Barry Garden Path

Maybe this is what happens when you get older, but I am deliberately choosing not to live by faith.   I think relying on faith is a royal “cop out.” It is a decision to live in a fantasy world, and that is not something I want to do.

How many times have I heard “you have to have faith,” and obligingly handed over my mental acumen to an illusion.  For me, having faith means deciding to follow your imagination rather than make the effort to sort things out.    Substituting an imagined world for a real, experienced one does not seem like something I am willing to do.   Settling into perceived reality seems much more appealing than living in a world shaped by imagination.

In my experience, faith has usually meant living in a world created by someone else’s imagination.

I know this sounds like it is all about religion.    Actually most of it is, but it also goes beyond religion.    It equally applies to the mind-set I have when I pick up the newspaper.   The news is presented in a way that requires me to have faith in the writer’s grasp of reality.   I  am reading about the author’s experience of the “news” and reliably not much more.

If I make the jump to believe that what is reported is an accurate description of reality, I have to have faith.    All that I truly know is that I am reading the newspaper.   Believing in what the writer reports means entering into the world of their experience and their imagination.     Some reality, some non-reality.    I’m not sure I can easily make the distinction.

I’m not willing to have faith in religion or the morning paper.   However, both do provide some amusement and entertainment.

I am saddened and disappointed by the impoverished role religion has played in  the development of humans, including me.   While I am thinking primarily about ‘religious institutions’, I am aware that there are few religions without a religious institution.   Not only has religion neglected to promote healthy human development, it has actually opposed and destroyed the development achieved by others.   Humans have been served poorly by religion.

I acknowledge that religions often encourage and promote virtuous behavior and that is a significant contribution to individual and community growth.   A prime feature of religion, however, is to restrict behavior and thinking in a narrow, defining manner.  That is how a religion and its members maintain their separate, unique identity.

In a literal way, religion is about thought and behavior control.    It has been used in that way by many individuals who wanted to acquire or maintain power.   Inevitably, that has included stamping out any opposing views.   That often has involved torture, death and war.   It has also meant the loss of knowledge.

The success of any religion requires having members who are willing to live by a fantasy.   Faith requires putting reason and experience aside in favor of a hypothesis that is undemonstrated or unproven.   Having faith in something is part of belonging to a particular religion.   Religion requires a certain amount of living in ones imagination or the imagination of someone else.

Historically, that has meant the destruction of ancient learning about the natural world by Christians because what the pagan Greeks taught did not support what the Church taught.   It has taken humans more than two millennia to catch up with what the Greeks of the 5th century BCE had concluded about the essential nature of reality.   It took the work of free thinking people like Einstein to re-discover what the ancient Greeks knew and the Christian religion could not tolerate.

Thanks to religious thought-control, the western world had to go through intellectual dark ages.   Supporters of Christian religion wanted control of people, which meant controlling their thought.   They, unfortunately, were very successful, and most humans languished.   People lived in a fantasy world for many, many years.

While religion has exercised behavior control in beneficial ways, religion has also guided people in many misguided directions.  The list is lengthy and includes crusades, burnings, witch trials and intolerance.   But for me the real disappointing thing has been the dishonest way religion has encouraged faith and discouraged intellectual growth.

People like the mystics were attacked and pushed aside.    People who explored the natural sciences, such as Galileo, Darwin and Teilhard, were vilified and kept from inspiring others with their discoveries.

I’ve come to the conclusion that faith and religion are highly over-rated.  All my life I have struggled to reach outside the confines of religion, and have been seduced back inside so many times.    Now that I have finally stepped outside, I see what an impoverished edifice religion is.

For me, a large part of being vulnerable is giving up the illusion of control.    I am no longer in charge, or at least no longer think I am in charge.    Becoming vulnerable has a lot to do with relaxing, allowing things to happen without imposing my sphere of controlling involvement.

My being vulnerable means that I am no longer in charge, I let go, I no longer try to hold on to myself or someone else.   I put aside all my familiars and assurances.   I yield to the wonder of the moment.   I allow it to happen.

Mindfulness has become for me an exercise in vulnerability.  I give up the role of controller and allow reality to happen without my intentional involvement.   I totally yield to what is.

