Author: barryschade@gmail.com

It has been some time since I began distancing myself from any expression of faith and decided to mostly rely on what I experience. For me, there was just too much imagination involved with faith, mostly someone else’s, and not enough observation and insight. Mostly I was becoming faithless in the arena of religion, a process rooted in my early 20’s.

I was mistaken to see faith as belonging only to issues of religion, and I’m noticing how much faith plays a role in so many areas of our lives. Today, I’m especially impressed by how much people rely on faith when it come to political views. Faith, not observation and insight, seems to guide the political decisions and actions many people take. I’m wondering about how faith affects my own political views.

My training and education in religion required that I have a hefty dose of faith to guide me along. In those days, faith charted out a world of unseen realities and promised a future with little observation or experience to support it. It went beyond the known and sometimes even pushed aside the known to reveal a world unsupported by anything I could see or did not want to see.

Religious faith enabled me to trust a reality that would support, sustain and save me. Relying as it did on the unseen, it was little more than imagination and superstition. Faith had no basis in my experience and relied heavily on the imagination of others.

Being faithless has given me a vantage point to notice how so many people rely on faith in the arena of politics. I see so much evidence of people going beyond the known and believing in a reality that is unsupported by anything they can see or want to see. Their political faith allows them to ignore the observations they can easily make and fashion a world of unseen, even false realities. Their political faith allows them to trust in a future that has little observation or insight to support it.

This is my way to make sense of a political environment clouded in so much untruth and imagination. The political arena has taken on the aspects of faith and superstition. Perhaps it has always been so, but it now appears more obvious to me. It is easier for me to think of so many people acting out of faith and superstition, rather than out of greed and malicious intentions. They just can’t see.

I prefer to live in a manner that is faithless.

There is space inside of me that encompasses and makes sense of all I encounter. This space reaches out and translates everything I encounter. In this space, I experience reality. It is where I encounter the essence of flowers and wind. It is where I absorb whatever comes to me or whatever I seek out.

This space has no definition or shape of its own, but is shaped by whatever I might absorb. Like the amorphous arms of an amoeba, this space reaches out and yields to what it encounters so that each essence might be intimately realized and absorbed.

Through relaxation and concentration, this space becomes pliable and flexible enough to be able to absorb. Then it is shaped by reality, and, being pliable and yielding does not shape what it encounters. This space, ideally has no definition or design, but takes on the definition and design of reality when allowed.

This space within me is infinite in proportion and in possibility. It is not limited by concept or time. It is with me at all times, but I am realizing its nature only in small ways.

This space is free to absorb when I allow my concentration to plunge in to the depths of focused and free attention. That is something that comes and goes.

From time to time I enter this space through brief attention to my nostrils and the breath entering and exiting. By allowing the representation of that breath to manifest, I find that I have entered this space within me, and it is a wonderful place to be. From this undefined space, I can drift into an awareness that comes through absorption. Realities that seemed to be outside me, are suddenly inside of me and part of me.

I think that this space is where I truly experience the world. For so much of my life, this space has been limited and shaped by my imagination and concepts. It is now possible for an older mind like mine to become pliable and able to be shaped by realities not my own.

The space inside me is slowly becoming not just my rigid world, but a flexible world surrendering to a realm of infinite possibilities.

I spent most of yesterday with people who share a similar attitude about mindfulness and the perception that mindfulness creates. I understand better how perceptions shape and highly influence how I see and interpret reality. My perceptions both affect what I see and shield me from seeing things that do not fit my perceptions.

How else could so many features of climate change present themselves and so many people are not able to see what is happening. Their individual perceptions of the natural world shape and restrict what they are able to see.

I notice how many religious groups have been in the midst of sexual abuse and exploitation by their leaders. And yet so many members of those religious groups are unable to recognize and internalize the reality of what is going on. Pema Chodron has finally pulled back, too late perhaps, from her role in the Shambala community because of that group’s inability to respond in a manner that the situation and their values might otherwise demand.

Tens of thousands, perhaps millions of Catholics have sat mute in their pews, inattentive to the sexual exploits of their leaders. Their perceptions have kept them from seeing what has been right before them. Yet they have not responded to, and often denied behavior of their leaders inconsistent with their common values.

