Barry Garden Path

My experience with meditation is relatively brief.     I’ve been sitting down and meditating for only about two and a half years.    This is all relatively new to me, even though my introduction to meditation goes back many, many years.   The clear transformation, however, has only happened during my recent experience of actually sitting down and meditating.

It is only recently that I have learned to anchor my meditation in focused body-awareness.     My gateway into meditation is through my intimate awareness of my body.   Like others who meditate, I often rely on my breath to make me aware of my physical person.   I observe my body, I feel my chest or whole body, I settle into that awareness.    My mind is given nothing else to do but pay attention to  my body and what it feels.

I have learned what this feels like only because I have done it many, many times. My attention finds its way home, just as I can find my way through my house with no lights on.    I have cultivated the habit of being attentive and totally immersed in the awareness of my body.

That’s really all there is to it.    As my mind wants to wander off, I notice that it is wandering.    There are some times that I will choose to follow the lead of my mind and perhaps reflect on some observation my mind might make.     Mostly, I watch my thoughts pass by, much as I might watch a passing cloud.     I am meditating.

Some people like to use guided meditation as a guide in their meditation exercise.   It gives them something to be attentive to.   For me, guided meditation runs away with my awareness.   I like to remain aware of  the intense presence of my body.

For me, meditation is an exercise.   It is practice in being attentive.    I am training and strengthening my mind very much as I train and strengthen my back and leg muscles by the exercises I do at the gym.   I carry the experience of that meditation training with me through the day, and consciously call upon it to be intentionally mindful of what I am doing

I rely on my gym exercise to help me to go up and down my stairs.   I rely on my meditation practice to help me be aware I am going up and down the stairs.

It was more than entertainment.  A movie I just saw made me think, and it even deepened my awareness.   It reminded me how systems of religious belief consistently become intertwined with secular social structure and the exercise of power.   I see this at all levels, from a family to a mega-state.   The belief and control structures become so entangled with each other  that it becomes difficult to distinguish one from the other.

I instantly saw echoes of my younger self in the movie “Silence”, a story of two young Jesuit missionaries in  17th century Japan.  The Japanese are torn between a traditional social structure and the recent infusion of christianity.    The intense personal belief of the missionary priests is challenged by the pragmatism of saving peasants from suffering at the expense of the faith of the priests.

The one priest is confronted by silence, a lack of divine inspiration on how to solve his conflict.   His unyielding attachment to his personal identify as a believer, to the end,  keeps him from being of substantive use to the people he is there to help.

He is ultimately unable to be of benefit to the Japanese  because he remains such an outsider  both in belief and nationality.  The struggle is never resolved.

I was reminded of how I saw that my own personal belief began to be an obstacle to my being a genuine benefit to people I intended to serve.   Had I been loyal to the beliefs of my community of Catholic monks, I might have been able to give believing people what they wanted but not what I saw they needed.

I deliberately and pragmatically learned how to bend the rules of my believing community so that I could be of genuine service.   In time I learned that I had to let go of loyalty to the institution that made the rules and dictated my faith.    I separated myself from the structure of belief, and in time embraced my own personal belief.

Since then, I have realized that I am better living a life without belief altogether.    I have decided to attach myself only to what I can experience and understand.   In the movie, I was surprised that the missionary priest never made that move, but instead chose to remain stubbornly attached to his silent divinity.    All the supporting elements were present, but he could not let go of his own restricted identity as a believer.

The identities of Church and State were mingled, just in real life.  I think his identity as a believer was intertwined with his identity as Portuguese.    And so it was for the Japanese.  He remained a Portuguese believer in a country of Japanese believers.

His system of belief supported a certain social structure, and that belief could not yield to a foreign social structure.    Neither could his belief be tolerated by a country whose social structure relied on beliefs indigenous to Japan.

Commitment to my way of belief was once tied intimately to my commitment to a certain social structure and social order.    My commitment to belief was actually synonymous  with my commitment to a religious institution.  In the movie, I well understood the Japanese concern for maintaining a belief  that supported social order, even while I did not like their methods of imposing control.

That should not be at all surprising because belief systems, religions, are consistently part of the affairs of state.   Christianity prevailed because it became the state religion and strengthened the power of the state.    Muslims are often identified not by religious beliefs as their name would suggest, but with their political entanglements.