The gateway to this kind of vulnerability begins with my body.   Before anything else, I sink into a deep relaxation.   This is something that can now happen almost instantaneously.    I tell my body “It is time to let down.”    It is no longer time to be physically vigilant, not time to adjust, not time to move about.  All my senses seem to become both at ease, but vibrant at the same time.

This is also true of my mind, my attention.    When I let go of vigilance, my mind becomes suddenly hyper-vigilant.   This is similar to my other senses.    With nothing to do, no agenda, my mind becomes more aware.   If allowed, it goes willingly and compliantly where I nudge it.   But mostly it simply stays relaxed, alert, full of power and energy.

Again, this is a paradox.    By becoming more vulnerable I seem to tap into a storehouse of incredible ability.  I welcome the power of vulnerability.

I may be forever grateful to Alain de Botton who has shown me the value of flirting. ( onbeing.org/programs/alain-de-botton-the-true-hard-work-of-love-and-relationships/ )   He has helped me realize that we have so sexualized flirting that its broader value has been diminished and hidden.

The common narrative is to shame one another for flirting and discourage its practice.   Once again, the fear of sexuality wins out.

Flirting, rather than abusive, can be a very loving thing to  do.   When I flirt with someone, I signal that “I enjoy your presence.”    I am saying that someone has gotten my attention and that I am responding to their attractiveness.   I notice you, you have all my focus, you give me joy.

I think that I do this kind of flirting habitually, with women and men.    I want to cultivate the combination of openness and responsiveness shown in flirting.    I want to be aware of people I meet and I want them to experience that connection with me.   I want to  enjoy them.   I invite the same kind of openness and enjoyment that I express.

I suppose that with women there may be a footnote message that I might consider them as a sexual partner .   Sometimes it might even be true, but that is way down the list.   More likely is the message that I see them in all their attractive radiance.    And I might want to give someone a hug.    That could be either a man or  a woman.

For me, flirting is a form of loving.   It says “I see you” and I have an open heart to you.   Flirting says that we can play and show our playful self without fear.   It says I am not a threat and I want to know more about you.   I am willing to be  vulnerable with you.    At this time and in this space.

 

 

It is a terrible burden I place on someone I decide to love.  It is almost like a default reaction for me, an easy response, almost “natural”.   I know what it is like to have this burden placed on me, so I am familiar with this experience from both sides.

It has happened to me many times.   The person I love is not standing before me but largely exists in my imagination.   There obviously is some reality to the situation, but I can also be swept away by my imagined lover.   This can be both good and bad.

It can be good if it delivers the exhilaration of finding someone who really understands me, someone who is just what I want in another person, someone who is ideal.    In a  word, someone who is perfect.

It can be bad because it sets an expectation, a standard no one can measure up to.   Reality disperses the hologram of a perfect lover, and disappointment descends.   As I come to recognize who they really are, I realize that they are not the perfect one I fell in love with.   It is easy to hold them responsible for not measuring up to my expectations.

I am most familiar with this dynamic as the one who did not measure up to expectations.   I was not the one that someone fell in love with, and it took time for the reality to set in.  I was not perfect.   I was just good enough.   The glass was not full, just half full.

The cultural pressure to fine the ‘perfect one’ as a beloved is so burdensome on us all.   It has failure written all over it.   There is no hope of joy if expectations are set so high.   Loving based on reality, and a first step must be to get rid of all the fantasy, all the cultural images of a perfect relationship.

I am becoming more aware of how this works,  and I try to break the spell of the imagined beloved.   I am attentive that the perfect one exists only in my imagination, and I try to place that expectation and burden on no one and no one individual.  I  make it a daily practice of approaching people with an open heart and the intention to see them as they really are, not as my imagination pictures them.   Seeing them as beautiful humans means they are all at least good enough.   In this case, that says a lot.

Dreaming has become such a well-tuned skill for me that it can be a successful stand-in for my real life.   Every day, I find myself paying attention to the content of my imagination as though that content is reality and not a fabrication of my own mind.

Many times this takes the shape of what I am planning to do or what is going to happen.   It is almost like the fantasy casts a hologram before my internal attention, and that is what I react to.  If I am thinking that I will work in the garden, I see myself working in the garden and have all the feelings of that experience.   For an instance working in the garden is as real as a dream.

