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“What if you let go of every bit of control and every urge that you have,” asks Adyashanti, “right down to the most infinitesimal urge to control anything, anywhere, including anything that may be happening with you at this moment?”  If you did, he says, you would be “a spiritually free being.”

Yet, as he describes this freedom and letting go, Adyashanti emphasizes that authenticity is even more important: “The best thing that human beings can do for themselves is to always be absolutely, totally, and completely coming from an honesty within themselves, a total internal integrity.”  A student asks if one should stop asking questions, since questions are a form of control.  Adyashanti replies that if “you stop asking questions, that would be a rotten thing to do because then you would just be controlling in the opposite direction.”

This “controlling in the opposite direction” can make it difficult to let go, but authenticity, opening honestly to one’s own urge to control, enables true surrender.

I spent a good portion of my week looking forward to the weekend, to spending time at the beach, which sounded utterly sublime.  The day arrived, and all the paradisical imagery that filled my mind approached reality.  I was so excited!  As I walked toward the beach, I imagined what I would experience.  The beauty of nature, tranquility, a connection with spirit.

Gradually, I felt myself tighten around my expectations.  I was looking for a sequence of perfect moments.  “If I don’t relax,” I thought, “I’m going to mess it up.”  I needed to let go, but instead, my instinctive strategizing continued.  The focus was my sensory experience of the world, which is sensitive to the mind and heart, and so it’s important to have your mind and heart in the right place in order to experience the joys around you.  But that knowledge was tying me up in little knots.  I was compelled to manipulate my inner state in order to engineer the perfect moment, and that, of course, is not the sort of inner state that allows joy and love to enter.

How do you receive an experience without trying to mold it into your ideal?  How do you anticipate something wonderful without trying to control it?  We seem built to approach each new moment with an attitude of control.  We want to make it into our fantasy, and yet often what fulfills us most is to open up to the moment as it is and allow it to fill us in its own way.

I have heard some say that the pinnacle of “perfect moment” engineering is the strategic use of recreational drugs.  I recently heard a story of someone who spent his life mastering that strategy only to end up confronting his profound troubles in rehab.  At the same time that I was stepping onto the beach, this person was grappling with withdrawal from chemical paradise.  In rehab, the first step is to admit one is powerless.  Instead, he described his strategies for engineering the perfect recovery, unaware that he was still approaching the world with the same attitude that got him stuck there in the first place.  In that intense state of control is so much fear.  He is terrified of what the world would be like if he were not manipulating it.

What is the world like in the raw?  Au naturale?  What do we get when we’re not exerting control?  What experiences would we have if we truly let go?  The fear is that, if we let go, pain and suffering would rush in.  We would have to face all of our deepest agonies… like the pain of drug withdrawal, the pain of losing paradise.  Perhaps there is some truth to that, but resistence to authentic experience seems to be one of the deepest agonies of all.

I was lying on the beach feeling some tightness and tension in my body, a clenching in my orientation to my experience, and I realized that I could not make the tightness go away.  The harder I tried to let go, the more I clenched.  And the paradox became clear.

I was trying to control my experience by trying to stop controlling my experience.  My tightness IS my experience, I thought.  And so, I opened up to my inability to open up.  “It’s okay,” I thought.  “The universe is here for me, and I’m surrounding by nothing but love and compassion.  I can be clenched, and that’s okay.  Today, I will feel the beauty of nature through my clenching.”

In that moment, I felt my heart open wide and pulse with the heartbeat of the earth beneath me.  I felt so much love.  The energy of the earth and the trees and water circulated through my body.  I felt blissful and embraced.  Totally at peace.  I wanted nothing more than to allow the moment and everything around me to be itself.

I entered the water and touched its surface and let the current pass through my fingers like the flow of time.  Impermanent, yes, but eternal at the same time.  This moment was engineered, I thought, but not by me.  I gazed at the sky and glistening water and said thank you.

