Month: August 2018

I aspire to be a respectful individual.    I want to honor the presence of other people, plants, animals, rocks, and everything else.   I want respect to come from the core of who I am and be expressive of my intent to establish an open, loving relationship.   It is the way I can acknowledge the worth of other beings and all other entities.

Respect is something I want to freely give.    I  do not respond well when respect is demanded, even in small ways.    I especially resist any standards of respect.    I pull back when I am asked to behave in a certain way as an expression of respect.

I think that people and all things have the opportunity to identify what they consider respectful, but then I have a choice whether I will comply.   Especially, I think that people can identify what is disrespectful to them, but then I get to decide whether I will act respectfully in a manner that suits them.    The expression of respect must come from inside me  and in that sense be genuine.

I grew up in a culture that imposed some rather arcane expectations on what to wear.    Women were expected to wear a head-covering in church as an expression of respect.    Certain kinds of clothing were not considered respectful.   There are still echoes of that in the mindfulness tradition that I am part of, and I am troubled by it.

I think, especially in areas of religion or spirituality, the notion of showing respect is a way of identifying tribalism or controlling sexual expression.   Women are often the blunt of  notions of respectful dress, and it is mostly an expression of control imposed on them.     I know it is something I do not like when I am told how to dress respectfully.  When I, a man,  am asked to dress respectfully  it is an exception because it is more often imposed on women.

I am still struggling with this.   I don’t like being told how to behave respectfully.

I seem to throw the word “spiritual” around a lot without really knowing what it means.   It clearly is not something supernatural and is a very natural part of who I am and who I want to be.   Using the word “spiritual” to refer to things unseen is  a rather weak notion of what it can mean.

I seem to enter the real of the spiritual the more I move away from notions of self.    The less I have of ego, the more I have an experience of spiritual.   Spiritual is the awareness that comes when my ego is muted.   It is a phenomena of the mind, of awareness that has been freed of the babbling and constraints of ego.

I  also think that spiritual has something to do about breaking with the past and the future.    The ego is supported and sustained by the notion of what has already happened and what is projected to happen.    Time is  framework for the ego.    To remain focused in the present is to step into a realm of the spirit.

Being present is an eminently spiritual act.    I have the experience of simply being.     There is no beginning or end in sight.  I have become a spiritual being.

I know how wrong I’ve been.   My eyes have focused way too much on the future, on the area of my headlights.   Even now, my day often lurches to a start that relies on knowing my plans for the day.   I am astonished how much of my energy has been focused on the “future” of a moment, on making permanent an event when “now” is the only thing within my grasp.

Even as I look back, I often notice regrets arising that I allowed experiences or relationships to diminish when they might have continued for “a long time”.  I wonder how much I have missed because I was concerned about where things would lead, what the future would be like.

My mistake has been wanting things to last so intensely that I may have failed to grasp what was actually going on at the time.   I know there have been times the doors of my heart strained to open, but I was cautious because permanence was so unclear, so unsure, so out of range.

As someone with traits of Aspergers, I naturally love the feeling that comes with trains.    When I see railroads, I know with all my being “where this train is going.”   The comforting roots of this assurance go deep.   Perhaps that is part of my wanting things to last, of knowing where the day will go.

Planning is one thing.     Taking deep assurance and identifying with the plan is something else.

I am a creature of my culture where promising a future is commonplace.     Love is only “true love” if it is forever and part of a commitment.    Even my teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, says so.     Coupling in marriage, in an exclusive relationship, is ideal and the norm.    In an attempt to see the future clearly, the reality of now typically becomes blurred.

Wanting the good experience of the now to go on and on  is a distraction and a detour from insight.    It is as powerful and as wrong as wanting something unpleasant to go away.    It is this kind of grasping that leads to suffering.    It is as powerful and in error as much as fear.

It is not my intent to seize the future when the real joy is in the present, in the now.   I do not want to repeat the error of my past and my culture by wanting the pleasant moment to continue so strongly that I am less able to plunge into the enjoyment in my grasp.

This is for me a reliable source of glee.   It is what gives me the most insight and joy.

As I look at the world with softer eyes, the more I see that I have been looking through a distorting veil all my life.    Reality is not the world as I have learned to see it, and I am slowly unlearning much of what I have been taught.

There are probably many ways to pierce the veil and begin to experience reality in a new and clear way.    I long ago discovered that poetry has this power.    Poets have a skill of turning my perception of the world over and over.   A poem that is well-written has the power to allow me to experience what the poet has experienced, to see reality in a new and unfamiliar way.    The veil of my common experience is pulled aside and I see reality with fresh, soft eyes.

