenly he knew. He knew what his mistake was, and he knew what he had to do.

The woman smiled gently and said, “Now you are ready. Close your eyes.”

circle eight glyph

Even before Stephen opened his eyes he knew where he was. He was back in his wheelchair, crumpled to one side. He remembered the moment clearly: he had been wheeled out to give a speech at the Royal Society for Advanced Physics. He was just sitting there, center stage, being introduced — and then he had died. Quietly, in front of everyone, with television cameras recording the whole drama. He heard the President of the Royal Society speaking to the shocked audience, “Ladies and Gentlemen, please be calm. It is with deep sadness that I must announce the passing of Dr. Stephen Hawking…”

Stephen opened his eyes. The doctors who had gathered around him on the stage gasped. “Wait!” one of them shouted. Stephen straightened his head, and then sat upright in the chair. He said to the doctors, “Please, step back, give me a little room.” They moved back, stunned.

The audience began talking all at once, “What? What?” Stephen lifted both hands toward them. “Please, I would like to say something.” He unhooked himself from the paraphernalia of the chair and stood up. First there was the sound of gasps from the audience, and then everyone went silent.

Stephen walked to the front of the stage. He stood tall, taller than he had been in his youth. In future years people would remark, when they watched the video of the event for the hundredth time, that there was a light around him, a pale blue light. Stephen began to speak, his voice clear and intimate. Though he had no microphone, everyone in the room could hear him perfectly.

“My friends,” he said, “don’t be alarmed. Yes, I did in fact die a little while ago, as you witnessed. But I have been asked to return to this life for a few moments to correct something, to correct an error I made.” There were cries from the audience. Stephen raised his hands again to quiet them.

“Dear friends, last year I announced that we had no more than a thousand years to develop the technology to escape planet Earth. I said we have to find other planets to escape to before the Earth becomes uninhabitable through the many dangers that confront us — climate change, overpopulation, nuclear war, epidemics, asteroid strikes. Six months later I amended that message and said we had no longer than one hundred years to make our escape. I was wrong. We have to do it now.

“The good news, dear friends, is that a habitable planet has indeed been found! And what’s more, we have the means to get there. I am delighted to tell you that the planet I am speaking of is perfect for us. It has vast quantities of liquid water and an atmosphere with just the right percentage of oxygen for us to breathe unaided. Its gravity is also perfect for our body mass – we will not bounce off its surface or struggle under our own weight to keep ourselves upright. Its star is a yellow dwarf, halfway through its life cycle, which means it will provide earth2us with at least five billion more years of light and warmth. And, miracle of miracles, the planet’s orbit is exactly in the habitable zone, with temperatures on the planet’s surface well within the range to support life. And as for life, because of these ideal conditions the planet has evolved a great diversity of life forms with whom we can share the planet. These life forms are not dangerous to us, at least not if we treat them with respect. And beyond all of this, the planet is beautiful, with mountains, and forests, and great plains of rich soil, and regions of ice and deserts and tropical jungles. And because of its rotation around its axis, it has a lovely rhythm of day and night, not too long, not too short, and the tilt of its axis as it orbits its star allows a progression of seasons that will keep poets writing for eons.

“I implore you — everyone — to find your way to this planet now, before it is too late. You can do it. It will not take enormous rockets to get you there, or undiscovered technologies. But it will take great resolve, and even greater love. For if you do not love that beautiful planet you will lose the chance to live there. I mean the word “love” here in its most sacred sense, as reverence, for the planet I am speaking of is a sacred place, created out of the stars, and the only way to deserve it is to honor it as you would honor something sacred to you. Reverence for life, for each other, for the natural ethics of kindness and fairness, and for living simply and humbly, these are not technologies but they will get you to the planet you hope for. Technologies can help you find ways to stop wasting and poisoning good and beautiful things, but only if they are guided by your love.”

Stephen paused. The audience was silent. He looked slowly from one side of the great hall to the other, and into the cameras, and then said simply, “Good luck to you,” and slumped to the floor and passed away.

Autumn Light

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for Pierre Delattre

Walking through a park you pass an old man sitting on a bench. He’s watching children out on the grass playing and tumbling in the fallen leaves. You see the wrinkles and lines in his old face as you pass. What kind of life carved those lines? Hieroglyphics of stories even he probably can’t remember. On a whim you sit on a bench down the path across from him, and wait.

You wonder about him. He just sits there watching the children, or looking up into the trees. You wonder what he’s thinking. Is he thinking? Maybe not. Does he have ambitions? Does he make plans?

A little breeze scatters leaves along the path, and more leaves flutter down from the branches to join them. You wonder what it’s like to be old. You decide to pretend you’re as old as he is, with the majority of your life behind you — just another old person on a bench in a park somewhere on an autumn afternoon.

You imagine first that being old must feel a little cranky, that you’ll be annoyed that your youth has passed and that your body hurts and no one cares about you. But then you look over at the old man and notice he has a slight smile on his lips. He doesn’t look cranky, if anything he looks contented.

So you try feeling that way, contented. You put the same slight smile on your lips. You look lazily out across the park. A thought comes up about your next appointment but you know the appointment is still two hours from now, plenty of time, and you already know what needs to be accomplished when the time comes. Other thoughts float by but you’re an old person now and you just pretend those thoughts don’t matter. They’re not really interesting anyway.

You invite yourself to feel fine just sitting there with nothing needing to be done. Just sitting, enjoying the autumn light sifting through the trees. At first it feels a little odd, this sitting quietly without the familiar pressure of wanting to distract yourself or get the next thing done. But you keep on with the experiment, letting yourself feel old, contented and at ease.

And then something extraordinary happens, all by itself. You couldn’t explain it if you tried. It’s as if the space between things goes right through things, right through you and the park and the old man and the children playing. You sense a spaciousness and closeness that’s so familiar it feels like it’s you, and yet it’s everywhere, completely empty of anything and yet full of everything at the same time. And the autumn light is just the same — the slant of the sun seems like it’s passing through your body and through the trees and the ground, as if everything is transparent even though everything’s right here too.

And there’s something else, something even more intimate. The familiar place that’s felt like the “you” inside of you, the you behind your eyes, the place of you that agrees with itself and quarrels with itself and makes judgments about everything, that place is suddenly so sweetly quiet and wide open and transparent too, just like space. You’ve never felt anything like this before. There’s an expansiveness everywhere that’s so vast and at the same time so intimate and lovely. It feels like you’re in love with everything! Your heart has burst open. The enormity of what you’re feeling is so unexpected and beautiful that you wonder if you’re going crazy.

You look down the path at the old man on his bench and see he’s looking at you. He winks.

Patriarchy's End

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1 In those days it is said that men stood above women, and kept them for their purposes, and used them as they wished. The women bore children and were told of their tasks, and their place was determined for them.

2 And men in that time made ranks amongst themselves, one above another, and made places of power amongst themselves, lesser and greater, and over the women also; and the lands and their fruits were possessed by men, but to the women their place was set.

3 Now it came to pass in those days that a great wind swept across the face of the earth and did not stop. For forty years it blew, and four times forty years, and the trees bowed their heads but did not break, but the minds of men were troubled and their fear was with them.

4 And thus it happened that the women stood and lifted their children to them; they went out of their doors and turned to the wind, for the wind troubled them not, and it was to them a blessing and to their children also, but to the minds of men the wind was a consternation and a grief.

5 In their trouble great multitudes of men gathered unto themselves, even kings and princes, warriors and those that followed them, and they spoke angrily together and built walls against the wind to keep it from them.

6 And it happened that some of that multitude of men looked down and they were ashamed at the anger of the others, and they who were ashamed turned away and went out of the walls and followed after the women, and the wind did not strike them and they were comforted by it.

7 But as for the multitudes of men the wind found them out; it poured through their walls and caught in their eyes; it took their voices from out of their mouths and turned their anger into air.

8 And the wind prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; it swept over the high hills, and even unto the halls of heaven where stood the throne of God the Father.

9 When the Lord God felt the wind touch His face, He withdrew into Himself and there was a great wonderment over heaven and earth.

10 And so it happened when His eyes were opened, the Lord in His wisdom stepped from the throne. He spoke not, but turned to the throne, and took hold of it with His hands, and pulled it from where it stood rooted in the firmament, and amazement came upon the angels.

11 High above His head the Lord lifted the throne. A great hush came upon the heavenly hosts and upon all the creatures of the earth, and the multitudes of men grew quiet, and quit their houses, and they looked up and were unsure.

12 For it happened then that the women sang, into the hush they sang, and their voices rose from the ages. Tender and severe their song touched the hearts of men, and they knelt who heard it.

13 Verily the song of the women reached even unto the heart of the Lord, and made tears come forth, and He wept, and the wind was made wet with His tears.

14 All the earth was washed in that holy rain, and it cleansed the places of men and their hearts also.

15 Thus burst forth the sun upon the earth and its light warmed all that lay beneath. And the Lord cried out and with His might He threw the throne He held aloft into the sun.

16 He came down then from His heaven; the Lord came down and joined the women and He was one of them and could not be seen apart from them.

17 And the multitudes of men stood, and throughout the land without rank they stood together, and they went unto the women who received them. The eyes of the women were tender with their suffering and the men’s likewise, and their gaze was of love.

18 And so it happened that the worlds rejoiced, and the lands were plentiful with the fruits of love, and no one sought to stand one above the other, from that day forever.

Impermanence and Love

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A little child runs across the lawn into her mother’s waiting arms. The mother cuddles the child and makes cooing sounds, and then the little one slips off her lap and races around the yard again, tumbling and showing off.

That was many years ago. Now the child no longer exists; a grown-up person has taken her place. The mother is no longer waiting with her arms open. She, too, no longer exists.

This is the hard truth of impermanence, and it’s how we usually think of that word — the endings it forces on us, the goodbyes, the losses and poignancy of never again.

The old Buddhists tell us the nature of impermanence is ultimately unsatisfactory. I imagine that’s doubly true if you believe we’ve had countless lives before this one, all of them marked by the losses we’ve endured. We come here, we get attached to these beautiful bodies, to our loved ones, to the places and activities we love, and then they change and disappear. Impermanence tears at our attachments and makes dukha, suffering — this is the reason they say impermanence is “unsatisfactory.”

