Month: September 2021

It is good enough for me to simply know that I am good by nature. It may well be good enough to trust what it is to be human and not impede or hinder what is natural. I have natural radiance, I am naturally enlightened. I simply have to do my best not to keep that natural radiance from opening and not hinder it from giving rich savor to the universe.

Looking around, it is easy to forget that it is natural for humans to trust and love. In a world that has become tainted by such an unsavory taste of hate and anger, it is easy to forget that the world is patiently waiting for human trust and love to emerge. What is so natural is being restrained and hindered by all the enclosures we envelop what is so natural about being human.

I am aware that I keep the gold within me hidden under wraps of protection, caution and fear. I can be distant and remote when I am by nature embracing and close. It is so natural that I be naked, vulnerable and exposed, but I am often so hidden and seemingly protected.

I have been taught and trained most of my life to restrain, not free natural impulses. I lived in an environment that even went so far as using the idea of “natural” to restrict what I instinctively knew wanted to be released. It is those very impulses that naturally revel what it means for me to be human. It feels so natural and right to be generous, trusting and loving. But I have learned the lessons of caution and control.

Every fiber of me wants to be connected, compassionate and loving. I want to relax so that those natural traits can ripen in me. I believe that those traits await ripening in all creatures like me. I expect that what is natural will emerge or we will surely wither away like unripened fruit.

It is no easy matter to probe what it means for me to believe. My wondering thoughts have roamed around the idea of belief for many years. Most of my life, I have thought that I only believed what my senses could not perceive. For a long time, I thought that to believe had to do with other beings or entities that may exist beyond my sensory awareness. I don’t think it is quite that simple.

I believe that there is a maple tree growing in my back yard. I think I have seen it, heard its leaves rustle, felt its sinewy bark, its thick trunk. I think I have smelled the scent of its dry leaves when I rake hem in the fall and have only failed to taste its flavor because I am now an adult and no longer think I need to place everything into my mouth.

I can put all these sensory experiences together and have a notion that there is a tree growing in my back yard. I think I know that tree. Yet every one of these sensory impressions are mediated by light photons, fluctuating sound waves and sensory nerve impulses that convince me, allow me to experience the presence of the tree.

The subtlety of this has begun to dawn on me. I have no direct experience of a tree, all my experience is mediated by something else. In a realty check, I notice that I may only be seeing light photons bouncing off a tree but I don’t see a tree. Yet something in me opens up to the tree’s presence. The softer and more open my heart becomes, the more deeply I feel and experience that presence as any other human might. I believe that the tree is present.

But only I, this human, experiences the tree directly in the way that is unique to me and my belief. All my sensory data is massaged and shaped by my long history of sensory experience. All my impressions are based on my belief in the validity and truthfulness of a whole assortment of mediating factors: photons, air waves, air molecules of treeness, nerve impulses. In some sense, I believe the tree is actually present based on a sensory experience I only remotely understand.

Every other week, I spend a couple hours looking at and talking with Kelli who lives in California. I habitually think I am having a direct experience of her presence, I sense her mood, watch her movements, listen to everything she says. In what seems like a truly experienced way, our minds and hearts not only touch one another but sometimes seem almost to blend. All this is based on my belief that I have a deep experience of her presence and am aware of what she is saying, what movements she makes, what expressions cross her face.

Yet, I have no direct sensory experience of her. All these sensory impressions are mediated by electronics, by electrons flying through air and wires. These electrons stimulate baffles in my speaker and a screen that glows with moving images of Kelli. I think I hear and see Kelli, but I am only hearing and seeing very indirectly. In reality, I am relying on human-made devices that mimic what my ears and eyes might otherwise perceive if Kelli were in front of me.

I believe in the reliability and truthfulness of those electronic devices, even though I know similar devices can not be reliable and truthful. Similar devices can distort and reshape the impact of photons electronically, and they can create CGI images that may resemble the original but not be the same. The images of characters created in movies like Avatar are all manipulations of photons the naked eye might otherwise perceive. The characters appear real and they invite me into their presence as any other character images might.

I rely on the reliability of my electronic devices, and I believe in a presence of Kelli who appears to be seated in front of me, even though I am looking at an electronic screen and Kelli is many miles away. She is miles away from any direct sensory experience, but I believe in what I seem to see and hear, all the while knowing only part of my awareness is true.

