Barry Garden Path

The very things I hold on to for security are my binding limitations as well.   Lashed to the mast, I feel safe from the raging storms and threatening swells.   But my freedom is lost as well.    Security is an illusion, and what I regard as stabilizing is often my greatest source of suffering.

Security can be a siren song in the form of concepts, notions that I hold on to in order to give illusory meaning to the world.    In my life, there have been greater illusory notions of security than those I embraced in religion.    The root meaning of religion, in fact, is “to bind.”    That should have been a warning clue.

The cultural structure of marriage has been another promise of false security.   I should have paid more attention to the concept of the “bonds” of matrimony.   Humans have created all sorts of contracts that promise a secure future.    I think it better to develop relationships based on and nourished by day to day openness and acute attention to what is happening right now.    Planning for a secure future is  distracting and dangerous.

There is no secure future.   So I might as well let go.

 

There are many doors into the absolute.    These are my portals into true intimacy.    They are my entries into the divine, into the sacred.    All these portals can be entered through deep concentration, through true mindfulness.

There are many ways of experiencing the absolute, what I sometimes have called the divine.   These are like sacraments all around me because the absolute is in the essence of everything.

Some portals are easy to find and pass through.   By practicing entering through them, I become more aware and skilled in mindfulness.    It becomes more of a familiar passage, a familiar entry or experience.   Insight, awareness comes as I enter through each of these portals.    I am noticing that it is almost becoming like a habit, except that I am able to be aware of what I am doing.

I have always had some portals that were easy to pass through, and there was some aspect of the absolute I sometimes experienced beyond.   The value of the portals has been in what they allowed me to experience.   Step by tiny step, I became familiar with some aspect of the absolute.

So I have some familiarity with what lies beyond the portals.    But all this has been changing.    The frequency and intensity of my experience of what lies beyond the portals has changed.    I am finding myself more and more at home in what I experience.

I am only slowly becoming aware that the sharing of intimacies with other people can be a portal to the absolute.   Like many human activities, all manner of intimacies can be shared with little awareness or insight.    Just as eating can be done pleasurably but with little mindfulness, so can intimacies be shared with little awareness.

Intimacy can be present in different ways and not always a portal to the absolute.    Intimacy is not a guarantee of awareness any more than eating is a guarantee, or seeing or any aspect of touch.   A hug may or may not  be a portal to awareness.

I think that the opportunity is often offered to the absolute by intimacies, but we have so restricted the opportunities for intimacies in our culture that it is difficult to come by.   Both verbal and physical intimacies have been carefully kept aside from common experience.    Worse yet, we have made some intimacies an object of barter, a commodity to be traded as we might contract for goods.    For some intimacies, there must be a contract and agreement before they are acceptable or allowed.

Fortunately, not all portals are so restricted.    So I begin each day with the intent to explore as many portals as present themselves.   I am glad for the growing familiarity I have in how to carry out those explorations.   I am finding my home in an expanding number of places

 

I am aware of aloneness and how that forms my life, my experiences, my days.    But there is more.    I am also aware that  I can only come to experience  jointly.    I have a different feeling when I acknowledge that I am handing the fate and form of an experience into the hands of someone or something else.

I have these moments of realizations that I am not at all independent, even while I often seem to act that way.   I know that my present moments are intimately tied up with decisions and essences of others.    For humans, it is their decision whether to enter into the experience.    For all else, it is simply their nature to become part of “my” experience.

All this is true of rocks, plants and humans.    My experience, and theirs, is shaped by what we actively create between us.   It is a binary adventure.   We each bring to the present moment our unique essence, and that shapes our experience.    I think that humans have this unique ability that allows us to choose whether to jointly enter into the shared experience.

The degree of intimacy in the encounter depends on a joint perspective and intent.   It cannot be forced from either side, but relies on the yielding, the letting go by each member of the joint effort.    The reality actually is in the relationship, neither experience is independent of the other.    There cannot be anything like a solitary relationship.   It is a joint effort.    Each member yields some level of solitary, alone autonomy to relate to the other.

I can extend an invitation, just as I do whenever I walk into my garden.   Let us do this jointly, together with one another.    I invite my plants to a moment, to a presence they alone are able to create jointly with me.    We yield to one another.   We share time and space.  We are joined in a shared intimate awareness.

