Author: barryschade@gmail.com

Yesterday, I stood for forty-five minutes on the corner of 9th and Nicollet, waiting for the number nine bus to arrive and take me home. It was cold and uncomfortable standing all that time, sometimes leaning against the stone building. It was, in looking back, a bit of immersion in reality. A chance opportunity to be real.

The elderly white woman next to me repeatedly stepped forward into the middle of the sidewalk. She looked down the street to see if the bus was approaching. When I tried to tell her it was still over 15 minutes away, she shook her head and pointed to her ears. I smiled and nodded.

There was a flurry of activity off to my left and a couple of young black men quickly hurried around the corner up Nicollet. Suddenly there was a chorus of angry voices. I couldn’t understand a word, but the loud shouting continued for a long time. I resisted the urge to walk to the corner and see what was happening. I was afraid.

A white woman huddled against the building to my right, clutching a pair of Yaktrax in one hand. Her stocking cap was pulled over her forehead down to her glasses. She had on a mask up to her glasses. I would not recognize her if I ever saw her again. She was hunched up quietly.

Trucks came and went, taxis dropped off people, individuals shouted across the street to someone.

A middle-aged black man and I joined in joking about the long wait for the bus. He kept dancing around on the sidewalk between the building and the curb. He had to pee he said, and was resisting going a little way up the sidewalk to get relief. He joked about not wanting to wet himself and we both laughed. He pulled a brown bag out of his satchel and took a drink. We kept up our exchange until the bus arrived.

My bus finally showed up and I gingerly stepped onto the ice in the gutter, not wanting to slip as I got on the bus. I scanned my card and found a seat, surrounded by a cluster of people I did not recognize and would likely not see again.

This has been my real world on a Tuesday morning.

It is frustrating for me that discussing sexuality is so absent or off-base in our culture.   Talking about sexuality and “private” body parts is routinely shrouded in shame-based avoidance or denigrated by exploitive humor.   

Something so natural and pleasant as sexuality is typically avoided or danced around in our culture.    It is something of a paradox since our bodies are so emblematic of who we are and how we see ourselves.   Yet we are so reluctant to genuinely share what would otherwise be expressive of what is and who we are.   

Speech mirrors cultural behavior. It is interesting to me how men and women play peekaboo with breasts.   We play a mutual game of going to great lengths to display and observe the shape of women’s breasts or reveal an abundance of skin.   We only stop at the ambivalence of how much nipple to display.   

The poverty of our sexual language in the culture reflects this ambivalence about bodies.   I am happy that some friends and I choose to embrace and even redeem sexual language.   This freedom of speech has begun to flow into my casual conversation with friends and we sometimes bravely talk about issues related to our sexuality. Speech need not be hamstrung by culture.

Soon after I was born, I learned to live in the world as I interpret it.  That activity is largely the work of my imagination.   How much I actually come close to seeing things as they are depends on my skills of observation, sometimes called mindfulness. 

It is easier to live in a world as imagined because it corresponds to my wants and fears.  It allows me to reach what I want and avoid what might harm me. I routinely grasp and avoid based on what I imagine, not on what I might observe if I ignored my wants and fears.  

No one is unique in choosing to live in a world as imagined.  It is a common practice. I think it takes becoming vulnerable to see the world as it is.  It takes letting go of our wants and fears to experience the world as seen and not as imagined.  

For me to surrender to the full force of a hug, I have to let go of my fear. If we each surrender, we both became vulnerable as we step out of our imagination. 

I no longer have a Path To Follow.

Perhaps it is the result of aging, of my approaching the end of my physical presence.

• I have noticed that some common themes have entered my life as I entered my 80’s 
• So many things are compressed, particularly time and space.
• Months ago, I read a quote from The Pearl Garland Tantra and it has become a daily theme of mine.
• It is an ancient text: “I no longer have a path to follow, I have gone to the other shore, I am all alone, but I am connected to everything.”
• It has become an often-repeated intention of mine:  “May I find that I no longer have a path to follow; may I recognize that I have arrived at the other shore; alone, may I see that I am connected to all things.”

It is a theme I have noticed showing up in Thay’s words.

• I hear him saying, “you no longer have a path to follow”, “you have arrived at the other shore,” “you are connected to all things.
• All is compressed into a deeply engaging now.
• For me, it is an invitation to enter into deep intimacy with the world.   To embrace a deep engagement with all things, with all beings, with all my friends, with you.

I no longer have a path to follow.

• So much of our practice references being on a path.
• Perhaps that is true in the historical sense;  minutes follow minutes, hours follow days, days follow days.
• But in a perspective of the ultimate, I have no more path to follow, my feet need not move, I have arrived.
• In the practice, the path seems like a tightrope; I want to lean neither to the side of grasping nor the side of aversion;  I am moving forward to some goal.
• In my experience, I am also standing still on the tightrope, I no longer have a path to follow;   this is IT.

