zenjohn

Spiritual security cannot be given to you – you have to find it yourself, and it can only be found within the source of existence that makes your life alive.
- Dainin Katagiri Roshi

Losing sight of our original openness, we closed our hearts to the Universe. Our delusions became the round hole in which, no matter what, the innumerable shapes of reality were made to fit. We colored present moment from the palate of our past because without such a lens, we thought we would be blind. And since ego was all we believed we were, what it saw we thought was all that there could ever be.

So we put down stakes and tried to homestead reality. We built up our little plots of Universe like frontier settlers, believing if we did a good enough job we’d eat, and be safe, and maybe happy. And walled away from the truth of the Universe, we awaited karma.
Sometimes the world looked nice enough, but never always, and for some, never ever. No wonder so many of us spent our days merely chasing one distraction after the next, like hungry frantic honeybees in fields of too few flowers.

Seeing and manifesting the truth of delusion is an amazing, exhilarating, and sometimes terrifying journey. Learning we aren’t just ego parts held together in service to obtaining pleasure and diminishing pain isn’t necessarily a joyful experience. Loosening the grip on our various cages can trigger a kind of psychic vertigo that – if we’re not careful – sends us hurtling towards any seemingly easy solution that might shore up the walls and re-lock the door.

This fear, however, comes from ignorance, not enlightenment. No one loses identity or anything else in Zazen; we simply realize the roles and personas we rely upon aren’t the fundamental truth we’ve always sought. We still get to protect, defend, assert, parent, love, coach, and fix anything we want. Only now, that’s decided and acted on from somewhere bigger and deeper, through something that exists beyond the transient concerns of our human lives and karma.

We still think, feel, hear, see, taste, touch, and smell. We still seek happiness, eat ice cream, desire love, hate paperwork, and drive too fast. We still worry, obsess, wonder, fret, and laugh. We make mistakes, hurt people’s feelings, behave selfishly, and sometimes fall flat on our faces. We’re still human beings in a world far larger and more incomprehensible then our thinking can handle, no matter how awake we think we are.

But in Zazen, and in our larger daily moment to moment lives, something happens that makes the journey well worth the effort. As attachment to ego and the small selves found within wanes, instead of anything disappearing, awareness dramatically expands. We learn at depth the world isn’t just out there and we’re not just in here. The walls we thought were steel turn to lifting fog, and like prisoners discovering the cell door was unlocked all along, we find the freedom to finally work and play at will in the fields and valleys of the Universe.

Experiencing openness in the world drowns out ego’s obsession with who we are and what we’re about. While our roles, patterns, habits, and tendencies remain, we wear them more like loose fitting robes. Since there’s nothing to run from, no more heart shaped holes to fill, no demons to slay, and no children to hide away, life’s pressures, demands, and expectations flow more easily. We see from the top of our heads to the bottom of our feet, and in that awareness embrace all life’s beings, all life’s moments, all life’s joy, and all life’s sorrow.

As our haunted past fades into calm memory, as we attend to ourselves just as we attend to the kindling and the checkbook, and as we continue to awaken, we realize our thoughts and feelings, beliefs, perceptions, and behavior are no longer enemies to endlessly fight or allies to desperately encourage. Just as with everything else going on inside or out, mind’s contents aren't bad or good, right or wrong. They just are.

And in that space where wise hearts abide, we can finally know the truth: that all is well, all is fine, everything as it is just is, just as it’s always been.

In the Genjo Koan, the great Zen Master Dogen Zenji talks about firewood and the ash it becomes afterwards. And though once burned there’s no going back, the firewood somehow continues to abide. Whatever it was it still is: the seedling, the tree, the wood, the forest, the axe and the flame. It’s the earth and sky and the people who learned fire in the first place. It’s warmth and the food we cook over the coals. It’s the mothers who fed us, the family that ate, each plate and every cup. All these transitions, connections, evolutions, and movement from one to the other always remain, embedded in the ash that blows away at dawn’s first breeze.

There’s no inside and outside here, no self centeredness, selfishness, greed, envy, hate, or fear. There’s nothing to gain, nothing to lose. The boundaries we built everywhere are gone. What’s felt and thought, seen and heard, smelled, tasted, and touched just is, whether we sense it in our own or someone else’s heart.

Understanding this, we chop wood and carry water, we wash our dishes and feed our children. We mourn the past and worry the future. We live. We get sick. We heal. We die. All of this – every last bit, and more – calls out moment to moment. It’s in the ash. In the wood. And in our hearts. We don’t make it, we find it, laying there all along in the palm of our hand, in the sun and moon, and in the smallest particle of the tiniest grain of sand in the most remote beach on an undiscovered island.

Knowing truth – not just intellectually but from the bottom of our hearts – is beyond words, beyond concepts, beyond the small self driving us down the street each morning. It reflects the openness of the Dharma, the Universe, and our place with it. Once merely floating in choppy shallow seas, we now melt all the way to the ocean floor.

To be genuinely conscious is to be truly awake, working in concert with all there is, perfecting life, moment to moment, through all time and space, a sort of brightly lit pinpoint of awareness through which we act in the Universe. Ebbing, flowing, grasping impermanence, understanding beyond words how moment arises, we attend our lives, not from the ego’s selfish separateness, but instead with eyes open to what needs doing and what moment calls for. As the walls fade, so too expands our compassion and connection with all beings, all things, and all life. Sensing how wrong we’ve been, we finally see that fundamentally there is no other out there, nor a self in here.

Nevertheless, we mustn’t forget the Buddha-way is a distinctly human endeavor. We’re thinking beings and nothing about waking up changes this one bit. We don’t cease wondering, planning, worrying, and attaching. We build concepts, create systems, develop rules, erect structures, map territories, and make judgments. We calculate, theorize, generate, quantify, tabulate, deduce, induce, extrapolate, and synthesize. And every last bit of this presumes – not improperly – a static and constant reality of discrete objects.

But of course if we aren’t careful, therein abides every last bit of our suffering too. After all, breath by breath we continually move closer and closer to our own demise while life just happens in all its flowing impermanence, interrelated complexity, and unexpectedness. Events transpire and conspire. Disappointment, tragedy, anxiety, and trauma color and flavor our days and nights. We get sick, loved ones leave, our jobs end, our taxes go up, and our incomes don’t. Even the good we obtain creates struggle, as it changes our reality, proves not to be the end we sought, or creates complications we aren’t prepared too attend to. Zen masters no less than anyone else struggle with grief, sadness, hardship, unfairness, and everything else humans call bad or wrong.

There is a difference however and it comes with the change that occurs in waking up. Though we still carry the ego-self we first brought to the cushion, now not only do we see it and know it, but we also begin to see and know the larger fuller deeper picture in which it thrives. We still struggle with our selves, but see the struggle for what it is. And though we still seek and desire and strive, we also come to such endeavors with open eyes and hearts, knowing full well the effort can’t fix something that isn’t broken.

