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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

On a walk through the woods this afternoon, I saw a white butterfly on purple flowers that were, themselves, shaped like butterflies.  I saw water from the marsh extending across the paved trail and a translucent crawdad the size of my thumb scurrying through the puddles.  He raised his pincers when I placed a twig in his path.  The trail was lined with wild flowers, tall lime green grass, and budding trees.  I felt utterly content.

The spring bliss made me long to share my experience with someone.  In the back of my mind, I kept imagining my friends with me and things I would say to them.  “Oh, look at the butterfly!” or “How did a crawdad get all the way over here?”  The greater the beauty and wonder, the deeper my desire for a companion to share it with.

Then I thought back to my time in northern California on a retreat at the Spirit Rock Meditation Center.  I wandered through the woods every day for a week, but I never felt the need for a companion.  I never felt alone.  I witnessed all sorts of amusing and moving facets of nature, but my contentment was not accompanied by that inner voice speaking to some imagined friend.

Eventually it dawned on me, why I felt differently then.  In the woods at Spirit Rock, I was the companion.  I was sharing in the experience of another, and the friend whose softly delighted voice I listened to was none other than nature herself, showing me her rock collection and so happy to have someone to talk to.

“Indeed, what can compare to the tree eating breakfast with the rock in a room inside my heart,” adds my friend, Rick Smith.  “If you continue to expand, eventually, it is all happening inside you. Your self conversing with yourself in 10,000 different ways.”  To express the insight, he wrote the following poem towards the end of a seven day sesshin:

The singing of a bird,
The ringing of a bell,
A kind word spoken…
I never know what I am going to say next.

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.”

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. 

A thought experiment:

Let us say that, as an enlightened soul (meaning, a consciousness standing outside of time and space, connected to everything and capable of dreaming anything), you take upon yourself the task of weaving into this tapestry of human existence the thread of a human life that will result in a most beautiful, awakened work of art, the cessation of suffering in those who cross your path, and light and love and joy.

What if everything that you are in this small thread, everything you’ve done and said, even your confusion and grief, have perfectly served this purpose?  Suppose there are “enlightened beings” who choose to forget who they are, because somehow this forgetting serves the purpose of relieving suffering and awakening others.  They choose amnesia, confusion, and turmoil, because this is the precise causal thread that would weave an overall pattern of love and light. 

Suppose our small selves are like a spider who knows only to move to the next beam of silk.  He just keeps going in circles and seems to get nowhere, but he is following the exact narrow compulsion necessary to create a vast spiral that will capture the most insects.  And you are capturing hearts and minds in a net of awakening, even if your spider self seems to be traveling a fruitless path.

Look back on things you’ve done, hypothetically in this light, back to regrets, perseverative impulses and instincts from the obviously ineffective to the subtle strategies of the mind, everything that seems inarguably wrong and bad, injurious or thoroughly not okay.  Has the cosmos gone awry?  Has your soul mission gone askew?  Has your bodhisattva vow been postponed, set to take effect at a later date?

Or, could there be in this vast perplexing tapestry a burning need for the precise thread of your life, even its knots and frayed ends?  For every supposed mistake or seemingly foolish act, while our little spider eyes see only the simple, immediate consequences, the true effects reach into the oceanic depths of existence where unimaginably complex currents of life and consciousness swirl and flow and ebb, throbbing to the pulse of the One that is the light shining throughout the abyss, and what returns to the surface is that which was originally intended by your deepest self but ignorant of the “how.”  Healing, love, and unadulterated joy. 

In our small fumblings, we may cause pain while at the same time, with the same motion, sowing the seeds of healing and joy.  There are no words to trace this or express this, because the story line exceeds the usual dimensions.  There is only the need to trust who you are, already perfect in every way, perfect even in your perceptions of imperfection.

While on a meditation retreat in Northern California, I wandered up into the hills and fell in love. First on my senses was the incredible earthy smell, like soft, moist soil, moss, cedar, and eucalyptus. I did not want to exhale, because it meant I would go one second without smelling the earth.

