Category: Uncategorized

I am present in a vast pool of possible experience. I know that my experience is not absolutely unique to me. The universe is filled with vast, surging energy. It is also formed by an intellignece that permeates and shapes everything that has existence. It is not a chaotic or random universe, but a universe pulsing with intelligence. I exist in that vast pool of intelligence, and my experience is guided by it. And I have a role in how I participate.

My participation in this vast pool of intelligence is not at all random. My involvement and alignment is guided by my decisions and actions. So too do all my associations guide how I make my way into this pool of experience. My participation in the universe was highly conditioned from the moment I had awareness.

For me, the obvious impact of my culture has shaped how I experience the world, how I make my way through the pool of world intelligence. I am aware how my culture is ever ready to impose dogma on me, tell me how to choose to act, shape how I experience the world. In many ways, this has allowed me to participate in the world in a useful, even meaningful way. It has also been on the ready to limit how I am present in the vast pool of universe intelligence.

My parents and all my ancestors have had a significant role in shaping my experience. Like the culture, they have been standing around me telling me what to see, what to feel, how to interpret the world. Especially for the early part of my life that was very useful. Then I learned to say “no”, and I began to shape my own movement through the pool of experience.

My own degree of openness to that vast array of potential experience has been influenced by how I have been open to the energy, the love of the universe. My own innate desire and deliverate decision for intimacy has allowed me to be shaped and guided by a multitude of individuals and events. I am a product of the many individuals and parts of the world that I have allowed to stand beside and penetrate me.

How much I have been shaped and formed by the world around me has to a large degree by what I allowed in. It has been very important that many aspects of the world and individuals have chosen to be close beside me. It has also been important how maleable I have allowed myself to be. Being open to all the experience that has presented has been a practice I have spent much of my life learning.

I am grateful for all aspects of the world which have been present to me. I am grateful for all those individuals and entities who have presented themselves to me. I am also grateful for my learning to be maleable and open to the wonders of the universe. It is a process that continues as I plunge deeper and deeper into the pool of experience. I continue to learn how to open to the intimacies of the world. I fall ever more deeply in the love of the universe.

I am curious about the level of resolve that enters into most of my days. From the time that I wake, I dip into a well of determination and begin a process of engagement that is guided by what I want to do, by what I choose to do. Some if it is predetermined by what I have chosen to do in the past. Some of it is recently preplanned by what I intend to do on that day.

It almost feels like a ritual that I have created to shape my day. But there is also a flexibility in it all that allows deviation from that ritualized pattern. My day progresses, guided by an evolving feeling of resolve. It may appear to many that I am inflexible, guided as I am by such a resolve. Perhaps I am both the beneficiary and the servant of my resolve.

It is curous to me because I know that meeting the expectations of others has been such a part of my life. I have always wanted to excel in ways others find acceptable. I have learned to perform, and perform well. But I also know that I have usually wanted to do it my way. I could comply, but I would do it in a way that tapped my own internal resolve. My own creativity fed my resolve, and I could still comply with the expections of others, but in a way that made sense to me.

This may have simply been a result of my being on the autism spectrum. I have wanted to live in the world of neurotypicals and get along with them. But I have wanted to do it in a way that made sense to me. I have wanted to do it my way. I have often been able to put a new, personal twist on whatever I have been doing. It would be close, but not exactly what the typial world expected.

My sense of resolve has given me a good dose of fortitude and resilience. Being able to do things my way has allowed me to be both compliant and non-compliant. I could put my own inner energy into whatever I have done, as long as I could do it my way. That inner energy has been a source of fortitude. I have confidence. I get things done, but in my own time and in my own way.

That experiece of fortitude has scarcely ever happened without the support of friends. I have often been surrounded by friends who have supported me and even valued me in how I did things my way. Because of others I have been able to live many of my days with resolve. I have been able to do things my way.

I remember very well when I decided to be close. I was twenty years old, and I recognized that I had been living in a way that did not include being close. I don’t think I understood just what that meant, but I knew I was missing something that I wanted. I have spent over sixty years exploring what that all means, and the unfolding continues.

I recognize that, for me, a number of things are involved in being close. My own transparency is a huge part of my being open to closeness and inviting others and the whole world into closeness. I have noticed that as I have become more comfortable with who I am and relaxed in sharing all aspects of me, the easier it is for me to be close. Perhaps it has something to do with being in my eighties, but I care less and less what others think and how they regard me. I will live the way I choose. I like being me, and I don’t need to put on pretense. I am at ease with being close and not worrying about how I will be seen.

Also, I have always liked my sense of touch, but that is more evident now than ever before. I like touching things. I especially like touching other people. It is not simply a sensory eperience, but it is an open door to deep awareness. I can in an instant, become aware of the presence of others, whether that be a plant in my garden or someone I know.

