There’s an old Zen story that I like very much. A monk comes to the monastery of Zhaozhou and asks for teaching. The master asks him, “Have you had your breakfast?” The monk says that he has. “Then wash your bowls,” is the teacher’s reply, and the only instruction he offers.

Zhaozhou wants to bring the monk down to the immediate present moment, as if saying “Don’t look for some profound metaphysical or yogic instructions here. Be present to this moment.”

Meditation reveals how many fixed ideas and opinions we have. How much judgment, expectation, and how much preconception we carry around with us all the time.

You noticed?

I come back to this simple story again and again (like, when I am driving, or doing routine tasks at work, and I catch my mind going all over the place, sometimes going over the same old story lines, over and over).

“Wash your bowls”–for me means just do what you are doing, and that’s enough.

I think it gets even more interesting when we look at why we even bother with meditation in the first place.

When was the last time you asked yourself why you do this stuff–you know, read spiritual books, show up to a meditation group, download–upload, sit attending the breath, walk attending to walking, whatever you do…

Why do you do this?

Is there something gnawing at you?

Some question you want settled, once and for all?

(OK, if you are honestly in this thing out of curiosity or for stress reduction, that’s fine. But if you are still at it after a few months, well, it’s time to ask a few questions).

The only place I can go from here is to stick to my own experience.

I guess I do acknowledge there is something gnawing at me; often below the level of my day to day awareness.

Yeah, after 30 years of doing this stuff, I do have an inner gnawing going on.

Some part of me wants to believe in something.

Maybe it’s part of our evolutionary biology; we may be wired to believe in something as a way of insuring our survival. Just look at historical frenzies around nationalism, fundamentalism, and now the Tea Party on their victories in last night’s elections.

This is what makes fundamentalism appealing for so many: So and so said it, I believe it, and that’s the end of it.

Our conditioning leads us to believe that there are answers to the questions which gnaw at us. And if we just work hard at it we will find those damned answers and be happy, and everything will be fine, no more gnawing.

I would love to believe in something

But let’s say we did find an answer. Let’s say we did believe in something. Would we then be happy?

Think of all the times you found an answer (in religion, philosophy, science)–did that do it?

I know of many incredibly brilliant people, experts in evolutionary biology, philosophy, and religion who seem to have some major gnawing going on. Just ask their spouses.

I am afraid that any answer is a stopping of awareness. Life stops, it dies.

OK, maybe we need to re frame this, and consider the process rather than the imagined destination, of living the question.

People often ask me what I have against Buddhism, or Hinduism, or any other religion (as you may have noticed, I take frequent pot shots!)

The best answer I can come up with comes from a Jesuit priest, believe it or not (whose work was banned by the Vatican). Here is the refreshing answer from Anthony de Mello, S.J. (which is on the nuts and bolts page of this blog):

“As soon as you look at the world through an ideology you are finished. No reality fits an ideology. Life is beyond that. That is why people are always searching for a meaning to life… Meaning is only found when you go beyond meaning. Life only makes sense when you perceive it as mystery and it makes no sense to the conceptualizing mind.”

So much of what is taught and practiced as Buddhism to me is quite dead.

Life is all wrapped up in a nice logical package: this is why we suffer, and this how we end suffering (now sign up for this seven day retreat! — after which, you’ll need to do the one six months from now to get “deeper” — then you’ll need to …. it goes on and on).

No thanks. Been there, done that. I am still pretty much in the same sinking boat I was always on 30 years ago when I started.

Only now there is more water in it!

Once we are given an answer (abhidhamma, seven stages of insight, even dzogchen) the questions stop. Or if they come up, we are redirected to work hard on the so-called answer.

Even this well-known passage from Rainer Maria Rilke, from Letters to a Young Poet

(1903) leaves one with a bait at end:

“…I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

But what if we never “live our way to the answer?”

What then?

Wash your bowls.

One of the genius aspects of some iconoclastic teachers within Buddhism and other traditions is that they know this very well, that the answer to such questions as what am I, what is life, etc…is not a cognitive statement, fact or “teaching” but rather, is the experience of awareness itself.

What we are doing in meditation is simply developing the capacity to experience awareness itself.

And not some fancy, esoteric mystical awareness, just this awareness right here and now.

Let’s take the example of loneliness.

I read an article recently (sorry, can’t remember where it was, but I do remember where I was when I read it–in our bathroom at home..too much information?) in which it was stated that fifteen percent of (North) Americans report experiencing an intense feeling of loneliness once a week.

There is a simple cure, and this is the heart of the meditation practice for me:

You just ask yourself: Is what experiences loneliness, lonely?

Living our ordinary, everyday awareness with greater and greater capacity allows us to savor every instant.

Every moment is a treasure, and time is never killed or wasted.

We become, to borrow a line from Kahil Gibran, “a flute through whose heart the whispering of the hours turns to music.”

And we just wash our bowls.

Then you get the real toughies.

Like: If there is no self, then how does karma work?

Or: If it is all happening as it should (variant–if it is all perfect) then why ____ (fill in the blank: Taliban cutting off women’s noses, the BP oil spill, Sarah Palin).

(These are just  two on a short list of about a six or seven; same questions in different clothes.)

