Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Attentiveness

If you seek after truth, you should investigate things in such a way that your consciousness as you investigate is not distracted by what you find, or diffused and scattered; neither is it fixed and set. For the one who is not swayed, there will be a transcending of birth, death, and time. Whether you walk or stand or lie down, stretch your limbs or draw them in again, let you do all these things attentively, Above, across, and back again. Whatever your place in the world, let you be the one who views the movement of all compounded things with attention.
- Itivuttaka Sutta

Monday, February 25, 2013

The Three Poisons

"If ever there has been a time in America to ask, 'is human suffering unavoidable' it’s now. To answer this question, I look to Buddhism because its main purpose is to reduce suffering. Buddhism is not a religion per se; it is really a philosophy of life. A Buddhist is not required to believe or disbelieve in God. The Buddha’s goal was to reduce human suffering, so he confined his teachings to this life.

So even if you are a devout Muslim, Christian or Jew, I am asking you to consider a Buddhist teaching called the “three poisons.” The Buddha taught that the three poisons cause a great deal of suffering. They are: Greed, Anger and Ignorance. His goal was to get people to strive for a life of: Generosity, Compassion and Wisdom. If we could reach that goal, we could eliminate a lot of human suffering, including our own.

Let’s examine how these three poisons produce suffering. First, greed comes from a desire to have more than we need. It’s a desire that cannot be satisfied with its object; for instance, money. When we give in to greed, the more we have, the more we want. Greed can never be satisfied. It can only be challenged with self awareness. We must determine how much we need and when we have enough, admit it. Greed is a distraction that always puts happiness out of our reach. It only produces suffering.
Generosity is the antidote to greed. It’s no secret that every great spiritual prophet gave everything away to the poor. I’m not suggesting that you do the same. I am suggesting that each of us look to our conscience and learn from their examples. There’s more than enough to go around.

Anger is the next poison. It’s not anger that causes suffering; it’s the actions that we take when we don’t know how to handle our anger. Anger is natural. Harming others is unnatural and causes suffering for the victim and the perpetrator.

Most Americans were very angry because of 9/11. We had a right to be. Anger is a natural reaction to such an atrocity. But we failed to direct that anger to the responsible parties and here we are twelve years later. We’ve lost thousands more lives. We’ve spent trillions of dollars that we don’t have on two unnecessary wars. And what have we achieved? We’ve created more terrorists. The terrorists’ anger that inspired the attack and our retaliatory anger have caused immeasurable human suffering. We can’t reduce suffering by adding more suffering.

Compassion is the antidote. I know, it’s difficult to imagine being compassionate toward terrorists. That’s not what I am proposing. I am proposing that as a nation, we become more circumspect in how we act out our justifiable anger. And as individuals we do the same. That action will reduce suffering for all of us.

Ignorance is the third poison. The most vivid example today is the ignorance that prevails in certain countries that are struggling to keep modernity at bay with archaic forms of obsolete religious belief systems. I won’t argue that there certainly are some aspects of post modernity that I wish we didn’t have to tolerate. But institutionalized ignorance is not the answer. This kind of ignorance demands that terrible things happen to innocent victims. For instance, demanding an honor killing of a female family member because she was gang-raped while the perpetrators went free. Or that a young gay man be bullied into committing suicide.

Obviously, we don’t need to go to the Mideast to find this kind of ignorance. Right here in America we suffer the ignorance of states like Tennessee, where a child can refuse to participate in a learning activity if it conflicts with his or her religious beliefs. Or in those states that continue their efforts to have religion taught in the science curriculum by calling it by a different name, i.e. intelligent design or creation science.

Wisdom is the antidote. We should naturally grow in wisdom as we age. Here’s the problem; there are people who have many years of living experience and become wise as a result. And then there are others who have had the same year of experience many times over and insist that life is the problem because it doesn’t conform to their expectations. We need to be open to what life brings and learn from it. That’s all life asks of us for wisdom to flourish."
Robert DeFilippis

Friday, February 22, 2013

Our Own Efforts

The soul cannot have true knowledge of God through 
its own efforts or by means of any created thing, but 
only by divine light and by a special gift of divine grace. 
I believe there is  no quicker or easier way for the soul 
to obtain this divine grace from God, supreme Good 
and supreme Love, than by a devout, pure, humble,  
continual, and determined prayer.

