Barry Garden Path

I wonder if there is a cosmic me. I’m starting to think of the whole cosmos and me as being one. It is an outrageous reach, but it feels intuitively right.

Actually, it is a kind of contradiction because there really is no “me”, and I am beginning to appreciate this. There is a tenacious illusion of self that I struggle to see around and beyond. As I attempt to to see that there is no self, then all that remains is the all expansive, all including, all possibility cosmos. And I think that cosmos and I are the same.

The crusty, persistent notion of self stands between my paltry experience of living as a human being and the experience of a vastness I am not yet able to grasp. But I’m reaching.

From a strictly materialistic point of view held by contemporary science, there is nothing in me that has not been there since the very beginning. Everything in me existed at the moment there was space and time. Science says that the material me was there at the moment we now call the Big Bang.

What existed before that “first” moment is debated and subject to much speculation. But I feel certain that every part of my physical body has been in existence since just before that first nano second of time when all the cosmos was physically united. That signature of singular cosmic oneness is still carried in my body.

It is fanciful, maybe poetic to say that we are made of star dust, but it goes back before then, before there were stars. Every part of material me, every component has been in existence since the beginning and came from the same original something.

I am made up of many parts that all point back to a common point of origin when time and space as we now imagine it first appeared. As a material entity I am intimately linked to all the cosmos. If I am capable of imagining it, I am inseparable from all that is, from the whole cosmos. I am cosmic, cosmic me.

For my mind to grasp what it is like to be part of this cosmic whole, I have to rid myself of any traditional notions of separateness. I have to rid myself of all the distractions I have made to get through my conventional way of living. But once I can rid myself of all these imagined distinctions, I see that there is no-thing, only emptiness. The cosmic me is emptiness.

The cosmos is an emptiness that is not a “without” except that there is nothing I have imagined. It is an emptiness that is all-embracing. all-containing, all-possibility. It is the cosmos as it really is and not as I imagine and as my senses encourage to see.

It is in this realm of emptiness that I really meet the cosmic me. It is there that I realize my consciousness is not separate but is an aspect of all consciousness. If there is anything I can regard as a me, it is the cosmic all. The all is cosmic me.

While I was growing up, it seemed that no one explained things to me. So I had to figure it out myself. For the most part, that meant I turned to books. I made many trips to the distant library, returning with new-found treasures in the basket of my Schwin bicycle. I found what I sought in reading. In the world of printed words.

Not that much has changed. People are still somewhat difficult for me to understand and I often turn my nose up at any suggestion that I should take this path or that. I definitely resist social patterns of how to behave. I have a companion stack of books at the ready, sitting on the table made entirely of glass next to my well-worn red leather chair. My books are my refuge, as much as they were in the days I pedaled to the library to replenish my supply.

I am following my own path. It is a path that no one has mapped out for me, and a path that calls to me and I step forward. I have no notion where it leads. But I am sure that I will be holding a book under my arm to accompany me along the way. I let go of most else, but books continue to be my refuge.

For me, relaxing is not just about taking a respite from doing things. It definitely is not zoning out. When I am relaxed, my body and mind take the opportunity to become more focused and engaged in a different way. A different and deeper energy is released. I walk into the realm of wildness.

Relaxing has become a routine condition, a feeling of my body that allows my consciousness a space to exist unimpeded and without bother.

When I sit on my cushion to have a time to meditate, I first attempt to totally relax my body. Body movements help me to become aware of my body as a whole before I sit. Some people use aids like guided meditation to achieve that relaxed way of sitting. I enter into a relaxed mode by becoming focused on my whole body before and when I sit.

It has become enough of a habit for me that I can touch and calm my body just by asking it to relax. I do have to ignore a variety of distractions in order to relax. My mind has become more compliant and can now slow down more readily. It helps if I touch my whole body with my attention, my awareness.

