Beyond the Material

     We're hard-wired to survive, as long & as well as possible. Like a possessed workaholic, our left brain obsesses about surviving & winning in this material world.
    INEVITABLY ALL of this turns to dust - all at once as in a fatal heart-attack or car crash, or slowly, incrementally as time & illness take back every bit of our hard-earned physical & mental capacities. Aging is a relentless, increasingly difficult 'school of hard knocks,' even if we're relatively fortunate!
    Our left brain's sole function is controlling the material environment. It CANNOT understand NOR cope with loss of control, at least partially explaining the ever-rising rates of depression, anxiety, addiction, violence, suicide, etc.

    Dying on the cross, “Jesus cried out in a loud voice, 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? ' ” (Mark 15:34; Matthew 27:46)

     “True love and prayer are learned in the hour when love becomes impossible and the heart has turned to stone.” Thomas Merton

    WHEN we realize the USELESSNESS of being lost in suffering, anger, regret, frustration & impatience - we CAN grow infinitely WISER with age AND spontaneously re-connect to our true nature, source & destination.
    ONLY AS our material world & 'small self' evaporate, can we fully appreciate our Divine True Nature.
    Please read / watch Amoda Maa's SUPERB teaching "Suffering as a Doorway to Liberation" : http://www.johnlovas.com/2019/04/suffering-as-doorway-to-liberation.html

    “Emptiness is two things at once:
     the absence of self
     and the presence of the Divine.
     Thus as self decreases,
     the Divine increases.”                             Bernadette Roberts

    "A man cannot enter into the deepest center of himself & pass through that center into God unless he is able to pass entirely out of himself & empty himself & give himself to other people in the purity of selfless love." Thomas Merton, quoted in M. Basil Pennington. "Centered Living: The Way of Centering Prayer." Galilee Trade, 1988. 

 
    “It is the perspective of the sufferer that determines whether a given experience perpetuates suffering or is a vehicle for awakening.” Mark Epstein

"Death is not extinguishing the light;
it is putting out the lamp
because the dawn has come."
Rabindranath Tagore

Fleeting moments of near perfection

What If We DO Belong Here?

      Many painfully honest songs, like Radiohead's "Creep," include the lament "I don't belong here." Some of us are sporadically struck by the very unpleasant sense that we shouldn't be here; can't handle the present situation or the people around us; that we're not good enough; that we seriously lack what it takes to succeed, be happy, or perhaps even survive. Some of us are burdened by such feelings on an almost constant basis.
     AND what if the complete opposite were ALSO true - that all of us ABSOLUTELY DO belong here - no matter how lousy our past or present situation might be? Sebene Selassie, a meditation teacher, has and continues to deal with far more real hardship than most of us, and has learned powerful real world lessons on how to really live:

     “But the challenges I faced – the challenges you face, the challenges we face collectively at this time, any place in the world (even a colonic room), any challenge in life (even cancer) – all are invitations to belonging. And belonging is our true nature.
     Belonging is our capacity to feel joy, freedom, and love in any moment. As the late Zen teacher Charlotte Joko Beck said: Joy is exactly what’s happening, minus our opinion of it. Joy is not about happy or unhappy, liking or disliking. Joy is accepting each moment for what it is without contention. We belong to any moment simply by meeting it with joy. This is freedom. Love is the ultimate expression of joy and freedom. Joy, freedom, and love could be considered synonyms for each other, and for belonging.”
     Sebene Selassie. “You Belong: A Call for Connection.” HarperOne, 2020. 

     Often when circumstances finally force us to drop our frantic scurrying around for what we think we lack, it suddenly dawns on us that we ourselves, are the source of loving intelligence, and that our very nature is wisely nurturing ourselves, others, everything - "intimacy with all." If this seems overly idealistic, remember that those who've had crushing losses - such as the death of an only child - can often only find consolation in supporting others who've suffered similar losses.
     At times, life IS very, very hard. We DO sometimes need help from others. AND YET all of us DO have an amazing capacity to wisely nurture ourselves (sometimes with help from others), and those who are suffering. We DO belong ALWAYS in ALL circumstances. We MUST wake up to our own depth of loving wisdom. To embody this requires that we learn to gradually let go of compulsive self-centredness, and prioritize deep meditation practice.

