Observations that dive deep into life and come up with treasures for all

“What do you want me to bring you,” asked my wife from Hilton Head where she was spending a week with some girlfriends and a cold she had contracted there. “Anything except the cold,” I said.

When she arrived home yesterday, she had a beautiful Buddha carved out of wood, and I realized that my house was becoming a Buddha Sanctuary. I will never buy another Buddha; they are coming to me on their own free will.

“Two of my friends got worried when they saw me buy this Buddha,” she said as we settled down to share stories of our week. Both were devout Christians, and they feared their friend was slipping over into the enemy camp where idols were worshipped. It was time for an intervention, they thought. “Nothing came of it but amusement,” my wife said.

And yet, I encounter these phenomena at least once a week here in the Buddha Sanctuary. It’s the fallacy of misplaced location, as I remember some philosopher’s words. The mind believes God is a form, because the mind can only think through form or thought, and since god, according to the mind, is a form, there can only be one form that is God. Being locked in a thought as an object with limitations and conditioning is prison. Buddha called it suffering.

God is formless and we are made in His image, therefore, in our essential nature we are formless spirit or pure consciousness. When we judge others as being this or that, good or bad, our judgment strengthens our own prison sentence. The eye that sees a prison is in prison.

From the perspective of spirit, there are no idols and no prisons because every form points to God, the formless absolute that is prior to all form or creation. My Buddhas all remind me of this truth, because Buddha is not a person or form but the state of formlessness and freedom that we all already are. From this perspective Buddha and Christ are the same truth just seen from different angles—the statue and the cross just point.

Posted under up lifting

“’I’m optimistic because I believe I’m right,” replied the obtuse Bush. “I’m at peace with myself.” That smug statement — uttered by a man who had no idea what he was talking about and no interest in what anyone else believed — could be the epitaph for his presidency.”

This quote for an article by Joe Conason in Salon, an online magazine, which caught my attention this morning, was about Bush’s refusal to listen to the advice and warnings of foreign leaders in his march to war. Here is the battle flag that waves over our times and the cultural wars that are now raging. The Iraq war is just one of our many wars and grabs the headlines because of its cost. The letters stitched on this flag read: I AM RIGHT.

The fallacy that has clouded the modern mind is that truth is a belief, and that the mind is the instrument of discovery. Faith then comes in and gives the mind its sword of righteousness and fills it with courage. I BELIEVE IN ME, says the second battle flag.

Now if you can get at least one person to rally around this flag, you can probably make a case in court that you are not insane. Get a group to help you fly this banner, and you can get in the news. Enlist a majority of the country to salute this emblem, and you can even start a war to justify your belief.

The need to be right is also the need to be complete. Being right gives me peace, says Bush. One also has to stay the course in order to be proven right. This is also the logic of the con artist who knows that if he can hold to his illusion with more sincerity than his opponent, he will be favored to prevail. And the more people that believe in your rightness, the more likely that your belief in yourself will be strengthened. “I must be right because so many people believe that I am,” says the ego.

Our president is us. He shows us our own ego. We elected him to do this, and we always get the teacher and leader we deserve. Our leader’s spiritual function is to wake us up by showing us our illusion of self-righteousness. Bush is a great teacher, even a kind of a savior, who took our sins upon himself so that we can see how blind we have become.

Posted under current events, up lifting

Our easy way of life has been disrupted by the repaving of Main Street, which borders my front yard like a busy harbor full of ships going and coming. Just to get to Wal-Mart a few blocks down the road your must wind your way through back residential roads in a long line of cars with town police waving you through stop signs during peak traffic times. Everyone talks about how irritating this disruption is and wonders when it will end.

But there is much wisdom to be gleaned from disruptions in one’s routine because it is only when the pavement of our expectations of what is is broken up that we have the opportunity to consciously accept what is. When we don’t accept what is, we have a grievance that makes us unhappy or uncomfortable with existing conditions. We want the universe to be different than what it is right now. What is the reality of this moment has become our enemy, and we create a gap between this “bad” present moment and a “good” future moment when the pavement will be fixed.

