Barry Garden Path

I just noticed a very simple thing, and I’m surprised I haven’t thought much about it in the past. It is something that frames and provides the platform for how I am learning to concentrate. It is a core theme in how I meditate. And it still feels like a discovery.

Whenever I consider the parts of my body, my hands, my face, my feet, it is the part of me where my consciousness lands. If I happen to whisper anything at all to my knowing mind, it is something like “my face is being known, my chin is known, my breath is known.”

I notice that this is a habit, and that I do not whisper “I know my face, I know my chin, I know my breath.” There is no “I” involved. The awareness is I-less. Without the “I”, the awareness is clear, energetic, joyful.

I notice that the way I surrender when I focus concentration is without an “I”. There is no acknowledgement or awareness that “I” am taking the plunge into formless space, a free fall into nothingness. There is only an awareness that the plunge is being taken.

This lack of a reference to self seems so important as I think back to what kind of release I experience when I relax and fall into the void. “I” has been left behind. “I” remains behind me on the shore as my concentration pushes out into the flowing, formless stream.

The conscious entity that ventures out towards the other side is without an identity, without a name. The entity is close to being “I-less”. I am obliquely aware that I am the one engaged in the journey. But the “I” is mostly off to the side. The focus of awareness, the concentration is that the journey is being taken.

I know that this seems like a small discovery, but it has already affected the way I am moving through the day. It began with the realization that when I scan parts of my body, my consciousness envelopes and absorbs all it touches. The cheeks, the nose, the breath are simply being known. There is no need for an “I” to act or take charge.

The subject of any sentence I might whisper is not the “I” who appears to act. The subject is the object that is being known. I notice that there is much to take in, much to absorb, much to be aware. It seems that this happens in such a relaxed, joyful, gentle way when “I” is not in the way. I seem to be learning a way that is I-less.

Perhaps it was with good intention that some people have called the Earth “Mother.” For me, this is wrong and unhelpful. To anthropomorphize the Earth in this way ignores reliable observation and encourages bad behavior.

If indeed the Earth has consciousness, it is not the consciousness of a caring, benevolent Mother. The Earth does not tolerate inattention, disrespect or careless behavior. It is not accurate or good to see the Earth as an entity acting in a mothering way.

In fact, the Earth has traits that are characteristically unfriendly and hostile to humans, even while humans have been given a select niche in which to prosper and survive. I fail to see that humans are regarded as anything special, entitled to mothering. It is not a caring, benevolent Mother that erupts and sends ash, lava and deadly gas in all directions, regardless what number of humans are affected.

It is not a mothering gesture to send destroying hurricanes ashore or ravaging tornadoes across a countryside populated by humans. It is no mothering entity that causes my fingers to go numb and white in winter. It is no mothering care that causes others to die in summer from drought and heat. The same Earth that provides nourishment also yields poisons that kill and harm humans.

I can breathe oxygen that plants have rather recently learned to spread in the vastness of the earth’s atmosphere. However, that is a balance that humans have now learned to alter. The apparently friendly benevolence of the Earth’s atmosphere can be changed by humans to an inhospitable, polluted atmosphere of suffocation and harm.

The Earth may have the appearance to some of a nurturing mother. But the Earth also is an unmoved arbiter of vengeance to creatures that ignore or alter the power and delicate balance of the Earth’s ecological systems.

Humans are nourished by plants that grow from the earth. But humans also can make the same nourishing food into agents of harm by the way humans apply chemicals to the Earth and alter the natural productivity of the land. The Earth is no motherly protector who catches a toddler who stumbles because of a lack of skill or insight. The toddler falls.

At best, humans are gardeners who have this brief time in the history of the Earth to draw breath and nourishment from the Earth. Humans have a very recent relationship with an Earth whose history has nothing to do with mothering humans. For a relatively brief moment in time, the Earth has given us a home and become a hospitable place for humans to live and prosper.