The confusion rises when in meditation practice, some teachers or traditions encourage students to explore the view of the so-called perfection of the present moment. This simply means that it’s too late to change the present moment, so we open to it as it is.

I feel this is meant to encourage what I call the “valley qualities” of non-striving, openness, warmth, and relaxation. I don’t feel it means that things are happening as they should be due to some plan or karma (frankly, for me karma is just way too much to take on board).

We try to relax into the perfection of the present moment as it is, yes, but it also means we allow our hearts to break over and over again at the madness and cruelty on a massive scale that is happening in the world.

We actively engage in whatever we can to alleviate suffering, as suffering is very real. We do what we can to work to change chauvinistic systems that oppress others in the name of some higher power. We do this out of mature compassion–the suffering with others. Spiritual practice serves us in this process of bearing witness with love and compassion.

This question points to a larger issue we face when we engage in spiritual practice. Aspects of practice that I encourage, and talk about and write about on the blog, pertain to a “valley” approach rather than a “mountain-top” approach.

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When I say “valley qualities” I am not referring to San Fernando, California.

The mountain-top approach encourages climbing higher and higher, and flirts with the idea of transcending the world. The valley approach, on the other hand, is about going down, not up. It’s not a waking “up” but a waking “down.” By down I mean: into the body (valley), not the rarefied atmosphere of the head (mountain-top).

It is about the richness, the lushness and the composting of our stuff in the valley, not about “transcending” our stuff on the mountain.

Another way to talk about these movements is to call the valley approach feminine, and the mountain one masculine. The valley accepts the refuse of the cities, and in the composting of the refuse grows the lotus, while the mountain rejects the refuse in search of “perfect” rarefied mental states.

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The mountain-top approach is all about peak experiences, while the valley is about the ordinary life of oatmeal, children and paying bills. So in valley spirituality there is little concern for transcendence. “Ordinary mind is the way” is a famous line from an old Zen teacher of 9th century China.

Some spiritual traditions encourage transcendence from the very things that make for a “passionately engaged life” (Catherine Ingram’s line). The mountain-top approach emphasizes the transient, ephemeral nature of life. This translates often into the seeing the world as unreal and unsatisfactory, and developing a hankering after what is real–some sort of spiritual upgrade, some other-world transcendence.

Mountain spirituality is about leaving home for a long journey; valley spirituality recognizes you can never leave home.

Mountain spirituality is about discipline and long (and expensive) retreats, and getting more and more refined levels of insight. Valley spirituality recognizes you can’t improve on our already perfect present moment wakefulness; trying to do so is gilding the lily.

photo by kevincole	via PhotoRee

I contend that the valley way is not about belief systems at all, but rather on opening to what is, in all it’s chaos, confusion, misery and mind-boggling senseless tragedy.

Of course, this is not a black or white deal. As as a sangha member pointed out in an email to me, mountains and valleys depend on each other. He writes “whether we choose the valley or choose the mountain, there is discipline involved to notice and accept what is happening.”

The mountain way seems to de-sensitize us into thinking it’s not really real, or it’s happening as it should be due to some cosmic plan, or karma. Or that it’s just a mass of suffering and our job is to “do what has to be done” to put an end to it–through striving, discipline, renunciation, and hard work.

I guess I am just lazy.

I like hanging with my family, and not using my precious vacation time from work to go off on retreat somewhere.

I am as happy as a clam in the refuse and lushness of the my life just as it is.

The valley approach suits me perfectly!

Please take this opportunity to engage in some dialog via the comment feature of this blog.  What do you think? Am I over-simplifying this?

(I would like to thank Dennis Butler for his insightful comments. Note: this is a re-write of a previous post in this same category).

I would first suggest that we very carefully re-read Raymond’s essay. Perhaps you might print it out and keep it some place where you might stumble upon it, perhaps when you are in the grips of confusion or irritation.

Raymond’s admonition to approach this work with some caution is significant. We may have a tendency to dive into spiritual practices and throw caution to the wind. Let’s be clear at beginning: this is hard work, and is not for the weekend warrior or dilettante. As we challenge and dismantle deep psychic structures we may find ourselves like the person at the of W. B. Year’s poem “The Circus Animals’ Desertion”

Now that my ladder’s gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

But if we hang in there we may find that the place where all ladders start is the ground zero of Being, the ground zero of love.

photo by Wonderlane	via PhotoRee

If we use these feelings of anger and confusion, as when we read or hear these hateful sound bites, as our starting point, and If we are honest with ourselves in this process, we will most likely uncover our inner bigot, our inner racist, our inner Pastor Terry Jones.

For me some humility helps me.

We rent out the master bedroom in our house on a month to month basis. We currently have a  physical therapist from Las Vegas who is here on a three-month work contract with Kaiser. One day he picked up a friend at the airport who had just arrived from Las Vegas who was going to stay in his room with him for two weeks. The friend is African-American.

When I met him I felt the bubbling up of psychic residues from an entire childhood spent soaking up racist notions. I found myself going out of my way to be nice to him, I guess as a way for me to appease my inner bigot.

Racist attitudes are deeply embedded.

At a meeting of Operation PUSH in Chicago in 1993 Rev. Jesse Jackson remarked “There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery—then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.”