All of our suffering, all of our conflicts, and even all of our wars occur in this gap between what is and what should be. Can you think of any human ill that does not fall into this gap?

If you look closely at this gap you will see that it is the child of the conceptual mind. The gap is a concept, a thought with a feeling tacked to it. When we see this moment as an abstract concept, then we can’t act creatively—we only react blindly.

Right now my chair is vibrating from the steamroller packing the roadbed in front of my house. It feels as though my house were alive, almost like my cat when she purrs. The vibration now turns my chair into one of those massage chairs that relaxes tense muscles. Now I image my house is trembling in fear like a dog looking out the door at the huge and frightening beasts tearing up the ground in front of the house.

When you accept the present moment as it is and don’t stamp it with labels of good or bad, your likes or dislikes, then this moment has tremendous depth. Underneath that break—oh, happy break—in the pavement of your conceptual mind a hidden wellspring is released, and from that spring flows the healing joyful waters of peace, forgiveness and creative intelligence.

Posted under up lifting

When I want clear insight that cuts through the media hype, I find Salon articles by Sidney Blumenthal always enlightening, especially the one he wrote today about Dan Rather and his lawsuit against CBS over his firing and suppression of his report on Bush’s National Guard service. I’ve lived long enough to have seen the rise and fall of Dan Rather, and well remember how he became the target for Republican darts.

And I also remember growing up with the unquestioned belief that the evening news was the truth, in the same way that the Sunday sermon was the truth. The news anchor was our anchor to God’s truth, and it was only this single tether that kept us from drowning in a sea of conflicting opinions. The news anchor reflected our own inner witness who stood back from the ego and its passions and kept us grounded in our highest nature. The news anchor represented our conscious and our soul in the collective mind that is our society. We trusted him.

But the takeover of the news media by corporations is like the take over of the soul by the ego, and now what is true is what is good for the ego. This is Rather’s complaint, warning, and final story. Like Edward R Murrow and Walter Cronkite before him, his mentors, Rather’s last stand is not about reporting but about the ability to tell the difference between the real and the unreal. If there is no impartial witness, can we ever tell the difference? And if we can’t tell the difference between the real and the unreal, then we have lost our golden thread to God and our salvation. We drown in violence, confusion, and dread, and there is no one to throw us a rope.

Posted under General Observations

Last night I watched the PBS series The War with my 96-year old mother, and it was such a delight reliving those times with her. Revisiting that world through the magical lens of Ken Burns was like visiting an alien planet where the world, though human, was totally different from the one we live in. My mother, whose husband survived all those terrible Pacific Battles, was right there on the home front, hauling me around from coast to coast so as to meet my father when his ship came in for a few days. She discovered her strength and determination during those years, and now in her later years, she has discovered wisdom.

There is nothing that can make you aware of the impermanence of forms then looking at the world through the eyes of a 96-year old. Everything dies when you live long enough. All those thousands and thousands of young men who died on those battlefields just dissolved their forms a little earlier than those that survived. And today, even the world they lived in is gone.

And what remains? After the form is gone, does anything remain? Is it all just a mist in the mind, a dream, an absurd play? Can we wake up from history? When I visit my mother and we talk about happiness, prayer, the past, the present, I feel that we are present in an eternal moment of witnessing awareness, and that we have always been and always will be. We are just watching a movie of history together, a real-life documentary made by God instead of Ken Burns, and the purpose of the movie is to wake up to our timeless self or soul that is prior to form and death. Before the world, I am, the soul says.

As the Buddhist say, If there were no illusion, there would be no enlightenment. If there were no dream, there would be no awakening.

Om Peace

Posted under General Observations

The older I get and the deeper I go into who I am and who we are as a culture, a civilization, the more I realize how deeply, deeply brainwashed we are. Or maybe I should say brain cluttered. We see the world as a broken cup, a Picasso painting where fragments battle each other for dominance. We have lost the ability to grasp the whole, the totality of who we are, and just be at peace and know.

