Barry Garden Path

Every day, I begin with the intention of engaging in deep concentration, of being aware. I know that this will be more than something about to happen in my mind. My body will be intimately involved in my being aware. While this will be an experience of my being conscious, it will be an experience that feels deeply rooted and braided in my body.

Even my most removed experiences of awareness feel intimately connected with my body. Awareness begins with my body as I feel the sensation of movement or of stillness. My experience of awareness is something like a step removed from that sensation. I am aware of what it is like that I am sensing the position or movement of my body. While it might seem that I am aware “in my head,” I am very aware that this is rooted in what is happening in my body.

So much seems held in the confines of my body. Memories seem intimately connected with the minute structures of neurons in my brain. If that physicality is impaired, the memory is impaired. Yet the memory is an awareness that feels distinct from the body that it inhabits.

I experience the world through my senses, but the awareness of sensation seems removed from the very senses on which it is based. I wonder about the way in which the non-physical is braided with the physical.

My body holds that spark of life that first appeared in gradual steps millions of years ago. And that spark seems somehow connected to the awareness of which I am conscious. Did my consciousness evolve with that spark of life and where will it go when my body can no longer support its presence?

Some day, the physical substance of my own body will be recycled, just as it now consists of material recycled from previous life forms. What of the consciousness that seems to inhabit that body? How will the braiding unfold. Perhaps my consciousness is simply a fragment of a larger consciousness that has received some kind of individual identity by being braided with my physical body. My own body is borrowing a fragment of something much more vast, perhaps infinite.

Without the confines of my body, without the confines of time and space, I wonder what form my consciousness will take. Some days, I touch the outer limits of what that might be like. Some days, my awareness momentarily steps away from my body and lightly touches that vast arena of no time and no space. Some days I allow my body to totally relax and take a break while I dabble in a place where there is no place.

I am happy with my body, and I have learned so much through it. I am also very aware that it is impermanent and will some day take on different form. The braiding of my consciousness with my body will come to a conclusion. That will be a day of great change. I may perhaps become aware of what continues.

I don’t think there are more frequent words put before a question mark than these: Do you believe in God? Perhaps it is only my own sensitivity to the issue that makes me think this. The question, however, seems to be one that I have heard more than any other. And it is a waste of words.

It is, of course, a trick question. It is a question that must first be directed to the person asking it before I can give an answer. The substance, the core meaning of the question is: Do you believe in MY God? or anyone else’s. The notion of “God” is really present first in the mind of the person asking the question. That is where the concept originates and allows one to ask the question.

An appropriate response might well be, “Describe your God, and I will be better able to answer your question.”

Language, after all, is that way. Language offers a way of communicating concepts. Those concepts are fundamentally subjective and in individual minds. They are based on the experience of the individual using them. Words, like “God”, allow us to come to come common, shared ground of understanding, but never to the exact same place.

Fortunately, we have developed the ability to communicate with one another because there is some overlapping of experience, and words can communicate some of the commonness we share in our individual minds. But the meaning of that commonness is never exactly the same between two minds, between two experiences of awareness.

Few words fail so miserably to communicate a common experience as the word “God”. The question, “Do you believe…….” is impossible to ask because we do not share a common notion or concept. I think very few, if any persons have directly experienced God. Hardly anyone can use that word to describe what they have experienced. They are in no position to describe an entity they have never experienced.

Until I reach a state of total absorption, all my experience is only peripheral. It is only the peripheral experience that I, or anyone else, can truly describe. If I use that ambiguous, subjective word “God” I am at best referring to a peripheral experience. The word, and hence the question, is at best a metaphor or perhaps a simile. The response can be nothing better.

Even the atheists who use the word “God” to refer to a void, an emptiness, an absence are on totally subjective and shaky ground. They have, perhaps, had no direct personal experience of the void, but that may be as much as they can say. For them, only a peripheral experience describes the void around which they ambulate and attempt to describe. As it is for anyone, peripheral experience is all the atheist can use to describe the conjectured entity or non-entity.