I sometimes begin thinking of what I am going to say or write to someone.    The words form in my mind no less convincingly than if I were actually talking or writing.    My feelings are no less powerful than if the person were standing in front of me or I was sitting at my keyboard.

This is my way of seeing reality through my imagination.   I get hung up in my imagination and that is as far as my attention gets.   My thoughts are led and formed by another part of my mind, and I am usually hardly aware of what is happening with the rest of my body.  In fact, my attention on my fantasy can be so intense that I am oblivious to where my body is, or where I am driving the car.   I am lost in my imagination, my fantasy.

I want to develop my awareness in a way that frees me from the life of a dreamer.   It is, in fact, no life at all because I am not connecting with any reality outside the confines of my mind.

It is actually a good first step if I can become aware how much I am attempting to live in my mind.    I become aware, mindful that my imagination is at work.    I am freed from the illusion.   Then I am able to relax, let go of my imagined world, and be fully engaged with the world around or part of my own body.

It helps me to think of my imagination as being a creation of all those little neurons in my brain.    My neurons make connections and create experiences, either remembered or predicted, and project those on my mental computer screen, my vivid imagination.   My brain is like another sense organ, and can be stimulated just like the other five.   The impulses may be real, but the image they create is not.

If I am not alert, those images in my brain can have all the convincing effect of a real experience.    In reality they are only a new assemblage of my past experiences.    Sometimes useful, but not real.

When I am mindful, when I am aware, I think I am using another part of me.    I don’t know what it is, but it is like looking at my mind’s activity in a mirror or a screen.   I know the dream is only an image, nothing real.

I know that when I am mindful, when I am aware, I am both relaxed and alert, peaceful and vigilant.   I am not lost in my imagination, caught up in my mind.   I am in charge of all my senses and they make me acutely, vibrantly aware of what is happening.   That is no dream.

 

It’s really quite simple.   Breathe.   How many times have I heard someone say, “Take a deep breath”.   Usually that would be at a moment of crisis or critical action.   It would have been a time I needed to summon all my resources to focus on something I needed to do or face up to.

How insightful, sitting there before me all my life.   Could the importance of a breath have been made any more apparent?   Could its power have been made more obvious?

I have finally recognized that breathing means so much more than sucking in air and blowing it out again, although that is a critical part of what needs to be done.   In a very real way, breathing supplies me with oxygen, an important part of the energy I need to stay alive and do things.

However, a “deep” breath does more than give me a good burst of oxygen.   It focuses my mind on what is happening right now.  It puts aside all the distractions clamoring for attention.   My fears are ignored, my anxiety is put on hold, all the activity around me is pushed to the margins.    All my attention is for that instant brought to my deep breath.

First there is a moment of intense relaxation.  Then I am girded, supported, prepared for whatever needs to be done.

How often have I done this simple thing.   Breathe deeply before taking action.  Then I moved on to the next thing and forgot about my breathing.   I had my hand on the door knob to a vast resource, and only made slight use of it.   Breathing is something I do almost constantly, and all I have had to do is pay attention to it.  Not for just a passing moment, but constantly.

This constant awareness is gradually becoming a new habit.   All my mental and physical energy can be gathered together and I become so much more engaged with the present reality.   This can go on, moment after moment after moment.    I know more, I am more aware, I am better prepared to do what needs to be done.

The energy I feel in the moment is so much more powerful.   It fills my whole body, not just my billowing lungs.   I see, I hear, I move, I touch with an intensity I hardly knew in the past.   All this can happen just because I am aware that I am breathing.

Breathing now summons powerful forces that have been lurking inside of me.  My breath becomes more than a gentle breeze coming and going.   It becomes a whirlwind, a hurricane, a tornado of focused energy.

Perhaps it is time for many of us to breathe together.   What an awesome effect that might have.

I have so little notion of where I’ve come from.   I remember my Mom and Dad rather well, but even they are a wispy memory.   I have a sense of their presence, but as time goes on I realize how little I really knew them. Nothing made this more clear than when I found the “secret” photo album my Mom had kept from her early teens until when she married my Dad.   We went over old photos so many times, but she never showed me the photos of the time before marriage.