Of course, impermanence doesn’t only work at the level of human attachment and suffering. If we look closely at the fine-grain of our experience, we can see impermanence acting in every instant and in every place. Each moment yields to the next and never returns. The events we are experiencing right now — physical, thoughtful, emotional — have already changed. You breathe. Your attention moves. Your body shifts. Appearances arise and vanish. Nothing stays the same.

We might think that “I” stay the same through all this change — but what is this “I” that stays the same? When I look closely at the evidence of the moment, at the point-instant of transience, what kind of “I” is really there?

Looking directly at impermanence like this is not easy. But when we can manage it, when we can look clearly at the transient nature of our experience, that recognition naturally floods back into us and erases our sense of being something outside of transience, something substantial and separate. As an early Buddhist scripture reports the Buddha saying:

In one who perceives impermanence, the perception of nonself becomes firmly established; and one who perceives nonself achieves the elimination of the conceit “I am” and attains nirvana in this very life.

And in the words of the Koran: “Everything is perishing except God’s Face.”

God’s Face, nirvana — what are these scriptures pointing to? By perceiving the continuous flow of impermanence (the perishing), the conceit of our isolated selfness is washed away. But we don’t vanish, just as the universe doesn’t vanish because of the impermanent nature of each moment. What’s holding everything together? What isn’t perishing?

This is where the deeper secret of impermanence is revealed. As we come face-to-face with the fact that everything is perishing, that our lives and all appearances are thoroughly ephemeral, the realization of what’s called “nonself,” or “emptiness,” or “openness” is born. In that realization we sense, beyond our senses, something that resists all description, something that we might variously call God’s Face, or nirvana, or holy intimacy, or simply, love.

Whatever we call it, this-that-does-not-perish is what connects us with everything — each other, the trees, the mountains, the sky, the stars, and all beings who have ever appeared. We remain the unique beings we are, but we recognize we’re not alone in our beingness, we are with the entirety.

I think of this “with-ness” as love— love that’s both complete in itself and endlessly creative, a holy intimacy that is cosmic, inconceivable, awesome, and at the same time ordinary, everyday, and particular. It’s the primordial generosity and ecstasy of light flooding the universe, and it’s the energy of the little child running to her mother.

Of course, impermanence is painful for us too — there’s no way we can escape loss and grief since everything we have ever been given in this life we will lose. But our grief too is love, it’s the form love takes when great loss comes to us, the cry of with-ness as it breaks free from particular love into universal love.

Knowing this doesn’t avoid the sorrow that impermanence visits upon us, but it embraces it in a larger order. People, things, and experiences come and go, but the truth of our connectedness is the reality that doesn’t.

Loneliness and Openness

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Oh look at all the lonely people — where do they all come from?

When I was a young man I often felt lonely. Even though I had friends, being around them didn’t relieve my loneliness. I think I even liked feeling lonely — it defined my “me.” I was inside it. No matter how much my loneliness ached, it was the little place from which I looked out on the world, the place from which I could judge what was happening and feel like a righteous victim of the world’s uncaring nature.

Back then I thought existential loneliness was the unavoidable human condition, and even though everyone was scrambling to avoid it, they did so in vain. In my case I even cultivated a kind of romanticism about feeling lonely — I think I believed it would make me more artistic and loveable.

That didn’t work. The self-preoccupation, the feeling of being inside my loneliness, simply ached too much. I wanted out.

Looking back, I see that both loneliness and “wanting out” of it determined the trajectory of much of my youth. Luckily, I had had glimpses of an awesome and holy “something” beyond my little loneliness, and those glimpses drew me toward a life of spiritual study and practice.

Slowly, gradually, I began to suspect that self-pity defined my lonely place. It was an echo chamber, a room of mirrors, a self-preoccupied illusion that separated me from real life, from being vividly alive. Even deeper than self-pity, I came to realize that the feeling of being “lonely me” was held in place by my fear of death.

Yes, I wanted out, but I wanted it to be me who got out, and that wasn’t possible. My lonely me, my inside me, my victim me, couldn’t survive the getting out. A terrible dilemma!

I’d like to be able to tell you there was a single miraculous epiphany that broke through the dilemma, but it didn’t happen that way. It happened much more gradually, through a whole diet of reminders and quiet contemplations, and through relationship struggles and failures, but it did happen.

In a way, I’m grateful for the intensity of loneliness that shaped my early years. It enabled me to relate to how loneliness is experienced by others. Often people don’t code what they’re feeling as loneliness — for some it feels more like alienation, depression, or repetitive annoyance with how they’re treated, for others it’s simply a feeling of unworthiness — but I think it amounts to the same insular sense of “me-in-here not seen or appreciated by world-out-there.” Whatever form it takes, it’s the illusory shell of the self-sense, and our reflex to retreat into that illusory shell is what all authentic spiritual paths try to release us from.

Though there wasn’t a single epiphany for me, the shift that happened in how I experience life comes down to something very simple: openness— the direct recognition of the open nature of my being and all being.

I came to see that the shell of hurt and self-pity that defined my “me” was made up; it was an invention of my mind, a habit. And what was more, the “me” it was protecting was made up too. Every time I tried to find my “me”, I could only glimpse a quickly vanishing feeling or thought, and those obviously were not me. There was nothing inside the shell! It was completely empty and open.

At first this was unnerving. It felt so exposed, as if I wouldn’t know how to function or relate without the habit of being my “me.” Yet slowly by slowly, and with the encouragement of spiritual teachers and teachings, I risked not retreating. The absurdity of doing so was not lost on me — after all, what was retreating to where? I experienced my nature simply as openness, an invisible, clear presence in which memories, thoughts, feelings and sensations arose and disappeared.

Perhaps to call openness a “presence” is misleading since that word seems to pin it down as a thing, which it isn’t. It’s openness — spacious, welcoming, and present. While it hosts my thoughts, emotions, and sensuality, it’s not attached to them.

This is how we all are — openness at the heart of us. The beautiful thing is that this openness doesn’t need to be improved. It doesn’t need to be protected. It can’t be hurt; it can’t even die. It can’t die because it’s the very nature of reality: vast openness.

Recognizing my nature is openness — rather than a “me” — dissolved my mental habit of feeling that I’m something that’s located “in here.” The sense that reality is threatening also dissolved. I could be intimate with what arises and passes without fear or self-protection. In the end, that may be the best way to describe openness: it is intimacy, and intimacy is love.

I know to say such things probably won’t assuage anyone’s loneliness — these habits can be stubborn, as I’ve learned. But I wanted to share my little story anyway, just in case.

Quietness

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Say you wake up one morning and notice that something is different about you. There’s a beautiful quietness inside your body that you haven’t felt before. It seems to emanate from the middle of your chest, a clear quietness opening from your heart area, filling the entire volume of your body. You sense how your skin envelopes this silence, but inwardly it seems to be without limit. The quietness disappears into the depths your body without coming to a boundary.

It’s an unfamiliar feeling but not alarming; it has a peaceful and spacious quality to it. So you sit in a chair and allow the inward quietness to have its way with you. You notice that you can’t really stand outside of the quietness to look at it — it takes up the whole interior of your body. There’s no place for you to be except within the quietness and pervaded by it.

Your attention is drawn to the boundary of the quiet where it touches the inside of your skin. You feel how this inner silence defines the shape of your body. And then an extraordinary thing happens. The quietness within you seems to open right through your skin and expand outwardly, or perhaps it’s just the opposite: the quietness of space outside your body instantaneously meets the quietness you feel inside. You are within the quietness and simultaneously held by it. Encompassed.

Although it’s purely intimate with you, you sense the quietness also has a numinous feel of otherness to it. You are it while at the same time it’s infinitely beyond you. Your private experience as a sensate body and distinct person arises within it and is somehow an expression of its vast, silent, and indefinable presence.

As you sit there experiencing all this, you feel a great tenderness — the quiet that pervades you and encompasses you is alive with a kind of tender warmth, though not a warmth of temperature. It’s intimate and dear and tender and not even approachable by these words. You feel safe.

After some time you get up from your chair and begin to attend to the necessities of the morning. At first the presence of the boundless, intimate, and safe quiet is still palpable to you — it’s everywhere as you move around and as normal sounds and sensations occur. Its intimacy unites with the phenomena of the world around you — you are within everything while at the same time you remain your unique bodily experience.

The sense of tenderness pervades your awareness of the people and things you encounter. When you touch something, a button on your shirt, a piece of toast, a cup of coffee, your touch seems to come from the tender quiet you have recognized. When you listen to someone speaking, and when you speak, the words seem to come from and be held by the same tender quiet. The sense of safety makes you gentle and unhurried.

Later, when you realize the world’s noises and your own thoughts and feelings have obscured the all-pervading quiet, you start to feel annoyed with yourself and with the people around you for taking the quietness away.

That’s when a second extraordinary thing happens. As you notice your annoyance, you see it for what it is. You see it’s given you a position from which to complain. The moment you feel the constraint of that position, you experience yourself outside it, as if you no longer needed to care whether the quiet has been obscured or not. You relax. The feeling that you’re missing something falls away, and in that instant, glory be, the tender quietness opens from your heart again as if it never left.

The Place Where Nothing and Everything Meet

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If you walk into a forest and put your ear against a tree, you will hear a silence in there that is like your own. It is a silence that has no end. Empty silence is the background to everything we perceive, in the same way that space is the background to everything we perceive. Most people don’t like listening to that silence because it makes them feel alone, and they equate aloneness with loneliness. But the silent aloneness inside us — and inside all being — is not lonely.

The Zen master, Katagiri Roshi, once said, “When you see the bottom of your life, you see emptiness right there. You are standing by yourself, completely left alone in emptiness. That is a very deep sense of aloneness.”

Accepting emptiness like this, accepting our perfect aloneness, is not isolating; it is an essential part of our awakening. As Katagiri puts it, accepting emptiness allows us “to stand up in a new way.” When we stand up like that, with recognition of the ground of emptiness everywhere, we enter the reality of what he calls togetherness and creativity.

