Barry Garden Path

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.

I seem to have an iron grasp on some images and it is hard to let go.   This could be an image of any sort, any thing that arises from my imagination and is not truly connected to the real world.

Sometimes the image is in the form of a concept that is ready to shape my thoughts.   Other times it an image that I impose on a real scene or object that I observe;  I see it as it “ought” to be.   It can be a person whom I imagine to be someone other than they really are.   Sometimes the imagined person is less than they actually are, and often the image is greater, especially if they are someone I really like.

It is possible for me to love the  image of someone and confuse that with loving them.   This is the way of grasping.   The object of desire is not the real person but the image I have of them.   Letting go of my imagined person can be more difficult than any attachment to a real person.

I practice seeing people as they really are, nothing more and nothing less. I want to see them as independent and separate beings.   What links us is a real awareness and not something conjured up by my active imagination.

This is not always easy.   But how freeing it is to let go of the facsimile and open awareness to the person before me.

It is a great gift to be given even a tiny glimpse into the timeless.

 

Cities crush the poor, grind them up to pave the way and provide comfort for the passage of the few.

 

It is simply wrong that so many should have so little and so few have so much.

 

Just like everyone else, I get to direct my own life movie    I write the script, and invite my companions to take roles.    They are in their own movie and decide whether to offer me a part.

I wonder who will survive the coming crash of pomp and power?  I think the laws of physics are taking charge and making world-wide adjustments to our living-space.   The changes we humans have made to our surroundings have been so dramatic that the resulting adjustments by nature are likely going to be equally awe-inspiring.   Our world is starting to come back into balance, and it will be different from the safe environment we evolved to become comfortable in.   I must adjust to survive, and I’m not yet sure what that will mean.

The crash will go beyond the climate and physical face of the earth.   The social and cultural structures on which we have relied are already faltering and unraveling.  They are no longer supporting our welfare in an adequate way, and changes must come.  This has happened before.   Dissatisfaction is spreading and a new order will emerge.   I am not sure what it will look like, any more than I feel adequate to predict the future climate.

I like to think that the survivors will be those who can adjust to the changes and figure out a better way.    I like to think that my companions and me will fine a place in the new world.   I have no doubt that there will be survivors, and I hope that they will be expressive of the human features I value.   That includes traits such as compassion, cooperation, companionship.

I find it hard to imagine that the selection process would choose for weaker human traits such as conceit, fear, grasping and competitiveness.    Unless, perhaps, it is time to pass the baton of intelligence to another species.

Today, I am very aware of how important it is for me to have companions and for them to walk side-by-side with me.   I want friends who are witnesses to my life, and who receive the same witness from me.   In becoming a witness, I think that we must not only be present to one another in an aware sort of way.   We must also have some understanding, some shared sense of having been in the same place, the same way.

I think that my life has turned out to be a great adventure so far.  I want to bring my friends along with me, to be a part of this adventure.    I want to walk along with them and share in the adventure they are living.   I want a mutual, deeply penetrating awareness.

I want to learn better how to do this without becoming so intently aware of them that I get pulled into an orbit around them.    The more I become sure and stable in my orbit, the less likely I am to falter.

The measurement of time is beginning to lose its meaning for me.   Apart from arranging for appointments or making plans with friends, the urgency of staying “on time”  or paying attention to time is weakening.   The past is becoming more of a blur, and it is becoming less important to remember just when it was I did something.   Like yesterday, I was trying to remember when I went to visit my brother, then decided the timing was totally incidental to the visit.

Some of this change in my perception, or non-perception of time is due to my developing an empty mind.  My attention to meditation is carrying over into my daily activities, and increments of time are fading.   I have less sense of the passage of time.   I am becoming more convinced that the progression of time or the breaking into sequential moments is an illusion.   There is simply the dimension of time, and the measurement of its progress is a useful artifact for my intellect.

This realization has been reinforced by my studying the development of life on earth, a process that has been going on over 3.5 billion years to the present.    Seen in a glance, as a whole, it is but one action.   The years stacked next to one another by millions, thousands or decades of measured years are but one singular event.    And I am part of that moment.

In concrete ways, the past is still taking part in me.   Even though I can impose measurements of time on snapshots of the past, the history of my origins, the emergence of my life is one event.   It is a singular event that is mirrored in my individual development, from the mergence of that egg and sperm to the breath I just exhaled.

To put things in order so that they make sense to my intellect,  it is useful to impose a grid of a day, a month, a year or an eon on the dimension of time.    But I can be aware of time without the aid of measurements.   First, I must develop the skill of an empty mind.   Then, in a flash, it makes sense.

I know there is a great storm coming, and I am curious what lies on the other side.  For decades, we have set in motion a worldwide process that will have great effects.   The earth is simply following the laws of physics and there must be changes in response to the actions we humans have taken.

The balance that has been dominant for the 20,000 or so years that humans have shown high intellectual power has been shifting.   The climate that humans have prospered in is transforming.  The conditions that were present for the rise of agriculture, the building of cities, the expansion of production, the achievements of science are changing.

The social structures humans have developed and relied on are changing as well.   The presence of wealth has expanded into many more sectors of our world in the past 60 years, and the effects are altering the existing  social arrangements.   In places where wealth has existed in the past, it is being concentrated in the hands of the few.   The shifting of wealth not only promotes dissatisfaction with existing social arrangements.   It also shepherds in new diseases as people change behaviors that have sustained them for many years.

Across the globe, the forces of change are stirring.    It promises to be a great storm.   I want to be around to witness and welcome the new world emerging.

I remember a time when I went to a zoo and the large and dangerous animals paced or lay on the other side of bars.   I wonder what the lion and panthers saw.   Were they able to see beyond the bars or did their attention go only to the vertical bars that defined the margins of their world.   Did they stare at me or at the bars that separated us?

So much of my life has been behind bars.   Many of the bars have been imposed by fellow humans and some I have put there myself.   It has been a struggle to see beyond the bars, and sometimes I contented myself to stay behind them even when I could easily pass through them.

Many of the bars have been cultural ones, society’s bars that defined what it means to be a man, to be responsible, to be married, to be a monk, to possess things.   The obvious ones in my life have been the bars of religion that attempted to define my world and keep me from looking beyond the limits imposed by my tradition and leaders.   Relations with individuals have imposed limits on me as they defined for me who I was or who I should be.

The irony is that I willingly accepted many of these bars.   Especially puzzling for me is how I have chosen to allow or even caused my world to be defined by relationships, especially those with women.

All the while, I have hardly been able to see beyond the bars around me placed by the likes of culture, religion and relationships.   I have never realized that the bars were an illusion, often nurtured by myself.   Now I know that they have been no more confining than a holograph, and at any moment I could both see and pass right through them.

I am learning that the bars are not real and I am slowly venturing into my larger world.   Much of it is unfamiliar and does not offer the same security I found behind bars.   It is also exciting and inviting.    It is a garden of beauty and delights, and it is all mine if I choose to enter it.