We need to acknowledge our denial of this stuff, and how it tends to creep into the daily life thoughtscape. Meditation helps us uncover, and ultimately to embrace and transform, these notions. As long as we continue to repress them they will invade deeper layers of our psyche and fester.

photo by AlicePopkorn	via PhotoRee

In time, this embrace morphs into the recognition that at the ground zero of Being we are pure capacity for these feelings.

(Let me gratefully acknowledge Richard Lang’s brilliant, accessible,  experiential instructions for the recognition of the ground of being–anyone can do it!–and for his phrase “pure capacity”).

We may in time see, as Raymond writes, that “we don’t ever need to change anything. But if we want to, we can work on changing ourselves so that we increasingly learn to realize that very fact that we need to change nothing.”

I am sorry to say I have no new, nifty techniques to offer. I simply practice quiet, mindful awareness and gentle self-inquiry. In time, with practice, we see that at ground zero we are nothing more than pure capacity for ourselves and for the world. You can also call this pure capacity love. This blog is brimming with notes on how to do this, and I offer a few pointers at the end of this post, so hang in there.

But I feel intense irritation towards this guy that wants to burn the Korans, you might say (or maybe you are rooting for him, it doesn’t really matter all that much).

Capacity, schmapacity.

Raymond’s insight here comes to the rescue. I get from his piece that as your feet become wet in spiritual practice, you might relax a little, and start to not take yourself so seriously. As you nudge up against feelings of irritation, and simply allow them without manipulation or avoidance, before you know it you are loving “that part of me that does contain some measure of hatred.”

Raymond goes on to say that if “I am able to love that negativity in me, my love will begin to expand naturally and it will increasingly include many more people. Not that I should include everyone as a person that I am not fond of; it is just that it is quite enjoyable to do so when this phenomenon spontaneously occurs.”

This is why they call meditation practice skillful means. Yes, “not that I should include everyone … I am not fond of” — it just becomes irresistible to do so after a while.

As you work through your resistances in this way, you become irresistible. To yourself and to others.

So when we are confused or overwhelmed with irritation or fear we simply sit quietly, settle the mind on the breath, and ask ourselves Who or what is feeling this?

On present evidence, if we discard all the ladders of ego and conventional identity, Who or what is confused?

photo by InkHong	via PhotoRee

With a little clarity it’s not hard to see that we are not our inner racist. The inner racist is simply a bundle of thoughts, a packet of conditioned phenomena, empty and rolling on as Munindraji would say.

When you see this, a shift happens.

So what are you then?

Pure capacity.

Open, eternally free spirit. The Tao, empty, yet full, and suffused with compassion through and through.

As the late Kalu Rinpoche once said:

“You live in illusion and in the appearance of things.
There is a reality.
You are the reality.
If you wake up to that reality,
you will know that you are nothing,
and being nothing,
you are everything.”

Yes, but What do I do with the feelings?

Mindfulness meditation teaches simply to feel them fully.

Allow them to compost.

photo by Wonderlane	via PhotoRee

Don’t take sides in your mind.

When meditating, take a hands-off attitude, allow the feelings to rise and fall in the wide open space of awareness.

Exercise benevolent indifference towards them.

And be free .. in time, with practice.

It’s heart wrenching, blue-collar work, but that’s meditation.

It’s what we signed up for.

Have a great week.

Tom

….. ….. …… ….. …..

About Raymond Sigrist. Raymond says about himself: “I write about apophatic mysticism and have published a book on this subject: “In Love With Everything–Apophatic Mysticism– The Benefits and Dangers of Love Without Reason.” Raymond has some excellent essays posted on Scribd, which I highly recommend reading. Raymond maintains a very useful website on apophatic mysticism here. He also has a Facebook page. Raymond is incredibly accessible. I have benefited from email contact with him, and I don’t think he would mind engaging in some dialogue with you in the comments section of this post. Just click on the blue Leave a Comment box below.

A few days ago a member of our sangha wrote asking me to help her get a handle on troubling feelings of anger, despair and confusion. She asks a radically urgent question, radical in the true sense of the word’s roots–the question gets at the root of who we are and how we manifest in these disquieting times.

A person she held as a good friend sent her an email in which she endorsed the thinly veiled bigotry we have seen so often splashed on the screen of our collective consciousness, filled with anti- Islamic, anti-progressive, and anti- affirmative action banalities. She describes feeling offended, angry, confused.

The deeply hurtful part came in a passively vicious personal dig.

In her email to me she asked “how would a pragmatic apohatic mystic hold the feelings I’m feeling?” We can rephrase this question simply as How can I deal with this? or Should I erase this person from my life?

These are urgent questions. As the voices of intolerance hijack our attention, these may be the most burning life questions we face today. We may find ourselves, in unguarded moments, asking how we feel about the plans to build an Islamic center at Ground Zero.

This collaborative post attempts to answer these questions.

Many of you who read this blog or attend our meetings may be aware that I have found tremendous resonance in the traditional spiritual teachings found in many of the world’s mystical traditions. Over the past few years I have struggled to understand and communicate the unifying message at the heart of these traditions.

