Barry Garden Path

I love to enter a world where thinking ends.   It is like going into a world of sensory deprivation, except it is my thinking sense that is left outside.   “Wait here”.    “Be still.”  “I’ll be right back.”

My thinking sense is impatient and jealous of its usual role in my world.   It is not always so willing to be left on the shore while I wade into the depth of no-thinking.    It calls out, reminds me it is there, wants me to return.   I simply smile and wade in deeper into my mindless world.

My other senses, however, are thrilled to be in this place.    For them it is a time to accompany me into a timeless world without space.    My body expands with excitement and energy as my other senses swim unrestrained through this mysterious place of nothingness.

This is a place where the darkness has a captivating brilliance.   It is truly a place I can see beyond the glow of the flickering candle just beyond my eyelids.   My sight comes alive without seeing.

This is a place where the rapturous melody of no-sound fills my head and descends through my whole body.    It is the no-sound that waited for me when my bell summoned me to this place where my hearing could come fully alive and alert.

This is a place where all that I feel in my skin is the slow, rhythmic rise and fall of my breath.  All my skin is alive and alert, but feels nothing.    I am warm and relaxed beneath the fleece cloak wrapped around me, but I am not sure that the cloak is really there.   My mind would figure that out, and it is not here.

This is a place where I love to be.  I look forward to the times that I can enter it and leave all else behind.   Strangely, it is a world that gives me a better understanding of what I left behind.    I am better prepared to see all that is beautiful and awe-inspiring.  I better understand and become more aware of everything I put aside to enter it.   It is a world that helps me know better what it is that needs to be done.

As much as I love it, it is still a bit of an alien world for me.   My exit from it is often abrupt and rushed as I re-engage my mind and return to the familiar.

I long for the days when the boundary between the two worlds fades away, when the two worlds combine.    I want my mind to be trained to be helpful and not a distraction from true awareness.    Then my every-day world will be awash with the awareness that is native to my true home.

There is such a thin wall that separates us from one another.    Yet it is formidable enough to create wholly separate universes.   It is a barrier I have sadly given the power to counter the natural pull that  otherwise would draw me together to others.   The natural pull between two entities is fundamental, but I go to such great lengths to resist it.

It is a mystery to me why beings with such great  powers of awareness would create a culture that insists on separating us.   I am a student of years of being taught to fear the unusual and unfamiliar, the other.  I have learned well how to use my primitive reptilian brain to guide me through halls of constraining fear and separateness.   It is easy for me to stay inside of my individual and isolating bubble.  It is safe, but it is also painful because it is against my true nature.   I want a different kind of comfort.

I know that a thin wall shields me from being openly transparent and revealing.   It is a wall that also obscures others behind an opaque boundary that is hard to penetrate.

The actual distance between me and others can be so slight, but we avoid possible contact by touch or meeting eyes.   We can sit together in a great room and together thrill to the musical world of someone like Dvorak.   Then together we exit our seats, all the while never touching one another or meeting eyes, each of us behind our thin wall.

I had such a moment this week when, during a concert, I gently placed my hands on the shoulders of an older woman and squeezed through the doorway that she and her companions were blocking.   I broke the cultural rules by touching her.   She was both startled and apologetic.  I had no regrets and feel we communicated in a respectful and meaningful way, with a high degree of awareness.

I think it is a cautious, anxious criticism to say that someone “has no boundaries”.   I think we have too many boundaries.   The boundaries keep us apart and unaware, and that includes the boundaries we place for touch.   Someone apologizes because they softly bump me as they pass.  I’m not sure that I share the same regret about contact.

Rather than hear someone apologize for touching me as they pass, I would prefer to hear them acknowledge “I’m walking behind you,” or “I bumped your leg.”   No regrets from either of us.  We each become more aware.

I am making it more of a habit to touch someone when I am greeting them.  I greet them with more than a “keep away” handshake.   Instead I touch their arm, their back.    Sometimes I hug them.    I prefer a lingering hug that allows us to take the time to be deeply aware of one another.   Maybe time enough to take a full breath, or maybe even two.

