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In Buddhism, samsara refers to a certain way of experiencing reality that involves an endless creation of mental worlds, or mental constructs, to grapple with life so that we can find peace and fulfillment.  The process evokes suffering that ranges from chronic discontent to intense anguish, because the ultimate transience of things ensures that every mental world is punctuated with loss.

Sometimes I focus on these mental worlds and try to work out a solution, but you can’t argue with samsara.  Some things can’t be resolved on their own terms.  Like loneliness.  Loneliness is an experience that knows no logical resolution.  Even when loneliness is placated, circumstances will leave us solitary once again, and this knowledge makes it impossible to imagine any truly satisfying outcome.

But outcomes are not what anyone really wants anyway.  It’s hard to break out of the habit of thinking in terms of strategies for controlling experience, because any attempt to do so is often felt as a strategy for controlling experience.  The only solution is to step outside the bounds of the problem, or to quit thinking about outcomes.

Don’t fall in love with a person.  Fall in love with the Divine.  And if someone’s form can open your eyes and heart to the Divine and awaken that light within you, that’s wonderful.  The form will change, but the light will always be there.  The only reason this might sound unsatisfying at first is because we’re accustomed to focusing on the shapes in our perception and not the awareness itself which carries the shapes.  The awareness itself is more than we think.  I mean that very literally.

Loving the Divine is a very personal process.  The whole affair is entirely between you and God, or the one consciousness, or whatever you want to call it. The reason for this is obvious when you think about it.  If you wonder about how others see things and in particular, how they see you, your mind is postulating spheres of awareness outside itself, but all awareness is one awareness.  That means that you find your true connection with the minds of others not by looking outward but by looking deeper into your own.

You’re never alone.  Even at this very moment, your consciousness contains within it the whole.  You’re carrying all the love in the cosmos inside you, as though your mind contained an interdimensional portal to all existence.  Every now and then, you wander across the event horizon and glimpse the love-light of all beings, and it feels like opening the door to your back closet and discovering the light of a million galaxies… in your closet!  You were looking up into the sky, thinking you would find it there, but the whole time it was in the closet right next to you.

So the task is to pay attention to your own consciousness as though it were the only consciousness in existence, to momentarily set aside contemplation of minds separate from your own.  A bit of solipsism produces the paradoxical effect.  You turn your eyes away from the world for a moment, give it the cold shoulder and act like it doesn’t exist, and suddenly you see all of it more clearly than ever, because only then do you realize that when you look at the world, you’re looking at you.

If your mind awakens to the Divine within you, you will have found the object of your affections and every love you ever had or will have.  They all come from that light.  They are all emanations of that light.

So don’t fall in love with anyone.  First, fall in love with the presence in your heart, and then suddenly you’ll see that everyone around you is that presence.  Then you will be in love with everyone and everything, and no circumstance will be able to rob you of it.  Forms will come and go, but you’ll never feel separated from them.  You’ll sense a continuation that you can’t explain.

Yesterday, I went on a walk through the forest.  Somehow my attachment to outcomes had dissolved completely.  I felt as though I was new, as though I’d never been born, and the present moment felt like the only thing happening.  “Nothing else is happening,” I thought, somewhat dumbstruck.  Everything looked very beautiful.  I was astounded that trees were trees and plants were plants.  I couldn’t get over the feeling of complete, wordless awe that anything was in front of me at all.  I sat on a tree stump and listened to everything.  I leaned back and saw the stem of a plant in front of my face, and it was the most vivid thing I ever saw.  I held it in my hands.  I felt as though my consciousness had just been born.  I approached the massive trunk of a tree that had fallen across the trail.  I put my hands on the thick bark.  I was agog at the fact that it was there, not there across the trail, but there in reality, there at all.  What a wonder that anything exists.  I have had this as a thought, but yesterday I experienced it directly.

I can still feel it as I’m typing.  Nothing else is happening.  This moment, everything that is in front of you right now, contains everything.  The loving play of the divine mind.

OM GAM GANAPATAYEI NAMAHA

Sunday night, I lay in the grass by the lake watching the sun set behind a line of thick trees on the horizon.  The air was fresh and warm, enveloping my skin like a silk sheet.  The water looked like gleaming liquid metal with a pastel sheen.  Sail boats coasted slowly between the pane of silver water and the lines of dusty lavendar clouds cutting across the flaming fucsia and apricot sky.

Overwhelming contentment entered my blood stream, calming and elating every cell, until I settled into a natural inner silence, an ever present listening.

Two days later, I developed pain in my back that reached a crescendo the following day.  I went into the emergency room in agony.  What a different moment!  Every cell in my body was flooded with pain.  The only thing entering my blood stream was the IV drip.  Instead of lying in soft green grass, I was being threaded through a CT scanner.  Instead of watching the sun paint the sky, I watched flourescent lights glare on bare walls as nurses and doctors came and went.

