Month: October 2018

I have been gifted with an amazing group of guides through my life.    Most of the meaningful guides have been women.    Each of them have nudged me to deepen and open my experience of my feminine self.

I never realized this at the time.   But as I look into my deep engagement with the energy and clarity that accompanies deep concentration, I recognize the impact of their guidance.   Meditation is such a natural, almost effortless experience for me.   I smoothly fall into awareness, and I realize that I have come to this familiar plane with the help of others.    All of them have invited me in various ways to become familiar with and share in their own femininity.

I know them all by name and the impact they had on my awareness.   There was the coaxer, the muse, the lover, the artist, the comforter,  the nurturer.    There was even the one who warned me of the danger that might lurk in the feminine sphere.    The list continues, and goes up to the present.    They have all had a guiding impact.    There were times that I became overly dependent on my guides, but they all contributed to my discovering and uncovering a feminine part of myself.

I find it interesting, but not too surprising, that as I look at the feeling and expressive part of myself, there are few male individuals who have acted as guides.   Men have helped me understand, but few had a hand in guiding me to uncover the deep insight and power in myself.   Even among writers, men are typically more conceptual and cerebral, with those couple of exceptions  who happen to be poets.    My guides have predominantly been women.

I am attempting to return the gesture by exposing my own feminine to men and women alike.    I invite them to partake, learn and enjoy as I, in turn, act as a guide.   This is not at all deliberate or highly intentional.    I simply allow myself be experienced as a guide.

When I meet someone, I often open into a channel that reaches into deep awareness.   This is also an invitation to deep awareness.    It is not a one way process, and not mine alone.   What I do is also an invitation for them to join me on this plane of awareness.   I open a door.

I am curious about them and encourage their curiosity about me.   I want to know all the experiences they have found to be insightful at the same time I invite them to explore the same of me.

It is the kind of exchange I have with students that sit around me at the University of Minnesota.   We have a mutual sharing and curiosity, usually something I initiate.   I am aware of them, and I ask about them and what they experience.    They sometimes mimic my inquiry.   I find that many of them are curious too.

With many people, I notice that the invitation is open-ended and without direction.    The frequent and common denominator is that we might share an awareness between us.

There are no rules.   There are no pre-conceived notions. There is only a prescribed willingness to grow in awareness.

First I had to abandon the outlines of religion to enter the realm of the spiritual and absolute.   Religion has become a corruption of the spiritual realm, and spiritual aliveness demands of me that it be abandoned.    For about 10,000 years, religion has attempted to put the tiger in a cage.    It has offered a close-up experience of wildness that is without the depth or energy of a genuine encounter.

I think that the tiger walks with those who are willing to allow the intimacy of a close companion, including the one existing within.   In the arena of religion, it was the mystics who figured this out, and religion pushed them to the side as a spiritual freak show.    I think they should have been on center stage.

It was in “A River Runs Through It” that the Presbyterian pastor is quoted as telling his son that Methodists are Baptists who have learned to read.    This captures well the contempt that religions have for one another.   It mirrors my own moments of contempt for most forms of religion.

The history of humans, beginning with the serious commitment to a farming lifestyle, reveals an emerging social, civil order.    In most cases, religion played the role of fronting for the social structure.    It became a shill for those in power, attempting to legitimize what humans had become socially, wrapped in the robes of shallow spirituality.    Even the images of gods reflected what the humans of a given time saw of themselves.    That is no less true of today and is typical of most modern religions.

All the while, the tiger has yearned to be free.   Humans have surrounded and confined themselves in social forms that have imprisoned most spiritual aspects of the erotic.    The deep human power of the erotic has been straight-jacketed alike by civil and the parallel religious forms of society.

The rising of patriarchy at the time of  serious farming sought to harness and control the erotic energy of the realm of the spiritual.    The deep erotic impulse came gradually under the control of the male element of society, in both the civil and spiritual realms.

Religions have correspondingly aligned themselves with the male model.   The erotic, which is basically feminine, tries relentlessly to break through the bars of the cage.    The tiger yearns to be free and wild.

My intent is to free the tiger, which I recognize and embrace as female.   I greet her every time I sit in meditation.    I walk with her through the day as I move through my world.   I brush against her energy, feel the depth of her presence.    She informs me of what I encounter.