Touching means that I have become much more of a hugger. I hug men and women alike. Not a quick and release hug, but a lingering hug that allows me to be deeply aware of the other person. Someone recently said to me, “We all need a lot of hugs” I totally agree, as a giver and as a receiver. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because I know how comfortable, even assertive I am about hugging. I sometimes wonder just how others are feeling about hugging. Most people seem to be a deep part of hugging and repeatedly hug me. But I want to feel assured that it is truly what they want.

I guess I think that hugging and, by extension, closeness is part of being human. While closeness is not unique to our species, humans have a deep engagement with being close. It has, in my mind, been one of the reasons we have prospered as a species. The experience of being close has been a huge part of why we have been successful. Even Neanderthals, I am convinced, valued and practiced what it means to be close. The presence of flowers in Neanderthal graves of individuals has been seen as evidence of abstract thinking, even some kind of religion. I think Neantherdals buried their companions with flowers because they were close to them, had a deep feeling of closeness with the dead individual.

In our culture, women seem to be more adept at hugging and all forms of closeness than men. I thnk that our culture has visited a curse on manhood saying that men should remain distant and aloof. I want to join what women seem to find and enjoy. Being close is a dramatic and central feature of being human. Regardness, I am choosing to be close. My resolve has not wavered since, at twenty years old, I set my sights on being close. It is who I am.

I continue to stroll through evolving notions of what it means for me to be open to the world. I constantly explore what it means for me to fall in love with the world. It takes on many aspects and it is a constantly changing of experience.

Most fundamental, it has involved my sense of touch. It has meant for me to become aware of how I was aware of what I was touching. It was an open awareness and an awakening of how I was aware of what my body experienced. I noticed how I felt when I sat down from a standing position, I paid attention to what it felt like to breathe, I deliberately touched things and people and noticed how I sensed their presence. Many sensory experiences became an open door to feel the presence of the world. My sense of touch became my opening to the world around me.

Being open in this way caused me to lose a sense of self. I became connected in a way that dissolved my protective carapace. I moved outside my protective, defining sense of self. I felt the deep connection with whatever or whomever I was touching. In an instant, my “world” became less defined and unbelievably expansive.

By becoming open, I have learned what it means to experience the “darkness of each endless fall.” My openness often loses its own definition and I have an sense of limitless space and an immense realm of emptiness. I become open because of a body sensation like breath or touch.

For me, this becoming open is a decision. I know I have agency. I become open deliberately. If this is free will, then I embrace it.

My deciding to be open is more of a decision to remove barriers that keep me from being open. It is almost a natural response, and it is an experience of great joy. By being open, I do what brings me joy. I fall in love with many people and with all sorts of things. It is not adequate to consider how many people I have fallen in love with. Falling in love, being in love has become more a state of existence for me. I routinely sweep many aspects of the world into my loving open arms., into my open presence.

I am grateful for every additional day I wakeup to. Each day, I am learning more and more how to become even more open. I understand it in new and different ways with each open experience. I reflect on my experience, I learn, and I open some more.

It has taken me a long time to recognize just how white I am. My actual skin color hasn’t changed much, except for occasionally showing the effects of gardening without adequate sun protection. My attitudes and spontaneous reactions tell me more about how white I am. I didn’t decide to be white. It came from being born of a white family lineage in a very white southern society. Now I get to decide just how white I want to be.

Being white in my culture is not just about how I react to traditional racial issues. Being white is also about how I act and react in my whole community. It’s not only about how I regard those whose skin tone is different from mine. I recognize how white some of my pale companions are because I am beginning to recognize just how white I am.

I instinctively respond to situations with an attitude that I know what is right. I often know the right solution to a problem. At leasst, I know the direction that is better. For me it is an attitude of white privilege, of knowing what is right and true better than others. I assert my whiteness when I think I am aware better than others or know the correctness better than others. That includes better than other people who look as white as I am.

I see whiteness in others who are close to me whenever they assert how right they are. I find myself in conflicts of whiteness. It is a contest of who can assert their whiteness. I am asserting my right of privilege, my whiteness whenever I claim that I know better than others. I feel white when I allow myself to feel attached to what I see is the correct or better approach.

It is this attachment to what I see as true or correct that reminds me that I am asserting my white privilege. I recognize it in my resistance to listen to an opinion that is different fron mine. I see it when I am evaluating an opinion to see if I agree. I recognize it when I feel that someone is trying to control a situation to conform to their notion of what is true or correct. Any time I participate in a disruption of the feeling of togetherness, I am being white. I am being white when I lose the feeling of community. I am being white the more I see companions as other.

I am slowly emerging from a feeling of wanting things to be right and true because I know what right and true means. I am slowly emerging from being managed by my being white.