By accepting our perfect aloneness we embrace our perfect togetherness. Our aloneness extends to others because we see that everyone shares this same empty nature. “A bodhisattva,” Katagiri concludes, “constantly becomes alive from emptiness, and that life helps others.”

Sufis have a different way to describe all this, but it amounts to the same thing. “Essence is emptiness,” Rumi tells us. “Emptiness brings peace to your loving.” And this:

Dear soul, if you were not friends
with the vast nothing inside,
why would you always be casting your net
into it, and waiting so patiently?
This invisible ocean has given you such abundance…

And this:

…lying in a zero circle, mute…
when we have totally surrendered to that beauty,
we will have become a mighty kindness.

The sufic equation of dissolving into emptiness and emerging as love is identical with the image of the bodhisattva constantly becoming alive from emptiness. It is the movement of awakening described in Sufi teachings as fana and baqa. Fana is deconstruction of the self-illusion, most often translated as annihilation of the self. “I honor those,” Rumi says, “who empty the self and have only clear being there.”

Baqa is what comes after. As Coleman Barks describes it: “Baqa is the coming back from annihilation with cleansed enthusiasm for particulars. In the state of baqa one reenters the moment fully, doing small quiet work, sewing the robe of absence.” This is Katagiri’s “standing up” in a new way, the way of togetherness and creativity. Or, as Sufis might say, it is the expression of love and of doing the beautiful that naturally flows from emptying oneself into clear being.

In my own life this “move” has become a practice that happens — in shortened form — dozens of times each day. Let’s try it together now. As you follow the practice below, notice the subtle kinesthetic sensations that occur in you. When you do this a number of times, those sensations will begin to elide, and the “practice” will happen almost instantaneously.

As you sit reading this, notice the clarity of your vision. Notice there’s nothing in the way of your seeing these words.

Now notice the clarity of the awareness in which these words appear. That clarity is unobstructed — there’s nothing in the way of the words appearing in your awareness; there’s no color or background, your awareness is perfectly clear.

Bring your attention now to the space between your forehead and the back of your head. Notice that the space inside your head is also perfectly clear. This clarity is emptiness.

Notice the sensations of your breathing. Notice how each inhale arises out of nothing and, at the top of your in-breath, it vanishes into nothing. Your out-breath does the same. Very gently, notice the space surrounding and pervading each breath. Recognize its clear, empty quality.

*Now allow your intuitive openness to expand, seeing how this clarity, this empty quality, is not bounded by anything — it is all around and through you, it is everywhere, like space is everywhere.

There is nothing you need to do to “hold” this recognition of the empty quality that pervades you and all the people and phenomena you encounter; it is always present. Relax in, and as, this clear, empty presence.

This is the “intentional” aspect of this practice. What happens next is where the magic is: baqa; “standing up in a new way;” reentering the moment with “cleansed enthusiasm for particulars.” However this occurs will be unique to you and the moment you are part of.

The place where you stand up is the place where nothing and everything meet. It’s not a place where your intellect will be of much use. We might call it a “heart space,” though it’s a heart space that pervades reality, not just the space inside your chest. In the place where nothing and everything meet, love opens all by itself, amazed and kind and creative.

Only this ancient love
circling the holy black stone of nothing,
where the lover is the love,
the horizon and everything in it.

– Rumi

Befriending Unfriendliness

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While the world we encounter day to day is not always friendly, it is our job to befriend it. Of course, befriending the world’s unfriendliness is a profound challenge; it requires equanimity and a great capacity for love and compassion.

When Jesus was being nailed to the cross he prayed that his executioners be forgiven. Although we may honor his response as an ideal, when someone criticizes us or expresses animosity toward us, what is our response? Most often we react with defensiveness: we try either to defend ourselves or to return the attack in ways that will diminish the accuser. Yet we can see from the world’s history of conflict, violence, and revenge the predictable outcomes of this kind of reactivity, just as the many small examples we can think of from our own lives show us the painful results of our own defensiveness.

Befriending unfriendliness is not something easy to accept, especially when we consider the horrendous examples of victimization and oppression throughout human history — befriending that unfriendliness can look like passivity, or foolhardiness, or even cowardice.

As a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, I grappled at length with the dilemma of pacifism — and it is far beyond the scope of this essay to deal with its many nuances — but most succinctly, for me it comes down to “situational ethics”: our job is to befriend the world, yes, but sometimes so many mistakes have been made, so many opportunities for befriending have been missed, that there is no alternative but to say No! and to stand up to oppression, as the Allies did when they stood up to the Axis war machine in the Second World War. Befriending must be our natural response in nearly every situation we encounter, but when it is too late and the only recourse to prevent even greater disaster is through force, then the use of force may be justified.

But then what?

This is the crucial point — there are endless possibilities for the healing power of friendship to avert violence and oppression before they have a chance to spread. For example, if something like the Marshall Plan had been initiated following the First World War, the Second World War might never have happened. As the lines I often repeat from Wallace Stevens tell us:

After the final no there comes a yes,
and on that yes the future world depends.

And so it is in our personal lives. We can and must say no to abuse and meanness, and to our own unfriendliness toward ourselves, but even that no has its roots in our love for life and for the well-being of all. Our everyday work must be to water those roots. There are many ways we can do this, most of them quite small and intimate — practicing kindness, forbearance, patience — but the most profound way is by opening our hearts to the nature of Pure Presence (or whatever name we wish to call it).

This is the gift of the mystic path. In its essence it is not a complicated path, but it asks of us complete openness and release of self-concepts, opinions, and judgment.

To the extent we can open our hearts to the nature of Pure Presence we realize that its nature is love, a love that is light-years beyond what we usually consider that little word to signify. It is unconditional. It’s the love that flames the stars and spins every atom. It’s the gift of this beginningless, endless moment, the infinite generosity of now.

When we recognize that this love is at the root of our own nature and the nature of all being — even though it is so often eclipsed by fear in the human realm — we open ourselves to the unshakable power of befriending.

NOTE: while there isn’t space here to recount personal stories and examples illustrating the power (and challenge) of befriending unfriendliness, I have often told these kinds of stories — if you’re interested you can find some of them in the archive of Notes from the Open Path — in particular:

The Gift of the Flower
The Tears of the Bank Robber
A Prayer in the Militant Mosque
Link Arms and Sing
Neighborliness
The Beautiful Revolution

This essay was first published in the Spring 2018 edition of FRESH RAIN, the Sufi Way E-Letter, which was devoted to the theme of friendship.

Easter Egg

A P R I L 2 0 1 8

On a festive day when I was three I found a lavender egg beneath a tree. It was Easter and the air was full of morning and the sun was shining, little children were running about, and then all of a sudden something happened, something that’s actually the first memory of my life.

I saw (and in that moment everything became quiet, at least in my memory it was quiet) I saw a glint of lavender in the leaves beneath a tree — a lavender egg half-covered by brown leaves nestled in the bosom roots of a tree that went way up into the sky.

It was so quiet, though the children were squealing in the front yard, and in the silence my small hand reached out, and I knew, I felt, something magical was happening, something intensely beautiful was being born from the dark beneath the leaves out of where the tree grew and the darkness down there began.

I took the egg into my fingers and touched its perfect seamless shape. Egg. Lavender egg. I held it to my cheek. It was as smooth as my cheek, its touch so tender and smooth, so secret and whole. I placed the egg into my basket, on the green grass inside my basket and it remains there now in my memory, lavender on a green nest, and the memory of my little selfless self contemplating it remains there too, and the quiet beneath the soaring tree remains, still there in my memory with the lavender egg.

Now seventy years have passed from that moment to this and it is Easter again and I know more, I know that Jesus made Easter by dying on a tree like the countless trillions of leaves that die and sail down between the trees and crumble into dirt and into the dark of the ground, and that the wetness of rain draws them down to the roots where they wait like Jesus until Easter comes and a little boy no bigger than that sees a glint of lavender appearing from the dark, from the fecund dark, from Jesus’ cave, resurrecting into the little boy’s hand, touching smooth against his cheek like a kiss from his mother.

The Intimacy of the Real

M A R C H 2 0 1 8

Perhaps the most startling moment in nondual inquiry occurs right at the beginning when you turn your attention inward and ask: What am I? What is it that is seeing the world around me? What is feeling the sensations of my body? What is experiencing these emotions? What is it that is asking these questions? What is this me?

The startling part of this kind of inquiry is that you can’t find an answer. You can’t find anything “there.” Where? Where are you looking? Some seekers veer off at this point and find a mental construction to substitute for the lack of an answer — for example, “Well, I’m not a thing, I’m the sum total of all the conditions that make me — my body, my thoughts, my memories,” or “There’s no solid me in here, I’m simply awareness.”

Answers like these give the mind some satisfaction, but they stop the inquiry process and allow the mind to continue business as usual. That business is based on the fundamental equation that says, “I (whatever that is) am in here and the world (whatever that is) is out there. I am the primary subject. Everything else is an object that I perceive. I walk from here to there. I pick up an object and move its position. Isn’t this obvious?”

This is where the inquiry must persist. One helpful route is to question your sense of relative location. Where is the world of objects? Where is the chair, the floor, the building, the person over there, where are they happening? Are these things of the world truly over there, or are they where I’m experiencing them, in here?

This can give us another shock. The chair I perceive as over there is actually and only perceived by me in here. The chair is in here!

This shock can be a helpful disorientation, but it only goes halfway.

When we look for the place where the chair is appearing in here, in our subjective experience of it, we can’t find that either. The chair is definitely appearing, but where is it appearing?

Now your inquiry must turn on itself once again. It must ask what is behind the notion of here and there? Yes, it is convenient to interpret the world as an arrangement of heres and theres — at least with regard to negotiating our movements — but is that how reality is?

If you’ve stayed with me this far you may sense the inquiry presents us now with another shock, one that upsets the whole equation of here and there, of me and other. This is no longer a mental exercise. It’s too close for that. We are confronted with the loss of the subject-object relationship. We begin to suspect that objects are not separate entities located in space distinct from a separate entity called “me” that is located in a different part of space. Whatever is happening is happening all at once in the same here.

