Singing the Song of Love
The sun had risen above the horizon billions of times before anyone took
meaningful notice of it. Then, after billions of unnoticed sun cycles, a being
witnessed the dawn of a new day and wondered.
Though its eyes had seen this glowing object rise into the sky many times
before, on this morning it knew that it knew and it knew it was separate. And
thus began humanity’s quest to return to the innocence of the one.
This initial instance of
self
consciousness was the dawning of human awareness and though this
antediluvian human lacked the words of language, it realized that in addition
to being separate from the sun, it was dependent upon the sun for life itself.
In this moment of awakening he or she perceived both beneficent wonder and
mortal fear. The unprecedented awareness of the sun’s wonderful warmth brought
with it the the realization that night may never again become day.
The fearful possibility that the sun may one day fail to appear in the sky
inspired in this human a profound sense of obeisance; it began to relate to the
sun in a way that we would recognize as worship. With the advent of spoken
language, humans gained the ability to teach each other about the importance of
the sun and how to worship it to ensure its ongoing presence in the sky. They
also used language to develop and pass down stories about their historical
origin and their place in the world relative to other life forms and the
objects around them. Their observation of the sun inspired stories that served
to explain its apparent motion in the heavens and its importance to the
planting and harvesting of food.
While our ancestors’ belief in
the power of the sun and in the
separateness of all things worked to keep them alive, this basic belief carried
within it the seeds of potential destruction.
Because the story-telling tradition is volatile and results in changes to
the stories throughout time, there can be no certainty about the reasons or the
timing of early human conflict. As early as 10,000 BCE, long before the
invention of writing, the archeological record reveals that various families or
tribes of humans fought against each other. Evidence of violent conflict exists
in the form of fortified cities, wounded skeletons and weapons dating to that
period.
The proximate causes of these conflicts probably involved the possession of
various territories and resources. The ultimate cause, however, can be
attributed to their
mistaken perception of separateness and
individuality. The very gift of self-awareness, so important to what it
means to be human, contains within it the means of human devastation.
The first known instance of war between humans was recorded about 500 years
after man learned to write. This conflict took place in 2700 BCE between the
people living in Sumer, which is known today as Iraq, and those living in Elam,
which is part of modern Iran. The war was fought in the location of the city of
Basra with possession of territory and resources as its stated cause.
The English word, war, is derived from the German word “Werran” and it means
“to cause confusion.” In his classic book,
On War, Carl Von Clausewitz states, war is a
“continuation of politics carried on by other means.” War has been a part of
our human reality; it has been happening since humanity’s beginning. War is the
extreme example of the results produced by man’s perception of separation from
his fellow humans and his world. And we humans have the ability and the power
to end it.
When we perceive ourselves as separate from other humans, other living
species and from our environment, we can lose all sense of the intimate
connection that exists between our own wellbeing and that of other humans,
other species, rivers, vegetable gardens, forests and deserts.
The destruction of life, wealth, and environments resulting from the human
perception of separation stems entirely from our gross misperception of the
nature of our essential reality. As Shakespeare’s
Hamlet explained in about 1600, “There are
more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your
philosophy.”
Everything that exists, everything we can perceive or know, consists of
energetic motion. Everything that comes into our experiential field, including
the bodies we are now inhabiting, is held together by energetic potential. Our
observation of the universe actualizes its potential in accordance with the
habits of prejudgement that we bring to our experience even before we
experience it.
We make use of the raw potential of unbounded reality in ways that tend to
extend our bodies in time. We accomplish this with a minuscule fraction of the
data potentially available to us. We do it this way because
we mistakenly identify
ourselves with the bodies we carry around and we think we will lose
something if we do it any other way. That is, we think we will lose our life.
Life learned how to use energetic information to keep living long before
single cell entities figured out how to keep themselves alive with more than
one cell to manage. We humans are, in general, still sensing and using just
enough of the unlimited potential that surrounds us and moves through us to
keep alive this thing that we think we are. This is what we’ve been taught and
this is all our human minds know.
Our highly developed data filtration system allows a very tiny amount of
information to enter the neural processing network. The network then interprets
this data as sight, sound, somesthesis, taste and smell. And it is with this
grossly limited data that we arrive at the ideas and concepts that have us
believing, feeling and behaving like we are the masters of life on earth.