The experience of falling is becoming somewhat familiar to me. I don’t mean the actual physical act of falling to the ground, but the feeling of plunging into a kind of void. Falling means that my whole body does seems to let go and plunge into something outside of me, something surrounding me.

I find that, in conversation, I often refer to the lines from Rilke, “You see, I want a lot. Maybe I want it all: the darkness of each endless fall, the shimmering light of each ascent.” I feel like I am breaking out of my body and diving, like a bird, into the space around me. I associate falling more like descending into darkness, but I have a sense of being surrounded by an aura of light. I feel like I am no longer constrained by the parameters of my body. I reach out of my body and am in touch with whatever presents itself.

The experience of falling is triggered by many things. For me, it is most often triggered by the experience of touch. Anything or anyone I touch can summon me to fall into their presence. It can be the edge of my desk, a plant in my garden, my sweetie present beside me.

I remember vividly the first time I experienced this kind of falling. I was dropping onto the edge of my bed, a common movement when I would plop down on my bed. However, this time my body did more than fall backwards. I felt like it was falling into a dark void. The feeling went through my whole body, from the top of my head to my feet on the floor.

My alarmed reaction was that I had experienced a stroke. I consoled myself that it was at least a small one. But the next morning, my doctor assured me that nothing that radical had happened. I had no loss of body function and I had not damaged my brain. It took a few moments, but I decided that it was a gift experience. I had learned something new and different. Once I got beyond my alarm and fear, I realized it was quite wonderful. I had a new sensation of falling. And I could do it without harm.

Actually, it is something I now do with great delight. By falling into something or someone, I feel a connection that is more intense and intimate than I had ever experienced before. It is as though my whole sensory apparatus dissolves, and I flow into whatever is present. It is like falling in love into whatever or whoever is before me.

I no longer think that my experience of deep falling when I sat on my bed was an accident. I had been opening my mind and my experience to the practice of jhana. It is a meditative practice of entering a state of deep joy, calm and clarity. It is a practice of concentration that opens into the realm of formless perception. My sitting onto the bed with a jesture of letting go, my falling onto the side of the bed in an uncontrolled manner gave me the experience of entering into that formless realm just a little. I had broken through a constraint.

I know it was only a small taste of what could be experienced. It was a small experience of falling, of letting go. But it allowed me to experience what it was like to fall into nothing, to fall into the dynamics of the universe, to fall into the energy of love.

I now realize that I am learning more and more what it feels like to be in love with the world. “Falling in love” has a new and delicious meaning. By letting go of all my constraints and perception, I can fall into whoever or whatever presents before me. It is an exciting experience of “the darkness of each endless fall.” By letting go of all my perceptions, I experience the world in a new and intimate way. By opening my experience to nothingness, I realize my deeper connection with so much.

I am slowly learning how to fall. Falling comes in short and unsteady spurts. Gradually I am learning the significance of a motto I set for myself years ago: “A day spent without falling in love at least once is a day not well spent.” I intend to fall as often as I can. Falling is becoming a rich way of living.

I know that I carry a jewel inside of me and I have the intention to share it wherever I go. That intent alone qualifies me as a monk, even though I no longer wear the robes of a monk. This intent is not for my benefit alone, but for the benefit of everyone I encounter.

The jewel I carry is my ultimate nature. It is the jewel that radiates the hopes and loves of all previous generations. It is, as some say, the jewel of my Buddha nature, my nature as a spiritual being. I do not walk in the secusion of a monastery. I openly walk in the world of humanity and all beings so that I may reveal and share the riches of being vibrantly human.

The jewel within me is not mine alone. I attempt to live out the generosity of being human. My generosity is not so much in food and matertial resources but in the flowing energy of the universe. I recognize and affirm the presence of all I encounter. My recognition is in a loving embrace.

Many years ago, I proclaimed that we are all born to be lovers. That is the glowing nature of the jewel I carry. It is my nature to be a lover. I share the jewel of my nature wherever I go. I walk in the world as a monk.

I learned a long time ago that ritual is a delicate portal to the spiritual. In my teens, I noticed daily that a priest in the seminary chapel, Father Martin, would go through the ritualized motions and language of the mass in around ten minutes. This is a ritual that typically takes around thirty or more minutes. I learned then that ritual could become rote. And that has been a foundational experience for me. I resolved not to follow that practice.

I’ve not always been successful in following my resolve. Ritual has been an important part of my life. I have often said that I like ritual. The ritual I like has been a signifiant and repetitious portal to the spiritual. I have also learned that ritual can lose its value when my attention strays, when it is not focused on the meaning of what I am doing. Ritual can become something like cultural custom, even in the seclusion of my bedroom.