A few months ago I read Raymond’s Sigrist’s book In Love With Everything. The struggle ceased. Raymond writes, authoritatively, eloquently and with dry wit, what I had been trying to articulate for years. Raymond presents a clear and engaging approach he calls “practical apophatic mysticism” which draws lucidly on Taoist principles to highlight the core message discovered by traditional mystics all over the world.

I emailed Raymond to see if he would help me answer this question. He agreed.

What follows is tag-team blogging: Raymond responds to the deep substance of the question, and asked me finish up with some practical techniques.

Feel free to add your comment to this post below, as Raymond may very well respond to them.

Raymond’s response follows.

photo by Justin Gaurav Murgai	via PhotoRee

Recently a reader of my book asked a daunting question: how is it possible to embrace people who we find to have despicable behavior? The subtext of this insightful question contains a related question: why should we; is there an authentic imperative to do so?

There is very little we can do right now at this moment about the perceived flaws we notice in our thinking and in our behavior. At this moment it may also be very difficult to see that there might actually be nothing fundamentally wrong with this apparently bad behavior. We don’t like the way we are, and we think there is an imperative to change it.

Yet some of the mystics say that there is an ability to nearly completely free ourselves from the suffering caused by these perceived flaws and these perceived imperatives. And so some of us become extremely interested in finding out if this is really the case. We are arguably not any better (more noble) than anyone else; we are merely curious about these reports of people who can live with an unshakable sense of well-being no matter what happens to them, and who have a knack of effortlessly embracing the totality of human experience.

Some of these mystics tell us that the root of a person’s ability to effortlessly embrace and become fond of every being, and everything else about this world, lies in the ability of the person to recognize, despite numerous flaws, her own immutable perfection. No matter what she does or fails to do, her fundamental moral status does not change. For a comparison, if someone goes over a waterfall and drowns, we do not make any moral judgment against that waterfall. It is behaving perfectly naturally. With a growing ability to realize immutable perfection comes the increasing understanding that the only difference between we humans and a waterfall is that we can learn to love life more, or can learn to love it less.

photo by Wonderlane	via PhotoRee

This ability to see that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with any of us is very difficult to acquire.

If I were able to recognize my being as something which is immutably perfect I obviously would not need to improve anything about myself. What is interesting is that I can move in a direction in which a sense of that non-contingent perfection increases. I can move in a direction in which there is a sense of my value which is completely non-performance dependent.

Ironically before we go about the task of realizing how to more perfectly love ourselves and everyone else we need to clearly recognize that we do not need to love ourselves and everyone else. The sense we are getting, or will be getting from the ground of our being, is that nothing we do will cause us to become any more, or any less lovable. The love we are increasing sensing is completely non-performance based! (Admittedly this growing sense of our impeccability may merely be a neurological dynamic that can be accessed with a certain amount of skill. But even if that is all it is, it is still an uncanny natural wonder and an extremely adaptive human behavior)

As we follow this path we will be practicing an unusual formula. By the use of “skillful means” we will be trying to increasingly and more enduringly realize that we don’t ever need to change anything. But if we want to, we can work on changing ourselves so that we increasingly learn to realize that very fact that we need to change nothing. As the realization becomes more comprehensive, we will find ourselves enjoying ourselves more and more. We will find ourselves more satisfied with the totality of life, all of the good of life, and all of the bad of it.

photo by r000pert	via PhotoRee

Although when I am able, I do enjoy categorically experiencing a love for all beings, I do not sense that there is anything morally wrong with not loving some of them. And in fact I find it essential to love that part of me that does contain some measure of hatred. Paradoxically, if I am able to love that negativity in me, my love will begin to expand naturally and it will increasingly include many more people. Not that I should include everyone as a person that I am fond of; it is just that it is quite enjoyable to do so when this phenomenon spontaneously occurs.

Assuming the first sentence above at the beginning of this essay can prove true to experience, how do we acquire that astonishing ability? How to realize we are perfect right now, right now despite what appear to be numerous and obvious flaws? How to rid ourselves of negative self-judgment?

But before we go on we best recognize a danger in this exercise. We best be aware of the psychological instability that is caused when we start dismantling the values we have depended on to structure our experience of life. Life in the raw is a raging river of apparently chaotic phenomena. Our values are part of the structures that contain life within comprehensible and meaning-rendering channels. Removing these needs to be a careful process. Free of fundamental self-judgment I am very prone to becoming completely insane.

That danger noted, in my experience unconditional love is a gift, not a command. Is there anything we can do to open ourselves enough to accept this invitation, this offer to realize a non-mandated and effortless love?

>>>>>

Thank you Raymond. We are all grateful for your clarity.

The second, concluding post, will highlight a few of Raymond’s key points and offer simple tools we can use to “open ourselves enough the accept this invitation.”

… ….. … ….. … …..

About Raymond Sigist. Raymond says about himself: “I write about apophatic mysticism and have published a book on this subject: “In Love With Everything–Apophatic Mysticism– The Benefits and Dangers of Love Without Reason.” Raymond has some excellent essays posted on Scribd, which I highly recommend reading. Raymond maintains a very useful website on apophatic mysticism here. He also has a Facebook page. Raymond is incredibly accessible. I have benefited from email contact with him, and I don’t think he would mind engaging in some dialogue with you in the comments section of this post.

