Author: barryschade@gmail.com

I sit on the edge of my bed and look out a window that stares into darkness. It is a darkness that has crept in. Only a few months ago, I would have been looking into a bright morning of light. Today there is only darkness. I see darkness everywhere. It is that time of year when the darkness sneaks in, slowly and quietly taking over more and more of each passing day.

As I gradually descend into this time of darkness, I feel the echoes of my past when I was enveloped in the weeks and works of Advent. For four weeks, I once allowed myself to consciously descend with other aware Christians into a darkened time of year. We knowingly surrounded ourselves with notions of darkness, mirroring the world around us. For us, it was a time that lead to a coming event at Christmas that would turn it all around.

For many people, it was a time to accept the darkening days as time crept toward Solstice when darkness would reverse the world and the sun would once again slowly return to bring light to each day. It was for all of us a time to settle into darkness, knowing that a celebration of light would come in a few weeks.

In recent times, that same darkness invites me to enter into a sphere of emptiness. Today I put aside the notions that give shape and definition to my days. I allow myself to settle into an experience of no shape, no form, no perception. Darkness reminds me to enter an arena of total letting go and descend into emptiness as a routine part of my life.

These days, when I am surrounded by darkness, it seems easier to touch the experience of nothingness. It is a time of emptiness where all is as quiet as a time of Advent. At the same time, the darkness feels so alive with the promise of infinite possibility. Surrendering to emptiness and entering a sphere of nothingness, I gain a sense that all is present. Unobserved but present.

I cheat a little during this darkening time of year. I may often look out my windows into darkness much more as the month of December advances. I have cheated darkness by populating my darkened yard with many tiny lights on trees around my home. Their soft glow reminds me of the promise that in the darkness there is light that can and will emerge.

I can celebrate my gradual entry into the emptiness of a darkened, indistinct world, knowing there is an abundance and richness enveloped by that cloak of darkness.

The darkness may lack form and substance, but it is also rich with abundance I may yet experience. Christians bring a faith and promise to their observance of Advent descent into darkness. I bring a confidence of emerging wholeness to my descent into emptiness. Whether I am staring out my window or sitting with closed eyes, darkness is not my foe. Darkness is my friend inviting me into a new kind of experience. I try to allow that experience of emptiness to happen. Sometimes it comes.

My dreams are often visited by ragged fragments of past experience that rise out of the distant mist to haunt me. Dreams hardly ever reach for an unrecognized or desired future. They mostly haunt me out of moldy graves of my past. They will not be forgotten, but remind me that they are a disjointed part of me that lingers just below the surface of my counciousness.

These haunts are fabricated out of memory parts that hover nearby and come out at night or during daytime naps. They roam in my imagination, pressing against the windows of my awareness. They leave emotional smears across my waking mind, reminding me that they have been present. And they are sure to return.

I wish that these fragments from my memories were more often pleasant or comforting. These haunts mostly recall unresolved moments of time that were uncomfortable. They come from places I would rather not revisit. They remind me of bits of experience that were difficult or challenging. I suspect they are moments that I have ever fully embraced as my own, and so they return to lurk and linger at the edges of my awareness.

My dreams are populated by these haunting guests who insist on ringing my door bell. They suddenly appear, uninvited, sitting on my living room couch and refuse to leave. If I wake, I am certain they will still be present if I allow myself to settle back into dreaming. There seems to be no way to get them to leave, except I become absorbed in my awake present. Even then, they are capable of leaving behind the emotional imprints of their presence.

If I return to sleep, they will take the occasion to return and appear as real as my hand before my eyes. They often leave an emotional imprint that reminds me for long moments, sometimes hours, that the haunt has been present and stirred my awareness.

These are the haunts that rise out of the moldy, musty detritus of my past. I wish that I were visited more often by a glowing fairy, bright with the promise of a relaxed mind when I wake. More often my haunts are a hairy man, a gnome that rises out of the decaying residue of a troubled time.

For a very long time, I have been trying to understand human nature. I think I have been looking for something that doesn’t exist, or at least doesn’t exist in the same sense that a tree outside my window exists. Thinking about my “nature” is confusing because the noun is not based on anything that is concrete and material. I don’t share a common “nature” with other humans, but I do share some of the same potential.

