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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.

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.

According to the heart sutra, “Form is emptiness; emptiness also is form. Emptiness is no other than form; form is no other than emptiness.”  I tend to think of form and emptiness as the contrast between sensory experience, or the world we manifest, and that inner silence and stillness that seems to lie at the source of all experience.  Between imagination and a state of wordless being.

In ordinary life, I notice a natural rhythm involving alternating periods of fulfillment and lack, but the periods of lack, which are characterized by the absence of desired sensory experiences, or the absence of desired form, are perfect periods of emptiness, perfect times to return to inner silence and stillness and know once again where the form arises.  Seen from that perspective, the rhythm of form and emptiness is pleasant, relaxing, always joyful, even in the midst of anxiety or grief. 

The idea that form is emptiness and emptiness is form strengthens that deep intuition that you can reach inner stillness by fully embracing experience, by loving form, and you can reach form by wholeheartedly immersing yourself in inner silence, by loving emptiness.  In this sense, you are never cut off from either condition, and each supports the other.  This feels to me to be a very life-affirming embodiment of the heart sutra.

An excerpt from a poem by Rumi:

Love and imagination do many things.
They conjure up a sweetheart’s form,
so that you can speak to it, “Do you love me?” Yes, yes.
A mother beside the new grave
of her son says things she never said when he was alive.
The ground there seems to have
intelligence.  She lays her face on the fresh earth,
giving her love as never before.
Days and weeks go by.  Grief for the dead diminishes.
Soon there is nothing but
oblivion at the grave site.
Let your teacher be love itself,
not someone with a white beard.
In the state of fana, love without form says,
I am the source of sober clarity
and drunken excitement. 
You have loved my reflection in forms
so well that now there’s no mediating.

Buddhism encourages people to deeply contemplate the suffering and transience inherent in life.  Other than for obvious reasons, I’ve always been bothered by this emphasis.  Something about it seems misguided.  For one, I’ve noticed that whatever I spend a great deal of time contemplating is eventually reflected in my external life (yipes), and so if I spend a lot of time thinking “life is suffering” and “nothing lasts,” I begin to see only loss.  I seem even to create suffering and loss, as if the world around me were a reflection of the activity in my mind.  Yet, when I think “life is beautiful” and “everything I need is always here” and “I’m surrounded by abundance,” that is precisely what I see everywhere I look, no matter what happens. 

Not wanting to be a “bad Buddhist,” I’ve tried to reconcile these two outlooks: my personal experience with optimism vs. the injunction to continuously recognize death and impermanence as a part of our existence.  Then recently, I read this interesting factoid from The Way of Liberation, by Alan Watts, which has to a large extent put my mind to rest:

“Many years ago when a Japanese scholar explained the teaching of Buddhism to me, he said something I have never heard anyone else say since.  He said that the Buddha taught that life is suffering in order to correct the wrong view that it ought to be pleasure.  He said that everything is impermanent in order to correct the wrong view that reality lasts forever in time.  The idea of the middle way is set up in this fashion–of going to one extreme to correct the other.  This is a very common Asian technique, and it is found especially in Zen.”

This makes me wonder… if you are already a person well-acquainted with impermanence and loss, someone who is acutely aware of the suffering and transience inherent in life, perhaps the corrective approach is to embrace total optimism, to see all the ways in which life is truly one of endless joy.  I don’t find that at all difficult.  In fact, I’m drawn to that perspective like an artist to paint.  I can’t help myself.  The more I look for it, the more I get it, and the more I get it, the more convinced I am that everything about this little existence is perfectly okay, and it will always be perfectly okay, and all we have to do is stop worrying.

After reaching a certain depth of open perception in meditation, an unusual primal fear is unleashed.  Gradually, one is opened to the multiplicity of valid perspectives on reality.  All perspectives arise simultaneously, as if one has stepped out of one’s single stream of existence and can now view a host of parallel universes disconcertingly juxtaposed. 

I feel like Kirk and Spock standing at the Guardian of Forever, an alien object in a Star Trek episode that acts as a portal to every world in every era.  It opens a window on a different time and place every few seconds, cycling through innumerable realities.  Whatever is displayed when you step through is the reality you enter. 