Your inquiry has exposed the fundamental intimacy of the Real. You sense, free of mental reasoning, that reality is completely intimate with itself. Your reality and the world’s reality are identical, all-at-once. You recognize that the experience of reality as a subject-object relationship is a convenience, not a truth.

You’ve probably noticed that this line of inquiry doesn’t leave any room for a “you” to be somewhere special. It obliterates your privileged position. This can be experienced as an unacceptable outcome and your habitual psyche can — and most frequently does — retreat to its customary positioning of “me as subject” and “world as object.” This arrangement of experience into self-other is so embedded in how we interpret reality that even though we may have a strong insight into the sheer intimacy and oneness of being, we quickly categorize it with our minds and avoid its implicit self-effacement. After all, how can I have “relationships” with people or things if there is no subject-object distinction?

I’m reminded here of the Buddhist lama who remarked, in a symposium with environmental educators, “You speak of developing a good relationship with nature. What are you other than nature to have a relationship with nature?”

The nondual inquiry process, in its many forms, is not something you do once and it’s accomplished. You need to engage with it again and again in increasingly sensitive and original ways. In the moment that the surety of the subject-object interpretative setup weakens, when you glimpse the perfect wholeness of things, relax into that glimpse. No need to think about it.

Let the world be utterly intimate with you, no separation. Relax and open into the directness of that experience. It’s not even an “experience” since that word implies an experiencer and something experienced. Relax into the all-at-onceness that happens prior to the interpretation of self experiencing something other. This all-at-onceness is intimacy.

To the extent that you can open into reality’s all-at-onceness, you begin to recognize that intimacy is simply another word for love. Love is the desire for, and the celebration of, no separation, closer than close. Although nondual inquiry begins as an intellectual process, the realization it reveals appears through the centerless and boundless dimension of the heart. When your inquiry results in this intimate blossoming of love, your life is given a confidence and joy that serves all.

One final note: you may have clear moments of recognizing the all-at-once intimacy of reality (including “you”), but then find yourself distinctly back in subject-object world. This is not a failure. Our bodies and brains have evolved to interpret reality in this dualistic way. The point is not to remain in “nondual awareness” continuously, but to develop fluency between these two “worlds.” After all, they are not two. Recognizing their unity frees us from situating ourselves in any position. Then we can say with Rumi:

I do not exist,

am not an entity in this world or the next,
did not descend from Adam and Eve or any

origin story. My place is placeless, a trace
of the traceless. Neither body or soul,

I belong to the beloved, have seen the two
worlds as one and that one call to and know,

first, last, outer, inner, only that
breath breathing human being.

Snowing God

F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 8

I had my first encounter with what people call “God” when I was four years old. The story may make you smile. You may even have a similar one.

There had been a snowstorm and my big brother and I went sledding. The long afternoon turned into evening. My brother told me he was cold and was going home, and that I should follow as quickly as I could. Then he disappeared up the quarter mile road to our house.

It was still snowing, big gentle flakes. I was a little guy and it was a long way for me to go through the deep snow, and it was nearly dark. My mother had dressed me in a snowsuit, but I was very cold — my fingers were wet and freezing in my mittens, my toes stinging. And I had to pee very badly. I waddled along as fast as I could, the snow above my knees. I became increasingly anxious, since it would have been babyish to wet my pants, my mother would scold me, and my brother would make fun of me, but I wasn’t able to unzip my snowsuit.

I came to a stone wall that was at a right angle to the path — there were large bushes in front of it making a dark tunnel between the bushes and the wall. I was desperate. I pushed through the snow into that tunnel, and fell backwards into its softness.

Everything became quiet. My hood stopped making noise in my ears. Snow drifted through the branches of the bushes above me, sparkling from the light of the street lamps out on the road. I let go. I let myself pee. The most delicious, warm feeling spread through me. I went from desperation to bliss. Suddenly everything felt enormously holy, like God was appearing in that glistening bush, though I doubt I had ever heard the word “God.” I felt an all-enveloping Motherliness holding me in that moment, peaceful and warm, a Mother who was everywhere, a Mother who had no name, not my real mother but a Bigger-Than-Everything-Mother in whose presence I was completely loved and accepted. I was Home in a Home that felt so familiar — it wasn’t strange at all. I knew this Place. It was so big and so close at the same time, and so loving, and the light on the falling snowflakes seemed like little sparkling angels.

Then it got cold and I struggled home.

It’s tempting to think the experience of that four year-old boy in the snow was just a matter of a physical release and the momentary comfort that followed. I can only reply that after seventy years have passed, the authenticity of that memory is still alive in me — not the physical sensations, but a numinous quality that escapes all telling. I didn’t make it up. I couldn’t. I was far too young and inexperienced to have any concept of holiness; I had never been to a church or been told about anything approaching that exquisite beauty or the love it radiated. And although I could, in a way, “see” it — which made it seem other than me — what I was seeing was simultaneously inside me — I was lit from within and without.

The soul of that little boy was touched by the remembrance of where it came from. I see now how the arc of my life has been shaped by that remembrance, or at least how it invited in time many other similar, and more intense, experiences — through psychedelics, Sufi teachings and practice, solitude in the desert, and immersion in Buddhist, Christian, Advaita, Dzogchen, and shamanic traditions. Each of these pathways to the numinous led me through different territories, yet each one ultimately revealed the same glimpse of Home, or what shall we call it? Supernal love? Peace? Emptiness? Bliss?

These experiences have gradually loosened the grip that loneliness, fear, and the feeling of being a separate entity had on me, and they have made my life joyous. To become certain that we are held by and are one with infinite love is, in my experience, the most beautiful teaching and gift we can receive here on earth.

A New Year's Vow

J A N U A R Y 2 0 1 8

Because this day is special
and we are together,
because the year’s starting
and we want to say something,
because it’s never been here before
and we have,
because the year is asking
and the children are asking and listening
for what we will say
and what we will do,
let us vow, let us make a vow,
now, because we can,
because we’re still breathing,
and the old year hurt,
and the animals are scared,
and the children are waiting,
and the air is listening,
let us vow, now,
to the mothers who bore us
and the millenniums before us
and the millenniums to come
who are waiting and listening
for what we will say
and what we will do,
and because it matters
and we are together,
let us vow, now,
to love more.

Sanctuary

D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 7

It’s not so easy being a human being. We learn early that this world hurts just as much as it comforts. The warm safety of our mother’s womb turns against us, squeezes, and sends us out into this too bright, clanging place. We find that sometimes we’re cuddled and sometimes we’re left alone to cry in a wet diaper. We learn to run happily on a sidewalk but then trip and skin our knees. Worse things happen as we grow taller, and we look for places to be safe, even if temporarily.

When I was a child and felt betrayed by the world — when I was scolded by my mother or had lost another fight with my big brother — I would climb to the top of a great beech tree in our backyard. It was my sanctuary. There was a place up there where the smooth branches made a good spot to sit and I could lean against the warm skin of the tree, my cheek against it, and watch the light play in the canopy of leaves around me. I was safe there. Nothing could hurt me.

My pillow was another place like that, when the lights were out and I could curl up under the covers and close my little eyes. That quiet, warm place was safe too, an inner sanctuary.

I suppose most of us had places like that as children, private places where we could hide for a while and feel our aloneness held in an undemanding embrace of safety. Of course, some of us had a relatively happy childhood, others not so much, but we all sought out our sanctuaries and found some degree of solace in them.

As we grew up, as we outgrew those first sanctuaries, we consciously or unconsciously looked for them in other places. Love relationships most often came next — the marvelous intimacy of another body next to ours, falling asleep together, especially when we were young or the love was new, made us dare think it would be that way forever, safe in the sanctuary of each other’s arms. But as we know, it didn’t last, and our once-safe relationships lost their safety.

So we looked again, and again. Sometimes a circle of friends helped, or a family, or children, but those havens proved demanding and stressful, and didn’t provide the comforting sanctuary we sought. Some of us turned to a religion or spiritual path and were comforted by the light coming through stained glass windows, the intoning of prayers, the wise words of the ancients, the promise of God’s arms, but — there’s always a “but” — even those consolations were fleeting and were more about a hoped-for safety than a present one.

Could it be that we’ve gotten this whole thing inside out? Could it be that our childhood hope for a sanctuary as a separate, safe place that’s able to shield us from suffering (and death) has actually kept us in the realm of suffering (and death)?

We are looking for safety, but what is it that we’re trying to protect? Our body? Our self? Our future? Our body is impermanent; we know that, just like everything in the universe is impermanent. Our self is a construct that vanishes when we try to find it, so what’s the point of trying to protect something we can’t even find? Our future? Is that even remotely up to us? Our future is, and always has been, something given by the whole universe.

What if we were to see that the universe itself is our sanctuary? That we’re safe here because we don’t need to hide from anything? If this is true, then we can relax. The universe sustains and supports our life and our death. Our life and our death are not actually opposites, they are united in each moment that arrives and passes. Our nature, and the nature of the universe, is the same: impermanence, change, arriving and passing, continual movement. When we understand this and don’t try to resist it, we realize we are safe, as safe as the whole universe is safe.

You might think that “the universe is our sanctuary” is a nice idea, but that it’s too abstract and cold to offer much comfort. But the universe and its wonder are not an idea. The universe is pure light and our lives are expressions of that light, each moment we live and each moment we die. We are its flaring forth, its blossoming.

When we see this and surrender to this, an even deeper mystery is revealed. The nature of this enormous sanctuary is impermanence, yes, continual change and becoming, and that is our nature too, but at the same time, we come to see that the nature of the universe, the totality, is pure presence, not subject to change, perfectly clear. That is our nature as well.

These “two” qualities of our sanctuary — impermanence and presence — are not in actuality two. How this is, is a mystery. Yet it’s a mystery that is apparent right now, for each of us, in this living moment: The simple clarity of our awareness is pure, unmoving presence, yet it reveals all movement.

Once we glimpse this mystery in our own being, we begin to see it everywhere. Everything changes, while this clear presence doesn’t. That impossible miracle is what blossoms with infinite generosity our radiant universe, our sanctuary. We see then that this generosity is what we call love, love beyond any conception we might have of that word. In that infinite love we are safe and always have been and always will be.