I often hear it asked whether someone a Jew because of their belief, their heritage or their nationality.    From the beginning, Christianity has been the State religion of the United States, in spite of a bold and brave attempt by many to support and be inclusive of people who have other beliefs.   While hardly practiced, the intent to be inclusive is often spoken.

The movie reminded me what a relief it is for me to be separate from the social framework of a Church.  I am able to acknowledge that I no longer want to believe in a certain way or believe at all.   I am free of that strangling structure.   The movie left me disappointed that  neither the main character nor the director, Martin Scorsese, seemed to exhibit that same break.

It was funny how I woke up this morning, and my first thought was “This is New Year’s Day, the first day of a new year.”   As far as the calendar goes, that makes sense.    In the bigger view, it misses the mark.

Our culture thinks this is a new year.    It was a conscious decision made many years ago so that people could get along with one another.  It makes for coordination, especially for commerce between cultures, but it is not a true reflection of what is going on.   For many cultures, it is just another day on the calendar, nothing new or special.    We base our calendar on the fiction that the earth has returned to the same spot relative to the sun as it was 365 days ago.   It is a nice idea, but it isn’t correct.

We measure our year by counting 365 days, but it actually takes the earth closer to 365 1/4 days to go around the sun.     So we have to insert an extra day every four years and call it a leap year.    If last year, 2017, had been one of those leap years with an extra day, today would be December 31 and tomorrow would be the beginning of a new year.  But it isn’t.

Some cultures choose to ignore the 365 day routine and determine the length of a year by cycles of the moon.     Their “year” needs major adjustments because the number of lunar cycles don’t correspond to the length of times it takes the earth to circle the sun.   Our culture adjusts the discrepancy by a day, they adjust by a month.

Even the way we measure days is not a true indication of what is happening. Whoever figured out how many seconds should be in a day didn’t get it exactly right, and adjustments have to be made from time to time.    Even that is not totally predictable.    It keeps changing.  Even with our modern technology, we just don’t know how to take into account all the factors that determine how much time passes in a day.

It is even something of a fiction to think of the earth returning to the same spot around the sun once a year.    That spot is constantly changing, we never occupy the same spot in space.   The path of the earth around the sun is in a constant wobble, some of which we can measure and predict.    We can take into account that there are at least three big, gross variables in that wobble.     There are many other  more subtle variables caused by the gravity effect of other planets, other solar systems and other galaxies.  There is the added effect caused by the earth slowing down as it makes its path around the sun and as it rotates.

It is quite a bold stroke of imagination and consensus  to determine that this is the beginning of some kind of new year.     Things around us, including the earth, are constantly changing.     There simply may be no accurate way to determine the passage of time astronomically.    Our best shot is like playing Pooh Sticks, throwing sticks into a moving stream and watching them float by.   So we do our best and live with a known fiction of exact measurement.

Even the revered Einstein didn’t get it right.    He opted for a static universe where there were no gross changes.   He chose to ignore what his mathematics told him, and instead went with the prevailing idea that the universe was static.    He fudged his math to make it come out consistent with his misconception.    Of course, he later regretted this error when the astronomer Hubble provided observations of a reality that was not at all static.

Our little planet is constantly changing what it is and where it is.    It is impossible to determine that it ever returns to the same spot.    All the reference points are constantly changing.    Even the world-wide GPS system needs constant adjusting, so we can determine where we are with some degree of accuracy.    We have decided on measuring sticks for time that are neither accurate or static.   Our days are not the same length, the time around sun is not measured in an even number of days.    We throw sticks into the spacetime flowing all around us and use those sticks to decide where we might be.

I actually like to observe that this is not really the beginning of a new year, except for people who need to know when to go to school, show up for work or keep a doctor appointment.    I like to think of it more as a new bend in a constantly turning, very unpredictable white water river.    It is another pulse in a long and uncharted surge of adrenaline.

I like it when I am not distracted by memories or restrained by thoughts of what is yet to come.    It is a good day when I embrace the notion that there never has been or never will be a greater opportunity to be fully alive than today .    This chance will never come again.

