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During my meditation class last evening, I watched the teacher, Mark, and  mused that this must be what it is like after 30 years of meditation practice.  His years have served him well.

I am excited about the impact on me by my past year of practice.  I have been reminded that I may be experiencing the effect of not one year but nearly 50 years of preparation for this day.  It has been a long time since the first indistinguishable seeds of contemplation were planted, without flourish and with little attention.  I never really learned to meditate during my years as a monk, but I think I developed an appetite.   And I am grateful for all those who planted that insistent longing.

Now those seeds have tentatively emerged after so many years of apparent dormancy.   They shape my comfort, even familiarity with the developing awareness that comes with meditation.   It is an awareness that often unfolds with ease and I feel the delight of being human.

Maybe those seeds haven’t been as dormant as I think.   Perhaps I have been rehearsing in subtle ways all these years.   No matter its cause, today is a great day to feel alive and awake, it is a great day of hope.

For a moment I am curious about what lies ahead.    Then I return to the delightful wonders of today.

These days, I am cutting down plants in my garden.   From time to time, my attention wanders to next spring when my plants will return.   Then I snap back to the snip – snip sound of my cutting shears and the feel of the firm stems  that grew all summer.

I flood my compost bins with the husks of my lovely, beloved plants.   I hand their severed stalks over to the denizens of decomposition.   I do this with the confidence of one who anticipates the earthy fragrance of the fine compost my tiny helpers will produce.

My culture did not prepare me for body awareness.   I obligingly accepted the teaching that I am to hide who I am under layers of cloth, even pretend that the outer layers said who I was, better than the flesh beneath.     All along, I have been stuffed under those layers, masked from my own awareness and from those around me.

How refreshing and useful to be “natural”.   To have those moments when I am simply alive under my skin.   No pretense, no secret.   These are all those times when I press my skin up against the world and it touches me.   The level of intimacy thrills me.

I am grateful for all those times I have felt the world present against my skin,  the rising sun striking all of me as I stood at the end of my dock, the water slipping over me as I swam in my lake, the warm fleece cloak against my skin as I sat on my cushion.   Those are times I am awakened to the world present around me, and to my own presence inside my skin.   I have learned to know what it feels like to be in my own body, inside my own skin.

Sometimes, all things on both sides of my skin become one.   A lovely paradox.  Breath-taking.

This it the first time I’ve thought about the afterlife in quite a while.   I don’t think it really makes much difference if there is or is not an afterlife.     So why put much energy into it.   Certainly not something to worry about.

If I were correct in thinking that there was an afterlife, and so lived my life in a wholesome, fully-human, mindful manner, I would walk thru the pearly gates fully prepared for what lies ahead.    If I were wrong and there was no afterlife, I would have lived a great life in the years I have been alive in the midst of a glorious, wonderful world.

If I were correct in thinking that there was no afterlife, and so lived my life to its fullest, I would have lived an exciting, insightful life.   End of story.  If I were wrong and there actually was an afterlife, I would walk thru the pearly gates in astonishment, everyone would shout “Surprise!” and I would be fully prepared for the party.

So why bother about trying to sort it all out.   There is, after all, no indication one way or another.    I only have the imagination of other humans to rely on.   And I know how unreliable that is.    Better for me to get on with life, experience it to its fullness, do what I can to avoid suffering and summon delight.  Every day.

I was drifting toward a quiet finale of a life I thought had been well-lived. I had a sense of having lived not one but several lives in one lifetime and had pretty much resigned myself that things were winding down.   There were some loose ends and unresolved items, but I was OK with that.   Was I in for a surprise.

I’ve been jolted back awake, finding that there is an aspect of me that has been playing hide and seek with me for years.    My senses have come alive in a way I have never experienced them before.    My awareness is sharper and brighter than I have ever known consciousness to be.

I am uncovering a new sense of myself that I only had short glimpses of in the past.    So much of my identity has been tied up with the house I lived in, the clothes I was wearing, the books I was reading, the things I had done.   These were some the things that distinguished me, set me aside, made me different.   Now I have a growing awareness of my sameness, my connectedness.   My appetite for that connection has been aroused.

With both good and bad aspects, I realize that my development and my daily life is intimately connected not only with other humans but the entire world around me.    That is often a satisfying realization, but also sometimes disturbing.

However, that is a part of life I don’t think I have truly grasped in the past.  Now I feel like I have found a new life, full of uncertainty, possibility and exploration. It is going to take a while for me to learn what this is all about.    So I signed up for another twenty or so years.

