The Consecrated Life

Of what does the consecrated life consist?
    Your life is a consecrated one when you are willing at all times to do the will of God --- when you are willing and anxious that God may be fully expressed through you, through your thoughts, words, and deeds, during every hour of the day.
    You are not concerned with the question of results. Results belong to God.
    Hear am I; send me (Isaiah 6:8).
Around the Year
With
Emmet Fox, p. 304

~

Happy Halloween: the most frightening thing to me is to go to my grave having not lived at all. That is the scary mask I wear today, and this night, we all try to shock each other via that possibility. 

Live well my friends.

I once troubled myself with the “Big Questions” like; how do I know the will of something as mysterious as what it is that we commonly call God? How do I know if I am acting in concord with a Spirit that can seem at times to be impetuous and arbitrary? Then it occurred to me that I was the one that acted impetuous and arbitrary and that the Heart of Compassion is always steady and works the wonders we call miracles in accordance with a divine will. When I act out of concern and compassion combined with the wisdom to know when to do so I can hardly go wrong. A peace that surpasses all understanding guides me through some of the most difficult challenges of my everyday experience. Prayerfully, attentively, and most willingly, I am awake to the creative possibilities of a life well-lived.

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To Humanize or to Demonize

Tradition Ten

“Alcoholics Anonymous has no opinion on outside issues; hence the A.A. name ought never be drawn into public controversy.”

Never since it began has Alcoholics Anonymous been divided by a major controversial issue. Nor has our Fellowship ever publically taken side on any question in an embattled world. This, however, has been no earned virtue. It could almost be said that we were born with it, for, as one oldtimer recently declared, “Practically never have I heard a heated religious, political, or reform argument among A.A. members. So long as we don’t argue these matters privately, it’s a cinch we never shall publicly.”

TWELVE STEPS AND 

TWELVE TRADITIONS, p. 176

~

     I can’t say that I’ve never heard an argument about religion or politics among AA members on the back porch at the Alano Club. But, usually, such matters are lightly argued with no real consequence. Rarely do they filter into an AA meeting. The political season is at its most heated point a week before National elections but I haven’t heard anything about it in an AA.meeting. The Nation is divided as it has ever been but, only in an occasional share, will someone express an opinion that is disturbing. However, such opinions are mostly “water off a duck’s back” for the rest of us in the room.

     I have learned much from this attitude for my own personal beliefs outside of the rooms. I have always been of the opinion that “to stand for nothing is to fall for anything”. However, my attitude about most social issues is now to promote unity rather than to polarize… to heal rather than divide … to humanize rather than to demonize… those who have opposing views. This attitude has granted me a peace I could not have had otherwise. No longer waving a flag on the ramparts, I am stepping out front to extend a hand to those I would otherwise despise. I found out by doing so that they… “others”… are human beings too.

     Which takes more courage?

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Compassion

Compassion is not true compassion until it is active. Avalokiteshvara, the Buddha of Compassion, is often represented in Tibetan iconography as having a thousand eyes that see the pain in all corners of the universe, and a thousand arms to reach out to all corners of the universe to extend his help.

GLIMPSE AFTER GLIMPSE
Sogyal Rinpoche

~

There is a knowing that goes along with acting on compassion… a knowing that my efforts are seen and carried by a power greater than myself. The arms of compassion compel as well as they protect when I act within their embrace. What does this mean to me? Let me act out of compassion beyond self-seeking and beyond the approval of others. Let me be at peace within myself… my faults and shortcomings as well as my assets… and know that I am known by the Heart of Compassion with a thousand eyes and a thousand arms to see and feel it all.

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The Cowbell: Live and Let Live

I have a cowbell hanging on my lanai (yes, lanai is a better word for the place than patio, or porch, or balcony because lanai is a Hawaiian word for porch, patio or balcony all in one). So, I have a lanai… like the island called Lanai. Lanai is the patio… the porch… the balcony of Maui. So much for that: what I have is a cowbell hanging from the ceiling of my lanai and paper wasps have made a nest in it. I saw them at work and looked up in there seeing nothing unusual but didn’t think anything of it until this morning when I shined my flashlight into the cowbell. There I saw… oh, it must have been a hundred wasps all cuddled up cozy in there. They don’t do much ‘til it warms up a bit. At first, I admit, I was appalled at the nerve of them little critters… don’t they know that this is MY cowbell!

    "May I see your papers?" of course, they have papers, they are paper wasps!

    I showed it to Bon Bon and she said, “Can you spray them with bug spray?”