It now appears that humans have perhaps overlooked that hospitality and have become unruly and unwelcome guests. The Earth has, in very unmotherly fashion, already begun to eliminate these ungrateful and destructive guests. Changes in the climate brought on by humans have already caused the suffering and starvation of millions of people. There is no intervening Mother protecting the gardeners who have ignored or misused the welcome from a gracious Earth.

I wonder if humans who have become like unruly children of a dispassionate planet will change. Will humans change enough of their greedy and uncaring behavior before they are cast aside by the Earth as countless creatures have been cast aside and gone extinct in the past. No Mother protected them, and there is no Mother who will protect humans from such a fate.

The Earth does not tolerate inattention. If humans cannot be skillful observers of what the Earth demands, humans will surely perish. They will at least perish in great numbers, but perhaps not totally perish. If humans continue to show themselves to be disrespectful, unruly guests in the Earth’s garden, they will certainly be evicted.

If the Earth is indeed a Mother, the Earth is more demanding than any mother I have ever met.

The scaffolding through which I interpret and approach the world still affects the way others see me. It is how I present and reveal myself.

But that same scaffolding is becoming more fuzzy, loose and fluid the more I am able to approach moments of unstructured absorption. My own scaffolding seems to have less and less effect on how I see and understand others, even while I think it still has some effect on the way they see me.

I noticed this at a gathering I attended last evening. When I look at my life and try to see it as others might, I see a structured scaffolding that has a certain shape. I think others might see me as a presence that has a certain scaffolding. I have been living in a shape, a form that gives shape. There is a scaffolding that affects how others see me and how they see who I have become.

I think that that same scaffolding has shaped for me how I see the world. I look out through the same scaffolding and think I understand what I see, all based on my own scaffolding. That scaffolding has shaped my experience and how I have interpreted all I have encountered.

A friend of mine is currently in Egypt, traveling through the traces of an ancient civilization and sending back amazing images that suggest what that civilization must have been like 4000 years ago. As I look back, as I suspect my friend does as well, we see a structure of a world now seen only from the outside.

Moreover, that same scaffolding also shaped the view that those people who lived 4000 years ago used to interpret and understand their world. I am aware that, looking through the scaffolding I can see, I have a certain view of those ancient Egyptians. The scaffolding they have left behind, shapes my understanding of their world.

However, I strongly suspect that their view looking out through that same scaffolding, must have been dramatically different from mine. Yet we both are looking at essentially the same world.

What view did indigenous people have of those strange, uncivilized Europeans who came ashore in 1609? How they must have seen them as uncultured, dressed in those awkward, tiny shoes and wearing those unpractical, ridiculous hats. They even rowed ashore in boats that had no relationship to the forests and streams the indigenous people knew so well. Those uncivilized Europeans even farmed in such impractical, unproductive ways, planting vegetables in separate straight lines. Did then not know about the benefits of the Three Sisters?

I live in a neighborhood that is a structured scaffold of parallel streets, two-storied houses and a rich assortment of yards and gardens. It is what outsiders see and experience as they come into Bryn Mawr. It is what shapes my scaffold view of the neighborhood, my living space. It affects what I understand as I look out and take in the world beyond my neighborhood.

It is this proximate scaffolding with which I surround myself that I use as I daily make sense of the world.

I meet at least once a week with others who are characterized by others as meditators, Buddhists, mindful people. That is how others see the scaffolding of our lives, shaped as it is by reflective, mindful living.

For me, that same scaffolding profoundly affects the way I see the world. It offers an ordering that arises out of my mind to filter and be imposed on all I see.

At the same time, I think that my personal scaffolding is having less effect on my view than it once did. The rigidity of my scaffolding is relaxing, especially as I begin to have moments of formless absorption. The scaffolding clearly is present, but it is getting more soft around the edges, a little more fluid. My view of the world keeps shifting from day to day.

There are times that I think I come close to seeing others as they are without the filtering influence of my own life structure.