Some walls that separate us may serve some good purpose, but  I think they are all much thicker than is helpful.    I want less boundaries, less structured contact, and more awareness.

 

 

 

I continue to puzzle over what I mean when I talk about having an open heart.   It is an expression that resonates so well with me, but I am at a loss to define it.   It seems to fit so many situations and yet I often think about  what it likely means to me and to others.

I first noticed how well it fit when I began to become more aware of everything around me.    It applied to how I walked through my garden and absorbed my flowers.  It seemed part of my new alert  way of driving along a road that now seemed to be more “there”.   Having an open heart was part of my being among the members of my beloved sangha.    I could feel every one of them sitting around me.

I noticed people getting on the bus in a new way.   They were no longer part of the ambiance but each one became a front and center person.   Each one seemed to step into my personal bubble.   For a moment, they were all I saw and I could feel a little of what it meant to be them.

I often listen to people in a different way, including my two adult sons.   What they say seems more neutral and doesn’t beg for a response from me.   I just listen.    There are some politicians I find it difficult to listen to with an open heart, and I guess that is just how things are.

For the most part, I am able to see and hear people without wanting them to be different.   I want to be with them at that moment, but not want to grasp, control or shape them.   It is a very open feeling of awareness and appreciation without wanting to possess.

For me, this open heartedness has a huge amount of freedom.   I feel much more able to be transparent and even spontaneous.   Everything I feel, I seem to feel in a deeper way.   Feelings resonate through my whole body.   I more often give myself permission to just be myself, which is approximately what I am offering to whomever I am with.

Sometimes my open heart gets me in situations that appear ambiguous to others.   Sometimes I may have been a little too transparent, or too engaging or too enthusiastic.   These are times I have perhaps been more vulnerable than I want to be.   Feelings are much less disguised.   Also, I think I have given genuine messages of interest and attention that are unwelcome.

It is confusing, to me and sometimes to others.   Having an open heart is something like being in love, and for that I offer no apology.   My flowers seem to understand that.   I’m still trying to figure out how it applies to people.

I stare at old bones and images of our distant ancestors, and I get glimpses of who I am and what I share with other humans.   I have a personal and recognizable lineage that goes back millions of years.   There are illustrating traces all along the way as I try to look back through all the years that my predecessors have been present.    My story is fascinating.

Most of the story is told in fossilized  bones and frozen footprints.  These hardened relics speak of ancestors who long ago began looking a little like I do today.   Gradually their progeny evolved into an appearance that I recognize in my morning glance in the mirror.

Along the way, the bodies of my ancestors changed in a manner that supported intelligence.   The field of energy in their bodies become more and more aligned with a deeper reality, and humans could understand their world in a new and deeper ways.    Humans gradually grew in an awareness and insight that seemed more powerful than other creatures and the inanimate world.

Most of the traces of this intelligent awareness are but thousands of years old, except for a few relics that suggest the first use of tools.   There have been countless structures built, pictures drawn, and written languages left behind by my ancestors.   Through them I know of their awareness and intelligence and how it has grown.

I now live in a world  on which human intelligence continues to leave its mark and sometimes flounders.    As I look around, I see both marvels and vast areas of ruin.   I think our awareness and intelligence has faltered, and I am not sure what that means for the future of the vast numbers of humans.    I am convinced that only the aware will continue to survive and prosper.  Evolution is sometimes messy.

With every breath, I accept a gift from a plant I may never see.   Every inhaling action of my lungs, receives oxygen from a plant that may live right outside my window or grew a hundred million years ago.   It is all around me, this invisible gift of plants, a gift without which I could not be alive.

How exciting that we can share this moment, these plants and me.  They breathe out, I breathe in.   We reach across time and distance, and connect in this most intimate way.   What was part of them becomes part of me.   We are joined by the spark of life that has been present in us both, our link but a molecule in size.   Our shared worlds stretch beyond the measurement of dimension and  time.

