Barry Garden Path

Knowing is not the same as feeling. Being routinely aware of that has made a wonderful difference in how I live. I can know a tree and all its traits. I can know that it is rooted in front of me. But feeling its presence is a dramatically different way of experiencing the tree.

The same is true of people. I can know that they are walking toward me, I can see their appearance, I can know a lot about their identity and history. But to feel their presence is another kind of awareness. I can look around the circle of people gathered in my Sangha and I can see them sitting quietly. I can even be aware of them in a sensory and knowing way. But it is such a deeper exerience to feel their presence.

Being able to feel the presence of someone or something is how I feel deeply connected with them. Feeling the presence of anything allows me to experience union with them. My awareness of my presence is joined with the awareness of their presence, and it occurs on a feeling level, not just a knowing level. In that instant of feeling, I am connected with them in an experience of oneness.

Many times my mind is distracting from feeling. Mind can easily block and be an obstacle to wonder. Wonder for me is in the realm of feeling. Knowing can sometimes keep me from feeling the presence of someone or something. My thoughts can distract my awareness and restrict how I can be open to feeling. Thoughts can even result in revulsion or avoidance.

Knowing can also be a doorway to feeling when knowing takes away the limits of time. Mind can take away the constraint of time and see an individual not just as they are now but as they have been many years from now. Stripping away the constraint of time allows me to see someone in their timeless entirety, in the timeless youth they continue to carry within them.

I have been learning how to change my way of being aware. I am learning how to enter the realm of formless perception. I have learned how to let go of the mind constraints I have such a natural tendency to put on peope and things. Knowing is such a limiting way of experiencing the world, and relying on what I feel has dismissed much of the tension I have felt about the people and things around me.

It is almost like I have discovered another sense by relying on what I feel, not so much on what I know.

There is no easy way to describe what connection means to me. Perhaps it is enough to say that I know what I experience, but then it gets difficult to find words that describe that experience.

I know that when I was walking in the small woods surrounding my cabin, I felt a deep connection with the trees and the ground. The memory of that experience is fresh in my awareness today. I remember what it meant to stand on my front small deck and feel the presence of trees in front of me. I also remember the wet shoreline by the lake, feeling its wetness even though I never bent over to touch it.

I know what it feels like each morning to stand before a burning canadle and swirling incense. The sound of my singing bowl travels all through my body and I can feel it all around me. I move my body in familiar patterned gestures, and the experience fills my entire skin. I often ignore my sensations and feel a connection with the whole universe, even though I am sitting still on my bed. It helps when I am not impeded by clothing and my body is free to reach out to feel where I am and what is happening.

I know what it feels like to be connected with a friend when they walk towards me or sit at my table. I feel the connection in every hug, no matter who they are. I look around the circle of friends who come together in my Sangha. I feel connected to each of them, but in different and specific ways.

None of this experience of connection has happened in a flash. It has not happened without clearing my mind through repeated acts of concentration. My sense of touch plays a frequent role in my experience of connection. I touch trees, I touch my desk, I touch friends. Sometimes I let go of my senses and that allows me to exprience what it means to be connected to all that I cannot see or touch.

To anyone who might want to know what I mean by connection, there is no easy answer. I only can offer that they enter into my experience. I offer that they use their senses to initially be connected and then let go of that sensation to be deeply connected. Being connected in this way gets easier with practice. With practice, the experience of connection comes easier. For me, the experience of connection lingers and stays me the more I let it take hold of me.

It is something of a paradox. The more I let go, the deeper I experience connection.

I do not think there is a reliabe recipe for life, for living, for loving. With that in mind I step into each day, aware that there is no set path to follow. There is only the path that I can see beneath me and that I left behind. I am not following a path, I am forming my path with every decision and every action I take.

I have let go and am falling into an awareness that there is no recipe to life and to how to love. This is the wisdom of having lived and stumbled through many decades. I have for times allowed myself to follow custom and the recipe that my culture has offered me as a guide. I have been a follower of the patterns of religion and found that the reliable recipe was inside me and not in what I was taught or told.

Some recipes offered by my culture have served as loose predictions of consequences. I have been given a map that showed where my decisions and actions might lead. But my rewarding experiences of life have arisen when I strayed from the directions handed to me. The consequences have not always been positive, but I have learned how to step into the moment without the clutter of should and shouldn’t. I have actually gotten a much more clear view of the past, present and future when I have ignored what I have been told and instead relied on my own awareness.

I am aware that I have little asssurance of the outcome if I ignore the many recipes offered to me. My life has no predicable outcome, my actions do not lead to guaranteed results. But I know that the more I keep an open mind and open heart, the more I am going to enjoy my daily journey. I think I will enjoy the outcomes no matter how much I ignore recipes. There is joy for me when I wander off the path, at least for awhile. I feel more agile.

I may plan and structure my days, but I allow myself to wander inside and outside those structures and plans.

Rigidity has typically been a part of my life, but not always a welcome part. The rigors and structure of rigidity have been a source of stability, predictably and comfort. For me, rigidity has also been a barrier to creativity, contemplation and community. Now I am realizing more than ever how rigidity blocks my in-depth relationship with the world . I am now seeing clearly how religious rigidity in particular has been a problem for me. Religious rigidity in some of my sangha members is now rising as a threat I am increasingly aware of. And I resist.

That I am resisting religious rigidity is nothing new to me. It has been part of the dynamic that resulted in my leaving the community of Franciscans that I had been part of for a dozen years. I attempted to break away from the rigidity of the monastic life and the catholic church, but it has been a gradual process. Only recently have I learned what it feels like to let go and enter a realm of unstructured perception.