To be heard and understood
is to be felt and have it confirmed
that you exist.
You offered yourself.
You were received.
When you feel there is nothing left
for your mouth to say and
only your heart can speak,
creating sounds that only
a heart can hear,
don’t be silent,
I’m listening.

Feeling unheard or misunderstood is deeply painful, because we fear being dismissed or rejected by people we love or look to for guidance.  Nothing embodies social exclusion, isolation, or marginalization like the belief that no one “gets you” or sees you clearly.  Even worse than that, we lose the impulse to communicate, because what is the point of speaking when no one will take the time to understand the crucial subtleties and nuances of your thoughts or world view.  We fall under the harsh spell of the Tower of Babel.  The meaning is lost, and in the process, we feel disconnected, without a peer group, or without a true companion.  The need to feel heard and understood is so great that without it, careers and marriages are soon abandoned.

Everyone needs someone who believes in them.  Someone who will assume the best about who we are and how we see things, someone who will hear us out and give us the benefit of the doubt.  As social beings who form part of our identity based on how others see us, we can scarcely function without knowing that someone has confidence in who we are.

How can I hear, see, and understand others better?  To truly listen requires a temporary suspension of judgment.  My usual inclination is to strive for a timely, fixed impression, to arrive at a firm conclusion about who someone is and what their intentions are.  Naturally, I want to know the situation with certainty.  The fundamental disturbance of being a social animal is the violation of our theories of mind, our conclusions about what others are thinking and feeling, how they will act, and how they will treat us.  The motivation to form accurate theories of mind is strong.  As a result, we might spend more time ruminating, trying to arrive at a logical conclusion about someone, than simply listening.

“To listen is to continually give up all expectation and to give our attention, completely and freshly, to what is before us, not really knowing what we will hear or what that will mean. In the practice of our days, to listen is to lean in, softly, with a willingness to be changed by what we hear.”
~ Mark Nepo

“Seek first to understand, then to be understood.”
~ Stephen Covey

“The most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen. Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention…. A loving silence often has far more power to heal and to connect than the most well-intentioned words.”
~ Rachel Naomi Remen

Being heard and understood, seen and received, does not require agreement with specific ideas.  In fact, disagreement with the particulars of an idea may nevertheless convey that you have been heard.  I recently gave a talk in a lab group at school.  I presented a hypothesis about the relationship between mental imagery and practices designed to cultivate compassion.  My goal was to find out if different forms of imagery depicting the relationship between self and other would lead to different levels of compassion in different social situations (particularly when confronted with a person who evokes disgust).  I presented three possible imaginal scenes for investigation.

Most of the audience disagree with my hypothesis.  I found this delightful and stimulating.  In such debates, I feel as though I am part of a team working towards a common goal.  We are working together to find out what is happening in some pocket of the universe.  Nothing gives me greater pleasure.

However, they disagreed with my basic approach to scientific investigation.  It was then that I felt deeply unreceived, for my thinking style is the very part of me I bring to science, that special element of my being that I believe constitutes my unique contribution.  “There is absolutely no evidence for any difference between these practices,” said one researcher, vehemently.  I replied, “Would that not be the point of doing the study?  To find out if there’s a difference?”  They strongly urged me to scrap the whole thing.  I never actually finished my talk.

One of the lessons I took from this experience: If someone presents a particular thought or idea, I can listen and receive them best by making a distinction between the specifics of their ideas and their style, the core of the idea that comes from who they are as a person.  I might disagree with their assertions, but I can recognize and acknowledge that they have put their heart into it, and there is absolutely nothing disagreeable about that.

Ultimately, I think the best form of self expression is that which gives expression to those who are listening.  I’ve noticed that most of my favorite songs happen to be those I can easily sing to with lyrics that articulate what’s in my heart.  To speak is to listen with your words, and to listen is to speak with the voice of another.

When I speak,
may you hear your own voice,
and when you read my words,
may you see yourself reflected.
If I say anything, let it be
“I hear you.”

