Barry Garden Path

I think that trauma is sometimes used as a defense, an avoidance of dealing with our deep unease, discomfort, suffering. The avoidance of “triggering” is often used as an excuse for not addressing deep trauma.

Everyone of us carries in us the remnants of trauma in the form of discomfort and unease. Any experience that triggers this personal suffering is an invitation to embrace and deal with the suffering that we carry. If someone or some situation triggers my unease, then I have the opportunity to address what some would call trauma.

Intent in triggering is important. To trigger trauma in someone with malice or inattention is not an act of compassion. Disrespect is not compassion. Compassion expressed in events, words or experiences that trigger my discomfort may actually be something that helps me overcome the trauma and discomfort I carry. By becoming mindfully aware of my discomfort and suffering I am taking an important step in moving away from the harmful effects that trauma has on me.

We can help one another by helping make us aware of the trauma and discomfort we carry. Loving compassion frees others from suffering. Assisting with awareness can be an act of compassion. At the same time, each of us has to face our own internal discomfort and take steps to embrace it with mindfulness. Awareness cannot be forced on us. A principal step in adddressing trauma is to engage it with deep mindfulness.

The notion of triggering is overused and is often an excuse for avoiding discomfort.

In recent years, I have often said that I was a monk for about 12 years. But that isn’t quite true. I may have been introduced to what it means to be a monk over a period of 12 years. But I still am a monk and never stopped being a monk. I may have my black robe and white rope sash on a hanger in the closet, and I no longer put it on. I took it off about fifty years ago. But being a monk is still part of my body. I am a monk through and through with all the embracing of the transcendence that implies.

I realize this because my dreams keep reminding me of that abiding monk nature. I often wake with an aching feeling of separation, with a feeling of having left something behind. The discomfort of that separation has shown up when I wake many, many times. I now realize that it has been my own Dream Maker pointing me in that direction.

My Dream Maker is me. For me, my Dream Maker is reminding me, asking me to embrace what I think I have left behind. My Dream Maker is telling me that it is my nature to be linked to the transcendent as a way of life. My every waking moment is attached to the aspirations of the young monk that I was fifty years ago. Those aspirations still guide me every day and remid me that all is transcendent. There are no longer the confining walls of a monastery. There is no duality, all of reality is in the roundness of all I perceive. This is the perspective of a monk.

My life of a monk was symbolized by the black-robed community of men that I was part of. Leaving the dogma of the Catholic Church was never a problem for me. I think I set that aside years before I disrobed. I chose to follow my own inner voice, my own intuition. I made the dogma fit into my view of the world, and not the other way around.

But leaving the life of a monk was harder, and actually never happened except in my decision to no longer live with other black-robed men. I loved the community nature of our shared vision about what it meant to be a Franciscan monk. I did not love the Catholic dogma that infused itself into that community of men. So I left, and I found other ways of experiencing community. But I have remained a monk.

I have sometimes said that I never left the priesthood, but I have left the priesthood of the Church. When I say that I am still a priest, I have meant to say that I am a vehicle to the transcendent. Saying that I am a monk is just another way of embracing my role as a teacher, seeker and guide of transcendence. I aspire now, as I have for seventy years, to be a way to experience the transcendence nature of things and to help others experience the same through me.

Perhaps my Dream Maker can believe me that I have embraced my being a monk. Nothing has actually changed except the way I think about who I am. I still consider myself a priest, but a priest who shares and teaches what it means to be a monk in the world outside a monastery. I am a monk learning to love the world in many ways outside the confines of monastic life. I make up my own rules for my daily monastic life.

I am a monk who constantly falls in love. I am a monk who lives outside the monastery walls.

For a long time, I’ve been puzzled by the social reluctance to believe those who disclose that they have suffered sexual abuse or violence. Admittedly, there are women who have falsely reported being harassed or violated. I have experienced this in my own life. But i doubt that is the norm, and I know many reportings are credible, many supported by witnesses. Yet there is a resistance in our society to acknowledge the abuse or violence.

I think sexual abuse and violence are part of the ambience of our culture. Fathers do abuse their daughters, men do force women into sex, husbands do assault their partners. It is all around us.

For a few years I have been studying the dynamics of racism in our culture. It is so much a part of our every-day ambience that we have become unaware that it is happening. The hidden violence and abuse of racism happens all the time. We are hardly even aware that we are participating in this culture of racism. We ignore and even deny that it is happening. We doubt the reporting by those who have experieced racial abuse or violence. We are unaware of our participation in this dynamic.

