Bearing Witness with a Tender Heart

*

So.

Something bad has happened, and we are all reeling from it. It isn’t important what happened- it’s sad and terrible, but the details don’t matter. What I’m looking for is what happens to the world when these terrible things arise.

I know enough now to know that although it often feels like the end of the world, the initial response is always heavily influenced by the ego and its rampant fear. The thing itself is terrible- I’m not trying to say that everything is happy and wonderful and it’s only our failure to see it- no, some things, many things, are objectively terrible. Suffering is such a huge part of our experience. But there’s this storm that, in my experience at least, rises up around the bare facts and looms over everything, full of fury and rage and despair.

This storm is totally orchestrated by the ego.

I almost always now have this immediate knee-jerk reaction to my own self-arising shitstorm of fear- I layer on the judgment that I shouldn’t be experiencing this egoic reaction if I’m an experienced practitioner. It shouldn’t arise, and if it does, then I should be able to immediately correct it by application of one of the remedies.

But at my stage in the game, the storm pretty reliably arises. I’m still a creature of samsara.

But.

But.

I do have this road map now. I can pull it out and look at it, and, so far at least, I keep finding it to be helpful. Just knowing that the storm is an illusion, that it is manifesting but there is a reason it is manifesting- that it seems big and scary and awful, but that it can’t maintain itself, that it doesn’t possess any solid reality from its own side- these understandings help to weaken it, even when I am still in the grip of my fear. Causes and conditions arise inevitably, and collapse just as inevitably. We do not control the play of forms. What we experience now is the result of unbelievably vast and interconnected threads of prior thought, action, relationship, literally everything that ever was interacting with itself and giving birth to this moment- it’s a miracle even when it creates a massive amount of pain and suffering. But it’s a miracle that isn’t dependent upon you to come into being, or to pass away again. It all happens.

Everything happens.

And this provides a measure of relief, a measure of comfort, that then begins to relax and expand in me, and allows for the storm to begin to weaken, to subside.

Gratitude creeps in. Compassion arises and softens the landscape. The thing itself, whatever it appears to be, is revealed to be not quite one thing, not quite the disaster that the ego is screaming about.

Maybe it’s draining all of the color out of life to seek equanimity, but I don’t think that’s quite right. Equanimity to me, at least at this stage of my development, seems to be more about accepting the variability of conditions, rather than imposing or seeking the experience of no variability.

Things go up and down. Pain and pleasure swap places like restless children. I guess what I’m learning to learn how to do is to decouple my identification with all that is going on- everything is going on all the time. Sometimes I see and experience this aspect, but then the view shifts and I see that aspect. Over and over, with unending complexity and ferocity, the facets glint in the sunlight of awareness and then disappear into the darkness of ignorance.

And if I can’t always watch what happens without freaking out about it, I can just watch myself freak out instead, and not freak out about that. I can go up a level, and find a place where I can bear witness to what is without having to control the outcome. I can find the sore soft spot in my heart and live from there. And once I can find my seat there, in the heart of tender compassion, then I can go back down as many levels as I need to to get to the thing itself, or what I think the thing itself is. And I can examine it. I can hold it in love and compassion, no matter what it is or looks like or means or does or fails to do. And as I look, I see.

Everything is everything.

***

And for me, there’s a measure of equanimity there. There’s love there. There’s the love and the error, the sharp blade of pain, the blank wall of fear, the buzzsaw of anger and denial, and there are ripples that expand out and ripples that go the other way, in and in and in. And none of it can be extricated from the warp and weft of everything.

***

It’s ego who lies to us about this. Ego sees something happening, and immediately freaks out about it. Good or bad, doesn’t matter. Ego really believes in the forms, believes in them as solid and real, kind of like a kid who hears a noise at night and knows there’s a monster in the closet.

Our job is to kind of be the parent to that terribly frightened and confused kid. To bring it a glass of water and to soothe it and caress its hair and kiss it tenderly. To not tell the kid that he’s imagining things, but to actually go examine and explore the fear directly. Go open the closet and look. Maybe there’s no monster, but there might be a big nasty rat that you need to deal with. There are real problems that need real actions to address. It’s just maybe that it’s a rat, and not a huge, fangorious swamp beast with burning red eyes and a taste for human flesh. Things might not be all that bad.

