Barry Garden Path

This is a time of year when the invitation to be present can be so very strong. Paradoxically, it is also a time when the distractions and disruptions of the same seasonal celebrations can keep me from being truly and authentically present.

I am trying hard this year to be more intensely present to myself and to those with whom I spend time. This is a time of remembrance, especially a time to remember what I have done in the past. Decorations tell stories of years past, and the memories of past times and ancestors seem more vivid and fresh.

It has also been a time of heightened distractions when I struggle with thoughts of what to buy, preparations to make, activities to schedule, visits to make. It seems that this year I am especially aware of all the emails and advertisements that urge me to buy one thing or another before it is too late.

More than anything else, I think it is a time for me to be present to myself and those around me. For some people, it is a time to live a time of intense presence with family members. For me it is especially a time to experience the intense presence of friends, including the members of my sangha.

I see myself as an intense island of presence. I want to be fully present to myself and to those I choose to encounter. In some ways, I want to be an island of resistance to all the forces of society that would distract me from being present. I want to be a refuge of presence and seek out others that are islands of presence. Together, we will resist the current of society that pulls at attention and creates distractions.

Simply by present, I will be a source of light, like the returning sun. When I sit in a restaurant that offers few options for vegetarians I will ask them to expand their menu offerings. When I look into my closet, I will resolve to go another month without buying more clothes that I know I really don’t need or can go without.

Not only will I be a refuge and island of presence to my friends, I will also be an island of authenticity as I brush up against the winds of my culture. It is not always easy to know what it means to be fully present, but I will attempt to do only those things that feel authentic to me, that allow me to feel like I am really present.

While I use concepts like heart and mind to explain what happens in me, I think they are both the same reality.    Each notion is simply a different aspect of what I think is my core essence.    Perhaps my heart is like the vast, throbbing, energetic part of me, like water is the ocean.     My mind and constant thoughts are the waves on the surface that give an apparent shape to the water below.   

When I think of how my mind and heart relate to one another, I remember what it is like to stand on my cabin dock at night.    When the night is cloudless, and there is no wind, the lake is without ripples.    The surface is as smooth as glass and it reflects the sky above.     The moon and stars are all reflected with clarity.   When everything is still, the lake is a perfect and a clear reflection of the sky.

My heart is similar to my lake.    When it is calm and the surface is smooth, I can see with clarity.    When my mind is in repose, it is easier for my heart to be engaged with my world.    All becomes clear.   

For my heart to be engaged in this way, my mind must be free of disturbances and distractions.     There can be no ripples.    If there are ripples, then I see a fragmented image of reality.     Things are not so clear.    

Clarity comes when my mind is still.   When my heart is relaxed, it sees and understands better and with more clarity than when it is rippled and disturbed.     

Like my thoughts this morning, my life is spent wandering.    I have a sense of where I have been, but only a vague sense of where I am.    It is my hope to be of some help to my companions as we wander together in the virtual darkness.   I rely on my companions to be of help to me and discover what lies beyond my senses.

What appears to my eyes and other senses as light is but a small window into the unseen.    For now, the rest is darkness.    There is so much that I do not see that I might as well be wandering in darkness.    What lies beyond my senses is a world of reality I have only begun to discover.    So much remains unseen.    

Some people speak of us living in an illusion.     I think that what we see and directly experience is real.    It is no illusion, unless we mistake it to be all of reality.   Like me, many others wander in a world of darkness.    We have the illusion that I can see, but what I see is only a fragment of reality.    I rely on a very limited sensory experience, and I might as well be a blind man stumbling and wandering through a world I can only partly sense.    

With my eyes, I can only see the visible spectrum, a fraction of the wavelengths surrounding me.   It is so illusory that I think I can see all of reality that I inevitably stumble.    There is so much more that exists beyond  my field of vision, and I could see only a small part of that even if my field of vision were  doubled.    

The unseen is vast and beyond anything I can come to understand, even with the assistance of devices we use to convert some of the unseen waves into something I might understand.    

I naturally shake my unbelieving, disappointed head at those who cannot or refuse to see what to me and to others seems so apparent.   Right now, that is especially the case for all the indications I see of the changing world climate.    Then I realize that we are all wanderers making our way in a darkness that we can neither grasp or understand.     With many others, I wander in a darkness that has yet to reveal what reality lies beyond what I can clearly see.   