- Angela of Foligno -

Tuesday, February 19, 2013

To Stand for Spirit

 
"What does it mean to be a spiritual hero? It is a bold and audacious idea, but I think that especially in our time, when there are many people looking for ways to step forward and make the world a better place, more and more of us are going to have to be willing to be just that, in order to take responsibility for where it is that we are all going. We're going to have to be willing, in all our imperfection, to be exemplars of what's possible and to stand for Spirit in a disbelieving world.
When we awaken to the truth and reality of Spirit, we see much more deeply into the nature of who we are and into the nature of reality itself. And it is there that we can discover a fearless courage to live this life for the highest reasons, and be a representative of that deeper and higher reality in this world. I have no doubt that the degree to which any one of us is willing to do that is the degree to which we're going to have a real impact on the future of our evolving consciousness and culture."
—Andrew Cohen

Friday, February 15, 2013

Attachment

Overcoming attachment does not mean becoming cold and indifferent. On the contrary, it means learning to have relaxed control over our mind through understanding the real causes of happiness and fulfillment, and this enables us to enjoy life more and suffer less.
- Kathleen McDonald, "How to Meditate"

Wisdom Is Beyond Thinking

And why is perfect wisdom beyond thinking? It is because all its points of reference cannot be thought about but can be apprehended. One is the disappearance of the self-conscious person into pure presence. Another is the knowing of the essenceless essence of all things in the world. And another is luminous knowledge that knows without a knower. None of these points can sustain ordinary thought because they are not objects or subjects. They can't be imagined or touched or approached in any way by any ordinary mode of consciousness, therefore they are beyond thinking."
- Prajnaparamita

Tuesday, February 12, 2013

When Time Disappears

 
The path of the mystic is one of transcendence, of going beyond: beyond the mind, beyond time, beyond the whole world. When the mind is transcended, awareness of the passing of time fades away. And when time disappears, awareness of the world also disappears. All the greatest mystics from the world's religious traditions have made the same unexpected and liberating discovery: when awareness of the world and everything in it, including one's own bodily shape and form, disappears, the most intimately felt sense of "I" still remains. Except now, "I" is all there is—beginningless, endless.
The transformative power of mystical experiences is that they can convey to us, in a way that our rational faculties can never grasp, that no matter what happens to our bodies and personalities in the world of time and space, mysteriously, at some other level, in another dimension of our own being, beyond the mind, everything is always okay.
—Andrew Cohen

God brings forth Love

Love must animate all things and hold all 
things together. Where there is no love, 
truth and unity are undone. It is, however, 
not our own human strength which can 
bring forth love, but only God."

- Bernard Haring, Christian Maturity -

Saturday, February 09, 2013

Compassion

Compassion hurts. When you feel connected to everything, you also feel responsible for everything. And you cannot turn away. Your destiny is bound with the destinies of others. You must either learn to carry the Universe or be crushed by it. You must grow strong enough to love the world, yet empty enough to sit down at the same table with its worst horrors.
~ Andrew Boyd

Worthwhile Success

If you're enjoying what you do, if you're part of the ecosystem, if you provide a service that benefits people, then success is a byproduct … a reflection of your creativity, and your ease. It's not dependent on hard work and driving ambition and exacting plans. On the other hand, it's created by having truly a purpose in life, a vision, a commitment to the vision, the enjoyment of the journey and a connectedness with people.
- Deepak Chopra

Friday, February 08, 2013

Flow

Flow winds of time
Whilst the night takes a spin
Stars are falling in deep prime
As the darkness comes in
Feelings like river going
All is within dream reach
Night sky is now glowing
In its twinkling glow bleach

Flow on to a daybreak’s light
Reach the awaken call
In dreams blue and height
As the night must fall
Silvery dress of the day
Awaken in its true reality
Every dream’s now on its way
To become once more free

Flow to the sounds I heard
Whispers in the deep dark
Like ravens of a winged bird
Shadowed dancing embark
Life is like merry-go -round
Deep into their whole make
Until the light’s again found
As new cock-crows’ awake

Now is the night in its dancing
Humming a breeze melody
Dreams of bedroom romancing
For a new tomorrow to be
 
