Barry Garden Path

Something has changed. A little over a year ago, I was on a retreat with a group of gentle Earth Holders. A startling experience from those few days was the ease with which my tears began to flow. I found that when I allowed myself to feel anything at a deep level, I would begin to cry. It was totally spontaneous and uncontrolled.

It was something that stayed with me for weeks after the retreat. If I allowed myself to go to the deep feeling spot, I would involuntarily tear up. I sometimes sobbed and became unable to speak. It happened at live concerts when I allowed myself to sink into the music of Beethoven. It happened when I talked about my experiences at the retreat. It sometimes happened when I sang.

It is now over a year later, and the tears no longer happen so readily. There are moments that I feel near to tears, but I don’t have a tearful response to hearing Beethoven’s music as I did months ago. I don’t so easily cry.

However, something else is happening. I may no longer venture into that deep place with an upwelling of tears. However, I do go to that adventuresome place more easily and frequently. I experience the same deep wave of joy that surges through my body, but it comes without tears. There is no uncontrolled rush of tears. I find myself in that same wonderful and lovely place throughout my days, but without tears.

I find that I can choose to settle into that deep experience without the tearful overflow. When I remember to go there, there is no surprise of tears. Instead, I can sustain for extended moments the embracing rush of excited joy, and then slowly let it go. There is no interruption of tears, there is no release or overflow. The joy simply hovers with me and attaches to whatever I am doing.

I now seem able to contain the experience and reside in that lovely place without losing the feeling in a sudden rush of tears.

I am aware that something happened last spring when, one morning, I accidentally surrendered to the feeling of plunging into a deep well of undefined awareness. It was a brief brush with a feeling of emptiness. It was so startling that I was concerned that I might have had a small stroke or seizure. I checked in with my doctor who assured me that my body was likely OK. But I remained startled.

About a week later, I summoned the curiosity and courage to allow myself to follow the path to that same formless place. It is now a familiar route.

Ever since then, and with some practice, I seem to be able to take that same uncontrolled plunge with little resistance. It has become a familiar pattern, but without tears . My mind becomes light, buoyant and bright. A ripple of contentment surges through my whole body.

I feel the same surging energies that were unexpectedly released during and after the retreat. But now there are seldom tears. Instead I typically feel a calm that accompanies, perhaps channels, the enthusiasm and delight.

Now I am curious to find where those tears make their future appearances.

I’ve been thinking recently how I made up of components that come from my four grandparents. Each of them contributes one-fourth of the factors that helped determine what I would become. For a long time, I’ve been daily aware of the contribution of my two parents, each of them contributing one-half of me. It is another matter for me to think of the contribution of each of my grandparents.

For me, it is more than being attentive to the genes I got from each grandparent. I have a growing interest in attempting to see into the shadowy recess of my origins. The more I search, the more these four grandparents seem to be with me. I have more acceptance of how I have come to be connected to this body and mind.

It has been a startling reminder that both my grandfathers were alcoholics. They were classic drunks. They led disfunctional lives, so the sketchy and whispered stories go. One was ‘kicked out’ and lived in isolation and obscurity. There are conflicting accounts about whether he was alive after I was born.

The other grandfather was only an image in a portrait that hung on my grandmother’s wall. He passed on the name ‘Charles’ that became my father’s middle name, and is now mine.

I suspect that the seeds that grew and prospered in them were scattered into my parents’ make-up and subsequently are part of mine. Each of these alcoholic progenitors give me one-fourth of my determiners and fashion the base of who I am.

I suppose that any time that I speak or use words I am using a kind of code. Words may imply what I am thinking, but they are only useful to the degree that they come close to what is in my mind. I value clarity, and appreciate it when someone’s words clearly code what is in their mind. This doesn’t always happen.

When I hear people speak about issues involving race, the meaning is often hidden in a code that has meaning only to those of us who have been trained and initiated. Rather than speak openly and clearly, people often speak in a code that somewhat shields them from being called racist.

An article recently appeared in the Southwest Journal that included a quote from a resident that was racially coded. I send the author a message that addressed this issue:

“I was interested in the quote from Sean Thorud about ‘what kind of element’ light rail will bring into the Bryn Mawr neighborhood.  The reference to North Minneapolis is  clear race code meant to raise fears and uneasiness in white readers like me.    

I appreciate the problem that a newspaper has in reporting quotes such as that.   But while it may be a correct representation of someone’s opinion, it also gives such racial agitation a broad audience.   I am willing to wager that any white reader of your reporting of that quote will feel the racial meaning and experience the racial uneasiness associated with it.   I think that the newspaper, perhaps unwittingly, reinforces the racial bias by stoking the racial fears of white readers like me.   I can only guess about the offended feelings your black readers might experience.