Fortunately, the perceptual conditioning that creates our world of
multiplicity is simply a habit that can be transcended, changed, broken. This
habit has taken hold because it has worked to keep us alive; but life is so
much more than the mere extension of our bodies in time. We humans – each of us
– is the embodiment, the very essence, of
unlimited potential.
The sense of possibility, wonder and fulfillment you may have glimpsed from
time to time is the voice of your true self telling you that you are more than
your body, more than your personality. You are the eternal Self that creates
and sustains everything that exists, ever has existed, and ever will exist.
That is who we humans are and all of us are one within that ultimate Self, the
ground of all being – timeless, self-shining, love.
Humans have been speaking this truth to each other for thousands of years;
the voices singing this song of love, of unity, of the limitless nature that we
are continue to increase in number each second of every day. You are one of
those voices.
The oneness that we are with each other extends to our unity with all that
is. We are the awareness and the bliss of pure being right now; we are that
essence and we are the words and the path that lead us back to the essential
self that we always have been and are right now.
Many of us humans have been talking and writing about our true self for a
long time, thus making available to us today many different words focused on
taking us out of our minds. Yes, out of our minds, because our minds are that
limited, filtered part of us that thinks we are all separate. The self that we
are simply uses the mind to accomplish the tasks of everyday life. Remembering
our true self is not something that we approach with a rational process of
logical problem solving. It is a leap that we take; a leap that connects back
to Self.
Millions of words have been written and spoken about how we can open up our
filtration system to allow more information into our sphere of awareness. When
this occurs, as it has throughout human history, and is happening right now for
many individuals, we become aware of a larger reality. That awareness opens the
windows of our mind through which we fly to the timeless beauty of all that is.
This is who you really are and always have been: unborn, never to die,
pure awareness of
being.
Flying through the windows of our mind reveals to us our true nature, our
interconnectedness with each other, with all living species and our living
environment. Oneness becomes completely obvious. It is then that we know and in
the knowing we realize that any action taken by anyone impacts the whole and
that whole includes the original actor. Thus, the ultimate recipient of all
that we do is our own self.
You Must Change Your Life:
Capitalism and the Evolving Dharma
Jay Michaelson |
Reality Sandwich
The following is excerpted from Evolving Dharma: Meditation, Buddhism, and the Next Generation
of Enlightenment,
published by Evolver Editions/North Atlantic
Books.
I’m sitting at the Wisdom 2.0 conference in San Francisco, awaiting a
program of millionaires and celebrities, half-envying and half-loathing the
fact that many of the people here are filthy rich. Over the next three days,
there are presentations on corporate efficiency with A-list tech names, product
rollouts that range from the sublime to the ridiculous, and lots and lots of
networking. I’m here to blog this conference for a well-known
Buddhist magazine, and I’m reminded that a lot of this stuff pisses Buddhists
off.
Well, it’s only going to get worse. We’re clearly at an inflection
point in the Western dharma right now: the last twenty years of secular,
mainstreamed mindfulness will likely be nothing compared to the next twenty—not
with healthcare, technology, and even the military coming around to the hard
data on mindfulness’s effectiveness. Is this a good thing or a bad thing?
On the one hand, meditation might just save the world, and mainstreaming
it—vulgarizing it, even—is how that will happen. On the other hand, what will
be the price of this wider embrace? Just how crass, cheesy, or watered-down
will things have to get?
I asked this of Jon Kabat-Zinn on the last night of the conference. I
mentioned David Loy’s open letter entitled “
Can Mindfulness Change a Corporation?” written to a board
member of Goldman Sachs, and arguing that a Buddhist couldn’t serve in good
conscience on the boards of corporations that have been involved in unethical
business practices. It was a pointed and well-stated challenge.
So I was curious what Kabat-Zinn, who has consulted with numerous
corporations and had just given a talk about mindfulness in business, had to
say. Although he hadn’t read the letter, his answer was surprisingly similar to
Loy’s. “This whole issue of ethics is really important,” he said:
“It’s not like Goldman Sachs can just do a little mindfulness and then be
driven by greed, hatred, and delusion all the more. That’s not mindfulness.
This is about restructuring things so that your business is aligned with the
deepest domains of integrity and morality. You can make money in the service of
creation of wealth, but not lying, cheating, and stealing, or cutting every
corner.”
Then he made a further point:
“I did some mindfulness work with a major Boston law firm back in the day,
and people ate it up—and then a whole bunch of them left. We have to be
prepared for that…. These people were being given annual bonuses called
‘no-life bonuses’ because you had to work so many hours that you never saw your
family.”