I live in a world where only a part of reality is visible to my searching eyes. Beyond the tactile and the seen, an experience of unfelt and unseen ghosts abides. There is a vibrant and dynamic reality that I can only barely become aware of. It is a ghost world. It has none of the shapes or forms of my more familiar world.

It is not enough for me to only know or or to simply realize that I live in a realm of unseen reality. It is not something so passive and lifeless that it is beyond my experience. The unseen world is as vibrant and alive as the world that is populated by what I can see and touch. I simply have to get more comfortable, familiar with it. This realm is a thriving arena of animated ghosts, entities as real as all the features I think I can see and touch.

Science has now reckoned with the ghost world of dark matter. Experience in the seen and tactile world has lead many to conclude that there is more to reality than what they can see and touch. A whole world of dark matter evidently exists, a world composed of ghost matter that is multiple times more vast than the matter we think we see and touch .

I sometimes wonder if the consciousness I experience is only a small part of a vast consciousness that reaches far beyond my finite experience. I wonder about a ghost consciousness that thrives with exuberance and vitality that is outside my seen world.

There is more stuff than the world I label as “material.” I already know that my experience of the material world is illusory and a fabrication of my own mind. What formless ghosts are there that also inhabit this world that reveals itself to me by my sight and touch?

Winter has become a time of deeper reflection for me. I’m less distracted by the exuberance of a warm, illuminated world populated by animated plants, rocks and animals. These are some of the material things I can see and touch, and they are a little less obvious, less available to me in winter.

I become more immersed in solitude in winter, and I am more inclined to settle into reflections on things I cannot see or touch. In winter I can better open my mind to an expanded reality, and in a small way I become more aware of the unseen ghost world. It is a ghost world that I am typically unwittingly a part of, a world outside my normal experience and attention.

Mindfulness is notably a practice of intimate contact with the material world of the seen and touched. Mindfulness also can extend to a world otherwise hidden from view. Winter offers me a quiet space of isolation where I can become more aware of the ghost world of the unseen. It is a world I can experience without the benefit or distraction of the customary shapes and forms of my seen world. And it is no less real.

I am glad for the occasional opportunity to rub up against a consciousness, an awareness not readily available to me in times of visual, tactile exuberance. Slowly I can become more comfortable living and moving around in a world dominated by ghostly exuberance and vitality.

For a long time, I’ve wondered about my fascination and experience of watching my model trains move around the wandering track in my basement. I sometimes even enter into that feeling just by imaging, remembering what it is like to watch them move.

I easily feel an openness and inviting allure that can arise even when I am only thinking about the experience of seeing the trains snake around corners or rumble down straight stretches of track . The puzzling part is that it is a felt experience not unlike what I encounter when I am entering into a state of focused, deep concentration on my meditation cushion.

Much of this is not new. For a long time I have considered this fascination with moving trains just part of my having Aspergers Syndrome, or AS. I’ve accepted that the orderliness and predictability of a train moving along a carefully defined path is an experience that someone with AS would find both comforting and attractive.

For me, my heightened interest in moving trains, seemed a normal trait of someone like me whose brain circuitry is slightly different from typical humans.

Now I am not so sure. I think that there is more to it. Because the train experience is so similar to focused concentration, I think it is more than just a symptom for someone with an uncommon brain circuitry.

Now, I am less apt to dismiss it simply as a characteristic AS symptom, and I am more prepared to see it as a helpful, reinforcing pathway to insight.

I am noticing that, for me, moving trains have been a learning experience. Moving trains allow me to feel what it is like both to enter into focused concentration and at the same time have a close encounter with impermanence.

A moving train is different from a train the is standing still on a fixed track. Watching a moving train has all the felt experience of encountering changing reality. It invites an abiding awareness of impermanence.

I might find a similar fascination with a spinning wheel or the whirling blades of a windmill. There is a sense of fixed reality coupled with an immediate experience of constant change or impermanence . But for me, it has been trains that have been most helpful.

A moving train going around a sinuous track is a facile way of experiencing impermanence while at the same time having an anchoring in a static reality. For me, it is a reflection of the changing world arising out of a solid foundation of infinite possibility.