Humans use similar electronic means to become aware of suns and planets that are far beyond what our senses can directly experience. We even see things outside the wavelengths of light our eyes can see. We believe what these electronics tell us as all their electronic “senses” are converted into human sense experiences, images and data. They electronically “see” so that we can interpret and understand a presence beyond our senses.

Through our “seeing” devices, we believe in the presence of many unseen worlds. Sometimes we even reach beyond what our electronic devices can detect and believe in realities such as dark matter and dark energy. These realities remain only inferred and are still undetected, but we believe in their presence. We see evidence of forces, traces of reality that suggest a kind of presence and we sort of believe, tentatively, in the presence of something.

We often create a kind of loose awareness by what we kind of believe. Cultures such as Tibetan Buddhism have had similar leaps of belief and quasi awareness. They have their own science. They have felt traces, signatures of forces in their experience and they gave shape to those energies. They created what we westerners habitually call gods and goddesses, and they regarded them as personifications of what they more directly perceived and experienced. Their gods and goddesses might have even been closer to what is real, closer to direct sensory experience, than our notions of dark matter and dark energy.

So when someone asks me whether I believe in God, this is no straight forward question and there is no straight forward answer. To believe is no simple matter. There can be no simple or unqualified statement of what I believe. To believe always relies on intermediary agents that only give faint impressions of a reality that exists beyond my senses.

It is further complicated by no two of us having exactly the same awareness of any reality, even when we think we have so much in common.

Though I sometimes think I am getting close, there is nothing I yet experience directly except what is inside of me. And that has its own qualifications and complications.

So every day, I step into a world built on my belief. It is a system of believing that has been built and shaped by many years of experience. It is a system of believing that constantly changes every day. I am convinced that if my heart can be open and generous, the world which I believe exists will continue to unfold, reveal its true self, and welcome me into it.

I am beginning to suspect that all I long for is already within me. What I realize through my interaction with the world is an awakening to what I already have within. I have all the connections with everything I desire, and my life each day is a gradual realization of what I already am in possession of.

So much of what I perceive as out there is actually a reflection of what is within. Each day is an opportunity to become more awakened, more aware to what I already have, an opportunity to internally embrace what I ardently desire, a deep falling into the all-consuming that has no dimension, no sides top or bottom.

I am experiencing a gradual convergence that is not a possession but a realization that there is a reality hidden behind the illusion that there is a me and an it. I sometimes reach a point where the appearance of separation yields to a formless, undefined oneness. And I carry that within me.

There are three ways this realization has arisen in me. The first is my recognition how my longing has been personified in my notion of God, gods and goddesses. What I long for and reach out to in the eternal, ultimate realm I already carry within me.

It is my nature to exist in an ultimate as well as historical realm. I have at times populated that ultimate realm with entities that were shadow entities, mirroring to me what I both ardently desired and already possessed. What appeared as illusions outside me are actually realities already within my grasp, dwelling within.

Seeming to be male by nature, I also long to be joined with what is feminine. I reach out for this in others, to touch and know what is female. I now suspect that those who in the historical realm appear to embody the feminine are aids to help me awaken what is already present in me. We help each other awaken to what is already within. They help me to awaken to my feminine.

Others who are in intimate possession of what it means to be female help me to see the feminine that is present within me. I already carry what I so ardently seek and long to discover in others, and they assist me to experience what I already possess.

In a more general fashion, the world around me offers me an opportunity to awaken to the vast wonders I carry within. The more I become more deeply aware of the flowing water, the greening grass, the moving wind, the more I feel the unity with them I already possess. I gradually recognize what is there by nature.

I now am better able to experience, to truly feel their presence and the continuity that exists between us. I let down the illusion that we are separate and begin to see them as they really are. I see us as we really are. I recognize the world as a sign, a reflection of what is within. My every reaching out to touch becomes an awareness of what I, by nature, already possess.

The awareness I have right now remains clouded, hindered by so many factors. I do not yet see clearly the unity in which I exist. However, each day is an opportunity to push back a little farther the illusion that there is a me and a them.

Each day is an historical opening to understand that I carry an immense treasure within. Each day, I will try not to be distracted from that experience and realization as I allow myself to feel what I possess within.

Each day I will take down the “No Trespass” sign from my heart and allow all to enter in and reside in their rightful place within.

What is my practice? It is to use as much of my day as possible to become deeply aware of the intimacy I have with the world. It is to be mindful of an experienced intimacy I have with every one and every thing.