And often, it’s nothing at all. A book fell off a shelf, or a breeze rattled the doorknob.

Ego doesn’t understand the way things really are. Ego freaks out and points and screams and throws a fit. That’s what we experience in the first rush of something terrible. But we don’t have to jump up on the bed with the frightened kid and scream along with him.

Okay, we can do that for a second.

But then we really need to remember how things are, and we need to gird our little loins and go turn on the light and open the door, and see what’s what. Clean up the poo, get rid of the rats, put the book back on the shelf.

Of course, one day it is going to be the fangorious swampbeast with a taste for human flesh. We can’t forget that.

***

I offer this to you in the hope that it may give you a little bit of solace when your own life seems to be unbearably cruel and unfair and too difficult to endure.

***

May you be happy, may you be at peace. May you love, and be loved, without limit, as is your due.

Namaste.

***

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Awake to this world

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Yesterday I found out that one of the seven hikers killed in the recent flash flooding in Zion was a guy I went to the Academy with. He was a good man, a medal of valor recipient who pulled a guy out of a burning car, twenty years on the job, three kids, grandkids, the whole shooting match. His wife was with him. They died together. I don’t know if that’s better or worse. Probably worse, I guess. I don’t know. Maybe it took their minds off of their own death, but it must have been terrible, completely terrible, to have your life stripped from you so violently.

I knew a couple of Highway Patrol guys who died when a road got washed out and they drove off into a flooded river. Their unit filled up with water and silt and it rolled and rolled downstream. There were indications that it took a while for them to die.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking so much about death lately. Not that I don’t often think about it- it’s always in the front of my mind given my job, but I’ve been thinking about the experience of violent death, the terror and helplessness, the knowledge slowly dawning that you’re not going to get out of this one. I think about the children in those cars that got caught in the flood, how they died. At six years old, what’s that like? I think about my grandkids going through that and it scalds my soul. I think about what Steve and his wife and the five other hikers endured on their way out of this world.

It seems terribly harsh.

They died doing something they loved. That sounds trite because on some level it is trite, but there’s truth in it, too. To me, it’s not that they died doing it, but that they were doing it at all that matters. How many of my days have I spent doing what I loved?

I was thinking about my best friend who had his friends child die in his arms a few years back. Thinking about the many people I know from work who have had their children die.

It’s strange, it fills me with love. It’s uncomfortable, it’s harrowing, really, to open up to all that pain- pain that is always there, that is going on every second of every day, somewhere, everywhere. But when I open up all the way, what’s there is love. Not the love of a hallmark card, but a love that burns the world away, that turns everything to ashes. And then the love that emerges like a green shoot from those same ashes.

Yesterday we were driving over the hill with the grandbabies asleep in the back of the truck- (the beautiful sedative of driving!) and we hit a brush fire that had been burning a little while. Firetrucks arriving, folks pulling over to gawk, and the flames burning along the roadway in three or four places. Not a big fire, but pretty close to home and nothing between it and our own home but open land. Anyway, driving through the smoke and flames was like this tiny taste of death, what it could be like, how it starts for some people, and I could hear the fear in my wife’s voice…

then we drove on through, into the normal world again, and went to The Home Depot for a new toilet seat.

How it goes.

***

This morning on the way to work I was feeling happy and content. We’d done so much work on the house, redoing the floors, and we moved the living room and dining room back in to the blue house from the studio- our loft bed is next!- and we spent the evening in our spanking new old house for the first time in, well, in years, I guess. And everything was clean and spare and gorgeous and we were spent and exhausted and happy and hopeful. The past, the present, and the future were all sitting with us in that little old house that we’ve been in now more that twenty years. Knowing all that had happened in those rooms, thinking of the future and of the open road, knowing we were going to sell the place soon- everything was all mixed up and yet perfect.

Anyway, I was in the same kind of mood this morning when I came to the north end of Cayucos where the highway meets the sea and it was calm and bright and cool and gorgeous and I was happy. And I passed this homeless crazy man, walking northbound on the shoulder. He was sunburnt and greasy and muttering and the pain that radiated from him was brighter than the sun. I winced when I saw him and started saying a little prayer for him, some ohm mani padme hungs and wishing for a good rebirth for him and just praying for some peace, for some lifting of his suffering.

