Barry Garden Path

There is something not right about the idea of winning.    All my life, the notion of winning has been part of my routine.   Coming out on top, overcoming problems, finishing the puzzle have all been attractive and motivating.   I finally have to admit that there is very little that’s satisfying about winning.

Im noticing that I have less intent to win.   I am learning to yield, to bend to forces outside and inside of me.  Even the bugs eating away at my plants are a little less of a challenge than they use to be.   My intent is more to understand, and all else will follow.

There are two statements from Mark Nunberg that keep coming back to mind.    The first is something I heard from him a couple of years ago: “This is how it feels.”    For me, that is the golden key for my meditation and the awareness I carry with me through the day.

Meditation, after all, is just practice.     I put myself in a somewhat controlled condition, I relax, and I pay attention to what is happening.    The candle is lit, the incense has been burning, the bell has rung and I am sitting on my cushion wrapped in my fleece cape.   I remember “this is how it feels” and slide into an almost instant experience of being relaxed and attentive.

My body knows what to do, and my mind is part of what my body does.  I am quickly aware of a whole experience of being relaxed and knowing a vast emptiness.   I am aware of a body / mind falling into nothingness.   The sensation is one of remembering what this is like.    I easily know that this is how it feels.    This is is how I intend that it feel.

This experience, repeated day after day, has left a lasting impression.    It borders on being a habit.   My awareness knows that “this is how it feels” any time I ask it to pay attention to what I am experiencing.     My body / mind knows how to cooperate with what it has been trained to do:   relax and be alert.    Then I can be aware.

I can be aware in an instant about what is going on, what I am able to experience.    Sometimes my awareness is directed to what I see or touch.   It could be my watching someone get on the bus, it could be my looking at a blooming plant.  Sometimes my awareness is focused on something I am trying to figure out, a problem being solved    Sometimes my awareness is simply being drawn into the world of my imagination.

The words Mark gave me, “This is how it feels,” may not be there, but the memory and the message is often present and clear.     I can go there to that relaxed and alert place because it is familiar, I’ve been here many times before.    What I experienced on my cushion I am able to experience on the bus and on my garden path.

The other statement I took from Mark is not so much a part of my daily habit.    It is more of a tool that I use when I get stuck or jammed up.   I simply fill in the blank when I can’t quite get on track:   “_______is being known.”

I use it when I get distracted when I intend to be meditating.    My distraction is being known.    If my leg is hurting, my hurting leg is being known.   If I start thinking about what I want to do this morning, planning is being known.    If I feel disconnected from someone, feeling disconnected is being known.   If I feel anxious, being anxious is being known.

Mark’s words are a handy, effective tool of making a distraction an object of my awareness.    For me, it is an expression of self acceptance and compassion.    Oh, this is what is happening.

The tool gives me instant control over my awareness and allows me to focus it where I choose.    It deepens my ability to guide my awareness every time I apply the words, ” _____is being known.”

It also gives me greater insight and understanding of how my mind works.    I recognize and appreciate the power of my habits of thinking.    Being aware of how my mind is working allows me to direct its awesome  powers to where I want it to help me be more aware of my world.   I see what my mind is up to, and it doesn’t get to be lazy or misguided.

For me, one of the most satisfying results is becoming connected.   Being able to use all the focusing power of my mind in an aware and knowing way allows me to become connected.    When I am aware how I am experiencing my world or my imagination, I am connected with my world or imagination in a most intimate way.

With this tool, I both see and remember the connection.   The separation, the distinctions, the uniqueness disappear and I am connected in being aware that we are one.

These two quotes from Mark, “This is how it feels” and “______is being known” make him one my great teachers.     Of course, there is much more.

 

It is not easy to explain why I meditate.    It seems easier to explain why I like to be in my garden than to explain why I like to plop down on the floor and shut my eyes for ten or fifteen minutes.

For me, it is a time to really be connected.    More than anything else, I feel connected to my body.    It is more than just being aware of my body.   I know that I am aware.   It is an intimacy I never felt before I took the time to sit and enter intensely into paying attention.

Once I have plunged into being connected, I begin to feel part of a vast void.   Strangely, that void has all the feeling of being everything, and I am connected to it.    It is a place I get to go a couple times a day.   I am very relaxed and very alert.

Meditation for me is a time to learn what it feels like to be connected to my body and connected to that vast void.   I am at home, and the contentment is full of energy.

It is an experience that doesn’t simply show up.    I have to invite it.   When I meditate,  I learn how to invite the experience more easily by doing it again and again.   Ah, this is what it is like.

What I learn in mediation follows me through the day.    Any time I pause and remember what it feels like to be connected, that same feeling of being connected returns.   My body and mind simply position themselves to be open to whatever is around me.     I have a relaxed experience of being connected.

It could be a quick touch of the door frame as I pass it.    The door frame and I are instantly connected.    It could be watching the people getting on the bus.    Each of them suddenly becomes more than an object of awareness.    I know them as someone I am connected to.

When I remember to pause when eating, the food I am putting into my mouth becomes an experience of intimacy.   Taste and texture are being known.  I am connected with the food by more than texture and taste.  I experience it with my whole body.   We are connected.

Being connected doesn’t make an awareness  itself more pleasant.   The bathroom floor is still chilly, the bus people are still noisy and rude, the food is too bland or too spicy.    However, the intimacy itself, the way I experience the awareness can usually be enjoyable.    Something about accepting and being intimate with the way things are becomes a source of enjoyment and contentment.

Meditation teaches me how to be connected.     Even when it is difficult, meditation is usually a source of enjoyment.    However, meditation is also practice, a warmup for what is yet to come.    The real payoff is when I take what meditation teaches me and use it to be connected through the day.   Then I discover what it feels like to live connected and how enjoyable the day can really be.