Death
is to think oneself
too broken for love.

She gallops into the burning barn,
where the future is a black concrete wall,
and random memories are rusted iron spikes,
of beauties lost, impaling,
of ill chosen words, severing veins,
and thinking is a mirror
of one’s contorted face.

Because this is where she must go
to enter the golden gate.
Because the bottomless pit,
the infinite darkness,
is the portal,
god’s gaping mouth.
Because resistance
to the chance of entering this abyss
is the wall between oneself and
light.

At the event horizon,
she is outside his periphery and
exiled from touch.
She is ugly, a mutated calf
with missing legs
and oozing skin, a source of misery
to the farm,
best put down.
She is unwanted,
yanked into the eddies
to drown
while they stand and watch.
She, a dark dusty little planet,
is on her way
to being nothing.

On the other side
of Kali
after one has disintegrated
into a million pieces of dust
and the dust has dissolved
into the ether of souls,
and finally,
after this journey of eons, one
loves
the emptiness,
a billion stars illuminate hell.

From the singularity
a fractal procession,
photons marching
in a whirl of spite,
merging into molecules of light,
self-creating, self-sustaining,
drawing others close,
she rematerializes
whole.

Before, she sought a sun
to illuminate and warm her surface,
but now she glows
from the core of her being,
a life-giving star.

Out on a small pier over Lake Mendota, I sat dangling my bare legs over the water waiting to watch the sun set on the unusually balmy Wisconsin afternoon.  The jagged edges of the wood planks scraped against the underside of my legs while the soft ripples of my silk dress brushed against my knees.  Sandwiched between rough and silky, dense and diaphanous, I felt oddly content.  The ripples in the water below echoed the ripples in my dress, gliding across the surface in a ceasless, mesmerizing ballet.  I watched the convergence of waves until the visual syncopation pulled me into the consciousness of the water.

In the water’s receptive silence, with my face towards the enlargening sun, my mind turned to matters weighing heavy on my heart, and I was glad that only the sun sat across from me, because I started to cry.  I gave my sorrow to the water, to the warm air, to the sun.  I prayed for comfort.

I thought ahead to my Friday night.  I imagined I would spend it sitting in my cave of a living room, straining to entertain myself with some otherwise bland activity, like reading a book or watching a video, that would scarcely surmount my longing for true connection with life.  “But this moment is all I have,” I thought.  I returned my mind to the lake, the sun. 

The wind picked up.  I listened.  As it touched my skin, I felt cold.  But I refused to cover up, because the long Wisconsin winter was finally coming to an end, and I was determined to experience the afternoon as though it were summer.  In that moment, cold became a word in the language of the wind.  The discomfort in my body was simply its tone of voice.  Rather than a boundary between myself and the sky, my skin became the means by which the coldness inherent in the wind became conscious.  The poet David Whyte wrote, “To feel abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surroundings.  Surely, even you, at times, have felt the grand array; the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding out your solo voice… Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the conversation… Everything is waiting for you.”

I dried my cheeks and left the pier before the sun kissed the water.  I passed through a throng of college students gathering on the terrace like an ant colony descending on a kitchen crumb, pacifying their social cravings with the overabundance of faces and freshly bared bodies.  I headed back to my car anticipating an evening of solitude and silence.

My forecast was off, however.  Life whispers continuously of love and beauty and raises its voice when we long to hear it.  I received a call from friends, and soon, I was standing in a vast green field near Lake Wingra, spying them in the distance. 

“Can you see the blue kite?” Dave asked on the cellphone, and when I spotted it, they waved in excitement, watching me cross the grassy plain to join them.  Daniel, a resident of the Madison Zen Center, had received a bright blue kite for Christmas with an image of the Buddha.  “Look, it’s a flying Buddha!” he giggled.  A blue Buddha doing sommersaults in the wind! 

Dave noticed the great shadow of an unassuming contrail streaking across the sky like a rainbow, an antirainbow, and told us about a photo he took in India when the sun cast a shadow of the mountains on the clouds in the sky.  The earth casting a shadow on the sky!