If someone ventures to ask me the ‘believe in God” question, as I am sure they will some day, I have at least two options. I can ask them to define God, based on their own experience and understanding of the word. I am confident that I can reply “no” to their understanding. It is impossible that my notion of “God” could be the same as theirs.

If they give me the chance to define my notion of God, then my answer relies on my own subjective experience, not theirs, and they will not understand my answer. I would never be able to answer their question affirmatively.

In either case, I am not aware that my answer can be at all meaningful to anyone asking the question. Perhaps, it is best to say that the question is unanswerable, it is irrelevant. It is a waste of words.

It has been many years since I took off the robe of a monk. I packed it away. I deliberately chose to live as an ordinary human without the guidance or benefits of a structured life.

The rawness and the uncertainty of the experience still lingers with me. There is no set pattern to follow, no tradition to guide me, no robe to surround me, no one to show me the way. The robe is no longer a comfort or a constraint.

I have no way of knowing the form and nature of a guiding path as the robe once offered. I have to rely on my observations and experiences, mixed with lessons from an assortment of teachers. Sometimes I feel like I am walking in the dark, without a guiding light and without a snuggly robe.

I wonder what I can handle and what gives me a sense of direction. It changes daily. Sometimes it feels like nothing gives direction or guidance. The robe is no longer a part of me, no longer a comfort, no longer a shield. My bare heart is all that seems to remain.

It is such a burden to worry or even think about the future. It is even a burden to worry about what is happening right now, but I prefer to think about it. I would like to be more receptive of what comes and what might come. I prefer not to plan excessively out of worry about what might happen next.

I find my breath is very helpful. Besides keeping me alive, breath is a central tool in my experience of mindfulness. Actually, it is not so much the physicality of my breath that is helpful, but it is the awareness of my breath that is central to my ushering in concentration. The awareness of my breath focuses my attention, and after that I relax in an interior atmosphere of ease.

Breathing is such a natural and regular event that I normally don’t notice it. Still it occurs about 11 times a minute, day and night. My breath constantly nourishes me with oxygen. In addition, my breath helps me focus my mind, bringing it to a state of sustained concentration, allowing me to experience the bliss of a relaxed and focused mind. But of the time, I am unaware that I am breathing.

I am also typically unaware that all around me, the same breathing is constantly occurring. Wherever there is life, some kind of breathing occurs. And I am totally surrounded by living organisms.

Some breath brings oxygen to living cells, as in animals and insects. Sometimes oxygen is given up in a reverse kind of breathing, as it is with plants. Where there is life, there is breath in some form. It is not always a complicated and sophisticated process as it is in large animals. But the breath occurs throughout the living world that surrounds me. The grass, the dirt, the birds, people. All are routinely breathing as we continue to live.

Today I am aware not only of my own breath, but also the breath that occurs all around me. The world surrounding me is breathing constantly, and for once I am aware of that breath as well as my own. The invitation to awareness presented by these living beings is huge, so huge I can scarcely grasp it. To be aware of breath is so much more than being aware of the breath that happens in my body. It is happening all around me, constantly.

It is perhaps only humans for whom breathing is an aid for mental focus and can stir the bliss of a focused mind. For all living organisms, however, breath is an exchange with the environment that constantly sustains our life. For humans like me, it is also breath that sustains concentration and bliss as well.

My life is littered with fables. There are so many made-up notions of reality my culture has taught me that it has been hard for me to be open to the unknown. There has been an answer for nearly everything.

Wanting to be certain, it has been hard for me to embrace the unknown, uncertain and undefined. My fellow humans have obliged by filling in most of the blank spaces. My culture has taught me how to relate to the world in ways that have little to do with experience or reality. I have been taught to believe, when to know was momentarily out of reach. Even science has been quick to offer tentative certitude.

My mind and heart are filled with a vast library of cultural fiction, put there to placate a deep desire to know and understand. Rather than face and absorb the unknown, I have learned to live in a made-up reality. For instance, my world has been enveloped in a fog of religious beliefs that people have fashioned to explain what they were unable or not ready to understand.