The fear, which feels something like standing on a pane of glass and looking down at a vast chasm and wondering what keeps you from falling, stems from a need to know the absolute, irrefutable facts of one’s environment.  Not a single act can be taken or thought or feeling sufficiently entertained until you’re certain where you are and who you are and what is going on.  To discover that the where and who and what can shape-shift at will into something entirely new, that your own faculties of perception can ascertain an equally accurate and legitimate reality with the slightest perturbation, seems to skirt the edges of insanity.  This multiple perspectives experience was bothering me a lot until my meditation dream weeks ago in which I stood in a room with numerous windows and heard the words, “There are many perspectives on the same thing.” 

That “thing” is the emptiness, the void, the One, Brahman, which contrasts with form or manifestation.  In other words, there are many forms for the same One, many manifestations for the same emptiness.  To illustrate more concretely, consider life and the world as you see it when down and out and compare this to life and the world as you see it when successful and full of joy.  The very same situations, people, and places seem to entail altogether different features and truths.  After loss, deprivation, fragility, and an impenetrable separation are hallmarks of life.  One’s reality is characterized by the struggle to find resources necessary to survive.  This feels true and irrefutable.  In moments of joy, however, one’s reality may be characterized by abundance and trust in some endless underlying resource and a sense of connectedness that can never be broken.  This too feels true and irrefutable.  How can these two be reconciled?  The first tendency is to think that one perspective reflects the truth and the other is a misperception, but what if both are true? 

We shift not between facts but between world views, and in this sense, we move between universes, self-contained worlds with their own internal veracity, and we tend to forget that perception is not just a reflection, it’s a thing in itself.  One’s current perspective usually feels quite right, as if it’s the most accurate depiction of reality, but repeatedly shifting to alternate perspectives eventually makes it clear that some degree of choice is involved.  If many valid perspectives are possible, you can’t escape a given reality by looking for a solution or fix any more than you can rescue a being from a hell realm by telling them that fire does not burn.  It burns for them.  Instead, you escape hell by shifting perspectives, by entering a reality in which there is no fire to begin with.  You cannot do it by convincing yourself that fire does not burn. 

The primal fear of the void then is the realization that we have the capacity to create anything, to lead ourselves into any experience.  The task is to choose perspectives that are consistent with the universe we wish to inhabit, to step through the Guardian of Forever at the desired moment (or avoid stepping through it at all).  In other words, the task is not simply to accurately perceive what is “out there” but to perceive “it” in the most fruitful, desired way, because perception itself plays an active role.

The magic of existence is not so much the ability to materialize desired objects and situations or finagle the law of attraction.  The magic is the capacity to shift perspectives even when one senses truth in one’s current perspective.  To move from “life stinks” to “life is beautiful” without batting an eye.  One leaves a perspective that brings suffering content that the arguments against that perspective have not been settled.  The case between “life stinks” and ”life does not stink” is not closed; one has not sufficiently repudiated the notion that life stinks.  Yet one goes on to embrace a perspective that involves endless joy.  Because endless joy is a more accurate representation of reality?  No, because endless joy is one possible reality, and you can enter it if you choose.  It feels like stepping through the portal from one universe to another.  You don’t leave the old universe by obliterating it.  You simply leave it behind and discover the new one.  The transition begins to feel authentic and legitimate because the new reality submits readily and with pleasure to the desire to find it. 

The state from which such shifting becomes truly, genuinely possible is the inner silence and stillness within which concepts dissolve, even concepts of time, space, and self.  Silence and stillness dissolve the whole multiverse and leave only the emptiness, the “thing” for which many perspectives are possible.  In this sense, deep meditation is the Guardian of Forever. 

I’ve been asked several times during the past year or so why I meditate.  That is a surprisingly difficult question to answer.  The stereotypical motivation for any behavior is the happiness it quickly brings for oneself.  Meditation certainly makes me happy.  I feel peaceful and blissful when I meditate, most of the time.  Sometimes when I meditate, I find myself simply sitting with pain and grief, confronting unhappiness in the most direct, unflinching way.  Yet, the ultimate outcome is always positive. 

There are other, often easier routes to happiness though, so why do I choose meditation?  I could take a walk or sit in the sun or eat some chocolate, but I return to meditation again and again, drawn to it the way a flower turns toward the sun.  Though logic suggests that I move in that direction out of logic, there is a deeper motivation that pulls me repeatedly to the experience of inner silence and stillness. 

