We are pleased to announce the availability of a free PDF, e-book version of Tarchin’s recently revised ‘Commonsense Retreat’

‘Commonsense Retreat’ is a small booklet introducing some broadly practical considerations that will help support a solitary retreat.  It was originally written in 1984 to help introduce people to the use of retreat huts at the Wangapeka Study and Retreat Centre in N.Z.  Though based on general Buddhist principles, it will speak to people from a wide range of traditions and backgrounds.  It touches on themes such as one’s motivation for retreating, basic preparation, the environment or place for retreat, physical health, diet, basic mindfulness practice, and how to smoothly emerge from retreat.

Click the link to download the entire 10 page booklet, Commonsense Retreat PDF or, visit Green Dharma Treasury and go to the section, Writings/E-Books.

‘A Four-fold Practice for Living Well’ was originally part of a letter written for some dharma friends who had drifted into relationship difficulties with each other.

In Buddhist teaching, it is said that truth, or dharma, is good in the beginning, good in the middle and good at the end.  Here is a fundamental dharma practice that I initially learned from Thich Nhat Hanh.  I find it inspiring at many levels, from pragmatically useful to profoundly encouraging and affirming.  It is definitely good in the beginning, in that it can help us deal with difficulties that crop up in our day to day lives.  It is good in the middle in that it can remind us of the central work of awakening even as we engage in an expanding array of dharma practices.  It is good right through to the end as it brings us back to the simplicity and straight forwardness of the path, and a life well lived.  The practice can be summarized in four words: stopping, calming, resting and healing.

Stopping
If you look into moments when you feel unhappy and not in the flow, when you are distracted and in the grip of difficult energies, you will inevitably find that you are not very present.  Mindfulness is absent.  Whirling in the contradictory breezes of planning, fantasizing, dreaming, and internal dialoging, there is reactive reaching in many directions; into the future, into the past — desperate attempts to make things better.  This is the time to stop.

Stopping means to bring to an end the present state of mindlessness, forgetfulness, scatter and fragmentation.  In stopping, we find ourselves to be richly in the midst of what is happening.  We are exactly where we are; right here in this place; right now at this time.  Think of stopping as if you were stopping by for tea or stopping over for the night, not stopping in the sense of blocking but entering, not bunging up but pausing to richly engage.  We make ourselves at home; opening the six doors of perception and deepening into the immediacy of what is happening within and around us: seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching, mingling with the myriad forms of mental activity.

To support this practice, mentally say the word, ‘stopping’.  At the same time, relax into an awareness of your breathing and open your sense doors to where you are.

Open the doors.
Open wide the doors, oh daffodil.
Breathe with it deeply . . .

Calming
Having interrupted the flow of unawareness by stopping, now we begin the work of calming.  This is practiced in five progressive steps.

(1) Recognizing
Supported by your breathing recognize the dominant state that is present for you right in this moment.  It might be anger, frustration, irritation, yearning, or a sense of helplessness.  It could be more neutral, for example, dull, frozen, distracted, or foggy and vague.  It could even be a positive; happy, interested, blissful, or inspired.  Whatever the state, having stopped the flow of unawareness, supported by a rich appreciation of our breathing, recognize the feeling/quality that is most dominantly present.  It can help to simply name it.

(2) Accepting
Sometimes in recognizing a state, particularly if it is a difficult one, we find ourselves trying to push it away.  To deepen the process of calming, having recognized our present state, rather that fighting against it, making excuses for it, justifying it or trying to deny it, we allow ourselves to accept it.  In our stopping, and recognizing, we make space for this state to be.

(3) Embracing
Allowing this state to be present we then open further and embrace it with all our sensitivity, caring, and concern; with all our love and awareness.

(4) Looking deeply
Embracing this state with mindfulness and caring we look more deeply into it.  Listening deeply, smelling deeply, tasting deeply, touching deeply, thinking deeply, reflecting deeply.  Just as we might support a friend who is suffering, by giving them all of our attention and allowing them the space to unfold their own story, so too, embracing our own suffering with kindness and caring, we look deeply into what is happening and allow the actual situation to speak, to reveal itself.

(5) Insight
In the midst of looking deeply, we begin to have fresh, or at least re-freshed, insights and understandings into how such a state has arisen.  These patterns of need in my childhood gave rise to these tendencies to react to certain situations.  This current physical challenge is draining my energies so I react with patterns of anger.  I can see that it is a pattern that has arisen in other similar situations.  Insight is the act of ‘sighting into’ and with it, a fresh and liberating understanding begins to emerge.

Recognizing, accepting, embracing, looking deeply and insight; these five, working together, will nurture the experience of calming.

Resting
Having arrived at a more calm easeful flow of being present with what is occurring, we can then truly begin to cultivate the art of resting.  Our suffering and mindless fragmentation has consumed lots of energy and we now need to use this freshly experienced calm to support a period of rest and revitalization.  Resting, simply refers to proceeding with whatever we need to do with the least expenditure of effort.  This is not the rest of staying in bed and being inactive.  Resting is a steady, gentle, experimental learning of how to do whatever we are doing with minimal effort.  To sit, stand, walk and move with minimal effort.  To think effortlessly.  To work effortlessly.  To engage in conversation and organizing with the least amount of effort.  Gradually we learn the art of resting in the midst of life as we experience it.

Healing
True healing is to experience utter wholeness, pure and total presence in the act of knowing itself.  This is not something we can make happen.  It is not a matter of technique or expertise.  It is not something we can force into being.  It is, however, something that naturally flows out from deep stopping, deep calming and deep resting.  Healing is a mystery, a moment of blessing and grace that reveals itself in the midst of moving mindfully in the fullness of what is.

Stopping, calming, resting, healing.  This four fold practice for living well is straight forward and simple.  It can be useful at any stage of life’s journey.  For beginners it can give a clear sense of how to work with daily experience and how to make one’s life into a path of awakening.  For more experienced practitioners it can be a reminder of the depth and profundity of Buddhist teaching and practice.  For a being dwelling in true spiritual maturity, it can be a companion on the path with whom we walk in joy.