  
If the newspaper is going to report those kind of comments, I would appreciate a comment by the writer that it is a racial slur.    The quote might be couched in soft language, it might pretend to be subtle,  it might be even be disguised as “nice”, but it is easily felt as racially coded and meant to stir fear and anxiety.    I don’t think that the newspaper should participate in that kind of complicity any more than it would quote language that is blatantly offensive.

   
I for one am offended by the quote you included from Sean Thorud.   I am offended that you would use a quote that would seek to stir racial unease in me as one of your readers.   I am offended that a quote like that would be used because of a belief that readers like me might be disturbed by it.    I am offended that such a quote might be associated with my neighborhood.

 
We white people have learned how to talk with one another  in a coded way that conveys a racist message without blatantly appearing to be racist.   We deftly and subtly pluck at the anxieties and discomforts that we have about people of a different color, without experiencing the embarrassment of displaying our full intent.   I encourage the newspaper not to participate in this charade and either avoid statements that are racially coded or call them out for what they are:  racially based slurs. “

I am satisfied that the editor responded favorably but the issue will continue to be a part of my life. I intend to be more alert to this kind of coding, in myself and others. I will attempt to clarify what it is people are actually saying and push for clarity when anyone is making a racially tainted comment. By paying attention to how I feel when I hear such a suspicious comment, I will know whether it has a racial meaning.

I have learned very well how to exercise my judgment skill. It is a skill that I developed at an early age as part of my family tradition. It is also a skill that has helped me make sense of experiences. Judgment often helps me make sense of what I encounter.

By putting experiences into categories, I find them easier to deal with. I have a well-tuned critical mind. It is a mind that can help me with shortcuts, but it also can cause me to move too quickly to judgment.

I find that I am highly capable of putting people into predetermined patterns of behavior and appearance. These categories have meaning for me and help me make my way through life. They are often based on and reinforced by my experiences. They also limit my ability to observe and react.

Judgment helps lay a foundation for my cognitive manner of understanding and help me determine how to react. I know how I might easily deal with a situation more efficiently if I see how something fits into my pat pattern of experience and consequences I am familiar with.

I think that judgment is like my own built-in form of Google. Anything new is measured against a life-long data storage that alerts me to whether the new is likely to be good for me or not so good. I judge whether it will be beneficial or harmful. Judgment is so much a part of my built-in psyche that it happens almost automatically unless I intervene.

I’ve had two experiences recently that have caused me to think about judgment and the role it plays in my reactions. At the Fair, I was standing in a long line at the Sweet Martha’s cookie booth, when a group of young women went up the exit aisle and proceeded to purchase many buckets of cookies. They were apparently Somali, and no one suggested they go to the end of the line, except the friend I was standing in line with.

My reaction was to suggest that I had experienced this kind of behavior in Somali individuals in the past, the demanding push to get what they want. Friends have simply called the behavior rude. For me, it reinforced my experience of pushy behavior, and probably set the foundation for future judgment.

This morning, I sat in a car dealership waiting room, for about half an hour, aware that a man with an “African” accent was all that time talking loudly on his cell phone. All 20 of us in the room could hear every word of his conversation. He was still talking when I left. I noticed that another man with dark skin was quietly and inaudibly talking on his phone. But it was the loud talker that will reinforce my categories and shape my judgment about what to avoid.

I am aware that the influences on my judgment categories are often more subtle, but they are also powerful to shape my future judgments unless I mindfully intervene. Judgment is a useful tool, but it requires considerable control and skill.

In my current meditation practice, I move through five kinds of concentration, the first of which I call Contact. It involves being very aware that I am breathing, before I move to the second level of concentration, Sustained awareness of my breath. The third level is one of Rapture, followed by Joy and then One-pointedness, which is close to absorption.

The foundation of it all for me is Contact. Before I am aware of and make concentrated contact with my breath, I have already made awareness contact with my body through mindful movements, including stretches on the floor and settling onto my pillow. Making contact with my breath is simply a continuation of the awareness, the attention I give to my body in other ways as I go through exercises and planned movements.

Contact with the ground, with plants and with people is no less an occasion of deep awareness. The contact is more than the basic physicality of the experience. The contact gives me the opportunity to be aware that I am touching or being touched. Even contact with the chair I am sitting in can be more than the simple physicality of feeling the chair. It easily becomes an experience of awareness of a chair that I am contacting.

To some degree, contact with inanimate things like a chair, keyboard or floor is remarkably different from contact with living beings such as persons, plants or pets. However, sometimes it seems that there is a continuum of animation that extends to things considered inanimate. I sometimes know a level of awareness that there is aliveness even in those things typically considered inanimate. To experience that awareness, I may have to realize the fifth level of concentration, One-pointedness. I definitely have to go beyond awareness of the simple physicality of contact by touch.

