Barry Garden Path

I seem to throw the word “spiritual” around a lot without really knowing what it means.   It clearly is not something supernatural and is a very natural part of who I am and who I want to be.   Using the word “spiritual” to refer to things unseen is  a rather weak notion of what it can mean.

I seem to enter the real of the spiritual the more I move away from notions of self.    The less I have of ego, the more I have an experience of spiritual.   Spiritual is the awareness that comes when my ego is muted.   It is a phenomena of the mind, of awareness that has been freed of the babbling and constraints of ego.

I  also think that spiritual has something to do about breaking with the past and the future.    The ego is supported and sustained by the notion of what has already happened and what is projected to happen.    Time is  framework for the ego.    To remain focused in the present is to step into a realm of the spirit.

Being present is an eminently spiritual act.    I have the experience of simply being.     There is no beginning or end in sight.  I have become a spiritual being.

I know how wrong I’ve been.   My eyes have focused way too much on the future, on the area of my headlights.   Even now, my day often lurches to a start that relies on knowing my plans for the day.   I am astonished how much of my energy has been focused on the “future” of a moment, on making permanent an event when “now” is the only thing within my grasp.

Even as I look back, I often notice regrets arising that I allowed experiences or relationships to diminish when they might have continued for “a long time”.  I wonder how much I have missed because I was concerned about where things would lead, what the future would be like.

My mistake has been wanting things to last so intensely that I may have failed to grasp what was actually going on at the time.   I know there have been times the doors of my heart strained to open, but I was cautious because permanence was so unclear, so unsure, so out of range.

As someone with traits of Aspergers, I naturally love the feeling that comes with trains.    When I see railroads, I know with all my being “where this train is going.”   The comforting roots of this assurance go deep.   Perhaps that is part of my wanting things to last, of knowing where the day will go.

Planning is one thing.     Taking deep assurance and identifying with the plan is something else.

I am a creature of my culture where promising a future is commonplace.     Love is only “true love” if it is forever and part of a commitment.    Even my teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, says so.     Coupling in marriage, in an exclusive relationship, is ideal and the norm.    In an attempt to see the future clearly, the reality of now typically becomes blurred.

Wanting the good experience of the now to go on and on  is a distraction and a detour from insight.    It is as powerful and as wrong as wanting something unpleasant to go away.    It is this kind of grasping that leads to suffering.    It is as powerful and in error as much as fear.

It is not my intent to seize the future when the real joy is in the present, in the now.   I do not want to repeat the error of my past and my culture by wanting the pleasant moment to continue so strongly that I am less able to plunge into the enjoyment in my grasp.

This is for me a reliable source of glee.   It is what gives me the most insight and joy.

As I look at the world with softer eyes, the more I see that I have been looking through a distorting veil all my life.    Reality is not the world as I have learned to see it, and I am slowly unlearning much of what I have been taught.

There are probably many ways to pierce the veil and begin to experience reality in a new and clear way.    I long ago discovered that poetry has this power.    Poets have a skill of turning my perception of the world over and over.   A poem that is well-written has the power to allow me to experience what the poet has experienced, to see reality in a new and unfamiliar way.    The veil of my common experience is pulled aside and I see reality with fresh, soft eyes.

I am grateful for all the poets who have done this for me.   They have taken me on journeys I might have never discovered without their guidance.

Right now, I am reading and listening about the power of psychedelics to take away the veil and remove the constraints imposed on the mind.   This past week, Michael Pollan and Rick Doblin have given me information about the effect of psychedelics I never understood before.    I especially find it interesting that the experiences they describe sound much like the experiences I have in meditation.

For me, meditation has become a practice at skillful concentration.   So much has changed for me in the past three year.      For me, there now is a facile letting go of constraints that is preliminary to meditation.    I easily enter into a time of relaxed diligence that takes my mind away from many of my preconceptions.    Past experience becomes more of a distraction than a guide.    The veil parts, and a wisp of freshness fills my whole body.   The world around me simply is.

Mindfulness offers me similar insights that Michael Pollan and Rick Doblin seem to be describing.    Because it is something I can choose, mindfulness can take place whenever I want.   My walk across the parking lot from my car into Trader Joe’s is not a convenient time  for psychedelics, but it is a very nice opportunity to be mindful.

Mindfulness for me is not shocking, not a surprise, never a bad trip.   It does take me through the veil, and the world appears as it has never been experienced by me before.