In my Sangha, we sometimes talk about humans having a Buddha nature. This is confusing because it is hard to find actualized Buddhas. So it is misleading to speak of sharing a common nature as though we have a reality in common. Being creatures with Buddha nature only means that we have the potential to become actualized as the Buddha was. Few of us are yet Buddhas. Few of us manifest what we refer to as our Buddha nature.

Being human by nature presents the same confusing notion. While anyone who is identified as homo sapiens sapiens is considered to be human by nature, that does not mean that they are actually human in the same manner as everyone else. I may have the potential to be human, but how that nature is manifest is unique to me.

Not everyone is human in the same way. In the most fundamental way, each of us is differently human. Our human nature is realized in different ways. While we might be considered to have the same nature, what we are is actually different. We are not the same.

Our nature is not something. The only way our human nature is something is if it is actualized in how we act. Our actions put us in the realm of reality. Anything we call human nature is but a collection of potentiality. Much of that potentiality is scarcely realized or actualized. Only fragments of our human nature is manifested.

I think each of us is potentially human in a different way. We certainly manifest a “human nature” in a different way. I think I have been trying to understand human nature in the wrong way, or perhaps have been looking in the wrong place. I think I want to give this more thought.

What does it take to notice that a new species, or a new sub-species is developing? What difference does it make? My son, Nathan, and I sometimes muse how humans with Aspergers Syndrome may be characterized as a sub-species of homo sapiens sapiens. We share this autism trait and are aware that we, and others like us, interpret reality and behave in a manner that distinguishes us from “typical” humans. We think that might make us a sub-species.

We are characterized as having Aspergers because we react to our environment in a distinctly different way. Moreover, there are many humans like us who have Aspergers and are distinguished as being different kinds of humans. Categorizing that difference in behavior reminds me how ancient mammals are described and categorized by how they responded to their environment in differing ways. We mostly know those ancient mammals through their fossilized remains. Those fossilized remains are important because they give us clues about how mammals behaved and adapted to their environment.

I have been wondering lately how it is that so many people seem to see the world different than I or most of my friends. We see reality in such different ways and react so differently that I think that we have become different kinds of human beings. I am not sure if that difference is enough to make us a sub-species, but it does distinguish us in fundamental ways.

It is not just that our thoughts are different or that we have different priorities and ideas. Watching our behavior makes me think that it is more fundamental than that. Our behavior reflects part of our essence, and the differences accordingly go very deep into our essence. Just like people with Aspergers or like ancient mammals, we are different because we behave differently.

In a deep sense, our behavior is who we are, and we are different from one another in essentially human ways.

I am noticing the epigenetic teaching that we humans inherit much more from our parents and ancestors than what is programmed by our DNA. We inherit more than eye color and body shape. We also inherit experiences of trauma and suffering. We inherit creativity and invention. We come into the world with unresolved conflicts of our ancestors and those conflicts become our own. They deeply affect how we react to our environment. Because we are humans, we can modify this inheritance, but it is part of who we are.

This is the teaching of Resmaa Menakem in his book “My Grandmother’s Hands.” His focus is on the trauma we inherit.

In the Buddhist tradition, there is also a teaching of the seeds we have within us, all of which affect how we behave. Our life and behavior is colored and affected by how we water and nourish those seeds. We begin our life with these seeds, and how we relate to them determines the real effect they have on our experience and our behavior. These seeds are like patterns of behavior at our core that can unfold as we allow. To me, these seeds seem like a rich form of human instinct that is constantly at the base of my behavior .

I think that these seeds are as real as the genes I received from my parents. The variety among the seeds is as great as the variety among our genes. The traits they manifest, the behavior is part of my inheritance. They underly my view of the world and distinguish how I react to it. They are at the base of how I behave and are manifested in how I eat, how I exercise and how I care for myself and others.

Because I am human and have the gift of intention, I can have some impact on how the seeds manifest. But essentially the seeds and the behavior they produce define the kind of human I am. Maybe they distinguish me enough that I can be characterized as a sub-species because of how I interpret reality and react to it.

It is ultimately behavior that, I think, defines differences in animals. It is human behavior that defines us as humans, species homo sapiens sapiens. While the physical attributes of a species are helpful in distinguishing one species from another, it is behavior and the traits of how individuals react to their environment that ultimately define what they are and determines whether they survive their environmental conditions.