So many people have perceptions that shape how they see the terrible behavior of political leaders. The do not recognize, even see behavior that is not only repugnant but also not in their own best interests. Their perceptions bend and shape what they are able to see.

I wonder who it is that can see clearly, independent of the distraction of social media, news casters and preachers? It is not easy to separate myself from these outside influence that would shape my perceptions. It is challenging to see clearly with insight, not influenced by my culture, my teachers, my on-going sources of information.

For this reason, I sit and free my mind from distractions, at least a couple times a day. I slowly learn to see without the guidance and distortions in perception coming from teachers, culture, and media. I sometimes sit with friends who also try to develop the skills of mindfulness, concentration and insight.

Perhaps this will help me see more of the world free from a multitude of distracting, distorting perceptions.

I am aware how words add to the clutter in my mind. So useful in communication, words become clutter when I intend to understand an experience, become more deeply aware of some reality, or see clearly what a situation demands from me.

Words actually interfere with insight. While they may on occasion guide me to an awareness, it is more likely that words will become so much clutter that distracts and interferes with awareness. Words obscure insight.

This is especially true when I consider rules and precepts. Rules add to the clutter. While rules are very useful in a cultural setting, their effectiveness is limited to how people might relate to one another. Rules are a way of setting expectations among people regarding the kind of behavior we want of one another.

Rules are effective and useful in defining how we “want things to be.” Rules are not so useful when they become personal, when they enter my mind and become the focus of my attention. They add to the clutter in my my mind, a distraction.

Rules may from time to time become a place of reference, a way of noticing “this is how things are.” However, on a personal level, rules that direct any activity are not so useful in helping me to understand how things are. Rules do not lead to insight, but they sometimes may arise from insight.

Rules are clutter if they function like the white line down the middle of the highway that becomes the center of my attention. They are a peripheral reference point, not a focus of awareness.

The lame effectiveness of rules is evident in how I might learn a new skill such as pruning trees Rulesare are very limited in being able to teach me how I might best become intimately familiar with a way of behavior or acting. If I have a teacher who praises me or corrects me based on how I am pruning trees, the voice of my teacher soon becomes the focus of my attention. I want to please them, conform to their words, avoid their criticism.

Rather than focusing and becoming more aware of my pruning behavior, I pay attention to the voice, the rules of my teacher. I want to learn the skill of pruning trees, not the skill of listening to my teacher. The rules of my teacher become clutter in my mind and obscure my focus. The rules actually interfere with my learning. Rules of my teacher become a distraction, an abject of attention, rather than an assist.

Insight demands the elimination of clutter in my mind, and rules add to the clutter. Insight does not come from words and is typically inhibited by words, the rules of thought. Insight is an awareness that might generate words, but it is an experience of reality that is unspeakable.

Rules and precepts do not capture the undefinable mystery of reality that is accessed without concepts and words. Even though they may have some usefulness in explaining how things are, rules do not tell me how to experience reality..

Rules may suggest how things are, but they are not helpful in telling me what to do. Rules that tell me what to do add to the clutter of my mind.

It use to be something infrequent and even startling. It could happen at the bathroom sink, behind the steering wheel of my car, or sitting on my bed. But it mostly happened next to my bed when I sat on my large pillow. Now it is more frequent and even reliable. I pause and notice my breath for a moment and in a flash I am focused on a representation of the breath.

Somehow my mind simply relaxes and the representation of the breath replaces the actual sensation of the breath.

With little or no effort, I find myself no longer in a sensory experience but in a slightly different and adjusted realm. The experience of breath is no longer in my nostrils but somewhere indistinguishable, nearly undefined. My whole body seems to become aware of breath, but it is a body without sensory stimulus to focus on. There is only the representation of breath.

Somehow my mind has opened up to an experience beyond simple sensory perception. The shift is both subtle and dramatic. The breath experience is no longer an isolated, tactile awareness of air flowing across nasal membrane. It is now more an awareness that the sensory experience is being known. I no longer know the breath but a representation of the breath. I know the breath as being known.