Three Stages of the Meditative Journey

#1     

     “Most beginners start with the idea that meditation is supposed to be peaceful. If they feel peaceful, they conclude that they are doing things right. Soon enough a disturbing thought or emotion erupts, and this is identified as a problem. We do not like disturbances. We start off with this dualistic preference. We want smooth ocean waters with no waves. When the waves come, we say we cannot meditate; or we assume that the presence of the waves means we are not meditating correctly. But the waves keep coming anyway, always. It is how we perceive them that changes. We can relate to these waves as threatening monsters and try to push them away. We can apply certain mental techniques to subdue them; or we can pretend not to notice them or try to deny their presence. But there is no liberation in trying to get rid of the waves; and actually, if you examine the mind that is trying to get rid of the waves, you will discover that it’s stuck on the problem. It is making a mountain out of a molehill. We can also tell ourselves intellectually, These waves are essentially empty. We can play with the ideas and concepts of emptiness and use intellectual logic to convince ourselves that the wave is not really a monster. But our hearts still feel the threat, and react to protect ourselves from it. This describes the first stage of working with the mind.

#2

     In the next stage, we are introduced to resting the mind in the spacious, nonconceptual aspect of mind that transcends the limited self. The waves might still be terrifying, but we begin to glimpse the boundless expanse of water beneath the surface, and this gives us more confidence to let them be. We do not yet see them as just waves, but our perspective has become so much bigger than the waves. Our personal stories of fear and loss, of rejection and self-recrimination are there – but they do not pervade every bit of space in our heads. Our fixed minds have loosened up a little; and once we recognize that our own version of reality exists within a vast impersonal experience of reality, these same stories do not disturb us as much. We might begin to think, Oh there’s a wave forming on the surface of my mind. Or, There’s a monster in my head. Okay, no problem. We can acknowledge the problem without reacting to it. We see it, but we do not feel it as much as we did earlier. The understanding of emptiness is dropping from the intellectual head to the experiential, feeling heart. The ratio is shifting: The more we rest in recognition of the spacious empty mind, and the more we embody the wisdom of emptiness, the less impact the disturbances have. The wave is there, but now it is just a tiny movement in the vastness of the ocean. But at this point, we still get stuck on the surface with the waves, and lose touch with the ocean beneath.

#3

     In the third stage, the wave no longer appears as a problem. It’s still a wave – big or small – but we don’t get stuck in it. We have become comfortable resting within the ocean itself.
     The ocean does not become calm and still. That is not the nature of the ocean. But now we have become so familiar with the full expanse of the ocean that even the biggest waves no longer bother us. This is how we can now experience our thoughts and emotions – even those we have spent our lives trying to be free of. Every movement of the mind, and every emotional reaction, is still just a small wave on the vast surface of the awakened mind.
     Although the mind is always free, it remains imprisoned in constraints of its own making. Concentrating on a sense object can protect the mind from feeling overpowered by the waves. For example, focusing the mind on a flower, or on watching the smoke from a stick of incense, can protect the mind from obsessing on marital discord, or on a business scheme. This type of focus may provide temporary relief. Still, it does not allow us to experience freedom. When we connect to our own awareness, then we can accommodate whatever arises: the big waves of loved ones dying and relationships ending, and the ripples of crashed computers and delayed flights. No wave stays the same shape: all crests fall. Let it be. Let it pass. Become bigger than the thought, bigger than the emotion. Everything is always in flux; by letting it be we simply allow for inherent movement. We can notice preference and desire, but chasing after them blocks the flow of change. Awareness contains impermanence, not the other way around. But they have this in common: Our liberation comes from recognition.
     Let it be makes it possible to see that our true nature is free from problems, distress, and suffering – and that it always has been. When we stop trying to make the surface calm – and accept that the very nature of ocean is change – we begin to experience this inner freedom.
     But this is not freedom from distress and anxiety. It is freedom that can be experienced with stress and anxiety. We are liberated from suffering by correctly perceiving reality; this means that we have the insight and experience to know that our minds are so much vaster than we generally think they are. We are not the size and shape of our worries. To recognize reality as-it-is makes recognition and liberation simultaneous." 
       Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, Helen Tworkov. “In Love with the World. A Monk’s Journey through the Bardos of Living and Dying.” Spiegel & Grau, 2019. A well-written, practical book for serious meditators.