A woman came to my house the other day and saw the sign Meditation Center. She said she was so stressed out by family and work that she couldn’t sleep. She wanted freedom, but she looked around and saw a statue of Buddha, a cross, a statue of Shiva next to a statue of an angel, a picture of some Indian guy with a beard praying, a small statue of fat bellied man with an elephant head, a picture of the Last Supper, and a picture of a lotus. She was confused. “Does meditation go against Jesus,” she asked? “I don’t want anything to do with any Buddha.”

The thread of this fear felt by this woman is thousands of years old. Our brainwashing is very deep and historic, going all the way back to the birth of science and the rational worldview in which we live today. It is becoming apparent to many postmodern minds that our world in going through a violent struggle that began when reason kicked God out of the world. Spirituality then got locked in the basement as a mythic religion—which was the religion of the Middle Ages—and you know what happens when a natural impulse gets repressed. Violence is always the fruit of repression. The heart, which is the seat of spirituality, was set against the mind, which is the seat of reason. We are in a civil war where the human heart cannot walk in peace with the mind towards the souls evolutionary fulfillment in God. The path is split, and each believes it’s way is the only way.

A mythic religion is a belief system that holds and expands human society. You don’t have to be related by blood to the group, all you have to do is believe. But belief in God is not realization of God; just as believing in water is not the same as drinking water. Belief is a thought system and a function of mind, realization is freedom from the mind and it’s fear and illusions. Our passion for God has been trapped in a belief system that blames scientific materialism for its suffering.

The modern mind, therefore, is thrown into a false war with itself. The repressed spirituality and urge to self-realization fights against reason and the materialism that is the modern world. “There is no place for God in your world,” scream the fundamentalists, whether Muslim or Christian. And as all good fundamentalists do, they become warriors of God whose duty is to destroy the evil liberal world of reason that has pushed them out.

Both sides are held captive by their own myth. The mythic religion says God is out there in time and you can only be with him when you die. Certainly not now, its scriptures say. Man and God are separate.

And reason says that it doesn’t need God, that it can save mankind by coming up with better technology and more research. Reason is god and the observer, the ego, is separate from the nature it has to fix.

As we see within ourselves how these two myths limit reality and split our minds, the conflict between religion and reason is transcended by a greater whole, one that includes both pairs of opposites. That greater whole, the larger Self, that marriage of faith and reason, that rebirth of freedom and fearlessness, is Spirituality. “Truth is one,” says the wisdom teachings of the world.

Om Shanti

Posted under up lifting

Some days you just wake up and find obstacles being removed everywhere. The external world reflects the internal state always, and this morning the street in front of our house was open to traffic and we could get out of our front driveway, and I got a print driver to work finally so I could use my laser printer. Yesterday, I got some unexpected money, so today I bought a new mattress, and my wife is having a beautiful time in Hilton Head with her girl friends. Where can I go that life is not flowing under a clear sky and warm sun? Where can I go that flowers are not blooming?

Some days we don’t feel at home here in existence. “Things could be better,” we say when someone asks. And some days every thing is great. Same existence, same day, really, so what gives? Is it really a matter of external conditions being favorable for us to feel at home and happy just to be here?

Or is it an illusion of the mind—maya, as the Eastern teachings say? How can existence be good one day and bad the next, and for many it is bad all the time, with just a few brief breezes of pleasure to fan the dream. Does existence really change just to make us unhappy? Is it personal?

Try this experiment. For the next five minute accept everything that is. Be conscious of every sensation, watching the breath, listening to the sounds, feeling the body, observing thoughts and feelings as they pass through the mind. Say to life, to existence, to the universe, to God, “I accept you. I have no grievance or resistance to you; I surrender all effort to change you. Thy will be done. I quit!”

If you let go, just for five minutes, and be with this moment—no matter what unfolds—the inner sun of joy and peace will come out from behind the clouds of your dissatisfaction, and you fill feel in your heart that your are at home and everything is okay.

In this way you will forgive the universe for not being what you think it should be, and you will be free.

Posted under General Observations, up lifting

We all have our worst thing, either in the past, right now, or coming in the future. Those of us with addictions have the worst thing all the time, like an internal Iraq war that we can’t extract ourselves from. Addictions can be destructive and life threatening, like alcohol, drugs, or even food. But large or small, we all have some form of addiction. If they are polite addictions, like a need for coffee, then there is no real necessity to quit. But if the addiction is killing your body and your family, the suffering can become intense and all consuming. You must do something or die.

