Barry Garden Path

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.

When I truly look inside, there is nothing there. My body supports sensation and awareness, but it often seems separate from what I am truly experiencing. My inside experience experience goes bveyond the sensation and resides at a place I am not aware even exists. But I am also aware it is there.

Sometimes when I look inside, there is the vastness of a formless universe. It’s all there. It goes on and on and on. It’s the closest I get to imagining what infinity is like. People sometimes speculate about what the edge of the universe might be like. When I look inside, I suspect there is no outer edge. The universe I sense when I look inside is infinite.

This is the completely open field I experience when I look inside. This looking inside is the kind of concentration I experience. I don’t concentrate on anything. I see myself as concentrating on nothing. There is nothing inside.

Without this concentration, I do not have insight. I have to erase the complete blackboard before I can delve into the mystery of insight. For me, concentrationn is all about going inside and finding nothing. I am concentrating when I am no longer thinking about anything. Concentration happens when I am able to look beyond the clutter of my thoughts.

Going inside this way is how I discover there is nothing. I discover nothing.

With everyone else, I sometimes seem to live mainly in a seen world. All that is external is our focus and object of attention. I suppose it is a matter of survival. We need to pay attention to the seen world to survive, but there is so much more. I want to experience more of the internal world. Not just my own, but the internal, unseen aspect of everyone and everything around me. I want to know and experience what is happening inside.

What is it like to be a tree? What is happening inside all those people who walk past me as I hurry down Nicollet Avenue.? What enjoyment does a rock experience in its stability ? I speak of actions and movements, but I want to know more of what is happening inside everyone around me.

It is easier and more familiar to talk of falling down than what it feels like to lose control and stability. I am told of members of my Sangha being ordained, of the actions they are taking, what they are doing. But what is the interior change taking place in them as they go through those seen actions.?

Like most, I seem to have become so habituated to focus on the external and we have lost touch or ignore what is taking place inside. Maybe that is because there is actually little taking place inside, we have become so adept at the external, seen aspect of everything including ourselves. All is done externally, or at least mostly externally, and very little internally. We live in a seen world, and so much possiblity lies in the vast unseen.

Weddings are especially such an expression of that sad divide. So much energy and attention is placed on the external trappings that little seems to be seen or felt on the inside. The same happens as we become absorbed in the ritual and actions, the words and the motions we encounter in my Sangha. Without deliberate attention, we begin to lose touch with what we are actually experiencing or capable of experiencing. Without practice, we do not have the skills of describing what is happening inside, in our unseen world. Sometimes there is little going on internally because we are so adept at focusing on what is external.

My morning walks through my garden can be no different. There are moments that I can truly focus on what I am experiencing and what it is like to be a plant in my garden. There are moments when I can focus on what it is like to be this plant and that plant. These are the monents when I am aware of the inner life that I have and am part of. For a few moments I am able to stroll joyfully in an unseen world. In those moments, my inner world expands without limits.