Opening to ALL of Life

     “Difficulty opens us to moments of grace during which we are reminded of the great vitality beneath the surface of things – beneath the way things seem to be. When we even talk about grace or about any moment of breakthrough into a greater sense of the reality of which we are a part and which we are, we think of it as something extraordinarily pleasant or at least more pleasant than the environment we are in. We believe that if we could only separate from our difficulties, if we could not be so challenged by what occurs day to day, we would have a better opportunity for moments of grace to occur; we would be more able to open to a bigger sense of reality and of who we are. It is interesting that we hold these ideas of what is conducive to grace, to spiritual breakthrough, because they actually contradict the moments when grace shows up.
     Sometimes we do have moments of grace and deeper understanding when we are in a serene, comfortable, safe environment. Grace can arise as we are walking through the forest on a quiet day when nothing is disturbing us, and we are taken by the great silence and held by that sense of nature that allows us to relax into the greater reality of what we are. However, after more than two decades of teaching, I have found that grace comes more often through great challenges: when we are coming up against some edge in our lives, when we do not know how to handle a situation, or when our normal ways of coping are not useful and we find ourselves on unfamiliar ground. The challenge could be the loss of a loved one or the loss of a job; it could be a serious illness or any manner of things that leave us no choice but to draw upon a capacity within us that we might not know how to access otherwise.
     We see this in stories from all the great religious traditions. The Buddha is a good example. He wanted to find out if there was any answer to the existential human dilemma of the unavoidable facts of birth, life, death, and suffering. He was motivated by seeing something we all recognize at some point or another: life holds a great deal of suffering. In his time, if you were going to go on a serious spiritual quest, it was common to become a renunciant, so he left his home, his wife and children, and his princely ease and wealth to seek answers. After six years of arduous spiritual practices and disciplines like fasting and self-mortification, after mastering religious teachings and many styles of meditation, he realized he had to face the truth that he had not found the answer he was seeking.
     This was the Buddha’s turning point – a period of great despair for him. Imagine you have given up everything in your life to go on a quest and you have done the hard work, you have practiced and studied with the great teachers of the day, yet after years of seeking you realize you have not found what you were looking for. What a disappointment! On top of that, the Buddha was starving to death, because his ascetic practices had worn down his body – he looked like a skeleton. We know the image of the Buddha sitting under the bodhi tree, but we often forget that what got him under the bodhi tree was the pain of meeting his own edge, of being brought to a place within himself that he did not know how to break through. In this difficult moment, he did not know he was approaching that mysterious and powerful dawning of grace that would open a new vista of realization – of connection with life.
     The bodhi tree is a mythic motif. The tree stands for the tree of life, much like the tree of immortality in the Qur’an or the tree of knowledge in the book of Genesis in the Bible. Adam and Eve plucked the fruit from the tree. The Buddha did not take anything from the bodhi tree but sat down under it. He sat with the stark reality of life. He committed himself to life, but not in the way we usually think of committing ourselves – squeezing it for all the vitality we can. Instead he sat down at the root of existence and tried to find a resolution to the unavoidable fact of human existence, and he woke up. That is why the image of the Buddha under the bodhi tree is a teaching unto itself. When we come to a great barrier, when we find a place inside us we do not know how to navigate, when we are in a painful experience that we cannot avoid, we need to sit down right there – at the root of that experience, at the root of the tree of life – and be still. It is not an easy teaching, but it is a great teaching: be still amid difficulty, making yourself available to whatever is occurring in that moment.
     Being still is not an act of physical motionlessness or of quieting the mind. It is about being available to whatever is occurring in every moment. When we are completely open – even if it is difficult – we have stopped fighting against life, we have stopped moving against whatever situation we find ourselves in, and there is a possibility for discovery. This is where a great movement of grace can occur. We stop trying to run away from what is and sit down right in the middle of it – even if it is unknown – and reach a place of deeper understanding.
     It takes a lot of faith to sit down right in the middle of your existence. This is not the same as the ‘faith’ that a doctrine or teaching or teacher is the truth. That is actually a belief, which tells us how to interpret life and find comfort and safety within it; a belief provides a way of insulating ourselves from real faith – from real trust. Faith in its purest sense is something different. Faith allows us to let go of belief, of how we habitually translate each moment of our experience into a conceptual model that seems to make it easier to understand, seems to give us some control, and eases the feeling of insecurity we have whenever we find ourselves on some edge. Your edge could be challenges in your work or relationship; it could be illness or a loved one’s death or even your own impending death; it could be your feeling very challenged by the great sorrow of the world. A lot of things can make you feel like you are on an edge and you do not know what to do with it.” 
       Adyashanti. “The Most Important Thing. Discovering Truth at the Heart of Life.” Sounds True, 2019.

 

Natural play of light ...

Difficulties - Wonderlands in Disguise!

     We all have the capacity to experience, embody & stabilize a qualitatively different aspect of our consciousness when we intentionally not react to desire eg scratching an itchy nose, or otherwise moving to get more comfortable, but instead respond with curiosity, closely observing what happens to that desire. This is a key component of meditation practice and evolution of consciousness.

     "... the human species possesses – has within its physical being – the capacity for a mode of conscious awareness that is qualitatively different from our ordinary form of consciousness.

