Barry Garden Path

I’ve been lost and floundering in the big picture. I’ve been unable to bring into focus any notion of how the inequities of racism are ever going to be dealt with. I cannot see a world path that has white people treating people of color as equal humans. So today I am paying attention to the small picture, and that is enough for now.

Today I will be present wherever I happen to be. I will really notice the people that pass along the sidewalk along my home. I expect to be very aware when kids come into my back yard to see the fish. I will listen attentively when people stop to talk with me. I will be very involved with my small world.

I began by time spent on my pillow, focused on where I was and what I was doing. My space was small but it had an immense feeling of spaciousness. I walked through my garden and the fresh green world allowed me to enter. My focus never went beyond the curb but lingered on this small area of my garden.

I think that before I can absorb the larger picture in a meaningful way, I need to ground myself right where I am. I will spend time in my small world. I will be sitting, walking, chatting, observing, listening.

I am surrounded by the question today of how will we ever bridge the chasm that exists between white people and people of color. How will I bridge the chasm that exists between me and people of color?

There is no hope for me where there is no realistic expectation of a desired outcome. I do not see a basis for hope. I wish I did. The chasm seems so wide and deep. I do not see a way that my society can ever come together. So I all I can do is at least work on my own personal chasm.

Where do I begin? I have started by doing what comes easy to me: I read. I create a link with people of color that is primarily intellectual, but the emotional link creeps in. I read authors of color whom I respect, and that includes some who make me feel uncomfortable by what they say. I look at my own racism through their lenses.

I am moving through a small stack of books of poetry and essays by authors of color. They include people like Danusha Lameris, Ta-Nehisi Coates, John A. Powell, Ruth King, Langston Hughes, Joy Harjo, Adrienne Maree Brown, and so on. I sit, I listen, I pay attention. I ignore any of my internal narratives that try to emerge.

I also sit in meetings and listen to the women of color who contradict me. I ignore my urge to respond or resist. I bend, I yield, I listen attentively. I create a space in which we can both exist. I tell my ego to be quiet and take a rest.

I also pay attention to my reactions to people of color. I am becoming a little more honest and transparent with myself. I notice and study my own racism. I am increasingly aware that my life-long conditioning has fashioned me as a racist. Every one of my reactions to people of color is shaped by experiences and nurturing that began in the white baby bed in the hospital where I was born. I have been feeding on a diet of white privilege all my life.

I accept that all my white friends and white non-friends are racists as well. Everything they do, everything they say has the nutriments of white privilege. All white public figures are raised on the same diet of white privilege and continue to benefit from it. I notice and acknowledge the racism we all share.

None of what I am doing bridges the chasm I experience. All it does is provide a personal foundation, a beginning. Perhaps I will learn from someone who can see a way forward. I watch. I listen. I pay attention.

I recognize and enjoy three main characteristics of my times of deep concentration. I’m learning to pay attention to this wholesome triad. My best times sitting on my pillow are marked by three jewels that sparkle and glow. They make those moments spent sitting time well spent. The three are like three legs on a sturdy kind of focused attention.

Relaxation is a key element of my concentration. My mind lets go of its usual business and my body settles into a deep, relaxed state. Activity seems to stop in my mind and my body. Everything seems to shut down, but in reality it is becoming totally alive. My mind and body have nothing to do.

Spaciousness replaces my sense of form and containment. I no longer feel the limits of time or space. My mind / body reaches out and experiences no sense of limits. I am aware of nothing in particular, but instead my mind reaches out to everything that exists. I enter a void that is thriving with potential.

Brightness infuses my mind and body. This is more than a visual experience, even though flashes of light often come out of the void. There is a kind of high energy that bursts out of my mind and body. The sense of illumination surrounds me and comes from within me.

If I am having a good day, this triad of relaxation, spaciousness and brightness stays with me for awhile. Sometimes it is a passing experience, and I have to return to my breath to take me back to that same spot. Naturally, it is a triad that I am always glad to visit. Sometimes, I take the triad with me into the meandering moments of my day.