© Tarchin Hearn, Dec. 2011

Oct 5/11 Simpson Desert Australia, 5:30am
Reflections on Knowing, Mind and Wonderment
With thanks to Sue and John for taking us there.
by Tarchin Hearn

I’m sitting on the red earth
gazing into mystery,
camp mat folded under me,
morning coffee steaming by my side.

In front is a young acacia bush.
Its roots are responding to moisture, sand chemistries,
and the lives of subterranean microorganisms.
Each one of these particular biochemical respondings;
a dancing of communion.
Plant collaborating with living earth.
Earth collaborating with plant.
— We could call them forms or ways of knowing.

The sun appears over an immense, flat, desert plain and molecules of chill air are responding to increasing streams of photons. Wind is beginning to stir. Temperatures rise and photosynthesis in grey green leathery leaves strengthens in rhythm and tempo. This changing activity demonstrates yet more forms of knowing. Intelligent respondings. Patterns of orderly connection and interminglement.

The low light illumines tight-ropes of spider web, tugging at leaves and shaping their movement, flexing and shimmering in the sea of light and breeze. A spider hunkers down under a leaf to wait out another period of heat. All these movements and respondings are themselves embodiments of knowing, an interflowing of living experience.

Rainbow bee-eater flashes in from the left and lands on the acacia branch, feathers reflecting sunlight to my eyes; cascades of neural conversations inviting the vastness of my being to see iridescent colour and think; “Good morning, beauty!” Me responding to bee-eater and bee-eater responding to me, and to acacia which is responding to sun and spider. Each moment of responding is a demonstration of knowing. Knowings within knowings shaping knowing; — an ocean of wondrous collaboration

Each being and becoming — a dancing of knowing,
a unique expression,
an immeasurable weaving of unfolding life streams.
This total field of all events and meanings.
This eternal immediacy of local ordinariness,
together considering the question, how should I live?
How do we live?

But wait! You too, dear reader, are also involved.
Widening the doors of empathy,
with exquisite sensitivity,
look around you and feel:
these writings,
the room,
the garden and sky,
the fly exploring the rim of your cup,
the sounds of people, friends and family, all around,
my words dancing patterns in your seeing embrace.
Open into this.
Breathing and appreciating.
A here and now translucent presence.
A seeing and being seen.

This interweaving is what and where you are.
It makes you.
It is you,
and me,
and the crickets,
and the sound of the traffic and the whirr of bee-eater’s wings. We are in it together: molecules, cells, creatures and landscapes. We need each other to function. We mind ourselves and each other into being. The dancing of everyone and everything brings forth a field of knowing, this mind and minding, an ever changing world of everyday mystery — this wonderment that we share.

©Tarchin Hearn Nov/2011

These words have arisen in response to the many enquiries over the years as to whether or not an upcoming retreat would be held in silence.

Will the retreat be in silence? Actually, if there is silence, the whole universe would have disappeared!  If the retreat is in silence, we will all be in deep trouble.  I expect the birds will continue to sing.  The leaves will rustle in the breeze.  Crickets and frogs will chorus with cicadas and the growing grasses and wild flowers.  The cells of our bodies will continue to converse with each other.  Organs will speak to organs.  Intestinal fungi, flora and fauna will gossip and exchange news.  Will there be silence?  I sincerely hope not.  We will, however, gently and care-fully, encourage ourselves, and each other, to listen deeply to the complex symphony of our lives unfolding responsively in the great togetherness of this living world.

Retreat is a time for so much more than just refraining from talking while engaging in disciplined effort.  Retreat is precious opportunity to cultivate a continuity of patient thorough listening and deep empathic experiencing.  Setting aside our habitual use of verbal communication will support an ambiance in which we can become more sensitive to the wisdom and stories and singings of our bodies and minds, as they commune with the embodied minds of all the other beings that together compose this extraordinary mystery of life.

Many people today float through life in an almost non-stop cacophony of radio, TV, internet, i-pods, cell phones, piped music and person to person talking.  From waking up in the morning to going to sleep at night we are immersed in verbalizing and if none is available, we invent some; filling the gap with internal dialogues, critiques and imagined entertainments.  We don’t quite know what to do when all this chatter stops.  Addictively tuned to the wave length of human language, we risk losing the ancient and life affirming art of appreciating the myriad other non-human communications that are necessary for a healthy living world.  This loss is fast becoming a tsunami of disaster for all of us.

It is understandable that people might feel a bit anxious at the thought of not speaking for a day or so, not to mention a week or a month but you might be surprised –– you may find you enjoy it.  In retreat, even one that honours silence, we inevitably have moments of speaking to our fellow retreaters; sharing in a class, asking for something in the kitchen or garden, but these moments will be simple and straight forward, and a lot less than what we are used to in our normal daily living.

Silence doesn’t have to be anxiety producing.  Rather than signifying a loss of something, an isolation or a cutting off, it could be experienced as a blessing, an invitation to responsive presence.

Like a deep clear pool;
limpid,
lustrous,
and sometimes even seductive,
silence draws us in,
strips us,
revealing jewels of experience that before were hidden in the noise.

Perhaps what we mean by silence is really an experience of harmonious settling; a natural at-oneness; a blending of inner and outer, without conflict or expectation; a manifesting of deep physical and mental acceptance of being at home in the fullness of whatever is occurring –– with presence, dignity and natural grace.  This is the silence of contemplation.  This is the stillness of healing presence.  Traditionally it has been referred to as the ‘noble silence’.  Will it take place in your retreat?  In truth, it’s up to you.

© Tarchin Hearn, Sept. 2011

How do we learn?  How do we grow into mature, loving, wise, competent human beings?  Does our vision of our place in the universe actually correspond to the biological realities that shape us?  Do our religious and moral aspirations harmonize with our mechanical and energetic interactions with the rest of the world?  Where do we find our sense of togetherness?  Where do we humans fit?  Can we discover a way to become, once again, native to this place, this living world, our home.  Can we rediscover our belongingness in life?

Reverencing the great mystery of education
I flex and bend and move in the flow of your unfolding wisdom.
May all beings realise the blessing of profound aliveness
and dance their lives in the flowering of wonderment and love.