The awareness that arises through contact is more than a simple sensory experience. However, the contact that generates awareness is typically grounded in some type of sensory experience. I think that, with practice, most sensory experience can be the foundation for deep awareness and joy.

Much of my reflective, spiritual reading is a nice backdrop but it is not true practice for how I want to live. What has had the greatest noticeable impact on me has not been what I read or listen to but what I practice on my pillow.

My experience sitting on my pillow has the greatest lasting impact. It is a wonderful practice for living. It is good practice for being aware when I am siting at my computer keyboard or next to a friend. It is practice for unpleasant experiences at the Fair or a delightful walk through my garden in the rain.

The concepts of spirituality I read and hear are interesting and helpful. They especially help my cognitive functions to prepare for and make sense of what I experience. They help my mind relax and move out of the way. They may even help me move through the thicket of confusing experiences. But it is my meditation practice that helps me the most.

What I experience for the few minutes I sit on my pillow helps me prepare for what I experience afterwards. The practice may end with the ringing of my bell, but the reverberations of the practice continue deeply into my day. The practice of descending into deep concentration allows my practiced awareness be less cluttered and impeded by the feelings and thoughts that readily arise. Putting aside the hindrances of distracting feelings and thoughts while I am sitting on my pillow trains me in dealing with similar thoughts and feelings that naturally occur later on.

Those thoughts and feelings may often be useful as I navigate my daily life. However, they are often a distraction that keep me from being intimately aware of what is going on. They distract me from being deeply aware of what is actually right in front of me. They keep me from being aware of things and people as they really are.

I am beginning to see that my awareness, my sense of presence grows as my concentration practice becomes less cluttered. It has been months since I began to use my breath habitually to guide me on a contemplative plane while I sat on my pillow. Now it happens more frequently when I am no longer sitting. My skill in descending into steady awareness has become more stable. I only have to nod gently in the direction of my breath, and I touch a steady state of focused awareness and penetrating joy.

Practice has slowly brought me to a place of simple awareness independent of content supplied by my mind. When I remember my breath, I can experience who or what is before me with little distracting explanation supplied by my mind.

I even sometimes think I may almost experience things close to the way they really are, without the shaping veneer supplied by my mind. In time, this may become more routine, more habitual. With practice.

It was a casual remark, ‘How goes your spiritual life?’ It quickly opened for me a whole boulevard of reflection and window shopping on just what having a spiritual life means to me.

I think that, for me, spiritual means the awareness that things are not what they seem. Being spiritual means being able to allow my awareness to depart from a conventional way of seeing things and seeing them with eyes that belong to me alone. It is my nature to be a spiritual being, and I am able to remove the barriers that keep me from experiencing my spiritual nature.

Being spiritual means putting aside all convention. It means seeing the world in a way unlike a common, daily experience that is conditioned by the culture I’ve grown older in.

My spiritual world is without form or shape, and is a portal into vast emptiness. It is my way of being aware of what exists beyond my perception and thoughts. It is my unique experience that sets me apart from my peers, but it is without a sense of self. It is my unique absorption in what lies beyond what otherwise appears to be real.

Spiritual is a surrender to what lies beyond concept and it reminds me that there is much more to reality than the shapes I touch or the concepts I hold.

My spiritual experience is in the realm of awareness, a place I have entry only because I have learned to surrender my conventional way of experiencing the world. It is my becoming aware in a manner that is beyond ordinary perceptions and no longer depends on time or space to give meaning. The awareness is beyond my senses and is capable of leaving my senses aside so that I can absorb what is real. The awareness is also beyond concepts, and relies on my quieting my mind and putting thoughts aside.

I think that art is by its nature spiritual. Art attempts to bring to viewers a view previously had only by the artist. Art is a non-conventional way of experiencing what had previously seemed commonplace. Art is a sharing of experience that reaches beyond the ordinary and is unique. It is personal, even separate, until shared by another aware individual.

I think I am by nature spiritual. I share in a consciousness that lurks behind all common experience. Becoming more spiritual-focused in my unique and personal way is actually an experience of dissolving my sense of self which otherwise makes me distinct. By becoming more spiritual-focused, I allow my awareness to be absorbed in an awareness that flows behind, beyond my individual self-focused experience.

Being spiritual, for me, places me in a sea of awareness that is without limit or distinctions.

For much of my adult life, I have lived in a dream world. I am becoming aware how much of that illusory world has been shaped by cultural consensus. So much of it has also been shaped by my willing fabrication of my notion of myself. From one perspective, I have thrived in that dream world so affected by lies. But it is a dream world. As an older person, I am realizing it is time to wake up. And it is about time.