Sexy Feminista

    Really, I didn’t want to commit genocide on the girls… ya know. That’s what they are… girls. The boyos are the drones whose roll is to only come in and put some love juice into the queen and then get their little butts outa there before they are eaten alive! The rest: the workers, the security guards and the scouts are all girls (kinda a Andrea Dworkin conspiracy of the sexual domination and exclusion… like, we know the ONE THING that we need men for!).

    So, I thought about it and figured that maybe it would be too pissy and dangerous to remove the cowbell. I might as well leave it alone. Winter is coming and when it is cold enough they will all go someplace warmer. Nah, I’ll let their illegal immigration piss off some of our Mexican pals South of here. Just live and let live… that’s what I think is best, eh?

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Convention: A Gated Community

I maintain that what an artist has to believe in is this: that there is a special world, to which he alone has the key. It is not that he must contribute something new, though even that would be an enormous achievement; but that everything in him must be or seem new, transmitted through a powerfully colouring idiosyncrasy.
He must have a particular philosophy, aesthetic, morality; his whole work tends only to show it. And that is what makes his style. He must have a particular wit --- his own sense of fun.

REFLECTION: V

Prometheus Misbound

Andre Gide

~

     To uncover, unchain and to open the iron jail house doors and to escape the conventions that ensnared me in the first place… that is what compelled me to take this path… to let loose my own “sense of fun”. I am a human being first and foremost before anything else. Even when I say that my name is George I am separating myself from the rest of humanity and stepping into a gated community whereby every house has an address and name to fence ourselves off from each other.

    Second to being a human being I happen to think of myself as an alcoholic with artistic strivings. This too makes me feel special within the gated community since I have given myself permission to come and go as I please. I feel as though I am an imposter within the gates and alone and vulnerable in the jungle outside looking back in because of this uniqueness.

    Once outside of the gated community I can see only a few alternatives: I can go back to where I feel safe as an imposter; I can stay in the jungle with drugs, alcohol and other entanglements; or I can forge my way out towards the loom of the light I see in the distance… to be truly authentic.

    I have no bone to pick with those who choose to return to the safety and comfort of the gated community… of becoming perhaps a productive member of society. That is a better alternative than staying in the jungle to contend with the hungry beasts of unrestrained desire. However, a few of us have banded together to trek through this jungle on the safari towards happy destiny. Buddhists call this safari the Sangha on the dharma path. Christians would call it the church on the path of righteousness. Our Muslim fellows would call this pilgrimage the Hajj and a personal Jihad. It is all the same journey from convention if we look at it objectively. It is in this spirit I stand with my fellow human beings.

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Going It Alone?

What comes to us alone may be garbled by our own rationalization and wishful thinking. The benefit of talking to another person is that we can get his direct comment and counsel on our situation, and their can be no doubt in our minds what that advice is. Going it alone in spiritual matters is dangerous. How many times have we heard well-intentioned people claim the guidance of God when it was all too plain that they were sorely mistaken. Lacking both practice and humility, they had deluded themselves and were able to justify the most arrant nonsense on the ground that this was what God had told them.

Twelve Steps and 

Twelve Traditions, P. 60

~

There are times I wonder whether or not God has anything to do with this whole business of human affairs at all. Before I sink into the despair of doubt I have to reflect; where would I be without the Hand of One greater than me? There is a balance, however, where I follow the dictates of conscience or yield to the counsel of my fellows. There are times when the direction is clear to me alone but such times are rare indeed. It takes practice to know good sense when I see it. I can ask myself these three questions to figure out what action I ought to best take: Is it true? Is it necessary? Is it kind? If the answer to any one of these three is vague I should run to wise counsel… run! How much regret to I need for a word thrown into conflict based on false information unnecessarily without compassion in mind? Wouldn’t the humiliation of regret be worse than the humility to run it by another for an objective opinion?

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Forgiveness

“Made a searching and fearless inventory of ourselves.”

Step Four: 

Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions 

~

The topic at yesterday’s Sundowners meeting was Forgiveness. I listened carefully but heard no one speak of self-forgiveness in terms of felonies committed that can’t be approached without causing more harm. How does a rapist or murderer find forgiveness for crimes of the past? How can one forgive oneself for assaults so devious on humankind without it seeming trite and self-satisfying? How do the victims of sexual assault or childhood abuse forgive the perpetrators of such monstrosities? How do the family members of these victims manage the emotions stirred by these crimes?

    Admittedly, these questions do not apply to most of us. However, having contact in the rooms of AA with a broad spectrum of society, these sources of guilt, shame and blame come up more frequently than elsewhere. In looking at these crimes some of us have committed, it is important that we don’t skirt the issue or divert ourselves from the impact our behavior has had on our victims. Conversely, it is equally important that, as victims, we don’t avoid the emotions deeply engrained into our hearts by such crimes against us.