As the sun went down, bats filled the air.  They flitted sporadically through the deepening twilight like large, hyper moths.  I held the kite taut, steering its unpredictable ups and downs into amusing figure eights.  I hadn’t flown a kite in nearly two decades.

Suddenly, we noticed that the bats were chasing the kite.  They began to divebomb the kite string!  I was utterly enthralled.  Dave surmised that, using echolocation, the cross section of the string probably resembled the dimensions of a small insect.  They sent vibrations down the length of the string and into my hands.  Every time I felt a bat bounce on the string, I did a little dance, overcome with euphoria.

The evening I thought would be bereft of communion was, quite unexpectedly, saturated with it.  Life never ceases to speak to us.  All around is a shimmering field of consciousness, linking every soul, that will touch your senses and open your heart if you ask for it.  Watching the blue Buddha soaring high above me, finally, I understood what the wind had been trying to tell me out on the pier… “Come now, isn’t this the perfect night to fly a kite?”

1.  When the moon shines upon a barren landscape, that’s when you most clearly see the beauty of the moon itself.  And that’s when you come to know that it’s always there with you.

2.  You are not the only author of this life experience.  However things play out, the universe tells your story, and it cannot help but be one full of love. 

3.  The heart awakens most fully when you can forgive people for not being everything you wanted.  When you get everything you want, you can still be separate.  But when the heart is fully awake, there’s no separation.

4.  The greatest love you’ll ever know is the love that comes out of you.  Love can always come out of you, and when it does, suddenly there is no inside or outside, and you discover that you’re loved beyond measure.

5.  Hope is present even when you can’t feel it, and when you can’t feel it, you have been given the gift of silence, stillness, and now.

6.  There is a core of light in everyone, a core that remains untouched by circumstance and unchanged by personality, and regardless of what you may find on the surface, it is always possible to connect with that core of light.  There, you are always welcome, always invited, never turned away.  By presuming it, you receive it, and by receiving it, you bring joy to others.

7.  Intense grief makes strawberries taste better.

8.  Every moment gone terribly awry is the interior beauty of a perfect moment.  As Katsumoto said in The Last Samurai, “they are all perfect.”

9.  You are the dreamer.  In this collective dream, things operate backwards.  Rather than feeling joy and love because wonderful things happen, wonderful things happen because you feel joy and love.  When you cultivate joy and love for their own sake, the world around you follows suit.  Just like in a dream, what you see around you materializes to match or explain what you feel inside.

10.  There is a voice that never ceases to speak your name and a hand that never lets go of yours, and the message is always the same: “If you open completely to receiving what’s yours, I promise you won’t regret it.”

In all of my dreams about water, water represents both love and emotion.  I recently finished reading the book The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho.  To inspire, comfort, and reinfuse you with conviction for your passions, I highly recommend it.  Not hours after I finished the last page, a friend of mine began the first and, like me, cannot put it down. 

A good portion of the story involves a desert trek.  As I immersed myself in that world, I began to notice how my own life had entered the desert.  Just then, another friend, who didn’t know I was reading The Alchemist, sent me a message to recommend we watch the movie Bab’Aziz, about a prince who wanders the desert contemplating his soul.  The subtitle reads “to find the beloved, you must have faith.”

I am coming to understand the true nature of this desert.  There are periods in life when you are forced to trust without knowing what outcome you are trusting will occur.  You cannot trust that things will turn out this way or that way, you can only trust.  This trust is empty of form, empty of specifics, and empty of images of the future.  It must be reverent of the unknown, completely accepting of it.  You have to be unwilling to attach to the nihilistic predictions of hopelessness and yet not enter into optimism about any particular, because if you focus too hard on some distant particular, you lose your concentration, and the desert will swallow you up.  It takes total concentration to survive the trek, but it also takes total trust.  You can listen to everything that happens in this moment without trying to imagine its future purpose but also without concluding that it has none.  This is the now that blurs across time, faith and surrender combined.

