Body of Knowledge

I’ve been running trails a lot lately and really enjoying it. My mind and body both rejoice at being outside in the wild and it seems pretty clear that there’s this body knowledge that arises in that environment, as if my body is kind of cognitively disabled all the time when I’m indoors and then like Charlie in Flowers For Algernon it gets real smart again when it gets outside. It wakes up its brain somehow. There’s this especially wonderful feeling when I’m running through varied terrain, going from wide open grassland into the trees, or coming out of the trees onto a rocky hilltop, that is deeply thrilling to my body and makes me want to just keep on running all day. If I can hit a long section of trail that is in and out of trees, with lots of climbing and descent, and where the trail disappears ahead a lot and then reveals itself again when you top a rise or turn a corner, I’m in total heaven. My lungs can be heaving, my legs totally smoked, my feet pounded to a pulp, but goddamn I feel great.

The other day I was on this trail out in the boonies and I left the trail just to climb this big, rocky hill and see what was what. I knew the ocean would be visible from the top of the hill, and it was early and no one was around so I shot off and scrambled up. When I got to the top it opened onto a string of rolling crests that lead to the sea. A hundred yards ahead of me and upwind was a scattered handful of deer, two young bucks, some does with their fawns. I kept trotting along towards them and they’d run off a bit and then stop, turn back towards me, their ears sweeping the horizon like radar domes and then freezing. Then one would turn and start high-stepping out of there and in a minute the rest would follow. I went after them for about a mile and got closer and closer until I was only a handful of yards from them, about fifteen deer altogether. It was early in the morning, cold, the salt air from the sea blowing across the hillsides and making the dried grass flatten and twist and I felt pretty much like every human animal since the dawn of time has felt in that situation. I could feel the spear in my hand, or the bow, the heavy rock even. I knew I could keep on after them all day until they couldn’t go on and in a little bit I’d have dinner for my family.

It’s the same thing on the trail. It’s ancient. Totally pure human animal activity, running through the trees. And everything in me just wakes up. Comes vibrantly alive. Every rock in the trail shimmers and vibrates with specificity. Sometimes I’m filled with energy and I feel like I’m on the hunt, tracking something down that’s just ahead of me. Sometimes I’m pumping adrenaline and feeling like I’m the prey, something big and powerful on my tail, running me down for dinner. Maybe both at the same time. And the longer I’m out there, the weirder it gets, the more ancient and wild everything seems, me especially. I notice that I start seeing snakes everywhere after about an hour of running, especially if I’m motoring, every stick leaps out of the ground at me like a coiled package of danger, my body shouts “SNAKE!” and jumps over it and by the time my mind says, “nope, just a stick” I’m long past it.

Probably I’m just nuts, but I run primarily for this experience of getting back to my cave man roots. And it’s why I want to run longer and longer, in ever wilder places. I don’t really want to race, I’m slow and old and although trail runners are great, friendly people, I want to be out there alone. I am lucky I’ve got access to a great bunch of trails out here and lots of time I can run off into the dark and tangly woods and not see another human the whole time I’m gone. It feels like I’m running backwards through time, that’s how I imagine it anyway. If I could run long enough and far enough when I popped out onto the grasslands I might bump into Homo Neanderthalensis coming back from his hunt.

We could grunt at each other, beat our chests, wave our bloody clubs in the air, then go off our separate ways.

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For me, it’s as close as I get to being aligned with the millions of years of evolutionary history that is carried in my DNA.

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It’s good, too, to have this other thing, this thing that isn’t cerebral, that isn’t at all about what makes sense or doesn’t, but is all about what’s in my body and what it wants to be doing to feel alive.

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Anyway, that’s what I been up to when I’m not working or sitting.

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Namaste.

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Working With Things As They Are

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We tend to think about death, when we do, as this thing that is going to happen to us, somewhere up ahead, some time still a bit distant from now, there’s room yet, some ability to maneuver around, to get to where we’re going, to get things sorted, to put our struggles behind us, to stand on our own two feet in the clear sunlight for a while, for a long time, maybe, before the shadows lengthen and we are called home.