There’s no nirvana for the small self. But we do find healing. There’s no land of plenty or eternal bread and circuses, but plenty of joy, romance, fun, happiness, passion, and elation. There’s love, peace, thriving, and overcoming. There’s the feeling that arises with a problem solved, a want satisfied, a pain cured. There’s the wonder of an elegant poem or a beautiful work of art, the laughter of friends, and the silliness playing children. And there’s sublime satisfaction in right sizing our worries and concerns, making peace with our warring troubles, comforting our wounded inner children, and honoring our newly semi-retired managers, problem solvers, and image makers.

And always when suffering comes, when pain again shows its unwanted face, we can know – with the knowing that flows from all we’ve faced, all we’ve nurtured, all we’ve seen and heard and thought – this too shall pass, impermanence is swift, and what truly is transcends these ultimately trivial momentary learning events.

In Zen we talk about koi, the beautiful and abundant Asian fish. While koi are plenty good enough just the way they are, seeking more some swim up the Yellow River to its headwaters. There, so it’s said, they find the Dragon’s Gate, a place of treacherous stormy waters. A few koi make it through the Gate, emerging into the sky as great and fierce dragons devoted to protecting the world, its people, and the dharma. They know all, see all, and understand all. But perhaps ironically, these dragons, even in all their glory nonetheless still look and behave exactly like koi.

We’re all like this. We struggle tirelessly for ourselves, our families, and our people. In service to these values, beliefs, wants and needs, we devote our efforts day and night. We sacrifice from motives pure as driven snow, each in our own unique effort to pass through the gate, attain whatever truth there is to be had, and bring it to bear in our life’s work.

Ironically, the wisdom is nowhere near that far away. The Dragon’s Gate isn’t at the headwaters of the Yellow River. It’s actually right here, right now, free for the taking in everyday life. We’ve tasted it many times; we can cultivate it in Zazen. And we live it in present moment.

The Buddha Way is to be with eyes wide open. Turning inward, exploring self, we eventually arrive at the bottom of the human condition. Along the path, waking to the moment, we make our own peace. Over and over in Zazen, washing dishes, holding our children, calling our mothers, or buying an ice cream cone, we awake again to the firewood and the ashes. It happens when we’re worried, angry, happy, or sad, from birth, throughout life, until death, and maybe thereafter, too. It is the awakened human condition, nirvana, peace, heaven on earth, becoming self actualized, and living lives of purpose, all rolled into one. We’ve been here all along. There’s no escape. And that’s a good thing, indeed.

I will walk through fire
for true love,
true heart,
true self,

because without
true love,
true heart,
true self,

why walk anywhere
at all?

I just wish
you
walked there
with me.

If you do Zazen with full concentration, immediately you are free from Zazen, and from the idea of being someone who is doing Zazen.
- Dainin Katagiri Roshi

So our egos don’t want to meditate. We don’t want to sit Zazen. We don’t want to quiet down, and we don’t want to just be with self. There may be a part of us who thinks it’s cool or inspiring or leads to something worthy, but when push comes to shove, no one wants to just sit. It’s foreign; it runs counter to everything we’ve ever done in life. We think it’s too hard, time wasting, somehow selfish, and very very alien. These perceptions are wrong, of course, but until we see through the layers of ego, none of us stands much of a chance of ever turning towards a more fully mindful awakened life.

Just sitting means to narrow ego’s activity to the bare minimum. We’re not washing dishes or driving cars or reading books or talking to anyone. We’re not actively planning the day or pondering The Iliad or learning guided imagery. We're not deciding to think about anything, and we're not deciding not to think about anything. We’re not trying nor avoiding doing or getting or accomplishing anything. In Zazen (sitting meditation) we not only cease directing our consciousness towards anything in particular, but we also don't resist whatever within us does dare to emerge. We sit. That’s all.

There’s irony in this. It flows from the layers of truth and playful falsehood that come with a real meditation practice. We don’t sit for any purpose because we’re so completely addicted to always having a purpose in everything we do that only by embracing an overt and committed non-purpose can we break free of such an object-driven mind. Yet as soon as anyone truly begins let go, something new pops up to take its place. Then, we turn our attention to letting that new thought go. Once our grip loosens yet again, like a lock on a river taking in fresh water, the space fills with still newer thinking, newer ideas, a newer focus to let go of yet again.

And so, while at one level it’s meaningful to speak of deflating ego, manifesting enlightenment, finding God, or discovering Buddha-Nature, at a deeper level, we realize, our seeking mind itself defeats this very purpose.

And so we just sit. Upright, on a cushion (or in a chair), our backs straight, legs crossed, left hand upwards on the palm of the right, thumb-tips touching. Eyes half open. Breathing without control or hindrance, witnessing the content of mind.

Zazen is paying attention. Zazen is witnessing. We watch our bodies, our breathing, the posture we maintain, the feeling of the breeze across the face, and the ground beneath us. Perhaps we find and release a sense of peace, as we let go whatever captured our focus and again turn back to conscious presence. Soon enough we’re resume wondering about this or that, worrying about the day ahead or the one just past, whatever. Maybe we believe this mindfulness business is stupid or pointless, that there’s something wrong because we can’t just focus on what we think ought to be present moment, or that our lives are too involved for the foolishness of seemingly not doing anything. Mostly, we wonder why it is we simply cannot stop thinking.

And if we’re earnest, in each such instance we catch ourselves, acknowledge conscious mind’s focus, and return as best we can to the undistracted moment.

Over and over this process repeats, as we bear witness to whatever crosses the travel-worn paths of mind. Thoughts arise, patterns emerge, the wind breaks over our shoulders, and the floor returns beneath our feet. Again and again we feel and forget the breath in our lungs, the straightness from our hips to our heads, the view before our half-closed eyes.

New meaning appears. Maybe we learn we can indeed sit quietly for brief periods of time. Perhaps we discover how important physical comfort is to our well being. Sometimes we’re inundated with concerns and worries. Often there’s a kind of energy, as the act of just sitting becomes routine and we come to think we’re Buddha. And frequently, we find ourselves struggling openly with difficulties we can’t satisfy, troubles we need to face, problems that defy solution, and tasks we dread. No matter. Witnessing and letting go continues, as we return again and again to breath, posture, the experience of just now.

There is a kind of deep and fundamental learning that takes place in Zazen. It defies explanation or description because it doesn’t depend upon words, sentences, pictures, or sound. It comes at first in the thorough realization that sitting still just with self is nothing at all like we anticipated. It appears in the clarity of seeing how attached we are to our thinking and judging and clinging to one or another particular state of being. It emerges when we notice how much we believe certain things, worry about particular events, and compulsively circle our awareness around the same sorts of concerns again and again.