Even a moving, constantly changing train simply “is”. A moving train offers both a focused concentration on “being”, while it is also in a state of constant change. It is a reflection of the impermanent world that simply “is” all around me. It is not unlike what I glimpse from time to time while sitting on my cushion.

Perhaps AS has given me an opening into the experience of something that otherwise might have been more difficult. Perhaps it helped moving trains give me a taste for what later would for me become part of deep concentration.

At any rate, I am grateful for moving trains. I think that my experience of trains has offered me a gateway to experience something much more than constantly turning wheels on fixed tracks.

I like the notion of embracing the unexpected. I even think of myself as learning to lead a non-purposeful life. I am, in small ways, learning how to give up “doing” things and “being done to” in the interest of yielding to a simple joy of “being.”

In its simplest sense, I am becoming more comfortable with just “doing nothing.”

This is not an intellectual game. It is not even an intellectual process, although it does affect where I put my attention. Rather it is a state that arises gradually from repeated surrender in time of concentration, in times I am sitting on my pillow. It is a state that arises from time to time as I immerse myself in the ordinary, daily experiences of mindfulness.

Sometimes, I have no expectations when I am walking across the room or when I am pushing the knife through banana bread. Sometimes, there is nothing I anticipate as an outcome, nothing expected in a felt manner.

Leaning into the unexpected is nothing that originates in my head but oozes out of my body as I feel myself absorbed in whatever is happening. I have little investment in the outcome, in the expected result. But I have a developed affinity for what is happening and that fills my body with a glowing joy. It is so good to be “here,” involved in whatever is happening.

My body is becoming accustomed to the simple and gentle joy of being. I can no longer be “the one” who acts to produce an outcome or to resist what is happening “to me”. I less frequently create an outcome, nor do I resist the actions of others. I have fewer expectations that I intend to meet.

I am in many small ways learning to accept things just as they are. I do not have a great interest in resisting them or changing them. I allow myself to be seduced into a close encounter with what is happening, with what is being.

While this intent to embrace the unexpected is strong in me, it is also seriously challenged by the squirrels who found it necessary to sever many wires and darken all the lights on two trees in my back yard. I have repeatedly called them naughty and lectured to them as I relocate them many miles away. But my heart is not resisting what they have done as it might have a couple years ago.

I may have been surprised, and saddened by my unexpected encounter with wire-cutting squirrels. But I have also experienced a quiet absorption that remains firm and calm in the midst of this unhappy event. I am part of what is happening, I am unhappy about it, I find it difficult. But I also am not resisting it.

None of this happens because I thought it through, or was convinced of its value. I am learning how to deal with the unexpected simply by repeated surrender in moments of deep concentration. I find that it is a slow process, but I am finding joy in yielding to events with little investment in the outcome.

I may even develop a habit of embracing the unexpected, just because it is.

As the earth has begun to tilt back toward the sun, I am attentive to the constant experience of change. It is a good time for me to remember that I am on a planet that is traveling around the sun at the remarkable speed of over 66,000 miles per hour. I am reminded of the way we use time and space to measure and observe change. Measuring speed is a way we attempt to express what appears to be a movement involving time and space.

My whole sense of change is dependent on and involves what I perceive as time and space. I think of a day in units of time invented by humans to measure what appears to be the movement of the sun across the sky. Humans have gone to great length to establish an unchanging basis for time, but still even that basis is constantly changing. It all is relative.

Even the measurement of space is relative, based on a perception that ignores the changing nature of the standard. If I can remove either aspect of change, either time to space, my experience of change vanishes.

Even if I attempt to examine what I experience without any measurement of time , there still is a before and an after. It is also a challenge to direct attention to any experience without evoking a notion of occupancy of space. It is difficult to step away from a world where space and time appear to be a constant. I mostly live in a persistent deception that space and time are a constant, and they are both changing.