The practice of buddhadharma and the process of meaningful education, are deeply related.  Buddhadharma is more commonly associated with Buddhism which, of course, is viewed by many as a religion.  Education is usually associated with secular schooling.  Yet each has something to contribute to the other.  I’d go so far to say that richly developed, each contains the other.

For readers unfamiliar with the term, the Sanskrit word buddhadharma is made up of buddha plus dharma.  The bu in buddha derives from bodhi which means to awaken, to unfold or to flower.  It gave rise to our English word bud, as in flower bud.  The ha part, is the natural sound of laughter, joy, and surprise, which are often outer indications of inner well being and harmonious good functioning.  Buddha therefore means joyful unfolding or awakening or perhaps even the flowering of joy!  Dharma has many meanings such as truth, phenomena and natural law but in Buddhism it is often used in the sense of ‘teaching’.  Broadly speaking, buddhadharma can refer to any teaching or guidance that supports joyful awakening; the unfolding or flowering of joyful good functioning – both in an individual and simultaneously in their surrounding community.

In it’s widest sense, buddhadharma, doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with Buddhism!  I find it useful to make a distinction between buddhadharma and what I sometimes think of as ‘Buddhism-dharma’.  Buddhadharma is universal.  It’s all around us and it becomes visible wherever there is skilful encouragement and opportunity to unfold in compassion, wisdom and awareness.  It can be lived and realised by Christians and Buddhists, by agnostics and atheists.  It has been cultivated by Sufis and scientists, artists and health workers.  Buddhadharma is alive and happening in many different types of communities all over the world.  What I sometimes call ‘Buddhism-dharma’ refers to the teachings of traditional Buddhism.  Hopefully, this Buddhism conveys something of true buddhadharma but sometimes traditions become sidetracked into preserving cultural beliefs and biases that have little to do with cultivating love, freedom and profound understanding, which is surely what good teaching or education should be in aid of.

Education is a process of nurturing, or from a utilitarian point of view, training or conditioning an individual so that he or she can function well in the society in which they live.  The idea of education sometimes carries a sense of preparing young people so that they can contribute to fulfilling the needs of society.  I’m sure many people could agree with these definitions – even the Minister of Education.  Where this becomes tragically limited is in situations where we seem to have a very narrow understanding of society and hence its needs.  The society we are mostly concerned with today is almost inevitably a human one.   The other species we live with barely get a mention.  And even narrower, it is often an exclusive group of humans, ones that share a common set of largely unconscious assumptions, biases and beliefs about the nature of reality.  Today, the majority of us seem to have fallen into a collective amnesia, forgetting that we are part of an immeasurably larger society called a living world; a world of animals, plants, fungi, micro-organisms, river catchments, mountain ranges and plate tectonics.  We are all part of this togetherness, brothers and sisters, neighbours and collaborators, all of us together.  Our lives and the activities of our living, interweave, back and forth, over and under and through each other; this living world, this rich diversity of form and understandings that comprise the very substance of our beingness.

Education shapes society but society also shapes the forms of our education.  What kind of education do we give our children when daily, we collectively and helplessly bow to the god of market forces? . . . when massive amounts of human industry are devoted to building and selling weapons designed solely to kill and maim beings?  . . . when we excuse and condone lies and deceit in politicians and business executives as long as they don’t break any laws?  . . . when nearly everything is measured in terms of money and economic performance, and instant gratification is the hallmark of a successful life?  What kind of education do we support when justice and unpretentious honesty are often dismissed as naive or sometimes even unrealistic idealism?

The second half of the twentieth century saw a quiet yet significant revolution in the healing professions, with a growing acceptance for the idea of treating ‘the whole person’ instead of trying to deal with a collection of disconnected symptoms.  In its more expanded forms, the whole person was seen as something or someone embedded in, or continuous with, their extended family or whanau, with their society, and with the surrounding ecosystem.  Ultimately the whole person is intermeshed with the whole existing world and any approach to healing must take this into account.  The good functioning of an individual is linked to the good functioning of every other living individual.  We desperately need a similar revolution that will expand our understanding and practice of education.

A good starting point would be to recognize that education surely involves much more than just pouring facts and figures into young peoples’ brains.  In the so called modern world, we tend to think of facts and figures as ‘hard data’ when, in truth they are more often just palatable prejudices or currently popular understandings or interpretations, that help to ensure a continuity of societal beliefs and action.  Recently in a BBC interview, NZ’s Prime Minister John Key was confronted with the results of a detailed scientific study that found that many of the rivers and lakes in NZ were significantly polluted.  The interviewer asked why, in the light of this study, NZ was continuing to brand itself as clean and green.  Mr. Key said that people were entitled to their opinions but that he rejected those findings as he could find other ‘experts’, that would give a different opinion which would show that NZ is 100% clean and green.  This is a case of hard data looking more like a Rorschach ink-blot test!

Good education involves so much more than developing the basic literacy and numeracy skills that spokespersons for the ministry of education seem to value as paramount.  Real education, complete education, education in completeness or wholeness, is a process of drawing forth all the qualities that are precious in a human being; for example, the capacity for love and empathy and creative thought, along with courageous straightforwardness.  It cultivates our capacity to be curious about all manifestations of life and to consciously participate in the life affirming shaping of this living world in which we find ourselves.

In practical terms, an education system must always serve the needs of society but we need to have the broad mindedness and honesty to recognise that meaningful society is much bigger and more multidimensional than we usually imagine.  Serving society (as biologist, writer and lover of life, Aldo Leopold, once put it), requires that we support, “the integrity, stability and beauty of the (whole) biotic community”.

Each one of us is born into a vast interweaving of matter, energy and knowing that is already in process.  It’s what we are.  It’s all through us and around us and it has been going on for 13.5 billion years; as it says in some Buddhist texts, since beginningless time, or for incalculable aeons, or inconceivable kalpas.  However expressed, whether with numbers or poetry, there is every indication that the unfolding of life was going on before we as individuals began and will likely continue after we end.

This ‘already happening, ongoing process’ can be seen in two ways.  It is the wholeness or totality of nature, unfolding and diversifying in the direction of increased discernment and knowing, thus nourishing a wider and wider range of unique yet totally intermeshed individuals.  This is evolution in action.  At the same time, this process involves each individual, feeling, with their own particular talents of perception and awareness, towards a lived appreciation of connection, a sense of unity accompanied by an increasing sense of understanding, wonder, devotion, reverence and awe.