I think Thay summed up his deep engagement with life when he wrote his book, “The Other Shore.”

• He wrote as one who has fully experienced what it is to stand on the other shore, of having arrived.  
• His experience of the other shore comes out in the Heart Sutra, as he translated it.  This is what it is like.  This is IT.
• You are standing on the Other Shore, and all you need do is experience it, open yourself to the reality.  You have arrived.
• That is an experience I aspire to; I sometimes get a small taste of it.

I think that for the ancient Buddists who wrote those words of The Pearl Garland Tantra,  it was an ultimate retreat into oneself, into one’s physical presence into one’s body.  

• While it was a retreat, at the same time it represented an immersion of inner clarity and bliss.
• It was combined with a seamless and unconditional immersion in the world.
• There is no need to seek for anything else;  it is all here;  this is IT.

Rilke echoes for me both the aspiration and the formula for attaining what it means to have no path to follow, to arrive at the other to shore, to realize I am connected to all things.

• “You see, I want a lot.   Maybe I want it all:  the darkness of each endless fall, the shimmering light of each assent.”
• For me, Rilke describes what it is like to experience absolute surrender and total engagement.
• Like Thay, Rilke wrote from the other shore, from an experience of having no path to follow, of feeling connected to all things.

I think of this when I walk in my garden when it is -5 degrees, or when I (more often) look out the windows.   

• It is all here: Winter and spring are one; the flowering plants are there under the blanket of snow;  the rotting debris of last fall is part of it all.
• My garden may seem asleep, but it is also wildly blooming.  Everything is happening right now.
• Rumi had this to say about my garden: “And I don’t think the garden loses its ecstasy in winter.  It’s quiet, but the roots are down there riotous.”

Rumi may be writing about my garden in an historical sense, but, for me, and maybe Rumi, the ultimate, timeless / spaceless aspect is there as well.

• The ultimate is there when I talk to Molly who, like me, was born 81 years ago.
• It is a small nod to the ultimate when I tell her that, for me, she is 81, and 55, and 90, and 23, and 35.    All here and now.  That is how I experience her.

All this is a hint of what I think it is like to no longer have a path to follow, to stand on the other shore, to (alone) feel connected to all things.  

• It is what I aspire to experience; what I sometimes experience in a small way.   It is a good reason for me to practice.  

This is a talk given at the Blooming Heart Sangha on September 15, 2022.

Cultivating the state of Jhana joy – take two

Last week, Karla gave a lovely talk on breathing.

• Moreover, she gave us the guided experience of what it feels like to breathe and become aware of our breath.
• Pause to be aware of our breath…….
• I expect that we all have experienced moments of joy, pleasure and delight.
• I want to talk about my practice of cultivating and expanding those moments if joy.   Based on breath.
• It is the practice of the 5 jhana factors, the precursors and precondition for the deep state of absorption:  Jhana
• The 5 Jhana factors are the path of deep concentration leading to: Jhana, samadhi. 
• I talked about this several years ago, and said I had a 6 month plan to explore the 5 jhana factors.
• I’m still exploring.   I’m still on the path, I’ve experienced lot, but still practicing.  I now see the path differently.  This is my current experience.

Summary: The 5 Jhana factors are steps along the path to cultivating deep concentration.

• A path of deepening joy.
• I’ve seen Thay refer to Jhana, but I haven’t seen him discuss the 5 steps I’m talking about.
• He talks about the factors and about the state of absorption.
• I have relied on authors like Shaila Catherine for identifying the path as the 5 steps.

First Step: Connecting

• I direct attention to a chosen object: the breath as known
• Connecting begins with the intention to know and become aware.
• Connecting relies on relaxed, natural awareness of the physicality of the breath.
• A focus on the breath as known.  On the occurrence of breath.  
• Equivalent:  the striking of the bell.

Second Step: Sustaining

• Sustained attention on the chosen object:  sustained attention on the breath as known
• Starts getting harder
• This sustaining of attention allows concentration to deepen
• Equivalent:  the reverberating bell, the steading hands of a potter.
• Next step is easy: do nothing

Third Step:  Rapturous interest

• Surrender to inner bliss; allow it to happen naturally. 
• Natural feeling of lightness and pleasure when the first two steps occur.
• I said it is easy, BUT:  the first time it happened to me it scared me so much I was in my Doctor’s office the next day talking about the possibility of a stroke.   
• I’ve decided that this surrender to rapture is a developed skill;  I now do it multiple times a day, without fear.  It is easy.
• Not some kind of random rapture; it is rapture out of attention to a specific object (for me: breath as known or some other tactile experience as known:  eg. Momentary touching the chair fabric)

Fourth Step:  Joy

• Enduring deep ease, pervasive contentment
• Mind is bright and undisturbed
• Sustain rapturous, but at lower level; not as intense
• Equivalent: settling into a warm bath.
• No urgency to finish…..nice

Fifth Step: One-pointedness

• A feeling of intimacy that rivets attention
• Sets the stage for absorption
• 5^th step has a feeling of certainty; stability of concentration. 
• I think: A summary of all 5 steps in one.  