More important, it’s the realization none of this has to be the way we are. We don’t have to obsess about how we look, act, think, or do. In witnessing what happens in stillness, we come to understand how foolishly important we’ve made our habits of mind. And eventually, we notice from this increasingly comfortable seat of newfound freedom the underlying commitments, tendencies, and conclusions we’ve hinged our reality upon.

Most significantly of all, we begin to finally glimpse something we’ve vainly sought after for as long as we can remember: the true and startling act of really letting go.

Returning to mindfulness, we again as best we can enter the simplicity of present moment. We experience an intermittent but increasing ease with settling in, giving up trivial worries that in the beginning stymied us. Our former concerns with aching knees and remaining awake haven’t disappeared; and yet, their significance wanes. We experience this as a kind of home, a place we’ve somehow made our own.

Not surprisingly a new layer of reality arises, as seemingly more substantial concerns come into view. Deeper thoughts emerge, as conscious mind tires of wondering how long until the end of the sitting period, why our feet are numb, and who thought this foolishness up in the first place. As such notions drift away, more fundamental content appears, emotions flare up, and aspects of self we don’t usually notice come into view.

Zazen is a revolutionary act if for no other reason then because it clarifies the existence and limitations of the ego self. In Zazen, not only do we notice how often we think about events that leave us feeling strong or weak, happy or sad, resolved or uncertain, and not only do we see the patterns that feed such thoughts, but also we begin to see the way such thinking traps and hinders our experience of the world.

Zazen puts us at the gateway to understanding the identities we’ve adopted throughout our lives. Starting with the obvious roles of parent, lover, spouse, employee, and so on, we soon discern deeper and more basic selves. We notice our protectors, distracters, and reactors, the judgmental parents we internalized, and the striving approval seeking children we’ve created. We begin to see our tendencies to run towards or away from opportunities for love, commitment, success, intimacy, and so forth. And we begin to understand the causes and conditions under which these patterns of living developed.

There is an awakening that comes in seeing how our ideas about ourselves and the world aren’t as real as we once thought. Just because we feel good or bad doesn’t mean we are good or bad. Even though we might believe we’re a certain way, this doesn’t make it some kind of objective fact. And although we’ve come to believe we forever will be whatever we are, such is not the case, as we see that what we think isn’t accurate or the end of the story.

And as we sit with such realizations, another awakening emerges. Concluding our beliefs are delusional isn’t quite right either. Though we maybe intellectually understand what we think isn’t on the same plain as what there is, this clarity’s not the end of the story. We do indeed, after all and as a matter of fact, hurt, suffer, strive for, and believe. We want, we need, we seek, and we flee. Just because we know the content of mind isn’t quite true doesn’t make it false. Just because our ideas are delusional doesn’t mean they aren’t real. The pain and struggle we find on the cushion isn’t some mere hallucination. The ego we’ve lived with for all these years is indeed substantial and deserves attention.

Grasping this is hard work. We want to let go, to feel be free; but our habits of mind don’t obey. Though we want to see with again-new eyes, our deep beliefs and commitments insist on flowing across the screen of awareness like leaves in late autumn. We feel; we think; we cling; and we suffer. Returning to breath, our thinking doesn’t end; it incessantly tugs and tosses like a hungry child, a toy boat in deep stormy seas.

Witnessing our concerns, parts of ego we can’t believe lay hidden come into focus. Increasingly cognizant of suffering, the memories bubble into awareness like overflowing lava, burning everything in its trek to the sea. Again and again, we return to the cushion, only to yet once more face ego’s wilderness.

It may seem as if something’s again wrong. After all, isn’t meditation supposed to be practiced mindfulness? Isn’t mindfulness supposed to be presence in the moment without the baggage of past and future weighing down consciousness? Isn’t this supposed to be relaxing or rejuvenating? Why instead, after finally getting used to sitting and breathing, are we now headed towards deeper, maybe more troubling thinking, wondering, worrying, planning, remembering, and feeling? The struggle we’ve run from outside of Zazen just gets louder and deeper within Zazen, cluttering up the breeze and distracting from the idea waking up. Worse yet, the discoveries we find here linger afterwards, flavoring and haunting our activities away from the cushion.

There is a temptation now to turn away from observing and back towards controlling. We want to try not to think about what we’re thinking. Our frustration emerges, and we judge our practice poorly, wondering anew if any of this has value at all.

Sitting Zazen takes courage. The practice isn’t for the faint of heart. Ego wants peace and learned a long long time ago how to settle for whatever approximation thereof might suffice. Why wouldn’t we sometimes fight tooth and nail against the perceived reality of simply sitting with mind splayed out across consciousness?

This work – this just being present in our lives – opens doors that were closed and welded shut back when what was faced seemed insurmountable. The nuts and bolts that sealed our fate were the ideas we evolved for very good reasons. The world was a certain way then, after all, and what we did needed doing. The rules and structures got us across whatever chasms and divides we encountered, and brought us to wherever we ended up. We didn’t die. We learned a lot. We grew and attained some measure of success, joy, peace, and meaning. Why screw it up, ego asks, by opening up old cans of worms?

So here we are, sitting just with ourselves, just with our lives, just with whatever there is, and somehow something’s happening we didn’t expect and don’t much care for. We feel. We sense difficult emotions. We think about the past, the future, lost love, and times of pain. Anger, resentment, fear, and sadness rise up. We crave distraction and want to look for avenues of escape. Whatever protectors within us try and go to work, as we find ourselves beginning to ruminate on old familiar territory, events, and times before or since.

If we witness our difficulties with compassion and wholehearted openness, we begin to see with deep clarity who’s inside us and why they’re the way they are. We start to grasp how we react, make sense of, and manage our lives. The concerns these parts of ego – these beings – foster, the truths they sustain, and the methods they utilize all come into view, as we observe and release the beings flowing before our eyes.

We notice how we run, fight, hide from, or deny the world. We see how our energy goes to measuring up, making demands, facilitating and manipulating the people in our lives. We recognize the importance of loving and being loved, pushing away or drawing close, pleasing and being pleased, not in service to others but always in relation to sustaining our own fragile status. We begin to clarify how important it is for everything to be just so, how imperative it is to color within the lines we drew out long ago, and how insistent we’ve become at sustaining a delicate balance.

At some point there may come a realization. It begins to dawn on us how the beings we usually think we are, the grown up, working, homemaking, and parenting actors we see ourselves as, just aren’t as substantial as we thought. The reality we attached to them seems less clear now, less defined, less fundamental. Their rules and structures, their boundaries and strategies and methods, their importance, and their meaning become suspect. We see how they perform, mindlessly at times, reacting on cue, promoting and persuading, sometimes seeming to insist, always with an eye towards the notion that their way is the way and the only way. We’re on a new path now. The transparency of our formerly solid commitments has begun to appear. What we think is right-sizing itself.