And so it is too when friends and I spend time together.    It is a time and space that we jointly create.   We invite one another.   The relationship experienced between us is framed and shaped by what we are willing to put into it.    Walking, talking with friends is not at all unlike the experienced  world of walking in my garden, except that we each can choose.

We rise in our awareness of one another.    The joint awareness is what makes the moment and experience unique.

Intimacy is not a one-sided experience.   It requires a mutual yielding to the energy, forces and essence of the other.    In that joint time and space, reality happens.

 

 

 

So much depends on my willingness to be vulnerable.    I am gradually beginning to accept that I just might not be in charge.   Nor do I have to be in charge.    Yielding to ‘what is’ is one of my greatest arenas of vulnerability.    That includes yielding to what I am, what others are, and what is happening.

I am vulnerable because I want others to be able to see me just as I am.    There must be no pretense.   Things are not in my hands as I once thought they were.    I allow more things to happen without a great deal of planning.    I relax more and simply experience whatever happens.    I rely on my instincts and insight to know how to respond.

I am more prepared and able to accept what comes my way, whoever comes my way with the confidence that all I really need to do is be present.    I do not intend to try to change or resist what exists.    This feels incredibly vulnerable.

I try to see others just as they are and not as I might want them to be or imagine them to be.   There is little attempt to make them different to meet my expectations.    I simply expect them to be present and be themselves.    I have a willingness and vulnerability to fall in love at least once a day, again and again and again.   It gets quite easy once I drop my expectations, my defenses,  my cautions and become vulnerable.

Being vulnerable means I am willing to accept the consequences.    That reminds me that I do have my limits.   I am not always willing to accept all the consequences.     I’m not sure yet if this is still self protection or simply an aspect of wisdom and insight.    I know that I am still willing to put limits on my vulnerability .    Those limits, however, are diminishing.

Being vulnerable has meant becoming more aware and accepting of my shortcomings.     There are so many things I do not do well.    There is so much I do not yet understand.

But there is one thing that I do understand.    The more vulnerable I become the more intimate I am with myself and the world in which I live.    That is a very good thing.

I’m amazed how simple it is.    For so long, the sacred was something separate from what I typically encountered.     Typically , the sacred was something set apart from the mundane.

There were sacred places,  such as groves or churches, identified by their unique nature.    There were sacred objects, like candles and chalices, identified by their special intended use.    There were sacred realms, mostly considered other-worldly.   Heaven was especially sacred because of all the luminescent clouds and rays.     People able to go there or be in contact with them were in some ways sacred agents.

I don’t think any of that is true.    The sacred nature of things is nothing separate but is totally bound up with their essence.    The sacred is a characteristic of anything that exists.    Sacred is nothing unique.    What is unique is the agility to experience it.

This is not some kind of intellectual twist or conceptual jump that now puts a sacred label on  all things.    It is not something to be decided or be convinced of.    There is no intellectual evidence or logic that suddenly makes everything sacred.    It is simply a recognition that arises from experience.    Once the nature of things is absorbed, made part of me, it becomes obvious that sacredness is simply a trait of all things.

There is no other, there are no special places or things that are uniquely sacred.   There is no need to look further.    It is all right here.

This has been a growing conviction of mine from a very early age.   I remember bits and pieces of the world that I played in.    I now recognize that I didn’t totally absorb the conventional understanding my culture taught me about the nature of reality.   Perhaps it was my unconventional brain, but I never completely bought into the relative world of my peers.

Someone asked me recently why I entered the seminary at 13, and I commented that there was no other choice.    For me, it was the obvious path of the sacred, identified as it was with the world of religion.     That was the most sacred arena I was aware of at the time.

I have been curious about the world of the absolute for as long as I can remember.     I have looked for the aspects of reality that allowed me to experience the absolute, whether it was poetry, plants, ritual or places.   I, of course, never spoke of the absolute nature of things.     But I have been attracted to those aspects of life that most clearly identified themselves as sacred.    I absorbed all the easy experiences of sacred.    I learned to become wholly present in places and times when I focused on the sacred nature of those places and times.

I think that this part of me has gone dormant for some time.    Now it is coming alive again.    I can see much more clearly how the sacred is simply an aspect of every one and every thing      It is not something separate, not an icing on the cupcake.     It is simply the nature of everything.

Nothing has changed to make it so except me.    My world has not changed, but I have.     I have begun to have small experiences of the absolute, and those experiences have awakened my sense of the absolute.    I’m starting to see the sacred all around me.