A Hundred Years from Now

N O V E M B E R 2 0 1 7

There are increasing signs that a hundred years from now life on earth will have taken a serious turn for the worse. We won’t be here of course, but our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will. What will they have to face?

Thinking of the future with grim expectations like this can be disturbing and scary, like imagining the sword of Damocles swinging from a thread above us. We’ve started having bad dreams hundred yearsabout what might happen — visions of nations collapsing, citizens armed and dangerous, the coasts flooding, forests burning, dust blowing over dried-out farmland, starving refugees taking what they can find, the last elephants shot for meat, the seas dying, dystopian mega-cities swarming with faceless strangers, replicants, sex robots, aimless wars fought for nothing… We keep dreaming these things. We see them beginning now and we hate ourselves for what we’re doing.

I want to be able to say it’s not too late. I want to believe that these dreams, becoming every day more real, will scare us awake and with the shock of waking we will remember what matters to us and what kind of world we want to leave for our children, and theirs, and theirs.

But even in waking, the dark dreams linger. We feel powerless, too insignificant to effect the changes that are needed. That’s one of the dreams too, our powerlessness. But like the rest of our anxious dreams, it doesn’t have to be true. We’re not powerless.

I’ve spent much of my life working on projects for positive social change — practical, grassroots efforts in cooperation with others — and this kind of citizen-activist work is an essential part of the power we have. But I want to point here to a deeper power, a power without which all of our hard work would be aimless and short-lived, a power that each of us has right now and can put to use at any time.

Behind every act of kindness, behind every plea for justice, behind every move we make to take apart the structures of violence that undergird human societies, there is something clear and luminous. That clear luminosity is our love, our love for what matters to us. It’s what we stand for; it’s what gets us on our feet, again and again. It’s not exactly an emotion; it’s deeper than that. Ultimately it’s not even about loving specific things that matter to us — it includes that, but goes beyond. Love itself is what matters. It’s the very current of life arising in and through us, and is at the heart of whatever power we have to heal the world.

I realize this begins to sound blurry and impractical — words like “love” can do that. We’ve become accustomed to thinking that only actions that produce measureable change in the “real world” will make a difference. As someone with a practical bent myself, I can appreciate that sentiment. But the longer I live the more I sense there are other realities or “energies” at work shaping what happens. What we call “love” is one of them, perhaps the most important.

I’ve come to believe that the more we love, the more love lives in the world. My sense is that love is a kind of light that radiates from us, an invisible light with the power to penetrate and leaven the density of the world. If this is true, then we are not powerless. Even if our life situation doesn’t allow us to become actively engaged in service of some sort, we can serve. We can love.

What does that mean? What can we love? My feeling is it doesn’t much matter what we love, we just need to love what we love. We need to keep discovering what that is. For example, we could start close in, discovering the love we feel for the warmth of our bodies, or our love for our breathing, or for our capacity to see. We can love the simple things of the world, love the way morning light spreads across the breakfast table, love the feel of our feet on a path, love the company of a dear friend or the sound of children at play. Love all the people we meet today, despite their flaws. We can sit under a tree and love the roots and branches and the sky. Love the babies being born right now, love their mothers, love their fathers, love everyone who will help them throughout their lives. Love the people near and far who are suffering, who are oppressed, whose lives are hurt by other people’s selfishness and fear. Love all the kindness everywhere, the generosity and self-sacrifice. Love the miracle of loving itself. As Sufi teacher Fazal Inayat-Khan said, "You can always love more."

Imagine that every moment we love, we are enlivening the world with that love. The world gets lighter, freer, because of our loving. Imagine that love is a current that can warm the heart of things, that can dispel the density and ignorance of the dark futures we fear. Love is a living force, a power, even when it is does not seem to energize specific action.

We live in anxious times, and there is no denying the storm clouds that are gathering around us. I am not suggesting we ignore that reality. I am simply saying that the future world depends on our keeping the flame of our love burning. Even if our bad dreams come to pass and the world has to endure that long darkness, if the flame of our love is still burning it will help guide our descendants onward.

I remember a moment that occurred several years ago that touched me deeply with this lesson. I was in Gaza, interviewing a Hamas leader and others as part of my work with a project called the Nonviolent Peaceforce (www.nonviolentpeaceforce.org). Even though I was prepared for it, the condition of life for the million and a half people locked in that small piece of land shocked me. Blasted buildings, warrens of little streets strewn with trash, extreme poverty, and a pervading sense of despair. It was our bad dreams manifest.

By the time I left Gaza, driving up the coast road in a beat-up taxi, I was thoroughly depressed. And then, as I gazed out the taxi window, something up in the air caught my eye. It was a kite! Brightly colored, dancing in the shore wind. Then I saw another, and another. Children on the beach were flying kites! Suddenly that vision of kites flying up from the dismal conditions of Gaza blew through my depression. My heart took a breath. I saw that as long as the children fly kites in the free air, as long as their love for the wind and the kites and the play and each other is alive, there is hope.

Lovers find secret places inside this violent world
where they make transactions with beauty.

Reason says, Nonsense.
I have walked and measured the walls here.
There are no places like that.

Love says, There are.

– Rumi

So Close

O C T O B E R 2 0 1 7

From the Tibetan Shangpa Kagyu tradition comes this exquisite riddle:

It’s so close you can’t see it.
It’s so profound you can’t fathom it.
It’s so simple you can’t believe it.
It’s so good you can’t accept it.

What is it?

The wonderful thing about this riddle is that it’s compounded of paradox — pure positivity (so close, so profound, so simple, so good) and pure negativity (you can’t see it, you can’t fathom it, you can’t believe it, you can’t accept it). It’s saying that no matter how we look for, or what we call, this “it,” it escapes the looking and the telling.

In most texts these lines are not referred to as a riddle, but are given the whimsical title: “the four faults of awareness.” But if we think “awareness” is the answer to the riddle, we’ve missed the point. To say “awareness” is to make a conceptual conclusion, and whatever this “it” is, it’s neither bounded like a conclusion nor objective like a concept. Yes, the lines are referring to awareness, but do we really get what that is, beyond the idea that the word “awareness” represents? The beauty of the riddle is that it forces us to the edge of language and then pushes us off.

Although these four lines certainly cannot be improved, I’d like to offer a few thoughts here in the hopes they may help, in some small way, with that push.

It’s so close you can’t see it
One way to enter the mystery of this line is to imagine space. Space is close and invisible too. It’s extraordinary, isn’t it, that we can have a sense of space without being able to see or feel it? Our bodies move through space and though space doesn’t separate to let us by, we feel no resistance — it goes right through us. Whatever our riddle is referring to is that close.

The great nondual teacher Jean Klein says it’s our “nearest.” So near it has no distance to travel to get any nearer. Sufis prize “nearness to God” and mean the same thing. “I am closer to thee than thy jugular vein,” it says in the Quran. In this case the words “close” and “near” are not about location or distance — they refer to identity, being so close to it we are it.

And so it is with our awareness. Can we find anything nearer to us than awareness? It’s so close we can’t see it, just like the eye cannot see the eye. Awareness is not seeable, though it is self-evident. And though the analogy of awareness being “like space” may be helpful, unlike our sense of space, awareness cannot be measured.

It’s so profound you can’t fathom it
This line drops the bottom out. It says we simply cannot understand what this is. To say it’s “awareness” doesn’t take us very far, since no one has ever fathomed awareness. Mystics have continually pointed out that awareness is the ground of all being, and now physicists are beginning to discover the same thing. But to say this is not to fathom it — it simply provides another mysterious description. This that we’re speaking of cannot be fathomed. It is a mystery and will remain that way because it cannot be focused into an object that our minds can surround. Mysterium profundum! The Divine Unknown.

To the extent we can admit this, humility graces our being. Our drive to understand, our insistence on possessing this profundity with our intellects… relaxes. The mind surrenders, making way for something we might call devotion or gratitude or praise or love.

It’s so simple you can’t believe it
What it is is so simple that it can’t provide any kind of story or concept for us to believe in. Every word we use passes right through it. Plotinus calls it “the One,” that which is uncompounded, that has no predicate, the absolutely simple first principle of all. Buddhists call it emptiness. Sufis call it the void of pure potential.

Does its primal simplicity mean we cannot experience it? We can, but not as an experience. In order to open to this non-experience we must ourselves become simple. We must become transparent to ourselves.

In the uncertain light of single, certain truth,
Equal in living changingness to the light
In which I meet you, in which we sit at rest,
For a moment in the central of our being,
the vivid transparence that you bring is peace.

— Wallace Stevens, from “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”

Becoming transparent is not so difficult as it sounds, since our true nature is already transparent. It is the transparence of pure presence — or as some call it, presence-awareness. If we try to picture pure presence, we can’t. If we try to fathom it, we can’t. If we try to believe in it, we miss it — it’s simpler than anything we can approach through belief.

And yet it’s here, the simple pure presence of being, vividly immanent every moment in how everything appears, while at the same time transcending every appearance, every moment.

It’s so good you can’t accept it
This final line may be the most mysterious of all. We might think that if something is really good we could easily accept it, but the goodness this line points to is beyond the capacity of our acceptance. We cannot contain it — our “cup runneth over.”

We have come to believe that this reality we’re in is a tough place. We’re threatened by illness, violence and death. Everything that we have will one day be taken away. How could the truth be something so good that it both holds and supersedes our pain and grief? The stubbornness of that question is one reason why we can’t accept this that is “so good.”

As in the preceding lines, “accepting it” hits the same limits that seeing, believing, and fathoming run into. As long as we think there is something we have to do — seeing, believing, fathoming, or accepting — we will miss what this is about.

This that is so good pervades all being. It is the pure love-generosity that is so close, so profound, so simple we can’t surround it with our usual ways of knowing and feeling. As Rumi advises, “Close these eyes to open the other. Let the center brighten your sight.”

Children of Happiness

S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 7

I woke before dawn this morning and, seeing it was still dark, checked the clock. 5:10. Oh, I thought, I can sleep a little more. I curled back up under the covers and fell asleep for about ten minutes. During that time I had a dream, just one short, very clear scene: I was watching at a little distance what seemed to be a holy man talking with a few students. He had a shiny, perfectly bald head and he was smiling broadly as he spoke to them. I was struck by how the light sparkled off his bald head and the vitality he exuded as he spoke. I only heard one sentence, but the words were very clear.