Eventually and if we’re brave, the people we once thought we were before these older selves took over, the helpless, hungry, playful, loving, and selfless children that cried and slept and played and stared in wonder at everything there was in this strange new world come out to join us on the cushion. Their fear, anger, happiness, confusion, and innocence flows through us, and we see the connection between them and who we later became. Memories open into consciousness and we start to again see that world we experienced growing up. We remember. We see and feel. We experience the years and times back when, watching the children we were going about their day. And we feel their hurt, their pain, their excitement and struggle as they navigate the growing world, making sense and learning how to survive.

There comes a time in practice where even this deep deep content exhausts itself. Just as we grew weary of our over-concern with aching bones and tired eyes, so too exhaustion turns us away from the habit of being in some or another role or guise. The parts of ego we rely upon from moment to moment and the underlying vulnerability it protects no longer carry us along so well. Instead, we sense a newness that’s bigger and broader and deeper than what before we took the world to contain.

In Zazen, a new kind of clarity arises. It’s not the clarity we gain from learning a new skill or mastering a difficult problem, nor is it the clarity that comes with the various life changes we may have undertaken during difficult transitions in the past. This clarity flows in deeper water, arising as we come to know, somehow, from a place beyond ego, below the patterns of thought and feeling we’re so used to, behind the roles and identities we’ve assumed were all we were.

It’s the awareness that comes in witnessing from below identity. It’s the place that isn’t a place, from eyes that aren’t eyes, and mind that transcends thought itself. And it’s here, where we finally after all these years, really begin to see, and feel, and touch, and taste, and hear, and know ourselves, our world, whole Universe. We’re no longer swimming in the shallows and thinking that’s the entire ocean. We’re beginning to grasp just how deep and wide the world is.

There is a old Zen story – a question for students to ponder – where the teacher invites her students to identify the face they had before their parents were born. The students earnestly return to their cushions to ponder this seemingly nonsensical puzzle, struggling mightily from a place of ego to solve the problem. Which of course, won't work; only from the place before ego, where witnessing mind transcends who we think we are does the answer to the puzzle reside.

Zazen, therefore, is about just sitting, and it’s about far more than just sitting. It’s the practice of learning to be, seeing where delusion abides, and coming to relinquish our grip on thought. It’s about letting go of ego, and it’s about letting go of letting go of ego. It’s right sizing what we just know to be true, and embracing the uncertain ever changing and interrelated truth of everything. It’s about True Self, Buddha-Nature, God Within, and the Spirit of the Universe.

Zazen tears down the artificial walls of self. It knocks away without harming the parts of each of us we once didn’t know existed, then came to believe were all we were. It clarifies truth and the foolishness of thinking we’re damaged subjects in an imperfect universe of objects, and it offers, in such realizations, real healing, as we find ourselves letting go our deathlike grip on ego’s concerns. Zazen brings into view both the reality of our fears and concerns, and their foolishness. It teaches who we are is both far less and far more then what we thought. And it brings out the deeper clarity of realizing while we don’t necessarily become at peace with everything, we do become at peace with not being at peace. We cease to suffer with our suffering.

waiting
hoping
wondering
feeling
missing
you

Imagine for a moment what it’s like to be an enlightened being. Think about someone that looks and acts like whatever you think it means to be awake. Picture that person with the inner reality of a Jesus, Buddha, Gandhi, Mother Theresa, or Mohammed. Choose whomever you want. What are the qualities that make up such an individual? Most of us immediately begin to imagine someone with a supreme sense of peace, clarity, wisdom, humility, altruism, and personal accomplishment.

Imagine now what might need to happen in order for each of us to become like such a person. In that event, we’ll likely turn our attention to our personal characteristics. We’ll compare our qualities to that image of enlightenment, and come up with the places where our character is similar and where it differs. We might identify core areas where we’re closer to this notion of perfection, places where we’re farther away, and perhaps places so far removed from enlightenment that we’re hardly able to even begin imagining the necessary improvements.

Perhaps we’ll see what we take to be our flaws, like selfishness, arrogance, passiveness, and so on; maybe we’ll see aspects of self we think aren’t so bad, such as compassion, understanding, knowledge. Maybe we’ll envision situations such a being might face, and try to map out the appropriate responses enlightenment calls for. Eventually, if we take the time, we very likely could come up with an image or fairly clear idea of what we’d need to be like, and perhaps even how the transformation might play out.

This, of course, isn’t at all what real enlightenment involves. It is, instead, very likely close to what we may have actually done at least once and perhaps many times in our lives. It’s the technique an ego-based approach to life employs, whereby we ladle over an already existing sense of self some new costume we think stands a chance of getting us the new external “enlightenment” or “self-improvement” or “big personal change” goal. The only difference, perhaps, is that while now we’ve targeted “enlightened being” as the self we want to be, in the past our sights were likely lower, targeting “good student” or “loving spouse” or “better parent.”

Ask yourself who were you when you were in kindergarten? What kind of a kid did you become in Junior High School? What were you like when you came into puberty? What did your parents’ expectations make you into as a teenager? How did you see yourself when you left home? When you became a spouse? Or a parent? Or a divorced person? Widow? Who did you become after you turned 50?

All these identities remain, in one guise or another. We’ve just covered them over and submerged them into the soup of past selves, much like we redecorate our homes or dress up for an evening out on the town.

Now, for a moment return to the exercise and just let the thoughts and feelings you had about enlightenment have their way with you. Accept whatever flows through consciousness without hindrance. You know now they’re just thoughts, just feelings, a sort of fantasy about who and what you can pretend to be. Let them evolve along for a bit, while you just pay attention. Try not to judge, but merely witness, for a few moments, and then let the enlightenment focus go.

Did this idea leave willingly? Were you able to send your thinking about all this off stage, out of the camera’s view? What happened next? Where did your attention travel? Did you judge the pictures that flashed across conscious mind? Did you have the thought: this exercise is stupid? Perhaps something emerged that’s tired of reading? Maybe distraction by other, unrelated notions arose? Or were you captivated and earnest about the content? In any event, it’s likely you found a significant amount of thought attaching itself to the simple directive to just let the thoughts and feelings flow along.

Typically, if we slow down enough to notice, we can begin to see how our minds are constantly cluttered with a torrential jumble of thoughts, beliefs, feelings, and so on. We’re always thinking, to the extent it often constitutes a dull rumbling roar.