It is a relief to look outside and see that the destruction and mayhem has not spread to my neighborhood.   I can only faintly imagine what it must be like to live in parts of the city directly affected by the rioting.  The fear and trauma must be very hard to bear.  

As much as I think outsiders have had some role in the destruction, I am deeply concerned that many local people joined in the action.   It is so hard for me to understand.  I wonder about the societal conditions that have brought about this departure from basic humanity and conditioned such actions.  I wonder how accountability will be acknowledged or assigned.   Where do I fit in as part of the cause of it all?

Today I am hearing people who want to own the destruction because it signifies their rage and the depth of their frustration. I understand what they are saying, and I suppose I can understand that someone would self-immolate as a sign of protest. But I don’t understand how harming someone else is a suitable way to show your own anger.

Above all, on this day after a day of danger, I want to be aware of my part in this whole affair. The urgency of the situation has intensified. I want to be attentive how my patience about changing an unjust system is contributing to the continued problem. The time for being patient for change has passed. The best time for change is now.

Every moment, I am moving in a sea of air, and yet I am scarcely aware of its presence. I cannot see air, and I am about as aware of air as a fish is aware it lives in water. I become aware of air when it moves across my skin, but I typically ignore its reliable presence. I may see the effects of air, but I never see air.

I know air when I feel its movement or when its warmth or chill contacts my skin. I know in my head that I do not live in a vacuum but in a sea of air no less real than a sea of liquid water. However, this reality is easy to be as invisible to me as the unseen realities that exist altogether outside my senses.

I depend on the substance of the air to supply my body constantly with the oxygen it needs to survive. I rely on the movement of air to carry wastes from my body, otherwise I would quickly die.

I cannot see the air, but it makes its presence felt in ways I only occasionally notice. I am convinced it has substance because birds and airplanes can use it to move through space. Unlike me, they can tread on the buoyant substance of air.

Air obviously rushes around because trees respond it it by waving their leaves. I turn my face to air or away from it depending on whether I find its presence pleasant or not. I sometimes bundle up to shield my body from the chill of air. Other times I bask in the warmth of air against my bare skin. In these moments I have a glimmer of awareness of the sea of air in which I live.

It must have weight because if I move outside of my heavy atmosphere, my body would expand and explode because of the unfettered air trapped inside. If air were compressed into a liquid or solid, as people sometimes do, I would be able to see it. As it exists around me, it is totally transparent except for particles it carries. It can make its presence known to my eyes by air bending light to color the sky blue or create a rose sunset.

Air is such a common, natural part of my living that I hardly notice it. However, there are times I become focused on air passing through the ends of my nostrils. In those moments, the awareness of air becomes for me a door to deep concentration.

What is typically so elusive in my ordinary experience becomes a means for the most extraordinary experience of concentration. Having experienced the air in my nostrils, I am truly able to leave the experience of air and become aware of my world in a more exciting way. Even as much as I need and rely on air, there are these moments I deliberately leave air behind.

Each new morning has so many familiar aspects that I seem simply to be repeating what I have done before. It is an experience I have often these days. The pills I take, the warm water of the shower, my sliding razor, the rug under my stretches, the cushion on which I sit and quietly concentrate. They all seem so familiar, such a soothing repeat. I’ve been here before.

Each day seems at times to be a revisit of familiar terrain. The continuity is so impactful that I begin to see each repeat as the same continuous action. Each repeat seems almost so seamlessly connected to what went before that they begin to murmur that this is a continuous, flowing NOW. The repeat quietly suggests that there is no before-NOW, no future-NOW. Just NOW.

The margins, the fading distinction between yesterday NOW and tomorrow NOW is beginning to be more blurred. The repeats say that there is no need to rush forward, no need to regret what is revealed by a backwards glance.

I only have the present moment to experience, and the repeat underscores that notion. I will do this again and again until the realization sinks in that this is one enduring experience.

