The Insubstantiality of form

“What’s that burning smell,” I asked the day before yesterday when I came home in the evening? Was there a fire someplace in town..must have been because that’s what it smelled like, that campfire that smolders after you stomped on the fire. The next morning I smelled it on the front porch and thought that was strange how the smell had collected there even though there was a breeze blowing across it.

That afternoon a customer who had parked in the driveway next to the house reported with alarm that smoke was coming up beside the house. Quickly doused with water, we saw that buried electrical wire going to the studio sign the yard had caught fire was was igniting the hard wood mulch covering it.

How easy it is to have your house burn down, I thought. There are so many wire buried out of sight and we assumed that are all okay, when one might just be waiting for the opportunity to catch you sleeping. But wait, this smoldering thought now spread to all form that we hold dear, our car, our equipment and appliances, our loved ones and even our body. Sleeping wire are everywhere, like the Manchurian Candidate, a sleeper spy waiting for the right circumstances to rise up and destroy everything. And some day, somewhere, somehow—as BP discovered—it will. Or as the terrorist experts warn, it now if but when they strike again.

We wrap ourselves in insurance against the attack from the unknown, from this devil we call the death of our own. We cling together behind armed walls of ideology and religion; we constantly invent new fail safe devices “so that it will never happen again.” But it does.

We order and constantly improve on the Known, but the Unknown always surrounds the Known like space surrounds the stars. We created science to control the Known, but the Unknown always works against it, as its enemy but also as its teacher. Without the Unknown, the Known would be frozen in time and would die.

We live in a conceptual universe constructed of thought, ideas, and concepts, whole systems of thought and yet no matter how much we know, we are forever being surprised by what we don’t know. And yet we fear this Unknown while in reality it is our best friend. It is our awareness of the Unknown that makes us human and a ray of the divine Light. We can’t see the Unknown, but we know it’s there. The questions is this: do we fear it and cling together shaking around our little campfire of the Known in the night? Or do we embrace the dark as a necessary source of the light?

The Wisdom of Seinfeld

Last night in a Seinfeld rerun George discovered that if he did the opposite of his first impulse the world worked for him. Today I was reminded of that wisdom as I was trying to get the battery to my 1972 Airstream trailer charged. It was a large marine battery that ran out of juice as soon as I got the trailer home. Advanced Auto checked it and said the battery was good, so I bought a charge and added water to the battery as the plates were exposed.

Today I hooked up the “charged” battery and it lasted about  two minutes. Oh, oh, this battery is bad and I’m going to have to replace it. This, BTW, is my first urge. I learned it from my parents, I guess, but when anything doesn’t work, you just get a new one. I’ve got some great appliances and things around my house that my mother discarded  because of some minor annoyance or obstacle. As I look at this for a moment, it seems to be rooted in the belief that one needs saving, some expert or professional to come in and fix the complicate technology that we live with.

Anyway, before I threw the battery out, I took it back to Advance Auto and he checked it again, and again it was okay, dead but okay. As we talked it was discovered by the “expert” that I had put water instead of battery acid in the battery. “Oh, you mean you don’t add water,” I asked surprised, as I had always just added water, distilled water, to  batteries. But I haven’t seen a batter that you could actually open in 20 years. So that was it.

Somehow I had not followed by first urge and by doing the opposite, which was to look beneath my assumptions, I saved having to buy a very expensive marine battery. Our first urges are always based on our hidden assumptions, and, as George discovered, by resisting that urge we often discovery the treasure that lies beneath it. Instead of being stuck in some tape loop of repeated errors, we break free and sail on the crest of an incredible wave of energy.

First urges, as in my case, always seem to be about applying yesterday’s map to the present moment, and when that urge is relaxed and allowed to deflate, the situation reveals the facts one needs to steer through the obstacles.

Air Stream

I don’t know if it was the name Airstream, the almost cult history of the trailer, its intelligence (well designed), our longing to look over the horizon, or because it was a deal we couldn’t refuse—but, regardless, we bought this 1972 trailer (everything works and its in great shape) that looks like futuristic dream from the 1950s. We have had a number of these “dreams” in our life, from a houseboat we never traveled in, a dodge camper (one of the first van campers in the early 60s, a Volkswagen campers, and recently an RV that we wish he hadn’t gotten but sold quickly, to this Airstream, our first real trailer (fortunately, we have a truck).

But here we are again, this time maybe we’ll use it. Or maybe because of my training as a photographer to always have backup, I can rest with the knowledge that if the house burns down at least we’ll have a place to live.

Keep it simple

We don’t have to go to Walden Pond like Thoreau to discover the essential truth of life or take a retreat in a Zen monastery. We have all we need right at home in the simple rituals of daily life, like washing dishes, ironing clothes, fixing the bike or mowing the lawn. Simple is as simple does, goes the saying. Carrying out our daily chores with humility is the service of the servant. You don’t need the feet of Christ to wash in order to discover the healing power of poverty of mind.