Experience raised questions of unseen reality and creative imaginations filled in the voids with religious notions. In time, many of these notions have been recognized as blatantly fictional or false. But many others remain in the daily conversation of my culture.

I also breathed the atmosphere of racial bias that supports most cultures, including my own. When there was a lack of genuine experience and understanding about the “others”, the gap has been filled with made-up notions of what those “others” were like and what I could expect. Fictional veneers have been placed to reface differences that I experience, fictional veneers that serve to further keep us separate.

People create fictions of extra-terrestrials because of the unknowns surrounding phenomena they occasionally experience. In another age, there might have been fictional angels or demons luring behind the unknowns. Today, creatures from another planed are conjured up to explain what people have yet to fully understand. Something is experienced, and imagination rushes in to explain, or at least suggest, the unknown.

I notice an aspect of emptiness to most of my experiences. There is an unknown quality or feature to much of what I experience. Rather than be quick to explain away the unknown, I prefer to encourage my mind and heart to be at ease with things I do not yet know or understand.

Perhaps, in time I will have the insight to reach behind the obvious phenomena and touch a reality I had previously missed or mis-understood. Rather than live in a world of make-believe, I choose to embrace the unknown as readily as I embrace the known. My mind is more at rest, and I am more likely to be comfortable boldly walking in an atmosphere of ephemeral fog.

I want to live in a realm of infinite possibilities, as yet unknown.

Much of my life, perhaps most of it, I been suspicious of pleasure. Pleasure clearly has been something that I am constantly taught to be suspicious and cautions about. I am turning that caution around and welcoming pleasure into my every daily encounters. I am learning how to allow the joy of deeply felt pleasure become part of my delight in being human.

The pleasure of deep concentration is gradually changing me and my attitude about pleasure. It is transforming my experience of pleasure and my intention about pleasure. The experience of surrendering to the joy of a focused and relaxed mind has taught me how to embrace pleasure, and I am gradually allowing it to fill my whole presence. It is becoming a feature of my walking day.

Open surrender to and absorption of what presents itself can be an intense source of pleasure. It is the experience of no resistance and no grasping. There is scant barrier to experience and no attempt to “keep it this way” when something is pleasurable.

Perhaps I I have been taught to be suspicious of pleasure for good reason. It is easy for me to start grasping, to want to keep experiencing pleasurable things. It is easy to want to make the experience of pleasure go on and on. To make it happen again and again. It seems so easy to imagine pleasure that does not end and try to make that happen. This, I think, is a danger of intense pleasure.

It doesn’t have to happen that way.

The experience of deep concentration had taught me both to enjoy the pleasure of a relaxed, focused mind and to be satisfied with what is an ephemeral encounter. A focused mind can both be immersed in pleasure and emptiness at the same time. A focused mind is in a state of surrender, of letting go. Becoming absorbed in awareness does not have the aspect of grasping, but is a surrender to what is.

It is a learning that I apply to walking through my garden, to drinking tea, or to being with a friend. Becoming immersed in the pleasure of the moment is close to being immersed in the timeless. There is no need to attempt to hold onto the moment.

For me, deep pleasure is a state of the mind. It may arise from a tactile or other sensory experience. But the immersion in joy rests in the awareness of the occurrence of the sensory event.

A traditional expression of this is the use of the breath as a foundation and gateway to deep concentration, and to deep pleasure. I also think any sensory experience can be the foundation and gateway to the deep experience of pleasure, which is actually a state of a concentrated mind.

I train my mind to concentrate and to immerse in pleasure when I sit on my pillow. My breath is the primary point of contact with the physicality of my environment. From there, I move into a state of relaxed, pleasureful mind. Sometimes, I have the same wonderful experience when I hold my tea cup, when I walk among the plants of my garden, when I touch the hand of someone during a concert.

The pleasure of a contented, focused mind is slowly expanding and growing through my days.

