Every morning I am faced by the swirling chaos that has arisen in the past week. Maintaining equanimity in the midst of paying attention is a challenge. I settle into my body. I find refuge in the practice of paying attention to my total body. I try to concentrate on my awareness of my whole body as known.
Chaos is hard to ignore.
There are frequent times that I am aware that I am no longer just breathing air. These are the times that the rush of air in and out of my nostrils continues, but there is more. My chest expands and contracts, but I no longer feel the rising and falling. My awareness shifts from the fundamental sensations to a focus on my breathing as known.
I become conscious of the awareness of my breathing. My whole body lets go of sensation as I become conscious that sensation is known. I become absorbed, not in breathing, but in the awareness of my breathing.
Breathing becomes a different kind of experience. I am aware that I am breathing air, but my actual sensation of breathing fades away. I might as well be breathing water because my consciousness has shifted to an experience of something other than air. I am breathing something else.
What I am conscious of is more like an inhalation and exhalation of the fabric of the universe. I feel afloat in a vast ocean and I am breathing in that ocean and becoming part of it. The experience has shifted from the sphere of my senses to the conscious reach of my mind. My mind is at rest as it floats on an ocean of awareness and becomes aware that I am part of it.
I have been breathing air all my life, since that first moment when my lungs expanded. Now it is my mind that expands, and I breathe in the vast ocean of the sphere of everything.
I feel as though we have entered into a national Alice In Wonderland world. Especially today, I feel surrounded by a kaleidoscope of reality. The news has become a warped distortion of the real world, not the one I choose to see. Sometimes I feel thrown into a distorted realm where it has become difficult to be in touch with what is real.
Even the guardians of a stable reality are running into one another, mimicking the antics of the Three Stooges. Those who I have elected and relied on to maintain a semblance of ordered reality are rushing to life boats and bailing frantically and ineffectively.
We have descended into a rabbit hole and reality is totally distorted. I grasp for the world I am being pulled from, resisting a tumble into that rabbit hole. In the midst of this madness, I reach for my anchors of stability, my connections to reality.
My anchors are my friends and my garden. I am also anchored within, by the awareness that relies on my inner stability. When the world seems to be morphing into a whirlwind of madness, I reach inside for the oasis of equanimity I hold securely. It is a stable island, and I welcome my friends to join me there.
The cognitive dissonance evidenced by the recent election is becoming more obvious to me. Polls continue to show that people support the right to choose abortion, the rights of women, the continuance of social security, etc. These are all policy positions not supported by a majority of those elected.
The electorate seems to be influenced not by what their rational thoughts dictate, but more by malice, bigotry and misogyny. It makes as much sense as someone announcing their intent to lose weight as they reach for a second piece of cake.
In all of us, there are the residuals of trauma. I am aware that my trauma is a combination of my inheritance and experience. The trauma constantly induces fear, and that fear can overpower what my cognition is sorting out. I act based on my deep fears sometimes, not what my rational mind is saying. Some aversions and attractions overcome what I rationally think.
Some people who think progressively, who know how to act progressively, act in a way that is not guided by their ideas and ideals. People who are insistent that they are not racist, who think benevolently about people of color, still act in ways that are rooted in racism.
I have grown up in an atmosphere that promotes bigotry and misogyny. Fearing the power and presence of people different from me, fearing the power and presence of women is part of my inheritance, culture and early experience. I think this is true of many people living in the USA. Men learn that they must dominate woman and women yield to an atmosphere of patriarchy. White people fear people of color and feel the need to dominate them, to stay in charge.
These trauma based fears promote cognitive dissonance. People think they have no malice, no bigotry, no racism, no misogyny. But it is a powerful, often unacknowledged part of them. So people act contrary to what their cognition tells them. They act contrary to what they think they intend to do, or what they think they should do. They even elect individuals who do not support their ideals.
It is both a gift and a skill to accept what I cannot do. I am no longer able to go cross-country skiing. I now realize that I am unable to change anyone. I am unable to save anyone who does not want to be saved. I am unable to convince anyone who does not want to change what they think. I cannot undo what has been done.
I am unable to turn back time and change what I have done or what someone else has done. It all remains a part of me and part of them. I do not resist that. I cannot unlove all those I have loved. Nor can I reach back and love anyone I felt estranged from.
I am not even sure that I can change who I am at this moment. Perhaps I am able to shape the future in some small way by actions I take. The past has consequences, none of which I am able to change. Perhaps the future is something I am able to affect.
It is best for me to accept what I am unable to change or affect. There is much else that I can do
What does it take to realize that I am connected to all things? What does it take to experience my unity with the earth and the stars? I know and feel that I am connected to the friend I hug as they leave my home or as I meet them in the hallway at Sangha. How do I learn to feel that unity that is such a deep and intimate aspect of us and has been there since we came into existence?
I want to remember we are not separate and never have been. We are one. We are united.
For me, freeing up this reality begins by my touching whatever is near to me. It might be a table, a plant, a person, or the rug under my bare feet. I practice letting go of the raw sensory experience and I become aware of the touch in a manner that reaches beyond the sensory. My deep awareness and the object touched or seen are experienced as one.
I am no longer touching the tablet on my knees or the keyboard at my finger tips. I enter into and am part of the unity that binds us.
I walk down the stairs and my feet become part of each step they touch. My hand is united with the railing, not by touch alone but by experiencing the unity we share. I touch a friend in a loving and intimate way and we both experience more than the simple sensory connection of touch.