When the urge for a cigarette, food, alcohol, or whatever, rises in the body, we never notice the subtle invasion of the alien into our mind. “You deserve a drink tonight. It’s been a rough day and one drink isn’t going to hurt,” says the thoughts, now under the control of the urge. The next thing consciousness knows that it is waking up from a three-day binge. “Oh, my God, what happened?” Now guilt, the addiction’s sidekick, takes over. “I must fight harder,” says thought that thinks the addiction is a separate and defeatable enemy.

But anything can be turned into its opposite. The way out of addiction is to welcome it as a teacher and an opportunity to become present as conscious awareness. One doesn’t defeat addiction; one dissolves it with awareness. When the desire rises, just watch it, letting it be, not judging it. “Ah, there you are. This is what is.” Sitting with an addictive desire is like having compassion for a friend. You just sit and listen to the friend without applying labels and finding fault or trying to change the friend.

In the watching, in the listening, in the looking, you discover a space around the desire and that you have a choice either to act on the desire or not. But you are conscious! When the desire takes over your mind, you are unconscious and have no choice. So bow to your addiction, welcome your addiction; your addiction is your spiritual teacher and has come into your life to bring you salvation and freedom.

Posted under General Observations, meditation help, up lifting

Last night I watched the 60 minutes interview with the Iranian president, Ahmadinejad, and he seemed like a nice man, but the interviewer was so serious, almost angry in his blunt efforts to get a confession that he was, indeed, the devil.

What is it about us that needs to find Satan, God’s fallen angle and “evil doer” in the world. He’s out there, we believe, so the search in on, and once we suspect that we’ve found him, BOOM, goes our nuclear bomb. But then he just pops up again with a new face in another place.

We got rid of Saddam, so now it’s Ahmadinejad’s turn. Welcome to the hot seat and the inquisition. If you confess that you are the devil, we won’t destroy you. That’s all we want. Say you are building a nuclear bomb. Admit you are arming insurgents with your weapons. Come clean that you want to destroy Israel and finish what the Nazis started. Take off your sheep’s clothing. Show us your teeth.

Our foreign policy is being held hostage by the myth of the cosmic war between the forces of good and evil, a myth that goes back to ancient Mesopotamia, which is now called Iraq. Once you believe that evil is out there and absolute, then it becomes a religious duty and purpose to find and destroy it. When religion and politics merge, as they have in our national mind, then the myth is armed with nuclear warheads.

A myth is a collective dream that holds our consciousness in its sleep, and as long as it frames our perspective of reality, then that is how we experience that reality. The purpose of life is not to defeat evil, but to wake up.

Posted under General Observations

Sunday is the day of least resistance. If you want to sleep late: You can! Read the paper until noon: Do it! Watch sports or movies all day: Why not! Whatever life says it wants, Sunday says, “Okay.”

But the rest of the week—forget about it! Get up, feed the kids, go to work, clean the house, fix this, fix that, never a minute, never a moment to rest. We are in perpetual resistance to whatever life says it wants, life here being the external world that makes demands on us.

Is this a life? Is this the purpose of the universe? Is this what millions of years of evolution or God’s design has brought us to? Why can’t we have Sunday everyday? Why can’t every day be a day of peace and rest? It’s like Sunday is the Garden of Eden and the rest of the week we are tossed out.

Maybe we need to look at our perception of the calendar. First, the calendar is artificial partition of the day— just as the clock is a symbolic and handy division of this moment. Clocks and calendars spread time out into a line, giving it a past and a future and leaving almost no consciousness for the present moment—which is where we live!

And thought—which is where we think we live—can only swim in the past or the future, just as a fish can only live in water. You can’t separate thought from time, but you can separate life from the calendar.

Sundays give us a brief glimpse of this timeless moment without the grid of past and future. We can just BE on Sundays, and listen to the wind chimes on the front porch. On Sundays we offer no resistance to life, and life loves us for it.

Posted under up lifting