It’s nothing that’s going to happen right away.

But, still, it’s strange and frightening to contemplate it, really. You wonder what it will be like to die- certainly there’s some trepidation there, but the nut of the thing is that being dead forever and what that is going to look like. You can’t really imagine it. A dreamless sleep from which you never awaken might hint at it, a little bit. Or, you know, heaven and the pearly gates, golden light, your loved ones all around and it never rains and everything is perfect forever and ever. Or whatever, somehow the story goes on. Back into rotation, another life, another body, another chance to fuck everything up, to spend your days and nights in terror and obsession, regret and denial, rage and fear. Another bite at the poisoned apple, another handful of glorious sunsets and sweet, lazy summer afternoons. Something, though. The void is just too strange to contemplate.

But we come from that void and return to it every night. We spent an eternity in it before we woke up here, and we spend half our lives safe in its warm and blank embrace.

It isn’t really so strange as we imagine.

Okay, that’s not exactly right, is it? It’s fucking odd as hell, still. We’ve got this big blind spot in our mind, in our whole conception of what it is that we’re living in, what it is that we are and what it is that we do. It’s a fuck of a lot stranger than our minds want us to grasp, and our minds, it seems to me, spend an awful lot of energy trying to keep us distracted from these big gaps that it doesn’t understand or even know how to represent to us. I mean, falling asleep is a very, very strange endeavor and yet it’s among the most intimate aspects of our lives. At any given moment you are only a few handfuls of hours out of the void yourself, today, this very moment. You just emerged, dripping wet as it were, from the vast sea of forgetting that you swim in nightly. And, yeah, it’s not that that time is all blank, there’s this whole dreamtime that colors and lights up our sleeping hours, but think about how that’s represented to you- you remember being sleepy, tossing around, maybe drifting off with lazy, half-formed thoughts, then nothing, then some wild, scattered, half-remembered dreams, then nothing, then another dream or probably not, but the feeling, the emotional aftertaste that reminds you that you were lost and scared, you were bereft, you fought and ran, you met this old friend, who was it?, and you know, it just drifts off like smoke on the water. But your mind shows you the dreams, sort of presents them to you as the evidence that things were still going on and it kind of hopes you won’t pay attention to that part of it where THE WHOLE FUCKING SHOW WAS SHUT DOWN.

I don’t know, maybe it’s important, somehow. Maybe it’s a good idea to explore that aspect of our endeavor. It’s kind of like the visual field, right? You know, our foveal vision where things are in sharp focus is this tiny spot in our overall visual field, but because our eyes and brain work together to bounce the eyes all over the place continuously and then integrate all those visual signals into an illusion that everywhere we look, the world is in focus. But it isn’t. Not by a long shot. And there’s a goddamn blind spot right in the middle of our field of vision where the optic nerve attaches to the retina, and unless you use a little trick to make it reveal itself, you never know it’s there. And those are two kind of subtle indicators that things aren’t exactly the way that the brain wants us to think they are. But how about this one: you can’t see anything behind you! You exist in a 360 degree world but you only have 180 vision that’s obstructed by your eyelids into a narrow band so what you do see, what you think of most of the time as, well, everything, is really more like a flashlight beam of vision in a world of complete darkness. More than half of the world in our little 360 degree bubble is not visible to us, and yet we walk around pretty convinced that we’re pretty much seeing everything that’s around us. But it ain’t like that.

And everything is like that. We get a narrow slice of every set of data that our senses present to us, visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, everything. And there’s all kinds of information floating around our heads that we don’t even have sensors for, so we think they aren’t there at all. All kinds of shit. And this is true for our minds as well, we’re shut off from almost every single thing that happens in the dark vault of our skulls, and we mistake the tiny slice for the whole shebang. It’s a terrible mistake we make and we all do it all the time, and then we make all of these decisions about things based upon this very unreliable representation, and we’re totally convinced most of the time, hell, we don’t even have to think about it- we know how things are.