For me, freedom comes by abandoning the constraints I allowed to be imposed on my thinking by religion and the social norms of being a man.  Allowing myself to feel the energy and power in my body has been a gateway to meditation and into the experience of the spiritual realm.     The deeper I penetrate that world, the more I recognize it as being predominantly female.

I feel and love her presence in me and my whole world.

 

 

It’s really quite simple, but it has taken me a long time to figure it out.    Having an open-heart is not a conditional act.   It is not a conditional state.   There are no built-in guarantees.    The openness is freely given with nothing expected in return.    There is unconditional acceptance and an unconditional invitation.    There is no bartering, no exchanges.

It is the natural way of the universe.    Being open-hearted means nothing is expected in return.    In contrast, humans have invented bartering.    Humans have invented so many ways to get around this basic reality.    Stepping out of a world in which everything was freely given, humans first bartered about goods and land.    Then it was about one another.    Relations with one another became conditional with promises about the future and with attempts to secure guarantees.

It was not the way of nature, not the natural way.   Nature is open-hearted.   Hearts are naturally open in an unconditional manner.    Then expectations gradually creep in that things be different than they are.     Open-heartedness unfortunately often becomes conditional.

I think it is appropriate to say “I would like……”.     But that is a perilous move.    A wish or desire is not an expectation, but the slope is very slippery. It is very hard to avoid expectations or conditional open-heartedness.

In my vocabulary, being open-hearted is another way of saying “I love”.   But the notion of love have so many barnacles attached to it, so many external conditions, that the word is both misleading and deceiving.   So I stay away from it.

I prefer to declare my open-heartedness, now that I am discovering what I think it is really about.   In open-heartedness there is no reciprocity expected.    It is an invitation freely given without any expectation of exchange.   I want it to be my unconditional state and my way of living.

 

 

I am noticing so many things out of balance.    That includes my daily struggle to bring myself into balance.     One difficult balancing act for me has to do with the tension between the future and the ever-present now.    I know that I need to make some plans for the future because I live in an historic, relative world.    At the same time, I know that the future is simply a figment of my creative mind, and the only reality is what is happening right now.

There once was a time that I thought of an after-life in such a way that it highly influenced what I was doing and experiencing in the present.    I now see that there is no after-life.    There is only what is happening right now.    We have imagined and created this whole notion of a future after-life.    Future time is not my home.    My home is only the present.    What is lacking is the balanced ability to see and experience it fully.

I live with humans and we are horribly out of balance with nature.    We have a lot in common with gypsy moths.    Like them, our burgeoning population will destroy the massive society we have created, careening out of balance with nature.    Like the gypsy moths, only a fragment will survive as nature brings our population back into balance.

We differ from gypsy moths because we can be more aware of what is happening.   Unfortunately, most humans have but a vague and loose notion of the world in which we live.    There are so many distractions, including our preoccupation with the future.    Most humans, including me, have but a loose notion of what it means to exist in this world.     Experience of the real world is barely accessible.

All around me, I see humans preparing for a future populated by more children, a future that cannot exist in the changing world.   Every day I read of someone with lofty notions of how to avoid climate change, when they would be much better to simply stop producing children and grandchildren.     Only then do we humans have a chance of being in balance with nature.

Preoccupation with improbable, imagined and other worldly existences obscures the wonder of what it means to be human.   The earth, however, has an innate awareness of the balance required, and is gradually moving into a new order of things.

I want to be more  earthy and present to the true nature of things.    I want to live in balance with the historical and the absolute.    I want to be more aware of the reality that is here, not some vague future beyond, imagined or anticipated.   I want to embrace this changing world that is moving to a new balance.

I accept the change and do not resist it.    I welcome the change for balance as the reality in which my every day is immersed.    My vision is not on some imaginary horizon, but on the today in which I am eternally immersed.

I do not choose to live in the imaginary world of a reality that exists only in hopes and dreams.    That is a reality that does in fact not exist.    I  choose instead to daily fall down on my knees in wonder and in recognition of the sublime nature of the real world in which I find myself.     It is a world that is gradually moving into a new balance, and I want to move with it.    That is the world I choose to experience.

 

The very things I hold on to for security are my binding limitations as well.   Lashed to the mast, I feel safe from the raging storms and threatening swells.   But my freedom is lost as well.    Security is an illusion, and what I regard as stabilizing is often my greatest source of suffering.