I am grateful for all the poets who have done this for me.   They have taken me on journeys I might have never discovered without their guidance.

Right now, I am reading and listening about the power of psychedelics to take away the veil and remove the constraints imposed on the mind.   This past week, Michael Pollan and Rick Doblin have given me information about the effect of psychedelics I never understood before.    I especially find it interesting that the experiences they describe sound much like the experiences I have in meditation.

For me, meditation has become a practice at skillful concentration.   So much has changed for me in the past three year.      For me, there now is a facile letting go of constraints that is preliminary to meditation.    I easily enter into a time of relaxed diligence that takes my mind away from many of my preconceptions.    Past experience becomes more of a distraction than a guide.    The veil parts, and a wisp of freshness fills my whole body.   The world around me simply is.

Mindfulness offers me similar insights that Michael Pollan and Rick Doblin seem to be describing.    Because it is something I can choose, mindfulness can take place whenever I want.   My walk across the parking lot from my car into Trader Joe’s is not a convenient time  for psychedelics, but it is a very nice opportunity to be mindful.

Mindfulness for me is not shocking, not a surprise, never a bad trip.   It does take me through the veil, and the world appears as it has never been experienced by me before.

 

I find myself trying to break away from my learned notion of what it means to be intimate.    A comment from a friend recently reminded me how I think that intimacy is not the same as cuddling.   How humans might behave with one another may be based on the intimacy that is present.    But the intimacy is there no matter how we behave.

The kind of intimate connection I experience and want is there with or without my awareness.    For sure, I want to be aware of it.   My intended awareness is an open-eyed attention to that intimacy that naturally occurs.

I want to live in an awareness that I have an intimate connection with the whole world around me.   It is the awareness that I experience when I brush up against the plants in my garden or when I hug someone.   I do not create the intimacy.    The intimacy is already there, and what I bring to it is my awareness rising out of concentration.   I  am able to see things and people as they really are and experience the relationship I have with them.

I intend to unmask the social illusion that intimacy is something special and that we have to be careful.    I have been taught a social illusion from birth that I am meant to be separate.   This illusion has been reinforced throughout my life by the barriers cautious people put up.    I intend to refashion the illusion I have of reality.

Naturally, my approach has everything with being mindful.    The deeper my concentration becomes, the more I am aware of people and things as they really are.    And that includes the natural relationship I have with them.   By being mindful, I experience the connection I have, and the more I affirm that connection the more I understand its meaning.

Intimacy is not something that I create.    Intimacy is something that I recognize and experience.     All is connected, and the more I realize that connection and experience it, the more I become immersed in the intimacy I have with all things.

I keep coming back to these small realizations of how we are so intimately connected.    It is becoming a central observation.     I don’t think much around me is changing, but I certainly am.   Every person I meet, every bee I see on my flowers is connected to me and to one another.    The more I allow myself to sink into this realization the more it becomes apparent and felt.

For some individuals, those connections are so intimate that they persist, almost in spite of me.    I’ve recently been thinking of someone I was close friends with many years ago.     In spite of my neglect of that connection, it has persisted, and shows up in small and unexpected ways.    Some overlapping patterns of our lives have surprisingly popped up.    It is curious that, with no awareness or deliberation, the same names have, years apart, shown up on our first-born boys.

I am constantly reminded that connections go beyond my normal experience.   They exist in a part of my world that is largely beyond my common perception.   They have roots in a reality that I only partially understand.

Sometimes, by keeping an open heart, the connection is something I can experience in an easy manner.   First meetings, brushing against my plants, looking into the night sky can be an easy experience of connection.    Other times it is not so apparent, and requires a focused attention to see the connection.    I have to look deeply with deliberation and with unfettered feeling.

Much of my training has been otherwise.   For me, religion has caused me to feel separate from the “others” and has encouraged me to focus instead on my own tribe of like minded believers.    Instead of opening my awareness to the broad reality, the focus has been on what distinguishes me from others, on my unique imaginary path into the spiritual realm.    Rather than learning to be a mystic, I was taught how to conform.    I, of course, have resisted, though the struggle still comes up from time to time.

Life is, instead, an opportunity for me to experience how I am connected to everything.   I have to let go of all my learned perceptions to allow this to happen.    I seem to constantly search for phenomena that allow me to see the connection, even with people and places I no longer directly experience.    I daily try to reach beyond the superficial ways I am part of a common entity and realize  the deeper, invisible connections.

I am convinced that the only reality is the connectivity, the interaction.   Rather than be caught up in how each of us is different, unique and separate, I want to live in a world of connection.