~Peter S. Quinn

Wednesday, February 06, 2013

Profound Discovery

The most profound discovery that I've made in my life is that it is possible to be free. The outrageous claims of history's greatest mystics and realizers about our potential to experience higher consciousness are absolutely true. And having no doubt about this alone can change everything! The Buddha's profound Enlightenment, the liberating love of God that Jesus passionately preached to the masses, the moral imperative in the universe to which Jews bear witness—all of these are available to us—if only we have the deep receptivity and yearning in our souls to know such hidden truths directly for ourselves. Once we do know, it's no longer possible to imagine life without the tranformative presence of this knowing that changes absolutely everything. Now we are not the same people we were. Now we are no longer living this life merely to have and to get and to become for ourselves. Now we know beyond any doubt that we're here for a higher reason and our lives must be a testament to that fact.

—Andrew Cohen

Tuesday, February 05, 2013

Friend, it is through him that you are speaking, 
it is he whom you breathe, and you do not know 
it! For your eye is blind, your heart hardened. 
But, if you wish, you can be cured. Entrust yourself 
to the doctor, and he will open the eyes of your soul 
and your heart.  Who is the doctor? God, using his 
word and his wisdom. . ."

- Theophilus of Antioch, "First Book to Autolycus" -

Monday, February 04, 2013

The Power of Thought Forms

     An idea is powerful, grand, subtle, boring, comforting, fascinating, repellant, upsetting, difficult to get hold of. These animistic terms are also used when describing our relations with other people. They treat ideas as alive and indicate that we to some degree experience them that way.

     We enter into relationships with ideas. We treat them as tools and they empower us in our lives.  We give them energy and they motivate us, but with this comes the possibility of “losing ourselves” in them. And then we identify with them, experience them as part of us, and lose track of who we are. We “fall under their spell.” It is a kind of entrancement.

     Ideas we hold can often mean more than we initially know until we enter into them more deeply. We learn what we did not previously know as we unpack them, tease out their implications, and find that they hold surprises.  Again, like people.

     One of the intentions of meditation techniques is to teach us we are not our ideas. Meditation teaches us to see ideas come and go.  But ideas can still grab hold of us as soon as we give them attention, particularly if it is emotional attention. We become the idea rather than observing it.

     This is why scientists praise those who can distance themselves from their scientific ideas, the better to evaluate how well they describe what they claim to.  It is a lesson we all should take to heart. When we fail to do this, we become the vehicles through which those ideas manifest in the world, on the idea’s terms rather than ours. They are not our tools, we are theirs.
Ideas empower or disempower us, depending on our relationship to them. And if we are disempowered, what is empowered?  The reality behind the idea, the focused mental energy that constitutes it.

     Writing these words reminds me of a passage by Malidoma Somé:
When power comes out of its hiddenness, it shrinks the person who brought it into the open and turns that person into a servant.  The only way that overt power can remain visible is by being fed, and he who knows how to make power visible end up trapped into keeping that power visible….
Whoever creates that kind of visible power must then stay in the service to that which he creates. . . .  To display power is to become servile to it in a way that is extremely disempowering.  This is because the service is fueled by the terror of losing the fantasy of having power. (62-3)
     Now let me shift our perspective to a wider stage: human history. History is interpreted today mostly in secular, materialistic terms.  The alternative view, a minority one, sees history as the working out of a divine plan or will. But there is a third possibility that arises from taking the thought-form idea as seriously outside magickal workings as we do inside.

     For thousands of years, dominant human societies have been based on ideas of hierarchy, subordination, and obedience.  They have been given religious reality (as in Catholicism), economic reality (as in feudalism and slavery), political reality (as in despotism and absolutism), and interpersonal reality (as in hierarchical family structures). The modern liberal world of science, markets, and democracy grew within that world. Yet it won a degree of independence from it through the power of its ideas about human rights, equality, and freedom—particularly when brought to the  “new world,” where disease had wiped out most of the original inhabitants but where, in North America in particular, the types of domination so prevalent in Europe had never taken hold.  Perhaps this weakened the hold of these hierarchical ways of thought that, in time, enabled other ideas to grow.

     Whatever the cause, liberal ideas began a transformation of humanity, a transformation as dramatic as when the first agricultural hierarchies triumphed over the more egalitarian hunting and gathering societies of our evolutionary heritage. For the first time in millennia, the world of hierarchy, domination, and universal subordination was put on the defensive. And as liberal institutions of science, the market, and democracy transformed their world, liberal ideas were validated and spread from two places relatively secure against the old powers: the US and Great Britain. An alternative thought-form universe was created.