 

I find myself trying to break away from my learned notion of what it means to be intimate.    A comment from a friend recently reminded me how I think that intimacy is not the same as cuddling.   How humans might behave with one another may be based on the intimacy that is present.    But the intimacy is there no matter how we behave.

The kind of intimate connection I experience and want is there with or without my awareness.    For sure, I want to be aware of it.   My intended awareness is an open-eyed attention to that intimacy that naturally occurs.

I want to live in an awareness that I have an intimate connection with the whole world around me.   It is the awareness that I experience when I brush up against the plants in my garden or when I hug someone.   I do not create the intimacy.    The intimacy is already there, and what I bring to it is my awareness rising out of concentration.   I  am able to see things and people as they really are and experience the relationship I have with them.

I intend to unmask the social illusion that intimacy is something special and that we have to be careful.    I have been taught a social illusion from birth that I am meant to be separate.   This illusion has been reinforced throughout my life by the barriers cautious people put up.    I intend to refashion the illusion I have of reality.

Naturally, my approach has everything with being mindful.    The deeper my concentration becomes, the more I am aware of people and things as they really are.    And that includes the natural relationship I have with them.   By being mindful, I experience the connection I have, and the more I affirm that connection the more I understand its meaning.

Intimacy is not something that I create.    Intimacy is something that I recognize and experience.     All is connected, and the more I realize that connection and experience it, the more I become immersed in the intimacy I have with all things.

I keep coming back to these small realizations of how we are so intimately connected.    It is becoming a central observation.     I don’t think much around me is changing, but I certainly am.   Every person I meet, every bee I see on my flowers is connected to me and to one another.    The more I allow myself to sink into this realization the more it becomes apparent and felt.

For some individuals, those connections are so intimate that they persist, almost in spite of me.    I’ve recently been thinking of someone I was close friends with many years ago.     In spite of my neglect of that connection, it has persisted, and shows up in small and unexpected ways.    Some overlapping patterns of our lives have surprisingly popped up.    It is curious that, with no awareness or deliberation, the same names have, years apart, shown up on our first-born boys.

I am constantly reminded that connections go beyond my normal experience.   They exist in a part of my world that is largely beyond my common perception.   They have roots in a reality that I only partially understand.

Sometimes, by keeping an open heart, the connection is something I can experience in an easy manner.   First meetings, brushing against my plants, looking into the night sky can be an easy experience of connection.    Other times it is not so apparent, and requires a focused attention to see the connection.    I have to look deeply with deliberation and with unfettered feeling.

Much of my training has been otherwise.   For me, religion has caused me to feel separate from the “others” and has encouraged me to focus instead on my own tribe of like minded believers.    Instead of opening my awareness to the broad reality, the focus has been on what distinguishes me from others, on my unique imaginary path into the spiritual realm.    Rather than learning to be a mystic, I was taught how to conform.    I, of course, have resisted, though the struggle still comes up from time to time.

Life is, instead, an opportunity for me to experience how I am connected to everything.   I have to let go of all my learned perceptions to allow this to happen.    I seem to constantly search for phenomena that allow me to see the connection, even with people and places I no longer directly experience.    I daily try to reach beyond the superficial ways I am part of a common entity and realize  the deeper, invisible connections.

I am convinced that the only reality is the connectivity, the interaction.   Rather than be caught up in how each of us is different, unique and separate, I want to live in a world of connection.

Europeans brought alcohol to the Indians.   They also brought the other mind-bending elixir of religion.    Both bent the minds of people who already were able to see how things are connected.   Both alcohol and religion supported actions that caused the indigenous people to lose lands and perspective.

The loss of this inherited vision is still a struggle, a lost heritage, a distraction from what was an ancient understanding of reality.   Both alcohol and religion have been poisons that destroyed the fabric of a world that had nurtured the spirit off millions of people.   The Europeans brought gifts that took away a life of insight and connection.

Those Europeans stayed and stayed, and they still keep on giving.

I continue to gather insight in what it means to fully love someone and expect to live separate lives.   It seems to happen to me rather frequently with so many different levels of connectivity, and I can see that it is simply the way things are.

It is a lesson that I was initially taught many years ago, and my understanding of it has only recently gotten more clear.   My life is populated by people whom I love, people with whom I have an open-heart relationship.   I am clear that I will not have a “living close” relationship with any of them.    We are actually close, but also separate.

What a transformation it is to be fond of someone.    Fondness is what I have for my companions.   One might call it love, but “love” is such a loaded and misleading word, almost like “God”.   Fondness is more like the “love”  in “loving kindness.”  So you can call it love, but I prefer to think it of being fond.