My breath often becomes my focal point of attention, but I first become aware of my whole body from head to toe. It helps to feel unimpeded by clothes that cling and suppress open body awareness. But there are chilly times when a fleece cloak is helpful so that the temperature is not distracting and I can let go into relaxing.

I once did body scans, relaxing each part of my body as it was being known. That was useful training. I now find that a few simple mindful movements are sufficient to being my whole body into a state of relaxed awareness. My whole body becomes an object of awareness and so it can relax as one.

What I call relaxing is actually a state of heightened vibrancy and awareness. The awareness that accompanies my relaxed body is unimpeded by distraction and can more easily let go of shapes and forms. Preconceived ways of seeing and anticipating lose their power and I can be aware of things as they really are.

For me, to relax means to open myself to deep awareness and concentration. The curtain rises,I enter the formless arena more easily. My mind becomes more of a free fall when I relax. I am able to glance into the formless ultimate realm of possibilities. My relaxed body / mind slides into the timeless, spaceless realm, if only for a brief moment.

With practice and repetition I hope to learn to linger in that realm longer. Relaxing holds the door open for me.

It begins right here. There is no one I want to feel compassion for more than myself. Compassion for myself, self- compassion is where I begin.

Of all the things I want to unlearn, self-criticism is perhaps the most difficult to tear down. But there is no one I need more to forgive than myself. I actually think it is shallow and maybe useless to forgive others unless I have shed my own sense of guilt.

I was raised on a steady diet of self-criticism and guilt. I grew robust, and at an early age I learned and practiced guilt as a virtue. I learned that to be forgiven by someone, to be cleansed, I first needed to experience and confess to failure. Nothing could have likely prepared me better to be unable to deal with and accept my shortcomings. I was not trained in self-compassion.

My naturally sharp mind was sharpened to see the shortcomings in myself and then in others. For this I was habitually rewarded by my culture, something that persists into adulthood. It built within me an unrealistic and fragile sense of self. Rather than be so industrious in constructing such an illusory sense of self, I wish I had been more adept at forgiving and accepting of who I am. I wish I had learned more self-compassion.

I have begun to turn all that around. I am more content to accept and not criticize my shortcomings. I understand myself better and accept my apparent failures. Forgiveness has become a self-healing balm, and it has become more easy to share its abundance with others. This is possible because I am becoming a pliant student of the nature of self-compassion.

All my life is a metaphor. It is all an attempt to capture the intangible by the way I approach what is tangible. Nothing really is as it seems. All that I think and perceive is an illusionary veil, a metaphor. My life is lived in a world shaped by make-believe. My attempt to experience what is beyond the veil of the perceivable is allowing me only glimpses of its true meaning, its true reality. The ultimate beckons behind the metaphor of the tangible.

It is metaphor that encourages me to live in a garden that constantly beckons me to live behind the make-believe walls of my imaginary house. Plunging into the woods at my cabin or a neighborhood wildflower garden is my response to the alluring siren song that calls me deep beyond the appearance of things.

My life is a metaphor that routinely invites me to leave the cozy safety of my fussy self and be open to a reality that smiles from behind mere appearance. I am reminded of all the metaphors I have sampled to explain the divine, unformed reality that looks back at me from the impoverished images and descriptions used to describe the indescribable .

I know that my resistance to be defined by roles or rules is my attempt to peel back the surface appearance of metaphor and embrace a deeper, hidden possibility. In an attempt to explain the unexplainable, metaphor observes what constantly flits away from and lies just beyond direct experience.

I am drawn to a practice of deep concentration because it involves a totally inactive, relaxed and blank mind. Only then can I begin to experience things as they really are and not as they are explained by my conditioned mind.

Still, I hesitate to step out of the apparent stability of a life made understandable by fanciful metaphor. I feel like I have stepped knee-deep into an ocean of reality, but I hesitate to leave my familiar sense of dryness. I seem unaware that I am already immersed in a sea of air and innumerable other things. But I am hesitant to abandon what I imagine I know and plunge into a vast sea of the unknown and unexplored.