He said, “Never forget, you are children of the vast beautiful happiness.”

Then I woke up, went to my study and wrote down those words.

I suppose that dream happened because I’ve been thinking a lot about happiness these days, in advance of this year’s Living Sufism teleconference on “The Alchemy of Happiness.” But that explanation only goes so far. When a dream has that kind of clarity for me, which is rare, and when I can hear the words spoken in it with precision, I pay attention.

What did the holy man mean by “the vast beautiful happiness?” In what cosmos is that the reality? The picture of the universe given to us by science shows no evidence of a vast beautiful happiness. If anything, the universe is described as a vast cold vacuum with little spheres of nuclear fusion scattered here and there, stalked by black holes, everything speeding away from itself until, they think, no stars will be seen and one by one they will be snuffed out.

Scientific views of the universe cannot avoid being limited by the fact that they are derived from measurement and analysis. Scientists are loyal to empiricism, and bless them for that! But if we are to discover a more profound “picture” of the cosmos, we need to use a different talent than measurement and analysis. The philosopher Henri Bergson suggests that this talent is intuition, which he describes as a simple and invisible experience of sympathy “by which one is transported into the interior of an object in order to coincide with what is unique and consequently inexpressible within it.”

So to intuit the nature of the cosmos we must “coincide” with that nature. Since fundamentally we cannot help but be coincident with the universe, being transported into its interior would seem not just possible, but unavoidable. Yet that is not our experience. What gets in our way is our mental habit of objectifying what we perceive. Once we relax that tendency we can be “transported into” the nature or essence of all things.

The vast beautiful happiness that is the “interior” of the universe is not something that anyone can convince us of. Its realization must come first-hand. This is where the holy man’s message that we are its children gives us some help. He’s saying that we are the intimate expression of the vast beautiful happiness — from this happiness our own presence has blossomed. Now we know where to look. To intuit the universal happiness we need simply to open inwardly to what we are before any definition is applied. To the extent we can rest there, in ever-opening openness, the beautiful happiness becomes evident, without any evidence.

This is what the Tibetan hermit Shabkar Lama was pointing to when he said, “When I remain in this state which is like a transparent, empty sky, I experience joy beyond words, thought, or expression.”

Back when I was a young seeker I remember being puzzled when I read these three words of Inayat Khan: “God is happy.” That sentence struck me as almost frivolous. Now I know what he meant. It’s not the happiness we feel when things are going well, although that too is a small ray of it, a “child” of the parent happiness. The vast beautiful happiness is the great alleluia of the whole thing, empty and radiant all at once.

For countless years, mystics have tried to reveal the great vast happiness with their words, knowing it was impossible, but I imagine at least it made them happy to try. Their trying has given us some hints, some reminders (“Never forget!” as our holy man said), a threshold of faith upon which our intuition can stand and swing open the door.

Here, to conclude, is a contemporary example of this kind of mystic reminder — Jack Kerouac’s generous attempt to describe his experience of the vast beautiful happiness:

It was the womb itself, aloneness, alaya vijnana
the universal store, the Great Free Treasure, the
Great Victory, infinite completion, the joyful
mysterious essence of Arrangement. It seemed
like one smiling smile, one adorable adoration,
one gracious and adorable charity, everlasting
safety, refreshing afternoon…

Morning Light: Five Scenes

A U G U S T 2 0 1 7

Upstate New York, USA
All night there have been cricket sounds in the field. Now they stop. A stillness touches everything, like when a conductor raises his baton and the orchestra goes silent. Dawn begins, pale blue, coral, faint gold. The first solitary birdsong sails up, and then others from here and there join as the last stars vanish. A great expectancy fills the air. Finally, suddenly, a brilliance pierces the edge of the hill, and without hurry the sun lifts above it. Down at the edge of the field where blackberries make a tangle of stems and thorns, a young rabbit sits quietly, only her nose twitching as she breathes in the smells of the morning. She watches as the faraway sun enters a dewdrop on a blade of grass. Inside her body her little heart beats unnoticed.

Valparaíso, Chile
In the hospital the old man lies in his bed, his head turned toward the window. His breathing is shallow. He can see the top branches of a tree and the pale blue of the dawn sky beyond them. He waits quietly, without waiting for anything. Now the first piece of sunlight touches the window frame. He watches as it slowly stretches across the wall. The man’s disappointment with how things have turned out drifts away. He feels himself becoming lighter, buoyant, as if he is being held by something greater than gravity.

Hill Tribe village, Thailand
The twelve year-old girl lifts the bucket slowly from behind the sack of grain so it doesn’t wake anyone. Her little body knows how to move through the crowded space of the hut without disturbing her sleeping family, stepping carefully between the different sounds of their breathing. Once outside and free of the porch and its two steps, she moves lightly down the path, swinging the bucket as if it was her little brother’s hand. Then at the creek she bends to fill it and, looking up, sees the first white spark of sunlight through the trees, watching her.

Near Hyderabad, India
In the gray light before sunrise the young man waits with the other laborers on the platform as the heavy train to Hyderabad hisses into the station and comes to a stop. Like every morning, the train is already full, men and women leaning out from the windows and doors, holding on. He climbs up the rungs at the back of a car and sits on the roof with a dozen others. The train lurches and pulls itself out of the station. This is the part of the day he likes the best, nothing to carry, the wind on his face, watching the mist on the paddies turn golden as the first sunlight spreads down the valley. The train clatters along, carrying his quiet eyes to a day of work.

Avignon, France
The woman wakes before he does, the dawn light pale on the ceiling. She feels happy without knowing that’s what she's feeling. She turns on her side and from under the sheets comes the faint smell of their lovemaking still on her skin. She lies still, watching how the first beam of sunlight from the window makes mountain ranges and valleys on the rumpled sheets. She imagines herself finding her way among them, like a pilgrim.

A Prayer in the Militant Mosque

J U L Y 2 0 1 7

Note: Ten years ago this month, July, 2007, there was a ferocious battle at the Red Mosque in Islamabad, Pakistan. Two and a half years later I gave a talk in Islamabad at a conference on Sufism and Peace. The following is an edited version of an essay I wrote from there.

The dawn call to prayer wakes me. It is still dark in Islamabad. Half dreaming I imagine the notes of the praying man’s song rise up through the neighborhood like a line of thin silver leaves, finding their way along the streets, brushing against closed doors, against windows, sliding through cracks into rooms, touching the skin of sleeping people like me, waking us if we are ready. Hayya 'ala-salat! – Come to pray!

While I am not formally a Muslim, I am not formally anything — and this gives me the chance to join praying people wherever they are. I get out of bed, dress, and leave the hotel into the still dark city. The sleepy guards at the gate with their submachine guns straighten up and nod to me as I go out.

There are no cars. An old turbaned street sweeper moves bits of paper along the gutter with his twig broom.

The Lal Masjid – the Red Mosque - is surrounded by a fence topped with razor wire, but the gate is wide open. I leave my shoes at the door.

An entry area opens onto a large, dimly lit prayer hall planted with columns; a few small lights break the shadows. Prayers are about to start. I join the line of about 50 men, shoulder to shoulder, waiting. One of the parts I like best about Muslim prayers is this line in which everyone is accepted equally — although I am obviously not Pakistani and look very different from everyone else, it doesn’t seem to matter. I also love when we touch our foreheads to the ground — the thought-filled heads of us men grounded on the common earth like electrical wires, for this moment subdued.

After prayers half the men leave. Those who remain sit in a corner listening to a lesson from a quiet-spoken teacher standing amidst them, or in the shadows praying by themselves, wrapped in their shawls like mounds of sand. The few lights are turned off and the hall becomes part of the dawn, the central dome brushed with blue-grey light. The soft sound of the teacher’s voice mingles with the voices of the solitary men reciting their prayers. The place feels like one peaceful heart waking in the dawn.

The Battle
I sit listening. I imagine the gunshots, the whiz of bullets glancing off these columns, the shouts, death cries and weeping that filled this mosque 2 ½ years ago when the Pakistan army attacked the several thousand madrassa students and heavily armed militants who had barricaded themselves here.

The Red Mosque and its large compound had long been used by Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI, as a station for organizing and training militants who were sent to Afghanistan to battle the Soviets, or to fight in Kashmir. The ISI continued to support this mosque and other Islamist training centers like it after the 9/11 attacks — on the one hand seeking to align themselves with the Taliban so they would have leverage against the increasing influence of India in Afghanistan, and on the other hand so they could continue receiving American military aid to counter the Taliban/al-Qaeda presence in their own country.

But by 2007 this strategy came back to bite them. The Red Mosque had become the center of Islamist militancy against the Pakistan state itself in the very heart of the capital. The ISI could no longer control what went on here, and ruefully could have said with Macbeth:

…that we but teach
Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return
To plague the inventor.

In July, 2007, the mullahs and talibs (militant students) in the mosque threatened civil war if the Pakistan government did not accept Sharia law. The government, now eager to regain credibility in the eyes of the international community, reacted brutally. After the Pakistan army’s first assault on the mosque, many talibs escaped. Those who remained pledged to become martyrs. The final battle lasted three days and hundreds were killed.

The fall of the Red Mosque was a turning point for Pakistan. Extremists across Pakistan banded together, determined to destroy the government and establish an Islamic state. The terrorist attacks that resulted provoked ever more violent responses from the Pakistan and U.S. military, fueling an increasingly militant backlash from the population caught in the crossfire.

This particular sequence of events — a militant provocation is met with a brutal reaction from the state, which in turn causes more people to become militant, which leads to further polarization and destabilization — has been described as the basic Islamist terrorist strategy, and it is working.

The violent reactions of state powers to terrorist violence have played into the hands of the terrorists. Their long-term objective is to exhaust the will and resources of the state, creating opportunities for new Islamist regimes on local and ultimately national levels.

The Prayer
As I sit in the dawn light of the mosque, painfully aware of this dark tragedy, I try to pray — but everything that comes to my mind feels trite. What words could be adequate to address the suffering that took place here, and that continues around the world?