Nature diversifying into ever more refined ways of being and knowing, and, individual discernment and knowing intuiting its way into a sense of wholeness and living mystery; this intermingling yin–yang of life is the natural ground from which, and within which, we all emerge and grow.  Going by many names, it is sometimes called God, or Totality, or Wholeness or ‘the pattern that connects’.  In Buddhism it is known as the dharmadhatu, the basic space of phenomenon, the immeasurable expanse of inter-being, or the total field of all events and meanings.  It is also called bodhicitta, often translated as the heart/mind of awakening.

Bodhicitta is a central theme in Mahayana Buddhism and is perhaps something that should be discussed in secular schools.  As we saw earlier, bodhi means awakening or unfolding.  It is both the impersonal ‘totality of being’ unfolding as a delicate, unique, and transient individual, and, the individual, awakening to the totality.  Each movement utterly pervades the other and together they reveal a mysterious whole.  This twofold bodhi is playing out in citta, the heart/mind of one’s individual knowing and experience.  Heart is God appreciating each detail.  Mind is each detail appreciating God.  Both movements together reveal a complete mandala, a rich a vibrant human being.

For some people, this two-in-one truth is an inspiring and beautiful thought.  For a smaller number, it is a lived experience, a true life of blessing.  Most of us though, were brought up by adults who, in the course of their lives, lost touch with the great mystery of living that they are.  As if through osmosis, we absorbed and embodied our parents’ hopes, fears and prejudices until, gradually, like the moon eclipsing the sun, these narrowed attitudes and approaches to life restricted our potential for clear seeing and we too lost sight of the interconnected unfolding of life that we are.  Shaped by social, economic, political and philosophical views, we drifted into ever more partial ways of experiencing.  The universe became a collage of separated bits, sometimes co-operating, often competing and almost always in threat of isolation, guilt and fear of abandonment.  Bodhicitta became more and more hidden.  Ironically, it can even be hidden through becoming a Buddhist and then naming a concept called ‘bodhicitta’ while not simultaneously realising that bodhicitta is what is doing the naming!

Imagine being born to parents who lived and appreciated this ancient and ongoing dance of life unfolding, who then nourished it by affirming the unique and precious vastness of your being, who encouraged you in a wide ranging investigation of all the myriad details of life, who demonstrated to you, at that early impressionable age, a fundamental approach to living that is deeply imbued with love and wonderment and a sense of fresh, spontaneous curiosity.  This is the heart of buddhadharma in action.  It also begins to look like the foundations of very good education.

A big step towards meaningful education involves honouring and appreciating the dual mystery that we are; this mutual shaping of inner and outer, of self and other, of body and mind, of subject and object; this seamless dyad of individuality and wholeness.  This is the nature of each student.  It is the nature of each teacher.  Encouraging it to flower and function well is the heart and foundation of good education.

With the economic cutbacks of today we often see schooling and education reduced to a pouring in of facts and figures and experiences.  Eventually the student is stuffed.  Sometimes this supports a conceited belief that the world we have learned to know, is the way the world really is.  Sometimes the weight of the ‘stuff’, crushes everything about us that is truly alive and we survive as automatons, replaceable units in the mechanical workplace market of life.

Rather than force feeding students with facts and experiences that will help them to maintain the world that we, the older generation, have grown accustomed to, education should be primarily engaged in drawing out, or drawing attention to, the qualities of being that can help us creatively meet with each new situation that arises in the journey of our communal living.  This includes meeting with earthquakes, environmental degradation, economic collapses and political turmoil.

How can we do this?  We need to explore and investigate our bodies, how they work and how they intermesh with others at multiple levels, from micro to macro.  We need to understand our feelings and the way we colour experience with values of good and bad, liking and disliking.  We need to learn the skills of unravelling tangled emotions and the resultant physical sensations.  We need to grapple with how the world of our knowing arises ever-fresh, moment by moment – a weaving of body, speech and mind, self and others.  We need to refine and augment our powers of observation through each of our senses.  These are our gateways to the world, the potentially sensitive points of meeting with others.  We need to cultivate the art of resting at ease and awake, in states of not knowing everything, and not being able to know everything.  We need to let go of the fear driven compulsion to freeze reality with the hammers and nails of dogmatism and certainty.  We need to cultivate the whole mandala of aliveness, capacities for thinking, feeling, sensing and intuiting.  We need to value diversity and its vast, creative, ultimately unknowable dance, called living.  We need to cultivate the potential that is in each of us to be utterly present for each other.  We need to learn the arts of tolerance and forgiveness and occasional apology and restraint.

Buddhadharma and secular education have much to offer each other.  Education can offer microscopes, literature, art and cultural history and a tradition of scientific enquiry.  This would take Buddhadharma into the 21 century with a relevance that would be felt by all.  Buddhadharma can offer ways of cultivating attentiveness, appreciation, forgiveness, mindful presence and healing.  These skills would enhance and round out the school curriculums honouring and respecting the deep intelligence and potential that is in each of us.  Buddhadharma and education belong together.  They augment each other and skilfully joined would help us humans tackle the challenges that will increasingly face us in the times to come.

Over the years, I have had the privilege of working with teachers from many traditions and backgrounds.  Some of them teach in schools; primary, secondary or tertiary.  Some teach healing arts; psychotherapy, body work, counselling and various forms of medicine.  Some teach meditation and a range of spiritual approaches to living.   In these times of tightening budgets and increased anxiety about the state of world and where we are all going, it is more and more vital for our own well being and for the well being of those we teach and interact with, that we live day by day with our feet solid in the ground of here and now wonder and appreciation, in all its vastness.  My aspiration is that these thoughts on education and buddhadharma will in some small way serve to strengthen our willingness and ability to do this.