I learned something from my Earth Science classes that has made a huge impact on me and been worth all the effort.    Everything has a temporary shape.    There is nothing in my world that remains the same.    “Form” is a creation of my intellect and has no lasting existence.    Anything I can identify as material is different than it once was and different than it will be.   This is most obviously true of anything alive, including me.

The world before the dinosaurs looked nothing like the world I recognize around me.    The last of the dinosaurs looked around themselves at a landscape unlike the world of their ancestors.    Today, we see a world the dinosaurs would scarcely recognize.

The shape of land masses, the look  of plants, and the appearance of animals running about has dramatically changed.    Everything continues to change shape.    No form has remained the same.   Yet the same material has always been present.   It gets continuously recycled.

We now have plants that we call trees and that look like oaks.   We have flowers that bloom.   We are surrounded by biped animals with hairless skin.  Yet all living things are made of recycled material.    We have all existed before.  My body is made up of everything not my body.

I find it amazing that the same matter simply keeps changing shape.    There has been no lasting form for many billions of years.    But the matter has remained the same.

In me there are molecules of water that fill out my body.   They do this just as they filled out the bodies of plants and animals many times before.   Parts of me supported life in animals and plants that existed before the dinosaurs.    My most recent breath recycled forms of oxygen the dinosaurs once breathed, that plants before them put into the atmosphere, that came from outer space before the time of our young sun.

Everything that is part of me is not me.    There is no part of me that has not pre-existed, most of it as part of another living entity.     I really had no beginning, I was never born.    All of me has pre-existed and has been part of the universe for all time.    And so it will be in the future.   I will never die, all parts of me will continue to exist when I  stop breathing.

My whole world has constantly changed shape, been devoid of any permanent form, since the Big Bang of my universe.    Perhaps, even since before the Big Bang.   Nothing has an essence or a form that has prevailed or continued.   There has been no observable permanence.

Earth Science has helped me to understand and experience the changing world.   Now I can see, in a single glance, how my world has evolved over billions of years.   Earth Science has opened my understanding that behind it all, there is no permanence, no lasting form.   I am fascinated by this new experience I have of emptiness.    What I experience as real is now something other than the forms I once considered real.  And I am connected to it in a most intimate way.

I recognize that the forms my mind created have been a practical response to an experience of an emptiness that lies beyond my senses.   I am grateful that I now get to peek behind that veil.

Occasionally I can touch a corner of that emptiness, and it feels like arriving home.    Even time loses its shape and form, and I am at ease.    There is only a hint of before and after.    The empty place is a lovely spot to be.   I love to go there as often as I can.

The sound of lawn mowers is so annoying.  The sound alone is enough to  make me roll my eyes.    The world-wide announcement that another lawn is getting a butch cut is even more troublesome.

Close-cut lawns look so awfully strange and unnatural to me.   How did we get obsessed with a well-manicured lawn.    I  doubt that the grass appreciates it.    I certainly don’t.

It means that the gardener must use special care, applying fertilizers and weed control agents because the grass is struggling to maintain some semblance of a happy life.   It keeps getting cut back again and again as it struggles for light and uses up stored energy to put out the growth it needs for survival.

I look at a well manicured lawn and I hear tiny voices crying out “Feed me, give me something to drink.”

I like to let my grass simply grow.   I occasionally, a couple times a summer, run my mower over my lawn to clip off the straggly shoots of grass.   My mower is not too sharp and I can set it at a height well above most of the lounging grass petals.    Some of those stalks standing up tall get clipped from time to time.

I like the soft and wavy look of a lawn that has been turned into a garden of grass.    Having a spreading lawn of grass that is faintly reminiscent of a putting green is as disturbing as plastic play-food.    It shouts out a message of obsessive control that the lawn-keeper proclaims to the neighborhood.  There may be some kind of satisfaction for the lawn-keeper, but not much joy.

I like my grass to grow like the rest of my garden.    I hardly ever trim the petunias to keep them “looking nice” and I feel the same about my grass.    I think the the fescue has taken over lots of my grassy yard, thankfully.    I sometimes have to craw around on the ground and pull out unwelcome plants, much as I do the rest of my garden.    But the grass mostly just grows, flops over, looks lazy.    I don’t demand that it stand up at attention so that I can keep it properly trimmed.

I leave that kind of unnatural behavior to those neighbors who have those annoying mowers that they seem to be obsessed with running.

To give thanks is worthwhile.    To feel thankful is transformative.   It is different to experience the feeling of being thankful.     Gratitude is an expression of a different kind of habit.    It is a habitual way of being, more than a habitual way of acting.

To see with soft eyes is transformative.    It changes the way I see the world.   It changes the way I experience my world, and so it changes my reality.    Soft eyes see through the illusion of habitual sight, through the illusion of imagination.

I am constantly reminded of how my mind has shaped the way I experience the world.    It is not easy to learn to use soft eyes.    I have been guided so much by what I expect to see, by imagined reality and it is hard to develop an awareness of the world as it really is.

Hardly a day goes by that I am not reminded that “truth” has been based on more imagination than observation.     My experience constantly challenges what I once regarded as “truth.”    My eyes are being transformed and I am more skeptical of what I once thought I saw.

Perhaps I am just being pragmatic.     I know only what I am learning to see and touch.    It is transformative to embrace a world known by experience.  I only faintly remember what it was to be caught in an imaginary world of angels, demons and gods.    I now struggle to stay clear of a world trying to be shaped by the imagination of politicians and media moguls.    I try to rely on my transformed eyes and ears.

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.