Just to iron the clothes without adding anything thought like wishing the ironing was over, or resenting having to iron while others in the house watch TV is the simplicity we’re looking at here. You can discover the dignity of life in your daily chores if you work with complete obedience to the work, being aware of your body/mind as it performs the ritual of that particular function and noticing the sensations of the body as it words. These quiet moments of work are the opportunity to be totlly present in the moment.

If you were a monk in a temple or a priest in the church, and your job was to carry out the rituals of the day, you would be instructed by your master to carry out this ritual as an offering to God. Christ led the way in this simplicity of action when he offer the bread and wine, saying “This is my body, this is my blood.”

He was so completely merged with the service of giving bread and wine that he saw no distinction between himself and the service and those for whom the service was performed. There was no I-thought of me separate from the serving of the bread.

Duties at home are a service in the same way, but the grace benefiting powers of service are lost when the work is viewed as labor you should avoid. When we work while wishing we were not working, we put ourselves in conflict with our work. WE are what we are doing, so avoiding what we are doing simple cuts us off from our own living presence.We become homeless in our own life.

How to scoop an egg

As I was scooping my poached egg, slightly runny, from the little bowl my wife said I should have a egg scoop designed especially for that task. I looked at my spoon and thought how happier I would be if I had the right tool. Then I thought, “Hey, wait a minute.” Tasks start our with one tool, and in time imaginative thought comes in and cuts the task up into segments, each requiring the proper tool. “What’s going on here?” I wondered. Is this how we lose the simple life of Walden Pond?

Thought just can’t leave action alone. It has to come in and make improvements. Look at the kitchen, the workshop, any workspace or specialized skill—except for primitive and reenactment sites—there is hardly enough space left for all the tools. But we don’t need to stop there. Just watch yourself doing any function and thought is probably there checking and looking for an opportunity to improve or find fault. Why can’t thought just get a life!

It’s this chop, chop, chop of thought on life that gets us so screwed up. When I do something without thinking, that’s the best. You just do it! Niki has it right. If you just do it, thought can’t chop it up. Imagine what would have happened to Michael Jordon if thought tried to perfect his dunk.

To Write

“Is there any spiritual system without the word? In any number of spiritual practices—from the sacred syllables of tantric yoga to the mystics of the Kabbalah, from the Word of the Christian God to the talismanic writings of Taoist magicians—the word is central. To write is a sacred act.

All sacred calligraphers try with greater and greater effort to release the writing that is within them. This takes years of spiritual practice, like waiting for the perfect confluence of heavenly bodies. Only here the calligraphers are waiting for the confluence of skill, technique, and spontaneity to express their devotion. When they succeed, there is a state of euphoria that manifest itself in ink. This type of writing cannot be achieved y the mere normal, rational ways of a scribe. It must be inspired: one must give oneself over to a sacred feeling welling from deep within.

It takes a strong person—perhaps even an extraordinary person—to stand by what he or she has written without doubt or eagerness for recognition. If you breach the spiritual in writing, it will transform you, not in a way that will bring you profit, but in a way that will instill a great and private faith. To feel that is to feel Tao. To feel that is worth all Th words in the world.”  Deng Ming-Dao Everyday Tao

Self-awareness…what’s that?

Yesterday at the Happiness workshop I gave at the SVCC Woman’s Festival I felt so at home there with the twenty women who attended. None fell asleep when I talked, and all we responded as we looked at our minds as if its contents were the furniture in the house that we lived in. We live looking out through the sensory windows of the mind, wanting or getting angry at the people and things passing by, but we never look at the window glass, the shades and curtains that we pull, nor the furniture inside. We don’t see the walls covered with peeling paint from layers of memories, nor do we notice the smell from buried grievances. Our attention—which has been conditioned by our culture—only peers outward, as if the house didn’t have any effect of the way we experience what we see through its windows.

But if we try to look at the interior of our mind, all we know what to do is look at it through the house of  psychology. It’s already named and cataloged by the  experts, and with this list of furniture to think about, we think we know who we are. But nothing has changed. We’re still an object without a subject. Who, we must ask ourselves, is the thinker, the observer, and the experiencer that looks at the world and itself?

Self awareness is not object awareness. Self awareness is not object consciousness. Self awareness is not even self consciousness. Self awareness is witness consciousness. Okay, what is that? Witness consciousness is like sky consciousness that is aware of clouds but is not the clouds. Witness consciousness is aware of thoughts and feeling but is not the thoughts and feelings. When are suddenly aware that you are lost in thought, that awareness is the Witness. When you wake in the morning and you witness leaving a dream and entering you everyday mind, that transitional space is the witness. The witness is the background behind self consciousness. It is the field, the sky, the ocean…the wholeness that contains the parts of consciousness that we mistakenly assume is who we are.

You can see this if you look deeply by taking your attention off what is going on outside your mental house. The witness is the eye behind the little self looking outside the window of the mind. The Witness never changes, is never born, and never dies. Like the clear sky is has no boundary, no form, and no end or beginning. The witness…is your soul.