Postscript

I began this essay on education and buddhadharma a number of years ago.  It was originally intended to be part of a reflection on the aspiration and purpose of the Wangapeka Educational Trust, a study and retreat centre in the south island of New Zealand that I have associated with for many years.  Somehow in the flow of circumstances, that early draft fell by the wayside; lost in a pixel cul-de-sac on my hard drive.  Recently it popped into view and in the light of momentous geologic events this year in New Zealand, I was inspired to rewrite it, making it, I hope, more broadly relevant.  For months, the great  taniwha of plate tectonics has been flexing its muscle, hammering Christchurch and the surrounding area with three major earthquakes and thousands of aftershocks.  Many people were killed or injured.  Thousands of homes were damaged if not destroyed.  Hundreds of business have collapsed.  Adults and children of all ages have been traumatized.  Life as many knew it, and expected it to be, has been turned upside down as parts of the city sink back into a wetland swamp and other parts are entombed under fallen rock.  This happened in the same year as the earthquake and tsunami in Japan.

One friend, living in Christchurch, who runs the administration side of a small school that was badly damaged in the first earthquake, has miraculously found time to write periodic uplifting e-mails to friends and extended family.  After the third quake, which really knocked the stuffing out of many people who were already barely coping with the first two, she shared some observations which, in spite of the trauma that is widespread, reveals a breadth of vision and aspiration that is wonderfully uplifting.  Describing how parents, teachers and children supported each other emotionally, and physically, adapting to broken plumbing, stuck doors, jammed windows, and cleaning up mud and liquefaction so that the school could continue, she wrote; “I hope I am around to see these children as they mature into the business, public and political leaders of the future.  I suspect that when that time comes, Christchurch will have been the home of a disproportionate percentage.”

Many schools have been disrupted by closures but deepening the skills of being truly human, the skills of being present and curious and capable of sharing in the very midst of an ever changing and unpredictable world, the gift of knowing what is important and being able to let go of what isn’t; these lessons have continued.  The school of life-experience hasn’t closed.  The personal maturing that comes with remembering and appreciating the value of friendship and the wisdom of community, for many in Christchurch, these learnings have actually accelerated.  Meanwhile, on television, in addition to reports of great courage and human kindness, we see, politicians, bureaucrats, and other officials, sometimes clearly out of their depths, waffling and justifying and red taping the process of recovery in a desperate attempt to fit in with and conform to, an already bankrupt and dysfunctional economic system.  These are telling demonstrations of the results of an education system that has done little to prepare them for the reality of being part of an evolving living world; a world with earthquakes, with climate change, a world that is an interweaving of biology, geology, meteorology, sociology and much more, a world that we share with all species, a world that we are awesomely and humbly privileged to be a part of.   The coming together of all these occurrences has nudged me towards finishing this essay and for all of that and all of you, I am thankful.

© Tarchin Hearn 08/11

Praise for ‘A Human Being Died That Night’
by Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela
Mariner Books, 2004, ISBN 0-618-44659-1
Some books are much more than pages and print.  Engulfing and disturbingly engaging, they slip into hidden crannies of one’s being, places forgotten, or ignored or more often simply overlooked in the ongoing business of living.  We find ourselves reviewing and revising our own lives in the light of what is presented and in that sense, even though the book may rest on a table for parts of the day, it could be described as un-put-down-able.  A Human Being Died That Night, written by Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela was such a journey for me.  Though the author is writing of her experiences, her insights and her struggles as a clinical psychologist working for South Africa’s  ‘Truth and Reconciliation Commission’, her penetrating and compassionate observations reverberate with relevance for many other countries and situations.

How can we heal communities that have been wounded by gross violence, prejudice and pathological ignorance?  Recognising that we share the same space of being, that we walk on the same earth and breathe the same air; that when we harm another, we harm and diminish ourselves, how can we learn to live well with each other when we share a history of mistrust and violence?  How do we find the courage to meaningfully forgive when we have been harmed, to nourish the core humanity of those who have hurt us, and to do this without condoning the harming?  When will we realise that healing society requires that we rely on our being able to see and appreciate the fragility and frailty and the need to love and be loved that is moving in each and every person.  How do we learn, as Czech writer and humanist, Vaclav Havel once wrote, to ‘live within the truth’?

Gobodo-Madikizela relates some of her personal experiences with preparing, and then bringing together, victims and perpetrators of apartheid era violence.  Much of the book focuses on her long series of interviews with Eugene de Kock who was jailed for life for his part as commanding officer of state sanctioned death squads under apartheid.  In the course of more than 40 hours of  interviews, she found herself responding to de Kock’s confusion, and remorse and gradually awakening conscience, and then having to struggle with her own emotional responses to his responses.  Her story is the eloquent testimony of a person of inspiring integrity and humanity.  It is a story of the deep healing that can come, even under the most unimaginably horrific circumstances.

In the midst of reading this book, I found myself reflecting on the seemingly benign society of present day New Zealand; about the unofficial and largely unconscious apartheid that so structures our lives that most people accept it as a normal state of affairs.  Humans carrying on, largely oblivious to the rest of living nature.  Rich people separate from poor people.   City people separate from country people.  The list hints at something systemic: government apart from people, private sector apart from public sector, and all of these separations being borderlands of conflict and confrontation stomping grounds of mistrust, suspicion and fear.  I found myself thinking of the deceptions and self serving views that allow us to poison our land and water in the name of healing and supporting nature.  I found myself thinking of the divisive ways we live on the earth, our economics, land stewardship and approaches to education, agriculture, science and religion, and our vast investment in industries of war and politics of power.

We need truth and reconciliation commissions all over the world, beginning with our families, our local communities and sanghas.  We have fractured the wholeness of life.  We humans have grown used to a normality of contention and confrontation, a normality that is so separated from the truth of interbeing that this unconscious practice of apartheid has become an ideology that we have come to accept and expect and see as inevitable.  We are all committed to the ideology.  We idealize fighting for good, even when it creates what we euphemistically call collateral damage.  The jails are overflowing.  The rivers and lakes are dying.  Species are denied a place to live by humans who don’t even realize such creatures exist.  Our economy based on extraction and unlimited growth is an impossible fantasy.  The gap between the rich and the poor increases everyday.  Our pharmaceutical industries are helping to poison the world.  Everyone wishes to do the right thing.  One group’s freedom fighter is another group’s terrorist.