Security can be a siren song in the form of concepts, notions that I hold on to in order to give illusory meaning to the world.    In my life, there have been greater illusory notions of security than those I embraced in religion.    The root meaning of religion, in fact, is “to bind.”    That should have been a warning clue.

The cultural structure of marriage has been another promise of false security.   I should have paid more attention to the concept of the “bonds” of matrimony.   Humans have created all sorts of contracts that promise a secure future.    I think it better to develop relationships based on and nourished by day to day openness and acute attention to what is happening right now.    Planning for a secure future is  distracting and dangerous.

There is no secure future.   So I might as well let go.

 

There are many doors into the absolute.    These are my portals into true intimacy.    They are my entries into the divine, into the sacred.    All these portals can be entered through deep concentration, through true mindfulness.

There are many ways of experiencing the absolute, what I sometimes have called the divine.   These are like sacraments all around me because the absolute is in the essence of everything.

Some portals are easy to find and pass through.   By practicing entering through them, I become more aware and skilled in mindfulness.    It becomes more of a familiar passage, a familiar entry or experience.   Insight, awareness comes as I enter through each of these portals.    I am noticing that it is almost becoming like a habit, except that I am able to be aware of what I am doing.

I have always had some portals that were easy to pass through, and there was some aspect of the absolute I sometimes experienced beyond.   The value of the portals has been in what they allowed me to experience.   Step by tiny step, I became familiar with some aspect of the absolute.

So I have some familiarity with what lies beyond the portals.    But all this has been changing.    The frequency and intensity of my experience of what lies beyond the portals has changed.    I am finding myself more and more at home in what I experience.

I am only slowly becoming aware that the sharing of intimacies with other people can be a portal to the absolute.   Like many human activities, all manner of intimacies can be shared with little awareness or insight.    Just as eating can be done pleasurably but with little mindfulness, so can intimacies be shared with little awareness.

Intimacy can be present in different ways and not always a portal to the absolute.    Intimacy is not a guarantee of awareness any more than eating is a guarantee, or seeing or any aspect of touch.   A hug may or may not  be a portal to awareness.

I think that the opportunity is often offered to the absolute by intimacies, but we have so restricted the opportunities for intimacies in our culture that it is difficult to come by.   Both verbal and physical intimacies have been carefully kept aside from common experience.    Worse yet, we have made some intimacies an object of barter, a commodity to be traded as we might contract for goods.    For some intimacies, there must be a contract and agreement before they are acceptable or allowed.

Fortunately, not all portals are so restricted.    So I begin each day with the intent to explore as many portals as present themselves.   I am glad for the growing familiarity I have in how to carry out those explorations.   I am finding my home in an expanding number of places

 

I am aware of aloneness and how that forms my life, my experiences, my days.    But there is more.    I am also aware that  I can only come to experience  jointly.    I have a different feeling when I acknowledge that I am handing the fate and form of an experience into the hands of someone or something else.

I have these moments of realizations that I am not at all independent, even while I often seem to act that way.   I know that my present moments are intimately tied up with decisions and essences of others.    For humans, it is their decision whether to enter into the experience.    For all else, it is simply their nature to become part of “my” experience.

All this is true of rocks, plants and humans.    My experience, and theirs, is shaped by what we actively create between us.   It is a binary adventure.   We each bring to the present moment our unique essence, and that shapes our experience.    I think that humans have this unique ability that allows us to choose whether to jointly enter into the shared experience.

The degree of intimacy in the encounter depends on a joint perspective and intent.   It cannot be forced from either side, but relies on the yielding, the letting go by each member of the joint effort.    The reality actually is in the relationship, neither experience is independent of the other.    There cannot be anything like a solitary relationship.   It is a joint effort.    Each member yields some level of solitary, alone autonomy to relate to the other.

I can extend an invitation, just as I do whenever I walk into my garden.   Let us do this jointly, together with one another.    I invite my plants to a moment, to a presence they alone are able to create jointly with me.    We yield to one another.   We share time and space.  We are joined in a shared intimate awareness.

And so it is too when friends and I spend time together.    It is a time and space that we jointly create.   We invite one another.   The relationship experienced between us is framed and shaped by what we are willing to put into it.    Walking, talking with friends is not at all unlike the experienced  world of walking in my garden, except that we each can choose.

