Barry Garden Path

Religion does not lead people or cause them to be good any more than meditation does. While religions may support and help people to maintain a good life, they may also do just the opposite.

It is true, I think, that religion can support the benevolent tendencies innate in humans. However, religions are equally capable of supporting malevolence and separation. There are many situations where religion validates and gives permission to the human tendency toward suffering and away from benevolence.

Religion typically is an expression of the innate and natural inclinations of people. The inclinations are innate and already part of who we are. Religion may offer a way of expressing those inclinations, but not always.

Religion has offered me ways of expressing what was already present in my human nature. It added nothing. I was born with all I really needed.

It is no longer enough or adequate enough for me to say that I am aware of someone. What I actually experience is affection. While this is especially true for numerous people in my life, it is also true of my plants and rocks. I’ve known this for months now, but it has been slow to emerge in words for me. I may speak of being aware and having an open heart, but what I really am experiencing and expressing is a deeply felt affection.

This realization has been growing since my retreat this summer. During the retreat, I had many situations when I exchanged bows with someone, even someone that I might simply run into while walking along a path. I finally understood that for some, the bow was more than a mutual exchange of recognition or awareness. It was an expression of fervent and mutual affection. I recognized myself as a giver and welcomed what I received. It was wonderful.

Now, when I speak of awareness, the word has such a cerebral, almost steely and aloof aspect to it. It does not at all reflect the depth of feeling that stirs when I become aware. Along with deep attention, I typically experience a deep feeling of affection. I’m recognizing this as a common experience for me.

It has been much easier and familiar for me to speak of the affection and excitement I might feel when I see plants blooming in my garden. It is more risky, maybe even too invasive, if I speak of the deep affection I feel when I meet or talk with someone. Speaking of affection indicates not only a special kind of attention but also a kind of absorption that generates deeply held feelings.

It is easier to speak of awareness, which is true. But that word, awareness, may mask the depths of what is actually happening. The experience of a relationship, even a passing one, can involve so much joy, glee and enthusiasm. However, I am reluctant to say all that.

I may go so far as to say how glad I am to see someone or be with them. But even that does not express what I am actually feeling. I have often told the gathered members of my Sangha that my bowing is an expression of affection, not just respect or acknowledgement. I am careful to allow myself to feel that affection whenever I bow. I am careful to live in a moment that overflows with more than just awareness. I take the time to allow myself to feel the accompanying affection.

I know that acknowledging presence is only a part of what I experience, and there are times that the experience of presence is shared. I know what it feels like to share that deep feeling of acknowledged presence. The level of absorption in one another is sometimes what I experience, and it gives me great joy to recognize it.

I think that joy in sharing presence is what happens when I have an open heart, and I am aware that someone else has the same kind of open heart. For me, simply experiencing my open heart can be enough for me to feel the deep loving affection. This often happens without anyone else being aware of it. However, it is blissful when the experience is mutual and shared.

For some time I have noticed that I have been training, practicing and experiencing awareness. Only recently have I realized that the focus and concentration involved with awareness produces deep feelings of affection naturally. The object of focus and concentration stirs more than awareness. Deep feelings of affection easily arise.

Now that I realize it is present, maybe I will begin to learn how to speak of affection.

I suppose I ought not be surprised that so much of my energy has been put into a world that is still becoming. It is an important survival skill that I have as a human, that I can anticipate what might happen and adapt. I avoid danger, I avoid failure by looking at events that haven’t happened but are only in a state of probable becoming. I also think that by paying attention to what is still becoming, I often miss what is happening right now.

I’m trying to change that.

So much of my life has been an experience of an unfolding of a world that is still in a state of becoming. So much attention and attempted awareness has been directed to what I anticipate or expect might happen. I know I am not alone in this. I have heard many times that the anticipation of some pleasurable experience is more powerful than the actual experience. The same thing is said of things I dread.

I think I have been living a large part of my life in this state, in this phase of becoming. Slowly, I am putting more of my awareness and attention into what is happening right now. I still make plans for the future. I think of meeting friends for tea or for an outing. But my life is less a time of becoming and the flow of energy is more in what has already become right now. I absorb more of what is happening in the present.

I am more attentive to the miracle of being here, not so much concerned about what is becoming. I care less about what I will become and what I will experience, and I care more about what I experience now.

I often attempt to manage, to control, to adapt to what is yet to be. This can be useful, but it often limits the scope of my true experience to my prior-conceived notion of what is becoming, not what actually is. When my notion of the future, what is becoming, turns out to be wrong, I am more inclined to resist what has actually become.