A Human Being Died That Night is a heartfelt appeal to our deep intuition of living truth.  Please read it and allow it to inspire or prod or jolt or encourage you into wholesome action.  The people of South Africa, along with many throughout the rest of the world, thought that South Africa was destined for a racial blood bath.  With courage and inspiration, they managed to move, in what at the time was almost an unimaginable direction.  Throughout the world today, the problems of population and ecology and how we humans are living is bringing the whole planet to a similarly volatile place.  In understanding the need for a Truth and Reconciliation process and then having the wisdom, the courage and the determination to carry it through all its ups and downs, a large number of very ordinary yet extraordinary people, graced with the inspiration and inspiring examples of a few like Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu and Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela have shown us what true human beings are capable of.  Their courage and vision is now rippling round the world.
© Tarchin Hearn, July 6, 2011
www.greendharmatreasury.org

Robes are like onion skins.
When you peel off one layer, another is revealed.
Even if you keep peeling off the layers,
you will never arrive at a central core or essence of onion-ness.
All you will have is a pile of old robes
. . . and a lot of space.

It’s not so rare for people, at some time or another in the course of their lives, to feel a stirring, a calling, a deep pull, to join a religious order – in Buddhist parlance, to take robes.  It seems that most manage to ignore this disturbing wobble in normality, or if unable to do so, they end up rationalizing it away: a medieval nostalgia, an adolescent fantasy, totally impractical, a meaningful thing to do but  . . .  maybe later  . . .  when I’ve finished my current projects and obligations!  Yet beyond desires to escape from rat races and lives of stressful trivia; or urges to be part of a respected community that is dedicated to study and contemplation; there flows a deeper yearning to free one’s self from society’s pervasive addiction to fragmentation and continual conflict and instead, to flower as an integral part of God’s garden, a community or sangha of life-unfolding wholeness.

In some traditions, a novice would sew their own robe.  In the Tibetan Vajrayana  tradition, robes or clothing represent thoughts or concepts or attitudes.  From this perspective, entering the religious life should probably involve taking off clothes rather than putting them on!  In spite of this, the setting aside of secular clothing and the wearing of robes or some kind or religious garb or insignia can be part of the process of transforming one’s life – an outer visible sign of an inner invisible process.  For young monastics, struggling with ego dreams, caught in the ancient and largely unconscious pattern of seeking approval and affirmation from parent or mentor or peers, the robe often becomes a focus of concern and it’s not uncommon for a considerable amount of thought and energy to coalesce around it.  Robes are a way of creating and maintaining a more solid identity.  This is far from maturing into a soft, easeful naturalness; a playful, no big deal, attitude to identity.

The true religious life is not possessed by any school or tradition.  It grows from reality itself.  It is older than time and wiser than any wisdom teaching.  Here is a meditation on how to stitch a robe.  I thank Linda R. who years ago asked for such a practice, thus sowing the seed for these words.

She was born into this extraordinary world;
a living planet,
a dancing of millions of interdependent species,
this mystery that grows us;
flowerings of wonderment, reverence and awe.

It’s what we are.
It’s what we’re in.

It’s who we’re with.
It’s where we are,
and . . .
why we are.

It’s what she was, is and will be,
–  in spite of exponential population growth, leading to masses of people living knee to elbow, cheek by jowl, mingled together in cities with oceans of anxiety, jungles of fantasy, storms of desire and frustration, and all the while shopping to survive, lost in a global culture of technology and mechanization, that, driven by market forces, requires ever increasing human intervention, micro-management, and control.

In a heartfelt moment of nostalgia and deep aspiration,
her parents named her Sophie to remind them (and their daughter) of a world of living wisdom, a world that was moment by moment, bit by bit, one creature after another, gradually slipping away.

She grew in body and spirit and interrelatedness.
She might have gone to a regular school.
She might have been ‘successful’.
She might have striven to get somewhere, to prove herself, to be someone
but instead
somehow . . .
She fell into a life of deepening and discovery,
cultivating the ancient arts of kindness and communal being-ness and clear-seeing presence and unrestricted reverential enquiry.

She explored how bodies and minds of myriad species are weaving together this mystery of nowful presence.  She cultivated awareness practices of buddhadharma and meshed them with science, personal healing and social responsibility to enter a way of living that, in an age of anxiety and uncertainty, was awesomely inclusive and joyously life affirming.

One day she decided to take robes; to commit herself to a life of health and naturalness and service.  This is her story and . . .
it could be your story.

As you sew your robe,
do a mantra of loving-kindness with each stitch.
Consider this robe that clothes you:
the robe of your body, the robe of emotions,
the robe of thoughts, and feelings and memories,
the robe of relationships,
of friendships, companionships, and casual meetings through life,
the robe of blessings and teachings and teachers,
the robe of all your ancestors, leading back to the beginnings of earth,
and the robe of your current life activities,
rippling out in myriad ways and directions,
reverberating into unknowable futures through the lives of all you touch.

Consider how you are clothed in stardust,
galaxies and the gravity of celestial bodies.
Consider all the lives that nourish you, support you,
and lend their beingness to your being.
Blue-jay, maple and may-fly,
Tui, flax and cricket.

And every once in a while, consider
what is there, when there’s no robe,
when there is total nakedness!

Who is it that is stitching?
Who is hosting these threads of your life
– this visible robe for the nourishing of everyone?

Life is not a journey,
we are eternally here.
Life is not a learning,
there is no knowledge to accumulate.
Life is not a testing,
there is no authority to judge.

Dwelling in a space of love,
tendrils of curiosity reaching forth in all directions,
we feel our way,
softening and sensitizing into the richness of community,
a living world within us, around us and through us.

Apprentices of wonderment and awe,
probing and questioning,
sampling and savouring
with calm abiding and vivid discernment exquisitely intermeshed,
we touch our home,
this world of you and me and all of us together,
precious
beyond words.

Endnote:
At the time of the Buddha, robes were simple clothes made from discarded fabric, sometimes bits of tattered cloth from funeral shrouds.  Sewing these many pieces together symbolized the reconnecting of the many different aspects of our life; aspects that are also parts of other being’s lives.  The making and on-going mending of a robe was an opportunity to contemplate wholeness and connectedness; this seamless garment, this cloak of many colours.  Wearing such a robe would remind us of the wholeness and inter-beingness of life and provide the opportunity for others to glimpse a possibility of wholeness.  To be clothed like this goes along with a willingness to be truly seen.