There are moments of concentration when the notions of space and time do become uncertain. I sometimes feel I am on the edge of something wonderful and magnificent, the edge of an experience where there is no time and no space. I sometimes enjoy standing on the edge of that unchanging, non-relative reality. It is a distant sense of no change.

Very slowly, the feeling of release is creeping into my life. I’ve never found much comfort or appropriateness in the common notion of “letting go.” That well-worn expression has too much the feeling of disengagement, stepping out of the situation, abandonment.

I find it much easier to embrace the notion of “release”. It has all the feeling of an unfolding flower. It allows me to be fully present while releasing control. I let the situation unfold, but never step away from it.

When I experience release, I no longer experience constraints. The feeling of discomfort, or dis-ease, departs. All my life, I have struggled to be free of the constraints that society, my culture places on me. All the while, it has mostly been my internal struggle to release myself from my adopted notions of how things are. When I experience release, I feel like I have finally come home.

My meditation pillow is my training platform. When I meditate, I rapidly slip into a state of release. I leave all notions of my body, the room, the world behind and release myself into a formless space. My stepping-off point is my breath. Being aware of my breath, then releasing that feeling of physicality as I become aware that I am aware, allows me to enter into that formless space. I have a deep and full feeling of release as the experience of an unfolding flower saturates my presence.

For me, this is a release into something that must be like an experience of absorption. Concentration does not arise by force. Instead, concentration arises when I release my notion of how things are. More likely, I am releasing my mind from any notion of what things should be like.

Release does not just happen but results from an extended progression for a gradual seclusion from my notions of reality. It is a gradual relinquishment from all I have learned, from all my mental and emotional constraints. I am gradually able to be free, released from physical and emotional disturbances.

In time, I am becoming released from all I know, from the constraints of knowledge. I am no longer sure of anything. I am especially not sure of what others tell me. I constantly ask myself, “Are you sure?” The question releases my mind from the constricting moorings of certitude. I become slightly awash in a sea of infinite possibilities.

I am but a beginner in this business of release. It is something of a new experience for me. I am discovering, however, that when I intend to release, I become released. That is an experience of fullness, energy and joy. I feel like I have come home.

I notice how much energy I put into the future. There is such an allure to put attention on what might occur in the future that I often scarcely notice what is going on right now Sometimes I am distracted by the allure of the future. I’m not sure if this is is how I have been trained or if it happens naturally. I know that being a “planner” is a skill valued in our culture.

The future is often like a siren song luring me to a place that does not exist. It becomes the focus of my attention and my efforts. I recognize that some of this is important for living in the relative world, a place that relies on time and space for structure. I like it better when I live in the moment I have right now, rather than be captivated by a promised future. It could be an alluring future filled with delightful attraction or beckoning me to a place of fear and dread.

I often worry about the future, that it is something to be avoided or solved so that it has limited impact. I am drawn by an expectation that a future will give me the satisfaction and joy I do not now possess. Because of the alluring future, I miss the joys and satisfaction of the moment.

I notice that there are people who live in the expectation, the allure of a future rapture. The notion of a future heaven is such a strong part of our culture and part of our avoidance of suffering and death. It is a future heaven that is always just out of reach, and a distraction from where we are, what we can do right now. The allure of a future happiness can cause me to miss the opportunity to enjoy the rapture available to me right now.

The promise of a future heaven or threat of a future hell can easily be a distraction from the good or the harm that I can bring about right now. Keeping my “eye on the prize” may make sense from a planning perspective, but it is not a full way to live. I want my prize to be right now.

Having a peripheral awareness of possible futures makes for good preparation, for good planning. I do not want to put much energy, however, in something that might eventually exist or never happen. I want to maximize my attention and energy in a present moment. I want to avoid the allure of the future.

I notice how much energy I put into the future. There is such an allure to put attention on what might occur in the future that I often scarcely notice what is going on right now Sometimes I am distracted by the allure of the future. I’m not sure if this is is how I have been trained or if it happens naturally. I know that being a “planner” is a skill valued in our culture.

TO BE CONTINUED