My practice is to try to be fully aware of everything I experience: the firm softness of the carpet when my feet first touch the floor, the warm water flowing over me in the shower, the cold hardness of the granite counter.

To practice this kind of mindfulness, I have to experience some degree of intimacy. My senses are key to mindfulness because they are the most foundational of my perceptions. My senses are the doorway through which I experience my intimate world. I first must experience the natural connection with that world . I can perhaps imagine a sensory awareness, but I typically choose to go through the common sensory portals available to physical me.

I practice with my senses. It is like a form of exercise. I deliberately touch, I deliberately taste and smell, I deliberately look at what is before me. This allows me to experience intimacy with whatever I am near.

Being able to be mindful of the sensory experience of intimacy actually enhances the experience of intimacy. I may be lightly aware of he softness of the carpet, but when I am mindful of that experience, my senses become more focused and alert. I taste more intently, I look more deeply. Experience of intimacy grows with mindfulness, even while mindfulness depends on the experience of intimacy. This grows with practice.

It is my intention to practice a deep experience of intimacy with the world and to be deeply aware of that experience. I want to share that practice with others. I want to connect with anyone who has a similar intention of mindful intimacy.

Some days it is more difficult to step into “Yes.” Some days it is challenging to meet the world just as it is and give my full attention to it, to step into it without resistance or constraint. On other days it seems so natural, so easy, so full of my inner energy, so fluid to yield to whatever presents. And on some other days, that natural ease seems so remote and hard to grasp.

A fog sometimes settles in, obscuring the identity of the world. The understanding of it all seems so obscure or at least obtuse.

What I want is to step into “Yes” with energy and enthusiasm. I want to open myself to the totality around me. I want to welcome the world as it is and as it unfolds before me each unique and precious day. I want to see thing as they are and not pine for them to be different. I want to accept their invitation for me to show up. I want a welcoming intimacy with it all.

In truth, it is very attractive to accept each person as they pass by or, in any small way, enter into my sphere of awareness. I want to say “Yes” to them all. I want to become skilled in that form of speech.

I know in my heart that I am part of a wondrous universe, and I want to step fully into that universe without reservation or resistance. I want to shout “Yes” again and again. I want my vocabulary to be reduced to one central word, “Yes”.

Be still my heart, learn to speak that one syllable. Forget the rest. Strip off all the trappings and expectations of culture and enter naked into the wholeness of reality. Learn the native tongue where the most important thing to speak is “Yes”.

I’ve complained a lot. I have resisted and pushed against my culture for much of my remember life. I recognize how deeply that rejection must go.

This continues to cause me much ambiguity and uncertainty as I try to relate to others who appear much more guided by what the culture prescribes. Most seem uncertain or even hesitant about how to relate so someone like me who walks a path unlike many others.

I remember how when I was in high school, I was not “one of the boys.” I found my own way of running in the woods and burrowing into books. I could act in very conforming ways, but internally I found myself separate from the culture that guided others around me. We had common ground, but I had little interest in following the way that most of my peers went.

This resistance to culture followed me into the classroom where I disputed what teachers said and where I wrote papers that took a different view of commonly held perspectives. I found in time that I could not be an honest teacher of religious tenets that felt alien to me, and so I left the monastic group I had been part of for a dozen years.

I have always pushed against what my culture tells me about being male. I have developed my own view of sexuality and other expressions of intimacy, separating myself from what I consider to be too extreme or too restrictive in my culture.

Now I am discovering that the culture that I have been pushing against on what now seems like surface issues actually has a deeper and more sinister aspect. All this while I have been living in a white culture that has a great impact on many of the cultural trappings I have been resisting. At the root of many issues I have instinctively pulled away from is a dark notion of what it means for me to be white.

The white culture that I was born into has lost its humanity. My white culture, based as it is on the enslavement and continued suppression of others, has warped and caused us to lose our sense of what it means to be human. Being culturally white, affects most expectations of what I am and what I am to do.

I am now trying to look at the big question of how to reclaim the humanity I have culturally lost by the way my white culture continues to treat those we see as not-white. I wonder what it will take to create a white culture that is more rooted in the common humanity we share with those we see as “others.”

My struggle against my culture has taken on a different, even startling dimension. It has gone to a different level. As I search for a revitalized white culture, I am uncertain about just what it might look like and wonder who I would be walking with.

This is an outline of a talk given on September 15, 2021

Mindfulness and Intimacy  9/15/2021

Here we are, obviously connected by words and by images on our screens

• Also, less obviously,  but we know it, we are joined together through infinite connections that extend beyond our capacity to conceive.   
• We are intimate and also mindfully aware of this.