I recently watched an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation in which a swarm of two dimensional beings pulled the Enterprise towards a cosmic string, an astronomical oddity which has the gravitational pull of something like a thousand stars.  At first, they assumed that the swarm was moving towards the cosmic string due to its gravitation.  Why would the two dimensional beings move in that direction on purpose?  However, they soon surmised that that creatures were drawn to the string by instinct.  Something compelled them to move towards it regardless of the consequences. 

Acting on biological instinct carries an immediate internal reward: renewed energy and the release of tension letting you know that you’re following an internal imperative.  Even before you reach the goal for which the instinct is designed, there is an immediate satisfaction brought on by obeying the instinct.  I think meditation is the instinct of my soul. 

Why I meditate is similar to why I’m drawn to be in a romantic relationship.  I can find happiness either way, so what compels me in that direction?  Both meditation and relationship reveal aspects of my true nature, my deeper self, that I would not be consious of otherwise.  Watching how my small self, my little cluster of me-ness, expands to encompass more, to envelop another heart, satisfies a deep instinct, an instinct that is greater than me and seems to originate from beyond me.

In meditation and in relationships, one experiences both individuality and oneness, and in this seemingly contradictory state, something of one’s deeper essence unfolds.  The caterpillar turns into a butterfly.  I think that both make me a better person, although if that were my explicit motivation, the whole endeavor would be an artificial act of logic.  Where we become attuned to what we generally assume exists outside us, logic subsides, replaced by movement that is more like a dance than a march towards some far off goal.  So perhaps there is no difference between meditating and relating sincerely to another person: to be both self and other, simultaneously open and bounded, assertive and deeply vulnerable, selfish and unconditionally loving. 

There are two because there is One,
Yet cling not to this One…
In the dharma-world of true Suchness
There is neither “other” nor “self.”
If you want an immediate answer,
We can only say “Not two.”

~ Shinjinmei

A few nights ago, anguish over recent events turned into utter exhaustion. I think I just reached that point where I felt the truth that no answer or resolution was possible. For some situations, the only response seems to be to sit with the pain and accept the discomfort, to just forge ahead without any expectation of peace. And then there is a certain peace that comes with accepting that you can’t find any.

I started meditating on the couch, and I got to that point of inner silence that confers a gentle happiness with things as they are, and I felt wide awake in the moment. I thought, “Woo hoo, I’m in the NOW! Sweeeet!” Eckart Tolle and Ram Dass would be so proud. About two seconds later, I thought, “Okay, how can I make sure I’ll be in the NOW later???” And my NOW bubble immediately popped. Or perhaps it was more like a deflating balloon. Oh drat! Well, I’d gone through that pattern about a million times before. But this time, it was different. By some cosmic grace, it struck me: Right now is all I ever have to worry about. I don’t need to worry about the next now. In other words, I only need to achieve presence in the moment for the moment.

The whole struggle for enlightenment thing (and I never really know what it is I’m struggling for anyway) is embedded in the idea that once you achieve enlightenment, it’s permanent. You are henceforth enlightened for the remainder of your NOWs. It never really occurred to me that maybe I only needed to achieve “enlightenment” right now. What a load off! I started laughing hard. Seriously, I laughed until my abdominal muscles were sore. I am officially a Zen geek. Does that mean I did it? Did I earn my Buddhism gold star? Does it matter? Moral of the story: Instead of trying to find eternal peace and happiness, feel peace and happiness… for now. It is way easier!

I had another moment like that just now, but it was even deeper. All the challenges and frustrations before me suddenly seemed intangible, as if the things I’m chasing are just a mirage. I reached a point where I had no choice but to let the whole game and all the little playing pieces just go flying into the air and watch them float away into space. Then I was suddenly awake in the moment and felt a rush of energy and luminosity. My blue fatigue turned into golden joy, and I started laughing to myself. I feel chill, like a surfer dude. Or maybe it’s the reggae. Peace and love!

I’ll be at the Spirit Rock meditation center in Woodacre, California, just north of San Francisco from January 11-18.

I’ll be far away blissing (ostensibly), hoping it rubs off on the planet. Namaste!