These five are the 5 Jhana Factors

• Set the stage, are prerequisites for Jhana absorption……absorption that can support insight or action, but it is not the same as insight or action. 
• I linger on these 5 factors;  They are where I am; still working on them, getting familiar with them.
• Jhana absorption is mostly out of my reach, though I sometimes think I see it in a distant mist.   
• I talked about the five as steps, and some authors, like Shaila,  present them that way.
• In true Thay fashion: I think if you really experience any one of them, you experience them all. All at once. And that is very  nice.
• Like 5-sided dice. 

The 5 Jhana factors are a way of deep concentration; also a way of deep joy.

• 5 Jhana factors rely on awareness of the breath that Karla taught us about.   
• In my practice, I add other tactile experiences that I become aware of as known.   
• However, for most, the breath is pivotal, the breath is foundational.   

This is how I use the breath;   What about you?

• How do you use your breath?
• How does the breath fit into your practice.
• Experience?

I want to presume it is a benevolent world. It is my world after all and the only world I have. I try to make my default attitude to see the world as a welcoming place filled with welcoming people. I, in turn, want to carry that attitude to all encounters with the world, especially people. I want the person in the check-out line to feel validated and seen. I want the people walking by my home to feel at ease and enjoy being close to my presence. I want to taste the joy of being present to others.

It doesn’t, however, always work that way. As much as I want to presume that everyone around me has a benevolent attitude toward me, I am also aware that is not always true. I do have my moments of caution. I am alert to the malevolence of others as I pull into my garage late at night. I am aware that others who live very near to me have been assaulted with guns. I am aware that there is a clear profile of those who have assaulted my neighbors.

So how do I balance this? I guess that I don’t always presume that I live in a benevolent world. There are others who are willing to harm me and others. So I mix a token of attentive caution in my presumption of benevolence.

I still open and close my days with an open heart, aspiring to connect with the world in a deep and intimate manner. This I aspire to, in spite of the lurking dangers. I still default to presuming benevolence, at least until I see signals of something else.

The universe waits to be touched. To me, it seems to be vision that is my most prized sense. But it is in touch that I become most aware of the world. I want to touch it all.

I touch my breath, myself, my friends, my plants. I want to touch all that is not mine. I want to touch it all.

All this will seem to end. It will end for me and for the world I love today. The Summer Glow dogwood bush I brush up against several times a day will no longer flaunt its vibrant leaves. Today, I will pass my bush and touch it again, knowing each of us will be gone. But maybe not today.

This is already a special day to experience the world I love just one more time. I will some day pass away, as will the waving trees, the brisk wind, the glowing sun. We are all together blessed and anointed with yet another measured day of time.

Today is a day never to be given and experienced again. Today will never return to me or to anyone else. All will transform and we will no longer seem to be the same, no longer just as we are today.

And yet, I think perhaps this is just it. There is no true measured today, a single piece of time. Today simply is what is. It is mine to experience and enjoy. It always was and always will be. I belong to today, we are always joined together. We are bound in a rapturous embrace. This is how it is.

It is beginning to sink in for me: there is nothing close to being permanent. When I got up this morning, I began thinking how “This is it!” This moment is what it is all about. The past is beyond reach, the future is beyond reach. This is the best I can do, so make the most of it.

For several years, I have been trying to get my thoughts around impermanence. I feel like I have been walking around the topic, looking at it from the outside, wanting to get a grasp of what it was really like. Now I simply try to let go of my notion of permanent, and what is left is what I have been trying to understand. There is a void. It is a void filled with everything. Here and now.

I can see how naive it is for religious dogma to promise something in the future. Most religions attempt to establish a culture of permanence in a world that is essentially impermanent. There are many descriptions of what happens after we die, all of which are imaginary trips into the unknown. We make promises to one another that attempt to define and even guarantee the future. I cannot even promise with confidence what my afternoon will entail. What I can know, is right here and now. It is all contained in this moment.

There is no such thing as permanent. It is a joy and a gift to experience the moment as free fall. I want to experience it as much as I can. I want to learn to live on the other shore.