My focus is in the realm of my mind, not in the realm of breathing. The more I relax into an awareness of what it is like to breathe, the more the representation of breath comes into focus.

A release has taken place. I am no longer in possession of the sensation of breath but have surrendered my grip on that sensory experience. The sensory experience has dissolved and been replaced by a representation of what breath once was like.

I no longer have a hold on the sensory experience, the sense stimulus. In releasing my sensory experience, I allow the breath representation to become the focus, the object of my awareness.

The representation has no clear location but is expansive. It has no simple location like the end of my nose, such as the sensation of breath might have. It seems almost boundless and everywhere.

What had been limited by the feeling of moving air has been replaced by a representation that feels more like a vast void. This is no empty void but a void that holds whatever might arise. Anything and all things seem likely, even waiting to arise.

Thoughts and concepts seem almost alien in this arena of representation. However, thoughts and concepts might be allowed to enter if that becomes my intention. I might deliberately allow that to happen in times I am driving or sitting across from a friend. It might happen when I am trying to resolve a problem.

At that time, I know my concentration has deepened and my clarity of focus has increased because I have made the subtle shift from being aware of the sensation of breathing. I have allowed my mind to relax, to be released into the representation of breath.

Sometimes it is just plain difficult to recognize that I am part of a criminal species. I am a member of homo sapiens, a member of a species that I am certain killed many of its own kind last night. I haven’t seen the newspaper yet, but I am certain that I will once again receive the news of what we have criminally done to one another.

It is hard to be frequently reminded that I am one of those creatures who kill one another, cheat other humans and take advantage of the weaker members of our species. We are a species most capable of insight and compassion, and yet we use our advanced intellect to cause harm and havoc among our own species.

It is hard to daily hear more news of celebrated criminals whose political power allows them to do harm to many fellow humans. For this they are idolized and applauded. I live among many countrymen who are thrilled to have elected champions who punish the poor and shield us from those who might want to share in our abundance.

It is hard to be one of the criminals who participate in the destruction of parts of the earth out of greed and power and not out of need. How can I be comfortable to be part of a species made up of billions of people willing to ignore and even exploit an environmental disaster. We invite our own destruction and ignore our self-imposed fate.

It is hard to live among criminals, and it is especially difficult to recognize that, in my own way, I am one of them. I have my own individual role I play in the mob action that causes harm and havoc all across the world.

I have my own life of privilege that is built on the harm and deprivation of many others. Still, I rise each morning and take my part in this criminal drama that shields and comforts me in many ways.

I wonder who of us will be left. Who of us will survive to give and receive forgiveness for our criminal behavior? Who of us be left to repair and rise above what has been criminally done?

Last evening we talked in terms of becoming enlightened, mirroring the words of Thay in “The Other Shore.” To me it is a welcome experience to be enlightened, but it is more like becoming awakened. The dormant potential of being human emerges into being felt and ardently experienced.

Becoming awakened, enlightened, is nothing really extraordinary or exceptional. It is no elitist experience of those who spend quiet years in a secluded monastery. It is something that can happen in all of us and on a daily basis. We all have the seeds of enlightenment. We each have Buddha nature. We have within us the essence of being awakened, of being a Buddha.

Nothing needs to be added for us to become an awakened one. No water needs to be poured over our heads, no one needs recite prayers over us, no oil is needed for anointing. Nothing needs to be added from the outside, we have all we need within us. Awakening just needs the right conditions, just like any germinating seed.

I have found that I primarily need to allow the energy to flow and not impede it. The key to awakening is concentration, and that involves a total lack of effort. It involves a removal of the hindrances, the obstacles.

Concentration allows awakening to happen every day. It opens the way to insight and allows awakening to happen. Concentration makes evident a deep understanding of the true condition , the true situation. In the midst of concentration, there are no impediments, there are none of the distractions typically coming from religion, entertainment, politics , cultural artifacts.

I consider the most difficult obstacle to concentration and the experience of awakening is the “I”, or self. The “I” is a major obstacle to awakening, to enlightenment. Concentration can happen when the “I” is aside. When I step out of the “I” role, Buddha nature is able to awaken and emerge.