My life obviously has a lot of structure in it, but I am embracing the unstructured more and more. Someone described my garden as “controlled chaos” and that description is becoming a characteristic of my life and my thinking. I am making strides in abandoning rigidity. I am becoming more comfortable with the formless and unplanned realm of existence. I am growing more resistant and uncomfortable when I am surrounded by rigid behavior, especially any signs of rigid religiosity. I have learned to recognize it, almost instinctively.

Like many others, I have taken comfort in rigidity. It has given me a feeling of security and helped me to feel in control. I now am aware that this is due in part because I am white and see myself as white. Rigidity is a huge part of white behavior. White people have traditionally taken comfot in religous culture that offered rigid, predictable, controlling structure. For me, that seems like the tyranny of being white. This religious tyranny creeps into my sangha, and I want nothing of it.

A highly organized and predictable structure is not what I want. Nor is it something many young people are looking for today. Certainly I want structure in my life. I welcome control of the unformed chaos. But I want plenty of room to welcome the chaos. I want the rigidity to be only what is absolutely needed. I want to experience the darkness of each endless fall. I want to learn to let go in how I think, how I feel and how I behave. I want rigidity to be by my side but not in front of me.

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This is a new test to see if my blog is publishing

For me, my sangha is a gathering of like minded people who care for one another . There are other reasons for coming together, but I think the main purpose for the gathering is to dwell in one anothers presence. We come together primarily to bear one another’s burdens and share one another’s joy. By sharing individual experiences we engage in a common experience.

I realize that some come to the gathering for learning about buddhism. Some come for devotion, to go through the motions taught in retreats or books. These doctrines and devotions have value, but for me they are secondary. They can be part of a gathering, but my main purpose is to experience the presence of all those who show up.

Watching from a distance on zoom has some benefit for those who watch. I see little benefit for those gathered in the circle. For me to experience the presence of the members of the sangha, I want to be able to see, touch and hear them. This means that we need to be in the same room. Seeing people on a screen or hearing their transmitted voices is not much of an experience for me.

My main purpose for gathering with the members of my sangha is to share our deep awareness of one another and experience one anothers presence.

For me, dogma and devotion are aspects of the same thing. In my world, I attempt to avoid both. Each interferes with concentration, each interrupts an attitude of mindfulness . Concentration and mindfulness are best experienced when there is no content, no form to perceive, no shape to fill my mind. Dogma and devotion provide content, form and shaped perception.

Dogma is all about shaping my thinking . It tells me how to think and how to act. A teaching is laden with the burden of content and form. When a teaching becomes a go to reference, it takes on the role of dogma. Anything that offers me assurance of truth is dogmatic. I am never sure. I try to keep a shapeless mind that allows all perceptions to pass through without leaving a lasting inprint.

I do not want my mind to be shaped by dogma. I have never experienced a dogma that was not a reflection of someone else’s imagination. I want my mind to be shaped by my own experience, not someone else’s. I think that even the most fundamental notions of “truth” are shaped by the perceptions of others, not my own. They do not represent my own experience.

Devotions include any actions that are done for their own sakes. Any habitual action can become a devotion. Actions that are devotional can be body movements, bowing, chanting, pouring of water, burning of sage or incense, etc. When done without an internal movement of mindfulness, actions can become nothing more than devotional. The same actions taken with an internal experience of concentration and mindfulness can be a deep spiritual practice.

Without concentration and mindfulness, repeated actions of devotion can lose their meaning and significance. Done out of habit or repetition, the actions become devotional, done for their own sake. They become a shell of experience and not the actual experience itself.

Dogma and devotion have been part of my life in the past. Now, I do not want to make them part of my daily experience. I have routine actions and expressions that I do and say, but I often stop and make sure they are an expression of an internal disposition of awareness.

I want what I do and say to be more than simple actions and gestures. I want them to be a genuine expression of who I am. For that to happen, I have to totally let go and become what I am doing. I want to be intently aware and part of what I say or do. For me, that means avoiding dogma and devotin

I think I want to be an everyday mystic. There was a time that, because of my Catholic heritage, I thought that mystics were monks kneeling in their monastic cell bathed in a beam of light. Mystics were also the nuns who were recognized by the way they levitated or clasped their hands together. Mysticism was not an every day experience but something reserved for the isolated few.

I don’t think this is so. I think we are all capable of mysticism. I certainly think it is something I’m not only capable of but routinely experience for brief moments. It is not unusual for me to experience rapturous moments when walking thru my garden in the morning. That moment lasts until I am distracted by some plant needing special attention and my rapture vanishes.

My mindfulness bell rings on the hour and invites me into a moment that I see as mystical. I touch whatever is near, and when I know that I know, all thought vanishes. I absoutely let go. I don’t experience a beam of heavenly light shining down on me, but it could easily be interpreted as that. My whole self vanishes and I have a moment of floating in a blissful, unattached space. Then I return to whatever I was doing before the bell summoned me to rapture.

I really don’t see this as something special or out of the ordinary. I consider it perfectly normal and part of being human. For me, it is all about letting go. It is an endless fall into darkness. It is a brief reminder that I am not a self and that I am not separate from all that exists. For a brief moment, I enter a space that is beyond form and perception.

For now, this is good enough for me. I accept my brief encounters with mysticism. I get to be a mystic multiple times during the day, and it opens my body to experience the moment to moment world around me. Bering an every day mystic, I have refined eyes to see the plants in my garden. I have ears that hear music in a slightly altered way. I touch others with a meaningful expression of our joined presence. I am not upset by the careless driver who cuts in front of me on the freeway. My food has a different savor and feeling in my mouth.

Everyday mysticism is not just a series of isolated experiences for me. Mysticism conditions me to be more awakened to the world around and inside me. Being a mystic brings me the joy of being alive.