And as I drove past him I sighed and said, “Fuck it.” and pulled over, whipped around, drove past him the other way, and got out of my car. I was going to give him the twenty bucks that was in my wallet, but what he saw was a man with a gun and badge getting out of a plain wrapped cop car, and he flipped me off and crossed the highway, still muttering. I tried again and got the same response. So I got back in my car and came to work.

Sometimes you want to help, but you just make things worse. That’s how it goes.

***

Then all that way to work I was listening to NPR and they had this Syrian refugee guy who’d been granted entry to the United States. He told of his arrests for protesting against the regime. They beat him, they tortured him with electricity. They removed his kidney.

He was so happy and thankful to be here.

I keep forgetting how what I have, most people in the world would kill and die for.

I just keep forgetting.

***

So, I’m happy. Happy and scalded. Awake, tender, exquisitely alive, painfully, radiantly, joyfully alive. For this moment, the only one there is.

May you be happy. May you be at peace. May you and everyone you love have everything you want and nothing you don’t want.

May we all find a way to love each other with the same fierceness that we love our most beloved.

May it be so.

***

Namaste.

***

Clean Slate

***

Got the house mostly empty and the insides all painted. Tore up some of the paint when I sanded down the floors. Next few days I’ll screen and buff, put down a sealer, screen again, then lay down some finish and half the floors will be done. Living room, office, kitchen, and bath. Still have the hall and two bedrooms but they will get done in a couple of weeks. Once I can clear them of the boxes and crap we’ve got piled in there. I got fences yet to mend and the outside to paint.

I got more work than I know how to do. It used to be I just flang myself at it and it got did, but now when I flang it only gets partway did and then I have to muster and flang myself a few more times to finish her off. I am getting older but also I am getting lazier, too. Like our old bull dog. Deef, half blind, all confused. Wake up to take a nap, go back to sleep after.

I aim to get a team of guys from Mercado to come over and cut back my hedges and clean up the yard and haul off junk. That will be a big help.

Gotta get this old house sold, is what.

***

I am meeting with the lady from pension trust today for my last time to pick a date final and make sure I get retired correctly.

I’m nervous about it.

I’ll go in a dark room where a bad man is hiding, I’ll kick down the door and go no problem. What I can’t do is make a phone call or go to a meeting with someone where there’s numbers or signing something involved. Every time I pay a bill or look a my bank account I have a tiny little heart attack. I never have got over my money sickness nor do I guess I ever will. A big part of getting out, of retiring and selling the house is the thought that that’s just so much less shit I have to deal with. If I don’t owe the bank and I don’t really have more than a handful of bills to pay then maybe I’ll settle down inside.

I doubt it, but still. Nice to imagine.

***

I like the way the house feels, all clean white inside. I think the floors will turn out good- they’re hundred year old douglas fir. Too soft for a floor, really, but they have a beautiful tight grain and a clean, warm color. Lots of marks and gouges and stuff that didn’t sand out, but shit, they’re old floors and they look fine old. The finish will be clean and clear and whats beat up and marked just shows character. There’s stuff to read in them.

The whole place has fallen from its glory years, when the kid was a kid and we had a thick green lawn and the garden overflowed with heritage roses and abundant flowers of every stripe, where there were balloons and dogs and sprinklers and everything was ship-shape and shiny. Where we had parties and friends over and drank too much wine.

In my mind it started to fall off when the kid went on her wild ride through meth land. Years of too much rage and despair and fear to do anything in the garden or around the house. I don’t know, though. I built that studio during that time. There was still plenty of work going on. And we got older, too, less inclined or able to spend the whole weekend busting ass to shine everything up. And then it reaches a tipping point where you stop looking cause everything is shouting at you for attention and it’s just easier to sit on the couch and have a beer.

But now it’s time to cut things to the ground, sell or give away everything we can, toss out the rest. Keep a handful of things that will fit in the trailer. Clean and paint and spruce up till my hands are falling off and I can’t move without groaning.

It’s all fine, it feels good to do. I hope the new owners have as much love and joy here as we have done.