This recently has been most evident in how I employ the breath as a means of concentration. I have realized that it is not effective for me to tell myself ” I am knowing my breath.” Deep concentration happens when I tell myself “The breath is being known.” Mindfulness, concentration happens when the “I” is left aside.

For me, learning to put the “I” aside is key to awakening, to every day enlightenment. The effect is transformative, and is more than just allowing insight to occur. In addition to insight, this experience of awakening is an embrace, a release, a surrender.

Living awakened is a transformed, liberated way of living.

I just noticed a very simple thing, and I’m surprised I haven’t thought much about it in the past. It is something that frames and provides the platform for how I am learning to concentrate. It is a core theme in how I meditate. And it still feels like a discovery.

Whenever I consider the parts of my body, my hands, my face, my feet, it is the part of me where my consciousness lands. If I happen to whisper anything at all to my knowing mind, it is something like “my face is being known, my chin is known, my breath is known.”

I notice that this is a habit, and that I do not whisper “I know my face, I know my chin, I know my breath.” There is no “I” involved. The awareness is I-less. Without the “I”, the awareness is clear, energetic, joyful.

I notice that the way I surrender when I focus concentration is without an “I”. There is no acknowledgement or awareness that “I” am taking the plunge into formless space, a free fall into nothingness. There is only an awareness that the plunge is being taken.

This lack of a reference to self seems so important as I think back to what kind of release I experience when I relax and fall into the void. “I” has been left behind. “I” remains behind me on the shore as my concentration pushes out into the flowing, formless stream.

The conscious entity that ventures out towards the other side is without an identity, without a name. The entity is close to being “I-less”. I am obliquely aware that I am the one engaged in the journey. But the “I” is mostly off to the side. The focus of awareness, the concentration is that the journey is being taken.

I know that this seems like a small discovery, but it has already affected the way I am moving through the day. It began with the realization that when I scan parts of my body, my consciousness envelopes and absorbs all it touches. The cheeks, the nose, the breath are simply being known. There is no need for an “I” to act or take charge.

The subject of any sentence I might whisper is not the “I” who appears to act. The subject is the object that is being known. I notice that there is much to take in, much to absorb, much to be aware. It seems that this happens in such a relaxed, joyful, gentle way when “I” is not in the way. I seem to be learning a way that is I-less.

Perhaps it was with good intention that some people have called the Earth “Mother.” For me, this is wrong and unhelpful. To anthropomorphize the Earth in this way ignores reliable observation and encourages bad behavior.

If indeed the Earth has consciousness, it is not the consciousness of a caring, benevolent Mother. The Earth does not tolerate inattention, disrespect or careless behavior. It is not accurate or good to see the Earth as an entity acting in a mothering way.

In fact, the Earth has traits that are characteristically unfriendly and hostile to humans, even while humans have been given a select niche in which to prosper and survive. I fail to see that humans are regarded as anything special, entitled to mothering. It is not a caring, benevolent Mother that erupts and sends ash, lava and deadly gas in all directions, regardless what number of humans are affected.

It is not a mothering gesture to send destroying hurricanes ashore or ravaging tornadoes across a countryside populated by humans. It is no mothering entity that causes my fingers to go numb and white in winter. It is no mothering care that causes others to die in summer from drought and heat. The same Earth that provides nourishment also yields poisons that kill and harm humans.

I can breathe oxygen that plants have rather recently learned to spread in the vastness of the earth’s atmosphere. However, that is a balance that humans have now learned to alter. The apparently friendly benevolence of the Earth’s atmosphere can be changed by humans to an inhospitable, polluted atmosphere of suffocation and harm.

The Earth may have the appearance to some of a nurturing mother. But the Earth also is an unmoved arbiter of vengeance to creatures that ignore or alter the power and delicate balance of the Earth’s ecological systems.

Humans are nourished by plants that grow from the earth. But humans also can make the same nourishing food into agents of harm by the way humans apply chemicals to the Earth and alter the natural productivity of the land. The Earth is no motherly protector who catches a toddler who stumbles because of a lack of skill or insight. The toddler falls.