It is the best day ever, and it is unfolding all around me, even as I write these words.

I have a brass singing-bowl that rings a couple times a day.   It is a sound that I encourage with a small wooden striker.     It is a sound that comes from the unique essence of the bowl as the metal vibrates in response to my invitation.

Whenever the bowl sings, it does so with a substance that has been present since the Big Bang began.   The metallic nature of the bowl has been shaped by stars a couple of  star generations before our sun.   The form of the bowl has come from energy produced out of the evolving essence of our own sun.

The sound I hear rises from sources that have been present for billions of our earth years.    The bowl sitting on my dresser has been rising to this moment of song for eons so vast that they lose their meaning.    The song of the bowl comes from a place that there seems to be no measurable time.

For me, every time the bowl sings, it does so outside of time and with an intimate connection with everything that is also arising.    The substance and shape of my bowl has been rubbing against everything that exists for as long as there has been time.   I may see my singing bowl sitting before me on my dresser, but it has always been present to everything, affected by everything and arising with everything.

The universe has been a chorus of arising entities and the arising is happening right now.    This is a realization of physics in our modern era.    It is a realization that I experience every time I hear my brass bowl sing.   I invite my bowl to sing, it  invites me to arise with it.

Rilke recently introduced me to the notion of poetry capturing experience.    He taught me that a poem is not about emotions but about felt experience.  I’ve been paying attention, and I agree that sharing experience makes a poem a poem.    It is also what makes my life a life.     Mine is not a real life, not a real experience unless it is a life felt as a whole body experience.    And that experience has the feeling of velvet.

When I was a teenager, I sometimes wrote of my experience of entering the “velvet forest.”   For me, walking in the woods was as tactile as brushing up against velvet.    I remember the experience of my whole body.    All the woody bark, the fluttering leaves, the lurking bushes, the hard ground were an experience of touching velvet.    My eyes and my hands could experience the rough , hard and moist surfaces, and my experience was one of touching, stroking velvet.   I was more alive when touching velvet.

It was an experience of my whole body.    It was much more than the sensation of smell, touch and sight.   The woods became real to me as enveloped and infused with velvet.    I experienced the woods as velvet.

My days are now become my woods.    My daily experience is increasingly one of feeling velvet.    The flowers are made of velvet, my meditation cloak is one of velvet, my feet walk on velvet ground.    I move through velvet as I go from room to room.   My senses are slowly becoming tuned to the velvety nature of things as I experience the world as it really is.

The granite of my kitchen counter is more than cold and hard.   It has the soft and ancient touch of velvet.  I look out into the backyard, and I feel the soft velvet of snow,  trees and bushes.    I feel the velvet not with my eyes, but with my whole body.

Slowly, I am realizing the velvety nature of things and they are so lovely to touch.    All things, even people, are made of velvet, and I gently touch that soft presence whenever I allow myself to experience it.

I use to walk alone into my velvet forest as a teenager.    I have learned that I can walk in a velvet world as an adult.   The touch is so soft, pleasant and peaceful.  I am at home in velvet.

Last night I was given the opportunity to present the following thoughts to my Sangha on how the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh might provide guidance for the holidays.   

What does our teacher Thay have to say about how we might approach the holidays?

-For me, it has been a year during which I have read many pages of Thay’s writings, absorbing, reflecting.

-As I have approached the holidays, what is different this year?

 

I checked the Plum Village website last evening, and Thay has nothing specific to say.

 

I’ve been reading “Old Path White Clouds”, a dear and lovely telling of the life of the Buddha in the words of Thay, written some 25 years ago.

-That may be about as close as I can get to receiving Thay’s advice.

 

At a time filled with so many traditional celebrations, I am not aware of any specific Buddhist celebrations at this time of year.

-There must be, just because this seems to be a navel of the solar year when every culture seems to have something to celebrate.

-I’m not so sure that is important anyhow.

 

I think Thay’s advice for the holidays is “be mindful”   Be attentive.   Be authentic,   Be present.

-Not so much about what we do as how we do it.

-Core teaching of the Buddha, as channeled thru Thay, is to walk mindfully, move mindfully, eat mindfully.

-BECOME AWAKENED

-Do what helps you become more awakened.