Based on what I expect reality to become, I limit my experiences and in a real manner shape my experiences because of what I anticipated. The unfolding of the moment is shaped by what I expect, and my reality is but a small sample of what is possible. I limit what has become my reality.

If you would be a companion of mine, this is what I want of you: I want you to be fully present, just as you are. I want us each to be fully present, and fully aware of one another’s presence. I want us to jointly experience the miracle of being there.

I want this to be true for all my companions. I want it to be true when we are standing together in a similar location or when we are separated by miles or years. I want the time we spend together to be as though there is no other time. I want there to be no past, no future. This is our one and only time and I want us to make the most of it. There is no tomorrow to rely on or anticipate. I want this to be the only time.

I want my companions to be part of a common awareness. I want us to know one another as we really are. I want to know and be known as fully as humans can be aware.

I want the barriers of self-protection to vanish, the shell of pretend to dissolve, the veil of illusion to disappear. I want no obscure vaults where treasures are kept, hidden and safe. If there are walls that might define who we are, they should be as transparent for us as crystal and as porous as mist. I want my companions to be as clear to me and I to them as our reflection in a mirror.

I want us to be separate in appearance, but truly the same reality, living in the same realm of possibilities. I want us to see one another with unshielded eyes, being aware of what it means to be who we are. I want us to recognize ourselves in each other as we become aware face to face.

I want there to be no resistance. Only yes.

I had been thinking of how my immersion in mindfulness is part of my uncovering my feminine. I now think of it more as a process of recovery. I am reclaiming what was lost. The feminine of my extreme youth is slowly re-emerging and I am taking possession, claiming, embracing it. I am deliberately recovering what appeared to be lost.

I am engaged in no accidental process of discovery. This is no sudden or gradual process of searching for something new. I am deliberately looking, feeling, searching for what was lost and retaking possession of what is mine. I am not exploring something outside of myself and applying it to myself. I am recovering my birthright to the feminine.

There are some simple and superficial things I do. I no longer hesitate to look for hats and scarfs in the women’s clothing section. Buying and using a hair dryer is more than just a way to dry my hair. I typically feel more at ease hanging out with women.

The recovery goes much deeper, however. I have for months been learning to feel and experience living at a deeper level. This is a level I associate with the feminine. I have little fear of the emotional aspects of me and I am probing that arena daily. I go deeper and deeper. I am not afraid of what might be considered a typically feminine response.

Today I allowed tears of joy to flow down my cheeks while I listened to a friend describe a profound experience in her life. It is not uncommon for this to happen, often beyond my control.

I also see all this as part of owning the feminine virtues that have long been a peripheral part of how I have lived. I am recognizing and recovering that genuine feminine part of who I am. I have seldom relied on the masculine virtues, sometimes even rejected them. Now I understand more deeply what that was about, what was really happening. My feminine had been stifled but it was not gone.

Now it is being recovered.

I once had a beginners mind. I want to reclaim it.

The awareness of that beginners mind was blinding. The world I experienced had no dimension, no form. All possibilities, all potential lay in front of me. I was for a brief time aware of everything, independent of what I now regard as space and time.

Then my neural network began to filter all that awareness, and that filtered world slowly came into a focus I could relate to. It was a lattice network that allowed me to move through that world with some understanding, however limited it was. I learned to interact with the world through this lattice and I survived.

My young life was lived behind a lattice of rules and expectations. This lattice meant that I thought I knew how to interpret the world and experience it. I never realized how much the lattice may have both protected me and seriously limited my awareness. The lattice has guided me in how I have experienced the world, how I have interpreted what I experienced, and how I was to act.

My chosen task is now to see the universe in an unfiltered manner. Perhaps not all at once, but slowly as I learn the practice of deep concentration. I am gradually penetrating the realm of the formless and undefined. I want to see without either the benefit or the limitations of the lattice that has become so much a part of my life.

I want to see reality in all its formless nature, without filters and without rules. I want to see the presence that is there beyond the forms and shapes I have learned to accept. I want to move forward without rules, not just in how I experience the world but also in how I respond to that formless world.

I am for sure changing how I am accustomed to think, and the freedom is joyful and energizing. This movement to another and distant shore is the challenge presented in the Heart Sutra.

My challenge is to experience a world with no beginning and no end, no birth and no death, no forms. My challenge is to see beyond the illusion the lattice of my life has created, to walk into Target with an awareness that goes beyond the cold pavement that rises to be touched by my feet.