    I have a friend who was assaulted in an alley and was severely injured. Years later, he still suffers physical pain from that attempt at strong arm robbery and has told me, “I don’t want to hear this bastard’s Fourth Step confession if he were to come to AA.”

    Am I to apply the same standards of forgiveness applied to other simple abuses and misdemeanors under these circumstances? Can we expect a rape victim to forgive and forget? How does guilt for felonies of these sorts be excused? How do felons of this sort forgive themselves without maudlin self-serving? Is it enough to believe that God has forgiven us all equally? There is no need for immediate answers here. The important thing about the Fourth Step is to take the inventory regardless of the questions. It isn’t necessary to go any further in this regard. Trusting that the process will answer these questions and provide the solution is how this Step works for both the felon and the victim. A fearless inventory takes courage beyond the grasp of most of us. Without trust in a power greater than ourselves we are helpless to proceed from here.

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Shared Experience

“At the time, I feared we might be involved with a religious sect of some kind,” Sister Ignatia recalled. She then asked Father Vincent Haas, a newly ordained priest, to investigate the meetings for her.
    They had met only a few days earlier, when Sister asked him to talk to a drunk with a pregnant wife. He tried; but after an hour, the man asked, “Have you ever been drunk for a week?”
    “No. As a matter of fact, I don’t drink, the young priest replied.
    Then you don’t know what you’re talking about,” the man said. “Come back when you’ve been drinking a week.
 
Dr. Bob and the
Good Oldtimers,
 p. 189

~

This little incident, when AA was in its infancy, helped shape the direction of the whole movement. The perfectly good intentions of the wise are welcome but are respectfully asked to keep their opinions to themselves. Well meaning advice is trumped by experience and it is my experience that is most valuable. We heal through the mystery of shared experience and shared experience puts us on an even keel with those we intend to help. Even though adjustments to variations of the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous are most affective for a vast range of spiritual neurosis, the fact is that a meth addict’s and a heroine addict’s experience is so divergent that there is little one can say to the other regarding recovery. This is so because the symptoms, the way these drugs act in the brain, spins the alcoholic and addicts behavior and consequences in different directions. There is no pill… no treatment… no commiseration or rehabilitation that can be as affective as talking… one alcoholic (or specific addict) simply talking and listening… with one another.

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Little Obstacles

When little obstacles crop up on the spiritual path, a good practitioner does not lose faith and begin to doubt, but has the discernment to recognize difficulties, whatever they may be, for what they are --- just obstacles, and nothing more. It is the nature of things that when you recognize an obstacle as such, it ceases to be an obstacle. Equally, it is by failing to recognize an obstacle for what it is, and therefore taking it seriously, that it is empowered and solidified and becomes a real blockage.

Glimpse After Glimpse
Sogyal Rinpoche

~

I suppose it is what combat vets would call “good under fire”… or, in civilian terms, “keeping one’s head”. It is where fight or flight and the classical “deer in the headlights” are intimately related as counter-productive. Neither fighting, fleeing, nor being immobilized by fear, can work to little avail in these situations but this is where learning to pause when agitated or doubtful comes into play in a powerful way. Instead of leaning into a problem or bending over backwards, I can stand and observe impassively… the answers will come if my own house is in order. 

This is nothing more than well intentioned advice leading to further frustration at failure to keep my peace if I do not prepare myself in advance as best as I can. A good practice usually takes in an inventory at the end of the day to keep an objective eye on assets and deficiencies. Where did I attack when I should have listened? Where did I freeze out of fear? How could have I looked for a solution instead of compounding the problem? 

Upon awaking the day begins with meditation resulting in emotional balance. Emotional sobriety is even more important than abstaining from bottle or pill. Emotional balance is the humility to see myself as I am under all circumstance. Am I always emotionally balanced? If I were at all times in control of my emotions I’d have no need for inventory or meditation. So, therefore, I sit.

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True Tolerance

Finally, we begin to see that all people, including ourselves, are to some degree emotionally ill as well as frequently wrong, and the we approach true tolerance and we see what real love for our fellows actually means.
TWELVE STEPS AND
TWELVE TRADITIONS, p. 92

The thought occurred to me that all people are emotionally ill to some extent. How could we not be? Who among us is spiritually perfect? How could any of us be emotionally perfect? Therefore, what else are we to do but bear with one another and treat each other as well as we would be treated in similar circumstances? That is what love really is.