I think this same dynamic is at play in how our culture denies and ignores sexual abuse and violence. It is such an integral part of the patriarchal world that we no longer recognize or accept when it happens in front of us or is evident on the pages of the newspaper. It is such a part of the ambience of our culture that we have largely become unaware of its presence, like the air we breathe. We often deny its presence.

The reporting of the sordid details attributed to leaders in our county are just one example of our broad unwillingness to believe the victims. Officials are elected and appointed without regard for their role in sexual abuse and violence. Like racism, the dynamics of our culture are so infused with sexual abuse and violence that many feel compelled to ignore them. Like racism, to acknowledge that the ambience is so affected by sexual violation would require a radical remaking of our culture.

If we widely acknowledge the prevalent ambience of sexual violation, our whole patriarchal house of cards could tumble.

Like the broad universe, the Earth follows a built-in intelligence that guides how everything interacts. Some people call these guides the laws of physics. This intelligence guides reactions to actions. These guides shape what for the Earth are logical consequences.

Atoms combine and break apart according to this internal intelligence. Outcomes are shaped by this guidance. Evolution and expressions of genes are simply a result of changing circumstances affecting the way things used to be. It is how the Earth and its myriad components act.

I think that the Earth may have reached a limited carrying capacity for humans. The Earth and its guiding intelligence recognize this. Many signs have emerged that say things have changed and the guiding laws are altering the conditions of the Earth. Humans have triggered an evolutionary process that is governed by the built-in intelligence of the Earth.

The Earth, following the guidance of the universe, may be in the process of ridding itself of certain kinds of life forms. That includes humans, particularly those whose thinking and actions challenge the internal guidance of the Earth. Only those who are consistent with the intelligence of the Earth will endure.

Science has prepared me to enter the realm of formless perception. It has been science that has prepared me by offering concepts that have made my mind more pliable and malleable, ready to enter where there is no perception or form.

My experience gives shape and form to my embracing of insight. It is the scientific experience of others that have prepared me to let go of the forms associated with perception. The contours of my mind have been shaped both by my own experience and the experience of countless individuals of science. My mind has been conditioned to yield to no form. My mind has been prepared to expand into the realm where there is no form.

Because of science, my mind can more easily combine the paradoxical realm of the historical and ultimate. For me, science has not been an impediment to the ultimate. Science has been an assist and facilitated that absorption into the formless realm.

Prepared as it has been by science, my mind is more likely to accept what the heart has come to grasp. My mind is more facile in being shaped by the heart experience of the guiding consciousness of the universe. This is the realm beyond form and perception. My heart is more easily moved by the driving energy and intellectual force of the universe. My mind, conditioned by science, is more easily shaped and led by the stirrings of my heart. I am more likely to trust with my mind what my heart already has felt and knows so well. My mind yields, puts up less resistance. It has been prepared by science to be docile to the leadership of my heart.

The experience of my heart allows my mind to open to the world of the absolute. But the mind has been prepared for that adventure by science. My mind has been freed of resistance and roadblocks. it is prepared to enter the realm that defies description and explanation.

I am grateful for all the people of science who have prepared my malleable mind for this excursion into the absolute.

I gave this talk at the Blooming Heart Sangha on June 19, 2025

The Buddha is a Biologist  June 19, 2025

I think of myself as a biologist.

• I think I am a biologist.
• I think the Buddha is a biologist too.

I have the academic training of a biologist.

• Also, I have a deep relationship with many plants in my garden
• I have an understanding how many living and inanimate beings act and relate to one another.
• I read a lot about current biological thinking and in all this I’m seeing a pattern that the Buddha would easily recognize.
• My bookshelves have books with lots of highlighting and underlining:  “An Immense World, Entangled Life, Becoming Earth, When the Earth was Green, The Possibility of Life,  Being Nature,” and so on.
• There is a pattern in all of them very similar to what I hear from that biologist we call the Buddha.

Buddhist meditation practices and scientific exploration have different ways of knowing.  

• With the scientific method, we largely look outside ourselves to find the truth hiding in reality.
• With meditation we direct our attention inward, relying on our experiential knowing.   
• With mindfulness, we seek to resolve the same questions as science, but in the direct experience of non-duality and the mystery of consciousness.
• What I have noticed: The two ways of knowing have arrived at so 

many similar conclusions.

• This is true in three areas:  Physics, biology and neuroscience  

Physics

Physics is where I first noticed that science and meditation have found agreement.