      … getting caught up in our desires … we create suffering. … the mind says, 'I want something, I’ve got to have something.' So … as we buy into different forms of desire, we create the causes of dissatisfaction. … 

     'If you learn to watch desire, see it come and see it go, then that's the way to not create the causes of suffering. That's the basic engine of insight and liberation, seeing that desire arises and passes away and realizing that you don't have to be swept up in it.'

     Later, while sitting in meditation and feeling hungry, Ajahn Amaro noticed that he really wanted to have some pineapple. So he returned his attention to breathing, and noticed that his mind got caught up with something else. Then he "suddenly realized 'Oh, I’ve forgotten about the pineapple.' What hit him was that, Ah, I didn’t get the pineapple, and nothing is missing. That was a huge 'Aha!’ experience. … That’s it! All you’ve got to do is stay with this (practice) and it will be the way out."
       Richard P. Boyle. “Realizing Awakened Consciousness. Interviews with Buddhist Teachers and a New Perspective on the Mind.” Columbia University Press, NY, 2015. 

    Other perspectives: http://jglovas.wixsite.com/awarenessnow/single-post/2017/02/01/Difficulties---Objects-of-Meditation
     and: http://www.johnlovas.com/2015/08/desire-craving-clinging-suffering.html

Frida Kahlo

Awaking from Conventional Slumber

     “At some point the hero’s conventional slumber is challenged by a crisis, an existential confrontation that calls previous beliefs and ways of life into question. The call can come from within or without. Outer physical crises may take the form of sickness, as with come shamans; a confrontation with sickness in others, as with the Buddha; or suddenly staring death in the face. 
     An inner call may take the form of a powerful dream or vision, as with some shamans, or of a deep heartfelt response to a new teacher or teaching. It may also emerge more subtly as ‘divine discontent’: a growing dissatisfaction with the pleasures of the world or a gnawing question about the meaning of life. No matter how this challenge arises, it reveals the limits of conventional thinking and living, and urges the hero beyond them. In our culture, this may appear as an existential or midlife crisis. Tragically, the deeper causes and questions of the crisis are rarely recognized, its potentials rarely fulfilled, and one of life’s great opportunities is then missed. 
     As Jesus said, ‘Many are called, but few are chosen.’ Indeed, few choose to even recognize the call. And no wonder! For those who hear the call now face a terrible dilemma. They must choose whether to answer the call and venture into the unknown realms of life to which it beckons, or deny the call and retreat into their familiar cocoon. If the call is denied then there is little choice but to repress the message and its far-reaching implications. Only by such repression can non-heroes fall again into the seductive, anesthetic comforts of conventional unawareness, suppress the sublime and sink into what the philosopher Kierkegaard so aptly called ‘tranquilization by the trivial.’ The result is a life of unconsciousness and conformity, which existentialists call inauthentic living and alienation.”

        Roger Walsh. “The World of Shamanism. New Views of an Ancient Tradition.” Llewellyn Publications, Woodbury, Minnesota, 2007.

Operationalizing Pragmatic & Sacred Dimensions of Mindfulness Practice

     "Even though washing dishes is one of life's necessary chores, and in spite of Thich Nhat Hanh's pragmatic approach to washing dishes mindfully (in order to enjoy the dessert which follows), he nevertheless (equally) sees washing dishes as a spiritual or sacred practice. As he elaborates:
     Each thought, each action in the sunlight of awareness, becomes sacred. In this light no boundary exists between the sacred and the profane. I must confess it takes me a bit longer to do the dishes, but I live fully in every moment, and I am happy. Washing the dishes is at the same time a means and an end - that is not only do we do the dishes to have clean dishes, we also do the dishes just to do the dishes, to live fully in each moment while washing them.
     With these two dimensions of mindfulness (being fully present in both ordinary, everyday and near transcendent experiences) established, a central challenge of the present study was to operationalize mindfulness ..."

       Brinkerhoff MB, Jacob JC. Mindfulness and quasi-religious meaning systems: An empirical exploration within the context of ecological sustainability and deep ecology. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 1999; 38(4): 524-42.

http://www.theweathernetwork.com

Embracing Difficulties

     "One of the most crucial things for students to learn, not just at the beginning of the practice but at any point along the path, is that obstacles are the path. Whenever an obstacle arises, we need to ask ourselves, Can I see this as my path? Can I see it not as an obstacle on the path, but as the path itself? Can I welcome this as the way to become free? But we have such an instinctual aversion to discomfort that when an obstacle arises, we forget to ask the simple question, Can I see this as my path?"     Ezra Bayda, Buddhadharma: The Practitioner's Quarterly, Summer 2013

     Toni Packer's wise words: http://www.johnlovas.com/2011/12/undefinable.html

Ryan Creary   http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/