I am finding that this is not just about thinking and how to think. It is beginning to feel more like not thinking at all. My whole body becomes an avenue of awareness, and there is no lattice to interpret what manifests before me. I am developing a comfort, a relaxed feeling associated with the absence of the lattice of forms.

This realm of no-lattice is not actually a new way to think, but is becoming a relaxed way of not thinking at all.

For much of my day, every move I make is in response to a constant invitation to enter into the realm of the spiritual. My body is becoming accustomed to being attentive to a reality that had previously escaped me. For most of my life, I never understood how the spiritual, unseen realm is simply manifested in what I see as physical.

Only my mind regards my experiences as physical. All this time I have been experiencing the tip of the spiritual and never quite realized it. I was being invited into the realm of the spiritual and got stuck in the merely physical manifestation.

I now regard my body as a receptor, a receiver of sorts for the energy that makes up the universe. I constantly experience the unseen energy of the universe, and it shows up in my mind as an experience, as awareness. I don’t think I’ve understood how to interpret the coded signals.

For most of my life, it has been possible for me to stop at the perception of the physical manifestation and not accept the invitation to experience the unseen spiritual. I have mostly experienced the spiritual reality only as it appeared as a physical manifestation. I have seldom opened my mind to become aware of the deeper energies that are the foundation of my relationship experiences. I simply have not been tuned in, and I mostly passed on the invitation.

I think that I have in my body / mind the ability to experience the spiritual. I mostly, however, have stopped at the sense perceptions coming through my eyes, my ears, my imagination. The intricate and delicate integration of the spiritual and physical are slowly becoming easier for me to grasp. I am learning to live in that relationship.

Art can be an invitation to realize the combination of physical and spiritual. I recently listened to a youTube presentation on Bernini’s rapture of St. Teresa. It was so clear to me that the words of the lecture were pointing to the relationship between the spiritual and physical.

Bernini expressed that relationship in a combination of religious metaphor and marble. The intermingling integration is so clearly represented. I’ve heard people refer to the marble statue as a sexual expression. I think that is true, but it is so much more. The rapture of the figure is a wonderful combination and unity of the physical and spiritual reality.

I often find that music is an invitation to experience the spiritual energy of the universe. It is a further invitation to sing, to dance, to be aligned with the flow of energy that is suggested by the sounds. I do have to relax and allow my body / mind to plunge uninterrupted beyond the physicality of the sounds. Then my heart soars with music. I easily move through the physical manifestation into an experience of the spiritual.

I am pleased that I am learning how to accept the invitation into the realm of the spiritual. I am also beginning to see myself as an invitation for others to enter that same spiritual realm. I want to be a portal for their awareness. I realize that my own vulnerability is required to be such a portal. I must be fully present. Allowing that presence to be seen is a vulnerable action.

The universe is waiting, offering me an invitation. I too will wait and by being transparently present pass that invitation on to others.

It is becoming somewhat irrelevant for me to think of things happening by chance. Having good luck has little or no meaning for me. Once an experience has happened, it is meaningless to consider any aspect of chance. It already is, it has happened. It is part of my life, there is no reconsideration, there is no turning back. I try to remember to simply settle in and absorb the experience as best I can.

I sometimes think of future events as unpredictable, a matter of probably. But this is more of a mind game and has little to do with reality, with what is happening right now. As unpredictable as they might seem, there really are no chance encounters, no chance happenings, no chance experiences. There is not, at any moment, any improbable or unpredictable event. It is simply happening.

For me, it is best to disregard any element of chance and simply seize the moment. Be open to it. It will never happen again in my experience. There is no “what if” things were different. There is no reason to look for another chance, another opportunity. This is the moment, the encounter, the experience. It is best for me to enter into it without hesitation or question. It is everything I have.

This is as good as this moment gets, and I had best not hold back or resist it. Because this experience exists, there is no doubt that it was meant to be. I want to be open to this very moment, this experience, this encounter. This is not a time to be casual about what is happening. This is not a time to be waiting for something better to happen, for someone better to come along, for the world to get more indulgent of me.

Urging me to “seize the day” is painting with too wide a brush, it is too wide a mandate, too wide a way of living. I want to seize every moment, to fully experience what it is like to be alive.

I want to walk around as though this is the most delightful step I could ever make right now. I want to meet people as though this is this is the most engaging encounter I could have. I want to savor every event with my full attention and pleasure. After all, it is the only event. It is all I have, it is my only opportunity. I don’t get another chance.