But we have lost contact with our soul and we mistakenly think we can find it out there on the streets of the world. We are told that it is closer to us than we are to ourselves, but those are just words to put in our memory files. The little guy or gal who lives in the mind runs the house as long as the soul sleeps. So it has a vested interest in not allowing the soul to awake because when awake, the house will become transparent, as if its walls were made of glass. An awakened soul is a transparent mind, an innocent mind, a mind that is always open and that sees everything as it is, without the filters of memory, judgments and past grievances. The soul, because it is deathless, timeless, never born and never to die….has no fear.

We all have brief moments when our soul is awake: when we fall in love, when we see the wonder of the great mountains, or a beautiful work of art. For a moment the soul is awake in wonder, then the false king of the mind starts thinking and objectifies the wonder experience into an object of experience. “Wow, did you see that! Let me take a picture.”

Hurt Locker: The Movie

For some reason I was really looking forward to seeing the Oscar Nominated Hurt Locker, even dreaming about it. I knew I was going to get a lot of metaphorical mileage out of this film just from watching the promotions on TV. War is an Addiction is the theme message of the movie, but it is a little more than that if you dig a little deeper. One could say Death in an Addiction, since war is about death and this movie is all about the addiction of being made to feel totally alive by being close to not being alive. The contrast of death in war and death at home is very clear when James, our heroic bomb disposal specialist goes home and feels the death in being normal, cleaning out the gutter, choosing cereal in the grocery store. So he returns to life…..in death.

James wore his bomb shelter as a suit when he went to work. One night drunk he even slept in it, as though it were some kind of oxygen tank he needed to breath through. Combat and cutting the wires to a bomb are meditation, a single minded focus of the mind on the present moment, and if the mind strays into random thought for one moment you are dead. So death is the great guru who keeps one’s mind/body/soul absolutely working as one.

“What’s the best way to disarm a bomb?” the colonel asked James. “Not getting killed,” James said. Perhaps, and just perhaps, one reason our nation fights so many wars is that being in the military, being a hero, is an addiction. We do it so well—the best fighting force man has every had. And why do soldiers have such a difficult time adjusting to our “normal” society when they return? There is death here. We have swept death out of sight. No dead bodies anywhere. No risk anywhere. We have insurance and safe wall against every threat. Let a threat happen anywhere in our social web and we are on it,cleaning it up, finding out what happened, and vowing that it will never happen again. Our mission is to remove death from life……

And what is the result. We are addicted to death. We blow up stuff, we shoot people, we fly plans into buildings, and then there is all the extreme sports that flaunt death, pushing the envelope because our nervous systems require greater and greater hits of death. And our entertainment is a feast on death. Horror, scary death, funny death, mystery death, but safe death. In a culture that fears death, death become the obsession. And war…ah, war….the fast track to death. One gets medals and a parade for just getting close to death.

I AM HERE

What I’ve discovered in my search for self is that it can’t be found in time. What is good or bad is in the past, what I wish to experience is in the future. Neither past or future is who I am because I am here! I taste, I smell, I hear, I breathe, I see, I talk, I write, I think, I move….all here. So I must be here. Who I am..is here. There are no qualities here, no likes or dislikes (can I know all that and say it is here? All that is memory.) There is no memory here.

I am this moment..this world right now. Can I separate myself from my world and say this is me and the world is that..this computer…Am I not this computer? I experience this computer in…me. This comcputer is in me. I am not separate from this computer in experience. I see an image in my mind. I hear the radio playing from the computer in my mind…The computer is in me…So the whole world thatI experience right now…the computer, the room and all the sounds of the house are in me….I am the center of the world and the world is in me. All else is knowledge of the world which is memory…in me. What I know is in me….so all I can say is I am here and all this existence is in me….

So as I back track on the search for me…I come to space that holds all this form, thoughts, things, sensations….space….awareness…a witness of me. I was before I was born and I am after I die….space has no form….I am spirit…formless awareness…free.

Dive, Dive!

Suddenly I remember my days in the submarines. (1957-1960) When a submarine is on the surface, it behaves like a surface ship. when it submerges, it behave like a fish. But there is a very dangerous transition when the sub first submerges, and a large wave could tip it over as it ballast tanks are half full and half empty.

And so with the path of liberation…there is a transition between the unreal and the real that is confusing and we flip back and forth. But with effort and perseverance and a steady meditation practice one makes the passage and the sub is free from the limitations of the surface world. It no longer has fear of sinking beneath the surface (of the mind) and leaving its surface ship identity. The fleet doesn’t even know you have gone.

The meditator, like the submarine, is familiar and free in both worlds. The mind is not two, a surface world and an unconscious world that is full of large demons and habits. The mind is one, the ocean is one. Stay up, go down, makes no difference…it’s all ocean.

So like the submarine, one must practice diving, day after day, until one is comfortable wherever you are. If you are busy, you are busy, if you are not, you are not. Wherever you are, whatever you are doing…it is still the ocean…and you are okay. You cannot die..because you have already been beneath the boundary…and you are there too

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