Every morning, I light a candle, I burn incense, and I invite my singing bowl. This is a prelude, a portal to my entering into mindful movements and a period of mindful sitting. The candle, the incense, the bell are all important factors that open my heart/mind into a ritual space, a spiritual space. Some days it is very effective in opening that portal. Some days my attention wanders, and the ritual becomes rote and less effective. Still I go through the motions every morning.

I am wary of the danger that I may at some point be going through the actions and no longer be entering into their true value. I may even cling to the ritual, unwilling to let go of something very familiar but without its savor. That clinging could be a clear sign to me that I have lost the value of the ritual.

I am attentive to my experience in the seminary chapel, and I am habitually alert to the danger of ritual becoming rote. For me, the whole value of ritual is not just familirity and ease. Ritual is of value to me beause it opens me into a spirit realm that is not always so present to me. The candle, the incense, the bell are sacred objects for me, but only if I make them so. Only if I make them so each time.

I wholeheartedly embrace ritual. And I want it to be an embrace of awareness.

A great obstacle to my being able to say “Yes!” to the world is my sense of self. For me, self is a reminder of Paradise Lost. It reminds me of losing that original state I experienced when I was born, of losing a time that I felt connected to all things. As soon as I was born, that primordial and unspecified experience was quickly interrupted by sensory experiences that fed me notions of separation. I emerged into a flurry of experiences that convinced me that I was a separate self. Now I try to return to the lost paradise experience of being connected to all things.

Individuation seems to be a requirement for functioning in the world. Growing as an individual gives me a framework for reacting to other human beings and all entities around me. But individuation comes at a price. To attain a notion of separation, of identity, I had to embrace the myth that I am separate. I see that I have stepped into a paradox of contradictions. I am both connected and I am separate. I practice at holding that contradiction as close as I can.

Aware that I function as a self, I practice at ridding myself of self. I practice at entering a realm of nothingness. I allow myself to plunge into a realm of formless perception. Without form, I once again exerience what it is to be connected to all things. I not only glimpse the lost paradise but I also momentarily step into it. All six of my senses dissolve and let go.

The paradox of that experience is that it has a foundation in the senses. I usually begin with touch, and then I embrace all my senses. I embrace them only to quickly let go of them. Maybe it is more like entering into them in such a way that they no longer function as senses. I deeply accept them, I free them, and they free me. The sense of self drifts away. Without my senses, I plunge into the brilliant and infinite darkness.

I cannot explain it any other way. When I lose my sense of self, I find all things in the resulting void. I forgot what that was, what I had lost, as soon as I emerged into the world. I could never have known what I was missing until I experienced it.

Pleasure is a tricky word. Maybe “sticky” is a better description because it attracts all the cautions our culture has about the sensory. Pleasure often is associated with sensuous, and that notion has all kinds of associations that our culture has hijacked both positively and negatively.

For me, pleasure is all about delight and joy in living. In one way, it minimally gives me a relaxed refuge from all the fears that confront me in my dreams and throughout my day. By relaxing into the yielding embrace of all that causes me fear, I am able to metabolize what otherwise would cause anxiety. By allowing myself to fall into the endless darkness of what threatens me and summons fear, I experience the calm thrill of soaring flight.

But there is so much more offered by pleasure. In so many ways, pleasure invites me into the delight of the rich experiences that awaite me throughout the day. Most of those experiences are founded in the senses. I walk through my morning garden and touch the grass, brush up against plants, look all around at all that is alive. I enjoy the deep pleasure of the bright awareness that surges through me. I stare at the dahlia in a vase on my table. I hug a friend and linger in the soft feel of their presence. My pleasureful day is sometimes punctuated by gently touching the butt of my sweetie. My contact with my world is flowing with pleasure, and my presence is repeatedly filled with joy.

I mostly try to do only those things that give me pleasure. I garden in a manner that gives me the joy of gardening. I tell friends routinely that if something about gardening is not giving you joy, it is only yard work. I may be sad about the loss of a favorite plant, but I am also embracing that it has done what it has chosen to do. My joy is in seeing it be the kind of plant that it is.

I practice joy by meditating. For me, meditation is not a burdensome, rigorout task. It is an opportunity to plunge into the pleasure of a quiet mind, to soar into the realm of formless perception. The experience may only last for a moment, but the warm, relaxed glow lingers. I often stop throughout the day when my bell rings on each hour. I touch something and feel the pleasure of touch throughout my body. My body has learned to respond from the top of my head to the bottom of my feet no matter how I am connected to my world. I am charged with the pleasure of the moment.

My days are filled with pleasureful moments. My body feels the presence of the plants in my garden, the clerk in the checkout lane, the friend stopping by to say hello. I know that pleasure is a tricky word, but it is all mine to own. After all, I have embraced the role of trickster. I choose to be full of pleasure and to share it.