I knew my two grandmothers for a few years and they died by the time I started school.    Both my grandfathers died in the clutches of alcoholism before I was born.   I only saw one of them, Charles, in a single photo.

There the memory trail ends, almost without a trace.    I have no sense of all those shadowy ancestors from whom I am descended, except that they were all German in their roots, some actually spoke German.

I know they existed because I have a part of them in me.   Part of them still exists.    Every one of them is inside me in the pattern of genes that have shaped this body of mine,   And who knows what else of them lives on in me.   In a very real sense, parts of them live on in me.

I once thought that this kind of inter-connectiveness was a philosophical concept, an idea beyond anything in the world of science or observation.

Now I can see that my connection with everyone that has gone before me, and those who will live in the future is real, observable, not a matter of conjecture.   I can be aware of it in no less confident manner than I can be aware of my hand before my face.

I see that I am linked to all humans by more than culture, activity and intention.   Any aware biologist or physicist can explain how we are all part of one another.  It is an awareness that can also come through meditation.

For so long, my mind has been guided by an attitude of caution and distrust.   This is especially true of how I have seen people.   I have found it easier and not threatening to be curious about other features of the world.   The trees, the mountains, the birds have all been fascinating and I have been much more able to be aware of them with an open mind.   It has been a joy to see them without caution.

People have been another matter.   I’ve been curious about them, but they have been more of a challenge.   People have been a difficult study, and it has taken a special effort to become aware of them and what they are up to.   I’ve not been able to just be aware of them without analyzing them, figuring them out.

Much of this has changed.    I am still wary, cautious and distrustful with some people.   I suppose that is all part of my discriminating mind that I allow some latitude.    But most of the time I have an open mind with people.   I am much more relaxed and more aware.

I speak of this as having an open heart, and what I imply is that my mind is open to be aware of them as they actually are.   I find people much more interesting, I am more curious, and I smile a lot more.

I now know a little about why music has such a deep effect on me.   This is something my mind could have never grasped had I not first experienced it.   Like right now, the penetrating energetic sound of a violin and orchestra (Mendelssohn)  is flowing through my ears and vibrating throughout my body.   Thursday evening I listened to a work by Dvorak, and the feeling of excited, exuberant peace filled me and felt as though it were bursting thru my skin.

This is only happening because I am learning the way of deep awareness.  I am learning to hear with more than my ears.   When I let go of my mental constraints, the path to my heart, my inner being, my whole physical and unseen self is opened.

I think this true of all my senses, but today I am aware of the effect of sound.  My inner self is especially impressed and influenced by the sound of music, no matter how primitive.   When allowed, the vibrations of sound, especially music, resonate and reinforce whatever intentions or dispositions I have internally.   The sound of music encourages me to focus and allow my awareness, my consciousness to travel deep inside me.   For this to happen, my mind, my guardian at the gate, must move aside and allow the passage.

This can be the healing power of music, when music amplifies my body powers of healing.   It can simply be the way to a deep feeling of peace.   The energy that falls on my ears is sent into my inner self, and my whole self is filled with this energy.   Some of this is simply a physical response if I am humming or singing.   My enhanced breathing sends more oxygen to my whole body and all my cells are energized.   My arousal centers are stirred, my whole body becomes awake.

I think musical sound has more than this simple physical effect.  I think the vibrations and waves on the fields around me, when allowed, resonate with the fields of my inner being.    The resulting harmony aligns my whole being with the universe to which I have thus become attuned.    I am more “in tune” with the energy in the fields around me, and that gives me a feeling of great peace.    I experience what it means to be one with the web of life, the web of reality.

Regretfully, I have heard considerable criticism for my humming.   I now think that my humming is a way of aligning myself with the universe, and I want to encourage it, but be discrete.   I want to cast aside the nagging, judging, mind constraints.   But mostly do it when I am alone.

I now understand why my bell is so effective in helping me move so easily to a place of awareness.   The familiar sound of my bell easily travels to that place of inner awareness and energy.   It knows the way very well.   It enthusiastically leads the way to that place, my controlling mind steps aside and my other senses seem to follow the sound of the bell.

I welcome and embrace the power of music.   No matter if it is a sound of sorrow or joy, I know it is a harbinger of peace and healing.