What’s the best spiritual practice, technique or lineage?

Well, after much thought, and thirty years of experimentation, I have to say it would be Kasmiri Shaivism, with the practices of Naqshbandi Sufism coming in at a very close second place.

Please, I am not being serious here. (Although, I must admit some experiential familiarity with both of these appraoches).

I get asked this question often, and each time I need to redirect the questioner, to cajole her to re-frame the question a little.

I nearly always get the urge to say the best path is the one which works for you, or better yet, the one which is working for you at this point in your life. Different approaches work best for different people at different times in their life.

I see many folks struggling with questions such as “Who’s got the whole answer, which one is the true path?”

“Which one starts up where the other ones leave off?”

I don’t think that’s the real issue.

The issue is what works for you at given time. And that might change over time. It certainly has been the case with me over the course of the last 30 years.

Ok fine, you might say, but isn’t there one that is absolutely better than the rest? Or perhaps one path will take you here, but after that you need to practice this other one to take you to the next level?

Or which is the TRUE one?

A variant of this question would be “Which one did the Buddha actually teach?”

Again, pardon me for being blunt, but who cares what worked for the Buddha?

The Buddha lived in a very different time and place, and was faced with many different issues. What worked for him may not work for you. Just because it worked for him means just that. It worked for him.

The Buddha did not have your mother.

Find out what works for you.

But isn’t there a path which is absolutely better than another? After all didn’t the Budhha supposedly say (in the satipatthana sutta) that the four foundations of mindfulness is the only way for the salvation of beings?

Many high level religionists make claims like this.

Sorry to be so blunt, but I just don’t buy it.

There is a way to compare practices, but it has to be done from the inside, from the lived experience of the practice, phenomenologically, if you will. This takes courage and honestly, especially at the beginning, when you see how much psychic investment there may be in a particular practice and tradition.

What you can do is compare strengths and weaknesses of particular meditation and spiritual paths and practices from the inside. At the beginning of this process you must allow the possibility that all practices and traditions have strengths and weaknesses. Then you can make an honest comparison.

This is the first step out of the incredibly subtle grip of a pervasive  fundamentalism I see in many spiritual circles.

Yes, even in the cool ones.

If you do this kind of honest appraisal, you just might come to see that the choice of a practice or tradition is not as important as you initially thought it was. You come to see that they all work in similar ways. Of course they emphasize different aspects of development, which is why different practices may be more relevant to you at different stages of you life.

You may even come feel comfortable with practices, traditions and world views which may have previously been seen as sexist, anachronistic, misanthropic, violent or quant. You may even feel enormous compassion and see how others get stuck in this subtle, pervasive fundamentalism, having been through that space yourself.

You see the urgent need for compasionate interspirituality.

And if you come this far, my friend, you have come a long way.

I happened to have been glancing at another book while re-reading Karen’s (yes, my bedside is littered with piles of books)–James Carse’s The Religious Case Against Belief in which he says practically the same thing–dogmas and beliefs have nothing to do with spiritual life.

Nada. Zip.

The point of religion is to shift consciousness, and has nothing to do with what happened under a tree in India 2500 years ago, or in Sinai in 1446 BCE , or in Mecca, Assisi, Jerusalem or Upper Myanmar.

Raymond Sigrist, in a comment to my last posting, mentions spiritual poverty. I think we all could do with a thumping deflation in our spiritual accounts.

It’s time we welcomed a Great Spiritual Downturn.

A spiritual recession.

Raymond writes: “Spiritual poverty, as seen in both Zhuangzi (“I depend on what I don’t know”) and some of the Christian mystics like San Juan de la Cruz (pobreza espiritual), is an efficacious perspective. I think there is a disadvantage in claiming that I can completely eliminate the ego. In fact, it might even be the ego that makes such claims.”

Yep.

From the point of view of this much needed spiritual recession, it doesn’t matter whether God is a benevolent being half involved in the workings of the universe or a hallucination.

All that matters is that we routinely access a set of skills that can transform the self, open the mind, and motivate decent, principled action.

It’s the transformation, not the myth, that matters, adds contemporary Jewish mystic Jay Michaelson.

In writing about the pragmatic approach to prayer in the last blog post, Raymond Sigrist made the following comment to my post, which I will quote at length (he is recounting an incident that happened when he was a voluntary chaplain in a hospital):

In the praying together, the client and myself were both acknowledging that in order to effectively cope with the situation they were in, we needed to find a perspective that could transcend the boundaries of typical habitual thought patterns and machinations.

What I found interesting was that we could access a dynamic process that was not as available even by listening with that powerful tool which Carl Rogers called “unconditional positive regard.”

As soon as we started to pray, the gestalt in the hospital room shifted markedly, and sometimes dramatically. The discursive thought of ordinary mind nearly completely vanished. Something from the center of our being had become acutely awake. Something quite beyond the thought of having or not having a God.  It is something Meister Eckhart prayed for: “I pray God to be rid of God.”

I have suggested on this blog that there is no one transformational cookbook (i.e., religious tradition) that will resonate with everyone. But the doing is the thing, not the believing.