 

 

I continue to notice my growing experience of being connected to other things and beings.    It is a connection that I experience in a number of ways.    One of the most previously-neglected connections I am discovering is the sense of touch.

I am discovering what was at one time my principal connection with the outside world.    I am becoming aware of a sense that served me so well on the day I was born, but has faded to the sidelines.

The simple experience of touch has become for me an important threshold of being connected.    I sit on the soft mattress of my bed, my feet touch the ripples of the rug, I feel a slight chill in the air.    Soon I will feel the touch of food in my mouth, the brush of leaves against my body, the arm of a friend.    They are all ways I am accustomed to feel the connection with my world.

I remember how I entered the practice of meditation by first experiencing the feeling of movement and sensation in my hands and body.    My meditation practice continues to rely on the feel of air going in and out of my body, the rising and fall of my body, the open palms of my hands.    The sense of touch is my threshold for entry into the world of the absolute.

Touch goes quickly beyond the sense perception.    The awareness I experience is so much more than the feeling of softness, warmth or position.   I am aware in a much deeper way that easily moves me into the absolute.    I have a sense awareness, but I feel a connection that rushes past the boundaries of my skin and muscle.    I feel with my whole body, my whole presence.    The touch awareness rushes over and through me.

The leaves of plants are no longer “out there” but are part of me.    I am part of the plant.    A hug is an awareness that connects me with someone in more ways than a simple perception of senses.    Holding a rock in my hand becomes an experience of transformation.    The rock becomes in that moment part of my presence.   I become part of the presence of the rock.

I regret that my culture urges us to walk around with “do not touch” signs on our foreheads.    The space occupied by humans is off limits for touching and restricted to special permission and invitations cautiously given.

We restrict touching to persons with whom we have a special arrangement or understanding.   We pay people to touch out bodies and call it massage therapy.    We reach out to professional touchers, starved as we are for touching.

When my two sons were young, they were allowed to touch anything in my garden with one finger.   In fact, they were encouraged to touch anything they wanted.    The urge to touch is strong in children, and I invite all children who enter my garden to touch anything “with one finger.”

This urge to become connected is suppressed as we grow older and become more part of a cautious social order.     Many humans do not know how to habitually touch with reverence and awareness.    I have been threatened and taught to put touch aside.    I have had to relearn what it feels like to be aware of my own body and the world around me through the sense of touch.

I am trying to relearn and regain that experience of wonder and awareness that opens through touch.   It principally began to grow from inside of me.    My unshielding has begun with my opening my heart / mind.   The openness to being connected in the world of absolute has been growing inside of me, and it affects the way I touch.

I am slowly beginning to challenge the cultural taboos of connecting by touch.   I am not sure how much the world around me is ready to welcome this change.    I watch the way that women relate to one another, and that has slowly become a standard for my cultural appropriateness.

Touch and sexuality have been so intermingled that it is often difficult to parse them into different kinds of experiences.    Then again, perhaps they are actually so connected that they cannot be totally separated, and that is just the way things are.    Sexuality clearly involves other senses, and it just might be part of being closely connected.

Touch is such a strong urge, yet it is perhaps my most restricted and guarded sense.    The desire to be connected physically is huge, but it has become pretty much restricted to my experience of warmth or the clothes against my skin.

One one hand, I am becoming much more attentive to the world I experience with sight, smell, hearing and taste.    Moreover,  I am especially aware that touch is becoming much more of my way of experiencing  the world.     I   want to relearn the way I touched as a child.

 

I have just been reminded that being connected actually requires no effort.    In fact, becoming connected is disrupted by effort.   For something that is so effortless our culture seems to be determined to keep me from being connected.

I live in a culture that is at war with itself on this issue.    On one hand, the culture is full of distractions that seem intent on keeping me disconnected.    How can I pay attention, how can I be aware of anything or anyone when the day is full of distractions:  activities considered entertainment, imagined problems to be resolved by buying something,  forms of promised happiness dangled before me to lure me from what is real.

At the same time, notions of being permanently connected in a stable future are constantly promoted.  Ownership perpetuates a grasping of things that are supposedly mine.   Relationships are promised with structures as contrived as marriage and nations.    The very concepts that promise permanent relationships, lasting connectedness, have the seeds that promote disconnection, separateness and dissatisfaction.