Physical attributes are clues to behavior, and human behavior attributes are defining characteristics of human body and mind. The presence of tools in the ancient record indicated behavior that characterized a body and mind we recognize as truly human. Human species are typically characterized and defined by behavior that indicates mental activity. This is more so than most other mammals.

For humans, some significant defining behaviors have been “maker of tools,” “builders of fire,” and “acting compassionately.” Humans evolved into a new kind of creature when they gave up a former lifestyle and became farmers, then builders off cities. Within these broad categories, I think there have been many other distinctions that characterized mental function and the resulting behavior. Various groups of humans have distinguished themselves by how they relate to their environment. That environment includes not only their physical surroundings but also other humans.

Humans are different in how we think, and how we behave. That inclination to think and behave in a certain way has been handed from one generation to another, and is part of the evolution of humans. The differences in thinking and behavior distinguishes one group of humans from others. Groups of humans respond to their environment in unique ways, and are subject to principles of evolution in equally unique ways.

I think that there is a broad array of sub-species within the broad category homo sapiens sapiens. We are each distinguished by how we interpret reality and how we respond to it. Our thinking may well be unique, but it is our unique behavior that allows us to distinguish one group from another. The differences allow us to define both who and what we creatures really are. The differences allow us to observe which groups adapt well to their environment and which are maladaptive.

There is a lot of emphasis on paying attention to how we are all alike. I think we are also served well by paying attention to how we are different. Some of those differences work better than others. Some of those differences are important for survival of the species.

More and more, I go to a room only I can enter. There is a room in my mind where I often enter. This room has a place in the back of my mind, or so it seems when I am there. I mostly go there in moments of deep, relaxed mind.

This room is a place that feels removed from all my surroundings. It is a room removed from my normal, cascading thoughts. Only the thoughts I allow to enter are present, and with them I experience an energetic intimacy. While this room is apart from all things in my immediate experience, it is such an intimate place. I am more at home and alive here than any other place.

I am more present in this room than any other place I can imagine. When I am in this room, my focus is more intense and concentrated than anywhere else. It is a place I can take a sensory experience and it becomes brighter and full of energy. This room swirls with a strange combination of extreme ease and intense energy.

This is a room that I enter by deciding to step inside. The power of my intention is the first step, and then I begin a divesting of my transitory relationships with my normal experience. I often take tokens of my surroundings with me. I take the solid feeling of the floor beneath me, I take people I am attentive to, I take plants that reach out to me in my garden. When they enter my room, they become absorbed in the ease and energy that surrounds them.

The way to my room is becoming more familiar. My body and mind know the way. They take me there when I remember to go and pause to allow the door to swing open. I go to the room in the back of my mind where I am very alive.

I have been struggling with names. I don’t mean the normal effort it takes to remember people’s names. I struggle daily to remember and recognize names such as Sphenacondontiodae, Sinoconodontidae, and Procynosuchidae. Almost every day I struggle with a whole assortment of names that have been given to ancient groups of early mammal-like animals. All of these creatures lived a couple hundred million years ago, but they now enter into my daily struggle to recognize them by their true names.

The instructor of the course, Fossil record of mammals, rattles these names off as glibly as if he were talking about his young children or his assortment of cousins. I am amazed how someone can be so at ease and struggle so little in referencing these ancient lineages of mammal ancestors. He shows no hesitation in coming up with an assortment of syllables that are familiar to him and that concur up concepts of unique animals with recognized traits. I meanwhile struggle to pronounce the names and vaguely associate the names with certain kinds of animals.

It struck me this morning how I might do the same thing as my instructor if I would lead him through my garden. With little hesitation, I would point out plants, giving them both a common and a scientific name. In my garden, my common speech would easily be littered with names such as Lysimachia, Kirengeshoma, and Filipendula. As I spoke their names, I would have a clear concept of my association with that plant. Their name would remind me of certain traits of the plant, perhaps be a reference to other plants of the same family.

I still have a reasonable recall of several hundred names of plants, all of which I learned to recognize. I could, with little effort, call them by their proper and real name. Now, as I struggle to remember names of animals I will never see face to face, I think of how every discipline has a language of names unique to that area of familiarity.