So I stop trying to pray and just sit still.

And then slowly, out of the stillness, I begin to sense something. What is it? Tenderness? Intimacy? Whatever it is, it is not complicated at all. It is utterly simple and somehow familiar in the same way my sense of being is familiar.

It feels to me somehow like the very heart of prayer — but prayer without any words, without even the sense of communication from the human world to a divine one. I am not making this happen — it is here already — a simple and unmistakable sense of connection, an intimacy with everything all at once.

In this intimacy there is no sense of judgment about good or bad, right or wrong, no distance between things. Nothing is excluded — not the wounded and dying talibs in this mosque, or the mullahs trying to be Allah’s heroes, or the frightened citizens in the locked-down city, or the politicians in their violent reactions, or people around the world anxious for their lives. Nothing is excluded.

It is as if a vast compassionate silence pervades our global tragedy, what Muslims call the Merciful, the Compassionate — ir rahman ir rahim — deep in the rock of this mosque, deep in the air between us — an unspeakable compassion holding us all.

As I leave the mosque I hear my practical self ask: So? What good is it? What good is sensing this numinous compassion when the world is so full of hatred and violence? Don’t we need pragmatic policies that will liberate us from fear and the desire for dominance that poisons human history?

Yes, of course we do. But there is another pragmatism, and it feels to me that to realize and appreciate in this place the compassion and intimacy that connects everything is why I have come halfway around the world — why, unknown to myself, I got out of bed in the dark this morning to come here. For a few moments at least, the militancy and self-righteous fundamentalism of this place became transparent, and I became transparent with it — everything released its position — and our common intimacy was revealed.

It may be that for us to touch this prayer of our common heart, even briefly, is where we need to return, where we need to begin again, where we might finally find a compassionate path to a world of peace.

One Love

J U N E 2 0 1 7

I once asked my mother when she was washing dishes at the sink, “Mommy, who do you love more, Daddy or us kids?”

She paused in her washing and said, “Ducky, love doesn’t come in quantities. It just touches us in different ways.”

It’s taken a long time but now I know what she meant. She was right — you can’t have more or less of love. For example, it’s not like time — you can have a lot of time, or you can run out of it. Love isn’t like that. Love is more like the present moment, like now. You can’t have more now or less now, can you? Right now?

Or perhaps we could say it’s like what is looking out of our eyes. Can we have more or less of that? What is it that is looking, or listening to the sounds around us? Did the Buddha have more of that than we do? What is it? Does whatever it is come in quantities?

My son left a phone message last night that I just picked up. He ended by saying, “Sending you lots of love.” Lots. A friend of mine always concludes his emails with the salutation, “Big love.” We want to tell each other we really mean it, so we turn to words that emphasize scale. How dear we are! And what else can we do? We’re trying to express something that escapes definition.

My sense is that love is like an invisible light that continuously ignites our being and all being everywhere. Love is the very radiance of each moment’s becoming — it’s that generous. That may sound abstract, but it’s actually so intimate and immediate we don’t know we know it, like the story of the little fish who doesn’t know what the ocean is.

Love is how and why emptiness bursts forth as form, how clear presence shows up as all these myriad presences. It’s the impulse of universal becoming, the élan vital, what the Tibetans call the sambhogakaya, the clear, luminous presence that gifts all manifestation — your existence, my existence, the earth spinning, all of it given fresh every instant.

When we feel love for someone or something it’s as if a channel opens in our heart to this great love that’s at the beginning of everything. At its source it’s unconditional. Once we start layering conditions on it, well, then the channel narrows into likes and dislikes. This is why my teacher, Murshid Fazal Inayat-Khan, said, “You can always love more.” Not more in quantity but in embrace. When our heart opens in love it doesn’t stop with a single love object — wherever we turn we see with the eyes of love.

To see with the eyes of love doesn’t mean that we are blind to the meanness and violence of the world. The infinite love I’m speaking of, the love beyond all ideas of quantity, is not blind. It sees all, knows all, embraces all. This is not something that’s easily understood with our normal way of perceiving the world, and it’s certainly beyond the scope of these words. Perhaps all we might appreciate here is how our recognition of the world’s injustice, ignorance, and brutality functions for us as a teacher — it shows us what matters, what we care about, what is worth saving.

We listen to the news and don’t approve.
Things are worse than we thought.
Though that may be, may we never forget
the love our pain is faithful to.

My mother’s instruction to me about love concluded with the words: It just touches us in different ways. Of course, this is obvious, but it may help us to see how love can appear in so many guises and still be one. It’s like water — here it’s a raindrop, here an ocean, here a tear, here it flows in the veins of a bird in flight, here it makes possible each movement of our bodies. One love!

Of all the guidance I have received in my life, the guidance of love is the most reliable. It’s not always easy to follow — self-pity, disappointment, and outrage can obscure love’s path — but when the dust clears, love is what remains. To the extent we can open ourselves to the one love, the love without quantity, our lives become beautiful and of benefit, part of the great gift of now.

The Practice of Living Presence

M A Y 2 0 1 7

A Zen master once said to his students:

In order to have warm human relations, we must pay attention to what is. In other words, we must touch the source of existence. Only then can we take a deep breath; only then can we feel relief. Under all circumstances, we must be rooted in the source of existence.

What does it mean to be rooted in the source of existence? What is this source and how can we know it?

In my experience, being rooted in the source of existence does not involve the thought-mind or require concentration. What is required is more like an intuitive openness, perhaps comparable to our peripheral vision or our experience of spatial dimensions. It’s a subtle capacity we have, to be able to open ourselves intuitively like this. For me it has a kinesthetic feel to it, as if the back of my head has disappeared, or the space inside my chest has no boundary.

So to benefit from what the Zen master said — under all circumstances, we must be rooted in the source of existence — we will need to allow our intuitive capacity to spread its wings, and not just try to understand conceptually what he’s saying.

The source of existence is immanently present, and it is alive.

Everything we see and feel, including the intimate and ever-changing feelings of our body and the thoughts we think, is inseparable from the source of existence. It is not that there is a source over here making existence over there, or that a source in the past made existence happen now. Existence and its source are immediate; they are happening all at once, and that happening is alive. I’m not referring to carbon-based life here, but to the immanence and impulse and creative becoming-ness that we experience moment to moment as the dynamic of reality.

Existence as we know it is continually changing and moving. It is alive with itself. Quarks appear out of nowhere, light blossoms from stars, our eyes move across the page, cars on the street roll by — everything is flowing forth magically, becoming what has never been before.

To the extent that we can appreciate this aliveness we root ourselves in the source of existence. Again, this is not an intellectual appreciation but an intuitive openness to how everything we perceive shares this blessed aliveness in this moment.

Simultaneous with aliveness and its ever-changing nature, is a numinous, ineffable stillness I call presence (it also has many other names.) Presence is the silent host of all that appears. It is what allows aliveness to flow forth. One way to intuit what I mean by presence is through the analogy of space. Space allows things to show up. If there were no space there would be no possibility for chair, table, or our bodies to appear as they do. Presence is like that, but is even more mysterious since it’s not dimensional in the way we imagine space to be, and yet it is everywhere.

Presence is silence itself, perfectly clear, open, and contentless. It may be difficult for us to understand how these apparent opposites — aliveness and stillness, sound and silence, co-arise as the source of existence, but they do. It’s like what happens when we listen. Our listening is silent, and that silence allows us to hear sounds. In the same way, our most intimate awareness is silent, pure, and clear, and that silent clarity allows existence to appear.

How marvelous, the presence of everything that we perceive, that is alive and changing, is simultaneously still, silent, and unchanging! Inayat Khan speaks of this primordial silence: “…our eyes cannot see it and our ears cannot hear it and our mind cannot perceive it because it is beyond mind, thought, and comprehension.” In this same passage he describes beautifully how we awaken to the silent quality at the source of existence:

This all-pervading, unbroken, inseparable, unlimited, ever-present, omnipotent silence unites with our silence like the meeting of flames.

The Great Silent Presence and our own silent presence meet, and though they were never separate, experiencing their meeting is what roots us in the source of existence.

The Zen master (Katagiri Roshi) begins his instruction with the words, “Under all circumstances” — Under all circumstances, we must be rooted in the source of existence. That’s a tall order. Again and again circumstances find us oblivious to the source of existence, caught up in odd assumptions about what is real and what matters. We need help here. We need to discover ways that we can easily remind ourselves of the living presence that is the source of existence.

To that end, below is an outline of a simple practice that might be helpful. In this version I use breathing as the sensory focal point; you can experiment with other sensations once you get comfortable with the practice. Then you can do it while walking down the street, or eating a meal, or in the midst of a conversation. Having done something like this practice for a few years, I‘ve found that over time it’s become less step-by-step as in this outline, and more fluid and creative. Whereas the practice here takes several minutes, eventually you may find it happens in a few seconds and becomes the kind of effortless kinesthetic movement I mentioned earlier. Good luck!

The Practice of Living Presence

1. Sit quietly. Come to rest; body and mind relaxed and alert.

2. Bring your attention to your breath. Breathe naturally.

3. With your attention on the living, changing nature of your breath, simultaneously open your awareness to the presence in which your breath rises and falls.

4. Effortlessly allow your awareness of presence to open to the boundless presence in which your surroundings appear, and in which your body and its sensations, thoughts, and feelings appear.

5. Notice that everything that appears moves, everything that arises comes and goes, while presence doesn’t. Recognizing movement in stillness, sound in silence, living presence: this is the key point.

Mystic Nonsense

A P R I L 2 0 1 7

How strange it is we have forgotten where we came from and what we are. Immigrants from a place of light, we take our turns here building nests and finding food and soon we forget the Home we started from. This world makes us fear that place. We think there’s nothing there, but we needn’t worry. That place and this place are the same place, though they’re not a place.

sunrise oceanThere is no place where the river’s current is, no place where sunlight collects. There is only this Pouring Forth, and there is nothing from which, or into which, it pours.

It’s not easy to talk about this, since it doesn’t seem to make any sense. But it’s helpful to have a feel for it because that feel can relax whatever fear we may have about dying, or living for that matter. After all, if a drop of water cried out it was afraid to flow over a rock, or rise up into a cloud, would that help anything?