And if we follow the exercise along the path a bit more, witnessing, perhaps identifying, and then letting go of whatever comes across the screen of awareness, the beginning of realization of just how amazingly frenetic active mind truly is appears. And short of coma, deep non-dreaming sleep, or death, there’s nothing anyone can do about this. Human beings are by definition thinkers, idea makers, conceptualizers, and mental organizers. It is, quite literally, what we do best. And it’s also perhaps quite literally the last thing we’re capable of changing.

The more fundamental concern arising from this exercise is to ask what exactly it means to witness any of this. We imagined enlightenment, allowed ourselves to flesh out what we thought that might be like, and compared it to who we think we are now. We saw how our picture, by definition, isn’t enlightenment at all, but merely an idea, and we saw what our minds did as we tried to let go it’s focus.

So clearly, whatever witnessing is, we’re capable of doing it.

But who or what exactly is it that actually witnesses anything? Was it a person? Can you glimpse him or her?” Was it one of your other selves, one of your current identity incarnations? Can you describe what the witness looked like or how it acts?

If so, then congratulations: you’ve just met one of your ego-selves. There are undoubtedly more; sometimes many many more. We build them at will from the airy content of thought and belief. Some are more durable than others, withstanding the test of time and actively engaging life for years. Other’s appear and retire quickly, barely noticed.

You haven’t, however, actually found the true witness, because we aren’t able to see the same eyes we look through. We observe a concept, a mental reflection we call “eyes,” but not the eyes themselves. The idea of enlightenment is like this. So is any idea of what we’re like, who we really are, what we see through, what True Self is. No matter how thorough the search, how actively we define and flesh out the thing doing the seeing, all we get is a concept, an idea, an image – never the real thing. Such an endeavor, for all it’s putative value, is most emphatically not waking up.

And yet, we can indeed somehow truly witness life, mind, self, and the Universe, from a place beyond or below the ego we all too easily take completely for granted. It comes in the night, when we’re trapped and paralyzed, when our loved ones lay in hospital rooms, when our lovers break our hearts, and when we stumble upon the angels and saints that get through our defenses and show us the next step on the path. It happens when we least expect it, when whatever we try to employ from conscious mind exhausts itself, gets sidestepped, and ultimately fails.

We can call these events spiritual moments. They happen, we find ourselves horribly or joyously overwhelmed, our experience of the world in petty or significant ways changes, and then conscious mind adapts and conceptualizes the experience into memory. Thereafter, we’re more or less able to go on, remade perhaps marginally wiser for the experience, but no more awake then our average carrot or fencepost.

There is another way to wake up, one that doesn’t require significant reality changing trauma. Mindful diligent practice-based exploration wakes us up, too. Any effort where we tenaciously refuse to allow ourselves to attach to anything less (or anything at all for that matter) wakes us up. Any endeavor whereby we remain in contact with the world as it really is (as opposed to our concepts of the world as we think it is) wakes us up. And any effort where we witness and attend to our internal life of concepts, ideas, beliefs, and truths wakes us up. And the best part of such an effort is it’s anything but transitory and illusive.

Manifesting unmediated True Self isn’t about generating new ideas, defining who we are, or adding yet another layer to ego’s mix. Waking up doesn’t involve installing some new truer truth, sense of identity, belief system, or alternative lens through which to view the world. Indeed, having performed innumerable such addition problems over the years to no avail, the raw truth of this realization ought to be obvious. Instead of spirituality, enlightenment, God-consciousness, redemption, or salvation, what we get for our efforts at most is a bit of respite, a sense of fleeting joy, maybe helpful information, good and not-so-good strategies for living life, and more ego-clutter to think and feel disappointment about once our suffering returns.

Waking up is instead a subtraction problem. Manifesting such openness involves finding ways to short-circuit and let go the content – the boundaries – of mind. Only by relinquishing the strangle-hold our thoughts, feelings, beliefs and sacred truths maintain over us does the opportunity to experience the Universe with eyes and heart wide open appear.

Waking up is about experiencing whatever there is unconditionally. It’s about fearlessly witnessing not only what our eyes and ears and skin and nose and lips bring to us, but also whatever we think and feel about it. Awakening is about opening up and sharing with ourselves, without preference, without judgment, without the habit of deciding and choosing, accepting and rejecting. It’s about experiencing self with open hands and hearts.

We still get to act, of course. We still get our preferences, desires, habits, ego-identities, everything. Letting go isn’t about denying anything or becoming some sort of stoic disengaged zombie. We don’t really need much help with that. We’re already experts at turning away from what we carry within but hate acknowledging, what we seek, what we fear, and what we truly truly love.

The great Zen teacher Dogen Zenji characterizes enlightenment as intimacy with all things. And that includes intimacy with the various contents of our ego-selves, our managers and protectors and lost little children, our addictions and compulsions, our desires, habits, wants, and needs. By turning and fearlessly embracing our inner reality, we empower ourselves to see what’s really there, to accept the full plethora of issues, concerns, beliefs, and core truths we’ve built our lives upon.

The difference is that in awakening, in seeing what ego self really is, we gain the opportunity to meaningfully respond to our wants, needs, desires, and revulsions. We gain the potential to choose wisely whatever needs doing, whatever’s called for in present moment, and whatever best suits the situation at hand. And best of all, from an awakened heart, we finally after so many years and so many struggles, find the opportunity to embrace real healing, real change, and real growth.

Everyone talks about being in the moment. Everyone agrees the best life is one where we’re always fully present here and now, as opposed to sharing moment to moment consciousness with past memories and future concerns.

And though such talk is nice, it begs the question: where exactly do we think we are if not in present moment? Where else is there, after all? Where else could anything possibly be?

Past and future are ideas existing in this very moment. We fool ourselves into thinking we’re in the past or future because we’re thinking about something that’s already occurred or that may occur, but what we’re really up to is nothing more than clumsily attending to whatever’s before us from one or another aspect of ego. In particular we’re coming at the moment from a sense of self that holds “the past is bad, it causes pain, I shouldn’t think about it” or “the future is uncertain, I’ll probably screw it up, I shouldn’t focus on it.” It’s a half-step towards waking up, but if we cling too tenaciously to the idea we’re “living in the past or worrying about the future,” we usually stall and then run away.

When we attempt to navigate present moment with rules like these we’re trying to pick and choose what’s actually here before us, what we’re willing to look at, what we’re interested in attending to. It’s like we’re saying, “OK, I am driving down the road on a beautiful Spring day and the best way to complete my journey is to pretend it’s only about the streets, and other cars and where I’m going, and not about how bad I feel about myself because of what’s really on my mind.”

Truth is what’s actually here and now is far more then streets and traffic and destinations. It’s the various selves in each of us, the memories, concerns, joys, and sorrows. They’re traveling, too. So are our friends and loved ones, our work and family, our history, our unknown future, all sentient beings known or unknown, and everything that ever was and ever will be throughout the Universe. Present moment contains all this, every last bit of it and far far more.

