Barry Garden Path

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.

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.