A wave approaches me. Will I allow it to take me away and let me feel the deep surge of a world unshaped by metaphor? How long will I attempt to hold my head above the water? How long will it take me to realize it is my true nature to be a fish?

There is a word I hesitate to use because it has been so misappropriated , misused, and misshaped . For the moment, I seem not to be able to avoid it because beneath its battered, almost unrecognizable exterior, the notion of “love” still tries to capture an infinite reality. Perhaps it has suffered the same fate as the word “God”. Under its may appearances, “love” daily challenges my imagination with its infinite dimensions.

There have been times I have heard others call upon love to explain a driving compelling force in the universe. These are the glimpses I have of love as infinite , ubiquitous and so mysterious. I see love is a way I have of explaining why I put the welfare of children above my own, still recognizing that same motivating force as an expression of my own individual destiny .

Love is a way of explaining what it really means and feels like to be thoroughly energized and alive. It responds readily whenever an opening is provided and flows freely when unimpeded . Love compels me to act and be drawn to another with what seems like an unmeasurable and mysterious power, whether that is a person, a tree or a rock.

Love shapes my world by bringing all things together. I am drawn to closeness and joining just as the moon is held in a gripping orbit around the earth, just as my body is kept from floating aimlessly into the stratosphere.

For me it is a warm paradox that love grips all things and draws them together. While, in this manner, love gives shape to all things in my world, this same force serves as a way of facilitating the ultimate dissolution of that world. The order that love creates is in reality the continuous step into entropy. While love gives all things their order and shape, it compels all things to an ultimate shapeless unity.

In a mysterious way, love seems to be an entropic force that drives the entire universe to be plunging into an ultimate oneness. At the same time we are cascading into ultimate dissolution of form, love joins all things together in a single process. Love is becoming an infinite gesture of letting go.

It is futile to impede love, yet it seems to be the habit of humans to restrict love and interfere with its free, inevitable flow. My own life is crisscrossed with the conditioning of dogmas that seek to impede the free flow of what is my nature.

I prefer to see that there are no limits to love because it is everywhere, in all things, and infinite. It is part of the dynamics of anything I can imagine. It will ultimately have its way, and I intend not to obstruct it or impede its energy. I will do what I can to constantly step into and feel immersed in the infinite pool of love.

I am trying to change my language to match my change in perspective. It is starting to seem strange to refer to “my body” when I am increasingly aware that this body with fingers on the keyboard and feet on the floor is “me!” I am this body, I do not have a body. This body is all that “I” am.

Consciousness is not something that floats outside this body, watching and observing all that is happing with this body. Consciousness is something that this body does. Consciousness is co-extensive with this body as clearly as my sense of touch. I am not aware through my body. This body is aware, which is to say I am aware.

The sensations that belong to this body are my sensations, not my body’s.

It has been a lengthy process for me to come to this way of thinking. I have always resisted the cultural training that objectified this body, that made it something to control, to beware of, to reverence. I have spent a lifetime slowly unlearning all I have been taught about body. Body awareness has not come easy for me, but I have had an intuitive reaching out for that understanding.

This is no subtle shift, but seems to me to be more of a tectonic shift in perspective. My body is not a temple of the Holy Ghost as I often heard. This body is the deity. The more I am able to enter into deep concentration, the closer I get to samadhi, the more I realize that what once seemed outside my awareness is actually within. The Vajrayana path is feeling both comforting and familiar. Will I have the courage to let go of my preconceptions and walk it?

Sensory connection is my only real connection. For me that includes imagined sensation. Imagination is included in what I regard as sensory / body experience. I think this is because imagination is built primarily with my remembered sensory / body experience.

Right now, Zoom is a useful substitute for direct sensory experience. But Zoom still remains a somewhat tragic substitution for direct body experience because I must imagine and then relate to something that is not actually happening in front of me right now.