This is the text of a talk I gave on July 21, 2022 at the Blooming Heart Sangha. The talk was a little shorter and focused on constraints.

Cultural Constraints on Intimacy   7/21/2022

Back in September, I shared with you my aspiration of becoming intimate with the world.

• I made a number of observations at that time, one of which was that this aspiration for deep intimacy is often counter cultural.   Our culture doesn’t support this aspiration of intimacy.
• What’s this all about?: I think that intimacy with the world is an aspiration we all share, and we describe it in many, personal ways.
• You may recall that the Buddha used 33 different expressions to refer to nibbana.
• Thay expanded the notion of experiencing the other shore in one expression: interbeing.  
• To experience interbeing, is to experience the other shore, experience deep intimacy.
• For me, it is most meaningful to think of interbeing as becoming intimate with what is, with the world.
• That is my basket for holding all those 33 expressions, along with interbeing.     

But it isn’t easy in our culture.  

• I think that we are part of a world that innately craves beauty and intimacy.
• Human culture sometimes supports that craving and sometimes makes it more difficult.
• In this Sangha, we have support for intimacy.   We are following a cultural tradition that relies on mindfulness to take us to a deeper level of intimacy.
• It is a tradition that goes back 2500 years, and probably beyond.
• However, those same 2500 years are littered both with powerful attempts at deep intimacy, and with resistance to intimacy.
• There have long been attempts at intimacy.  In the past half dozen years, archeology has found new ways of uncovering what some of our ancestors were drinking in the vessels they left behind.   
• We are becoming aware that, for a long time, the wine and beer they drank had many other plant-based ingredients, many of which were capable psychedelic effects.
• Ancestors were reaching for an alternative experience of reality, of connecting with the underworld, connecting with the unseen.
• They were seeking ways of stepping into transformative time.

Our current culture does not support deep intimacy with the world, nor the mindfulness that makes it possible.

• We see all around us the unbalance that results in our culture.
• How can we live in balance with the world when we lack a deep connection with it?
• Why is this important?  I find it useful to notice those cultural impediments to intimacy.  I think that by being aware, by paying attention to those impediments, I might more easily find my way into intimacy.

Some cultural impediments:

• Top of my list:  Possessing: Our culture encourages possessing things and one another; it encourages and supports the very thing that the second Noble Truth identifies: grasping.   Grasping things, grasping people blocks intimacy.
• Aversion: Alternatively, as one of you recently pointed out to me, our culture encourages fear;   it encourages aversion, fear of one another, of the world.   I might be able to embrace my fear, but I don’t think I can be intimate with what or who I fear.  
• The ever-present Ego: Our culture strokes and supports the ego, and the ego is an impediment to intimacy.
• Doctrine: Our culture promotes doctrines; usually in the form of religion.   While religion can invite intimacy, a step into transformative time, most religion quickly encases that experience in a golden doctrinal cage. 
• Expections: We see what we want or expect to see, and the culture tells us how to see.  There are so many examples.   I have a friend who is 81 like me, and I could simply see her as my culture sees an 81 person.    I tell her that I choose to turn those numbers around and see her also as 18, and we enjoy the anti-cultural experience, and a fair degree of intimacy.   
• Relationships: The culture teaches us what to see in sexual relationshipsbetween men and women, men and men, women and women, the number of relationships.   That limits many opportunities for intimacy with one another, with the world.   Our own Five Mindfulness Trainings are still playing catch-up to shed the cultural way of seeing sexual relations.
• Body: Our culture has a very ambiguous relationship with the body and with sensory, sensual experience.   Our culture has many ways to celebrate and pursue the sensory, but it stops there and does not penetrate into the experience of intimacy.   
• Desire: Even Buddhist writers have a hard time writing desire without attaching a descriptive sensual desire.   Desire, the deep energy of the universe, eros:  the erotic is hard for the culture to handle.

The list can go on, but I am stopping.   I invite you to add to it, or expand on what I have said.

• I don’t think that it is an accident that “culture” and “cult” sound so much alike.   I approach both very cautiously.
• Culture tells us how to see the world, and when I only see the world as I think it should be, I miss out seeing it as it really is.

I think our practice allows us to step outside of culture and become intimate with the world, to move to the other shore.

• Our practice allows an unconditioned connection with the world.
• Our practice encourages stepping into a transformative time and space, and that time and space is largely independent of the human artifact of culture.  
• Many humans follow the culture and are impeded from intimacy, they are held back by roadblocks.   We form a sangha where we help one another, through mindful practice, evolve into deep intimacy with the world
• When we try to be mindful of the impediments, we can better avoid their influence.

What are your thoughts about the cultural impediments to intimacy with the world?

• How do you experience those cultural impediments.
• How do they affect you?
• How do you work around them?