Originally the robes were utterly functional – just as wholeness is utterly functional! They were worn to keep warm or cool, to stave off biting insects, protect from the sun and to preserve a basic modesty.  Today, religious traditions have, by and large, lost touch with the simple, straightforward and practical.  They have replaced the grace of divine ordinariness with institutionalised ‘ordination’.  For many seekers, the robe is bought ready-made off the rack, and we are prided or shamed by the richness or poverty of the colour and weave.  We might ask what need have spiritual beings for needles and threads?  With our air-conditioned buildings and pesticide protected nature, robes have lost most of their original functions and now, more often, serve to identify the wearer as being a religious someone who belongs to a particular tradition or cult.  Robes have become uniforms, badges of office, tokens of authority and myriad other functions far from the original, simple, natural intent.

To glimpse the wholeness and unity of beingness,
To value the vast dance of diversity, the unique one-off-ness of each individual,
To marry these two – seamlessly – in the temple of our lives,
This is to enter the ancient and venerable order of divine ordinariness.

Each day brings opportunities for a fresh ordination.
Each moment of living we don our robes anew.
One morning, in such a moment, the following verse blossomed in my mind.
It felt like my voice whispering through the cells of my body,
Reminding me of how I might move through the day.
It could be your voice.
It could be our prayer.
May it touch us deeply.

Being the fullness of the human animal that I am,
Uniquely clothed in this continuously morphing collage of sentience,
Abiding in the monastery of a world that is utterly and profoundly alive,
I wander in unpretentious openness, wonderment and service.

sarva mangalam

© Tarchin Hearn, June, 2011

This short piece was originally written in July 1999.  It may give you a fresh sense of possibility for breathing meditation.

I look into the air and see right through it.  I move my body and feel invisible pressures, waftings of liquid presence, pressing round with no gaps or spaces.  Looking opens to knowing this mystery; in the room, in the door locks, between the carpet tufts, around my tongue, wrapping each object so intimately that no violence of movement can cause a total vacuum.

Playfully I isolate a cubic metre of space and begin to sift the invisible contents with sieves of in-place knowing.  Dust, moulds, tiny seeds, spores, bits of hair and flakes of skin; pollen grains of many species, globs of soot, perfume, diesel fuel exhaust, invisible microorganisms grazing the three dimensional field, tiny insects – themselves great birds of prey in this micro vastness; and all of these beings, complex weavings in themselves, are leaking chemicals and absorbing others.

There is a cacophony of chemical conversations, a silent deafening clinking of countless bottles, all carrying messages to land eventually on new and unexpecting shores.  “Goods for sale.”  “Accommodation wanted.”  “Flatmate looking for companion.” “Employment offered” and “employment wanted”; a vast metropolis floating in the matrix, trusting in the universe to further all their stories.

Around these fluid becomings are molecules of gas, translucent to photons streaming from the solar being’s great unfathomable heart.  Nitrogen, carbon dioxide, oxygen, hydrogen, carbon monoxide, ammonia, methane and so forth.  They are jiggling and flowing, vibrating to the dance of changing temperature, always on the move from here to there.

Linking into forms and disappearing from space.
Entering space and bursting free from opaque forms.
This cubic metre is a bouillabaisse,
an either soup,
a ferment of beingness, rich and flavourful
to tongues designed to taste these worlds.

Breathing in a sucking swirling of beings, logs, flotsam and jettison – the whole avian universe rolling round the nostril hairs, heating, transforming, descending into a new time and place of constant changing activity.  Gaseous universe plunging into the ocean.  My blood is filled with beings.  Conversations everywhere, orgies of potlaching, gifts given and received, a never ending party with guests coming and going.

How rarely we imagine the richness of activity that is needed for anything to be, even if that anything is called ‘being bored’ or ‘doing nothing’ or simply waiting for something interesting to occur!  Dip into this moment of nowness.  The one that’s all around you and right in front of your nose.  Open your mind and breathe.  You’ll see what I mean.

I read the following two paragraphs during a recent weekend retreat in Auckland and it seemed to touch people deeply.  One of the participants asked that it be put on Green Dharma Treasury, hence this posting.  The writing was originally part of an extensive e-mail reply to some questions about using anger in compassionate ways.  It’s not uncommon today for people to aspire to explore dharma and to live awarely and compassionately and yet to experience frustration when people they care for don’t seem to value and cultivate these same interests.  Our friends, or relatives, or co-workers, might appear to be asleep or hypnotised and we, the frustrated dharma practitioner, sometimes get irritated and (out of compassion!) want to break through the dullness in order to wake them up.  There is even a category within Buddhism to describe this and it’s called wrathful or fierce compassion.  I wanted to shine a different light on such situations and the following words arose.

Dear (you might like to fill in your own name here)
You are a tree.  If your experience of roots is shallow and the wind is strong, you need to be very flexible and accommodating in order not to be blown down.  You bend with every little puff, and that can be tiresome, and tiresomeness breeds irritability.  You restrict the growth of your leaves and branches so that your small public face can be secure with your small hidden roots.  If you feel your roots running vast and deep, even if the wind is threatening, you can be very strong and upright and you still will not be blown away.  The deeper your roots, the broader can be your branches (and the more numerous your leaves and the heavier and richer your fruit).  Trees with deep roots might not bend as much as trees with shallow roots but trees with deep roots provide support and stability for more shallow rooted plants that grow all around and hang epiphytically from bark and limbs.

Fierce compassion is not about using anger in compassionate ways.  Fierce compassion is actually fearless compassion. (The word padma, in the mantra of Guru Rinpoché, represents “fearless compassion”.) Fearless compassion arises from deep rootedness; an experiential knowing of oneness and embeddedness in life.  This is a richness of being and natural engagement that leaves nothing and no-one out – that is profoundly inclusive.  With fearless compassion there is less fussing and concern for ‘self’ and more a tendency to stabilize and provide supportive inspiration for others.  Using anger/ill-will or directing anger for compassionate reasons is the action of a shallow rooted tree.  The tree with deep roots may stand uncompromising, implacable, upright and strong, and that may be felt by more shallow rooted ones as threatening, but the steadfastness of the deep, broad rooted one, ultimately stabilizes the earth and air and water content for all around and so in the end, such a being will be appreciated for their integrity.