I only have the present moment to experience. What seemed a repeat of again and again is becoming a deep well of an undefined present. The repeat is full of no longer real past and of not yet real future .

It is not yet time to repeat. There will never be a time to repeat. There is only the continuous NOW.

The shadow of an afterlife obscures the experience of what stands before me right now. Any notion of time added to a continuing existence inhibits my ability to plunge into the impermanence of existence. It restricts my ability to let go of notions of permanence and perpetuation, and I am less able to enter the depth of being.

I was well-schooled in the christian preoccupation with what is yet to come, what will occur after I leave the world of senses. The shadow of that notion has hidden the rich, all-embracing nature of the present moment and limited my ability to enter into it. The more I distance myself from that shadowing mythology of heaven and hell, the more sacred and precious the present becomes.

Even my preparing in small ways for my temporal future, for next week, shadows what is directly before me. Without a shadow of the future, I can more mindfully touch the loose soil around the Pansies as I push them into the open holes I’ve made in the ground. My fingers more earnestly sense what really exists. There is no shadow of the future. The sensation is both one of impermanence and one of touching all that exists. My fingers push into the timeless now. Without the shadow of what is yet to come, I know more deeply what touches my skin.

Without the shadow of what is yet to be, I am able to touch and see what is otherwise partly obscured. I relax, and there is no tension to the future. I am able to more deeply experience the body of myself and others with a fulness that is otherwise obscured by any leaning to the future. The sound of the chime in my garden drifts into a relaxed world of a forever now when I listen with no notion of continuance, of what will happen next.

I realize that much of my experience of life, of reality has been shadowed by the belief of an afterlife. It has distracted me from what is truly happening right now. The whole notion of merit or sin, the idea of future reward or punishment, have shielded me from a full experience of what is always happening right now.

I intend to plunge into a deep earthly experience. I desire a sacred earthly awareness that allows me to enter into the widest dimension of what is. I want my encounter of being to happen outside the shadows.

The unweaving of the tight-knit fabric has begun. Deep exploring can do this. I spent so many years living in the well-fashioned, carefully woven edifice of a spirituality which I fatefully inherited and gladly accepted. It was a view of reality consistent with years of careful compliance, rules of practice and patterns of design.

Some of the early years I spent on my knees before the radio, a young boy’s fingers moving across rosary beads. Some times I floated in the fragrance of incense and glow of candles, outfitted in an altar boy’s outfit. In time I replaced that outfit with the robes of a monk and put on the official garb of one who leads others in prayer.

I was steeped, saturated with the shape of traditional spirituality, given oner to it. I came to understand it very well. Yet, I always wanted more. My intuition routinely whispered to me that there was more. The fabric of rich design did not give the welcoming comfort of being home.

Little did I know that it would be someone from a foreign land and foreign tradition who would help me go deeper, finally let go of what had been carefully done. With the unwoven freedom to explore, I have found deeper insight, energy and passion.

What I had been missing all those years was a spiritual foundation based on my own humanity, not the crafted patterns of a religious tradition. As I uncover more and more what it feel like to be human, as I trust the basic goodness of my nature, I understand what was lurking behind the woven fabric of a traditional orthodoxy. I understand better what was trying to emerge from behind all those years of rigorous compliance.

I am now better able to trust the wonders of what is real and yield to all I have yet to discover. It is the unwoven pattern of a realistic spiritual path.

Once again, I am grateful to Thay for what he has done. This time: uncovering Christianity in his book “Living Buddha, Living Christ.”

I have been aware of this book for a long time, and I’ve been avoiding it. I wasn’t ready to hear Thay speak well of a Christianity I know so well, and have found wanting. After all, I was “raised Catholic”, followed the rules, immersed myself in theology studies for four years, lived a monastic life for a dozen years, led thousands of people in Christian practices. 

For me, Christianity was not enough; didn’t quite cut it;  I wanted more. It took a talk I heard in December to convince me that I should listen to Thay.   

Here I am, listening to a Buddhist monk help me to uncover Christianity.

This is all about the first three sections of “Living Buddha, Living Christ”.