At best, humans are gardeners who have this brief time in the history of the Earth to draw breath and nourishment from the Earth. Humans have a very recent relationship with an Earth whose history has nothing to do with mothering humans. For a relatively brief moment in time, the Earth has given us a home and become a hospitable place for humans to live and prosper.

It now appears that humans have perhaps overlooked that hospitality and have become unruly and unwelcome guests. The Earth has, in very unmotherly fashion, already begun to eliminate these ungrateful and destructive guests. Changes in the climate brought on by humans have already caused the suffering and starvation of millions of people. There is no intervening Mother protecting the gardeners who have ignored or misused the welcome from a gracious Earth.

I wonder if humans who have become like unruly children of a dispassionate planet will change. Will humans change enough of their greedy and uncaring behavior before they are cast aside by the Earth as countless creatures have been cast aside and gone extinct in the past. No Mother protected them, and there is no Mother who will protect humans from such a fate.

The Earth does not tolerate inattention. If humans cannot be skillful observers of what the Earth demands, humans will surely perish. They will at least perish in great numbers, but perhaps not totally perish. If humans continue to show themselves to be disrespectful, unruly guests in the Earth’s garden, they will certainly be evicted.

If the Earth is indeed a Mother, the Earth is more demanding than any mother I have ever met.

The scaffolding through which I interpret and approach the world still affects the way others see me. It is how I present and reveal myself.

But that same scaffolding is becoming more fuzzy, loose and fluid the more I am able to approach moments of unstructured absorption. My own scaffolding seems to have less and less effect on how I see and understand others, even while I think it still has some effect on the way they see me.

I noticed this at a gathering I attended last evening. When I look at my life and try to see it as others might, I see a structured scaffolding that has a certain shape. I think others might see me as a presence that has a certain scaffolding. I have been living in a shape, a form that gives shape. There is a scaffolding that affects how others see me and how they see who I have become.

I think that that same scaffolding has shaped for me how I see the world. I look out through the same scaffolding and think I understand what I see, all based on my own scaffolding. That scaffolding has shaped my experience and how I have interpreted all I have encountered.

A friend of mine is currently in Egypt, traveling through the traces of an ancient civilization and sending back amazing images that suggest what that civilization must have been like 4000 years ago. As I look back, as I suspect my friend does as well, we see a structure of a world now seen only from the outside.

Moreover, that same scaffolding also shaped the view that those people who lived 4000 years ago used to interpret and understand their world. I am aware that, looking through the scaffolding I can see, I have a certain view of those ancient Egyptians. The scaffolding they have left behind, shapes my understanding of their world.

However, I strongly suspect that their view looking out through that same scaffolding, must have been dramatically different from mine. Yet we both are looking at essentially the same world.

What view did indigenous people have of those strange, uncivilized Europeans who came ashore in 1609? How they must have seen them as uncultured, dressed in those awkward, tiny shoes and wearing those unpractical, ridiculous hats. They even rowed ashore in boats that had no relationship to the forests and streams the indigenous people knew so well. Those uncivilized Europeans even farmed in such impractical, unproductive ways, planting vegetables in separate straight lines. Did then not know about the benefits of the Three Sisters?

I live in a neighborhood that is a structured scaffold of parallel streets, two-storied houses and a rich assortment of yards and gardens. It is what outsiders see and experience as they come into Bryn Mawr. It is what shapes my scaffold view of the neighborhood, my living space. It affects what I understand as I look out and take in the world beyond my neighborhood.

It is this proximate scaffolding with which I surround myself that I use as I daily make sense of the world.

I meet at least once a week with others who are characterized by others as meditators, Buddhists, mindful people. That is how others see the scaffolding of our lives, shaped as it is by reflective, mindful living.

For me, that same scaffolding profoundly affects the way I see the world. It offers an ordering that arises out of my mind to filter and be imposed on all I see.

At the same time, I think that my personal scaffolding is having less effect on my view than it once did. The rigidity of my scaffolding is relaxing, especially as I begin to have moments of formless absorption. The scaffolding clearly is present, but it is getting more soft around the edges, a little more fluid. My view of the world keeps shifting from day to day.

There are times that I think I come close to seeing others as they are without the filtering influence of my own life structure.