I began to learn to be connected first when I practiced Tai Chi Chih.    I gradually became more aware of my body and the energy flowing in it.   I first relaxed and became intimate with my moving hands, arms and legs.   The connection gradually sped throughout my whole body.  I had to make no effort.    I only had to yield to the moving parts, to relax into the feeling of movement.    I learned to stop trying to feel and simply paid attention.

This experience of being connected stayed with me as I began a regular practice of meditation about three years ago.   I yielded to a space and allowed myself to relax into it.   I was encouraged by the new kind of joy I found.

I learned to connect to a strange void even while I was aware of the deep calm that filled my body.   It has been very surprising in its simplicity.

My days are gradually being enlivened by similar aware moments of intimacy, of awareness of connection.  Sometimes the intimacy is with a plant, sometimes with the ground or breeze.   The connectedness is easiest for me to experience when I am aware of living things.    I often bypass their color or fragrance and connect more with an awareness of their essence.    They are simply present.

The hardest connections for me are with people.  It is hard even though I have developed an open-heart that seems an open door for anyone to enter.   This openness occurs routinely, often for people on the bus who are scarcely aware that I am present.

For people with whom I interact, it gets more complicated.    Humans seem to require more trusting interactions for mutual connection or intimacy to occur.   Unlike plants, there is no presumption of connection.    On the contrary, we have been taught well to beware and suspect connection or intimacy.    There is such resistance and caution.

The reteat I was on recently taught me otherwise.   It was a time of greater mutual trust, connection and felt intimacy.   I experienced a deep connection with the woods and with many people.   It was a lovely time to feel unspoken, undefined, unclinging intimacy.

Being connected and clinging are not compatible.   Felt connection is possible only by removing hinderances caused by clinging.    Connection is more about yielding to impermanence.   True intimacy is not achieved by clinging but instead naturally flows from yielding.

Awareness and insight lead to felt connection and intimacy.   They affect the ways I am choosing to experience my connection with rocks, plants and people.   I welcome the feeling of great freedom and intimacy.

 

 

What am I doing wrong?   I feel like I am on the other side of a mirror, a looking-glass.    When I invite others to join me, there is such a reluctance to step across.

I am aware that I am the one inviting, and perhaps that is the problem.    I am aware more and more that I live in a world that is both historical and absolute.    Largely through meditation, I am becoming familiar with a world that has such a wonderful aspect.    It is becoming more and more apparent and obvious to me.

My experience of open-heartedness continues to grow.    It is an aspect of me that I have learned only by dwelling on the absolute side of the mirror.    This open-heartedness is an open invitation for others to join me.    But invitation is not enough.    I seem so inept in explaining to others how this aspect of the world can be so transformative and wonderful.

It is hard to give the invitation without it seeming a reflection of the typical, historical world.    Anything I say is heard with historical ears, and it is hard to open those ears to the absolute side of the world.     With friends and acquaintances it seems so hard to explain the depth of connection offered by stepping through the mirror into the absolute.

Sometimes I wonder if this is an aspect of the world that belongs only to me.    I have entered it through my own way, and it may not be a passage others can follow.   I wonder if I must be in this place by myself, while I also dwell in the historical world and live by its norms.    I definitely want others to join me, but most seem unwilling.

It can be a strange and unfamiliar place.    But it seems so clear to me the deeper into it I go.    While I show the way, even the curious seem to falter and draw back.

It is getting more clear now, but I have been vaguely aware for a long time that I live in both the historical and absolute world.    There have only been a few times that others have chosen to join me, and this is disappointing.    I have been able to get only a few people to join me on the other side of the mirror.     Maybe that is why I have kept one foot so firmly in the historical world.

As I look around, I see most people living in an imaginary world with little ability to move beyond the constructs created by society.    It is wonderful that in my sangha, there are those who can feel their way beyond the conventions of normal living.   I am grateful to have them as companions, as searchers in this absolute place that is sometimes brilliant and sometimes foggy.

I am aware that the rules are different on my absolute side of the mirror.    Actually, there are no rules in the absolute world.    The constraints are on the historical side of the mirror, and I have very adroitly lived by those rules most of my life.    Decisions I have made, invitations I have turned down were made based on rules and not based on being anchored in the absolute.