• Mindfulness, like physics, can reveal that there is no solidity anywhere, 
• ….that the observer cannot be separated from what is observed, …..that phenomena seem to appear out of emptiness
• …..and that everything affects everything else in a co-emergent system. 
• Meditators can discover these same insights by simply focusing their attention inward.
• We casually speak of interbeing.   
• Modern science, like meditation, has found that oneness is right there in reality’s core.
• Scientists attempt to express this mystical oneness in concepts such as wave-particle, space-time, matter-energy.
• Cosmologists like Jude Currivan write of a universal intelligence and she sounds much like a meditator engaged in samadhi, deep concentration. 
• I understand her better because I meditate. 

Biology

However, it is in other ways that the Buddha reveals himself most clearly as a biologist. 

• Buddhist and scientific maps of mind and cognition are strikingly similar.
• Mindfulness as taught by the Buddha, explores and uncovers what it means to be alive.  
• Through mindfulness, I learn daily that everything I touch is alive with the vibrancy of life.
• Even what we call suffering offers an opportunity to know what it means to be alive. 
• This is deep biology.

This deep biology is taught by biologist Buddha in the four noble truths.

• As a biologist, the Buddha studied the human condition thoroughly. 
• He announced his findings in four truths:   
• The first noble truth, life is inherently unsatisfactory
• Dukkha, suffering, is part of the deal when we get a human body and nervous system.
• With mindfulness, Biologist Buddha was simply making a scientific observation.  
• It is not easy having a body: we fight gravity constantly, we need food, warmth and shelter, we are driven by an urge to procreate.  
• Biologist Buddha saw and taught that we need to come to a deep understandingand acceptance of these biological conditions. Ie. The First Noble Truth.

In The Second Noble Truth, he taught that our evolutionary inheritance keeps us continually dissatisfied and off-balance. 

• The world creates pleasant and unpleasant sensations, just by coming into contact with it. 
• We automatically have reactions of attraction or aversion. Ie. The Second Noble Truth

Biologist Buddha’s Third Noble Truth is perhaps his most significant biological insight.

• He taught that Nature has given us the ability to train our minds to bring us to new levels, to end suffering, and to attain freedom and satisfaction.
• Evolution has gifted us with the potential for high degrees of self-awareness, to take part in our own evolution. 
• In some recognition of this, we have given ourselves the labels of “conscious one”or Homo sapiens sapiens.  ….humans who know that they know and how to know.  Ie. The Third Noble Truth.

In The Fourth Noble Truth, Biologist Buddha gives the basic instructions for developing the vital human skills of concentration and mindfulness.

• He explains how to apply these skills in meditation and our daily lives in order to realize, to recognize, to understand our true nature. 
• This is the 8-fold path leading to the cessation of suffering, ie. The Fourth Noble Truth.

Neuroscience

Biologist Buddha offers more:  It has taken about 2500 years for neuroscience to catch up with the understanding handed to us by the biological Buddha

• Biologist Buddha gives us the gift of the Four Foundations of Mindfulness
• These are the four fundamental components of the human condition; they all parallel modern views of brain function:
• One: the physical elements that make up our body, especially the process of breathing.
• Two: The nervous system that gives us sentience;
• Three: The emotional life and psychic states that color our experience;
• Four: the ideas, concepts, beliefs and consciousness that together we call the mind. 

Much like contemporary neuro-science tries, the biologist Buddha guides us through thisfour-fold lens of mindfulness, showing us the basic, neurological  aspects of our being. ….what it means to be human,     

• These four foundations of mindfulness are deep-ecology practices, ways of exploring our nature as nature, and they have many manifestations:.  Examples:
• Through mindfulness, we can explore who we are, how we are connected with each other, and how we are connected with all other forms of life on earth, with the living earth itself. 
• Through mindfulness, we see that our body grows out of the life that has preceded us.  
• Mindfulness allows us to experience how with every breath we feed the plants and are fed by them.  
• Thru mindfulness, we can see how we are part of an evolving level of consciousness that began 13.5 billion years ago,
• In Biological Buddha’s teaching on mindfulness, we see that the cognitive mind is mentioned as a sixth sense organ
• Through mindfulness, we are able to extract ourselves from the content of what we think and explore how we think and feel. 
• Meditation becomes a relaxed form of consciousness with no content.  

Finally, I notice that 2500 years ago, the biologist Buddha already dispelled the myth of survival of the fittest.