For me, body is the foundation for longing and desire. Body is a rich source of how it feels like to be alive. At the same time, body is a constant reminder of the impermanence of life.

Body is how I most deeply relate to others. Closeness with others, with trees, with rocks comes in many body experience. I open in awareness in a manner that is intimately involved with and dependent on body. How I relate to others comes in so many forms: how I see, how I hear, how I touch others. I consider it ironic that I learned how not to see, how not to hear, how not to touch, all things that body does so naturally. So much shame has been attached to teaching about body.

It is a gift to feel body. I feel grateful to have the experience of ripening, of shedding the deadening husks of my culture. I am grateful to begin to know what it means to be body.

For me, this has become a highly sensory time of year. In fact, I like seeing it as sensational. All my senses are invited to become alert Now is a time of a dramatic shift in the color palette in the world I walk through each day. I notice the sudden appearance of a new scent made from the spice of drying plants. I experience the routine rustle of crackling leaves under my feet. I walk out the door into surprising shifts in temperature so characteristic of Minnesota.

It is a different kind of vibrancy that reminds me of what it is like to really be alive in a highly sensory world. Many of us experience it as a time of letting go as we wake up to new sensations. It is tempting to attempt to pay attention to what must be surrendered to the past. But alert senses draw me into the present and open my awareness to what is new and exciting.

I step out into the open air of autumn, and I accept the invitation to see myself as free fall. The highly sensory, sensational time of year is a gift that calls me into an unattached kind of living. I launch into an experience of emptiness made accessible through my fully alert senses. I accept the invitation to free fall.

It is good enough for me to simply know that I am good by nature. It may well be good enough to trust what it is to be human and not impede or hinder what is natural. I have natural radiance, I am naturally enlightened. I simply have to do my best not to keep that natural radiance from opening and not hinder it from giving rich savor to the universe.

Looking around, it is easy to forget that it is natural for humans to trust and love. In a world that has become tainted by such an unsavory taste of hate and anger, it is easy to forget that the world is patiently waiting for human trust and love to emerge. What is so natural is being restrained and hindered by all the enclosures we envelop what is so natural about being human.

I am aware that I keep the gold within me hidden under wraps of protection, caution and fear. I can be distant and remote when I am by nature embracing and close. It is so natural that I be naked, vulnerable and exposed, but I am often so hidden and seemingly protected.

I have been taught and trained most of my life to restrain, not free natural impulses. I lived in an environment that even went so far as using the idea of “natural” to restrict what I instinctively knew wanted to be released. It is those very impulses that naturally revel what it means for me to be human. It feels so natural and right to be generous, trusting and loving. But I have learned the lessons of caution and control.

Every fiber of me wants to be connected, compassionate and loving. I want to relax so that those natural traits can ripen in me. I believe that those traits await ripening in all creatures like me. I expect that what is natural will emerge or we will surely wither away like unripened fruit.

It is no easy matter to probe what it means for me to believe. My wondering thoughts have roamed around the idea of belief for many years. Most of my life, I have thought that I only believed what my senses could not perceive. For a long time, I thought that to believe had to do with other beings or entities that may exist beyond my sensory awareness. I don’t think it is quite that simple.

I believe that there is a maple tree growing in my back yard. I think I have seen it, heard its leaves rustle, felt its sinewy bark, its thick trunk. I think I have smelled the scent of its dry leaves when I rake hem in the fall and have only failed to taste its flavor because I am now an adult and no longer think I need to place everything into my mouth.

I can put all these sensory experiences together and have a notion that there is a tree growing in my back yard. I think I know that tree. Yet every one of these sensory impressions are mediated by light photons, fluctuating sound waves and sensory nerve impulses that convince me, allow me to experience the presence of the tree.