Jay Michaelson observes that we must “shift away from a belief-centered, ethnicity-centered, and history-centered religious worldview and toward a pragmatic one.”

We also need to shift how we view role models. In the past, much of the truly deep spirituality was associated with an elite minority (with the exception of Shin Buddhism, and a few others). We need to re-consider spirituality as a pragmatic, everyday deal, just like keeping fit and eating healthily. It’s do-able. You just gotta get off your butt.

Or, perhaps more precisely, put your butt on the floor. Or in a chair.

Just get your  tush to the cush.

Here’s Jay Michaelson again:

“Spiritual excellence is every bit as real as physical or intellectual excellence, and to my mind, smart people who don’t do any work on themselves are as out of balance as bookworms who never go to the gym. … But if you aren’t doing something, you’re the spiritual equivalent of a 98-pound weakling.”

It aint easy. Neither is going to the gym, lacing up your running shoes, or cooking most nights.

But ya gotta just do it, as the Nike folks say.

You’ll be glad you did.

(Imrei Tzaddikim, trans. Ayeh Kaplan)

At our last meeting a dear friend related how in her experience she found  an initial bit of psychic friction when doing an openly devotional practice, which dissolved as the practice took hold. Her words struck a chord, saying at one point that the whole thing started out hokey, but soon became profoundly “non-hokey.”

Openly, unabashedly devotional practices, as found in many of the world’s religions, often appear infantile to us, especially those of us initially drawn to the meditational and rational systems within Buddhism.

Devotion can be frankly embarrassing from these perspectives.

But I would we suggest we not be so quick to judge.

On the surface, the prayer enterprise seems utterly preposterous. Prayer seems absurd, and it is. Yes, it imagines a God and seemingly asks for favors, at least in some popular forms.

Yes, devotion implies a devoted to, and with it we seem to cement duality. And duality, of course, is implicated as the metaphysical culprit behind our very human malaise, the stunning conundrum of being human.

Yes, prayer is based not only on weak metaphysics and pre-rational thought, it’s also, well, hokey.

Yes, but when was the last time you prayed?

Not since I was a kid, you might quickly, and exasperatedly, reply.

Yes, prayer is preposterous, but so is the heart. The heart speaks a language which the mind often rebukes.  And in the end, heart trumps mind.

Much of the refinement of certain seemingly rational philosophical and meditative systems has been the product of this split, with the mind wrestling with the heart, and winning a sort of victory.

But as Jay Michaelson observes, after many years of study, the principles which he found the most transformative have been the most banal –they could fit on a bumper sticker. And Jay has been there and done that (mystical Judaism, and elite nondual Hinduism and Buddhism).

The capstone of any deep transformation is the full engagement of the heart: a naked heart completely unashamed of itself.

Nonduality is not quite the adversary of prayer we often imagine it be; it’s quite the opposite. I think it is because of nonduality that we can even begin to pray, and pray meaningfully.

It starts out hokey, then turns utterly, stunningly, non-hokey (thanks to Gloria for the line) precisely because of nonduality. As we allow the insights of nonduality to sink in, the stubborn veils of the ego are lifted, the self is seen as a construct, and the pretensions of knowledge drop away.

Ha!

It turns out we don’t have a clue, and that’s perfectly, brilliant fine!

This is the birth of the great I don’t know, the liberating trumpet blast of the text we looked at earlier—the sublime negative treasure of The Cloud of Unknowing, the blessings of negative theology.

We relax when we finally get it that we don’t get and maybe never will get it.

This grand unknowingness gives the heart permission to express itself, and that expression is often one of yearning. A yearning we have often silenced through rational, systematic deconstructionist meditation.

Let me leave you with a few thoughts from Raymond Sigrist. He charts the path of what he calls “pragmatic apophatic mysticism” in his brilliant book “In Love With Everything: Apophatic Mysticism. The Benefits and Dangers of Love without Reason.”

Sigrist explains that “it does not matter that you have prayed to a god that does not exist. This is probably because in praying to a perceived external power you have implicitly recognized that what you want will require that you engage and collaborate with a complex of unidentifiable forces located both within and far beyond your own psyche.”

Prayer, aided by the fragmentation bombing of nonduality, encourages a deeper and fuller surrender of the ego.

Sigrist, I think, agrees with me on this last point, and adds that “this psychological and neurological surrender resets and optimizes the resonance among the forces that are coming to the fore, enhancing the resonance between your psyche and the world it inhabits … Whether or not the prayer phenomenon demonstrates the existence of a god is of no interest to the apophaticist. He is only interested in the quality of the fruit, not the correct identification of the tree.”

Thank you Raymond. Thank you Gloria. Thank you Sangha. Thank you everything and everybody!

As we surrender more deeply we acknowledge our multi-layered resistances and face our egoic conditioning head on. Humility allows us to recognize and allow fuller access to these layers.

I have not surrendered easily. Surrender grows in me though the apprceciation of what the Buddha saw as the primary fact of our lives—suffering. Every one would agree suffering is a natural part of who we are: we are born, grow old and sick, we die. Along the way there are countless separations and insults. This aspect of suffering is undeniable.