Daily Reflections, p. 304

~

Does it really matter to me whether others are emotional ill or not? The answer to this question is that it does matter when others take their neurosis to me and force me to do something about it. But I have to ask myself, how often does that actually happen? I don’t have to ignore neurotic and sometimes paranoid behavior but tolerance doesn’t necessarily translate to approval. I have often wasted valuable time renting room in my head to the foibles of other people. It is even more important that I don’t discount and eliminate others from my heart. Most of the harm others do to me is based on a misunderstanding and rarely can it be a vicious affront. Before I take drastic measures against another it is better for me to pause when agitated or doubtful. This takes practice and practice is what meditation is all about.
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The Un-God

Religion says the existence of God can be proved; the agnostic says it can’t be proved; and the atheist claims proof of the nonexistence of God. Obviously, the dilemma of the wanderer from faith is that of profound confusion. He thinks himself lost to the comfort of any conviction at all. He cannot attain in even a small degree the assurance of the believer, the agnostic, or the atheist. He is the bewildered one.

TWELVE STEPS AND
TWELVE TRADITIONS, p. 28

I am comfortable with my belief in an Un-God. Because I believe in this Un-God doesn’t make me an atheist or agnostic. It is more to me that the whole idea of God being irrelevant to my experience. Yes, I have made contact with my innermost spirit and, by virtue of doing so; my spirit has made contact with a far greater Spirit. My Christian friends feel a degree of pity for me because this seems so impersonal or a flat-out intellectualization of a personal relationship with God. My seeming indifference would even appear to them that I can’t possibly relate mine to their spiritual experience at all. It is my conviction, however, that nothing could be further from the truth. My experience has more in common with theirs than they might think. I just am not able to dress mine up with preconceived notions, concepts of God, or dogma other people have passed down through the ages. It has proven to be most productive for me to refer to my Un-God as the Heart of Compassion and by calling God this name I describe the action this Spirit empowers just as Jesus Christ does for Christians or enlightenment does for Buddhists. The Heart of Compassion allows me to look at the religious beliefs of others and in this Spirit I am encouraged to see the similarities of our faith instead of the differences.

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Powerlessness

The principle that we shall find no enduring strength until we first admit complete defeat is the main taproot from which our whole Society has sprung and flowered.

TWELVE STEPS AND
TWELVE TRADITIONS, pp. 21-22


It isn’t like I haven’t tried... maybe I haven't given everything a shot but this one is the one that worked for me. The first step is where it all started and, once I had been crushed… that damned ego smashing moment… the obsession to drink was lifted. Was it miraculous? Was there a hand of God in this phenomenon? I believe that is what did it… just the idea that there might be a Power greater than myself able to do anything about my problem with alcohol opened a window to slip in. That just happens to be the second step in which I came to believe. And, having been crushed, I was able to turn my will and my life over to this wonder… this beautiful mystery… this surrender that became the fresh breeze that entered my soul as the result of the defeat that opened the window. Light and air enough to clean up my consciousness followed easily after that. It just isn’t enough to give up… it is something, however, to give up and follow the spirit of forgiveness… the Heart of Compassion.
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Listen!

The way to discover the freedom of the wisdom of egolessness, the masters advise us, is through the process of listening and hearing, contemplation and reflection, and meditation. They advise us to begin by listening repeatedly to the spiritual teachings. As we listen, they will keep on and on reminding us of our hidden wisdom nature.
    Gradually, as we listen to the teachings, certain passages and insights in them will strike a strange chord in us, memories of our true nature will start to trickle back to us, and a deep felling of something homely and uncannily familiar will slowly awaken.

Glimpse After Glimpse
Sogyal Rinpoche

I have a friend who has taken upon herself to quit smoking by joining a support group. She is doing well but has noted that, when the group convenes, it is chaos. Egos as large as Sequoias take over and gobble up all the time. Remarkably, this doesn’t happen in most of our AA groups; especially ones that have a format that has time limits for sharing and prohibits crosstalk. I have learned to listen in this disciplined environ and this has been the most valuable tool I have found to help me towards emotional sobriety. This is no special innate talent I possess because I know I am as ego-centric as the worst of us. But sitting in the rooms and hearing what others are saying, without running an inner commentary or engaging in a debate… thinking of what I want to say instead of listening, has developed as a habit over time that carries itself with me outside of the rooms. Again, I admit, this is not my normal state of mind and for most of my life I have not been this way. Perhaps at one time I might have had the humility to do so but this quality had to be encouraged in order to resonate in my heart the true nature of the Heart of Compassion.
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Lurking Notion

Most of us have believed that if we remained sober for a long stretch, we could therefore drink normally… We have seen the truth demonstrated again and again: “Once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic.” Commencing to drink after a period of sobriety, we are in a short time as bad as ever. If we are planning to stop drinking, there must be no reservation of any kind, nor any lurking notion that someday we will be immune to alcohol.
ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS, p. 33


Even after fourteen years of sobriety… or should I say, especially after fourteen years… the notion waits in ambush for me to allow ego to tell me I am different... I had a drinking problem but I have taken control of it. I could have “just one” now and then. I have to admit that there have been times when self-pity, resentment, or self-centered ambition has also overwhelmed me and I considered a drink (or, more commonly some form of dangerous prescribed opiates). In times like these the habits I formed in early sobriety draw me back into a reasonableness that sees the insanity of such notions. Close contact with the Fellowship can sometimes be the only thing that awakens me to the hazards of isolation. The honesty and close contact with the spirit of the Fellowship has saved my ass on several occasions. Ego tells me that I have found God and that ought to be enough but it isn’t. Because of the insanity of my condition this contact with God is easily eroded if a stray from my fellow alcoholics and addicts.