The subtlety of this has begun to dawn on me. I have no direct experience of a tree, all my experience is mediated by something else. In a realty check, I notice that I may only be seeing light photons bouncing off a tree but I don’t see a tree. Yet something in me opens up to the tree’s presence. The softer and more open my heart becomes, the more deeply I feel and experience that presence as any other human might. I believe that the tree is present.

But only I, this human, experiences the tree directly in the way that is unique to me and my belief. All my sensory data is massaged and shaped by my long history of sensory experience. All my impressions are based on my belief in the validity and truthfulness of a whole assortment of mediating factors: photons, air waves, air molecules of treeness, nerve impulses. In some sense, I believe the tree is actually present based on a sensory experience I only remotely understand.

Every other week, I spend a couple hours looking at and talking with Kelli who lives in California. I habitually think I am having a direct experience of her presence, I sense her mood, watch her movements, listen to everything she says. In what seems like a truly experienced way, our minds and hearts not only touch one another but sometimes seem almost to blend. All this is based on my belief that I have a deep experience of her presence and am aware of what she is saying, what movements she makes, what expressions cross her face.

Yet, I have no direct sensory experience of her. All these sensory impressions are mediated by electronics, by electrons flying through air and wires. These electrons stimulate baffles in my speaker and a screen that glows with moving images of Kelli. I think I hear and see Kelli, but I am only hearing and seeing very indirectly. In reality, I am relying on human-made devices that mimic what my ears and eyes might otherwise perceive if Kelli were in front of me.

I believe in the reliability and truthfulness of those electronic devices, even though I know similar devices can not be reliable and truthful. Similar devices can distort and reshape the impact of photons electronically, and they can create CGI images that may resemble the original but not be the same. The images of characters created in movies like Avatar are all manipulations of photons the naked eye might otherwise perceive. The characters appear real and they invite me into their presence as any other character images might.

I rely on the reliability of my electronic devices, and I believe in a presence of Kelli who appears to be seated in front of me, even though I am looking at an electronic screen and Kelli is many miles away. She is miles away from any direct sensory experience, but I believe in what I seem to see and hear, all the while knowing only part of my awareness is true.

Humans use similar electronic means to become aware of suns and planets that are far beyond what our senses can directly experience. We even see things outside the wavelengths of light our eyes can see. We believe what these electronics tell us as all their electronic “senses” are converted into human sense experiences, images and data. They electronically “see” so that we can interpret and understand a presence beyond our senses.

Through our “seeing” devices, we believe in the presence of many unseen worlds. Sometimes we even reach beyond what our electronic devices can detect and believe in realities such as dark matter and dark energy. These realities remain only inferred and are still undetected, but we believe in their presence. We see evidence of forces, traces of reality that suggest a kind of presence and we sort of believe, tentatively, in the presence of something.

We often create a kind of loose awareness by what we kind of believe. Cultures such as Tibetan Buddhism have had similar leaps of belief and quasi awareness. They have their own science. They have felt traces, signatures of forces in their experience and they gave shape to those energies. They created what we westerners habitually call gods and goddesses, and they regarded them as personifications of what they more directly perceived and experienced. Their gods and goddesses might have even been closer to what is real, closer to direct sensory experience, than our notions of dark matter and dark energy.

So when someone asks me whether I believe in God, this is no straight forward question and there is no straight forward answer. To believe is no simple matter. There can be no simple or unqualified statement of what I believe. To believe always relies on intermediary agents that only give faint impressions of a reality that exists beyond my senses.

It is further complicated by no two of us having exactly the same awareness of any reality, even when we think we have so much in common.

Though I sometimes think I am getting close, there is nothing I yet experience directly except what is inside of me. And that has its own qualifications and complications.

So every day, I step into a world built on my belief. It is a system of believing that has been built and shaped by many years of experience. It is a system of believing that constantly changes every day. I am convinced that if my heart can be open and generous, the world which I believe exists will continue to unfold, reveal its true self, and welcome me into it.