Yesterday, a friend drove me to Iowa for a change of scenery.  It was comforting to be traveling on a long stretch of road without a destination in mind, a desert trek of sorts.  In two hours, we encountered the Mississippi River and drove to a bluff to watch the water rush across the earth.  Directly below us, along the side of the tree-lined cliff, picnic tables had ended it all.  Methinks Iowa offers little entertainment for its rambunctious youth.  Out in the river, also directly below, a line of vast machinery controlled the flow of water from one bank to the other.  A tugboat approached, and a sequence of locks that looked like pinball switches opened to let it through.  I was reminded of aortic ventricles controlling the flow of blood through the heart. 

Locks and dams on the Mississippi River, Dubuque, Iowa

After passing through the locks, it proceded merrily down the stream, and I wondered, if this were a dream, like all of my other water dreams, what I might take from the notion of navigating mechanisms that control the flow.  The tugboat waited awhile to get through.  Going with the flow and having patience?  Or am I the builder of that vast machinery?  Whatever the lesson, it’s clear that water is important in this world.

Then last night I dreamed that I held a beautiful goldfish in my hands.  The goldfish wriggled and gaped, but she was happy to be in my hands.  She knew I would take care of her.  I looked everywhere for water.  I found a faucet, and as I was looking for a cup or small bowl, the goldfish slipped out of my hands.  I couldn’t find her anywhere.  The lights became dim.  I tried to turn on more lights, but nothing shone brightly enough to illuminate the area around the kitchen sink.  Finally, I was able to shine a light and see clearly, and I found the goldfish lying on the floor under the cabinetry.  I picked her up gently and placed her in a small bowl of water.  She was still alive and very grateful to enter the water.  She swam around happily. 

But the water was murky, and the bowl too small.  She stirred up dirt and soil as she swam in circles.  I knew she needed a larger bowl with clean water.  I was looking for a larger bowl when I turned on the faucet, and I noticed that the water coming out was cloudy and full of dark fluid, like coffee.  I poured glass after glass, but every glass came out cloudy and murky.  In the first cup, some glob of pink goop had settled at the bottom and expanded slowly into a disgusting blob.  I showed someone nearby.  They were revolted.  In subsequent cups, layers of sediment and clouds of dust swirled around like a storm on Jupiter.  I was going to drink the water anyway.  Someone nearby was alarmed at my attempt to drink it, but I felt it was the best I was going to get. 

Eventually I woke up.  The goldfish was still thriving in the small, dirty bowl, but I knew she would need clean water, and a lot more of it, very soon. 

A dear friend recently asked me to once again express my perception that everything in this life and everything of this existence is always okay.  Even when you can’t feel it, everything is okay.  Everything is always okay.  The closer you come to that part of your mind that is expanded across time and space, your higher self, the more you begin to sense that everything is just as it should be, perfect and wonderful, even now in the midst of darkness and wrongness and disaster.

When things go badly and this sense of okayness is lost, the universe becomes a hell realm.  Suffering and grief and destruction are all around.  Yet, when you descend into hell and then find your way out, returning to this well being that is always present, you learn. 

You can learn one of two things.  You can learn that it’s possible to experience hell, and afterwards you tread with fear and trepidation and a memory of that suffering–in which case you never actually full rose out of the hell. 

Or, you can learn that hell is all bark and no bite.  It cannot really burn you, and afterwards you are afraid of nothing, because you know it is within your power to levitate out of any pit you find yourself stumbling into.  And nothing, absolutely nothing, lies outside of this power, because nothing is beyond mind.  Everything is mind.  Nothing lies outside its scope.  In other words, no circumstance or perception or object or scene is immune to the power of perceptual transformation.  When you know this, then you know you really have risen out of hell.  When you have the conviction that there really is no hell anywhere except what you create, then fear is gone.  (See the National Geographic story about Peruvian shamans who create this very experience for seekers.)