We rise in our awareness of one another.    The joint awareness is what makes the moment and experience unique.

Intimacy is not a one-sided experience.   It requires a mutual yielding to the energy, forces and essence of the other.    In that joint time and space, reality happens.

 

 

 

So much depends on my willingness to be vulnerable.    I am gradually beginning to accept that I just might not be in charge.   Nor do I have to be in charge.    Yielding to ‘what is’ is one of my greatest arenas of vulnerability.    That includes yielding to what I am, what others are, and what is happening.

I am vulnerable because I want others to be able to see me just as I am.    There must be no pretense.   Things are not in my hands as I once thought they were.    I allow more things to happen without a great deal of planning.    I relax more and simply experience whatever happens.    I rely on my instincts and insight to know how to respond.

I am more prepared and able to accept what comes my way, whoever comes my way with the confidence that all I really need to do is be present.    I do not intend to try to change or resist what exists.    This feels incredibly vulnerable.

I try to see others just as they are and not as I might want them to be or imagine them to be.   There is little attempt to make them different to meet my expectations.    I simply expect them to be present and be themselves.    I have a willingness and vulnerability to fall in love at least once a day, again and again and again.   It gets quite easy once I drop my expectations, my defenses,  my cautions and become vulnerable.

Being vulnerable means I am willing to accept the consequences.    That reminds me that I do have my limits.   I am not always willing to accept all the consequences.     I’m not sure yet if this is still self protection or simply an aspect of wisdom and insight.    I know that I am still willing to put limits on my vulnerability .    Those limits, however, are diminishing.

Being vulnerable has meant becoming more aware and accepting of my shortcomings.     There are so many things I do not do well.    There is so much I do not yet understand.

But there is one thing that I do understand.    The more vulnerable I become the more intimate I am with myself and the world in which I live.    That is a very good thing.

I’m amazed how simple it is.    For so long, the sacred was something separate from what I typically encountered.     Typically , the sacred was something set apart from the mundane.

There were sacred places,  such as groves or churches, identified by their unique nature.    There were sacred objects, like candles and chalices, identified by their special intended use.    There were sacred realms, mostly considered other-worldly.   Heaven was especially sacred because of all the luminescent clouds and rays.     People able to go there or be in contact with them were in some ways sacred agents.

I don’t think any of that is true.    The sacred nature of things is nothing separate but is totally bound up with their essence.    The sacred is a characteristic of anything that exists.    Sacred is nothing unique.    What is unique is the agility to experience it.

This is not some kind of intellectual twist or conceptual jump that now puts a sacred label on  all things.    It is not something to be decided or be convinced of.    There is no intellectual evidence or logic that suddenly makes everything sacred.    It is simply a recognition that arises from experience.    Once the nature of things is absorbed, made part of me, it becomes obvious that sacredness is simply a trait of all things.

There is no other, there are no special places or things that are uniquely sacred.   There is no need to look further.    It is all right here.

This has been a growing conviction of mine from a very early age.   I remember bits and pieces of the world that I played in.    I now recognize that I didn’t totally absorb the conventional understanding my culture taught me about the nature of reality.   Perhaps it was my unconventional brain, but I never completely bought into the relative world of my peers.

Someone asked me recently why I entered the seminary at 13, and I commented that there was no other choice.    For me, it was the obvious path of the sacred, identified as it was with the world of religion.     That was the most sacred arena I was aware of at the time.

I have been curious about the world of the absolute for as long as I can remember.     I have looked for the aspects of reality that allowed me to experience the absolute, whether it was poetry, plants, ritual or places.   I, of course, never spoke of the absolute nature of things.     But I have been attracted to those aspects of life that most clearly identified themselves as sacred.    I absorbed all the easy experiences of sacred.    I learned to become wholly present in places and times when I focused on the sacred nature of those places and times.

I think that this part of me has gone dormant for some time.    Now it is coming alive again.    I can see much more clearly how the sacred is simply an aspect of every one and every thing      It is not something separate, not an icing on the cupcake.     It is simply the nature of everything.

Nothing has changed to make it so except me.    My world has not changed, but I have.     I have begun to have small experiences of the absolute, and those experiences have awakened my sense of the absolute.    I’m starting to see the sacred all around me.