On the absolute side of the mirror, everything is simply apparent and known.    The historical world relies on rules to give guidance, perhaps to quiet minds so that people might know, for a moment, what it feels like to be anchored in an absolute world.    Things seem so much more apparent and known on my absolute side of the mirror.

I wish I was better at offering invitations to others to join me.

As I was concluding my meditation time this morning, a word flashed into my mind.    I thought for a brief moment what this felt like to be sitting on a cushion,  legs crossed, eyes closed, hands in my lap.   The word “orgasmic” instantly leaped into my mind.

This is not a typical way to describe meditation.

However, for me, the condition of meditation is so close to an orgasmic rush of excitement, of total letting go, of being suspended in time in space.   There is an intense loss of self and openness to other that is becoming a familiar part of my time spent in meditation.

My whole body seems to be in a continuous state of gleeful vibrancy.    The rush of warmness, generated from within, fills my legs, head, torso, arms, and hands.     My head feels like it has opened up and is blooming like the open petals of a flower.   My whole body is open to the experience.

This is nothing I make happen.   I have simply relaxed, and my whole body seems to find its natural state.    As soon as I quiet my mind, it all happens, like a rushing cascade.   As long as I am not distracted by sounds, aches, random thoughts, it all just rushes in.    It can take place in a matter of seconds.

I’m a little surprised that I have never seen the word “orgasmic” used to explain what happens in meditation.   For me, it is the most descriptive adjective I know to explain the experience.    It describes the physical glee that opens my body and mind to awareness and is very much like the experience of orgasm.

My own hesitation to write about this is probably no different from what others feel when they approach the issue.    Any reference to sexual delight is simply not considered socially appropriate.

It is a shame that words have such a control over us that we would shrink from using them when they could most aptly describe what is happening.

I am aware that members of my Sangha speak very little about their meditation experience.    Is this because the experience is too private and therefore revealing?   Is it simply an experience that could perhaps aptly be described in sexual terms like “orgasmic?”   References to sexual issues is generally taboo in conversation.

I now that, for me, meditation is a sustained “orgasmic” experience as long as I can maintain my focus without distraction.    It is an experience that I take with me through the day and recall frequently but with less intensity at times of mindfulness.

I would not use the word “orgasmic” to describe these random mindful moments I have throughout the day.    But the residue of gleeful absorption still infuses whatever I am doing at the time.   Perhaps “mini orgasmic” moments is an apt description of my experiences of mindfulness.

I could call these moments “joyful” and be correct.    But “joyful” seems so abstract when gleeful “orgasmic” is so much a better word to describe what I experience.

 

Since my retreat experience this summer, I have been exploring my newly discovered and deep power to feel.   It often feels like I have learned to unleash an energy of feeling that I never before knew was there.   I have heard myself describing it as ‘going deeper,’ as I attempt to explain what this new depth of feeling is like.

What I wasn’t expecting is that I had also uncovered a deep feeling of emptiness and longing.    It is as if there is a void that wants to be filled.   I am sometimes not even sure if it is a feeling of joy or absolute emptiness.   It is a strange combination of feeling the exhilaration and terror of a free fall into a bottomless chasm.

I feel like I have come home, but it is often more like stepping into a familiar void than into a place of welcoming fulness.    This is a place of scary emptiness and longing even while it is a place of intense excitement and glee.

The act of letting go in mindfulness is for me an act of courage.   It reminds me of what it felt like the first time I stepped off the ledge on a zip-line and I went plunging out of control into thin air.     I still don’t understand what it means that as I am in free-fall into an empty void I am also feeling an intense sense of longing.   The void wants to be filled, but I don’t know what the longing is about or what I am longing for.

I am sure that I never knew what I was in for when I opened this new treasure chest of deeper feeling.    The treasure chest is not full of golden nuggets or diamonds.    It is an absence of all that I have known.    It is a beckoning  chasm without dimension .

This is a place of no space, no time, no contact, no grounding.

It is no small wonder that I have been inviting others to be there with me.   It is not just that I think it would be a  good experience for them to become more mindful.    I am also terrified of being in that scary void alone.

I can only speculate about what is happening.   It seems to me that becoming more open-hearted means creating a relaxed void that draws in all manner of reality.    Awareness creates something like a magnetic form of absorption.    The longing is the tension of the void wanting to be filled.

I am confident that others have been here before me, and I hope to learn from them.   Right now, it is simply a mystery to be felt and observed.   .