“How would you rate your pain on a scale of 1 to 10?” the doctor asked.  I answered the question many times that day.  In some moments, I was a 10 and in others, only a 2, the merciful consequence of pain medication.

This seems to be the question we are always asking ourselves as a way of judging the quality of the present moment.  Is this moment happy or sad?  How good do I feel right now?  When the answer is positive, we relax.  When the answer is very positive, we naturally sink into the present moment, and the mind settles.  On the other hand, when the pain crosses a certain threshold, perhaps at 4 or 5, we reject the moment and yearn for something else.

Deep contentment grows from being present with things as they are.  But I think there’s something even more important than this.  In loving the moment as it is, one practices unconditional love.  This unconditional love for now, for nature and reality, then arises in your relationships.  When you can be fully present when times are good, and when times are bad, you can be fully present for those you love.  When you can see beyond transient circumstances into the fundamental okayness that permeates life, you can see beyond someone’s transient characteristics into their fundamental okayness.

Even in the midst of terrible pain, there was beauty in the present moment.  There were friends and family expressing immense kindness, doctors and nurses fulfilling their altruistic professions, and medicines working.

“Love the moment. Flowers grow out of dark moments. Therefore, each moment is vital. It affects the whole. Life is a succession of such moments and to live each, is to succeed.”
~ Corita Kent

Today, I focus on being in the moment through listening.  Listening as if everything around me was about to share the most profound secret.

If I were going to tell someone the secret of this reality (as if I knew), I would put it this way:

Okay, now, I’m going to tell you the secret of reality!

Listen very carefully, because I’m only going to say it once.

You must listen with a completely open mind.

You have no idea what I’m about to say.

Listen as though you’ve never heard the spoken word before.

Listen without having any preconceptions about what the secret will be.

Okay, are you listening?

Are you completely listening with your whole being?

You’re about to hear it.

Are you hanging on my every word?

Then I would pause for a very long time, still, as though the words were on the tip of my tongue, as though the words were carried upon my every breath.  If they were really listening, they would know the secret, because the listening is it.  What it feels like to be in that listening, the kind of listening that is dripping with confident expectation yet completely clear and open and without demand, that is the thing we are listening for and wanting to hear.  In that listening, we are perfectly aligned with what is, and we enter the current.

Eventually I would start a new conversation about something like the good movies, dancing, or the ocean, and the listener would know that every word, every syllable, was giving away the secret.

My kayak glided on a gently undulating membrane separating one vast expanse of light and color below from one above.  Below me, clear, glowing water, about twenty feet deep, gleamed with violet, sparkling emerald, intense blue, and turquoise, exactly as one would imagine the Mediterranean would appear in dreams and fantasies.  I was floating on liquid amethyst.  Above me was the deep blue sky and serious summer sun of the Côte d’Azur.  The shore was lined with red-orange, sandstone cliffs where nude sunbathers reclined on the rock.  I paddled over crystal swells to hidden beaches coated with polished black and red stones the size of my palm.

As I looked around, I absorbed the tranquility and felt a deep appreciation.  What if I could share this experience with others right now, I wondered.  What if it was possible to transmit one’s own experience to others, people working in office cubicles or lying in hospital beds or sitting in prison cells?  I imagined the beauty and happiness of that moment going out like a radio signal to other hearts and minds.

I think my signal was received by my future self, because when I look back on my trip to France, I don’t feel grief that it’s over, I just feel wonderful.

Next time you experience a perfect moment, don’t tighten around it… share it.  Imagine giving your experience to everyone in the world.  You’ll never lose it.

* Click here to see beautiful photos of the Calanques just north of Saint Raphael, where people often go kayaking along the rocky coastline.

Consider the consequences of the choice you are about to make.  This is the injunction of a book that caught my eye last night, “10-10-10: A Life Transforming Idea” by Suzy Welch.  For every decision, she offers this formula.  Think.  What will be the consequences in ten minutes?  In ten months?  Now, in ten years?  As one progresses further into the future, the fears, desires, and cravings motivating our impulses become clear, and the more appropriate choices become obvious.

My only beef with Welch is that she stopped short.  When I look ahead and consider the consequences of my actions, if I stopped at ten years, there are a good many things I would do differently.  My whole approach to life and love would be dramatically different.

But think.  What will be the consequences in ten decades?  Ten lifetimes?  What will I have left after this ego mind has disintegrated?  What will I take with me?  More importantly, what will I leave behind?

There was a time when ten years felt like the sweet spot, but after living through many of the classic ten year experiences (marriage, family, college), it doesn’t look the same to me anymore.  Ten years go by really fast, and I might just end a decade empty handed.

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
and things are not what they seem.
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art; to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Sometimes, a choice that feels right in this moment begins to feel wrong when I consider the possible consquences ten months or ten years from now, but when I consider the long-term consquences for my soul (or whatever), it feels right again.