The colors of this world are the colors of heaven, just from the inside out. Here we see the colors, there we are them. Here we play in God’s Beauty, there we are that Beauty. Since here and there are fictions, everything’s all right already. Free Medicine! Purifying, revivifying, sanctifying, we are the Holy Light we bathe in, we are the Good News we seek.

Pouring forth, neither you nor I have a moment to waste. Facing the firing squad we smile and forgive. Even grief is a blessing. A solitary soldier comes to mop our blood and sees his reflection crying.

If a thousand Buddhas hovered in the air, you wouldn’t see anything. All the dark oceans are empty light. After all, clear space doesn’t part around us when we walk together, arm in arm by the river, confessing our love. But who are you, my love, who? Even you don’t know.

The fountain flings its water-drops all night long, and inside each one, stars are twinkling. No one sees them. In the morning, ducks swim under, taking a shower.

To follow the way that this doesn’t make sense leads beyond sense-making to Presence-glimpsing, though without imagining a thing that is present. Our Enormous Home is not a place, though every place is Home. God is not a thing, though everything is God. God does not exist because God is not something already made. God is This. Like God, we too do not exist and are not something already made.

Because we imagine that we are something that does exist, we imagine we can die. We can’t. That which does not exist cannot die. What we call God and what we call us is divine Delight, and where does Delight exist? No place. Just This!

Does that make sense?

The Face that Lights the Candle

M A R C H 2 0 1 7

Generous is a word that is almost big enough to describe reality. After all, what could be more generous than this that allows everything to be everything? The hypothetical start of things — the Big Bang — that primal flaring forth was nothing if not Pure Generosity, no holding back — Here! A universe for you!

The nature of our sun is the same: its light given freely year after year, for billions of them! We live by the generosity of its light. Every glass of milk, every apple, every cup of coffee is given by its light, and we appear by the grace of that giving.

And what of this ever-unfurling spontaneous moment, how might we describe it but Purely Generous? Or this awareness that is the root of our being? We take our awareness for granted, we take the spontaneity of this moment for granted, and indeed they are just that: granted, given without our needing to ask.

This Vast Generosity we live within is free, unselfish, generative, unconditional — blessing us and everything with becoming. Its generosity is love itself. So if we need some guidance about how to live, this might be a good place to start — to contemplate the Ocean of Generosity we live in, and how every moment it makes its offering. There’s no need to go out of our way to do this — every given breath reminds us!

You might say this view of an Ultimate Generosity as a guide for living is overly simple, and it is. There is more to the story —

The Pure Generosity of transparent light is met by opaque matter. Light goes every which way yet doesn’t bump into itself. But matter, that other form of light, offers resistance. It absorbs and reflects. It waits in a form, and when it can sustain that form no longer it shape-shifts into another form. In each form it seeks to remain as long as possible. So now we have, in the midst of Universal Generosity: boundaries, self-definition, self-maintenance — that which does not to give itself away like sunlight, but seeks instead to maintain itself as itself.

Our lives are balanced right there — part of the Great Give-Away and yet charged to be these unique forms, for a time. Now the question of generosity as an ethic to live by has more depth. If you continually give away all the food on your plate, you’ll starve. If you never give, you’ll wither alone. How then shall we keep our balance between generosity and self-interest?

We see this question being played out in the politics of our time: for example, the desire to welcome refugees and the fear they will threaten us or weaken our identity. We see it in our personal relationships, when by always putting others’ wishes before our own we risk losing our sovereignty. My sense of this question — finding the balance between generosity and self-maintenance — is that in stating the question we’ve done most of the work. The act of holding the question reveals its answer. We find balance the way we do when we walk, by always being off-balance and then correcting. It’s a good example of how non-duality shows up through duality: left foot, right foot, giving, keeping, so the flowing flows without getting stuck at either pole.

But there’s something else here, something this little contemplation on generosity and sovereignty might faintly point to. These words — generosity and sovereignty — are stubbornly spatial: sovereignty or self-maintenance is a concept that denotes a special place, a location where “I” am sovereign. In a parallel way, the word generosity denotes a transaction from “here” to “there,” from giver to receiver. We conceive both of these ideas spatially. But that conception leaves us in a dualistic and fractional view of how things actually happen.

There’s a beautiful phrase from one of Rumi’s poems: “the face that lights the candle.” It makes us stop. What? How could this be? Candles light faces, not the other way around. But we’re invited here to escape the linear logic of our language, just for a moment, and allow the generosity of the light and the uniqueness of the face to mutually arise, without one causing the other.

Mutually arise? How?

The apple ripening in the sunlight allows the sunlight to appear, to be sunlight. Without the apple, or any “thing” of matter, the sunlight would not be revealed. It would just go on and on, and never become visible. At the same time, as we know, the sun gives birth to the apple. No sun, no apple.

And so it is with our sovereignty: our being this unique being is made possible by our generous reciprocity with All Being. No generous reciprocity, no unique being. Likewise the Great Generosity itself makes possible what is sovereign, what is unique.

The candle lights the face, and the face lights the candle.

Neighborliness

F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 7

I recently became a member of a fledgling group called the “Muslim-Jewish Alliance of Boulder County.” Its purpose is to “take prayerful action to protect the civil liberties and security of all religious and other minorities” and to develop strategies “to address anti-Muslim bigotry and anti-Semitism wherever it occurs.”

Amidst the unease precipitated by the election of Donald Trump and the increase in hate crimes and bullying, groups like this are forming throughout the country to protect minorities and progressive ideals and causes.

To me, this Alliance is a beautiful sign of neighborliness. Muslims and Jews have been at each other’s throats in Israel-Palestine for decades, yet in this little city in Colorado they are coming together to protect one another. At the Alliance meetings imams and rabbis stand up and pray in Arabic, Hebrew, and English. One imam recited this verse from the Quran:

Oh people, we have created you from a male and a female, and made you families and nations that you may know each other. (49:13)

He emphasized the teaching that, though we have different beliefs, we have the same source and we are here to know each other and keep each other safe. Then a rabbi told the well-known story of Rabbi Hillel who was asked, some 2,000 years ago, to teach the entire Torah while standing on one foot. The good rabbi stood on one foot and pronounced:

“What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole of the Torah. The rest is commentary.”

Later in the meeting, someone quoted my late friend Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi:

The only way we’re going to get it together is… together!

There’s an insightful politics emerging here in America in response to the fearful policies of Trumpism: on the one hand it is a movement that champions resistance, but on the other hand it recognizes that resistance must be accompanied by visions of a better life. The work of this Alliance is, yes, to resist bigotry, but it quickly and naturally blossoms into communion and neighborliness — people meeting each other, having a good time together, learning about each other, caring for each other — the heart of a better life.

At the close of one of the Alliance’s meetings I was asked to offer a prayer, though I’m not formally a Muslim or a Jew. I said something like this:

Let us pray. Let us pray that our prayers illuminate the dark corners of the world and the places where fear hurts. May we know that the origin of the light in our hearts is divine. This intimate light in our hearts that we can feel right now is God’s light, boundless in its mercy and love. May this knowing give us courage, knowing the origin of our love, and may we be confident in its strength in the days that will come, days of danger and days of brotherhood and sisterhood. May our confidence and the knowledge of our love’s origin guide us and assure us, especially in those moments when we feel threatened or afraid.

Muslims and Jews, and indeed people of all faiths, are not strangers to suffering. We know the hard path love asks. Let us take that path, not only when we hold hands with one another but when people whose hearts are closed from hurts they too have suffered, when they try to hurt and demean us, let us take then the hard path of love: standing firm for what matters while reaching out with forgiveness and wisdom to those arrayed against us. Let that be how we make our offering to the healing of the world.

A Little Fable for New Year's Day

J A N U A R Y 2 0 1 7

There’s dread in the air as we journey into this New Year, a feeling that we’ve somehow taken a wrong turn and we can’t go back. We tell disturbing rumors to each other about the country we’re approaching. We talk about the way people there treat each other, and the bad smell of their cities. We can’t go back, we can’t turn around. In the back seat the children are worried, hearing us talk. They’re afraid something bad is going to happen.

rainbowWe wake up. It’s New Year’s Day. It was just a dream. The day is bright as yesterday and everything seems okay. But the dream lingers in our conversations. Was it an omen, a sign of what’s coming?

Someone opens a book and reads to us.

“Humans,” it says, “are capable of just about anything, from the worst abominations to the most beautiful love. They delight in their uniqueness, but it makes them headstrong. They think they own the place. And even then they want more of everything. They take from each other and don’t give back. They fight each other for more, they even kill each other. It’s a big problem.”

Someone interrupts. “Does it say anything about hope? Is there any hope for us?”

“Let’s see,” the reader says. She skips ahead. “Maybe here, this might be good…”

She reads, “Love is the active principle of evolution — love in the sense of absolute openness for each and every thing. Love is the Life of God, this great, ungraspable energy of the One that pervades all creation and acts as the driving force. It reveals itself in the allurement that is gravity. It reveals itself in the readiness of an atom to bind itself with another atom in the form of a molecule, and in the readiness of molecules to jointly create a cell, and in the readiness of cells to become a greater organism. This readiness for self-transcendence appears throughout the cosmos. It is the driving force of life and evolution. Love. Only those who can maintain their identity while simultaneously transcending themselves in unity with others have a chance of survival in the process of evolution.” [1]

The reader stops. “Does that help?” she asks.

We look at each other. We see something we hadn’t seen before. The dread we felt is less now. We know the selfishness and fear of our species surrounds us and infects even our own hearts, but now we feel something else, something strong, steady, and beautiful. We know this feeling.

It is a readiness. We take each other’s hands. The children come out to join us.

Someone starts singing this song, and we all join in —

Step by step the longest march, can be won, can be won.
Many stones do form an arch, singly none, singly none.
And by union what we will, shall be accomplished still,
Drops of water turn the mill, singly none, singly none.

[1] Adapted from the writings of Willigis Jager.

2017 - 2018

Notes from the Open Path

Notes from the Open Path - 2018

Notes from the Open Path - 2017

Stephen Hawking Goes to Heaven