When it comes to hell and heaven, perception is the creative force.  Turn it inside out.  Perception is expectation is your reality.  Cultivate a sense of okayness for its own sake, and the world around you follows suit. 

The fundamental okayness of this whole existence is like music.  When you hear it, it’s not some logical conclusion or the result of analytical contemplation of the many pros and cons of existence.  It simply is.  You hear it and immediately think, “Ah, yes, of course, there it is.”  And you just know and feel this okayness.  Believe it first, and then you find it.  Feel it first, and then you create it.  But even if you fail at that, everything is still okay.

Once upon a time, there was an orange-breasted bluebird living near the canyons in the Sierra Nevada mountains.  She spent her days in a small swath of land studded with craggly pine trees and berry bushes, and in the pillows of wind filling the great space above.  Layers of forest ebbed into the distance, becoming bluer and paler until they dissolved into the mist of the horizon. 

Where sunlight mingled with cool air from the shadows of trees and boulders, she flew.  She flew effortlessly from branch to branch in search of snacks and curiosities.  One day, however, she felt a desire to fly beyond her usual territory.

I want to fly west towards the river and see the ribbons of gurgling light.  No wait, I want to fly north towards the peak of the nearest mountain and perch on the highest branch.  Which way do I fly?  What if I fly in the wrong direction?

Torn, she did not fly north or west.  She flew northwest, towards nothing in particular and found neither a river nor the highest branch.  Instead, she ended up in a place not unlike her starting point.

Disappointed, she then flew towards the river but thought continuously of the mountain and fretted about what she was missing.  Her thoughts of the mountain soured her experience of the river, and her crestfallen rendevous with the river dampened her desire to fly toward the mountain.  With that, she perched for a full afternoon on a dead branch near the river bank not knowing what to do next or what would satisfy her longing.

When finally she decided to attempt another journey, she focused intensely on the movement of her wings and began to worry. 

Am I flying correctly?  What if I make a mistake?

As her attention became isolated to her feathers, she lost her feel for the wind, and the air quickly became reluctant to carry her.  Her wings stiffened, resisting her flap-by-flap scrutiny and logical commands.  She entered a free fall, her heart siezed up, and fear enveloped her like a wave of sun-scorched air.  She fell into the leaves of a tree and thought she would meet the ground soon, but the air caught her wings again, and she lifted with it.  She flew to a nearby branch and rested.

She had failed to reach any destination, and she seemed unable to fly.  She descended to the ground and stood in the dry pine needles and brown leaves and dirt.

What do I do now?  I don’t like where I am, but I can’t seem to get anywhere else.

She poked around in the dirt for many days, too afraid to fly and too confused to select a journey. 

Then, one morning, a squirrel scampered by and darted up a nearby tree.  She watched as it climbed out onto a lone branch extending out over a clearing in the forest.  The squirrel was soon poised at the end of the branch.  Where would it go now?  Suddenly, the squirrel leaped into the open air.

The bluebird gasped.  She watched in horror, awaiting the squirrel’s demise.  However, instead of plummeting quickly to the ground, he opened his arms.  Flaps of squirrel skin fanned out from his body, and he caught the wind.  He glided across the clearing, soaring into the space like a ray of sun, and gently landed in the brush many yards away. 

He ran quickly back to the tree and scurried up the trunk.  His little claws on the thick bark made a comical clatter as he found his way back to the lone treebranch, positioned himself, and leapt again into the open air. 

Weeeeeeeeeeee!

The bluebird felt a light enter the knot in her heart.  Looking up, the bright blue and soft white of sky filled her with glee.  She rocketed into the air and flew across the forest.  She bounced on currents of air, grazed the treetops, and chased dragonflies around. 

The knot in her heart slowly unraveled.  Joy was her compass.  Joy was her destination.  In her play, she found her way to the highest branch of the mountain top, and from there she could see the whole river.