***

There’s just this ugly patch in front of us now, and the allure of the open road beyond that. I really am looking forward to spending my days with the woman. Not giving myself to this job anymore. Tending to the spiritual work that intrigues and sustains me. I want to live outside twenty hours a day and hike and run and swim and read and hold hands with my wife and sit by a fire under the stars and be unencumbered by the last fifty years. Let it all fall away.

See what’s out there in the world. See what’s in my true heart.

***

And stop wearing pants.

***

Namaste.

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To Love As Christ Loves

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To condemn is stupid and easy, but to understand is arduous. 

– J. Krishnamurti

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Last night I awoke in a state of physical and spiritual bliss. All borders of the self had totally dissolved, yet still there was an “I” to experience this state. But the “I” was porous, a dream-like manifestation of pure play, a vehicle for play, a thing to allow love to pour through it and from which to pour love into something else.

-Me, this morning

***

I am a Buddhist because I have chosen the vehicle of Buddhist teachings as my path, but I do not “believe” in Buddhism as “The Thing.” It is my thing, but not The Thing. The Thing lies beyond all words and concepts. In order for it to be the thing, it must. If it can be named, you know, well….

it’s probably not The Thing.

This is pretty straightforward. And this state I awakened to, this blissful state of union, of non-dual experience, is a familiar one to me. It is very much like being in love- when you’re experiencing it, there’s nothing more real and never has been and never will be, and it’s impossible to imagine not always feeling exactly like that forever. But once you’re thrown out of love, it becomes a foreign country that you can’t quite remember. Oh, you can recall a street name, or the facade of a building, but you cannot recapture the experience of it.

For me, this numinous, blissful sense of union arises most frequently just like this, in the middle of the night, unanticipated and unsought. I simply awaken in this pure bliss, completely loved, completely dissolved, still myself, but everything else as well. My teachers flow through me, my loved ones flow through me, my life in all of its particulars is revealed to be perfect, flawless, as intended, as the most serious play, as the dance of everything but made small, made particular in space and time- both of which are only the stage for love to reveal itself upon.

Blah, blah, blah.

So I was in this state and enjoying it like a dog rolling in grass, in ecstasy, and feeling that I was home again after a long exile in the wilderness. I was graced.  And when I said this to myself in my silent mind, the face of Christ, the image of Christ, the experience of an embodied Christ, was in me. Before me. Dissolved in me.

Present, somehow, but not in that way. Not real, not even really imagined. Impossible to describe, I guess. But there. Unquestioningly there.

And there was this kind of unfolding in my understanding, in my mind, in my interior landscape. I came to Christ as a child, I remember it so clearly, not five years old yet, up early on a Sunday morning watching the black and white television set in the living room of a home I have forgotten, and listening to some television evangelist exhorting us to accept Christ as our personal savior. And I did. I longed for it, longed for his love, craved it.

And I did it again and again as a child. Baptized at eleven in the Southern Baptist Church under my Grandmother’s watchful and hopeful eye. Again at sixteen, a fervent and devout appeal to Christ, to God, for faith, for belief. For his love.

And I grew out of it very quickly, left it behind. Cursed the small-mindedness of the Church, and its error, and its hypocrisy. The bodies of those killed in the name of God’s love choking the doorway to the church, preventing my access. And then I left even that disappointment and judgment behind. The Church, God, Jesus Christ, all of it was simply a myth for children and not even worth getting worked up over. I mean, it’s not like I got mad at Santa Clause or the Easter Bunny, right? Why bother?

But there’s this woman I know who is devout, who loves God and loves Christ and who has anchored her soul in the Christian faith, and we are friends.  We give each other support and encouragement in our struggles to live in love and service and in genuine connection to what we each believe to be holy, to be the ultimate truth. And she tolerates my Buddhist view, and I tolerate her Christian faith, and we muddle along, we try to help each other.

And for me, it’s easier, I think, because, well, Buddhism is more capacious, less rigid in many ways. There isn’t a god, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t something like a god, that there isn’t some benefit in relating to an idea of God- after all, Tibetan Buddhism is rife with images of god like-beings. So I can say God and mean something like that- and it’s easy to speak of compassion and love and service and to really be talking of the same things. I think it’s a bigger reach for her, who can have only one true God, and who sees the faiths of others as sinful, as error, as irrevocable loss.