So wait a minute. Meditation is being brought into the corporate world
because it improves well-being and productivity–but then it causes people to
leave. Who’s gaming who here? I was reminded of something
Krishnamurti said, “It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly
sick society.” Sometimes the unavoidable fact may be that our lives need to be
adjusted to the dharma—if what we’re after is deep change. And often, seekers
(including this one) actually integrate too fast, moving too quickly from
low-level spiritual states back into the conventional world, without adequately
deepening the stages and insights they bring about. Sometimes, we use the
rhetoric of “integration” to have our spiritual cake and eat it, too.
Yet not all daily lives are created equal. Many of us want both the
capitalist householder life with children and the rest, and, you know, peace
and enlightenment. But what if such an “evolved” dharma is really a devolved
one? Zen master Jahn Daido Loori once complained that Western Dharma “reflects
our cultural spirit of greediness and consumerism. With all the possibilities,
why give up anything? We want it all. Why not do it all?” [1]
Rilke’s encounter with the numinous in his poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo”
concludes with “You must change your life.” Not “You must make small changes
around the edges” or “You must find twenty minutes a day to meditate.” Likewise
with spiritual practice. I am often asked, at the end of a meditation retreat
or other spiritual program, how the practice can be brought home, integrated
into regular life. It’s a natural question, and a good one, and I do my best to
answer. But the real answer may be “You can’t integrate it into regular life;
you must change your life.”
Some people don’t want to hear that, of course. It feels much better to be
told “Yes, just do this practice half an hour each day, watch what you eat, and
you’ll obtain all the benefits.” But what if a deep process of introspection
and contemplation is incompatible with working sixty hours a week, raising a family,
and being surrounded by American media? What then? Letting go is great, but
letting go into what? Western life is often so cluttered with demands, to-do
lists, and appointments that if I “let go” into that, I become a crazed and
nervous wreck. The Hindu sage Ramakrishna once said that the mind is like
fabric; it takes the color of the dye it’s soaked in. Soak the mind in a quiet,
relaxing environment and it will become quiet and relaxed. Soak it in floods of
Facebook and, well.…
Now, let me pause this torrent of pessimism for a moment. Surely, in the
tradition of the “Middle Way” there are productive methods of managing the
complex dance of integration and commitment—to create what Jack Kornfield has
called “the mandala of the whole.” [2] I want to talk about three of them.
First, of course contemplative practice is not all-or-nothing; it’s possible
to make incremental progress, and we don’t all have to be saints. There are
numerous practices—I have written and taught about many of them—that are easily
accomplished in the midst of a busy life, and which owe much to non-sitting
meditative practices such as Zen
oryoki (eating meditation),
Theravadan walking meditation, and the Tibetan encouragement to experience
“small moments, many times.” And I have seen, firsthand, that these practices
work – maybe not all the way to full enlightenment, but toward more wisdom and
compassion.
Lama Surya Das, a leading Western teacher, once told me:
“Integration is the name of the game, not seclusion. We have to do it where we
are, in our lives, except for those few who can renounce the world and go off
for a good period of time and really devote themselves to it.… It would be
heretical if any of us believed that people couldn’t get enlightened today. The
Buddha’s message is that anyone can become enlightened and awakened…. We just
may not get enlightened as soon as we want to.”
The following is excerpted from Evolving Dharma: Meditation, Buddhism, and the Next Generation
of Enlightenment,
published by Evolver Editions/North Atlantic Books.
I’m sitting at the Wisdom 2.0 conference in San Francisco, awaiting a
program of millionaires and celebrities, half-envying and half-loathing the
fact that many of the people here are filthy rich. Over the next three days,
there are presentations on corporate efficiency with A-list tech names, product
rollouts that range from the sublime to the ridiculous, and lots and lots of
networking. I’m here to blog this conference for a well-known Buddhist
magazine, and I’m reminded that a lot of this stuff pisses Buddhists off.
Well, it’s only going to get worse. We’re clearly at an inflection
point in the Western dharma right now: the last twenty years of secular,
mainstreamed mindfulness will likely be nothing compared to the next twenty—not
with healthcare, technology, and even the military coming around to the hard
data on mindfulness’s effectiveness. Is this a good thing or a bad thing?
On the one hand, meditation might just save the world, and mainstreaming
it—vulgarizing it, even—is how that will happen. On the other hand, what will
be the price of this wider embrace? Just how crass, cheesy, or watered-down
will things have to get?