The Buddha also described a second, more subtle form of suffering. He taught this level of suffering was entirely of our own doing: the psychic displeasure caused by clinging, by our attachments, our reluctance to surrender our views, opinions and desires.

In the Christian view, it seems Jesus took suffering and transformed it into love. He did not flinch. Through his courage we have come to know something very precious and transformative: suffering as redemptive.

When we approach suffering as ultimately redemptive I feel we can appreciate the work of humility. No matter how advanced you think you are in your meditation practice, if you lose sight of humility, your practice is hurtful.

There is a tendency to think we can somehow get it all together with good meditation. That we can move past suffering for good.

I think we can certainly experience life with more spaciousness, with less reactivity, and more warmth, but I don’t see us getting out of suffering, no matter what we read. I don’t think it’s particularly helpful to take on the programming regarding the end  of suffering that is so prevalent in the spiritual advertising handed down to us for hundreds of years.

Rather, it might be more psychologically and spiritually grounding to acknowledge the saying attributed to one of the most celebrated spiritual figures of early Christianity, St. Anthony. He is said to have remarked “expect pain and temptation to the last day of your life.”

This just feels truer. No matter how advanced you think you are, or will ever be, expect pain and temptation.

I am speaking here from some thirty years struggling with Buddhist influenced meditation. I was taught over and over that there is an end to suffering. This sets up the expectation that this will come about with deeper and more correct practice.

Rather, let’s acknowledge that this whole thing is fragile and frail all the way through, from bow to stern. It’s so easy to buy into some fairy tale like expectation of getting it all together.

What if instead of getting it together, we allowed life to be fully tragic?

Isn’t this humility?

Cynthia Bourgeault, in a commentary on The Cloud of Unknowing, which I was listening to the other day on CDs received recently as a gift from a dear friend, quoted Helen Luke when she got to the Cloud’s teaching on meekness. I don’t have the exact words, but Helen writes something to the effect that wholeness is born out of the willingness to bear the struggle between the divine and the human.

Wholeness, or the transformation we all seek (w-holiness?) doesn’t come from the divine somehow canceling out the human. We stop thinking along these collusive lines. Wholeness is simply the willingness to bear the struggle; to allow whatever is there to simply be there. And to let ourselves be moved.

I think this may be what Christianity calls self-emptying. It takes on a very rich context in Jesus’ self-emptying love. The heightened and extended practice of Buddhist nonattachment empties the self into nothingness; it is in this nothingness that we find peace. It is in this nothingness that Christian mystics find God.

Often times I think we find ourselves trapped in a cage of our own making.        

I have forgotten who it was now, but someone on the dusty Dharma trail years ago remarked, after spending 6 months in a Burmese monastery practicing intensive vipassana meditation, that he felt like he had “downloaded an entire religion.”        

I think it is absolutely essential to carefully examine the beliefs we carry into our meditation practice. What this usually means is to examine the resistance we have to doing this. It is precisely this resistance which allows Maya to spin her web.        

Beliefs are rather subjective and are notoriously prone to the forces of persuasion. What has comes under the rubric of fact does change, of course, but beliefs have a noticeably more dramatic will-o’-the-wisp quality.        

When beliefs go largely unexamined and unquestioned, they can create enormous subconscious tension in the mind. We don’t need to look too far to see this: the angry, homophobic fundamentalists of many religions are just one example.       

When beliefs are held lightly they certainly contribute to a lesser degree of intrapsychic strife. My favorite example of this is comes from a new online friend I have recently made (Raymond, I hope you don’t mind me calling you that). Raymond Sigrist recently sent me an extraordinary book he recently published In Love With Everything: Apophatic Mysticism The Benefits and Dangers of Love Without Reason. This is such a rich buffet of a book; I can only offer a few delicious morsels up here in regard to this topic.       

In regard to lightly holding beliefs versus the adamant, tight-fisted grasping of them, Raymond has an alter-ego character in the book named Rawley Creed who comes up with brilliant one-liners.  (Raymond, you had me Googling this character for more of his wisdom until I noticed your trickery!).       

At one point Rawley confesses he is so committed to radical spiritual pragmatism he is willing to give up pragmatism at the drop of a hat! (Raymond calls his approach practical apophatic mysticism, and I wholly concur with his observations.)       

But holding a belief lightly is still holding, still a subtle form of grasping, to use the Buddhist lingo. Practice as I see it looks deeply into this entire enterprise. And this looking at beliefs we hold, even lightly, is often very uncomfortable, which is born of a deep desire for the comfort of the familiar (or what has come to become to represent the familiar in recently acquired beliefs).       

It’s natural to resist change and the unfamiliar—because it does not resonate with us. I get this feedback all the time. Why do I have to be such a rabble-rouser? Just relax and toe the line.       

It is exactly this turning of attention to that which has been overlooked that permits breakthroughs to occur.     

Some sages of old suggested the use of equally cunning counter trick to squash the operation of Maya, often calling it self-inquiry. This “technique” was likened to a stick used to stir the burning sticks in a funeral pyre until the stick itself was consumed by the fire.       

Beliefs masquerade as facts because they take up residence in the subconscious.  They remain hidden precisely because our of our unwillingness to look at them. But to look at them requires a focus strong enough to break old habit patterns.       