It is time for me to let go of the old goals and outcomes that have seemed so important to my culture and myself. Letting go of my old ways does not just happen easily or over night. It is a slow process of becoming aware. Intention, as critical as it is, does not bring about instant awareness, but it does light up the path.

I am gradually learning to live a new kind of life that is open to ambiguity and uncertainty. My attraction and attachment to outcomes and to a way of living is slowly fading away as though it was a dream I once lived. If there is anything I might call success, it is becoming more aware. Gradually, the past lies can disappear.

There is a new kind of rawness that allows the melting away of the old illusions. I am becoming more familiar with rubbing up against a world that is uncertain and unpredictable. I am developing an awareness that comes from raw experience and not something that comes from cultural convention or concepts.

Surrendering to this awareness is like the experience I have of falling asleep. I find myself falling into a world without preconceived notions and shapes that constantly seem to change. I surrender notions of how things should be, aware that those illusions diminish my awareness. I neither resist what shows up or get attached to what is desirable.

I am weary of living in a culture preoccupied with lies and fabricated illusions and expectations. I want to free myself from the lies we share about our world and about ourselves. I am intentionally giving up an impersonation of myself, and opening myself to a free adventure of becoming.

I want to make each day something other than a replication of yesterday’s lies. It is not too late.

As I light the candle and incense, preparing to sit on my pillow, I am very aware of my whole body. My whole body seems intensely present. I am standing there, present in a very physical way. I feel that I am present from my forehead to my toes. I feel present from the surface of my skin through my muscles and organs.

In this moment, I am aware how my body is here, present in this small space, standing above my pillow. I feel the outline of my skin, the weight of my torso, the tingling in my head.

This has been a new experience for me for perhaps three years now. Aware of my body presence was not only frowned upon while I was being taught. It was somehow simply wrong. Except for eating, I was mostly taught to avoid this intense awareness and not focus in a way that might encourage bodily delight.

Today I stand here above my pillow and before my shrine and my body vibrates, radiates, proclaims awareness and delight. I enjoy the feeling of being physically present, I welcome the tactile awareness that oozes through my bodily presence. If I had the eyes to see, I would appear to glow.

This is no simple delight in a sensory experience. It is the foundation, the opening for the growing experience of concentration. When my mind is focused on my bodily presence, it relaxes.. I feel the joy of a mind at ease.

I enter into a seclusion that otherwise evades me when I am not so intimately aware of where the parts and extent of my body reside. When my body is known as being present, the rest of my world fades.

Soon, I focus my attention on my breath, still aware that it is my body that is breathing. My awareness of my body presence has made the arrangements. My mind can now settle down and focus on my breath. Then my mind will enter into the between, into that place where there is no past or future, no space or time.

All this happens because my body has learned to open the welcoming portals. When my body experiences this kind of being present, my mind can more easily enter a place where there is no physicality at all.

My body has finally learned to be present in a most intimate fashion, and so my mind can be free to do what it does so well when it is unimpeded. My mind can be present as well.

I am constantly between what was and what is about to be. My world, and I, are in constant change. I am beginning to wonder if there is anything in the between. Or maybe it is everything. So it sometimes seems.

I am constantly reminded of what has been. I spent a few days at my cabin, and I was surrounded by reminders of my past experiences, especially all those aspects of my cabin I have built. I am often reminded of past experiences, all of which can lure me into thinking of what has been. I have friends who populate conversation with remembrances of what they have done, of what happened to them. They quickly move from now to then, a point in the past.

For me the future often has a similar distracting attraction. Promises of things to come, threats of how things may not turn out to my liking routinely populate my thinking mind. The past invites me to think of past joys and regrets, the future tells me of a panorama of hopes and fears.

Still, all I really have exists between the past and future. Apart from memories, I can really know little of what has been. I cannot yet know what has yet to be. I am between, and that is all my mind can truly gasp and absorb. That same mind yearns so much to dwell on memories of the past and to anticipate what is about to become.

If, out of habit, I allow my mind to be drawn to the past or future, I am likely to miss out on what is happening right now. I am living between, and so is the world. Nothing exists any longer as it once was, and nothing has yet become what it is about to be. No activity or fabrication of my mind can change that. I can only know what is between.

I am beginning to think that what is between, between past and future, is emptiness. I think that time and space between past and future is emptiness. There is no true now. Everything is between, in a state of becoming. To enter into now is to enter into emptiness. Now is the realm of infinite possibility.

Focusing on now can be a small and subtle experience of emptiness. Between past and future there is only a realm of becoming. When I experience what it feels like to be between, I experience a small door of openness to what is yet to be and a small trace of what has been. That is as close as I typically get to experiencing becoming.

My between is not so much past or present or future. It is the emptiness of becoming.