I am feeling sad the more I realize that so many humans are born like puppies and die pretty much like other animals.   I am learning what it means for me to squander my inheritance of being human.  I am becoming aware that I could live my whole life and, except for passing moments, not experience what it really means to be human.  Not even know what is possible.

It saddens me that there are so many people who are wandering in an imaginary dream-world, unaware that they are capable of so much more.  Some are born that way with an impaired ability to understand.    Some are simply ignorant and lack the needed knowledge.   Some chose the path of being unaware because they avoid the pain of letting go of the world they think they know.

I have spent much of my life in ignorance and delusion.  There have also been many distractions along the way.   For years, I relied on religious belief to fill the gaps of my knowledge, and now I realize how much I was living in someone else’s dreamy imagination.   I was unaware of what many people had learned thousands of years ago and what others had uncovered in the past century.  I was uninformed, unconscious,  and I allowed my culture  to take over.

I am grateful that I am beginning to understand that there is an alternate reality and humans have the ability to live in it.   My consciousness is finally beginning to awaken.   Someone finally turned on the lights.

I am sad that so much of humanity seems to be unaware and stuck in a world of thrashing teenagers.   There is hope because I see some adults in the room.

 

Is the story of a lost paradise a memory of what I knew and experienced as a baby?   That was a time when there seemed to be no separation between me and the world.    It was a simple time when I first learned to live in my senses, my awareness was only on the sensory level.

Then my rationality began to develop, and I gradually learned to step back from my senses and know that I existed, a separate, human boy.   The sense of deep intimacy with my world faded. My attention shifted more inward and I began to flex and train my mind to step back from my senses.   I knew that I existed.   The higher power that comes with rationality gradually grew.  I began to wield the mental strength that is my inheritance.

In the process, I lost that intimate connection with the world, simple as it was.   Rationality has a price.   I am grateful now to be using that same rationality to experience and “see” the world in a more exciting way.   I am learning to connect with the world in a real way that still relies on my senses.    Now, however, it is as an observer, a watcher of what my senses tell me.

I still rely on my senses to tell me about the world, but I have a heart that is telling me how to interpret those sense messages in a new way.   I think I see the gates to paradise in the distance.

When I was a baby, I’m sure I saw the world differently.   I think I simply saw it as it was, not much different from the open eyes of a new puppy.   I don’t think I saw it as something different or distinct from me.   Everything was connected, and we were all part of the same.

Gradually, my eyes turned around and I developed a view of myself.   “I” came more into focus, and I developed a sense that I was different and distinct from the world.    Sometimes the world served me, sometimes it became a scary place.   Sometimes I asserted my growing vision of self, even with tyranny on occasion.   I learned to use my turned-in eyes.

In time, I even learned how to see the world not as itself, but how it measured up to my internal images.    I set expectations for those I loved, even tried to shape them,  based on how I had come to see myself.

Now I’m gradually turning that vision back around, learning again what I naturally did as a baby.   Seeing the world as it is, not as I have come to imagine it is or should be.   Seeing others on their terms, not mine.   I am regaining some sense of the web that joins me with everything.

It’s an exciting time.   It is a time to turn my world around, open my eyes to see and discover what I use to think was separate and  ‘out there’.

When did we decide to become lovers?  When did that moment pass when we opened our hearts and we decided to let one another in? For most of my friends it is too late to decide because that decision has already been made.   Maybe it is hard to determine just when that moment passed because the process was so gradual.   But I know and can feel that we have decided.

Some days, I think I must make this decision to open my heart a dozen or more times.   Mostly the other person is totally unaware it has happened.   But I am.   They are caught, unaware, in the web that binds us and there is no struggle.   Sometimes they are momentarily aware and open their heart ever so slightly.   Then we go our way.

Then there are my deep friends who have truly joined hearts with me, knowingly, willingly, sometimes tentatively.     For us our glittering, abundant humanity  has become a shared treasure.

Do we touch?   Of course, because that is part of being human, part of sharing pleasure.   For some it is a casual gesture, a familiar hand on a shoulder.   For others it is a hug that quickly passes but assures us we are connected.   For others it is a warm embrace that for a moment brings us together as only touch can.    We are all meant to be lovers, but we get to decide when.

I spent so much of my young life schooled in words from the distant past. I learned to live my life in the maze of ancient texts,  and loved the mysterious  comfort that came from worn tomes.   These were the writings crafted by scores of people who attempted to capture their  world of the divine in metaphors drawn from their own experience.   It was their time, their now.  Their  words

Now it is my time to craft words and break out of the crusty library of the past.   I am aware of the Humming with senses not shaped by the old  words.  It is a world shaped by my own knowing.   This is my time, my now.    It is my turn, and I intend not to waste it with old words.