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Surrender: The Only Option

There are mornings I start out from bed distracted by grief from actions I have taken that can never be taken back. That isn’t so important as it is to grasp what it is that I do with it. These aren’t the minor gaffs and misdirected anger that I usually take care of before falling off to sleep. These are the sort of things that have been deliberately committed to a losing strategy… like an army in full charge. There is a point in any battle where it is futile to keep on going and it is just as futile to retreat. Surrender is the only option… to cease any and all action. In spite of this clumsy metaphor, these moments are precisely the location…i.e., the time and the attitude, to approach meditation. Can I do this without working myself into a cauldron of regret for misdeeds? I suppose so but it isn’t the case when the harm has been done and no apology… no words can be taken back… no positive conclusion can come of the mess I’ve made. While the sorrow rakes the coals of desire, fanning the flames, can I rest in meditation? This so happens to be the channel where access to the Heart of Compassion can be embraced most fully. Just as a wound must be painfully opened and treated before affective healing can proceed, sometimes the soul goes through such agony. Where grief roams untreated and pain avoided, the wound festers. If I distract myself prematurely with drugs, alcohol, television, food… even service to others… a scab forms and I can become hardened to it until it is too late. I’m not suggesting that I don’t use healthy distractions like service to others and even some of the lesser ones (like a good football game or a fine diner with a loved one) but only after I treat the source of suffering… the wounded heart… do they work for healing the mind.

    So, I sit this morning and wait for direction or quietude. I surrender to a Power greater than myself.

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LIVE & LET LIVE

     Jesus had it made…What’s the big deal? So, he was on the cross ‘til 3pm; that’s what they say anyway. He was on the cross from, oh, after sunrise sometime maybe… It had to be daylight because crucifixions were performed as drama and there were no stadium lights back then. That gives him about, oh, 10 hours, max. Yes, they say he took on the suffering of the world in those ten hours. Yes, and then of course, I don’t want to diminish the torment and pain of the forty lashes or the crown of thorns… throw that in and it is possible he suffered a whole lot more than others by packing the wood down the Via Dolorosa after that night in Caesar’s palace. 

     Please, don't get me wrong, I'm not sayin' it wasn't a bad night for the carpenter, for sure. But by three pm it was over… it was over for good and for that alone it is enough to call it Good Friday. So, what about the poor souls who suffer quietly and with no equivalent drama for the whole of our existence this turn around? No one is writing a book about how our suffering saves the world. Did Jesus do anything about our suffering? Did his day on the cross count for anything but a good story about how evil Jews and powerful Romans did him in? Tell me, you good Christians, what has your Christ done to give us a break since then? Not that I think he should have done more and I am sorry you suffered that day dear Jesus… I truly am. The grief he suffered in that "Eli-Eli! Lama Sa-bach-thani!" moment breaks my heart, but haven’t billions… billions of others suffered a moment just like that since then a hundred times more in our lives? Why then all this fuss about you on the cross? Isn’t it nothing more than a taunt… a taunt telling us to suffer some more and to do it gladly for a taste of some glory after it is all done? I think not.

     I believe there is a message for us in Christ’s suffering but it isn’t that lesson about salvation the sweet nuns taught us in Catechism classes. It could just be as simple as: DON’T DO THIS TO EACH OTHER! It could be as simple as this: LIGHTEN UP… LIVE AND LET LIVE! It could be that we ought to take each others lives a little more seriously than our religious beliefs… for Christ’s sake, be kind to each other. Amen.

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The Ordinary Mind

One of the greatest Buddhist traditions calls the nature of mind “the wisdom of ordinariness.” I cannot say it enough: Our true nature of all beings is not something extraordinary.
    The irony is that it is our so-called ordinary world that is extraordinary, a fantastic, elaborate hallucination of the deluded vision of samsara. It is this “extraordinary vision” that blinds us to the “ordinary,” natural, inherent nature of mind. Imagine if the buddhas were looking down at us now: How they would marvel sadly at the lethal ingenuity and intricacy of our confusion.