I asked this of Jon Kabat-Zinn on the last night of the conference.
I mentioned David Loy’s open letter entitled “
Can Mindfulness Change a Corporation?” written to a board
member of Goldman Sachs, and arguing that a Buddhist couldn’t serve in good
conscience on the boards of corporations that have been involved in unethical
business practices. It was a pointed and well-stated challenge.
So I was curious what Kabat-Zinn, who has consulted with numerous
corporations and had just given a talk about mindfulness in business, had to
say. Although he hadn’t read the letter, his answer was surprisingly similar to
Loy’s. “This whole issue of ethics is really important,” he said:
"It’s not like Goldman Sachs can just do a little mindfulness
and then be driven by greed, hatred, and delusion all the more. That’s not
mindfulness. This is about restructuring things so that your business is
aligned with the deepest domains of integrity and morality. You can make money
in the service of creation of wealth, but not lying, cheating, and stealing, or
cutting every corner."
Then he made a further point:
"I did some mindfulness work with a major Boston law firm back
in the day, and people ate it up—and then a whole bunch of them left. We have
to be prepared for that…. These people were being given annual bonuses called
‘no-life bonuses’ because you had to work so many hours that you never saw your
family.”
So wait a minute. Meditation is being brought into the
corporate world because it improves well-being and productivity–but then it
causes people to leave. Who’s gaming who here? I was reminded of
something Krishnamurti said, “It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to
a profoundly sick society.” Sometimes the unavoidable fact may be that our
lives need to be adjusted to the dharma—if what we’re after is deep change. And
often, seekers (including this one) actually integrate too fast, moving too
quickly from low-level spiritual states back into the conventional world,
without adequately deepening the stages and insights they bring about.
Sometimes, we use the rhetoric of “integration” to have our spiritual cake and
eat it, too.
Yet not all daily lives are created equal. Many of us want both the
capitalist householder life with children and the rest, and, you know, peace
and enlightenment. But what if such an “evolved” dharma is really a devolved
one? Zen master Jahn Daido Loori once complained that Western Dharma “reflects
our cultural spirit of greediness and consumerism. With all the possibilities,
why give up anything? We want it all. Why not do it all?” [1]
Rilke's encounter with the numinous in his poem "Archaic Torso
of Apollo" concludes with "You must change your life." Not
"You must make small changes around the edges" or "You must find
twenty minutes a day to meditate." Likewise with spiritual practice. I am
often asked, at the end of a meditation retreat or other spiritual program, how
the practice can be brought home, integrated into regular life. It's a natural
question, and a good one, and I do my best to answer. But the real answer may
be "You can't integrate it into regular life; you must change your
life."
Some people don’t want to hear that, of course. It feels much
better to be told "Yes, just do this practice half an hour each day, watch
what you eat, and you'll obtain all the benefits." But what if a deep
process of introspection and contemplation is incompatible with working sixty
hours a week, raising a family, and being surrounded by American media? What
then? Letting go is great, but letting go into what? Western life is often so
cluttered with demands, to-do lists, and appointments that if I "let
go" into that, I become a crazed and nervous wreck. The Hindu sage
Ramakrishna once said that the mind is like fabric; it takes the color of the
dye it's soaked in. Soak the mind in a quiet, relaxing environment and it will
become quiet and relaxed. Soak it in floods of Facebook and, well.…
Now, let me pause this torrent of pessimism for a moment. Surely,
in the tradition of the “Middle Way” there are productive methods of managing
the complex dance of integration and commitment—to create what Jack Kornfield
has called “the mandala of the whole.” [2] I want to talk about three of them.
First, of course contemplative practice is not all-or-nothing; it’s
possible to make incremental progress, and we don’t all have to be saints.
There are numerous practices—I have written and taught about many of them—that
are easily accomplished in the midst of a busy life, and which owe much to
non-sitting meditative practices such as Zen oryoki (eating
meditation), Theravadan walking meditation, and the Tibetan encouragement to
experience “small moments, many times.” And I have seen, firsthand, that these
practices work – maybe not all the way to full enlightenment, but toward more
wisdom and compassion.
Lama Surya Das, a leading Western teacher, once told me:
"Integration is the name of the game, not seclusion. We have
to do it where we are, in our lives, except for those few who can renounce the
world and go off for a good period of time and really devote themselves to it.…
It would be heretical if any of us believed that people couldn’t get
enlightened today. The Buddha’s message is that anyone can become enlightened
and awakened…. We just may not get enlightened as soon as we want to."