This is nucking futs.

Anyway, back to my point about death and the void of unconsciousness. There’s this whole, giant, intimately familiar and yet utterly strange relationship we have with essentially being dead and we really tend not to think about it. I have never read anything of substance about this issue, and that seems strange to me. I guess it’s difficult to write about something that has no content. I don’t know. It just seems like there’s this whole half of our existence that is very, very closely related to being dead, and yet we never think about it at all, and we almost never think about death but when we do it is this very frightening, very foreign country that we’re terrified to encounter.

I say that I have never read anything of substance about this, but that’s not actually true. Buddhist teachings are all on this shit like white on rice. There’s a lot of teaching on this, and many, many great teachers have investigated this phenomenon very thoroughly and have some profound instructions on it as a result. But it seems like a total void in the western cannon, at least as far as I’ve been able to discover.

And what do those Buddhists say about it? Yeah, you’d like to know that, wouldn’t you? I know I’m pretty interested in it. From what I’ve read and been able to figure out, there’s the understanding among highly realized practitioners that there’s a kind of awareness that permeates all states, a luminous ground of being out of which all experience, all thoughts, and all forms arise, and meditation practice gets us in direct contact with that ground of being. It is something that you can experience directly. Certainly it takes a lot of time and practice, but it seems to be a reliable phenomenon that is widely reported. And in dream yoga it is said that you begin with cultivating the connection to that awareness while you are awake and meditating, but then you can also cultivate that same connection once you’ve attained a stable lucid dreaming practice, you can actually connect with and rest in that awareness while you are dreaming. And then, eventually, with more and more practice and skill and determination and experience, you can maintain connection to that ground of awareness in the transitional states between wakefulness and sleep, between dreamless sleep and dreaming, really, you can maintain awareness continuously. And if you can do this, you can do the same thing in all transitional states, for example, between the bardo of living and the bardo of dying, between the bardos of death and of birth, just like the bardos of wakefulness, dreamless sleep, and dreaming.

I don’t know if that’s true or not. I believe that it is, in a lot of ways that makes sense to me, and I’m engaged in my own attempt to achieve that connection for myself. I’ll let you know how it goes.

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All of this is tremendous fun for me. I am suited to the spiritual path and I enjoy thinking deeply about the nature of reality and the nature of what’s beyond the borders of the known. I love practice and I love the ways it is enriching my experience of being alive and being of benefit to those around me. And that’s the real point of this endeavor, after all. It isn’t so much about achieving spiritual creaminess for myself, to fully realize my own innate Buddha nature, although I am committed to doing just that, but it’s really and truly about being a good person, being a loving human being who makes things better for others, who gives love without regard for what comes back, who sees the beauty in everything, who turns away from nothing.

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In all the ways that matter, this world is a dream. We’re here so provisionally, so briefly, and we spend our days distracted from what’s important, what really gives meaning to all the suffering and horror we’re absolutely going to undergo.

It seems like a great blessing to wake up, to understand what to let go of and where we should spend ourselves utterly.

What a shame to suffer all of this for nothing.

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May you be happy, may you be at peace, may you be free from suffering.

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Namaste, bitches.

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What is burning? The world is burning.

 

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“What is burning? The world is burning. The trees are burning. The rivers are burning. The people are burning. Everything is aflame.”

 

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I begin my days, as you know, with prayers and meditation. I wake from sleep, take a piss, make a cup of coffee in the dark, go as silently as possible out to the lair. I open my big plastic bin that holds all my meditation crap, my cushion and blanket and my pouch for my malas, my Sadhana texts, incense, lighter, little cloths I use for sliding my hands during prostrations, I open that up and set my cushion down in front of the altar, lay out the wool blanket, take out the lighter and incense and go kneel in front of the altar, light a candle, light the incense, bow, sit down. Arrange the blanket around me, set the coffee cup in front of me, begin.