Throughout the day I am reminded by a bell to become aware of the unity I share with whatever is near me. It is often a table or a wall. The table or that wall becomes a portal to all that is. I open to unity through practice. I enjoy the unity I have with all things.
All answers are within. My senses can be a source of impressions. But all the answers are within. Even my own eyes are unreliable. Reality is known from my inner awareness. Only within is my consciousness aligned with the consciousness of the universe.
Communication from others is always somewhat suspect. Communication may be based on another’s own inner awareness, but the consequence of language is that I am only perceiving a shadow of another’s awareness. Today, communication is becoming even more distorted by the fabrication of AI technology and is deceptive.
Communication typically suggests a point of view based on the author’s imagination, and not necessarily an inner awareness. I have seen this fabrication of imaginative reality for years in the words of clerics. The landscape maps they describe is based on their creativity and imagination or that of others. Even the most skillful individuals offer but a shadow or reflection of an elusive experience.
Answers about reality are within. What I see and hear is a suggestion of reality. I only trust what resonates with clarity coming from my own inner experience. That is the inner place where I choose to live and trust. That is where I intend to be present.
Since I first joined the Blooming Heart Sangha, I have struggled with what we call the Five Mindfulness Trainings. I have resisted what seemed to me to be echoes of my early exposure to the Ten Commandments. No matter how the descriptions have been updated, they seem to have kept their ancient flavor of “Thou shalt not.” I have tried to value them as an ethical foundation for mindfulness. It is hard to be mindful if one is not ethical.
The flavor of the more contemporary language still has retained the sting of prohibition. I don’t like someone else to tell me what not to do.
It was a “beginning anew” ceremony at the beginning of January that opened my eyes a little more to the underlying problem I have had with our form of Buddhist practice. The ceremony began with a recitation of all the ways in which we had failed to live up to the ideals of the practice. We recited our wrongdoings in the form of a confession. It had all the negative feelings of the “mea culpa” I recited many times as an altar boy at the beginning of the Catholic celebration of Mass. This exercise took me deeper into an understanding of the negativity I have instinctively felt in the recitation of the Five Mindfulness Trainings.
The Five Mindfulness Trainings have their root in the Five Precepts that have come to us from the time of the Buddha. These are vows for lay persons. They are five vows taken to promote good conduct and support spiritual practice. They are all negative: no killing, no stealing, no sexual misconduct, no lying and no intoxicants. Traditionally, they are prohibitions of wrong behavior, they are vows of avoidance.
I don’t find this helpful. They are white lines of prohibition along the side of the middle path, warning us not to cross. I would prefer that they be arrows of encouragement, showing actions that promote mindfulness. I would prefer that they not tell me what to avoid.
I think that the Five Mindful Trainings as rewritten by Thay and the monastics of Plum Village are a helpful revision of the traditional Precepts. But they still sound to me like vows of avoidance. They are still burdened by the precepts of avoidance.
My own approach is expressed in the intention that I make every morning to be a guardian of nature, a healer of misery, a messenger of wonder, an architect of peace, a release from all suffering and a font of loving kindness. That kind of guidance for ethical behavior affirms the direction I want to go. It does not define what I want to avoid. It is a guidance based on insight into the object of desire, not on pitfalls to be avoided.
I simply want to acknowledge the Five Mindfulness Trainings as precepts. But I want them to be precepts of nourishing behavior, not warnings of behavior to avoid. If I am going to make it a commitment, I want it to be that I will: cultivate and support all forms of life, be generous and respectful of the needs of others, engage in powerful and loving erotic behavior with all beings, listen and speak with attention and transparency, and attentively nourish my mind and body.
These are precepts that I find helpful and nourishing. These are precepts that have positive meaning. These are precepts that train me in mindfulness.
I am cautious about trusting vision. I’m even somewhat distrustful and critical of my own vision. What my eyes see is often misleading. What I see around me is an interpretation, not truly an accurate representation. My eyes may work just fine, but my brain interprets what my eyes see. That interpretation is highly influenced by past experience. I only “see” what makes sense to me, which usually means how it corresponds to what I have experienced in the past.
Actually, I see with my mind, not with my eyes. And my mind can be misled, influenced and shaped by what happened in the past. I want to be able to see beyond what my eyes see, beyond the nerve impulses that come from my retinas, beyond the photons bouncing off the world around me.
The same is true of what others say and represent to me. I am cautious of what others tell me, especially if it involves the vision others have had. I am cautious about what others tell me about what is true, about how the world exists, even about what they have experienced.
I am very cautious about ritualized and written expressions of reality, as I experience in my Sangha. It is easier for me to listen to someone explaining their own experience than to listen to a written account of what is real. I resist accepting what someone else has written, especially someone who has established themselves in a position of authority. The vision of someone else is inherently flawed, just as my own vision can be flawed. What their eyes see can be misleading, especially if they are influenced by a point of view. I am especially critical of anyone who speaks from a position of authority, real or imagined.
I am least cautious about trusting my own vision, especially the internal vision that provides me a critical view of the world. My mind is critical, it is my ally, it is the vision I trust most.
There is a concept I don’t want to forget whenever I come across the MAGA nonsense about being patriotic, being true to the American ideals or preserving democracy.
This retrospective and misguided effort appears to want to derail the dynamics of an active, evolving democracy by returning to an imagined notion of what people thought a couple centuries ago. Based on the enlightenment experienced by the country in the intervening centuries, many early notions in 1776 now appear severely anti-democratic, bigoted and misogynistic.