Sometimes, I think that my heart is my body. My feeling of awareness seems deeply grounded in my body experience. My body is the root of my perceptions, and my heart experience is anchored in that body awareness. Even when I am reflective and am aware that my body is aware, even in those times of focused concentration, my body tugs at that awareness.

As much as I know that my awareness is more than physical, so much of my reflective awareness is still shaped by a penetrating sense of my body. Even when I have those fleeting moments of touching something that seems completely empty, without time or space, my awareness habitually returns to my body and all that it feels.

I may think of myself as essentially a spiritual being. I also seem to be routinely learning what it means to make the most of what it means to be alive with a well-0functioning body, a body that at least still supports my consciousness. I am aware that until I am totally free of what it means to have a self-defined body, I will experience the tension between the physicality of experience and the aspect of experience that is almost totally separate.

The price of being alive is living. Each moment is full of the tension of a wager. Unless I am willing to take the risk of being fully alive in that moment, unless I am willing to embrace the risk of surrender to what is soon to become, I will not experience what it means to be alive with a heart that is my body.

Each moment has the risk of unpredictability and uncertainty. That is what it means for me to have a heart that is my body. My experience is embedded in an uncertain, unpredictable world. That produces a tension.

The fragile experience of an open heart in the body of mine is dependent on my risky leap into each new moment. There is a constant tension between what I think I know in the present moment and what is yet to be.

In order to be alive, I must willingly give myself to it. Not hesitate, not resist. The tension draws me into a different kind of experience that leans beyond my body.

I watched a spider clamor up the top of the shade and then up the wall of my bedroom. There was an instant when I relaxed inside and saw the spider so differently. The whole aspect of my experience shifted. The distance between me and the spider seemed to disappear and we were suddenly next to one another. Someone else might observe that we were actually some twelve feet apart, an observation so different from my experience.

It is such a pleasure to surrender to what presents itself, and I have the joy of experiencing this from time to time. It occurs when I surrender into a place of deep relaxation. One might say it is a deep opening to concentration. It is an effort of no effort. My mind takes a break.

It could perhaps be the touch of the firm mattress where I am sitting. It could be a plant rising from the ground in my garden to be seen and touched. There is a strange emptiness that arises when I experience some thing or some one with surrender. A vastness appears, and there is no attempt by my rational mind to put things into a familiar shape or form. The object of my attention and I seem to step into a field of emptiness.

What had appeared to have shape and form and distance becomes so close the we share the same space. Nothing has apparently changed, the person or the plant or I. But I seem to have shifted in how I am experiencing something. It happens by a simple transforming act of surrender.

Suddenly everything is different. My skin has disappeared and I am moving through space that no longer seems to exist. Simply because I have no longer given it shape or dimension, I have surrendered to whatever or whoever is before me. We have lost distinction and reference.

It is an encounter of deep pleasure, this simple act of surrender.

There is something about expectations that I find unsettling. I am very aware that expectations can often be the occasion of disappointment, especially if the expected doesn’t measure up to what was in my mind.

Not meeting expectations can take the joy out of an otherwise pleasant experience. Relatively neutral experiences can turn sour. Not realizing expectations between individuals can foster irritation and arguments.

I also have this notion that anticipating joyful experience can be a very positive force in my life. I want things to turn out pleasantly. I might even want them to be exciting. Perhaps, for me, the key is how much I am grasping and attached to what I “want”.

The future is constantly full of surprises for me, and things seldom turn out just as I expected. The future often doesn’t measure up to what I expected or perhaps even wanted. The more I am attached to how I want the future to be, the more likely I am going to be disappointed if my experience doesn’t match my expectations.

I don’t want to give up having expectations. At least not yet. I think I do intend to be much more accepting what happens, even if the present doesn’t turn out the way I expected. Resisting how things turn out is a great source of discomfort and is very unsettling. Being attached to my expectations can be a serious distraction and disturbance, a resistance to what I am experiencing.

I still want to keep expectations. I am trying not to be too cozy with them.