The transition from the dream world to waking life is much more fluid than it used to be for me. Waking up is now more like a continuation of dreamtime. It’s still dark and silent and my mind is in that kind of dreamlike state before the world starts up. This effect is exacerbated by my dream yoga practice. It feels to me like I shift from one dream to another. During the coffee making and setting up time I come close to breaking through into “normal” waking, but as soon as I sit down then that hyper-clarity of the meditative mindset arises and I’m in a state somewhat different from what used to be “normal.”

There is a richness in practice that is difficult to describe, or even to understand. How something so simple, so empty of “doing” can open the door to, well, everything. Being new to practice and not understanding much, I’m at the point where I tend to get kind of astounded and worked up about what’s going on. I have these rich and powerful experiences and I get caught up in them, captured by them to a large extent, and it can be difficult to maintain my equanimity. It’s relatively easy for me to not follow the negative emotions and experiences, it’s relatively easy for me to recognize them as the reflexive churning of the mind and let them go, come back to the breath, bring my attention back to the moment. But when the moment gets all luminous and clear, blazing with powerful emotions of bliss and peacefulness and love, I tend to run after that. I tend to think that something wonderful is happening to me.

And this is where grasping and clinging can arise and kind of corrupt practice. I know intellectually that I shouldn’t grasp, should see these experiences as just as empty as anything else that arises, but it’s very easy for me to want to make them solid and “real” because they are so much what I was seeking when I first entered the path.

And this is just one of the experiences you can have on the path. There are many, many mistakes to be made as we learn. And luckily we have the instructions handed down from all of those who have gone before, made the same mistakes. We can refer back to the instructions for guidance and go back and sit some more and learn to make a new set of mistakes. Mistakes that you couldn’t even make before because you didn’t know enough to make them. And really, it isn’t exactly correct for me to refer to them as mistakes, they aren’t that at all. But there’s this constant process of fine-tuning, of going off a little bit in one direction, correcting, drifting the other way, correcting. There’s a lot involved in doing absolutely nothing.

The whole endeavor makes me very happy. The better my awareness gets, the more I can see my habitual patterns in action, the less I’m interested in protecting my ego, the more I want to just keep dissolving everything I’ve built up over the years. I believe that there is a way to do just that and I’m committed to doing it.

I love this path. I love my teachers and my fellow practitioners and everyone else, too. I feel as though I have fallen into a way of being that reflects my true nature, that is in harmony with how things really are, and the rewards are astounding.

And empty, yes- that too.

 

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Lately I’ve been having the experience of the universe conspiring to give me exactly what I need exactly when I ask for it. Like the world’s most perfect English butler, silent, invisible, ever at my elbow, putting a needed book in my hand, introducing to me someone, opening a door, pressing my suit, shining my shoes, whispering the name of the person approaching me, putting a cool cloth on my forehead when I get overheated.

It’s an interesting experience.

Also, my family. As if everyone suddenly burst into flame, flowered, opened up, unfolded, got born into wild happiness. Marriage plans afoot. Babies and dogs under foot. Everywhere you look someone is smiling at you, in love. Ease and comfort, hard joy, blissful craziness, happy despair and longing, everything all the time.

A goddamn miracle of love is what.

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Also, swimming in a sea of devotion. Exactly like the deepest, most powerful and vast ocean, profoundly impersonal, wind-swept, shocking in its scale and limitless seeming scope, absolutely overwhelming. Not something to reject or accept, really, it seems too vast for that. I could shut up and swim, but I don’t know that there’s anywhere to go and it feels like maybe its better to just lie on my back, float, and look up at the sky.

Devotion. Compassion. Wisdom. Awareness.

 

A strange county to enter after fifty years of wandering the deserts of loneliness, self-hatred, rage, despair, anxiety, bitterness, boredom, itchiness, ignorance, plain meanness and generalized angst.

 

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May you be happy, may you be at peace, may you be free from suffering.

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Namaste.

 

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