Praise for Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology
written by David Abram, published by Pantheon Books, 2010

“Magic doesn’t sweep you away; it gathers you up into the body of the present moment so thoroughly that all your explanations fall away: the ordinary, in all its plain and simple outrageousness, begins to shine – to become luminously, impossibly so.  Every facet of the world is awake, and you within it.”

These are words by David Abram in his most recent book, Becoming Animal. (Some of you will have read his The Spell of the Sensuous that came out in the mid 90s.)  Becoming Animal is a glorious sadhana for becoming truly human(e) and rediscovering our membership in and with the living community of earth.  The entire book is a song of awakening, that frequently draws on his rich and personal experiences, both with non-human creatures and humans.  His writing, which often  flows like a great braided river of poetry, opens up fresh understandings of perception, language and the workings of mind, and places them right in the midst of communally lived embodied life.

Here are a few excerpts to give you a feeling for his style.

“When we allow that mind is a luminous quality of the earth, we swiftly notice this consequence: each region – each topography, each uniquely patterned ecosystem – has its own particular awareness, its unique style of intelligence.  Certainly the atmosphere, the translucent medium of exchange between the breathing bodies of any locale, is subtly different in each terrain.  The air of the coastal northwest of North America, infused with salt spray and the tang of spruce, cedar, and fir needles, tastes and feels different from the air shimmering in the heat of the Southwest desert.  Each atmosphere imparts its vibrance to those who partake of it, and hence the black-gleamed ravens who carve loops through the desert sky speak a different dialect of squawks and guttural cries than the cedar-perched ravens of the Pacific Northwest, whose vocal arguments are often instilled with liquid tones.  Likewise, the atmosphere that rolls over the Great Plains, gathering now and then into swirling tornadoes, contrasts vividly with the blustering winds that pour through the Rocky Mountain passes, and still more with the mists that advance and recede along the California coast.  The specific geology of place yields a soil rich in particular minerals, and the rains and rivers that feed those soils invite a unique blend of grasses, shrubs, and trees to take root there.  These, in turn, beckon particular animals to browse their leaves, or to eat their fruits and distribute their seeds, to pollinate their blossoms or to find shelter among their roots, and thus a complexly intertwined community begins to emerge, bustling and humming within itself.  Every such community percolates a different chemistry into the air that animates it, joining whiffs and subtle pheromones to the drumming of woodpeckers and the crisscrossing hues of stones and leaf and feather that echo back and forth through that terrain, while the way these elements blend is affected by the noon heat that beats down in some regions, or the frigid cold that hardens the ground in others.

“Each place has its rhythms of change and metamorphosis, its specific style of expanding and contracting in response to the turning seasons, and this, too, shapes – and is shaped by – the sentience of that land.  Whether we speak of a broad mountain range or of a small valley within that range, at each scale there is a unique intelligence circulating among the various constituents of the place – a style evident in the way events unfold in that ecosystem, how the slow spread of a mountain’s shadow alters the insect swarms above a cool stream, or the way a forested slope rejuvenates itself after a fire.  For the precise amalgam of elements that structures each region exists nowhere else.  Each place, that is to say, is a unique state of mind, and the many powers that constitute and dwell within that locale – the spiders and the tree frogs no less than the humans – all participate in and partake of, the particular mind of the place.

Later, he says,
“Of course, I am writing of these earthly elements, or moods, from an entirely human perspective.  Indeed, I’m writing from the subjective perspective of a single human creature – myself.  Nonetheless, I write with the knowledge that there cannot help but be some overlap between the direct, visceral experience and the felt experience of other persons – whose senses, after all, have much in common with my own.  Moreover, I’ve confidence that my bodily experience is a variation, albeit in many cases a very distant variation, of what other, non-human, bodies may experience in the same locale in that season, at a similar moment of the day or night.  For not only are our bodies kindred (all mammals, for instance, sharing a common ancestry), but also we are all of us, at the present moment, interdependent constituents of a common biosphere, each of us experiencing it from our own angle, and with our own specific capabilities, yet nonetheless, all participant in the round of life of the earth, and hence subject to the same large-scale flows, rhythms, and tensions that move across the wider life.

“The world we inhabit is not in this sense, a determinable set of objective processes.  It is our larger flesh, a densely intertwined and improvisational tissue of experience.  It is a sensitive sphere suspended in the solar wind, a round field of sentience sustained by the relationships between the myriad lives and sensibilities that compose it.  We come to know more of this sphere not by detaching ourselves from our felt experience, but by inhabiting our bodily experience all the more richly and wakefully, feeling our way into deeper contact with other, experiencing bodies, and hence with the wild, intercorporeal life of the earth itself.”

Becoming Animal is one of the most beautifully written and inspiring books I’ve come across for a long time.  It evokes a rich intermeshing, a kind of synaesthesia, of sensing, empathizing, and intuitive understanding.  Each page exudes the perfume of profound reverence for life.  From a Buddhist perspective, Becoming Animal points to a practice of kayanupassana (awareness of the body and a deepening appreciation for the mystery of embodiment) taken to a very broad and rarely appreciated level of refinement.  It points to our rediscovering our living relationship with all beings both animate and inanimate, which is something we desperately need to bring back into focus in order to creatively move with the many ecological, social, political and economic problems that face us today.

This is not a book to read in a hurry.  It’s a treasure of contemplations to have with you in retreat or on the lived journey of your life.  You could think of it as a kind of puja, a daily remembering to question and notice and actively participate in the vast  mysterious community of unfolding creatureliness, that is what we all are.

Paraphrasing Abram’s words; “Becoming Animal doesn’t sweep you away; it gathers you up into the body of the present moment so thoroughly that all your explanations fall away: the ordinary, in all its plain and simple outrageousness, begins to shine – to become luminously, impossibly so.  Every facet of the world is awake, and you within it.”

Enjoy!