 

For me, becoming awakened is not an abstract goal or concept.

-It is how Thay says to go through every day of my life.

-The holidays are not an exception.

-Even if they are a special challenge.

 

The holidays are especially a dangerous time because of the heavy reliance on tradition.

-The holidays are a time where we scrupuously and avidly repeat what has been done in the past.

-The Second Noble Truth tells us that clinging is a cause of suffering.

– I think Thay would ask: ‘Does Traditiion help us be mindful”

 

I think we give meaning to what we do by listening to three voices.

-The voice of the past, our ancestors, tradition.

-The voice of the present, our teachers, the world around us, our experience.

-The voice of our awakened heart.

 

For me Thay’s advice would be to put the emphasis on present experience and our awakened hearts.

-What doesn’t promote deep awareness, awakening, should be abandoned.

-Traditions that promote mindful awareness should be celebrated.

-Traditions that do not promote mindful awareness should be abandoned.

-Practices, celebrations that affirm and encourage awareness of our world should be promoted.

-Those that do not should be abandoned.

 

I’ve taken this to heart this year and I am making an effort to do only what feels authentic for me.

-I am trying to do what increases, promotes mindfulness.

-Abandoning what does not.

-I am not just going through the motions just because it has been my past practice.

 

I am celebrating solstice, the tilting of the earth back to light by burning lots of lights, including candles.

-As I have done in past years with my boys, I am decorating a tree in my back yard with fruit slices and peanut butter pine cones,

-inviting the critters to celebrate the shift from the cold days of winter toward a future spring.

-I have turned away from rabid, frantic holiday shopping;  it supports consumerism and does little to promote my mindfulness.

– When I walk into Target I can feel the intensity and tension around me.

-I am scheduling time with my own sangha of friends, spending time with them individually and mindfully during my holiday time.

-It is a time for affirming what we mean to one another.

 

I think that is what Thay would say: whatever you do, do mindfully.

-Don’t do things that don’t encourage mindfulness.

 

On the surface, our celebrations could look very very different;

-Some will look like a baby Jesus celebraion;

– some like Hannucha,

-some like solstice,

-some like a loving frenzy of gift giving and cookie baking.

 

I think that for those of us who listen to Thay, they will have the common feature of mindfulness;

-they will be authentic,

-they will be what we really want to do.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I am surprised how much magic there is in everything.     There is explosive magic in the common and ordinary.    It is there, waiting to be experienced.  Sense perception is wonderful and tells me many things about my world.  It is the beginning of awareness of the magical.    Here is so much more to know, feel and be aware of.   My experience has begun to take me deeper into an appreciation and awareness of what is real and full of wonder.

For me, the irony is that so much of this truly magical  and real world was hidden from me for many years by my own pious hands.    I was one of the million of “believers” who, rather than trust my own senses and awareness, chose instead to live in an imaginary world.

Now, that seems like trying to live in my imagination was such a huge effort.   Like many others, I laboriously surrounded myself with a world of imagined divinity while the real expression of wonder was ready to play out effortlessly all around me.

Fortunately  for me, my pious hands have parted,  the wall is crumbling and there now is abundant light.   The scenery of my imagined world is being put into long-term storage, and the real world of my direct experience is taking center stage.    My flat, two-dimensional world populated with imagined caricatures has dissolved to reveal an exuberant magical reality.

I’d like to say that I have chosen a path of direct experience.   But it is hardly a choice at all.   I have simply learned the value of relaxing.   I have chosen to open myself, my mind and my body so that I can directly experience the magic of reality throughout the day.    I practice acceptance of the possibly scary nature of what I may see.    I let down my guard.

The rest simply happens naturally, once I relax and allow my hands to move from my eyes. It is no effort at all, and for me that is the secret:   stop making such an effort.    I allow the magic of the world to unfold before me, allow it to express itself, allow the experience to happen.

For the magic to happen, for reality to manifest, for me to experience the real world, I simply allow it to happen.

 

I am sad when I think of how many graduating seniors are told, “Today is the first day of the rest of your life,” or something like that.   This kind of thinking is it just plain unskillful.  It encourages young people to dwell in the future and pay less attention to what is going on around them, now, today.    That is not helpful.