Glimpse After Glimpse
Sogyal Rinpoche

~
When I first began practicing meditation I was under the impression that I would attain a state of bliss that would be extraordinary. I imagined that I could attain a higher level of consciousness and dreamed of somehow being above it all. The more I practice meditation the more I understand that the smell of a rose, the giggle of a child, the loving hand of my mate, the sight of the clear night sky in Northern Idaho was far more than enough for an awakened mind. What I was seeing before was more akin to seeing a beautiful sunset and saying, “It is a pretty as a picture!” Am I seeing the picture or am I “being there” in the beauty of the reality? The magic of the fleeting moment of it… do I wish I had a camera to capture it? Do I miss it by seeing it through the viewfinder? Meditation is being where I am, when I am and that is a powerful time and place to be because that is the natural mind of here and now.

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Experience... More So than Faith

Pray --- and keep praying until it brings peace and serenity and the feeling of communion with One who is near and ready to help. The thought of God is balm for our hates and fears. In praying to God, we find healing for hurt feelings and resentments. In thinking of God, doubts and fears leave us. Instead of those doubts and fears, there will flow into our hearts such faith and love as is beyond the power of material things to give, and such peace as the world can neither give nor take away. And with God, we can have the tolerance to live and let live.

TWENTY-FOUR
HOURS A DAY
[Hazelden Meditations]

~

The first step of Alcoholics Anonymous took me to a place of humility in which I had to cede to my innermost-self the state of mind… the gripping addiction… and unmanageability of my alcoholism in what is commonly referred to as a necessary deflation of ego universal for spiritual renewal. Prayer became a routine established early in my sobriety while I was still humbled enough to accept it as a useful tool. I have recently experienced a depression so profound I could barely pray… my mind so confused… I could hardly meditate. Meditation is a practice so established in my morning exercises that I  practice regardless of how I feel. I recite the liturgy of prayer as an automaton in times like these with no hope that anything positive will come of it. Though I rise from my cushion feeling no better for the effort, my experience has been that there is more power in it than I can see or feel. Expectations of immediate relief from prayer foul the big picture by clouding it with the fog of despair if I don’t see results. Experience… more so than faith… tells me that the Heart of Compassion is always there but it takes faith to understand, and have patience, and to see it in my darkest hours.

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Thoughts Have Density

Most people indulge in some form of daydreaming. There is no harm in this so long as such daydreams are positive and constructive in character. You are always thinking, when you are not asleep, and you know that it is in the selection of your thought that your destiny lies.
    Do not let your daydreams take the form of escape from actuality. A daydream is an evasion when it consists in fantasying something pleasant that nevertheless you believe could never happen. Such a daydream debilitates the whole mentality.
    Some people daydream about all sorts of unpleasant things. They rehearse imaginary quarrels, imaginary injustices, accidents, and misfortunes, and because they do not believe such things could happen, and because thought is creative, they actually bring them upon themselves.
    See to it that your daydreams are concerned with such happenings you would really like to find in your life. Know that anything good is possible; remember the creative power of thought; and your daydreams will come true.
    A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways (James 1:8).

Around the Year

With Emmet Fox

~

A dear friend of mine often said, “Be careful what you think because thoughts have density.” Whenever she said this I reacted with a smirk because I thought she was engaging in a form of magical thinking. After all, isn’t it what I do that is important and not what I think? A drunk can’t think himself sober… can he? There has always been an aspect of positive thinking throughout our culture but in AA it is commonly said, “I couldn’t think my way out of drinking. I had to take action in order to change my thinking.” And furthermore they say, “It matters more how I act and not what I think” when it comes to misdeeds and their relationship to angry or resentful thoughts. I have been known to call these people Action Jacksons but I know there is a mountain of truth to what they say. It takes such action to treat any disease in order to get to treatment in the first place but, once there, it is essential that I am positive about what I am doing. Very often what I do from the time I begin is brought about by how I think. Thoughts do have density and when I “curse my fiddle my fiddle will go sour.” What I believe about myself can color everything I do. Circumstances I thought I had nothing to do with brought about unforeseen consequences that takes time and effort to unravel where my troubles originated. I might have acted out of self-pity or self-aggrandizement because of erroneous thinking that undermined everything I tried to do to correct myself from there on. So, I ask myself, "Why prayer and meditation if my thinking is of so little importance?"

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Infinite Reality and Finite Mind

Is contemplating the same as thinking?

We use thinking as a tool, but the knowing that arises because of its use is above and beyond the process of thinking; it leads to our not being fooled by our thinking any more. You recognize that all thinking is merely the movement of the mind, and also that the knowing is not born and doesn’t die. What do you think all this movement called ‘mind’ comes out of? What we talk about as the mind --- all the activity --- is just the conventional mind. It’s not the real mind at all. It is real just IS, it’s not arising at and it’s not passing away.