It is hard for me to remember that the unseen is as real as the lights on the tree outside my window, which I think I can clearly see and discern.   I have simply not yet figured out how to see that reality.  

 I sometimes call “spiritual” those parts of me and my world that I cannot see.    It is as though that unseen reality is something unlike the people, plants and rocks I can see and touch.   The unseen is simply a reality beyond my sensory array.    It is as real as anything I can see and touch.   

I may be a wanderer in a sea of sensory darkness.    That, however, does not limit my field of awareness.    The darkness holds many secret realities, and I think there may be ways to experience them.    

I can’t imagine what it would be like otherwise.    Each day is so conditioned by all the days that have gone before.    Any openness  I have to a spiritual world has not suddenly happened.   It has been developed for as many years as I can count.    My comfort with walking in an unseen aspect of the world is no new discovery.    This is not a recent development.    It is the result of having visited that familiar place so many times and in so many ways since my youth.    

Being able to be absorbed in to the unseen essence of things is a conditioned awareness.   It is not the product of some mental construct, or figuring something out.     It is a conditioned experience, a familiar encounter.

I have been in touch with a saved, unseen aspect of reality since I first smelled the scent of incense in a church.    Now, when I light an incense cone in the morning before I meditate while sitting on a cushion, I know I am about to enter familiar territory.   It is somewhere I have visited often since I was a young boy.   My heart lightens up.  This is a familiar place.   

My open gesture to the world when I bow to others is anchored in and is a repetition of all the times I entered into an unseen reality with ritualized gestures as a monk.   I often allowed my self to feel the hidden reality then and allowed it to penetrate and soften my heart.    The path is well-worn.

Now it is becoming an easy and familiar thing to open my inner self, my vibrant heart, to someone else when we exchange a bow.   It has become a gesture that is more deeply felt since I focused more on it during a retreat this past summer.    The path to that intimate place now has deeper grooves.  

These are not just learned motions I am able to make with ease, like having learned to ride a bicycle.   It is more of a felt expression of openness to a familiar reality only implied and not so obviously present.

I have been conditioned to have an open acceptance, awareness and absorption with the unseen.    I continue to be conditioned  more day after day.   

What is it about trains moving on a track that stimulates the feeling of absorption for me?    I have the same penetrating feeling when I think about or actually watch my model train move along the track as I do when I get absorbed in the essence of my night stand.   It is the same feeling I get when I am absorbed in the presence of a plant in my garden.    When I am intensely aware of someone, I feel the same sensation of being totally absorbed.     The feeling just comes more habitually with my trains.

In each of the situations, whether with trains, plants or people, I find myself standing by them in a solitude that seems without limits.   I am not sure if I am absorbing or being absorbed.    There is a felt unity that drenches my whole presence.

I may be aware of their solitude and mine, but I feel bathed in a permeating glow of benevolence.   I want them to be all that they are.    There is no resistance, no expectations, no reservations.     I do not want them to change except to unfold.    Their wholeness and mind are merged.    In that instant, we share a fate.

With rocks, plants and people, I have discovered the same feeling of letting go and being absorbed as I have when I feel wholly engaged and absorbed in the movement of my train along the track.    There is the same thrill of being part of a reality I do not fully understand, but in which I am immersed, absorbed.

Between me and my train, my garden, my deck, or my friends the absorption in awareness seems to be dominated by my consciousness.    Even while awareness may be natural, I am the entity that seems more engaged.    With another person, however, I am often fortunate to feel the awareness as a mutual experience.    Our consciousness meets at a more engaged, reciprocal level.   We can be jointly aware as only humans can.

The absorption feels like a blending of the heart, not something only physical or cognitive.   It is a blending of inner life, a sense of our mutual desire to protect, enjoy and benefit.

As much as I can feel absorbed in the presence and movement of my train, it is in no way equal to my absorption in my companions.

 

What if the universe once, and forever, was one entity.   It appears to have exploded, and we all seem to be parts to that once-upon-a-time entity.   For me, it is only perspective that things seem, appear as separate entities.    But actually, all of us items are just apparent fragments of the one timeless, spaceless whole

What if there was never a Big Band.   What is changing is not the whirling universe around us, but only our own perspective, our own interpretation.    The notion of an expanding universe is very recent , only “proven” or accepted within my lifetime.   It is a notion based on observations linked to our sensory perception of the world, which provides us with very limited  and personalized data.