So it’s no wonder we ask our small selves to manage consciousness, especially the concerns we encounter inside we’re tired of because they cause us pain. It’s no wonder we pretend present moment is tiny and anything that doesn’t fit that preconception is unhealthy, a relic of the past, or some unwanted future concern. From ego’s view, all these objects of awareness are at best nuisances and at worst pathological and dysfunctional character flaws.

Truth is, though, no matter how unruly, disruptive, or inconvenient these notions are, and no matter how much or how little attention we grudgingly offer up in their direction, we bring on all our journeys all our successes and fears, hopes and dreams, desires and aversions. Always in this moment is whatever comes along for the ride. And while our ego-selves just want to treat parts of the here and now like unwanted passengers we let out at the next corner, no matter how often we try and fling open the doors to kick out the pain, it always reappears.

True Self witnesses this, sees our silly efforts at denial, and recognizes the truth of present moment. True Self knows and accepts all there is. True Self laughs joyously at ego’s effort, grieves its pain, and hears its sorrow. And if we let it, True Self lights the way home. Indeed, True Self is the perfection of present moment.

Present moment is irrevocable, all inclusive, infinite. It’s everything that was, everything that is, everything that ever will be. Right here and right now, we each bring to the Universe our selves, our desires, wants, needs, worries, fears, terrors, joys, and sorrows. Arrayed across the mind’s horizon rest all we’ve been through, all we face, all our karma. We carry our parents, our brothers and sisters, our lovers, husbands, wives, children, grandchildren, friends and enemies; every one and every thing.

Witnessing this is awesome and terrifying. We think we can’t embrace so much, and so we box out whatever doesn’t suit the thing we want. We pretend all we are is something small and all there is is some tiny little concrete manageable thing. And we do it just to get where we’re going, because once there, small self says, everything will finally be alright.

Witnessing more deeply, waking up to what we deny, facing pain from an open heart, we come to understand and accept. Without costumes cloaking being, nothing comes between us and the world. And rising to these truths, we finally begin to wake up.

We learn. We grasp how lonely, tired, angry, sad, and fearful our ego’s become. We see abandonment, taste rejection, and touch the solitude our small selves carry through the years. And we begin to recognize at depth the compassion, comfort, acceptance, and understanding we’ve sought forever doesn’t come from our eating, drinking, fucking and spending. And it doesn’t flow from not eating and drinking, fucking, and spending either. It doesn’t come from friends, and lovers, and parents, and children, the sun, the earth, or anything else. And it doesn’t come from conceptualizing, figuring things out, adopting or abandoning spirituality, reading books or kneeling in front of alters.
The completion we seek comes from within – from True Self – where it’s been all along.

The awakened life is life here and now, in this very instant. It’s presence with everything that is, with all the trees and grasses, walls and fences, all the people, all their thoughts and feelings, and all their behavior. It’s the past and the future throughout time and space. It’s being with what there is, what we feel, what we do, where we go. It’s open hearted acceptance inside and out. It’s beyond words and ideas, unknowable, ever changing, constantly flowing. It’s the past, the future, our thoughts and feelings, the Universe we face.

And when we witness it, attend to it, love, nurture, and parent it, even for the briefest blink of the eye, the whole world flowers, peace descends, and our hearts somehow grasp the true joy of just being in the moment that never ends.

I left roses for her
everywhere

they lay now in piles
and corners

unsought
untaken
unknown
alone

a subtle call

cold night air
echoes their silence

in perfect
unanswered
prose

As adults, our waking moments are usually spent in constant active connection with the world. We experience this as a kind of perpetual doing where the focus of attention and effort is purposely directed elsewhere. This activity is ubiquitous; it permeates consciousness. Our days and nights are filled with one task after the next, often to the extent that we find intolerable the sensation of having nothing to do. We crave stimulation and activity, obsessively seeking it out in work, play, relaxation, even sleep. We eat, drink, make love, read, converse, watch television, listen to music, work, study, clean, groom, shop, and worship, often compulsively because we wholeheartedly believe the path to completion lies in acquiring the right amount of object oriented goodness. In short, we’ve become seekers stubbornly focused outward into the world, chasing salvation, respite, and relief as if it were a commodity.

We do this to remedy what’s feared in its absence. Doing nothing, we believe, isn’t just morally suspect, it’s also an invitation for more suffering. Once our attention lags we find ourselves lured inward, to thoughts and feelings, to our deeper beliefs, and to exactly the places we fear to tread. And there, we just know, lies terrible painful truth we don’t know what to do with and cannot vanquish.

So in a sense it’s a good thing when the pain starts to simmer and fear reappears, that other aspects of self rise up to yet divert our gaze. We chase frantically out the window of mind until the nagging inward yearning ceases its pull, because the last thing we really want to do is go inside and suffer. Pain’s appearance is a clarion call to arms; when heard, our responders leap to their feet, charging off towards whatever attracts our attention with the promise of relief.

 And there’s nothing wrong with feeling good, being at peace, achieving serenity, finding meaning, creating beauty, enjoying sensual pleasure, and living with purpose. Just because we’ve attempted such a life under the auspices of a self we don’t realize is a delusional construct doesn’t make the goal a bad thing. And no one ought to be blamed for looking first where the pain isn’t; only fools and masochists hold their hands to a hot stove without very good reasons.

 So our motives throughout have been the peace all humans seek. If we just find the correct combination to the safe, we’ve learned, its treasures are ours for the taking.

There’s a price for this error though. It lies in the increasing difficulty we encounter managing denial. It rests with the consequences we encounter by keeping our focus externalized. By refusing to acknowledge our lives aren’t really working, the innocence we once savored becomes a faded distant memory. Real and deep-seated happiness, purpose, meaning, and joy are gone. And all we know to do is more of the same.

 Keep in mind how we’ve learned not to be needy, not to complain, not to create waves, and not to resist. We’ve learned to ignore our fear, loneliness, anger, and sadness. We’ve accepted the message we were too demanding or willful or weak, or fragile, or selfish. And we learned to hide these concerns, first from our caregivers, and then from ourselves.  

 Now, as adults with decades of practice, we unmindfully see our task as continually playing out the truths we internalized in our youth. And so we chase after whatever resonates with what we already think. We eat and sleep and dress and shelter ourselves from physical suffering. We seek companionship, love, and support as solutions to loneliness. We strive for professional, family, and personal achievement in order to feel important. We build things and make babies and earn money and do good deeds to gain approval. And down deep, we do it all with the hope that if we’re successful, the little children inside us will finally measure up and achieve the kind of caring loving nurturing acceptance they have always craved.

 And we live out our lives as if in a dream.