I am sure that when I walk in the woods, I am enveloped by the gifts of the living pines and oaks around me.   I can feel that my breathing garden becomes part of me as I walk among the flowers.  I am embraced in the constant, swirling cloud of the breath of plants.

Most of the time, however, I may never know which plants have given me this gift that sends me energy and makes me live.   I do know that in some discrete moment of time, recent or long ago, some plant freely sent me a gift that I now gratefully accept and make of use.   And we are joined.

 

I am patiently waiting for my flowers to emerge from the ground.   I imagine them crouched under the snow, quietly waiting for their summons from the sun.   I know that my flowers and I share this tension of anticipation.  We are all trying to be patient.

After all, are we not all related?   Are we all not progeny from the same ancient life form?   Have we not all descended from the same organism that had not yet learned to make sugar from the light of the sun?  Do we not have the same sightless ancestor who did not yet have the eyes to thrill to shape and color?

We are all brothers and sisters, and we are ready for what is to come.
We are waiting patiently for the time we will share a loving presence, an awareness of who we are, a time to accept the glowing power of sunlight.

For now, it is only our minds and imagination that separate us.   I am aware that all around me, there are so many life forms ready to emerge.   There are many plants, humans, animals.   I want to call them forth right now, but for many the time is not right.   Nevertheless, I want to be ready.  I tell my mind “be still”, “be quiet”, and “be patient”.

There will be a time we can see one another with an awareness that reminds me that we are all one.  Meanwhile, I want to be attentive to our shared parentage, to be mindful of how all life forms share a common beginning.    We all have in us so many shared designs.    We have the same shared life force and intelligence, expressed in so many different ways.

I look around and realize that we have no reason to be fearful.   There is every reason to trust one another, to be transparent, to be open to love.   I will be patient and ready.   The time will come.

There are so many things I want to tell my 20 year old son.   For him, it is too soon.    His heart has not yet developed the quiet strength, his eyes are not yet discerning enough, his impatient mind has not yet learned to be still.    He has grown in all these areas, but there are some things a dad just can’t say until much later.

I want to tell him to ignore the advice of the world, especially if it appears in an advertisement.   He must learn to be critical of any promises that appear on tubes or bottles, such as “see results in 3 days” or “instantly makes you look younger.”   I wish he could quickly become critical of any advice that comes from someone wanting to make money from his decision.

I want to tell him that everything he has learned so far is suspect.   It is probably something out of his own or someone else’s imagination and is only loosely connected to reality.    He must relearn all that he has learned, and then relearn it again.    This is the joy of living, everything is new.

I want to encourage him to be curious, to have a yearning to discover, to constantly ask “why?”    I want to tell him that when using a scroll or bandsaw, always focus about one-fourth inch in front of where the blade meets the line you are following.

I want to be able to tell him to always look a second time when driving into an intersection.   Magical vehicles appear out of thin air.

I want to tell him to always distrust the opinion or information given him by someone who is certain.    This is especially to be applied to anyone who begins a sentence with “I believe……”

I want him to know that it is greater to love than be loved.

And there is so much more.

For me, meditation is effortless at its core, but that is the hard part.   Mindfulness takes no effort at all, and I have found it has taken me years to learn to actually do it.

In the past two days, I’ve been reminded of this paradox.   I was talking with a friend about meditation, and he said he had tried it.    But he didn’t seem to be able to put that much effort into it.    His mind is too active.   Another friend has told me that she plans to meditate when she retires and has more time to devote to it.   I listened yesterday to an interview with a known author who spoke of putting enough effort into not getting distracted during meditation.   She spoke of the work of meditating.

I suppose that in some kind of back-handed way, meditation does take energy.   However, most of the energy I experience is the intense excitement that comes with the rush of letting go.   There is the burst of freedom of not being constrained by what my mind is promoting and prompting.   There is the consuming glow of stepping out of my imagined world and coming face to face with a whole different reality.