Beginning: I invite you to close your eyes and relax

• Allow yourself to feel connected to your chair, and know that you are one with your chair.
• Allow yourself to feel connected to all of us in this meeting, and know that you are one with us.
• Allow yourself to feel connected to all the world around you, and know that you are one with all that is.
• Open your eyes.

That is an experience of intimacy and what it is like to be mindful of it

• It is what we cultivate and develop in our practice.
• We are all familiar with intimacy and mindfulness.
• We all have some sense of how to be mindful,  how to be focused on what is here in the present moment.
• We also have some sense of how this intimacy and mindfulness can produce a joyful life, a compassionate engagement with what is right here and now.
• I confess, my major ambition is to experience intimacy with the world and be aware of it.
• I’m trying to figure it out; I don’t have answers, but I do have some observations.
• I am inviting you to think about intimacy and mindfulness this evening.
• Perhaps deepen our capacity to experience this intimacy and mindfulness, something we cultivate through practice.

I am aware that Intimacy is a delicate word, a delicate topic, because of common speech, our minds tend to go to intimacy of sex.

• When I met a close friend of mine several years ago, she said “no intimacy.”
• I knew that, in common speech, meant “no sex.”  
• And so it has been, though I think we have a lot of intimacy in our relationship.
• I think of intimacy in a much broader fashion. 

Offer a list of seven observations, any one of which could invite reflection and discussion.

My first observation about intimacy is that intimacy is a given.

• All our relationships have intimacy, even if we don’t experience it.   
• We are intimate by nature; we are naturally connected to all things; will we experience it????
• Intimacy is a way to go toward what is deepest and most powerful about being human.  
• The reality of natural intimacy is a basis of our practice.  
• Thay teaches us about interbeing;  we are naturally that connected, with one another, intimate with everything.   
• We miss out; we aren’t often experiencing that intimacy or being mindful of it.   
• Learning to be open to that experience of intimacy is part of our practice.

• First observation:  I am already intimate with the world;  I want to experience that intimacy and know it

Second observation:  experience vs. know, intimacy as experienced vs. mindfulness

• Think of being inside watching it rain outside; watch the raindrops run down the window pane; that is mindfulness of the rain.
• Now think of running outside into the rain and feel the rain on our face and body, soaking your clothes; that is experiencing intimacy with the rain  
• For me, intimacy and mindfulness are two sides of the same coin.
• One depends on the other; they grow together as I practice.  They are the twins of my practice

Third observation:  intimacy relies on intimacy with self; based on sensory awareness

• What I observe with my senses is foundational for experiencing intimacy
• I include real and imagined sensation.
• This is counter-cultural:   our culture seems either caught up in the senses, or avoiding sensory experience.
• Our practice recognizes that the senses invite mindfulness;  it’s front and center:  hugging meditation, walking meditation.

Fourth observation: Nature has a great role in the experience of intimacy and becoming mindful.

• A group I sometimes sit with: Awake In the Wild
• Nature not only calls me to my senses but also invites me beyond to a deep experience of intimacy.
• Nature invites me to step beyond my habitual, cultural views.

Fifth observation:  Experiencing intimacy softens and requires a softening of my sense of “mine”.

• Intimacy is about experiencing things as they are and not something to be possessed.
• I think for me this especially applies to my experience of intimacy with others; trying to possess someone, even a partner, interferes with intimacy.   

Sixth observation:  Experiencing intimacy is counter cultural, I must go against my culture if I am to experience intimacy with others, with the world.

• Especially means rejecting the notion of possessing things and people.  

Seventh, and final observation:  Experiencing intimacy is challenging and raises questions:

• How do I experience intimacy in a culture that so strongly encourages possessing, possessing things and person?
• How do I experience intimacy in a world that seems to threaten my safety?
• How do I reconcile my inheritance from my ancestors that seems so aversive to intimacy?
• What are the roles of boundaries?   Do they help or hinder intimacy?
• How do I become intimate with something repulsive that I don’t want to be close to or part of, such as racism, ageism, homophobia, misogyny?   
• The list could be long, and I am sure you can add to the list of questions.   

That is part of what I invite you to share:   what is puzzling about intimacy.   What works?   How is it part or not part of your practice?  