Looking ahead and calculating consquences can make life very scary.  I learn quickly, I condition quickly, I know fear.  No, I know terror.  I know what it is like to watch the illusion of love and security slip away in an instant and to shake all over as if death were imminent.  As if a forty-foot tsunami were hovering above my head poised to crash and shatter my bones.  In such moments, I have quaked from head to toe, vomited, and very near lost my mind.  As love ebbs, the reality of separation slams into my mind, and I am paralyzed.  In ten months, I see grief.  In ten years, I see disillusionment.

But then, by some grace, my mind is brought to a more distant future.  Perhaps this is the “consequence” of fifteen years of meditation, but in any case.  Fear loses its intensity, and a less self-focused love begins to come more naturally.  As I confront my fears, the part of me that would die of separation is given a proper burial, and I’m free to live within a deeper experience of union.  A friend recently sent me this quote:

“I must not fear.  Fear is the mind-killer.  Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.  I will face my fear.  I will permit it to pass over me and through me.  And when fear has gone I will turn the inner eye to see its path.  Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.  Only I will remain.”

~ Frank Herbert, Dune

Not long ago, a very dear friend communicated feelings of loneliness and a sense of having no close-knit community or tribe within which to feel “essential.”  Being all too familiar with this loneliness, this experience of not being needed, my heart went out to my friend.  I offered a hug, and then later, a message: “You’re not alone… I love you.”

Later, my friend commented on the courage it must have taken to say those words.  For a moment, I was baffled.  Why would it be scary to tell someone that they are loved?

Yet, I do know this fear.  If my goal had been to solicit a reciprocal sentiment, I would have been shaking in my boots waiting to hear the response.  What would be the conquences of my words in ten minutes?  Indifference, repulsion, rejection?  In ten months?  Regret, embarrassment?  In ten years?  Sadness, humiliation?  All of those predictions are consequences for the short-lived ego, and for my short-lived ego at that.

What will be the consequences of my words in ten decades, after my little ego has ceased to exist?  Hopefully, love.  Love in my heart, in my spirit.  Love injected for one brief, needed moment into the life of someone who matters to me.  In ten lifetimes?  Perhaps we will meet again.

In ten thousand lifetimes, perhaps I will discover that, in spirit, that someone is me.

Buddha meets Boticelli.  Venus, goddess of love and beauty, is born anew in every moment.  She holds an abalone shell, a symbol of the ocean, containing burning sage.  The smoke cleanses her of negativity as it rises into the sky.

“…except a man born be born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God… except a man be born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter into the Kingdom of God. That which is born of flesh is flesh, and that which is born of Spirit is spirit.” John 3:5-7

 
Colored pencil drawing by Lisa Lindeman
For a larger version, click here.

My mom called on my birthday and said, “It seems like it was just yesterday that you were being born!”  I responded with the cliche, “I wasn’t born yesterday!”  And yet, as every new moment presents itself fresh, my own self is lost and revived along with it.  I die and reincarnate with every heartbeat of the One.

Every year, my friend Rick, a Zen Buddhist, writes a poem on his birthday.  In honor of my own birthday, he gave me his poem.  His insightful words were accompanied by gifts to heal my mind and spirit: for my spirit, a bushel of sage and an abalone shell for smudging, and for my mind, the book Spell of the Sensuous, by David Abrams.  The book is described as “a meticulously researched work that gently addresses such seemingly daunting topics as where the past and future exist, the relationship between space and time, and how the written word serves to sever humans from their primordial source of sustenance: the earth.” 

Thank you, Rick!

Birthday Poem
by Rick Smith

Today I was born.
No different than any other day.
I was born yesterday;
I will be born again tomorrow.

How long have I been alive–you ask.
Since the beginning–
the beginning of time.
And I will be around
until the end of time.

My form always changes.
I may change my clothes
once or twice,
perhaps a new hairstyle,

but it is still you,
disguised as me,
or me,
disguised as you.

Forgetting my true face,
I search–
in yesterday or tomorrow,
looking for life, but finding only death.

When all along being born
–NOW–
again and again,
laughing all along.

Smiling an endless smile–
the mountains sing,
the rivers dance,
giving us now.

My body is on loan from Mother Earth, and someday it will be time for me to return it.  I’m beginning to realize that “I” will never become enlightened but will only dissolve into the enlightenment that already exists.  Can “I” aspire to become not-I, or is the task as simple as forgetting oneself?

I met two hound dogs this afternoon, both quite eager to tackle me and, I can only assume, lick my face.  The name of the first dog was a Tibetan word for “long ears.”  The name of the second dog was a Tibetan word for “deep meditator.”  What a contrast!  At first I thought that if I were one of those dogs, I’d want to be the one named “deep meditator!”  But then I wondered, what do you achieve, as a hound dog, after years of meditation?  Perhaps the capacity to recognize that the small “you” is pretty much just a beast with long ears.  Maybe “long ears” is the more spiritually advanced pooch.