Still, her heart is big enough, her kindness large enough, to include me and my odd beliefs.

It’s a nice thing.

Anyway, so I’ve been engaging in this kind of approach with her, kind of holding up a puppet figure of Christ in front of my face as I talk to her about faith and what’s asked for us on the path- like I’m using any terminology of hers that I can that correlates to some Buddhist thought just so I don’t keep hitting her over the head with terminology that might interfere with the message I’m trying to get across. I don’t know if that makes any sense at all. But that’s what I’ve been doing. Saying God’s love, meaning the ground of being. Etc. Not all the time, only occasionally- lots of times I use the buddhist term, the buddhist idea, the buddhist approach directly- I’m not trying to disguise anything, but to use terms that are understandable.

Kind of lying, kind of hiding, but kind of also trying to use familiar language to get at the same thing that is in her experience. And back and forth we go, holding this ongoing conversation from a place of love and tolerance and acceptance.

So, now here I am, awake in the middle of the night, all spiritually creamy and non-dual and blissed out, and there’s this Christ figure in my mind, just right there, kind of insistently being there. And he’s silently conveying to me the image of this woman I know, and I have this experience of seeing her through Christ’s eyes.

This is some kind of experience.

I can see her as a child, as a young woman, as an adult, as an old woman. All of her struggles and triumphs and loss and longing and despair, joy, everything, I can see it all at once, and I can experience this overwhelming rush of love for her, of protectiveness, of deepest compassion for all of her confusion. Cheering her on all the way, holding her up in her darkest hours, all of her life seen as though I am looking through Christ’s eyes and feeling whatever he feels for her, what he feels for all of us all the time.

And this sense of his body, of his actual physical heart, his bones and sinews. His embodied self. How that embodied knowledge makes his love for us real in a way that no other god has experienced. Except, for me, in my mind, immediately, there was this twinned experience of the Buddha Shakyamuni, and his physical, earthly body. The cells in the bodies of Christ and of Buddha were the cells in my own body. Their hearts were my heart, we were a mixed being, a superimposition of beings in one space and time. And all of us were looking on this one woman, her life, her entire experience, and of course she was only the representation of all of us.

So what unfolded in this experience for me was this relationship with Christ and Christianity. I went from believing like a child believes, to believing like an adult tries to believe, to disbelieving, to appropriating the language and image of Christ to carry a different, a more universal message, to having that prop come back to life, to assert itself as a real imaginary symbol.

And I had this allegory or metaphor of the whole Christian creation myth rearrange itself for me in that state as well. I imagined that God created the world, but the heavens and the earth, the dirt which he formed and into which he blew the breath of life- all of this was made necessarily from his own being- he did not create something separate from himself as I’d always imagined- he made everything out of himself, which of course is everything. So everything there is contains God himself, herself, itself. There isn’t, and can’t be, anything that isn’t everything, anything that isn’t all of God or all of the dharmakaya- the point is that everything is everything else in all ways. There isn’t anything that isn’t everything.

And Christ is made of God and you are made of God and I am God and God is me and yet also God loves us and also the Son of God loves us and also we love- back and forth and around and around and around. And what is asked of us is not to do it right, not to be good, not to be perfect, not to figure everything out, not to not fail, not to not know despair and longing and loss and terror and unholiness and all the garbage and error- but to learn to love. Learn to love, to light our lamp of love and let it burn in exactly the same way that the light of love burns in the heart of Christ himself.

If you believe in such a creature.

We are asked to ignite ourselves in love and burn for the world. We are asked to take up the words and the puppets and the path and the teachings and then we are asked to burn them up as well. We are asked to burn and to burn and to burn, to step into the flames and give ourselves to them- not with resignation or sorrow but with joy.

***

Anyway, that’s what happened to me last night.

***

I’m pretty sure I’m not very sane.

***

Namaste, you fire-starters, you lamp-lighters, you lost and serious children.

May you be at peace in every cell in your body. Especially the ones in your head.

Big love to you, to each of you, to all of you, all the time.

***

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