• Foreword and Introduction are important because they offer such a contrast.
• Brother David, though well-intentioned, seems to speak from behind a wall of separation, someone not quite ready to sit down at the picnic table and share in Thay’s fruit salad.   
• Elaine Pagels, on the other hand, gets behind the bric-brac of Christianity, beyond the rules, the orthodoxy, the vestments, the institutions and exposes the richness of foundational Christianity.   
• All this based on the chance discovery of hidden texts in the 1940’s and her eventual reading them when they became available several decades later in the early 70’s.
• Elaine Pagels’ books prepared me for what Thay had to say about early Christianity.
• Her reference to Thay’s “spiritual intuition” is very aligned with her own description of the richness and diversity in the early Christian community as expressed in the pre-gospel texts.  
• Elsewhere, she writes about the likely trade connections with India that probably brought Buddhist ideas into the middle-eastern world of early Christians.

Chapter 1, Be Still and Know

• This chapter would not get church imprimatur: “let it be printed”
• Might even be banned in recent Christianity I know.
• There is no monopoly on the Truth.
• Nourished by richness of many traditions
• Let go of views.
• Meditation, mindfulness, is the source of energy and good works.
• Some Christians embody the spirit of understanding and compassion of Jesus. – they allow Thay and us to plunge the depths of christianity. 
• Church has recognized people like this in the past; but put them behind a screen, a veneer of orthodoxy.
• Thay is carefully specific: “those who authentically represent a tradition.”
• True in the context provided by Elaine Pagels.  Her Christianity.

Some things are especially important:

• Importance of experience: live deeply our own tradition; practice  deep looking and deep listening.  
• Importance:  Richness is not in uniformity but in diversity; Wednesday discussion of how we meditate.
• Importance of being willing to be transformed by traditions of others;  not just look for overlapping, familiar aspects.
• Importance:   Interbeing, there are no barriers between us.   

Chapter 2, Mindfulness and the Holy Spirit  (Ghost)

• Thay weaves many themes through this chapter, especially intertwining the notions of mindfulness and Holy Spirit, both a source of enegy.
• Holy Spirit = ‘energy sent by God.’
• Spirit = spiritus = spirare: breathe, or better wind. 
• Energy of the Universe.
• What we experience in mindfulness;   no need to personify.  
• Many avenues for experiencing the energy of the Holy Spirit.
• Central role of experience.    

Thay highlights rich traits of Christianity that have only been, in my experience, outside the main stream,  there in trace amounts.,

• Thay goes below the infrastructure, below the edifice, to foundational elements hidden by centuries of practice and tradition.
• He is a Buddist archeologist who relies on his “spiritual intuition” to uncover rich elements I have wanted very much to be there.     

What if the birds at my feeders could tell me about their speedy travels from bushes to trees. What if the doors on my closet could speak of the idle times between closing and opening. What if the maple tree rooted behind my home could speak of its many visitors it receives daily, speak of the exuberance of its budding leaves, speak of the loss of crisping foliage in the fall.

What if the ground could speak to me of the myriad web of roots, molds and insects that constantly stir its innards.

When I think of what these voices might be like if all the world around me could speak, I only think of sounds reaching out to my ears. I think mostly in terms of my ears perked to hear what is being said. I am slow to remember how everything around me sends out an awareness that I have only to “listen” to, to pay attention to.

If my mind is otherwise quiet, I can hear what it is for a tree to be solidly present in my back yard. If I listen with an open awareness, I can understand the marvels of flight those birds enjoy. When I truly relax my mind, I might be able to penetrate the ground as I walk on it and feel the aliveness the ground might otherwise conceal.

Everything around me proclaims its reality, its suchness. Everything speaks what it means for it to exist. Everything speaks the language of presence.

What if I could pay attention, truly see and hear what surrounds me. What if my awareness could absorb the speech of the world in which I find myself. What if I could learn the language of reality. What if I could hear the voice of everything just as it is.

I think I can. I think that is possible.