My mind is active, inquisitive and solicitous.   It is so good at what it does that even when I turn myself to moments of awareness, my mind wants to leap into action.    It becomes an anxious host constantly suggesting what I might need.   It wants to flash in front of my attention a myriad of suggestions about what would both satisfy and excite me.   My only response is to smile a soft “not now.”  “Later.”

I try to remember that my mind is just doing its job.   There will be many times I rely on my imaginative, creative, insightful mind to guide me and help me solve problems or find my way.    But there are times I simply need to say “not now” and slip into a moment of no-effort.

My moment of mental no-effort is like sliding down a narrow, dark chute.   There is the exhilaration of no felt attachments to my mind / body.   I see with a part of me that otherwise is clouded by a constant barrage of thoughts and images generated  by my mind.   My muscles are for the moment no longer at attention, ready to leap into motion.    I  am totally relaxed and at ease.

Then I can finally become aware and accept whatever there is.

Then I can smile at my puppy-mind which waits just outside my attention, ready and anxious to leap back into action.    But this is not the time.    This is instead a time of no-thought, no-action, no-effort.   All those will come later.

I have recognized that there is no “God.”   There is no separate Entity that humans have personified in so many different ways over the centuries.  Human imagination has reached out and stretched in a myriad of directions to explain something that has been sometimes felt but never seen.

However, there is the murmur.   The Murmur is in all things, material and non-material.   I live in a myriad of  fields, and there is movement in the fields.    The movement is quantified in the reality I can experience.   Most of the fields are totally beyond my experience, and their presence is known only by implication.    But I know that there is the Murmur that gives reality and shape to my world.

There is an intelligence that give shape to what I am and brings my world into a reality.   My interaction with those ripples in the fields around me is my personal reality.    The only reality I know.   I am at my true best when I harmonize, synchronize, vibrate with the world which is at the margins of my self.   And in all, including me, there is always the murmur.    The intelligence and dream that shapes me and my world.

I know the Murmur when I yield to it, conform to it, let it shape me thoroughly.

I continue to be fascinated by the role that imagination plays in my world. For so long, I believed in a vision of my world that was dominated by the imagination of someone else or myself.   It was a world I  believed in, even though I had scant experience that it actually existed.    I still have some of that fantasy aspect in how I see the world.  It is not always helpful, and it obscures my attention to the reality around me.

It is hard for me to push aside all the images created by my beliefs.   My beliefs color so many of my experiences and give shape to those experiences in ways that are not helpful.    This is true of my continuing beliefs about the world of matter, god(s), or persons.

Belief is the product of fantasy and imagination. It has helped me to impose some sense and rationality on a world I barely understood.   It has allowed me to maintain a temporary balance when I was awash with ambiguity and uncertainty.    Belief has been a helpful working hypothesis, giving me some stability until such time as I am able to embrace the fundamental ambiguity of the real world.

Belief has been a temporary  fix.   Worse, it creates a fantasy world, a world of non-reality.   It keeps me from entering the world of reality.   Not at all comforting, it is a source of suffering because it separates me from the real world.   When I am no longer distracted by my imagination, I am able to truly know whoever or whatever I experience.  Only then is reality present.   Only then does reality happen.

Coupling has been one of those illusory beliefs of my life.    My coupling has created an imaginary structure or arrangement to make things the way I want them to be.   Coupling has been based on some experienced reality, but has largely been a product of my imagination. It is a temporary structure that needs constant adjustment.   It serves me until I am able to experience someone as they really are, without my imagination, how they relate to me without the imposed structure.   Only that is real.

Coupling is an agreement drawn out of imagination, fantasy and desire to provide stability until such time as the real relationship can exist on its own.   I think that coupling for me has usually been based on some realities, but it has primarily been made of aspiration, intention and imagination.

Even imagined coupling can for a time provide mutual support and refuge, much like that provided by reliance on an etherial, imagined, divine entity.  My imagination can serve me well until such time as I am ready and able to experience  reality as it truly is.   Then it is time to let it go.