Thinking about the future and making plans can make sense.   However, much of the future will take care of itself if those students have an open, skillful grasp of what is going on right now.    Planning is nice and even helpful.   It is so much more effective to put the emphasis on now, on today.    Learning how to put the emphasis on now, on today is not a skill I was taught, and I don’t think my experience is unique.

If I am paying attention to what is happening today, it will be so much more obvious what consequences will flow into the future.   The more I am skillful in understanding what is happening right now, the more the future will unfold in a clear manner unmatched by any skillful “planner”.    The more I am emerged in what I feel about right now, the less I will invest in feelings about what might happen in the future.

I have had to unlearn my planning preoccupation.    I have given up much of my old anxiety about the future and what might happen, even though the old habits about worrying seem to reappear from time to time.    It simply works: the more I pay attention to what is happening now, today, the more I seem to understand the unfolding future.    I don’t have to plan or make decisions.    The options present themselves in such compelling, insightful ways that there is no real decision to be made.     The “planning” is obvious, it is built into my understanding of what is happening today.   I just have to pay attention.  I don’t even have to “do” anything else.

I have two sons, and I sometimes get the impression that friends want me to worry more about them and their future.   I would rather simply be more attentive to what they are doing right now, how they are living today, how they are engaged.    The future is built into their today, and it does me no good to worry about where that will lead.    I’m not convinced that it does them any good either.

Those students who have to listen to the nonsense about “today being the first day” would do much better to sharpen their awareness and attention on what is happening right now.    If they haven’t been taught how to do that in school, today would be a good day to learn.

 

I seems so wrong that anyone could think that someone belonged to them.    It seems equally wrong for anyone to think that they belonged to someone and took comfort in that notion.

I recognize that I have bought into both sides of this notion of belonging, but hopefully no more.   It is wrong to reduce the beautiful spirit and free independence of anyone to the attitude I might have to ownership or property.    I still struggle with the lingering traces of a habit of feeling like I want to belong.

Like most people, I was taught from an early age that I belonged to my parents, and that got terribly mixed up with their wanting to be my support and protection.     They came to own me, and I owed them.    Breaking that deeply forged sense of belonging has not come easily.  Unfortunately, I have managed to transfer my sense of belonging to others.    There is a great comfort in surrendering to someone else’s ownership.

There certainly are powerful cultural structures that promote a deep feeling of belonging.     Slavery is not a huge part of our culture but many of us give ourselves into servitude to individual bosses or organizations.    Those bosses and organizations commonly treat us as though we belonged to them.    We get a feeling of acceptance, validation and comfort when we belong.

Marriage, as practiced in my culture, also surrounded me with a circle of belonging.     The words of songs still float through my head, reminding how I belonged to someone and they belonged to me.    I still struggle against this notion.   It is a perverse concept rooted in early agricultural cultures when owning property and products became the norm.     I too, like the early agronomists, felt I was owned by someone and they owned me.

This mal-formed kind of relationship is learned in childhood, and for me and most of my friends, carried into adulthood.    We retain a sense of ownership of  someone’s time, attention and affection.  We have a strong feeling of betrayal and violation if someone strays outside the domain we have mutually established.    It is hard to determine which is stronger, the desire to belong or the desire to have someone else belong to me.   I don’t think either is helpful or encourages well-being.

The standard of belonging is falsely applied to just about any kind of relationship, so strong is this habit part of me.   Attempting to be a dominant force in someone’s life is played out in so many situations: friendships, meetings, organizations.   I think none are more damaging than the practices around coupling.   In our culture, it is so acceptable, even encouraged, to place someone, maybe only part of them,  in a glass cabinet to stare at and admire, to care for and protect, to take pleasure in possessing.   Disappointment, jealousy, resentment all can happen if the glass cabinet is ignored.

I hope, instead, to create moments when I can simply be immersed in other people’s presence.    Those would be moments when we can see and witness the free spirit of one another, feel the flutter of unfolded wings, not experience the tug of  fetters of belonging.

I am sad that land belongs to individuals, that plants belong to gardeners, and that people belong to someone else.    It is not the nature of things to belong, and it is not my desire to either belong or to possess.    I do not want to take false security in promises of belonging when it is neither mine to give or to receive.