Perhaps it was only a scripted part of an entertaining movie. But it left a lasting notion in my heart and comes to mind frequently. In the movie “Avatar,” the indigenous people greeted one another with “I see you.” What a wonderful way of meeting another person. What a wonderful thing to think and then say to another person, to plants, to rocks.

To be seen by another is such an affirmation and recognition of my presence. I know what it feels like not just to be noticed but to be experienced and acknowledged in such an open, unprejudiced way. I want to see everyone with those eyes of openness . I want to feel that experience of seeing and being seen.

In my culture we have a practice of shaking hands when meeting. It can be a real gesture, but it is so weak. I have heard that shaking hands means that “I am not armed,” I hold nothing in my hand that can harm you. I suppose it is a useful gesture, but I would rather it were more than that, more than a cautious letting down of shielding and protection.

I want my meeting someone to be more of an open exchange, a deep affirmation of presence. I want it to be an acknowledgment that we see one another without prejudice or assumptions. I want us to say that we see one another just as we are, and have that to be true.

Actually, I prefer that we go beyond words and that we hug one another deeply. I prefer that we become aware of one another more deeply than simply seeing one another. If I could, I would say with wholly open eyes and heart, “I am you.” Sometimes that is what I feel. I never seem to say it.

Those words, “I am you,” are not common, but they can be a part of me just the same. It would be a routine reminder to me how we are all intimately connected. Now, if only we could let it freely show!

Seeing each other is one opening to intimacy, an initial recognition of how we are connected. For me to affirm that I really see someone is the beginning of an affirmation of the intimacy we naturally share. Seeing is an initial invitation to enter into a heart-joined experience of intimacy .

Some would consider it a flaw in my person that I want so strongly to be noticed, but I embrace it. I want to be recognized as part of something or someone, as connected to them in some deep and mysterious fashion. When I walk among the shoulder-high plants in the prairie section of Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden, I want those plants to be as aware of me as I am of them. I want to be noticed by them, acknowledged, confirmed.

I want my presence to be felt by people around me just as clearly and strongly as I feel them. I want the plants in my garden to direct their plant-awareness fully to me as I walk among them every morning and acknowledge them. Awareness cannot be a one directional street for me. I want there to be a constant exchange of noticing.

When I walk on the path down to the lake at my cabin, I want the ground to yield ever so slightly to my feet. I want the dirt and grass to feel my weight and my presence. They need not remember my passing, but I want them to notice and be intently aware when I am present.

For me it is about being reciprocal, of jointly feeling the connection we naturally share. I typically not only notice the presence of someone else, but I allow myself to feel their presence and acknowledge it somehow. There is nothing about the past or future involved, only the moment during which we notice that we are in a time of existing together. We are connected. I want to habitually be someone who notices that and is noticed.

Deep within my culture there is a framework that has been hidden from me. It is as hidden as the bones that make up my skeleton. And like my skeleton, it is essential to providing structure, support and shape to my culture. Knowing it is there, now helps me to understand the otherwise incomprehensible resistance I see daily to reasonable things like getting vaccinated and wearing masks.

I just finished reading “Caste” by Isabel Wilkerson. I think I can better understand the deep and hidden energy source behind many people who are so strongly anti-vaccine and anti-mask in the midst of this pandemic. What seemed wildly unreasonable to me, now is a lot easier for me to understand. There is a deeply engrained and hidden force behind the resistance.

While not specifically about race, resistance has been made a hallmark of belonging to a certain caste that many white people are desperately trying to preserve. Many white people are trying to keep their position of privilege, even if it is only imagined. They want to maintain the caste system that racial injustice has supported for hundreds of years. It is the hidden agenda behind a wide assortment of cultural dynamics, and it is providing the energy that resists masks and vaccines.

The attempt to “make us great again” is deep and powerful. At its roots, the structural caste system is quite hidden. The manifestations, however, are very visible. Not wearing a mask or not being vaccinated has been made one of the symbols of belonging to a once-privileged caste. It has been made part of the culture of the caste. Caste identity gives the resistance energy.

I recognize that the issue of resistance to masks and vaccines is complicated, and the generalization about caste structure doesn’t always fit all individuals and specific situations. However, uncovering the hidden nature of caste and its role in our white culture has helped me make sense of what seems like wildly unreasonable resistance.

I don’t want to miss or underestimate the power of this deep and hidden caste system and how attached to it many people are. I also want to be aware how it affects decisions I make. I recognize that I have been born into the privileged caste by having white parents. It is the hidden structure underneath my white culture.