Fondness may open doors in my heart I hardly knew were there.   Fondness is unplanned and almost unintentional, except it helps if I have a random openness to become fond of people I meet.

Each realization of fondness is unique.   Each fondness I experience expands my own awareness, and with it my heart.    The impact is lasting, permanent, unless I deliberately close my heart.

My life is not focused on a singular companion, but I open my heart to many fond companions.   For me fondness is not an expression of empathy, of my feeling what they feel.    It is rather a connection of compassion, of loving kindness.   I am open to an awareness that allows me to see with their eyes, to walk with their loving steps.

Sometimes it seems that I am almost moving inside their skin, aware as they are aware.  I may have my own identity, but it is no longer singular and totally separate.    I recognize the connection that is already there naturally.   My recognition and experience of the natural connectivity  with fondness allows it to endure.

With fondness, there is a joy in the companionship we share, but it is much more.    It is an expression of an enduring connection, an extension of the moments when we experience the sharing of time and space.   But only if I choose to allow the experience to occur.

Fondness is not a taking, not a possessing.   It is an allowing in.   It is an awareness that is shared and is always a part of me.

It is an evolving experience, and each day is a little different.    This morning I was especially aware of how I am beginning to think with my whole body.    For me, it is easiest when I am sitting on my cushion.     But it is what I experience as my fingers touch the keyboard and when the blueberries burst between my teeth.

My sense of presence, my consciousness, my awareness is no longer such a cerebral event.    It extends through my arms, torso and legs.    My body has never felt so alive with awareness.    Each tiny maple tree that I pull from my diminutive lawn has a feeling that sends a wave of awareness through my whole person.   The collection of roots in my hand is a tangled image that I see with more than my glancing eyes.

The more my body becomes involved in awareness, the less I am attentive to the passage of time.

This morning I was conscious of my diminishing grasp of time.   My connection with time is becoming less clear, less distinct.    I sometimes wonder if I am becoming cognitively impaired.   Is this a sign of creeping dementia.    I may be losing my grip on reality and slipping into a realm of lessened cognitive order.    I take some solace in my ability to be aware of this experience and reflect on it, but still I’m not sure.

I would like it if all this means that I am beginning to get a better awareness of what it means to be immersed in the un-anchored now.    It is inviting to be so totally absorbed in what is happening that my growing sense of awareness is all embracing and my connection with time is fading.

I am thinking these days about a relationship I had with someone in my younger days, and how I was so inept at entering into the present moment.    I could hardly see what was before my eyes, and could scarcely absorb the moment.    And that moment passed with minimal engagement by me.

This memory reminds me that there is no more important moment than now.   My desire is to embrace that moment without hesitation, without holding back, with complete vulnerability and transparency.    I see that I have begun to do that more and more.    I am beginning to understand what it feels like, and a little about how to do it.    I also think it must look a little crazy.

I am deliberately stepping out of a reality most humans around me have created and in which they live.    I am in a way becoming disengaged from what others consider the real world.    I am aware this must look a little crazy, disconnected, out of touch.   I sometimes wonder about it myself.

The more I become able to be immersed in the now, the more I feel I am stepping out of the common reality.   I am convinced that things are not what they seem.   More importantly, I have begun to experience a different kind of world.    It is an alternate reality.

I only hope I’m not actually going crazy.  The looking glass is a two-way mirror, and I am stepping beyond the typical reflections into something different.   I’m not about to step back.

There is a very human part of me that struggles with being alone.   It has been a lifetime of learning as I have tried to find how to be alone and yet be absorbed by my world.    There is no more obvious example of this than how I have reacted with my fellow humans.   I look back, and I realize how I have often reached across the divide and gathered companions while at the same time I was holding onto something that kept me separate.

It happens even now.  It may only be a passing glance, or a long and intimate conversation.    The connection may only be subtle, but we touch one another’s aloneness and we are connected.

There are times that the presence of another seems such a familiar place.    Someone is so similar that I am almost seeing a reflection of myself and whom I have become.   Other times the difference is strange and foreign yet inviting.   For the moment we are companions and we dance away a time of passing opportunity.   Polarities sometimes attract and sometimes push away.

All my life, my experience of aloneness has been a mystery I have cautiously explored.   I have never really understood or absorbed what it means to be alone and at the same time stand side by side with my companions.     I only know that I am less cautious and restrained than I was half a century ago.