• Scientists are finally questioning the wrongful interpretation of Darwin for decades and acknowledging that evolution moves forward through cooperation.   
• Modern biologists like Ed Yong are acknowledging the connection between living and inanimate beings. ….as Thay says, interbeing.  
• Some point out that all living beings are connected, even to the point of being part of a living earth (Ferris Jaber)  and a universal intelligence ( Jude Currivan). 

Summary: It is a bit of a stretch to call me a Buddhist.

• But it is clear to me that I am becoming a different kind of biologist because of Biologist Buddha.  
• Biologist Buddha guides me through the science books that I read.
• He guides me through the living presence of plants in my garden.
• He provides the deep biological guidance I sometimes need to understand thestrange behavior of some of my fellow human beings.
• And biologist Buddha gives me guidance in understanding my own body, my mind and myself.     

How do mindfulness and science, art, psychology, writing, etc. blend?

For a long time, I have been uncomfortable with the word “love”. This is because of all the ambiguity that word carries in our culture. Like the word “God”, the meaning of the one speaking it is obscured and twisted in the mind of the one hearing it. “Love” carries so many meanings and implies so many intentions that it can be a dangerous word to use.

There are numerous people that I know I love, but I am reluctant to tell them so because it requires so much clarification and that explanation is awkward to initiate without losing the true impact of the expression.

Right now, I like the word “harmony.” For me, “love” expresses a state that exists deep inside of me. So does “harmony”, and at the same time points to the recognized and deeply felt relationship with another.

If I recognize that I am in harmony with someone or something, I don’t immediately have to explain what that means to me or someone else. Love demands immediate sorting through a prism of many meanings. Unlike love, harmony does not carry for me the implied assortment of wants, fears and expectations, all of which beg rapid clarification.

Harmony is a state of presence. Harmony does not mean an action or intention. Though it infers a reference to another, harmony describes something that exists primarily in me. It does not invite or require the other to do anything but exist, to be present as they are. There is no pressure for them to harmony back to me.

I do not even have to like or agree with the who or what with whom I am in harmony. I do not have to match cognition with an individual when I am in harmony with them. Harmony is a state of openness and acceptance, not a state of agreement. However, it is difficult for me to be in harmony with someone who is threatening me or in clear opposition to me.

If I am in harmony with someone, I don’t have to deal with all the misleading barnacles that cling to love. Harmony is a simple expression of a state of being. It does not imply any wants, intentions or promises. While harmony requires a great deal of introspection and self-acceptance, it is simply an expression of what I feel and what I recognize inside of me.

Above all, harmony is less ambiguous and even more precise. In addition, I think I am more comfortable telling someone that I am in harmony with them than I am in love. This is easier, even though both mean the same to me.

It is my intent and choice to walk in beauty. I want to be surrounded by a world of beauty. When I walk in my garden, it is a reminder that I choose to be in the midst of beauty, no matter where I walk. I invite all my companions to walk beside me, to walk the same path of beauty. Everyone is welcome to walk with me in my garden, the touchable garden and the metaphorical one..

The question comes up whether Buddhism is a religion. The most satisfying answer I have heard is “perhaps.” For me it is a way of living, a way of walking in the world. It is a path of awakening. It is not a path toward awakening, but a way of awaking, a way of being aware.

I walk in awareness, I walk in beauty, I walk mindfully. I act accordingly because I walk in beauty.

I realize that I am overstimulated by FaceBook and the news. In spite of my restricting my involvement with the news, I still allow too much of it to enter my body. I have normally considered overstimulation to be a problem of youth, but I see that even us older people can suffer its effects.

I want to keep my attention on how I breathe, how my feet touch the ground, and how the plants rise out of the ground. I want to be deeply aware of people I am with and whom I touch. That is enough stimulation for me.

A central notion I have learned from ancient wisdom is the question, “Are you sure?” I question everything I hear or perceive. I put an uncertainty blanket over all that I am told, especially what I hear in the context of religious thought. I may even not be “sure” of what I hear from the masters of ancient wisdom.

The only thing I trust is my own experience, especially an experience of what I do. I try to keep an open mind and heart, but I trust only what arises within me. I actually don’t have something people often speak of as faith. I put a modicum of trust in what I perceive, but even that is unsure. I trust only what arises within me, what I truly experience.

What others say can often be a guide. But I am not sure of what they say, or even what I perceive to be true. I rely on what I experience. I trust my own involvement with the universe, not what others tell me about the universe. Tell me what you will, and for that I am grateful. However, I will only rely on what comes to me through my experience.

I try to remain curious with an open mind and heart. I want to experience as much as I can. I try to remain open to new and inviting experiences. That connection I have with the universe through my own experience is what I trust.