The language of common speech is amazing enough in itself. Humans have come up with so many different sounds and words to describe what they experience. On top of practical common speech, there are so many unique names that describe individuals or groups of individuals.

I once went beyond my daily experience and learned to make sounds rising out of the Greek alphabet. I learned the names of many things in Latin, French and Spanish. Besides learning the names of ancient animals, I now struggle with a whole new group of names as my native culture embraces immigrants whose names sound nothing like those familiar names I grew up with: Tom, Nancy, and Charlie.

While names might be a struggle for me, they also are a kind of shorthand. It is useful for me to speak of a dog instead of four-legged animal with fur, a wagging tail and a bark. I can even speak of a specific animal as Jet, and people will know exactly which being I mean and what kind of being they are.

Learning new names seems like a good thing for me. My world of names is growing slowly in spite of my considerable struggle. I am happy for that growth, and so I work every day at learning new names. I am determined to force a few more names into my brain, and I am convinced that a few of those ancient mammals will become almost as familiar as the plants in my garden.

It has become a daily practice for me to spend at least a few moments thinking of my ancestors, typically welcoming them to be part of my day. However, just “who” those ancestors are has changed dramatically.

I keep a photo of my Mom and Dad on my dresser, and that photo is a routine stop in my morning routine. It is a photo of them before they had children, and I like to think of them as simply Mary Lee and Henry. To me, they have a reality in that photo that otherwise gets distorted by the later varnish of parenthood. They are in an intimate sense, my ancestors, and I like to feel how their presence as a woman and a man continues in me.

That is changing. For a month, I have been immersed in a university course on the Fossil Record of Mammals, and my notion of my ancestors has been stretched way beyond that photo on my dresser. I notice that I have a couple hundred million years of ancestors to account for.

My hallway upstairs is a photo gallery of some of my ancestors that go back several generations. I sometimes pause and look at them. My parents, my grandmother, my great grandparents all remind me that I have identifiable roots that go back more than a century. But my ancestors go back much further, and I carry traces of them all.

I have been aware that I have ancestors who lived in Europe. I don’t know what their faces looked like, but I suspect I see something of them when I look in the mirror each morning. If I turn my imagination loose, I can imagine those ancestors who might have been struggling to become “human” some 20,000 years ago. Even they would be easily recognized as someone who looked just like me if they walked into my garden, dressed in modern clothing. I would not have trouble being identified as their progeny. They would easily pass as my ancestors, and I am acutely aware that I carry traces of them.

However, the humans who lived 200,000 years ago probably didn’t look just like me, and they had not yet begun to act just like my contemporaries. However, there were many similarities, and it is not at hard to recognize them as my ancestors. I am one of their distant children, and I carry in my bones unmistakable signs of my lineage.

Of course, it doesn’t stop there. As I am learning in my class on Mammal fossils, I have ancestors that were running around 200 million years ago. They exhibited traits then that I clearly share with them, even though they ranged in size between a mouse and a medium sized dog. They were eaten by larger dinosaurs and they included small dinosaurs in their diet. The modern humans that I know might not have lived in the time of the dinosaurs, but my ancestors certainly did. They just looked a little different than I do now.

It is a new experience for me to be thinking of these ancient precursors of humans as my ancestors, but I am beginning to occasionally invite them into my day. I am who and what I am because of them, and for me that is enough to make them my ancestors.

I am slightly aware that the reptilian part of my brain goes back in time even farther. My brain development and activity reflects my reptilian ancestors that go back well beyond 300 million years. That is an awareness that still seems a bit slippery to me. But I suspect that some day I will recognize, even welcome reptiles as my ancestors as well.

For now, it is enough for me to think about the early mammals. They were my very ancient ancestors who scurried around a variety of plants I would scarcely recognize. What was part of them is now part of me. It is enough for me to recognize them as my remote ancestors and occasionally thank them for making me the kind of individual I am.

I’ve developed a very narrow view about the value of teachings. I’m convinced that most teachings are not valuable for their content but for the validation they give to my personal experience. Most teachings do not convey much intellectual content, but they can validate what I experience.