     The old thought-forms of domination, hierarchy, and obedience did not disappear.  They sought to manifest wherever they could, inaugurating a profound struggle in the West between what we might simply call freedom and slavery.

     In the US, these thought forms’ most powerful stronghold was the antebellum South. The South’s leaders increasingly turned their back on the Declaration of Independence because they knew it to be fundamentally hostile to slavery.  For them, domination trumped equality. They lost a war, but still maintained a way of life reflecting the old values, reinforced by a form of religion that supported slavery and rigid hierarchy, both secular and divine.

~ Gus diZerega

Friday, February 01, 2013

Mist


A couple weeks ago, here on the mountain, we woke up to mist. Sometimes thick like fog, sometimes wispy like gossamer, it curled around tree limbs and blanketed the forest. Things were not what they seemed: solid things, like our houses, looked ethereal; bright birds, like cardinals, became filmy spirits. Strangely, while the visual world blurred and dissipated, the auditory world sharpened and clarified. Standing out on my back deck under the pergola, I could hear distinctly the train in the valley and the bells from Holy Cross Abbey across the river.
 
Frank MacEowen, in The Mist-Filled Path, says, "The mist is an ancient initiator and sacred reminder in the Celtic traditions. In the old tales of Britain, just beyond the mist lies the realm of Avalon." Avalon of course is a holy place of wisdom and healing. Earlier in the book he notes that mist creates a numinous, threshold space. He writes, "Mist is a beautiful natural power. This old spirit is an ambassador of the in-between. Not entirely water, not entirely air, the mist is a unique dancing marriage of these two elements. ...when the mist descends upon us, the veil that ordinarily separates the unseen world from the visible world is drawn back, fostering a fluency of movement between the two worlds...."
 
What is that unseen world? I would argue that it is the world of soul, the inward world which harbors the Divine Guest, our connection with the sacred, with that energy of energies that permeates the universe, the One. It is everywhere. In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says that this realm is "spread out upon the earth, and people do not see it."
 
But there are threshold places, mist-filled spaces, (which as Vivian noted at a community retreat, are called "thin places"), where people do see it. MacEowen says, "Thin places are potent doorways within our sacred world, which includes the natural world (and aspects of the human world) and also domains that permeate and lie beneath our world. It is where the ordinary and the non-ordinary come to rest in each other's arms. These places might be in-between places or particular in-between times, such as twilight...It is where the unseen and the seen share one ground." Or, as Rumi puts it, "the doorsill where two worlds touch."
 
I am grateful to be living in such a thin, mist-filled place and to have the work, as we do, of inviting and creating hospitality for others to spend time here too. Conversations with many over the years and recently confirm that people are drawn here, sensing that this is a special place, from the first days of people camping and gathering at the site of the Meditation Shelter, to Nan Merrill's deep feeling that this should be the home of Friends of Silence, to our most recent guest who walked all over the land and called it "paradise".
 
We may live in a mist-filled paradise, but discussions at community suppers and our various business meetings affirm that being and ministering here makes us very busy people. There is a lot to do so that we care for one another, have wood-stove warmed homes, offer our guests and one another organic, fresh vegetables and food, invite others into a serenely beautiful retreat house, and keep the bills paid, the water flowing and the lights on. Sometimes I wonder how long I can keep it up, and I know I'm not the only one with that question. In fact, some of us are meeting  to ponder what comes next for all of us together as we age, or sage, as the case may be.
 
Perhaps we yearn for that time called retirement, when presumably there is less to be done, but in the meantime, we have responsibilities. Yet I find that I remain profoundly grateful to be here, in this thin place, with my beloved community, with this sacred work to do; to prepare stew for community supper, and soup for the next retreat, to prune the raspberries with my friends, to build a fire for a retreat house guest, to stack logs for whoever needs it, sweep snow from the Meditation Shelter steps, to be able to wake in the morning to a mist-filled landscape, to walk out into the woods, to hear the monastery bells floating in the dancing air. This is what I do all day long. I may not be strolling through the fields with Mary Oliver exactly, but I am just as happy and grateful to ask myself, as she does, "Tell me, what else should I have done?...Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild (and, I would add, mist-filled) life?"
Lindsay McLaughlin