Ajahn Chan: SEEING THE WAY

~

My understanding is that most contemplation practices are about concentrated thinking on an object, phrase, word, icon or other material object. As my practice evolves I can see that what is achieved by doing so can lead to the same results as meditations focusing on the breath. A good friend insists that these are all material and that he practices contemplation on God (envisioning his compassion, wisdom, grace or higher consciousness and etc.) as though these are somehow different from any other material manifestations. Words are just words and, as Marshal McLuhan was at one time often quoted, “words are the map and not the territory.” In this case the word God is but the map of a higher consciousness, a higher power, and I believe even these to be a rather inadequate ones at that. I look at these words closely and find that some roads are no longer there in the territory and that new ones are not yet on the map at all. God is a territory I must travel to know. If I want to get the bigger picture I can Google up one but it is still not the same as actually going to the place. Words are but our limited perceptions and not the infinite reality that can never be completely known with the finite mind. When I sit, I access the terrain, the feel, to sense what it is to be one with God.

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The Path

You have always been one with the Buddha, so do not pretend you can ATTAIN to this oneness by various practices.

HUANG PO:

ZEN TEACHINGS OF HUANG PO

Huang Po:
Zen Teaching of Huang Po

*****

All the spiritual teachers of humanity have told us the same thing, that the purpose of life on earth is to achieve union with our fundamental, enlightened nature. It says in the Upanishads:
There is the path of wisdom and the path of ignorance. They are far apart and lead to different end…. Abiding in the midst of ignorance, thinking themselves wise and learned, fools go aimlessly hither and thither like the blind led by the blind. What lies beyond life shines not to those who are childish, or careless, or deluded by wealth.

Glimpse After Glimpse

Sogyal Rinpoche

~

Bill Wilson said it several times and is quoted in  AA Comes of Age, we are but children in a Spiritual Kindergarten. In fact, there was a time I looked at advice of this sort as merely something for others. It didn’t occur to me that it was my practice that was being spoken of. Am I striving to attain or am I simply accepting the power within me? Is the Heart of Compassion beating outside of my own heartbeat? I am no longer seeking achieve it and I sit with the practice that keeps me aware and awake. Aware and awake I see myself as I am, or, in the words of Joan Osborne, “What if God was one of us?” It wasn’t hard to miss the point when I held my daughter in my arms or when I left myself long enough to be at one with another when I seek to comfort rather than to be comforted; to love than to be loved; to understand than to be understood; to give rather than to demand I receive. To these ends I awaken. These qualities were always there and I don’t have to attain to them if I accept myself as I am, rise up off my cushion, and walk out of my sanctuary with all my flaws and misdemeanors acknowledged.

geo

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For Alanna: Sadness

  This is not a poem. It is placed on the page to look like a poem but it is prose put in poem form, page-wise only: what the old boyos in the “beat” days called shit like this, prosey.

For Alanna: Sadness

Who thought love was walking around in bliss all of the time?
No one said that did they?
No one whose feelings weren’t opaque said that.
Love is hard sometimes.
It takes the wind right out of you, doesn’t it?
Okay… one spirit meets another…
a chemistry happens…
something in the brain says something to the heart
or the other way around.
What does it matter?

Who says we don’t love the pain of love?
Why do I go back to it when flight
or fight dictates otherwise?
Fools rush in, they say, and then
Fools rush in again and again.
Again and again… swoosh!
There again and again I’m there.

You hold a child in your arms a few years
and she is in your arms forever a child.
There is no explaining or denying it
by explaining or denying it.

I surrender to it all… the universe of suffering…
the passion of love denied.
What else is there?
To go to the grave across the River
with a boat-load of regrets about it…
I could have loved better
or I could have loved less?

Passion denied is grief.
Grief denied is inane.
Why not give up to the
emotion and float with dreams?
Isn’t that better than being nothing at all?

We Are Made of Stardust

Read Psalm 18.
    In verse 28 the Psalmist moves to another phase of teaching. Wilt thou light my candle: the Lord my God will enlighten my darkness.
    Many similes have been offered by religious teachers to illustrate the relationship between God and man. One of the best known and most helpful is to think of man as a spark from a great fire, which is God. The spark is not the whole of the fire but it is part of it, and therefore of the same nature, and possesses, potentially, all the characteristics of the parent fire. It can ignite many things upon which it falls, thus producing another fire essentially of the same nature as the original fire.
AROUND THE YEAR
WITH EMMET FOX
p. 277

~
When Carl Sagan first put out the proposition on the PBS program, Cosmos, "we are all made of stardust," the idea became more than a metaphor to me.  Still, I have, at times, difficulty in realizing this in spiritual terms when I think of myself as a bag of skin that contains George. The concept deepens when I come to understand that even the bag of skin called George is made of the same stuff that the rest of the universe. The energy that the universe is made of is as close to eternal as I can grasp with a finite mind. There are times I see this connection and those are usually when I am eye to eye, on equal footing, with another human being having an earnest desire to help each other. These are precious moments that I have the opportunity to experience daily if I wish. I am the spark that ignites the fire in the heart of my fellow alcoholic or addict but these aren’t the only ones I can connect with. I can do so with family and friends, or even those who confuse and confront me. I can do so with everybody I come in contact with if I can only get out of myself long enough to listen and share what has been given so freely to me.