This seems like a healthy balance. Practice may look different in
different contexts. On retreat, one might get deeply concentrated and very
quiet, and have one set of goals. But the goal of daily practice isn't the same
as the goal of intensive practice. You're not trying to have the most exotic samadhi
or mystical experience each day; you're trying to increase your spiritual viscosity,
that property of slipperiness that enables you to move quickly and smoothly
from mortgage payments to spiritual truths, from linear achievement to
present-moment love. You don't need to discover new territory—only to return
with ever-decreasing friction to what you know is truest, most authentic, most
real.
Second, “integration” goes two ways. On the one hand, one goes into
intensive environments to train the mind to do certain things, to go certain
places, to rest in certain ways. Then, in the rest of one’s life, the mind
practices doing that—alighting in a place of calm, amidst the rush-hour
traffic. Finding an inner capacity of love, amidst cacophony and discord. And
yet, the complementary motion is also essential: bringing the wisdom of the world,
of our karma, into practice as well. When I sit, I bring all of my sound and
fury, my time and place, to the cushion. I’m a humanist, after all, and I
love the eroticism of the everyday, emotional sensitivity, the juiciness of
sensuality of all kinds. I'm also mindful that spirituality that doesn't
include some form of serious social/political engagement is, at least for me,
empty. So I get involved in things that will necessarily invite some anger
(politics) and lust (food and sex) – and I bring that to practice.
This karma—by which I mean the social constructions of my
particular Western subculture, which seem as much a part of “me” as
anything—may well be holding me back from further advancement. Then again, this
is also the “Tantric turn,” the turn from enlightenment outside the world to
enlightenment within it. It is what I called in one of my books the
“resanctification of the world,” in which holiness is seen—as in Allen
Ginsberg’s “Footnote to Howl”—everywhere and in everything. And each time I re-ask
whether it wouldn't be better to give up the fleshpots for the cloister, I hear
a clear, humanistic “No” in response. What was it that Nisargadatta, the
Vedanta sage, said? “Wisdom tells me I’m nothing. Love tells me I’m everything.
In between, my life flows.”
Third, let me return for a moment to the Wisdom 2.0 conference,
home of the meditators from Mashable and yogis from Yahoo. On the last day of
the event, we heard from Meg Pilasco, a former Marine. Tragically, she was
sexually assaulted while serving, and subsequently suffered from PTSD as well
as other trauma-related conditions. Making matters worse, her superiors chose
not to pursue her case, and, like other veterans, Pilasco was afraid to go to
the VA for fear of being labeled as damaged goods. She was eventually put on
cocktails of meds, which she says didn’t work, and she eventually hit bottom,
ultimately attempting suicide and landing in the hospital.
Following her release, Pilasco found her way into a program called
“Honoring the Path of the Warrior,” which included mindfulness and meditation,
as well as a five-day retreat at the Tassajara Zen Center. “I thought
meditation was for crazy hippies—no offense,” she said to the laughs of the
crowd. “But this program saved my life.” Her depression lifted, her
twice-nightly nightmares decreased in frequency and intensity, and by the time
the program was over, she said, “I was ready to live my life again.”
This is why we bother with this meditation thing in the first
place. Dukkha is not the self-inflicted stress of a technology
executive; it’s the real stuff, the kind of suffering that merits the Pali
word’s original meaning: brokenness, stuckness. I’m delighted, really, that
mindfulness can also relieve the stresses of privileged, fortunate people. But
Pilasco’s story, simple as it was—indeed, it is entirely un-unique—moved me to
tears.
You can call the mindfulness biz watered-down and over-adapted if
you want. But it saved Pilasco’s life. And it’s been this way since
the beginning. On the first page of the first chapter of Jon Kabat-Zinn’s first
book, he writes about teaching mindfulness to AIDS patients in the 1980s, to
people recovering from crippling injuries, and ordinary people suffering from
debilitating migraines. [3] For some people, sure, mindfulness simply greases
the wheels, and makes an already fortunate life that much more pleasant. Even
then, corporate mindfulness is a gateway drug that will bring some minority of
practitioners into a more meaningful engagement with the reality of life. But I
think it’s better than that. I think that for a significant percentage—maybe
significant enough to make a real difference—it will lead to the conclusion
that, indeed, you must change your life