Next was the texture of the ground, tufts of tall grasses interspersed with twigs and dirt. Along one trail, I spotted a tuft of grass that was quite comically getting shorter and shorter before my eyes, apparently swallowed up by an underground critter. The trees were covered with a light green hanging moss. One tree had lost nearly all of its bark and looked like a hairless cat with its smooth and slightly wrinkled skin.

Sparrows darted along the little dirt trails. On several occassions, I came within inches of a sparrow, stopped, and watched him scurry further along the trail, walked ahead until I approached him again, stopped, and again watched him scurry further along the trail. We repeated this dance until I was laughing. My gestures and gentle remarks for the little bird to move sideways were to no avail. Eventually they would fly from the trail probably wondering why I kept following them.

One misty morning, I sat on a hillside and watched a herd of giant wild turkey poke around on the hill opposite mine. They were only perhaps ten yards away. Our hillsides were separated by a dirt trail. I watched as the turkey formed a line and proceeded to cross the trail from their hill to mine. En route, another retreat member, my friend Daniel from the lab, came rambling along and had to stop for the turkey crossing. I laughed and planned to ask him later, after the rule of silence was lifted, why did the turkey cross the road?

On my first day, I hiked to the top of a hill where I could look out across the entire valley, and I laid in the grass and napped in the sun. I slept so deeply that when I awoke hours later, I felt as though I had turned into a stone and come back to life.

A team of world class cooks prepared the daily meals which were both nourishing and spectacularly delicious. I knew the food would be healthy when I saw that one of the condiments was Beano. I found that very amusing until about the third day (d’oh). In the mornings, breakfast was set out: a large steel pot of oatmeal with corresponding oversize ladel for which the first word automatically occuring to me was “slop.” But it was the best oatmeal I ever had, all fluffy, buttery, and warm topped with raisins and toasted almonds. I looked forward to it every morning.

My heart was pulsating with love, love for the dirt under my feet, the bright sun in the clear sky, the vast open space, eagles and hummingbirds smaller than my thumb, curious lizards, and fearless, frolicking deer. I felt so much love that there was no me in it. I gave myself to the here and now, leaving behind whatever I thought I needed in order to be present, and it seemed that my inner experience became an offering to the divine. If I had any thoughts prior to the moment, they soon seemed unimportant. What overcame them was a stillness so quiet that not even silence remained.

Just as I was losing myself in the sacredness of nature, I found my own. One afternoon, I was walking back to my room and stumbled across a small building, the “gratitude hut,” which housed a shrine to many gurus. I was humbled by the display of photos and biographies. These sacred people dedicated their entire lives to the spiritual well being of the world. I wrote a prayer on a slip of paper and placed it in the bowl with hundreds of others. Before I left, I looked at the photos and bowed my head and said the only thing that my heart was saying in that moment, the most sincere thought in my head, a sad remorse I laid at the feet of all of these amazing people: “Forgive me for not being you.”

Moments later, I was back in my room. I had just removed my shoes outside the door, and I realized that hours of hiking made it necessary for me to wash my feet. As I washed my feet, I was reminded of a scene in a movie about Jesus where a woman rushes to him, weeping and full of remorse, and washes his feet as a sign of love and devotion. I started to laugh. I’m washing my own feet! How apropos, I thought. I felt my own sacredness, like the earth and sky, as divine as any guru, and the guru seemed no more special and no less sacred than the beautiful rocks and dirt. From the stones to the goddesses, all was sacred.

In the place where I meditate, I have a cushion, my hibiscus plant, and two candles.  I sit facing the beautiful panorama of trees and grass in my front yard and just across the street.  I didn’t put much deliberation into the set up, but it’s worked well for me. 

A few nights ago, as I sat down, I thought, “Why did I decide to use two candles?”  I could have been happy with just one.  Two candles carry no particular symbolic meaning for me.  Then I remembered my thinking at the time.  I chose two candles rather than one because, quite simply, it is nice to have more light.

This is same reason I find relationships, particularly spiritual relationships or group meditation, appealing.  One candle is fine on its own, but it is nice to have more light.