Teachings seldom offer something that I want to yield to. However, they can provide an intellectual framework that gives permission for me to accept and follow my own experience. I do not pay attention to teachings that contradict what I experience. But I do value those teachings that validate my experience, perhaps put my experience in a helpful framework.

Even when I am reading an instruction manual for assemblage or operation of some item, I always examine the item carefully after reading the directions. I check whether the instructions, as I understand them, make sense. I follow the directions only after examining the piece of furniture or the mechanical tool I am trying to figure out. If the instruction makes sense, based on that examination, I follow the instruction.

Even teachings on theoretical things have limited instructional value. Teachings are useful because they help me to trust and rely on my own experience without resistance from my mind. For me to accept it, the teaching has to make sense to me, and that means correspond to my experience.

I carry a whole lifetime of cultural and academic teachings that I am constantly examining, sometimes challenging based on my experience. Especially when I was in theology classes, I was often told “You just want to have it your way.” I was told that often during my training, and I think that is true. I do want to accept only that which corresponds to my experience, or at least validates it.

Even the Buddha is reported as saying about his teachings, “don’t take my word for it; discover it yourself.” I suppose that I follow that way of thinking, and challenge even the teachings of the Buddha. I will accept only the teachings that correspond to my experience. I trust my experience, which is not something I can say about all teachings.

I’ve gotten weary of seeing the word “natural” on the packaging of foods. It is a word that has deep significance for me. Now I cringe when I see it printed on food and used as a distracting ploy of advertising with little meaning at all.

I am natural. I am part of nature, and noticing that is to be invited to a stirring intimacy with all things natural. I am part of an evolutionary process that has gone back many million years. I have a dependent relationship with nature that is beyond my control, even if I should try to resist it.

For me there is no escape, but there is the opportunity to enter deeply into a living relationship with the whole world around me. The interdependence of all things in this world includes me, and the more I recognize it the more I can enjoy my place in this wonderful embrace.

I trust my nature. I trust my mind to glow with insight when I discard all the clutter that I and my culture have added to my thinking. My challenge is to relax and yield to my nature. My intent is to live a natural life.

Most things make sense to me only in the context I have created. This is what I have been doing since I was born. I shape the context so that I can relate to what I experience.

I noticed that when I dictated a text message to someone last evening, Siri wrote down a word both I and the recipient knew was not correct. We each inserted the meaning of the correct word. We knew to do this only because of the shaped context both of us brought to the reading of the text message. We both knew what I meant, even though a literal reading of the written world was something else.

This happens constantly. It happens when I am interpreting, actually deciphering the meaning of something I have earlier written in longhand. My handwriting is notoriously hard to read, even for me. My scrawl is more like shorthand and is only remotely accurate in forming enough letters to spell out words. But I am still consistently able to understand the meaning of the partially-written words because I am aware of the context. My mind supplies all the form that the lines on paper only suggest or remotely represent.

This is like most of my life. Things I experience typically make sense to me because of the context I supply. I often see what I expect to see. When I notice a neighbor in their yard, I typically see whom I expect to see. This happens spontaneously until I become aware of information that contradicts what the context provides. I might realize that the person I noticed actually isn’t my neighbor but someone else.

When I visit with a neighbor or other friend, our whole conversation is awash in the context of our past association. We each bring context to a conversation that could be very brief in duration. Context fills in many gaps and expands the meaning of much that is said.

I am increasingly aware how my body brings context to most of what I encounter. It is a context built out of many years of experience and practice. A body that has learned to be anxious or cautious shapes my experience of people I don’t know, especially people of color. A relaxed and receptive body creates a whole different context when I meet friends or walk through my garden. The context shapes the experience.

The world I walk in every minute has meaning because of the context my life has shaped. Learning to see things as they really are requires that I be able to somehow put most of that context aside. It demands that I quiet a body and a mind that is eager to provide an abundance of context and meaning.

Learning to shed the habit of context comes from practice. Learning how to quiet my body and mind is neither easy or rapid. Learning to shed my habit of creating context happens slowly, but it requires surprisingly little effort. That is the way that letting go of habits is for me. Letting go is not effort. It is not acting.

I think it helps when I have the intention of creating a different kind of context. Sometimes that means creating a context of no presumptions. It helps to have the intention of living in a daily world of unlimited possibilities. This is a context I find attractive. This is a context I would like to live in.