This focus is precisely the openness of meditation not directed at any object. It has the ability to leave up absolutely vulnerable. Here is another gem from Raymond Sigrist:       

Utter vulnerability is the apophatic’s treasure. The apophatic path is vulnerable to the distinct possibility of meaninglessness. The spotless clarity which results from the surrender of all ideation allows the apophatic to attain transparent awareness. Within this sublime awareness the mystic experiences the pure quality of being here. This experience is called the “numinous” or the “mystical state.”       

This is precisely why Meister Echkart wrote, in the reading for a couple of weeks ago on this blog:       

Therefore I pray to God to make me free of God.       

This transparent awareness is present and available, on tap 24/7, and like broadband, there is a very short connect time compared to the slow dialup of conventional meditation practice. Often all that is needed is a little nudge.       

This discovery is not reserved for special people or available only after years of practice or seeking. What is discovered is your utter birthright, and is who you already are, and absolutely not some special state, experience, or least of all thought, that one has to work hard to find and maintain.       

This recognition is just a very direct looking at who and what you actually are in this moment:  thoughts arising and passing in a field of ever-present awareness, with nothing to stick to. Who or what owns the thoughts? Where do they come from, and where do they go? Do you need to wait for some special circumstance to recognize this presence-awareness in which thoughts arise and into which they dissolve? Can you relax into and as this awareness? How old are you as awareness?    

This re-cognition is as ordinary as oatmeal.

It can put out the smoldering fire of belief-driven agendas. It brings joy, love, peace, and well-being. It also reveals the quivering heart of compassion.       

Somewhere in the Bible I remember reading “much study is weariness to the flesh and in the making of books, there is no end.”       

Along these lines Nisargadatta said “No university can teach you to be yourself”.       

This all too sneaky ego trick, of thinking that the discovery of timeless awareness is the result of great effort or study, was pointed out to me last week while sitting down for coffee with a friend, who said “your problem is you think you will find an answer in a book.”

I believe this simple, ordinary discovery is crucial to undertaking a sincere look at the interspiritual literature suggested in the reading list for the year on this blog . It is also at the heart of the apophatic mystical journey.        

(with warm thanks to Raymond Sigrist and Rev. Dan Hatch)

In meditation we unhook the mind. The mind of anxiety, doubts, craving, and compulsiveness.

The mind I am speaking of is primarily one-dimensional and is characterized by what psychologists call primary process thinking. This mind is so familiar to meditators, it’s what we wade through in the process of settling the mind on the breath: the seemingly incessant push and pull of liking and disliking, of self adoration and defamation, of planning and remembering (often with ego-affirming revisions).

The tragedy is that is mind is unfamiliar to most people, whose lives are often lived in its clutches.

We unhook this mind by returning again and again to the breath (or our chosen object of meditation).

We stop picking at our wounds so they can finally heal.

As long as we remain caught up in the one-dimensional energy of ego consciousness we  keep flying right past the eternal now in which we can find true comfort and rest.

This eternal now is beyond the reach of the mind, yet it does not require immense effort to reach, because it’s always right here and now.

It’s simply a matter of a little patience, and some regular periods of mediation practice, over time. And over time, meditation, when practiced consistently, can evoke subtle alterations of consciousness which bring one to a place that offers the least resistance to real, lasting change.

from The Four Quartets (Burnt Norton) y T.S. Eliot

And so each venture Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate, With shabby equipment always deteriorating In the general mess of imprecision of feeling, Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer By strength and submission, has already been discovered Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope To emulate – but there is no competition – There is only the fight to recover what has been lost And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss. For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

Each time we sit down to meditate is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate … in the general mess of imprecision of feeling.

The conditions we face never seem appropriate. We put off meditation until we feel better or have more energy or more time.

But, for us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

The trying is simply our consistent efforts to regularly show up for meditation, in our home, on the bed before going to sleep, or in some other place.

The place we make our efforts to reach is like the center of a hub of a wheel.

We can only bring ourselves to the center; the center acts on us over time.

How it does this is really not our concern, not our business.

We can’t make the center change us, we can only do our part to get there, to a place where there is the least resistance to allow this real and lasting change to take place.

This change, this lasting peace, cannot be induced, or forced, or willed in any way. It can only be received.

It’s an outbreak of peace.

Don’t worry about, theorize, or read about it. Just bring yourself to the center.

Once a day.

Over time our daily practice starts to infuse our life. Some days it’s like an low level underwater explosion, only heard and felt inside. Other days it seems like nothing is happening.

And it is.

That nothing, which is the stillness at the center of the wheel, is happening

That nothing, oddly, is like a compass–it shows us where center is.

I agree with Laurence Freeman. We can’t afford to waste a minute. The sooner we connect to the center, the better.

What keeps us from this outbreak of peace, this lasting change we all seek?

Again, nothing.

Nothing except ideas in our mind that this center is far way, or that we aren’t worthy, or smart enough, or … the list is endless).

These are the ideas constantly generated in the mind we unhook everyday.

This surely a good use of our time.

James Finley remarked once that taking the time to transcend the tyranny of time is time well spent.

Please explore a re-commitment to your true self for real, lasting peace.  That’s what we’re here to help you do.