Barry Garden Path

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.

I find that the comparison of the deep happiness that comes from meditation practice with the transitory pleasures of the senses is instructive.  However,  I am not about to dismiss the value of sensory experience and awareness.

The rich taste of dark chocolate, the soothing warmth of my cup of tea,  the hard touch of the desktop next to my keyboard all reignite the deep pleasantness I felt on my pillow this morning.   Sensory experiences remind me through the day of how to find the experience of abundant pleasure.   The memory is stirred.

None of my senses have as dramatic and effective consequence as touch.   Being aware of shared awareness with any entity is a delight that goes beyond any simple sensory contact.   Shared touch with any sentient being, especially humans, is an entry into great happiness, pleasure and joy.

Today I am feeling overwhelmed by the difficulty I have in establishing deep  and meaningful relationships with people.   It is probably an exaggeration to say that I feel immersed in some kind of relationship poverty, but I am aware that anything beyond a casual interaction seems very difficult.

Even in my Sangha, where there could be penetrating interactions, people seem so reluctant to go beyond much more than cerebral exchanges.    That presumes that they even bother to show up.

I am taking an on-line course on deep concentration, “Focused and Fearless”, and the exchanges between students seem anything but fearless. At least 80 percent of the comments are totally in the cerebral area and sadly not at all revealing of where people live and breathe.    Two comments I’ve made, which I considered rather revealing,  received no response .

I don’t understand it.     I feel like I am drifting on some alternate plane, and most everyone else is some where just beyond.    I think I often extend opportunities to connect with others, even to plunge into those places where we really live.     But others seem so reluctant to reciprocate.     I wonder what I am doing that keeps me in this impoverished arena.

Am I alone in wanting and working for deep and meaningful exchanges?   Are other people also taking steps to make that kind of connection happen, but I’m not picking up on the clues?  Maybe I’m simply being too obtuse in what I say.    I have this feeling of being in a relatively stable place, but stable and isolated.

I have this sense that my showing open vulnerability, those places where I really live, receives such an impoverished, faint response.     Reciprocity is only occasionally part of the interaction.    I’ve just about given up on men being able to sustain a conversation on anything but a surface level.     I’m sadly finding that most women also seem to interact in a cerebral arena and not so much on a feeling, more revealing level.

Neither men or women seem able to get beyond the few of showing where they really live.    There is such a reluctance to be really present.    The caution over their vulnerability is so distancing, stifling and disappointing.    I hear so little of their inner workings, their inner struggles.    And so we do not connect.

The poverty of this situation is leaving me sad.

I have lived in a culture where any mention of pleasure is sure to raise suspicious eyebrows.    Any engagement with pleasure is at least suspicious and probably should be avoided anyhow.    Pleasure and hedonism seem like second cousins and, for good measure,  I have learned to be wary of each.

It is quite a surprise to learn that pleasure is the topic of the third module of my deep consciousness class.   A deep absorption in pleasures is in fact inherent in jhanas,  and the pleasures of jhanas are an essential element of liberating insight.

While the absorption in pleasure is part of the meditation practice, any sensory delight can be a source of pleasure when done with mindfulness.   Throughout the day, normal daily experiences of sensory delight can be an echo of the deep pleasure experienced in the concentration methods.   The pleasurable moments spent sitting on my pillow can follow me through the day.

Pleasure is a good thing and not to be  avoided, but is a problem if it becomes a source of attachment.     That works out well because most sensory pleasures are brief and transitory, but the pleasures that come from absorption and deep concentration are lasting.    Mindfulness can create a state that prevails beyond the transitory experience of sensory delight.

It is a state that can stay with me during much of the day.     It is a pleasure that can infuse itself into many sensory experiences.     I am aware that distractions and disturbances can remove mindfulness and interfere with concentration.    When this happens, the pleasure, joy and rapture fades.

However, when mindfulness prevails, even the smallest sensory delight can be accompanied with intense and lasting pleasure.