What if the notion of  whirling, whooshing galaxies is simply an artifact of our limited powers of sensation.   It could simply be a notion, a projection and mere perception based on what we experience on earth.   All the inputs from what appear from distant galaxies are filtered through our limited sensory organs.    All the data takes on the form of sensory inputs.

All of our awareness of what is going on “out there” is based on very limited sensory awareness of what is happening now “down here.”   What is changing is not the expanding. whirling universe but only our perception.    Are we on the training moving away from the station, or is the station moving away from us?

As our consciousness, our awareness of the universe changes, so does our universe seem to change.    What we see and experience is a reflection of our collective consciousness, based on some very sketchy inputs we think we see coming from the world surrounding our little planet.    The sky we see is dramatically different from the sky my grandparents saw, and the generations before them.

Perhaps the universe we see out there is as much of an artifact as the canvas of moving stars and planets our ancestors once saw surrounding the earth.

What if I could see the same sky with the eyes of my children’s children?  What would I see?  Would I ever be able to see that one entity that now seems to be a vast mixture of separate parts?

I am now convinced that mindfulness is an affair of the heart.    That isn’t what the word “mindfulness” would typically suggest.    Even meditation sounds like an exercise of the mind, a form of concentration or contemplation.   For me, and as the Heart Sutra implies, insight and deep absorption are a lived and engaged experience of the heart.

There certainly is a role for a quiet and focused mind.   But it is the heart that teaches and engages.    The path to insight is not a cerebral adventure.   It is not an exercise in understanding.    Actually, it largely requires removing the disturbances and distractions of an active mind.    Understanding is helpful by removing obstacles that the mind might create by resisting the movement of the heart.

 

 

I only lightly touched her upper arm.    It was but a random gesture of communication.   But it had the awareness of her presence that shot through me and seemed to penetrate all of her.    If this is the stirring of eroticism, then I say “bring it on.”

This intense experience of someone’s presence is what I feel when I welcome people coming into a meeting of my Sangha.    It could be anything from a light, gestured touch or a warm hug.   I sometimes wonder what it is about touch that is so powerful, and for some so terrifying.

The apparent physicality of my world is something I know and experience primarily by touch.    Other senses are useful, but not nearly as penetrating as touch.   Touching a rock or a plant opens an opportunity of awareness no other sense experience can match or adequately describe.

The sensory intimacy of physical touch is a ready invitation to a deep sensory awareness.   Touch allows me to easily move to a reflective awareness, an absorption with the touched object.   The awareness that comes through touch seems so basic and fundamental.

More than other senses, touch allows me to approximately occupy the same temporal space as another.   It invites a oneness and absorption that no other sense can quite match.

As I move through each day, touch seems so fundamental to my intimate experience of my world.    And yet I am puzzled that I have not found much confirmation of this experience in the teachings of the dharma.    Touching my cup of tea is an object of my concentration and focus.    It instantly takes me from the strictly physical contact experience to one of reflection on the presence of the cup of tea.    The cup of tea and I are joined, mostly because of the sense of touch.

Feeling the movement of air through nostrils is such a common focus of methods of deep meditation.    Why not also focus on what it is like to touch another’s arm, their hand, the small of their back?    For me, it invites the same deep awareness as caressing the warmth and firmness of my tea cup.

Touching another person in this way creates an even deeper awareness because I am touching a sentient being, a being capable of a reciprocal act of deep awareness.

When I sit on a bus and am pressed up against an individual sitting next to me, I am aware of them in a deeper, more intense manner than if I only listen to them or look at them.    Touch may not always be a welcome path of mutual awareness.    However, when it is present, it offers a wide avenue of awareness.

 

It now seems to me that religion is to spirituality what landscaping is to gardening.   Religion imprisons the erotic nature of the contemplative experience much as landscaping attempts to contain and limit the wild and unpredictable nature of being immersed in plants.  It tries to restrict the essence of gardening.

Religion holds the spiritual experience at a distance by attempting to contain it in forms that people have developed and imagined.    Landscaping does something similar, imposing a contrived order on the vital and energetic nature of plants.    It is only by letting go and putting my trust in the unpredictable, uncertain spiritual experience that I can enter into what the mind and body can really do.

I want to trust my nature, as I trust the nature of the plants in my garden.

Just like my mind and body, plants have great potential and are free to show their deepest radiance and joyful nature when allowed the freedom to be outside the forms I might try to impose on them.

I trust my mind and awareness to know what is best and possible.    I try to garden with a similar abandon and minimal control.