 Only in a conscious and sustained effort is waking from this slumber possible. It takes deep courage and firm resolve. It calls on us to mindfully relinquish our cherished talent for distraction and control, not only in the beginning when motivation is all shiny and new, but later, when our inner fear screams out to run away. It requires facing with open eyes and hearts the beings who inhabit and decorate ego’s contours. It requires discovering the lost and buried little children in whose service they act. And it requires, in the end, stepping away completely from the need to conceptualize self at all, instead allowing the mind free reign to experience an unmediated universe

 We haven’t always been asleep. We’ve all experienced beautiful days, gorgeous sunsets, epiphanies and realizations that took our breath away and left us speechless and awake. We’ve also all had moments where our plans and dreams and scripts are thwarted, and we exhaustedly found ourselves disrupted not just on the surface but through to the bottom of our very being.

 When this happens, invariably, we initially experience a profound sense of imbalance, perhaps wonder and joy, and maybe terror and paralysis. Then, if we’re lucky, our ideas, thoughts, feelings, and concepts somehow settle away, and we face the experience unmitigated by ego’s concerns. These are the events we come to see as life changing. Whatever the trigger – death, loss, birth, great and overwhelming beauty – thereafter, everything forever is just a little bit different.

 These glimpses give us clues to an awakened life. We call them spiritual moments, mid life crises, the manifestation of God – the words aren’t important. They force us to regroup, recalibrate, and reorient. This is waking up. It happens in increments. It occurs best when we see how our efforts have come to naught, and we’re left adrift in a sea of unknown circumstances, when not only our thoughts fail us, but when we recognize that failure. Then, perhaps for the moment only, we wake up.

 Seeing, feeling, tasting, touching, smelling, and realizing our thinking, feelings, beliefs, and habits of mind we formerly took for god’s honest truth aren’t as real or sufficient as we thought can be the turning point. Here, in that blinking instant, we get a brief glimpse of what we really are, what the world really is, what life’s really like, and where the next step in the seeking path  might lead.

 There’s clarity here. And if we stay with it, we can realize how big, interconnected, flowing, and changing the Universe is. We can understand in a way that’s fundamentally different, because it comes from somewhere besides the ego-self. We see from a place that isn’t a place, from a self that’s somehow bigger then what we thought before was all we were, where the need to force what’s happening into necessary categories of meaning ceases, and where what we think and feel about the moment is as much an aspect of it as the moment itself.

 

Indeed, from this view, our small self’s perceptions and reactions are irrevocably embedded in the mix itself. The boundaries between subject (the me doing the looking) and the object (what I’m looking at) disappear into the larger reality; where before there was a self set apart from and experiencing through the lens of belief an object, now there’s just the experience itself, which includes but transcends the former’s truth.

 Alas, then and just as quickly, our conceptual needs take over to make sense of what’s happened. We likely find ourselves re-assessing any number of ideas we formerly took as bedrock truth. We incorporate that reassessment into our conceptual reality, and move whatever just happened into it’s newly made space inside the ego-self. We determine what happened in large measure by assessing what we think about it, how we judge it, and how it comports with what we already knew to be true.

 And once finished, our ego safely rebalanced, our inner truths returned to balance, and our emotions sequestered back into their proper place, we roll over and resume our slumber, never realizing the significance of what just happened.

 But the important truth is at least just for the moment we were awake.

We humans possess certain essential qualities, traits, beliefs, emotions, memories, tendencies, and habits of mind. We see who we are as being strong or weak, good or bad, happy or depressed, motivated or lazy - the list is endless. We think we're creatures with souls persisting through time, that we're essentially the same person from birth onward, and that we'll exist like this forever. These ideas, for better or worse, make up our sense of identity. They comprise, in short, our unique understanding of self.

The problem is that the person we each believe we are usually isn’t particularly happy. We suffer. We think we’re too this or not enough that, that we have problems and issues, and that these states of being are exceedingly difficult if not impossible to change. We worry about our jobs or our relationships or our roles in life. We carry ourselves through each with a distinct reoccurring sense of brokenness and imperfection. We think if only our loved ones measured up, if we had more money or more things, if we finally found a way to work through our issues, if we get right with God, and so on, we’d be complete enough to end our struggle and achieve serenity.

Even when we’re blessed with all the joys of life, we accept that experience warily, knowing full well it probably won’t last, isn’t enough, or carries unforeseen consequences. True love, wonderful family, professional success, great wealth, unsurpassed fame – none of these fill our hearts like we wish; we always return to the places of concern we think more faithfully demonstrate who we think we really are.

Our dissatisfaction doesn’t arise in a vacuum; it’s not a feature of original sin, nor the outcome of biochemistry (though there are those that believe otherwise and seek solutions exclusively in church or pharmacology). Our identity and our suffering flow instead from our unique experience with life and the way we make sense of it.

We’re born into the Universe essentially helpless blank slates. Maybe we have certain biochemical traits, physical abilities or disabilities, or genetic tendencies, but these matters we ultimately resolve based on what happens later in life. Our karma - the cause and effect our lives bring us - is primarily a matter of circumstances, the way we cobble together our understanding of reality, and what we do with that understanding.

And although most of us are raised by loving committed grown-ups who gladly embrace their parental roles, no one experiences anything close to perfection in the care they receive. Even the best mothers and fathers imperfectly nurture us through our hardships and struggles. Instead, these human beings, who bring to life their own set of issues, talents, struggles, and competencies, do the best they can but are often marginally to woefully inadequate in preparing autonomous, happy, safe, and happy human beings.

The result leaves us with a sense of helplessness, dependency, weakness, and imperfection, as we learn our desires are fulfilled only in relation to the competency of the adults in our lives. More important, we also quickly realize that relationship flows both ways. We learn if we perform in a certain manner, we enhance our parents’ motivation, and in turn hopefully get more of what we seek. We find our elders rely upon us to meet their needs. We begin to discern the functions we serve and the responsibilities our relationships entail. Although still children ourselves, we find other’s happiness, meaning, and sense of purpose depends on us. Our roles, the demands we encounter, and the responses we get become increasingly complex. Tensions emerge as conflicting desires arise within and between us. Our needs no longer rule the day, as we come to understand we’re not quite the center of anyone’s universe but our own.

In all of this, we develop habitual ways of making cognitive sense of what we face. We remember what worked before and replay these efforts in the hope our successful experience continues. We learn. We form concepts and beliefs. We add these notions together and grow repetitive methods of navigating the world. With luck, our efforts become more sophisticated and our ability to meet our needs becomes more competent.

Out of this, we end up with particularized beliefs about who we are, who others are, and what the Universe is. We determine we’re smart or stupid, outgoing or introverted, happy or sad, good or bad, loved or unloved, important or unimportant, and an asset or liability. We see the world and its people as bountiful or barren, safe or dangerous, pleasant or harsh, loving or unloving, helpful or harmful, trustworthy or untrustworthy, and so on.