Could it really be that simple? Could it be that the practice I follow by deepening concentration is facilitated by my own physiology? Could it be that my practice of deepening my concentration to become more aware is promoted by the flow of dopamine throughout my body?

When dopamine is released into my physical system, I feel rewarded. I have a rush of glee and a brush with ecstasy. I am convinced this happens when I meditate and when I carry mindfulness into my daily activities. How marvelous that I both feel rewarded and find it easier to release my tendency of clinging. Dopamine helps me move into habitual mindfulness, and is perhaps becoming my natural drug of choice.

I think my own physiology is geared to nudge me along the path to insight and wisdom. It is just part of being human. I marvel how this has come out of the evolutionary process as humans have evolved to greater consciousness. We are destined to be mindful.

It actually is nothing new for me to notice and experience how body and mind seem to be one entity. They are one reality, one entity. The two concepts are intimately intertwined in my experience, and current science is moving in that direction. It is simply natural that my body and mind would work together as one entity to move me into that awareness, into that consciousness the spiritual teachers call insight.

The mystics may have called it rapture, with an other-worldly overlay. They explained the experience in the religious metaphors common in their day. For me it is an essentially human experience, deeply embedded in my own inherited physiology.

Perhaps this is part of an explanation of why meditation and eroticism are beginning to seem so intertwined. I have been surprised to notice that the two have so much in common. Perhaps they are simply different aspects of the same process that naturally guides me to good outcome for humans.

The ecstasy of bodies touching can be much more than just a base sensory experience. I notice this whenever I put my hand on someone’s arm. The physicality of it is but a small aspect of an awareness that is latent in the contact. The physical contact can readily bring the two entities into a deep absorption of the other. It is easy to grasp the base physicality, but it is also inviting to move to a deeper kind of awareness.

The same physiology that may reward and move me to reproduce also drives me and rewards me for becoming aware of the deep entanglement we have with one another.

I am noticing that my practice of meditation, my deepening of concentration is rooted in and involved with my physiology. I am aware of this as I lie in bed, slowly becoming awake. The more I awake, become aware of my comforter, notice the extent of my body, observe the walls of my room, the more my sense of well-being increases. I am being rewarded for becoming mindful and aware.

I am developing the habit of awareness, and the flow of dopamine reinforces that practice. My physiology supports and encourages my awareness.

I’ve noticed for some time how it is such a pleasant experience to feel the touch of my surroundings, the sight of my room, the sound of passing cars. I don’t think this is only an abstract or spiritual experience. I feel it through my whole body. I know it is rooted in my physiology. My mindfulness is being supported by the release of rewarding dopamine.

Not a bad way to go through the day.

It would probably be more common for me to comment on what it means to make eye contact. That sounds to me like a mellowed down version of what actually takes place for me. I am noticing how I use my eyes to actively communicate and others do the same.

When I am eyed, I can feel someone affirming my presence. I use my eyes to tell someone I am very aware they are there. For me, it is no casual and neutral ‘making eye contact.’ It is an act of being aware and communicating that awareness. I am being eyed. I have eyed others.

This was so apparent to me while contra dancing on Saturday evening. In the dance there is a lot of contact with one another. But before our hands ever touch one another, the eyes consistently lock on to the other. Before I was ever touched I was eyed.

The connection happened in an instant. The messages were all over the map. Mostly the eyeing said how good it was to meet at this instance, in this place, in this dance. It was one awareness after another. It was one affirmation after another. It was done by eyes alone.

I have two friends that I share conversations with on FaceTime. Seeing an active image of one another adds so much to the words we speak. So much is said by eyeing and being eyed. I seem to be so much more aware of the presence of the other person, even though that perception of presence goes over miles of space.

I was walking with a friend recently. We were walking side by side, looking forward, chatting casually as we walked. At one point, there was something I wanted to say in a way that called for us to be more intensely present to one another. I turned and, holding her by the upper arms, looked into her eyes. It was quick, spontaneous. I confirmed my presence and affirmed hers. The words I spoke were only part of the message. We each were eyed.

Much has been made of the eyes being the ‘window to the soul,’ and I think that is true. Vacant eyes indicate disinterest or absence. Alert eyes convey attention and affirmation. Expressive eyes convey shared vitality. Eyes tell me when someone is aware I am present and invite an avenue of awareness.

My eyes are my first avenue of being aware of people. My eyes are perhaps my most open expression of awareness of another’s presence. People I meet are constantly being eyed by me, and I hope they know it. It is how I say “I know you are there.”