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Wake Up and Die Right!

We need to shake ourselves sometimes and really ask: “What if I were to die tonight? What then?” We do not know whether we will wake up tomorrow, or where. If you break out and you cannot breathe in again, you are dead. It is as simple as that.
    As a Tibetan saying goes: “Tomorrow or the next life --- which comes first, we never know.”

Glimpse After Glimpse

Sogyal Rinpoche

~

Funerals eventually evoke in me a reflection of one sort or another around whatever is said about the deceased and comparing it to what I suppose would be said about me. Yes, I admit, I am especially self-centered and interpret everything as being about me: it is my favorite character flaw.

     I also have this aversion for almost every spiritual discipline or those religions whose obsession with death is the primary goad to do good. Cults of skulls and crosses don't appeal to most of us and my default attitude about death is to simply avoid thinking about it... to focus on the moment.... it will come to my door no matter what I think about it. However, next to birth, death is the most powerful of all the facts of life… in the words of Bob Dylan; those of us who “ain’t busy being born are busy dying”. For this old salt, though (as I meditate on my mortality), the promise of heaven or threat of hell, or karmic justice via reincarnation just doesn’t ring my bell.

     Acknowledging my own mortality is a plain and simple fact fundamental to my spiritual maturity. Although I no longer quake at the thought of a stern father waiting for me to arrive at the pearly gates to be awarded or punished, when I exhale that last time, my reward is in having no regrets: no regrets for unfinished business and the joy of having crossed the line today or tomorrow, free of fear and guilt. A most horrible punishment would seem to be for me to die having not lived.
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THE TIME IS NOW

my friend always wanted to be a writer
he became a translator
working the language of the successful practitioners
into his own.

so long hard hours
with the dream
getting further
and further out of
reach,
his wife going
mad:

“you’re always
typing!”

a killing unhappiness
never knowing
what you might have
been.

Charles Bukowski
From: each man’s hell is different
BONE PALACE BALLET
~
Dedicate this poem to: Anyone who has ever given up their aspirations… anyone who has ever felt trapped by obligations put on them by choices… bad choices… marriages… careers… fear of being alone… fear of leaving the security of a hated job… hunched over a bar stool wishing he had stuck out his thumb a long time ago… she wishes she had gone to grad school… they want to just go… go somewhere… escape the inevitable… chains forged by fear and with hope disintegrated by time… these are the ones called.

Not what I might have been… but what I might be… pull it out from within… a silver thread of hope. The time is now.

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The Grand Fandango

You can have no greater ally in the war against your greatest enemy, your own self-grasping and self-cherishing, than the practice of compassion. It is compassion, dedicating ourselves to others, taking on their suffering instead of cherishing ourselves, that, hand in hand with the wisdom of egolessness, destroys most effectively and most completely the ancient attachment to a false self that has been the cause of our endless wandering in samsara. That is why in our tradition we see compassion as the source and essence of enlightenment and the heart of enlightened activity.

Glimpse after Glimpse
Sogyal Rinpoche
~

The key words here are to me “the practice of compassion”. I am in sharp and unrelenting physical pain today and the practice of compassion was furthest from my mind before I struggled to rise from my cushion. Yet, I still found comfort and encouragement in these words. What do I have to give in such a condition? To even ask the question is helpful because, immediately, my mind goes to service. This body… this bag of skin I call George, is breaking down and it is hard to do what once was easy. I can’t go out and run a mile in the morning and I can hardly take a half hour walk on the beach: days like today I can barely make it to my desk. This condition would give me plenty excuses to fall into self-pity but remarkably it doesn’t. My meditation practice is to breathe in my pain and breathe out compassion… empty myself of it. Breathing in the pain is to acknowledge it and accept it and breathing out compassion is to send empathy to others… to care enough to take my own suffering less seriously. After all, what else is there to do about it besides bring down the curtain of opiates on it? I choose to use it to get out on the dance floor to perform a fandango with suffering… the grand hoedown… taking the hand of the Heart of compassion to lift my spirit to another dimension.

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