These ideas form the foundation for our individual sense of reality. Upon them, we develop strategies to balance these core truths of self and others in ways that allow us to attain our share of life’s bounty. For better or worse, we learn to use our perceived talents to get what we want, to keep bad things from happening, and ultimately to create lives worth living. We learn how to extract the most from our world, to connect with others to whatever degree they allow, to shape ourselves to what our caregivers want to see, and so forth.

Unfortunately, the conceptual reality we create in our heads is by no means a perfect fit. Sometimes we’re conflicted. Sometimes a frightening disconnect occurs between what we believe, what we do, and the results we obtain. Sometimes we experience searing pain or unexpected misfortune that seemingly has no connection to who we think we are or what we do, and sometimes we simply seemingly shut down, as the periodic trauma of everyday life intensifies and we don’t know how to proceed.

Our efforts to make sense of this disconnect usually fall somewhere along a continuum between concluding there’s something broken in us or there’s something wrong in the world. Either our efforts failed, the world’s efforts failed, or some combination of the two conspires against us. Over time, as with everything else, we discern patterns to this suffering, and as a result, we construct additional aspects of cognitive identity and reality to accommodate this experience.

Maybe we realize our parents aren’t all wise, loving and giving, or that our own efforts are clumsy or misplaced. Perhaps we conclude the need wasn’t all that important. Or, we decide there is something in us that’s undeserving. Maybe we come to believe we’re weak or needy, that our relationships are dysfunctional, that we or our loved ones have too many problems, or that we’re somehow bad or evil or selfish or greedy.

And so again we internalize and accommodate these new conclusions. We develop methods of attending to the parts of self whose needs don’t get met or we endeavor to change those aspects of the world that threaten us. We learn to deny our needs. We flee the places and things in the world we fear. We chase after magical solutions, and compulsively seek easy respite from the growing pain.

As time goes by, these elementary efforts evolve into even more thoroughly defined core truths of identity. No longer do these events lead to mere thoughts about experience; instead our ideas become entrenched, reflecting who we are and what the world’s like. We become, at best, people who survive and sometimes thrive because of our successful efforts and talents. At worst, we’re broken, imperfect, undeserving, selfish, unlovable beings. To us, other people are generally happy, giving, loving beings, or angry, self-centered, and inherently neglectful creatures. The world, we realize is a place of opportunity, resources, beauty and meaning, or a hostile, dangerous, and hurtful land.

And consequently, we cope. We develop more tenacious habits of mind and patterns of behavior meant to address this core reality. We learn to distract, hide, or remove ourselves from situations. Or we act out by deploying extreme behavior in an effort to change reality. We become achievers, or avoiders, or deniers. We dive into academics, sports, or social activities. We learn to appear cute, tough, pretty, handsome, smart, dangerous, funny, mean, reactive, fragile, lonely, or weird. And we discover new ways to manage our lives and find respite, through alcohol, drugs, sex, love relationships, food, religion, and so on.

Eventually, we develop problems. We become depressed, anxious, angry, or withdrawn. We acquire phobias and compulsions and terrible dark reactive fears. We find ourselves increasingly focused in internal battles between various aspects of ego, as the problem parts in us rise up, to be met by the problem solvers and managers who exist to keep our pain under control and help us get our needs met. And so we seek connections, crave approval, attempt to over-manage, treat others competitively, run from or to intimacy, and approach and withdraw as needed from our daily lives, always with an eye on the emotional barometer we keep finely tuned and pointed at the core state of our ego’s being.

If this fails we take more drugs, drink more alcohol, move across the country, return to school, leave school, quit our jobs, abandon our relationships, get new relationships, spend our money, save our money, get religion, leave religion, make to-do lists, make babies, read self help books, teach self-help courses, reject self help, have more sex, abandon sex, become vegetarian, and so on.

Sometimes with increasing desperation, we struggle valiantly to get the one or two things we think we need in order no longer to be complete, but instead to simply continue to function. And if that’s not possible, we settle for something less, something insufficient for true happiness but perhaps barely enough for meager survival. We determine life involves inevitable suffering we must simply endure, that our childlike dreams and strategies aren’t good enough, and that we’re not smart enough or stable enough or lucky enough for actual meaning, purpose, and joy.

And so defeated but wholly committed to the seemingly obvious truth that we’re irrevocably made up of what we habitually think and believe – that our ego self is all we are – our eyes grow dim, our heart shrinks, our dreams disappear, and we live out the rest of our days, dreading our failing health, lost youth, and impending demise.

A trail of roses
one each day
lays along the path
from where
she is
to here

sealed
in frost
and covered in leaves
dying
under the blanket
of these
cold
days

the fire
in my heart
burns softly
through the night

She is
the One
I cannot
live without.

And though gone now
abides
deep and through

my broken heart.

We're all Platonists

We all believe
there's an essence
to everything

a truth
to the this and that
of the Universe

where each thing
even us
most important
us

has it's form
to which
we hope one day
to know

only then
will peace
rest easy
in our weary weary
hearts

Imagine what it would be like
to experience life
from the place
of True Self .....

You can't grieve
from ego alone.

That self,
the one who's hurting
hiding
desperately wanting
not to feel

until the damn bursts
and memory's sludge
pours down the spillway

can't possibly heal itself
alone.

Only from the you
who doesn't just hear
but listens
to the cries
of the world

can grieving
real gut wrench
sobbing grieving

the kind
that heals

happen.

Find
True
Self

then
trust
its
voice

We who look
through eyes
of suffering
see far more
then what appears
to those
not blessed
with pain
transcended

From when the crystal clear heart
of what needs knowing,
what needs doing,
and what needs nothing
first appears

to the end of days,
beyond fear
beyond anger
beyond the sad remembered
way things were
that chains us down
and left for dead

there will always be
the deepest place
inside True Self
where who we really are
abides.

And if you too
go where that is
and look with Buddha eyes,

you'll see.

I'm there now
just waiting.

After all the tangled thorny brambles
and the rancid stinking murk
of which no more
no one need speak

there's a single truth
clear and elegant
as the bluest cloudless sky

and when
you learn to trust
true heart

and true love
thus bursts forth

we are
all of us
redeemed
made right
and born anew

These memories
leave me
in tears
too

It's an unremitting moment, the space we find ourselves.
Beyond words, color, sound, taste, touch, feeling, and thought.
Not out there; not in here; not not out or in.
Not the next moment, nor the last, just this,
churning, flowing, all at once freezing solid and seemingly immobile,
only to cook off like vapor wafting upwards into the ether.

And from it, each of us,
we make the world.